“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 bottle 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.’