Father Mattingly had never heard of Deirdre Mayfair. Father Mattingly had only just come south from the seminary in Kirkwood, Missouri.
He found Sister Bridget Marie quickly enough, in an asphalt yard behind the old convent building. How European it had seemed to him then, quaint and sad with its broken walls, and the gnarled tree with the wooden benches built in a square around it.
The shade had felt good to him as he approached. Then he saw that the little girls seated along the bench were crying. Sister Bridget Marie held one pale shivering child by the thin part of her upper arm. The child was white with fear. Yet very pretty she was, her blue eyes too big for her thin face, her black hair in long careful corkscrew curls that shivered against her cheeks, her limbs well proportioned yet delicate.
There were flowers strewn all over the ground-big gladiolus and white lilies and long fronds of green fern and even big beautifully formed red roses. Florist flowers, surely, yet there were so many …
“Do you see that, Father?” Sister Bridget Marie exclaimed. “And they have the nerve to tell me it was her invisible friend, the devil himself, that put those flowers here, brought them right into her arms while they watched, the little thieves! They stole those flowers from the very altar of St. Alphonsus-!”
The little girls began to scream. One of them stamped her feet. A chorus of “We did see, we did see!” broke out with alarming fury. They egged each other on with their choking sobs into a regular chorus.
Sister Bridget Marie shouted for silence. She shook the little girl she had been holding by the arm, though the child had said nothing. The child’s mouth dropped open in shock, her eyes rolling to Father Mattingly in a silent entreaty.
“Now, Sister, please,” Father Mattingly said. He had gently freed the child. She was dazed, utterly pliant. He wanted to pick her up, wipe her face where the tears had smudged it with dirt. But he didn’t.
“Her invisible friend,” the sister said, “the one that finds everything that’s lost, Father. The one that puts the pennies for candy into her pockets! And they all eat it, too, stuffing their mouths with it, stolen pennies, you can be sure of it.”
The little girls were wailing even louder. And Father Mattingly realized he was stepping all over the flowers and the silent white-faced child was staring at his shoes, at the white petals crushed beneath them.
“Let the children go in,” Father Mattingly had said. It was essential to take command. Only then could he make sense of what Sister Bridget Marie was telling him.
But the story was no less fantastic when he and the sister were alone. The children claimed they saw the flowers flying through the air. They claimed they saw the flowers land in Deirdre’s arms. They had been laughing and laughing. Deirdre’s magic friend always made them laugh, they said. Deirdre’s friend could find your notebook or your pencil if you lost it. You asked Deirdre and he brought it to her. And there it was. And they even claimed to have seen him themselves-a nice man, a man with dark brown hair and eyes, and he would stand for one second right next to Deirdre.
“She’s got to be sent home, Father,” Sister Bridget Marie had said. “It happens all the time. I call her Great-aunt Carl or her Aunt Nancy, and then it stops for a while. Then it starts up again.”
“But you don’t believe-”
“Father, I tell you it’s six of one, half a dozen of another. Either the devil’s in that child, or she’s a devil of a liar, and makes them believe her wild tales as if she’s got them bewitched. She cannot stay at St. Alphonsus.”
Father Mattingly had taken Deirdre home himself, walking slowly, steadily with her through these same streets. Not a word was spoken. Miss Carl had been phoned at her downtown office. She and Miss Millie were waiting on the front steps of the grand house to meet them.
And how lovely it was then, painted a deep violet color with green shutters and the trim all in white and the porch railings painted a shiny black so you could see the cast-iron roses so clearly. The vines had been a graceful etching of leaf and color, not the menacing tangle they had since become.
“Overactive imagination, Father,” Miss Carl said without a trace of concern. “Millie what Deirdre needs is a warm bath.” And off the child had gone without a word spoken, and Miss Carl had taken Father Mattingly out for the first time into the glass garden room for café au lait at the wicker table. Miss Nancy, sullen and plain, had set out the cups and silver.
Wedgwood china trimmed in gold. And cloth napkins with the letter M embroidered on them. And what a quick-witted woman, this Carl. She had looked prim in her tailored silk suit and ruffled white blouse, her salt and pepper gray hair in a neat twist on the back of her head, her mouth neatly colored with pale pink lipstick. She put him at ease at once with her knowing smile.
“You might say it’s the curse of our family, Father, this excess of imagination.” She poured the hot milk and the hot coffee from two small silver pitchers. “We dream dreams; we see visions; we should have been poets or painters it seems. Not lawyers, such as I am.” She had laughed softly, easily. “Deirdre will be just fine, when she learns to tell fantasy from reality.”
Afterwards, she had shown him through the lower rooms. And Miss Millie had joined them. She was such a feminine thing, Miss Millie, her red hair in old-fashioned finger curls around her face, and jeweled rings on her fingers. She’d taken him to the window to wave to old Miss Belle, who had been cutting back the roses with large wooden-handled shears.
Carl explained that Deirdre would be going to the Sacred Heart sisters just as soon as there was a place. She was so sorry for this silly disturbance at St. Alphonsus and of course they’d keep Deirdre home if that was what Sister Bridget Marie wanted.
Father had started to object, but it was all decided. Simple matter to get Deirdre a governess, someone who knew children, why not?
They walked along the deep shaded porches.
“We are an old family, Father,” Carl said, as they went back into the double parlor. “We don’t even know how old. There is no one now who can identify some of the portraits you see around you.” Her voice was half amused, half weary. “We came from the islands, that’s what we know for certain-a plantation on Saint-Domingue-and before that from some dim European past that is now completely lost. The house is full of unexplained relics. Sometimes I see it as a great hard snail shell that I must carry on my back.”
Her hands passed lightly over the grand piano, over the gilded harp. She had little taste for such things, she said. What an irony that she had become the custodian. Miss Millie had only smiled, nodded.
And now if Father would excuse them, Miss Carl did have to go back downtown. Clients waiting. They walked out to the gate together.
“Thank you so much, Father!”
And so it had all been waved away, and the little white-faced girl with the black curls had left St. Alphonsus.
But in the days that followed it had bothered Father Mattingly, the question of those flowers.
Impossible to imagine a gang of little girls climbing over the communion rail and robbing the altars of an enormous and impressive church like St. Alphonsus. Even the guttersnipes Father Mattingly had known as a boy would not have dared such a thing.
What did Sister Bridget Marie really think had happened? Had the children really stolen the flowers? The small, heavyset round-faced nun studied him a moment before she answered. Then she said no.
“Father, as God is my witness, they’re a cursed family, the Mayfairs are. And the grandmother of that very child, Stella she was called, told the very same tales in this very same school yard many a year ago. It was a frightening power Stella Mayfair had over those around her. There were nuns under this very roof who were scared to death to cross her, a witch is what they called her then and now.”