by Rice, Anne
“(Seymour was an opportunistic jerk, or so I thought at the time. Fate had punishment in store for Seymour.)
“Patsy was obviously astonished by this, and jubilant, and we sat through quite a few concerts in the garage, which Lynelle enjoyed more than me. Naturally enough Goblin loved them and danced and danced until he flat-out dissolved.
“As I tell you this, I realize that Lynelle was quite deliberate in this design. She sensed that Patsy was afraid of her and backing off from us—‘You’re a couple of eggheads’—and so she took me out there to Patsy quite cleverly to forge a new link.
“In fact, she pushed the matter further. She took me to see Patsy perform at a county jamboree. It was in Mississippi somewhere, right across the border from where we lived, and part of the county fair. I had never seen my mother on the stage, and people hollering for her and clapping for her, and it opened my eyes.
“With her teased yellow hair and heavy face makeup Patsy looked plastic pretty, and her singing was strong and good. Her songs had a dark bluegrass tone to them, and she herself was playing the banjo, and another guy, whom I didn’t know very well, was sawing away on a rapid, mournful violin. Seymour was a pretty stiff backup with the harmonica and drums.
“That was all very sweet and made a huge impression on me, but when Patsy launched into her next number, a real hard-edged ‘You’ve been mean to me, you bastard!’ type of song, the crowd went nuts. They couldn’t get enough of my little mother, and people were flocking towards the stage from all over the fair. Patsy upped the ante with the next one, her priceless ‘You Poisoned My Well, I’ll Poison Yours.’ I don’t remember much else except thinking she was a hit, and her life wasn’t in vain.
“But I didn’t need Patsy. I’m not sure I’ve ever needed Patsy. Sure Patsy was a hit with the yokels, but I had Beethoven’s Ninth.
“And I had Lynelle. It was when Lynelle and I drove into New Orleans alone together with Goblin that I was most overjoyed.
“I have never known a human being who drove faster than Lynelle, but she seemed to possess an instinct for avoiding policemen, and the one time we were stopped she told a tall story about us rushing to the bedside of a woman in labor, and not only did she not get the ticket, the policeman had to be discouraged from giving us a full escort to the fictitious hospital in town.
“Lynelle was beautiful. There is no more perfect way to say it. She had arrived here at Blackwood Manor to find me a country boy who couldn’t write a sentence and left me some six years later, a dramatically well-educated young man.
“At sixteen I completed all the examinations for high school graduation, and ranked in the top percentile on the college entrance exams as well.
“In that last year that we would be together, Lynelle also taught me how to drive. Pops fully approved, and I was soon roving with the pickup truck on our land and on the backcountry roads all around. Lynelle took me to get my license, and Pops gave me an old pickup to call my own.
“I think Lynelle would have left me a real reader of books too if Goblin hadn’t been so jealous of my reading, so intent upon being included, so intent upon me sounding every word to him out loud or listening to him sound it to me. But that skill—the skill of sinking into books—was to come to me with my second great teacher, Nash.
“Meanwhile, Goblin seemed to feed off Lynelle, even as he fed off me, though at the time I wouldn’t have described it that way, and Goblin was getting physically stronger all the time.
“Big shocker. A Sunday. It was pouring down rain. I must have been twelve years old. I was working on the computer and Goblin cursed at me and the machine went dead. I checked all the connections, booted my program again, and there came Goblin, switching it off.
“ ‘You did that, didn’t you?’ I said, looking around for him, and there he was near the door, my perfect doppelgänger in jeans and a red-and-white checkered shirt, except that he had his arms folded and a smug smile on his face.
“He had my full attention. But I turned the computer back on without taking my eyes off him, and then he pointed to the gasolier. He made it blink.
“ ‘All right, that’s excellent,’ I said. (It was his favorite compliment and had been for years.) ‘But don’t you dare turn off the power in this house. Tell me what you want.’ He made the motions to ‘Let’s go’ and of the rain coming down.
