The Witching Hour Page 14

  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, Angelique 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."

  "Yes! That's correct. In, let me see, I think it was 1871. It took the river to finally swallow that old house. Such a beauty it was, with columns all around. There were photographs of it in the very old guidebooks to Louisiana."

  "I'd like to see those," the priest said.

  "They'd built the house on First Street before the Civil War, you know," Lightner went on. "It was actually Katherine Mayfair who built it and later her brothers Julien and Remy Mayfair lived there. And then Mary Beth made it her home. She didn't like the country, Mary Beth. I believe it was Katherine who married the Irish architect, the one who died so young of yellow fever. You know, he built the banks downtown. Yes, the name was Monahan. And after he died, Katherine didn't want to stay at First Street anymore because he had built it and she was so sick at heart."

  "Seems I heard a long time ago that Monahan designed that house," said the priest. But he really didn't want to interrupt. "I used to hear about Miss Mary Beth ... "

  "Yes, it was Mary Beth Mayfair who married Judge McIntyre, though he was only a young lawyer then of course, and their daughter Carlotta Mayfair is the head of the house now, it seems ... "

  Father Mattingly was enthralled. It wasn't merely his old and painful curiosity about the Mayfairs, it was the engaging manner of Lightner himself, and the pleasing sound of his British accent. Just history, all this, not gossip, quite innocent. It had been a long time since Father Mattingly had spoken to such a cultivated man. No, this was not gossip when the Englishman told it.

  And against his better judgment, the priest found himself telling in a tentative voice the story of the little girl in the school yard and the mysterious flowers. Now, that was not what he'd heard in the confessional, he reminded himself. Yet it was frightening that it should spill out this way, after a half-dozen sips of wine. Father Mattingly was ashamed of himself. Suddenly he couldn't get the confession out of his mind. He lost the thread. He was thinking of Dave Collins and all those strange things he'd said and the way Father Lafferty had gotten so angry that July night at the bazaar, Father Lafferty who'd presided over the adoption of Deirdre's baby.

  Had Father Lafferty taken action on account of all Dave Collins's crazy talk? He himself had never been able to do anything.

  The Englishman was quite patient with the priest's silent reverie. In fact, the strangest thing had happened. It seemed to Father Mattingly that the man was listening to his thoughts! But that was quite impossible, and if a man could overhear the memory of a confession in that way, just what was a priest supposed to do about it?

  How long that afternoon seemed. How pleasant, easeful. Father Mattingly had finally repeated Dave Collins's old tales, and he had even talked of the pictures in the books of "the dark man" and of witches dancing.

  And the Englishman had seemed so interested, only moving now and then to pour the wine, or to offer the priest a cigarette, never interrupting.

  "Now, what do you make of all that," the priest whispered at last. Had the man said anything back? "You know, old Dave Collins is dead, but Sister Bridget Marie is going to live forever. She's nearing a hundred."

  The Englishman smiled. "You mean the sister in the school yard that long-ago day."

  Father Mattingly was now drunk on the wine he'd had, that was the plain truth of it. And he kept seeing the yard and the children and the flowers strewn all over the pavement.

  "She's out at Mercy Hospital now," the priest said. "I saw her last time I was down. I suppose I'll see her this time. And what nonsense she talks now that she doesn't know who she's talking to. Old Dave Collins died in a bar on Magazine Street. Fitting place. All his friends chipped in for the biggest funeral."

  The priest had drifted off again, thinking of Deirdre and the confessional. And the Englishman had touched the back of his hand and whispered: "You mustn't worry about it."

  The priest had been startled. Then he'd almost laughed at the idea that someone could read his mind. And that's what Sister Bridget Marie had said about Antha, wasn't it? That she could hear people talking through the walls and read their minds? Had he told the Englishman that part?

  "Yes, you did. I want to thank you ... "

  He and the Englishman had said good-bye at six o'clock outside the gates of the Lafayette Cemetery. It had been the golden time of evening when the sun is gone and everything gives back the light it has absorbed all day long. But how forlorn it all was, the old whitewashed walls, and the giant magnolia trees ripping at the pavement.

  "You know, they're all buried in there, the Mayfairs," Father Mattingly had said, glancing at the iron gates. "Big above-ground tomb down the center walk to the right, has a little wrought-iron fence around it. Miss Carl keeps it in good repair. You can read all those names you just told me."

  The priest would have shown the Englishman himself but it was time to get back to the rectory, time to go back to Baton Rouge and then up to St. Louis.

  Lightner gave him an address in London.

  "If you ever hear anything more about that family--anything you feel comfortable passing on--well, would you contact me?"

  Of course Father Mattingly had never done that. He'd misplaced the name and address months ago. But he remembered that Englishman kindly, though sometimes he wondered who the man really was, and what he had actually wanted. If all the priests of the world had such a soothing manner as that, what a splendid thing it would be. It was as if that man understood everything.

