The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,363

Carlotta Mayfair, and two of the Sisters of Mercy who later described the scene in detail to Sister Bridget Marie.

Father Lafferty held the baby in his arms. He explained that he had just baptized it in the Mercy Hospital chapel, naming it Rowan Mayfair. He showed her the signed baptismal certificate.

“Now kiss your baby, Deirdre,” said Father Lafferty, “and give her to Ellie. Ellie is ready to go.”

Parish gossip says that Deirdre did as she was told. She had insisted that the child have the name Mayfair and once that condition was met, she let her baby go. Crying so as she could scarce see, she kissed the baby and let Ellie Mayfair take it from her arms. Then she turned her head, sobbing, into the pillow. Father Lafferty said, “Best leave her alone.”

Over a decade later, Sister Bridget Marie explained the meaning of Rowan’s name.

“Carlotta stood godmother to the child. I believe they got some doctor off the ward to be its godfather, so determined were they to have the baptism done. And Carlotta said to Father Lafferty, the child’s to be named Rowan, and he said to her, ‘Now, you know, Carlotta Mayfair, that that is not a saint’s name. It sounds like a pagan name to me.’

“And she to him in her manner, you know the way she was, she says, ‘Father, don’t you know what the rowan tree was and that it was used to ward off witches and all manner of evil? There’s not a hut in Ireland where the woman of the house did not put up the rowan branch over the door to protect her family from witches and witchcraft, and that has been true throughout Christian times. Rowan is to be the name of this child!’ And Ellie Mayfair, the little mealymouth that she always was, just nodded her head.”

“Was it true?” I asked. “Did they put the rowan over the door in Ireland?”

Gravely Sister Bridget Marie nodded. “Lot of good that it did!”

Who is the father of Rowan Mayfair?

Routine blood typing done at the hospital indicates that the baby’s blood type matched that of Cortland Mayfair, who had died less than a month before. Allow us to repeat here that Cortland may also have been the father of Stella Mayfair, and that recent information obtained from Bellevue Hospital has at last confirmed that Antha Mayfair may have been his daughter as well.

Deirdre “went mad” before she ever left Mercy Hospital after Rowan’s birth. The nuns said she cried by the hour, men screamed in an empty room, “You killed him!” Then wandering into the hospital chapel during Mass, she shouted once more, “You killed him. You left me alone among my enemies. You betrayed me!” She had to be taken out by force, and was quickly committed to St. Ann’s Asylum, where she became catatonic by the end of the month.

“It was the invisible lover,” Sister Bridget Mane believes to this day. “She was shouting and cursing at him, don’t you know it, for he’d killed her college professor. He’d done it, because the devil wanted her for himself. The demon lover, that’s what he was, right here in the city of New Orleans. Walking the streets of the Garden District by night.”

That is a very lovely and eloquent statement, but since it is more than highly likely that the college professor never existed, what other meaning can we attach to Deirdre’s words? Was it Lasher who pushed Cortland down the staircase, or startled him so badly that he fell? And if so, why?

This is the end of the life of Deirdre Mayfair really. For seventeen years she was incarcerated in various mental institutions, given massive doses of drugs and ruthless courses of electric shock treatment, with only brief respites when she returned home, a ghost of the girl she had once been.

At last in 1976, she was brought back to First Street forever, a wide-eyed and mute invalid, in a perpetual state of alertness, yet with no connective memory at ail.

The side porch downstairs was screened in for her. For years she has been led out every day, rain or shine, to sit motionless in a rocking chair, her face turned ever so slightly towards the distant street.

“She cannot even remember from moment to moment,” said one physician. “She lives entirely in the present, in a way we simply cannot imagine. You might say there is no mind there at all.” It is a condition described in some very old