“ ‘No, I’m too old for that,’ I said. ‘You come here and work with me.’ At once I got a chair for him, and when he sat down beside me I explained that I was writing to Aunt Queen, and I read the letter out loud to him, though that wasn’t necessary. I was telling Aunt Queen thank you for her recent offer that Lynelle could always use her bedroom if she needed to freshen up or change clothes or spend the night.
“When I got to the bottom and went to close, Goblin grabbed my left hand as always and typed without spaces, ‘IamGoblinandQuinnisGoblinandGoblinisQuinnandweloveAuntQueen.’ He stopped. He dissolved.
“I knew without question that he’d exhausted himself in turning off the computer. That made me feel safe. The rest of the day and night was mine.
“Another time, very soon after, when Lynelle and I were dancing to a Tchaikovsky waltz—really cutting up in the parlor after all the guests were gone to bed—Goblin socked me in the stomach, which took the breath out of me, and then dissolved, not as if he wanted to but as if he had to—gone in a puff, leaving me crying and sick.
“Lynelle was quite astonished by this, but she never doubted me when I told her Goblin had done it, and then when we were sitting, talking in our intimate way, adult to adult, she confessed to me that she had several times felt Goblin pull her hair. She had tried to ignore it the first couple of times, but now she was certain he did it.
“ ‘This is a strong ghost you have,’ she said. And no sooner had she spoken those words than the gasolier up above us began to move. I had never seen that trick before, this slight movement of those heavy brass arms and glass cups, but it was damn near undeniable. Lynelle laughed. Then she uttered a startled sound. She said she’d been pinched on her right arm. Again she laughed and then, though he wasn’t visible to me, she spoke to Goblin in soothing terms, telling him that she was as fond of him as of me.
“I saw Goblin—now fourteen, you understand, because I was fourteen—standing by the bedroom door and looking proudly at me. I realized keenly that his face had more definition to it than it used to have in the past, principally because that slightly contemptuous expression was new. He was quick to dematerialize, and I was confirmed in my earlier opinion that when he affected matter physically he didn’t have energy to ‘appear’ for very long.
“But he was getting stronger, no doubt of it.
“I vowed at once ‘to kill’ Goblin for hurting Lynelle, and after Lynelle took off in her shining Mazda, I wrote to Aunt Queen that Goblin was doing the ‘unthinkable’ by hurting other people. I told her about the sharp punch in the stomach as well. I sent the letter off by express so she’d get it in two or three days though she was in India at the time.
And to keep Goblin amused that weekend I read aloud to him by the hour from Lost Worlds, a wonderful book of archaeology that had been a gift from Aunt Queen.
“Aunt Queen called as soon as she’d received my letter and she told me that I must control Goblin, that I must find a way to stop him from his behavior by threatening not to look at him or talk to him, and that I had to make these declarations stick.
“ ‘You mean to tell me, Aunt Queen, you finally believe in him?’ I asked.
“ ‘Quinn, I’m across the world from you right now,’ she answered. ‘I can’t argue with you about what Goblin is. What I’m saying is you have to contain him, whether he’s real and separate, or simply a part of you.’
“I agreed with her and I told her I knew how to control him. But I would concentrate on learning more than I knew.
“Meanwhile I was to keep her apprised of things.
“After that she raved about the coherence and st
yle of my letter, which showed a vast improvement over earlier letters, and she attributed my progress correctly to Lynelle.
“I followed Aunt Queen’s directions regarding Goblin, and Lynelle did too. If Goblin did something inappropriate, we lectured him and then refused to acknowledge him until his weak and puny assaults came to a halt. It worked.
“But Goblin wanted more than ever to write, and he moved into a new level of concentration, spelling out messages on the computer using my left hand.
“It gave me more than an eerie feeling, this takeover of my left hand, because Goblin didn’t move my right hand, and so a strange rhythm of writing with one hand mastering the entire keyboard occurred. Lynelle would watch this with a mixture of trepidation and fascination, but she made an astounding discovery.