  As he drew nearer the old corner now, Father Mattingly thought again of what the young priest had written: that Deirdre Mayfair was shriveling up, that she could hardly walk anymore.

  Then how could she have gone wild on August 13th, he'd like to know, for the love of heaven? How could she have broken the windows out and scared off men from an asylum?

  And Jerry Lonigan said his driver saw things thrown out--books, a clock, all manner of things, just hurling through the air. And the noise she'd made, like an animal howling.

  The priest found it hard to believe.

  But there it was, the evidence.

  As he slowly approached the gate on this warm August afternoon, he saw the white-uniformed window man on the front porch, atop his wooden ladder. Knife in hand, he applied the putty along the new panes. And each one of those tall windows had shining new glass, complete with the tiny brand-name stickers.

  Yards away, on the south side of the house, behind her veil of rusted copper screen sat Deirdre, hands twisted out at the wrists, head bent and to the side against the
back of the rocker. The emerald pendant on its chain was a tiny spark of green light for an instant.

  Ah, what had it been like for her to break those windows? To feel the strength coursing through her limbs, to feel herself in possession of such uncommon power? Even to make a sound, why, it must have been magnificent.

  But that was a strange thought for him, wasn't it? Yet he felt himself swept up in some vague sadness, some grand melancholy. Ah, Deirdre, poor little Deirdre.

  The truth was, he felt sad and bitter as he always did when he saw her. And he knew he would not go up the flagstone path to the front steps. He would not ring the bell only to be told again that Miss Carl wasn't home, or that she could not receive him just now.

  This trip had only been Father Mattingly's personal penance. Over forty years ago, he had done the wrong thing on a fateful Saturday afternoon, and a girl's sanity had hung in the balance. And no visit now would ever make the slightest difference.

  He stood at the fence for a long moment, listening to the scrape of the window man's knife, curiously clear in the soft tropical quiet around him. He felt the heat penetrate his shoes, his clothes. He let the soft mellow colors of this moist and shady world work on him.

  It was a rare place, this. Better for her surely than some sterile hospital room, or vista of close-cropped lawn with no more variation than a synthetic carpet. And what made him think that he could have ever done for her what so many doctors had failed to do? Maybe she had never had a chance. Only God knows.

  Suddenly he glimpsed a visitor behind the rusted screens, sitting beside the poor mad woman. Nice young man it seemed--tall, dark-haired, well dressed in spite of the wilting temperature. Maybe one of those cousins from away, from New York City or California.

  The young fella must have just come out on the porch from the parlor, because a moment ago he had not been there.

  So solicitous, he seemed. It was positively loving the way he inclined towards Deirdre. Just as if he was kissing her cheek. Yes, that was what he was doing. Even in the dense shade, the priest could see it, and it touched him deeply. It made the sadness well in him painfully.

  But the window man was finishing now. He was gathering up his ladder. He came down the front steps and went around the flagstone walk and past the screen porch, using his ladder as he went, to drive back the banana trees and the swollen oleander.

  The priest was finished too. He had done his penance. He could go home now, back to the hot barren pavements of Constance Street, and the cool confines of the rectory. Slowly he turned and moved towards the corner.

  He glanced back only once. The screen porch was empty now save for Deirdre. But surely that nice young man would come back out soon. It had gone right to the priest's heart to see that tender kiss, to know that someone even now still loved that lost soul that he himself had failed to save so long ago.

  Four

  THERE WAS SOMETHING she had to do tonight. Someone she was supposed to call. And it was important, too. But after fifteen hours on duty--and twelve of them spent in the Operating Room--she could not now remember.

  She wasn't Rowan Mayfair yet, with all Rowan's personal griefs and concerns. She was just Dr. Mayfair, empty as a clear pane of glass, sitting here silent in the doctors' coffee room, hands shoved in the pockets of her dirty white coat, her feet on the chair opposite, a Parliament cigarette on her lip, listening to them talk as neurosurgeons always talk, regurgitating in language every exciting moment of the day.

  Soft bursts of laughter, voices overlapping on voices, smell of alcohol, rustle of starched clothes, sweet aroma of the cigarettes. Never mind the personal disgrace that almost all of them smoked. It was nice to remain here, comfortable in the glare of the lights on the dirty Formica table, and the dirty linoleum tile, and the dirty beige walls. Nice to be putting off the thinking time, the time when memory would come back to fill her up again and render her heavy and opaque.

  In truth, it had been a damn near perfect day, which was why her feet hurt so much. She had been through three emergency surgeries, one following another, from the gunshot wound at six A.M. to the car crash victim brought in four hours ago. And if every day was like this day, her life was going to be just fine. It was going to be perfectly wonderful, actually.

  She was aware of that just now, in a relaxed sort of way. After ten years of medical school and internship and residency she was what she had always wanted to be--a doctor, a neurosurgeon, and most specifically the new board-certified Staff Attending in Neurosurgery in a giant university hospital where the Neurological Trauma Center could keep her operating on accident victims almost full-time.

