“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?’