“And this astounding discovery was that she could communicate with me privately and secretly by typing out on the computer what she had to say using very big words. On that day she wrote something on the order of:
“ ‘Our gallant and ever vigilant doppelgänger may not perceive the many perambulations that run through the cerebral organ of his much cherished and sometimes misused Tarquin Blackwood.’
“And it was plainly obvious from Goblin’s nearby dumb appearance that Lynelle was perfectly right. Goblin, for all his early gains on me, couldn’t interpret such messages. Lynelle typed out more, something like this:
“ ‘Comprehend, beloved Tarquin, that your doppelgänger, though once he absorbed all that you absorbed, may have reached the limits of his power to master fine distinctions, and this allows you a luxurious measure of freedom from his demands and intentions when it is desired.’
“I took over the keyboard and, as Goblin watched suspiciously, being very solid and curious, I wrote that I comprehended all of this, and that we now had the computer for very rapid communication of two kinds.
“It could be used for Goblin’s tapping out simple messages to me using my hand, and by Lynelle and me communicating with a larger vocabulary than Goblin could grasp.
“About this time in my adventures with Lynelle, she tried to explain these mechanisms to Patsy but met with a flat-out ‘You’re crazier than Quinn is, Lynelle; both of you ought to be locked up.’ And when Lynelle approached Pops and Sweetheart they appeared not to understand the significance of Goblin not knowing everything that was in my mind.
“Because that was it: Goblin didn’t necessarily read my thoughts! When I look back on it now it seems an earthshaking discovery, but one that I should have made a long time before.
“As for Pops and Sweetheart, I think they caught on that Lynelle believed in Goblin, which we’d withheld from them before, and they issued a couple of warnings that this ‘side of my personality’ oughtn’t to be encouraged, and surely a high-quality teacher like Lynelle ought to agree. Pops got tough about it and Sweetheart started to cry.
“I took time alone with Sweetheart in the kitchen, helping her dry her tears on her apron and assuring her that I was not insane.
“The moment is deeply inscribed in my memory because Sweetheart, who was always pure kindness, said softly to me that ‘things went terribly wrong with Patsy’ and she didn’t want for things to go badly for me.
“ ‘My daughter could have had a Sweet Sixteen Party in New Orleans,’ Sweetheart said. ‘She could have made her debut. She could have been a maid in the Mardi Gras krewes. She could have had all that—Ruthie and I could have managed everything—and instead she chose to be what she is.’
“ ‘Nothing’s going wrong with me, Sweetheart,’ I said. ‘Don’t misjudge Lynelle or me either.’ I kissed her and kissed her. I lapped her tears and kissed her.
“I might have pointed out to her that she herself had abandoned all the refinements of New Orleans for the spell of Blackwood Manor, that she had spent her whole life in the kitchen, only leaving it for paid guests. But that would have been mean of me. And so I left it with assurances to her that Lynelle was teaching me more than anybody ever had.
“Lynelle and I gave up on the question of insight or commiseration with others as to Goblin—except for Aunt Queen—and Lynelle believed me when I complained of how difficult it was sometimes to stop Goblin’s assaults.
“For instance, if I wanted to read for any length of time, I had to read aloud to Goblin. And that, I think, is why I am a slow reader to this day. I never learned how to speed through a text. I pronounce every word aloud or in my head. And in those times I shied away from what I couldn’t pronounce.
“I got through Shakespeare thanks to Lynelle bringing the films of the plays for me to see—I particularly loved the films with the actor and director Kenneth Branagh—and she took me through a little Chaucer in the original Middle English, but I found it extremely hard all around and insisted we give it up.
“There are gaps in my education which no one could ever get me to fill. But they don’t matter to me. I don’t need to know science or algebra or geometry. Literature and music, painting and history—these are my passions. These are the things that still, somehow, in hours of quiet and lonesomeness, keep me alive.
“But let me close out the history of my love of Lynelle.
