by Rice, Anne
“I was afraid of Goblin. Afraid of what he might do.
“I helped Patsy load all her things in the van so Goblin would know I meant her no ill will. And then Patsy was off, declaring that she was never coming back, but of course she was back in two weeks, demanding to stay in the big house because she ran out of money and there was no place to go but home.
“That night, as soon as Patsy was safely away, I demanded of Goblin, ‘What did you do? You almost made her fall!’ But I got no answer from Goblin; it was as though he was hiding, and when I went back upstairs to my room and sat down at the computer he at once grabbed my hand and typed out,
“ ‘Patsy hurt you. I don’t like Patsy.’
“ ‘That doesn’t mean you can hurt her,’ I wrote, speaking the words aloud.
“At once my left hand was snatched up with extraordinary force.
“ ‘I made Patsy stop,’ he answered.
“ ‘You almost killed Patsy!’ I countered. ‘Don’t ever hurt anyone. It’s not fun.’
“ ‘No fun,’ he wrote. ‘She stopped hurting you.’
“ ‘If you hurt other people,’ I answered, ‘I won’t love you.’
“There came a silence and a chill in the room, and then by his power the computer was turned off. Then came the embrace, and with it a faint loving warmth. I felt a vague loathing of the pleasure this embrace produced in me, and a sudden fear that it would become erotic. I don’t remember ever feeling that fear before.
“Patsy had called me a queer. Maybe I was one, I thought. Maybe I was steered in that direction. Maybe Goblin knew. Goblin and me together. Fear stole over me. It seemed like mortal sin.
“ ‘Don’t be sad, Goblin,’ I whispered. ‘There’s too much sadness as it is, at home. Go off, now, Goblin. Go off, and let me think by myself.’
“In the weeks that followed, Patsy never looked at me in quite a familiar way, but I did not want to admit to anything regarding the event on the staircase, so I couldn’t ask her what she had felt.
“Meantime everybody knew that in her bathroom in the big house she was vomiting and retching in the morning, and she took to hanging about the kitchen, saying that all the food disgusted her, and Pops, driven away from the table, spent his long hours in the shed.
“He didn’t talk to the men. He didn’t talk to anyone. He watched the television and he drank Barq’s Root Beer, but he wasn’t seeing or hearing a thing.
“Then, one night when Patsy drove up late and came into the kitchen claiming she was sick and Jasmine had to make her some dinner, Pops sat down at the table opposite her and told me to get out of the room.
“ ‘No, you let him stay if you’ve got something to say to me,’ Patsy said. ‘Go on, out with it.’
“I didn’t know quite what to do, so I stepped into the hallway and leaned against the back doors. I could see Patsy’s face, and the back of Pops’ head, and I could hear every word that was said.
“ ‘I’ll give you fifty thousand dollars for it,’ Pops said.
“Patsy stared at him for a full minute, and then she said, ‘What are you talking about?’
“ ‘I know you’re pregnant,’ he said. ‘Fifty thousand dollars. And you leave the baby here with us.’
“ ‘You crazy old man,’ she said. ‘You’re sixty-five. What are you going to do with a baby? You think I’d go through all that again for fifty grand?’
“ ‘A hundred thousand dollars,’ he said calmly. And then he said, ‘Two hundred thousand dollars, Patsy Blackwood, on the day that it’s born and you sign it over to me.’
“Patsy rose from the table. She shot up and backwards, glaring at him. ‘Why the hell didn’t you tell me that yesterday!’ she shouted. ‘Why the hell didn’t you tell me that this morning!’ She made her hands into fists and stomped her foot. ‘You crazy old man!’ she said. ‘Damn you.’ And she turned and flew out the kitchen. The screen door banged shut after her, and Pops bowed his head.
“I came into the kitchen and stood at his side.
“ ‘She’s already gotten rid of it,’ he said. He bowed his head. He looked utterly defeated. He never said another word about it. He went back to his silent ways.
“As for Patsy, she did lie sick in her room for a couple of days during which Jasmine cooked for her and took general care of her, and then she was up and off in her new van for a series of country jamborees.
