The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,339

rebellious and unmistakably sensuous in Deirdre from the start. Neighbors frequently saw her running “like a tomboy” through the garden. At the age of five she could climb the great oak tree to the top. Sometimes she concealed herself in the shrubbery along the fence so that she could deliberately startle those who passed by.

At nine years old she ran away for the first time. Carlotta rang Cortland in panic; then the police were called in. Finally a cold and shivering Deirdre showed up on the front porch of St. Elizabeth’s Orphanage on Napoleon Avenue, telling the sisters that she was “cursed” and “possessed of the devil.” They had to call a priest for her. Cortland came with Carlotta to take her home.

“Overactive imagination,” said Carlotta. It was to become a stock phrase.

A year later, police found Deirdre wandering in a rainstorm along the Bayou St. John, shivering and crying, and saying she was afraid to go home. For two hours she told the police lies about her name and background. She was a gypsy who had come to town with a circus. Her mother had been murdered by the animal trainer. She had tried to “commit suicide with rare poison” but had been taken to a hospital in Europe where they drew all the blood out of her veins.

“There was something so sad about that child and so crazy,” said the officer afterwards to our investigator. “She was absolutely in earnest and the wildest look would come into her blue eyes. She didn’t even look up when her uncle and her aunt came to get her. She pretended she didn’t know them. Then she said they kept her chained in an upstairs room.”

At ten years of age, Deirdre was packed off to Ireland, to a boarding school recommended by an Irish-born priest at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Father Jason Power. Family gossip said it was Cortland’s idea.

“Grandfather wanted to get her away from there,” Ryan Mayfair gossiped later.

But the sisters in County Cork sent Deirdre home within the month.

For two years Deirdre studied with a governess named Miss Lampton, an old friend of Carlotta’s from the Sacred Heart. Miss Lampton told Beatrice Mayfair (on Esplanade Avenue downtown) that Deirdre was a charming girl, and very bright indeed. “She has too much imagination, that is all that’s wrong with her, and she spends much too much time alone.” When Miss Lampton moved north to marry a widower she’d met during his summer vacation, Deirdre cried for days.

Even during these years there were quarrels at First Street, however. People heard shouting. Deirdre frequently ran out of the house crying. She would climb the oak tree until she was well out of the reach of Irene or Miss Lampton. Sometimes she stayed up there until after dark.

But with adolescence a change came over Deirdre. She became withdrawn, secretive, no longer the tomboy. At thirteen she was far more voluptuous than Antha had been as a grown woman. She wore her black wavy hair long and parted in the middle, and held back by a bit of lavender ribbon. Her large blue eyes looked perpetually distrustful and faintly bitter. Indeed, the child had a bruised look to her, said the parish gossips who saw her at Sunday Mass.

“She was already a beautiful woman,” said one of the matrons who went to the chapel regularly. “And those old ladies didn’t know it. They dressed her as if she were still a child.”

Legal gossip revealed other problems. One afternoon Deirdre rushed into the waiting room outside Cortland’s office.

“She was hysterical,” said the secretary later. “For an hour she screamed and cried in there with her uncle. And I’ll tell you something else, something I didn’t even notice till she was leaving. She wasn’t wearing matching shoes! She had on one brown loafer and one black flat shoe. I don’t think she ever realized it. Cortland took her home. I don’t know that he noticed it either. I never saw her after that.”

In the summer before Deirdre’s fourteenth birthday, she was rushed to the new Mercy Hospital. She had tried to slash her wrists. Beatrice went to see her.

“That girl has a spirit that Antha simply didn’t have,” she told Juliette Milton. “But she needs womanly advice on things. She wanted me to buy her cosmetics. She said she’s only been in a drugstore once in her entire life.”

Beatrice brought the cosmetics to the hospital, only to be told that Carlotta had put a stop to all