“A great high point came right before the end.
“Aunt Queen called from New York on one of her rare visits to the States and asked if Lynelle could bring me there, and both of us—along with Goblin—were delirious with joy. Sweetheart and Pops were glad for us and had no desire themselves to be away from the farm. They understood Aunt Queen’s wishes not to come home just now, but they wanted her to know that they were having her room entirely redone, as she had requested, in Lynelle’s favorite color blue.
“I explained to Goblin that we were going away, much farther away than New Orleans, and he had to cleave to me more closely than ever before. Of course I hoped that he’d stay at Blackwood Manor but I knew that wouldn’t happen. How I knew I can’t say. Perhaps because he was always with us in New Orleans. I don’t know for sure.
“No matter what my hopes, I insisted that Goblin have his own seat beside me on my left on the plane. We flew first class—the three of us, with the stewardesses serving Goblin graciously—to join Aunt Queen at the Plaza on Central Park, and for a great ten days saw all that we could of wondrous sights, museums and the like. Though we had suites as big as Aunt Queen’s, eternally filled with fresh flowers and boxes of Aunt Queen’s beloved chocolate-covered cherries, Goblin and I bunked in with Aunt Queen as we had in the past.
“I was sixteen by this time, but it doesn’t much matter to people like my people whether or not a teenager or even a grown man bunks in with his great-aunt or his granny; those are our ways. In fact, to be utterly frank, I was still sleeping with Jasmine’s mother, Little Ida, at home, though she was now very old and feeble and sometimes dribbled a bit of urine in the bed.
“But where was I? Yes, in New York with my great-aunt, at the Plaza Hotel, cuddled in her arms as I slept.
“Goblin was with us for the entire trip, but something peculiar happened to Goblin. He became more and more transparent as the trip progressed. He seemed unable to be anything else. He lacked strength to move my hand, too. I learned this when I asked him to write for me how he liked New York. He could not. And this meant that there could be no pinching and no hair pulling either, though I had pretty much punished him—by silence and scorn—for those acts in the past.
“I pondered this, this uncommon transparency in a spirit who has always appeared to me to be three-dimensional and flesh and blood, but in truth I didn’t want much to worry about Goblin. I wanted to see New York.
“The high point of our trip for me was the Metropolitan Museum, and I will never forget no matter how long I live Lynelle taking Goblin and me from painting to painting and explaining the relevant history, the relevant biography, and commenting on the wonders we beheld.
“After three days in the museum, Lynelle sat me down on a bench in a room full of the Impressionist paintings and asked me what I
thought I’d learned from all I’d seen. I thought for a long time and then I told her that I thought color had died out in modern painting due to World War I and II. I told her that maybe now, and only now, since we had not had a Third World War, could color come back to painting. Lynelle was very surprised and thought this over and said perhaps it was true.
“There are many other things I remember from that trip—our visit to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, in which I cried, our long walk through Central Park, our roaming Greenwich Village and SoHo, our little trek to obtain my passport just in case I might soon be drawn off to Europe—but they don’t press in on this narrative, except in one respect. And that is that Goblin was utterly manageable all the time, and in spite of his transparency seemed to be as wildly stimulated as I was, appearing wide-eyed and happy, and of course New York is so crowded that when I talked to Goblin in midtown restaurants or on the street, no one even noticed.
“I half expected to have him show up beside me in my passport photo but he did not.
“When we returned, Goblin appeared solid again, and could make mischief, and danced himself into exhaustion and invisibility out of sheer joy.
“I felt an overwhelming relief. I had thought the trip to New York mortally wounded him—that my inattention to him had been the specific cause of his fading severely and perhaps approaching death. And now I had him back with me. And there were moments when I wanted to be with no one else.
“Just after I passed my seventeenth birthday, my days with Lynelle came to a close.
“She had been hired to work in research at Mayfair Medical in New Orleans. And it would henceforth be impossible to keep up with her work, and with tutoring me.