The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,318

She honestly wished it hadn’t happened. In fact, it was dreadfully distasteful to her suddenly, and she felt soiled and tired and angry. Even a little revolted. She wanted to think about her mother, and about seeing Michael.

She had called Jerry Lonigan from Dallas. The parlor was open. And the cousins were already arriving. They had been calling all morning. The Mass was set for three P.M. and she wasn’t to worry. She should just come on over from the Pontchartrain as soon as she arrived.

“Where are you, Michael?” she whispered, as she sat back again, and closed her eyes.

Twenty-two

THE FILE ON THE MAYFAIR WITCHES

PART VIII

The Family from 1929 to 1956

THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH OF STELLA’S DEATH

In October and November of 1929, the stock market crashed and the world entered the Great Depression. The Roaring Twenties came to an end. Wealthy people everywhere lost their fortunes. Multimillionaires jumped out of windows. And in a time of new and unwelcome austerity, there came an inevitable cultural reaction to the excesses of the twenties. Short skirts, booze-swilling socialites, and sexually sophisticated motion pictures and books went out of style.

At the Mayfair house on First and Chestnut Streets in New Orleans, the lights went dim with Stella’s death and were never turned up again. Candles lighted Stella’s open-casket funeral in the double parlor. And when Lionel, her brother, who had shot her dead with two bullets in front of scores of witnesses, was buried a short time after, it was not from the house but from a sterile funeral parlor on Magazine Street blocks away.

Within six months of Lionel’s death, Stella’s art deco furniture, her numerous contemporary paintings, her countless records of jazz and ragtime and blues singers, all disappeared from the rooms of First Street. What did not go into the immense attics of the house went out on the street.

Countless staid Victorian pieces, stored since the loss of Riverbend, came out of storage to fill the rooms. Shutters were bolted on the Chestnut Street windows never to be opened again.

But these changes had little to do with the death of the Roaring Twenties, or the crash of the stock market, or the Great Depression.

The family firm of Mayfair and Mayfair had long ago shifted its enormous resources out of the railroads, and out of the dangerously inflated stock market. As early as 1924, it had liquidated its immense land holdings in Florida for boom profits. It continued to hold its California property for the western land boom yet to come. With millions invested in gold, Swiss francs, South African diamond mines, and countless other profitable ventures, the family was once again in a position to lend money to friends and distant cousins who had lost all they had.

And lend money right and left the family did, pumping new blood into its incalculably large body of political and social contacts, and further protecting itself from interference of any sort as it had always done.

Lionel Mayfair was never questioned by a single police officer as to why he shot Stella. Two hours after her death, he was a patient in a private sanitarium, where in the days that followed weary doctors nodded off listening to Lionel rave about the devil walking the hallways of the house at First Street, about little Antha taking the devil into her bed.

“And there he was with Antha and I knew it. It was happening all over again. And Mother wasn’t there, you see, no one was there. Just Carlotta fighting endlessly with Stella. Oh, you can’t imagine the door slamming and the screaming. We were a household of children without Mother. There was my big sister Belle clinging to her doll, and crying. And Millie Dear, poor Millie Dear, saying her rosary on the side porch in the dark, shaking her head. And Carlotta struggling to take Mother’s place, and unable to do it. She’s a tin soldier compared to Mother! Stella threw things at her. ‘You think you’re going to lock me up!’ Stella was hysterical.

“Children, I tell you, that’s what we were. I’d knock on her door and Pierce was in there with her! I knew it and all this in broad daylight. She was lying to me, and him with Antha, I saw him. All the time I saw him! I saw him! I saw them together in the garden. But she knew, she knew all along that he was with Antha. She let it happen.

“ ‘Are you going to let him have her?’ That’s