The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,364

people who reach the same state in advanced senility, and sit staring in geriatric hospitals throughout the world. Regardless, she is drugged heavily, to prevent bouts of “agitation,” or so her various doctors and nurses have been told.

How did Deirdre Mayfair become this “mindless idiot,” as the Irish Channel gossips call her, “this nice bunch of carrots” sitting in her chair? Shock treatments certainly contributed to it, course after course of them, given by every hospital in which she had ever stayed since 1959. Then there were the drugs—massive doses of near paralytic tranquilizers—given to her in astonishing combinations, or so the records, as we continue to gain access to them, reveal.

How does one justify such treatment? Deirdre Mayfair ceased to speak coherently as early as 1962. When not tranquilized, she screamed or cried incessantly. Now and then she broke things. Sometimes she simply lay back, with her eyes rolling up in her head, and howled.

As the years have passed, we have continued to collect information about Deirdre Mayfair. Every month or so we manage to “interview” some doctor or nurse, or other person who has been in the First Street house. But our record of what really happened remains fragmentary. Hospital files are, naturally, confidential and extremely difficult to obtain. But in at least two of the sanitariums where Deirdre was treated, we now know that no record of her treatment exists.

One of her doctors has clearly and by his own admission to an inquiring stranger destroyed his records of Deirdre’s case. Another physician retired shortly after he had treated Deirdre, leaving only a few cryptic notes in his brief file. “Incurable. Tragic. Aunt demands continued medication yet Aunt’s descriptions of behavior not credible.”

We continue, for obvious reasons, to rely upon anecdotal evidence, for our assessment of Deirdre’s history.

Though Deirdre has slumbered in a twilight induced by drugs all of her adult life, there have been countless sightings by those around her of “a mysterious brown-haired man.” Nurses in St. Ann’s Asylum claimed to have seen him—“some man going into her room! Now I know I saw that.” At a Texas hospital where she was incarcerated briefly, a doctor claimed to have seen “a mysterious visitor” who always “seemed somehow to just disappear when I wanted to question him or ask him who he was.”

At least one nurse in a northern Louisiana sanitarium insisted to her superiors that she had seen a ghost. Black orderlies in the various hospitals saw “that man all the time.” One woman told us, “He not human. I know him when I see him. I see spirits. I call them up. I know him and he know me and he don’t come near me at all.”

Most workmen cannot work on the First Street house any more today than they could in the days when Deirdre was a girl. There are the same old stories. There is even some talk of “a man around there” who doesn’t want things done.

Nevertheless some repairs are completed; air-conditioning units have been installed in some rooms, and some upgrading of the electricity has been carried out—these tasks almost invariably being done under Carlotta Mayfair’s on-site supervision.

The old gardener still comes, and he occasionally paints the rusted fence.

Otherwise First Street slumbers beneath the oak branches. The frogs sing in the night around Stella’s pool with its lily pads and wild irises. Deirdre’s wooden swing has long ago fallen from the oak at the far end of the property. The wooden seat—a mere slat of wood—lies bleached and warping in the high grass.

Many a person stopping to look at Deirdre in her rocking chair on the side porch has glimpsed “a handsome cousin” visiting her. Nurses have sometimes quit because of “that man who comes and goes like some kinda spook,” or because they kept seeing things out of the corner of their eye, or thought they were being watched.

“There’s some kind of ghost hovering near her,” said one young practical nurse who told the agency she would never, never go back to that house. “I saw him once, in the bright sunlight. Scariest thing I’ve ever seen.”

When I asked this nurse about it over lunch, she had few details to add to the story. “Just a man. A man with brown hair and brown eyes in a nice-looking coat and white shirt. But dear God, if I have ever seen anything more terrifying than that! He was just standing there in the sunlight beside her looking at me. I dropped