The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,340

visits. When Beatrice called Cortland, he confessed he didn’t know why Deirdre had slit her wrists. “Maybe she just wanted to get out of that house.”

That very week, Cortland arranged for Deirdre to go to California. She flew to Los Angeles to stay with Garland’s daughter, Andrea Mayfair, who had married a doctor on the staff of Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. But Deirdre was home again at the end of two weeks.

The Los Angeles Mayfairs said nothing to anyone about what happened, but years afterwards their only son, Elton, told investigators that his poor cousin from New Orleans was crazy. That she had believed herself to be cursed by some sort of legacy, that she had talked of suicide to him, horrifying his parents. That they had taken her to see doctors who said she would never be normal.

“My parents wanted to help her, especially my mother. But the entire family was disrupted. I think what really finished it however was that they saw her out in the backyard one night with a man, and she wouldn’t admit to it. She kept denying it. And they were afraid something would happen. She was thirteen, I believe, and very pretty. They sent her home.”

Beatrice recounted pretty much the same story to Juliette Milton. “I think Deirdre looks too mature,” she said. But she wouldn’t believe Deirdre had lied about male companions. “She’s confused.” And Beatrice was adamant that there was no congenital insanity. That was just a family legend that Carlotta had started, and one which really ought to be stopped.

Beatrice went up to First Street to see Deirdre and take her some presents. Nancy wouldn’t let her in.

The same mysterious male companion was responsible for Deirdre’s most traumatic expulsion from St. Rose de Lima boarding school when she was sixteen. Deirdre had attended the school for a full semester without mishap, and was in the middle of the spring term when the incident occurred. Family gossip said Deirdre had been blissfully happy at St. Ro’s, that she had told Cortland she never wanted to go home. Even over Christmas, Deirdre had remained at the boarding school, only going out with Cortland for an early supper on Christmas Eve.

Yet she loved the swings in the back play yard, which were big enough for the older children, and at twilight she would sing songs there with another girl, Rita Mae Dwyer (later Lonigan), who remembered Deirdre as a rare and special person, elegant and innocent; romantic and sweet.

As recently as 1988, more data was obtained about this expulsion directly from Rita Mae Dwyer Lonigan in a conversation with this investigator.

Deirdre’s “mysterious friend” met her in the nuns’ garden in the moonlight, and spoke softly but audibly enough for Rita Mae to hear. “He called her ‘my beloved,’ ” Rita Mae told me. She had never heard such romantic words spoken except in a movie.

Defenseless and sobbing bitterly, Deirdre did not utter a word when the nuns accused her of “bringing a man onto the school grounds.” They had spied upon Deirdre and her male companion, peering through the slats of the convent kitchen into the garden where the two met in the dark. “This was no boy,” said one of the nuns in a rage afterwards to the assembled boarders. “This was a man! A grown man!”

The record from the period is almost vicious in its condemnations. “The girl is deceitful. She allowed the man to touch her indecently. Her innocence is a complete facade.”

There can be no doubt that this mysterious companion was Lasher. He is described by the nuns, and later by Mrs. Lonigan, as having brown hair and brown eyes, and beautiful old-fashioned clothes.

But the remarkable point is that Rita Mae Lonigan, unless she is exaggerating, actually heard Lasher speak.

Other startling information given us by Mrs. Lonigan is that Deirdre had the Mayfair emerald in her possession at the boarding school, that she showed it to Rita Mae, and showed her a word engraved on the back of it: “Lasher.” If Rita Mae’s story is true, Deirdre knew little about her mother or her grandmother. She understood that the emerald had come to her from these women, but she did not even know how Stella or Antha had died.

It was common knowledge in the family in 1956 that Deirdre was crushed by her expulsion from St. Rose de Lima’s. She was admitted to St. Ann’s Asylum for six weeks. Though the records have proved unobtainable, nurses gossiped that Deirdre