“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.