“I was very curious. Would Patsy immediately get pregnant just to make two hundred thousand dollars? And what would it be like to have a baby sister or brother? I really wanted to know.
“Pops set himself to solitary tasks around the farm. He painted the white fences where they needed it; he clipped back the azaleas. He laid in more of the spring flowers. In fact, he enlarged the garden patches and made them more brilliant than they’d ever been before. Red geraniums were his favorite flower, and though they didn’t last too long in the heat he set out plenty of them in the beds, and he stepped back often to get perspective on his schemes.
“For a while, a brief while, it seemed that somehow things would be all right. The joy had not quite fled Blackwood Manor. Goblin behaved himself, but Goblin’s face mirrored my tension and my mounting conflict. The fear was winning over my mind.
“What was I afraid of? Death, I suppose. I longed to see Little Ida’s ghost but it didn’t happen, and then there was Big Ramona saying that people didn’t appear to you once they’d gone to Heaven, unless they had a powerful reason for coming back. I wanted one last glimpse of Little Ida. I knew Sweetheart wasn’t going to appear, but I had some peculiar faith in Little Ida. I wondered how long she’d been dead in my bed.
“Meantime, Blackwood Manor went on.
“Big Ramona, Jasmine and Lolly ran the kitchen to perfection as they had always done, handling the tours with equal aplomb, and Pops progressed to a rampage of repairs and renovations to keep himself exhausted all the time, so that he was in bed, out cold, by eight o’clock.
“Big Ramona did everything she could to cheer everyone, baking all her ‘secret recipes’ and even cajoling Patsy into staying with me for dinner a few times (when Pops was absent on errands), as if she felt that I needed Patsy, which frankly I did not.
“Some interesting guests came and went, Aunt Queen wrote loving letters, and Easter Sunday did see an enormous buffet with people from miles around and music on the lawn.
“Pops didn’t help much with this Easter banquet and everyone understood why. He did appear, dressed in a fine white linen suit, but he mainly sat silent in a chair, watching the dancing and looking lifeless, as though his spirit had fled. His eyes were sunken. His skin had a yellowish tinge.
“He was like a man who’d seen a vision, and for whom normal life held no charm.
“When I looked at him, my throat tightened. I could feel my heart pounding. I could hear it in my ears. The sky was a perfect blue, the air was mild and the music of the little orchestra was lovely, but my teeth were chattering.
“Out in the center of the dance floor, Goblin danced. He was very solid, outfitted in a three-piece white suit just as I was. He didn’t seem to care whether or not I saw him. He was winding his way in and out of the dancers. Then his eyes fixed on me and he became sad. He stood still and reached out to me with both arms. His face was marked with sorrow. And it was no mirror image, because I knew my face was blank with fear.
“ ‘No one can see you!’ I whispered under my breath, and quite suddenly everyone there seemed alien to me, the way people had in the church at Lynelle’s Memorial, or rather I felt myself to be a monster that I could see Goblin, a monster that he was my familiar, and there seemed no possibility of comfort or warmth in all the world.
“I thought of Sweetheart in the crypt in New Orleans. If I went to the gates of the crypt, would I smell formaldehyde? Or would I smell something worse?
“I drifted away. I went down to the old cemetery. There were quite a few guests hanging about down there, and Lolly was passing among them with a bo
ttle of champagne. I saw no ghosts in the cemetery. I saw only the living. Cousins of Sweetheart’s talked to me. I didn’t hear them. I pictured going upstairs to Pops’ bedroom, taking his pistol out of the drawer and putting it to my head and pulling the trigger. I thought:
“ ‘If you do that, this terror will end.’
“Then I felt Goblin’s invisible arms around me. I felt him wrap himself around me. There came what seemed a heartbeat from Goblin and a spiritual warmth. It was not a new thing for me to feel this. It had lately made me feel guilty. Only just now it seemed desperately important.
“And the elation returned to me, the wild elation I felt when I left Sweetheart’s hospital room, and tears rolled down my cheeks. I stood under the oak tree, wondering if the sad ghosts of the cemetery could see all these living people. I cried.
