By the time Father Lafferty died in the spring, they had locked her up far away. Nobody even knew where. Rita Lonigan asked her father-in-law, Red, because she wanted so badly to write. But Miss Carl said it would not be good. No letters for Deirdre.
Only prayers for Deirdre. And the years slipped by.
Father Mattingly left the parish. He worked in the foreign missions. He worked in New York. He went so far away that New Orleans was no longer in his thought, except now and then the sudden remembrance and shame: Deirdre Mayfair-the one he had not helped, his lost Deirdre.
Then one afternoon in 1976, when Father Mattingly had come down for a brief stay at the old rectory, he had passed the house and seen a thin, pale young woman sitting in a rocker on the side porch, behind a veil of rusted screen. She seemed no more than a wraith in a white nightgown, but he’d known at once it was Deirdre. He’d recognized those black curls hanging around her shoulders. And as he opened the rusted gate and came up the flagstone walk, he saw that even the expression on the face was the same-yes, it was Deirdre whom he’d brought home to this house almost thirty years ago.
Expressionless she was, behind the screen, which sagged on its light wooden framing. No answer when he whispered: “Deirdre.”
Around her neck on a chain was an emerald-a beautiful stone, and on her finger a ruby ring. Were these the jewels he’d heard tell of? How incongruous they looked on this silent woman in her limp white nightgown. She gave no sign that she either heard or saw him.
His visit with Miss Millie and Miss Nancy had been brief, uncomfortable. Carl was downtown at work, of course. And yes, that was Deirdre on the side porch and she was home to stay, but there was no need to whisper.
“The mind’s gone,” Nancy said with a bitter smile. “The electric shock wiped out her memory first. Then everything. She couldn’t get up to save herself if the place was burning down. Every now and then she wrings her hands, tries to speak, but she can’t-”
“Don’t!” Millie had whispered, with a little shake of the head and twist of her mouth as though it wasn’t in good taste to discuss this. She was old now, Miss Millie, old and beautifully gray, dainty as Miss Belle had been, Miss Belle who was now long gone. “Have some more coffee, Father?”
But it was a pretty woman sitting in the chair on the porch. The shock treatments had not grayed her hair. And her eyes were still a deep blue, though they were utterly empty. Like a statue in church she was. Father, help me. The emerald caught the light, exploded like a tiny star.
Father Mattingly did not come south very often after that, and in the following years when he rang the bell, he was not welcome. Miss Nancy’s excuses became more abrupt. Sometimes nobody even answered. If Carl was there, the visit was rushed, artificial. No more coffee in the garden room, just a few quick words in that vast dusty parlor. Didn’t they ever turn on the lights anymore? The chandeliers were filthy.
Of course the women were getting quite old. Millie died in 1979. The funeral had been enormous, with cousins coming from all over the country.
Then last year Nancy had gone. Father Mattingly had gotten a letter from Red Lonigan. The priest had been in Baton Rouge at the time and he had driven down just for the funeral.
Miss Carl, in her late eighties, was bone thin, hawk-nosed, with white hair and thick glasses that magnified her eyes unpleasantly. Her ankles were swollen over the tops of her black string shoes. She had to sit down on a gravestone during the final words at the cemetery.
The house itself was going down pitifully. Father Mattingly had seen that for himself when he drove past.
Deirdre too had changed, inevitably. He could see that her fragile hothouse beauty had at last been lost. And in spite of the nurses who walked her back and forth, she had grown stooped, and her hands bent down and out at the wrists, like those of an arthritic patient. They said that her head had now fallen permanently to one side, and her mouth was always open.
It was a sad sight to behold even from a distance. And the jewels only made it more sinister. Diamond earrings on a senseless invalid. An emerald big as a thumbnail! And Father Mattingly, who believed above all in the sanctity of human life, thought Deirdre’s death would have been a blessing.
The afternoon following Nancy’s funeral, as he had paid a silent visit to the old place, he had met an Englishman stopped at the far end of the fence-a very personable man, who introduced himself to the priest as Aaron Lightner.
“Do you know anything about that poor woman?” Lightner had asked quite frankly. “For over ten years I’ve seen her on that porch. You know, I worry about her.”
“I worry myself,” Father Mattingly had confessed. “But they say there’s nothing anyone can do for her.”
“Such a strange family,” said the Englishman sympathetically. “It’s so very hot. I wonder does she feel the heat? You’d think they’d fix the overhead fan. Do you see? It seems to be broken.”
Father Mattingly had taken an immediate liking to the Englishman. Such a forceful, yet polite man. And he was dressed so well in a fine three-piece linen suit. Even carried a walking stick. Made Father Mattingly think of the gentlemen who used to stroll in the evening on St. Charles Avenue. You used to see them on the front porches, wearing their straw hats, watching the traffic pass. Ah, another era.
Father Mattingly found himself chatting easily with the Englishman in a hushed voice under the low-hanging oaks, about all the “known” things with which the man seemed quite familiar-the shock treatments, the sanitariums, the baby daughter long ago adopted out in California. But Father Mattingly would not have dreamed of mentioning old Dave Collins’s gossip of Stella or “the man.” To repeat such nonsense would be flat-out wrong. And besides, it came too near to those painful secrets Deirdre had confided in him.
He and Lightner had somehow ended up at Commander’s Palace for a late lunch at the Englishman’s invitation. What a treat for the priest. How long had it been since he dined in a fine New Orleans restaurant like that with tablecloths and linen napkins. And the Englishman had ordered an excellent wine.
The man admitted candidly that he was interested in the history of families like the Mayfairs.
“You know they had a plantation in Haiti when it was still called Saint-Domingue. Maye Faire was the name of the place, I believe. They made a fortune in coffee and sugar in the days before the slave uprising.”
“So you know of them that far back,” said the priest, amazed.
“Oh, indeed, I do,” said Lightner. “It’s in the history books, you see. Powerful woman ran that place, Marie Claudette Mayfair Landry, following in the footsteps of her mother, Angélique Mayfair. But they had been there for four generations. It was Charlotte who had come from France in, what was it, the year 1689. Yes, Charlotte. And she gave birth to twins-Peter and Jeanne Louise, and they both lived to be eighty-one.”
“You don’t say. I’ve never heard tell of them that far back.”
“I believe it’s a simple matter of record.” The Englishman gave a little shrug. “Even the black rebels didn’t dare torch the plantation. Marie Claudette managed to emigrate with a king’s ransom in possessions as well as her entire family. Then it was La Victoire at Riverbend below New Orleans. I think they called it simply Riverbend.”
“Miss Mary Beth was born there.”