  She had to admit she was glorying in it, glorying in her first week as something other than an overworked and critically exhausted chief resident who still had to operate fifty percent of the time under someone else's eye.

  Even the inevitable talk today had not been so terrible--the endless running diatribe in the Operating Room, the dictating of the notes after, and finally the lengthy informal coffee room review. She liked these doctors around her, the shiny-faced interns opposite, Dr. Peters and Dr. Blake, who had just begun their rotation and were looking at her as if she were a witch instead of a doctor. And Dr. Simmons, the chief resident, who told her now and then in a heated whisper that she was the finest doctor he'd ever seen in surgery and that the nurses said the same thing, and Dr. Larkin, the beloved chief of neurosurgery, known to his protegees as Lark, who had forced her over and over again today to elaborate--"Explain, Rowan, explain in detail. You have to tell these boys what you're doing. Gentlemen, behold, this is the only neurosurgeon in western civilization who does not like to talk about her work."

  Understatement. She hated talking. She was innately suspicious of language because she could "hear" with remarkable accuracy what lay behind it, and also she just didn't know how to talk very well.

  Now they were talking about Dr. Larkin's virtuoso performance this afternoon with the meningioma, thank heaven, and she could drift in this delicious exhaustion, savoring the taste of the cigarette, and the awful coffee, and the lovely glare of the light on the beautifully blank walls.

  Trouble was, she'd told herself this morning to remember about this personal thing, this call that had to be made, this something that really mattered to her. So what did that mean? It would come back as soon as she stepped out of the building.

  And she could do that any time she liked. After all, she was the Attending, and she didn't have to be here longer than fifteen hours, and she never had to sleep in the on-call room again, and nobody expected her to go down to Emergency just to see what was going on, though left to her own devices, perhaps, that is what she would have liked to do.

  Two years ago, less than that perhaps, she would have been long gone by this time, headed over the Golden Gate at the speed limit, eager to be Rowan Mayfair again, in the wheelhouse of the Sweet Christine, singlehanding her out of Richardson Bay and into the open sea. Only when she had set the autopilot for a great circular course, well out of the way of the channels, would the exhaustion have conquered her. She would have gone down below deck into the cabin where the wood shone as brilliantly as the polished brass, and falling into the double bunk, she would have lost herself in a thin sleep through which all the little sounds of the boat penetrated sweetly.

  But that was before the process of working miracles on the operating table had become positively addictive. Research had still now and then beckoned. And Ellie and Graham, her adoptive parents, were still living, and the glass-walled house on the Tiburon shore was not a mausoleum filled with dead people's books, dead people's clothes.

  She had to walk through that mausoleum to get to the Sweet Christine. She had to see the inevitable mail which still came for Ellie and Graham. And maybe even hear a phone machine message or two from an out-of-town friend who didn't know that Ellie had died of cancer last year, and that Graham had died of "a stroke," to put it simply, two months before Ellie's death. She watered the ferns stil
l in memory of Ellie, who had played music for them. She drove Graham's Jaguar sedan because to sell it would be a nuisance. She had never cleaned out his desk.

  Stroke. A dark ugly feeling passed over her. Think not of Graham dying on the kitchen floor but of the day's victories. You saved three lives during the past fifteen hours, when other doctors might have let them die. To other lives in other hands you gave your skillful assistance. And now, safe in the womb of the Intensive Care Unit, three of those patients are sleeping, and they have eyes that can see, and mouths that can shape words, and when you hold their hands, they grip as you tell them to grip.

  Yes, she couldn't have asked for more. Would that she could always leave the tissue transplants and the tumors to others. She thrived on crisis. She needed it. She'd go home in a little while only because it was healthy to do so, healthy to rest her eyes and her feet and her brain, of course, and to be someplace besides here for the weekend; to be on the Sweet Christine, at sea.

  For now, rest in this great ship called the hospital, for that is exactly what it felt like--a submarine, traveling without sound through time. The lights never went out. The temperature never varied. The engines never shut down. And we, the crew, are bonded together, in spite of anger, or resentment, or competition. We are bonded and there is a form of love whether we acknowledge it or not.

  "You're looking for a miracle!" the supervisor in Emergency had said to her at six this evening, contemptuously, glaze-eyed with exhaustion. "Wheel this woman over against the wall, and save your juices for somebody you can do something for!"

  "I want nothing but miracles," Rowan had answered. "We're going to get the glass and dirt out of her brain, and then we'll take it from there."

  No way to tell him that when she had placed her hands on the woman's shoulders, she had "listened" with her diagnostic sense to a thousand little signals; and they had told her, infallibly, that the woman could live. She knew what she'd see when the bone fragments had been carefully lifted out of the fracture and frozen for later replacement, when the torn dura mater had been further slit and the bruised tissue beneath it magnified by the powerful surgical scope. Plenty of living brain, unharmed, functioning, once she'd sucked the blood away from it, and cauterized the tiny ruptured vessels so that the bleeding would stop.