“ ‘You come inside with me,’ Jasmine said. She took me by the shoulders. ‘Come on, Taw-quin, you come on,’ she said. She only called me by my full name, pronouncing it ‘Taw-quin,’ when she was very serious. I followed her in, and she told me to sit down in the kitchen and have a glass of champagne too.
“Now, being a country kid I had drunk wine and whiskey plenty of times, though never much in quantity—but very quietly, sitting at the kitchen table—after Jasmine left—I drank a whole bottle of champagne.
“That night I was violently sick, my head hurt as though it was going to burst, the Easter party was over and I was vomiting as Big Ramona stood over me declaring in no uncertain terms that Jasmine was never to set me to drinking wine again.”
10
“In the weeks that followed I felt better. I don’t think you can feel sheer panic continuously. Your mental system breaks down. It comes in waves, and you have to tell yourself, well, this will end.
“I went back to a leaden misery that was more easily manageable, and my mind was sometimes flooded with memories of Sweetheart, of her singing, and of her cooking, and of little things, unimportant and fragmentary things, that she had said, or would say, and then a terror would follow, as if someone had taken me bodily and put me out on a high window ledge nine stories up above a street.
“Meantime I hadn’t forgotten what Patsy had called me—sissy, Little Lord Fauntleroy, queer. I knew perfectly well from the realm of television and movie watching, as well as books, what that meant, and I had a deepening inevitable adolescent suspicion that that characterization was true.
“Understand, I was too good a Catholic to experiment with sexual stimulation when I was alone, and no good opportunities had come up for experimenting romantically with anybody else. I didn’t think people went blind from self-stimulation, but the contemplation of it filled me with a Catholic shame.
“But I had had wet dreams. And though I’d awakened disturbed and humiliated and cut them short, repressing the memory of what really drove them, I had a deep suspicion that they were about men.
“No wonder Pops had offered two hundred grand to Patsy for a baby. He thought I’d never marry, never have children. He knew from looking at me. He knew from the way I couldn’t hammer a nail into wood that I was queer. What had he thought about me raving over supper about movies like The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffmann? He knew I was queer. Hell, probably everybody who’d ever seen me knew.
“Goblin knew. Goblin was waiting. Goblin was a profound mystery of invisible tentacles and pulsing power. Goblin was queer!
“And what about the palpable embrace of Goblin, and the way that sometimes this embrace sent a cool delicious chill through all my skin, as though someone were stirring the hairs everywhere on my body and telling my body to wake up?
“There was something so eternally intimate about Goblin’s attentions that they had to be sinful.
“Whatever the case, I did nothing but brood about it, and try to keep busy, and the panic grew in me, rising and falling, and it began to come at its very worst at twilight each day.
“Now that summer was coming and the days were longer, I knew the waves of panic longer—sometimes from about four p.m. till eight. There came that image to my mind of me putting a gun to my head and the thought that the bullet would make the pain end. Then I thought of what that would do to Pops and Aunt Queen and I put it out of my mind.
“It was around that period that I made everybody turn on certain lights at four o’clock, come hell or high water, and whether we had any guests at Blackwood Manor or not.
“I was becoming the Lord of Blackwood Manor—the Little Lord Fauntleroy, I suppose.
“Each evening, like a creature driven, I turned on classical music in the parlors and the dining room, and then I checked on the flower arrangements and the placement of furniture and went about straightening out all the pictures on the walls; and, as the panic went away a little, I sat in the kitchen with Pops.
“But Pops didn’t talk anymore. He sat in a straight-back chair, staring out the screen door at nothing. It was awful to be with Pops. His eyes were more and more empty. He wasn’t snapping back the way that Big Ramona had snapped back. There was no consolation I could give or take.
“Then one night, when the panic was on me heavy and it was mixed up with gloom and fear of being queer and mostly with gloom, I said to Pops:
“ ‘Do you think Patsy will get pregnant again just to sell you the baby?’
“This was a very uncommon kind of thing for me to say to Pops. Pops and I spoke in rather formal terms with each other. And one of the things we had never done was discuss Patsy.
