The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,359

Texas Woman’s University. She made excellent grades. The girls liked her. Her teachers liked her. About every six weeks or so she signed out of the dormitory for dinner with her cousin Rhonda Mayfair and Rhonda’s husband, Professor Ellis Clement, who was Deirdre’s English teacher at this time. There is also a record of one date on December 10 with a boy named Joey Dawson, but it lasted one hour if the register is to be believed.

The same register indicates that Cortland visited Deirdre often, frequently signing her out for a Friday or Saturday night in Dallas from which she returned before the “Late Check In” time of one A.M.

We know that Deirdre went home to Metairie to Cortland’s house for Christmas, and family gossip declared that she would not even see Carlotta when Carlotta came to call.

Legal gossip supports the idea that Carlotta and Cortland were still not speaking. Carlotta would not return Cortland’s routine business calls. Acrimonious letters went back and forth between the two over the smallest financial matters concerning Deirdre.

“He’s trying to get complete control of her for her own sake,” said one secretary to a friend, “but that old woman won’t have it. She’s threatening to take him to court.”

Whatever the particulars of that struggle, we know that Deirdre began to deteriorate during the spring term. She began to miss classes. Dorm mates said she cried all night sometimes, but would not answer their knocks on her door. One evening she was picked up by the campus police in a small downtown park, apparently confused as to where she was.

Finally she was called to the dean’s office for disciplinary action. She had missed too many classes. She was put on Compulsory Attendance, and though she did manage to appear in the classroom, teachers reported her as inattentive, and possibly ill.

Finally in April, Deirdre began to suffer nausea every morning. Girls up and down the hallway could hear her struggling with her sickness in the communal washroom. The girls went to the dorm mother.

“Nobody wanted to squeal on her. We were afraid. What if she tried to hurt herself?”

When the dorm mother finally suggested she might be pregnant, Deirdre broke down sobbing, and had to be hospitalized until Cortland could come and get her, which he did on May 1.

What happened afterwards has remained a mystery to this day. The records at the new Mercy Hospital in New Orleans indicate that Deirdre was probably taken there directly upon arrival from Texas, and that she was given a private room. Gossip among the old nuns, many of whom were retired teachers from St. Alphonsus School who remembered Deirdre, quickly verified that it was Carlotta’s attending physician, Dr. Gallagher, who visited Deirdre and ascertained that yes, she was going to have a child.

“Now, this girl is going to be married,” he told the sisters. “And I don’t want anything mean being said. The father is a college professor from Denton, Texas, and he is on his way to New Orleans now.”

By the time Deirdre was taken by ambulance to First Street three weeks later, heavily sedated and with a registered nurse in attendance, the gossip was all over the Redemptorist Parish that she was pregnant and soon to be married, and that her husband, the college professor, was “a married man.”

Quite the scandal it was to those who had watched the family for generations. Old ladies whispered about it on the church steps. Deirdre Mayfair and a married man! People glanced furtively at Miss Millie and Miss Belle as they passed. Some said that Carlotta would have no part of it. But then Miss Belle and Miss Millie took Deirdre with them to Gus Mayer and there they bought her a lovely blue dress and blue satin shoes for the wedding, and a new white purse and hat.

“She was so drugged, I don’t think she knew where she was,” said one of the salesgirls. “Miss Millie made all the choices for her. She just sat there, white as a sheet, and saying ‘Yes, Aunt Millie,’ in a slurred voice.”

Juliette Milton could not resist writing to us. We received a long letter from her detailing how Beatrice Mayfair had been to First Street to see Deirdre and brought her a whole shopping bag of gifts. “Why ever did she go home to that house, instead of Cortland’s!” wrote Juliette.

There is some indication that Deirdre had little choice in the matter. Medical science in those days believed the placenta of