The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,299

Lionel and Stella were fighting. Was there at last another man?

When the investigator began to ask about the matter, he discovered it was well-known about town that the family was in the midst of a battle over little Antha. Stella was threatening to go away to Europe again with her daughter, and was begging Lionel to go with her, while Carlotta was ordering Lionel not to go.

Meantime Lionel began to appear at Mass at the St. Louis Cathedral with one of the downtown cousins, a great-niece of Suzette Mayfair named Claire Mayfair, whose family lived in a beautiful old house on Esplanade Avenue owned by descendants to this day. Dandrich insists this caused considerable talk.

Servant gossip told of countless family quarrels. Doors were being slammed. People were screaming.

Carlotta forbid further “voodoo gatherings.” Stella told Carlotta to get out of the house.

“Nothing’s the same without Mother,” said Lionel. “It started to fall apart when Julien died, but without Mother it’s impossible. Carlotta and Stella are oil and water in that house.”

It does seem to have been entirely Carlotta’s doing that Antha and Nancy ever went to any school. Indeed, the few school records we have been able to examine with regard to Antha indicate that Carlotta enrolled her and attended the subsequent meetings at which she was asked to take Antha out of the school.

Antha was by all accounts completely unsuited for school.

By 1928, Antha had already been sent home from St. Alphonsus.

Sister Bridget Marie, who remembers Antha perhaps as well as she remembers Stella, tells very much the same stories about her as she told about her mother. But her testimony regarding this entire period and its various developments is worth quoting in full. This is what she told me in 1969.

“The invisible friend was always with Antha. She would turn and talk to him in a whisper as if no one else were there. Of course he told her the answers when she didn’t know them. All the sisters knew it was going on.

“And if you want to hear the worst part of it, some of the children saw him with their very eyes. I wouldn’t have believed it if it hadn’t been so many; but when four children all tell you the same story, and each of them is afraid, and worried, and the parents are worried, well, then what can you do but believe?

“It was in the school yard that they would see him. Now, I told you the girl was shy. Well, she’d go over to the far brick wall at the back, and there she’d sit and read her book in a little patch of sun coming through the trees. And soon he would be there with her. A man, they said he was, can you imagine? And you ask me do I know the meaning of the words, ‘the man’?

“Ah, you see, it was a shock to everyone when it came out that he was a full-grown man. For they thought he was a little child before that, or some sort of child spirit, if you follow me now. But then it was a man, a tall dark-haired man. And that really set everyone to talking. That it was a man.

“No, I never did see him. None of the sisters saw him. But the children saw him. And the children told Father Lafferty. I told Father Lafferty. And he was the one that called Carlotta Mayfair and said, ‘You have to take her out of school.’

“Now I don’t criticize the priests, no, never. But I will say this. Father Lafferty wasn’t a man you could buy with a big donation to the church, and he said, ‘Miss Carlotta, you’ve got to take her out of school.’

“No use calling up Stella by that time. Everyone knew Stella was practicing witchcraft. She went down to the French Quarter and bought the black candles for her voodoo, and do you know, she was bringing the other Mayfairs into it? Yes, she was doing it. I heard it a long time after, that she had gone to look for the other cousins who were witches and she had told them all to come up to the house.

“It was a séance they had in that house. They lighted black candles and they burned incense and they sang songs to the devil, and they asked that their ancestors appear. That’s what I heard happened. I can’t tell you where I heard it. But I heard it. And I believe it,