“He answered in a quiet flat voice, ‘No. It was just something of the moment. I figured I could save that one. I thought that that was something to do, to bring up that one. But the truth is, I don’t even think she could carry one to term if she wanted to. She’s gotten rid of too many, and that makes a woman’s womb weak.’
“I was amazed at his candor.
“I wondered why I was alive. Maybe he’d given her money to carry me. But I didn’t say anything. I’d rather be afraid of it than know. And Pops’ voice had sounded too dead and metallic. I wasn’t easy with Pops. I felt sorrow for him. Neither of us said another word about it.
“And then at last—at last—it was eight o’clock and I could sit down on the bedside with Big Ramona and she’d brush her long white hair and slowly braid it and I’d be safe, safe in the shadows, and we would talk, and then lie down to sleep.
“One afternoon, around three p.m., I was sitting out on the front steps of the house, looking down the long avenue of pecan trees at the changing of the light. It was a Tuesday, I’m almost sure, and we had no company, the last of the weekend guests having gone away, and the guests for the coming weekend not yet arrived.
“I hated the stillness. I saw that image of the gun at my head. What could I do, I thought, to stop thinking of putting that pistol to my head? It was too late to go out fishing in the pirogue, and I didn’t want to get all dirty in the swamps anyway, and everything—absolutely every single thing—was done in the house.
“Goblin was nowhere about. Goblin had learned to shy away from me when I got in these dark moods, when his influence to get me to do things was at its lowest. And though he would probably have come had I called him, I didn’t want to see him. When I thought of putting the gun to my head, I wondered if one bullet would kill us both.
“No, I didn’t want the company of Goblin.
“Then it occurred to me that I had not inflicted myself as Lord of the Manor on the attic; the attic was in fact an undiscovered territory, and I was too old to be forbidden to go up there, and I didn’t need to ask anybody. So I went inside and up the stairs.
“Now, at three o’clock there was plenty of light coming in the dormer windows of the attic, and I could see all the wicker furniture—whole sets of it, it seemed to me, with couches, chairs, et cetera—and the various trunks.
“I inspected first a wardrobe trunk that had belonged to Gravier Blackwood and was now standing open with its little hangers and drawers all vacant and clean.
&n
bsp; “Then there were suitcases with old clothes in them that did not seem to be all that fascinating, and more trunks, all stamped with the name of Lorraine McQueen. New things. What were they to me? Surely there was something older, something that had belonged perhaps to Manfred’s sainted wife, Virginia Lee.
“Then I came upon a big canvas steamer trunk with leather straps to it, so big that the lid came almost to my waist, and I was already six feet tall. The lid was open a little, and the clothes were bulging out of it, the whole smelling strongly of mold, and the label on the top of the trunk read in faded ink ‘Rebecca Stanford,’ with the address of Blackwood Farm.
“ ‘Rebecca Stanford,’ I said aloud. Who could this be? Very distinctly, I heard a rustling noise behind me, or was it ahead of me? I stopped and listened. It could have been rats, of course, but we really didn’t have rats in Blackwood Manor. Then it seemed the rustling was a conversation between a man and a woman and someone arguing … Just doesn’t happen. I heard those words very distinctly, and then the woman’s voice … Believe in him, he will do it!
“She had pasted on the label, I thought. She’d packed her trunk and pasted on the label. She’d been waiting for him to come get her. Miss Rebecca Stanford.
“But where did all these thoughts come from?
“Then the noise came again. It had a rather deliberate sound to it. I felt the hair stand up on my neck. I liked the excitement. I loved it. It was infinitely better than depression and misery, than thoughts of guns and death.
“I thought, A ghost is going to come. Voices. No, a rustling. It will be stronger than the apparition of William. It will be stronger than the vaporous ghosts that hover over the cemetery. It’s going to come because of this trunk. Maybe it will be Aunt Camille, who has been seen so often on the stairs, coming up to the attic.
“ ‘Who are you, Rebecca Stanford?’ I whispered. Silence. I opened the trunk. A mess of clothing was inside it and mildew had grown all over it, and there were other articles all tumbled with the fabrics—an old silver-backed hairbrush, a silver-edged comb, bottles of perfume in which the contents had dried up and a silver-backed mirror, all splotched and darkened and no good anymore.