“There were so many questions I wanted to ask Dr. Winn Mayfair, but it wasn’t my place to do it, and so I had to rely on Mona’s assertion that her condition was indeed stable and I knew that I had to leave her the next morning with her word that Aunt Queen’s health was what mattered at this juncture in my life.

“Within moments after the doctor had left we were in each other’s arms, overly conscious of the sacred wiring, and I was kissing her with all the drama I could effortlessly muster, calling her my eternal love and seeking only to pleasure her as she pleasured me.

“It was a long night of tender kissing and lovemaking, and the quilts probably bear their testimony to this time.

“Dawn had come, vague and pink as twilight over the city, before I said my farewell to Mona, and if anyone had told me then that I would never see her again—this soft, drowsy child amid her lace and her flowers, and her gloriously disheveled hair—I wouldn’t have believed it. But then there were many things I would not have believed then.

“And there were more good times to come.

“I went straight from her hospital room, where I left her sleepy and beautiful and fresh as the flowers all around her in their moist baskets, to obtain the airline tickets, and from there to obtaining Tommy’s passport, where Aunt Queen and I were both able to ‘claim that we knew him as Tommy Blackwood,’ and then we were on our way by plane to Newark, with Goblin strong and visible and in his own expensive first-class seat, and from Newark we flew out to Rome.”

CHAPTER 35

35

“WHO CAN SAY how different my last few days in New Orleans might have been had I known that we would be gone on our European odyssey for a full three years?

“No one among our party knew that the festivities would go on so long, and indeed it was the spirit of living moment to moment which kept us going—forever checking Aunt Queen’s blood pressure and general stamina with her favorite physicians of Paris, Rome, Zurich and London—as we roved ever back and forth through the castles, museums, cathedrals and cities that Aunt Queen showed me with such love and enthusiasm, and with Nash’s wise instruction from which I drew constant overwhelming stimulation; always yielding to Aunt Queen’s desire to travel ‘a few more months,’ to yet another ‘little country’ or another great and grand ‘ruin’ that I should ‘never forget.’

“Aunt Queen’s health was failing, there was no doubt of it, or, to put it more truly, she was simply getting too old to do what she was doing, and that is what she would scarcely face.