The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,330

to be. Sean wouldn’t be happy unless she was successful too. ‘You know, the only thing I can be is a writer,’ she said. ‘I’m absolutely unprepared for anything else. When you’ve lived the kind of life I have, you are good for nothing. Only writing can save you.’ It was all very touching actually, the way she spoke about it. She seemed altogether defenseless and absolutely genuine. I think, had I been thirty years younger, I would have fallen in love with her.

“ ‘But what kind of life did you have?’ I pressed her. ‘I can’t place your accent. But I know you’re not from New York.’

“ ‘Down south,’ she said. ‘It’s another world.’ She grew sad instantly, even agitated. ‘I want to forget all that,’ she said, ‘I don’t mean to be rude, but I’ve made this rule for myself. I’ll write about my past but I won’t talk about it. I’ll turn it into art if I can, but I won’t talk about it. I won’t give it life here, outside of art, if you follow what I mean.’

“I found this rather clever and interesting. I liked her. I cannot tell you how much I liked her. And you know, in my line of work, one gets so accustomed to just using people!

“ ‘Well, then tell me about what you write,’ I begged. ‘Just tell me about one of your stories for instance, assuming you write stories, or tell me about your poems.’

“ ‘If they’re any good, you’ll read them some day,’ she said, and then she gave me a parting smite and left. I think she’d become suspicious. I don’t know really. She was glancing around in a rather defensive way the whole time we talked. I even asked her at one point if she was expecting someone. She said not really, but ‘You never know.’ She acted as if she thought someone was watching her. And of course my people were watching her all the time. I felt pretty uncomfortable about it at that moment, I can tell you.”

Reports continued to pour in for months that Antha and Sean were happy. Sean, a big burly individual with an endearing sense of humor, had a one-man show in the Village which was quite a success. Antha had a short poem (seven lines) in The New Yorker. The couple were ecstatic. Only in April of 1941 did the gossip change.

“Well, she’s pregnant,” said the upstairs painter, “and he doesn’t want the baby, you know, and of course she wants it and God knows what’s going to happen. He knows a doctor who can take care of it, you see, but she won’t hear of it. I hate to see her going through this, really. She’s much too fragile. I hear her crying down there in the night.”

On July 1, Sean Lacy died in a single car accident (mechanical failure) coming back from a visit to his ailing mother in upstate New York. A hysterical Antha had to be hospitalized at Bellevue. “We just didn’t know what to do with her,” said the upstairs painter. “For eight hours straight she screamed. Finally we called Bellevue. I’ll never know if we did the right thing.”

Records at Bellevue indicate Antha stopped screaming or indeed making any sound or movement as soon as she was admitted. She remained catatonic for over a week. Then she wrote the name “Cortland Mayfair” on a slip of paper, along with the words “Attorney, New Orleans.” Cortland’s firm was contacted at ten-thirty the following morning. At once Cortland called his estranged wife, Amanda Grady Mayfair, in New York and begged her to go to Bellevue and see to Antha until he could get there himself.

A horrid battle then began between Cortland and Carlotta, Cortland insisting that he should take care of Antha because Antha had sent for him. Contemporary gossip tells us Carlotta and Cortland took the train together to New York to get Antha and bring her home.

At an emotional drunken lunch, Amanda Grady Mayfair poured out the whole story to her friend (and our informant) Allan Carver, who made it a point to inquire about her old southern family and its gothic goings-on. Amanda told him all about the poor little niece in Bellevue:

“ … It was simply awful. Antha couldn’t talk. She couldn’t. She’d tried to say something and she’d simply stammer. She was so fragile. The death of Sean had destroyed her utterly. It was twenty-four hours before she wrote down