“Oh, come now, Sister,” he had objected immediately. “We’re not on the foggy roads of Tipperary, looking out for the ghost of Petticoat Loose.”
“Ah, so you’ve heard that one, Father.” She had laughed.
“From my own Irish mother on the Lower East Side, Sister, a dozen times.”
“Well, then, Father, let me tell you this much, that Stella Mayfair once took my hand, and held it like this, she did, and told me secrets of my own that I had never told a living soul this side of the Atlantic. I swear it, Father. It happened to me. There was a keepsake I’d lost at home, a chain with a crucifix on it, and I’d cried and cried as a girl when I’d lost it, and that very same little keepsake Stella Mayfair described to me. ‘You want it back, Sister?’ she said. And all the time smiling in her sweet way, just like her granddaughter Deirdre can smile at you now, more innocent than cunning. ‘I’ll get it for you, Sister,’ she said. ‘Through the power of the devil, you mean, Stella Mayfair,’ I answered her. ‘I’ll have none of it.’ But there was many another teaching sister at St. Alphonsus school that took another tack, and that’s how she kept her power over those around her, getting her way in one thing and another right up to the day she died.”
“Superstition, Sister!” he’d said with great authority. “What about little Deirdre’s mother? You’re going to tell me she was a witch, too?”
Sister Bridget Marie shook her head. “That was Antha, a lost one, shy, sweet, afraid of her own shadow-not at all like her mother, Stella, until Stella was killed, that is. You should have seen Miss Carlotta’s face when they buried Stella. And the same expression on her face twelve years after when they buried Antha. Now, Carl, she was as smart a girl as ever went to Sacred Heart. The backbone of the family she is. But her mother never cared a fig for her. All Mary Beth Mayfair ever cared about was Stella. And old Mr. Julien, that was Mary Beth’s uncle, he was the same. Stella, Stella, Stella. But Antha, stark raving mad at the end, they said, and nothing but a girl of twenty when she run up the stairs in the old house and jumped from the attic window and dashed her head on the stones below.”
“So young,” he’d whispered. He remembered the pale, frightened face of Deirdre Mayfair. How old had she been when the young mother did such a thing?
“They buried Antha in consecrated ground, God have mercy on her soul. For who’s to judge the state of mind of such a person? Head split open like a watermelon when she hit the terrace. And baby Deirdre screaming out her lungs in the cradle. But then even Antha was something to fear.”
Father Mattingly was quietly reeling. It was the kind of talk he’d heard all his life at home, however, the endless Irish dramatizing of the morbid, the lusty tribute to the tragic. Truth was it wore him out. He wanted to ask-
But the bell had rung. Children were lining up in proper ranks for the march inside. Sister had to go. Yet suddenly, she turned back.
“Let me tell one story about Antha,” she said, her voice low on account of the hush in the school yard, “which is the best one that I know. In those days when the sisters sat down to supper at twelve noon, the children were silent in this yard until the Angelus was said and after that the Grace Before Meals. Nobody has such respect for anything in this day and age, but that was the custom then. And on one spring day, during that quiet time, a mean wicked girl name of Jenny Simpson comes up to frighten the poor, shy little Antha with the body of a dead rat she’d found under the hedge. Antha takes one look at the dead rat and lets out a chilling scream, Father, such as you never heard! And we come running from the supper table, as you can imagine, and what do you think we see? That mean wicked Jenny Simpson thrown over on her back, Father, her face bloody and the rat flying out of her hand over that very fence! And do you think it was little Antha did such a thing, Father? A mite of a child, as delicate as her daughter Deirdre is today? Oh, no! ’Twas the selfsame invisible fiend did it, Father, the devil himself, as brought those flowers flying through the air to Deirdre in this yard a week ago.”
“Sister, you think I’m the new boy on the block”-Father Mattingly had laughed-“to believe something like that.”
And she had smiled, it was true, but he knew from past experience that an Irishwoman like that could smile at what she was saying and believe every word of it at the same time.
The Mayfairs fascinated him, as something complex and elegant can fascinate. The tales of Stella and Antha were remote enough to be romantic and nothing more.
The following Sunday he called again on the Mayfairs. He was offered coffee once more and pleasant conversation-it was all so removed from Sister Bridget Marie’s tales. The radio played Rudy Vallee in the background. Old Miss Belle watered the drowsing potted orchids. The smell of roast chicken came from the kitchen. An altogether pleasant house.
They even asked him to stay to Sunday dinner-the table was beautifully set with thick linen napkins in silver rings-but he politely declined. Miss Carl wrote out a check for the parish and put it in his hand.
As he was leaving he had glimpsed Deirdre in the garden, a white face peering at him from behind a gnarled old tree. He had waved to her without breaking his stride, yet something bothered him later about the image of her. Was it her curls all tangled? Or the distracted look in her eyes?
Madness, that’s what Sister Bridget had described to him, and it disturbed him to think it threatened that wan little girl. There was nothing romantic to Father Mattingly about actual madness. He had long held the belief that the mad lived in a hell of irrelevance. They missed the point of life around them.
But Miss Carlotta was a sensible, modern woman. The child wasn’t doomed to follow in the footsteps of a dead mother. She would, on the contrary, have every chance.
A month passed before his view of the Mayfairs changed forever, on the unforgettable Saturday afternoon that Deirdre Mayfair came to confession in St. Alphonsus Church.
It was during the regular hours when all the good Irish and German Catholics could be counted upon to clear their consciences before Mass and Communion on Sunday.
And so he was seated in the ornate wooden house of the confessional in his narrow chair behind a green serge curtain, listening in alternation to the penitents who came to kneel in the small cells to the left and the right of him. These voices and sins he could have heard in Boston or New York City, so similar the accents, the worries, the ideas.
“Three Hail Marys,” he would prescribe, or “Three Our Fathers” but seldom more than that to these laboring men and good housewives who came to confess routine peccadillos.
Then a child’s voice had caught him off guard, coming rapid and crisp through the dark dusty grille-eloquent of intelligence and precocity. He had not recognized it. After all, Deirdre Mayfair had not spoken one word before in his presence.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. My last confession was weeks and weeks ago. Father, help me please. I cannot fight the devil. I try and I always fail. And I’m going to go to hell for it.”
What was this, more of Sister Bridget Marie’s influence? But before he could speak, the child went on and he knew that it was Deirdre.
“I didn’t tell the devil to go away, when he brought the flowers. I wanted to and I know that I should have done it, and Aunt Carl is really, really angry with me. But Father, he only wanted to make us happy. I swear to you, Father, he’s never mean to me. And he cries if I don’t look at him or listen to him. I didn’t know he’d bring the flowers from the altar! Sometimes he does very foolish things like that, Father, things like a little child would do, with even less sense than that. But he doesn’t mean to hurt anyone.”