“She took me through enough French to understand many of the subtitled movies we watched together, and she loaded me with history and geography, pretty much designing her fluid and wondrous lectures to me around historical personages, but sometimes romping through whole centuries in terms of what had been accomplished in art and war.

“ ‘It’s all art and war, Quinn,’ she said to me once as we were sitting cross-legged on the floor up here together, ‘and it’s a shocking fact but most great men were insane.’ She was careful to address Goblin by name also as she explained that Alexander the Great was an egomaniac and Napoleon ‘obsessive compulsive,’ while Henry VIII was a poet, a writer and a despotic fiend.

“Irrepressibly resourceful, Lynelle came flying in with whole cartons of educational or documentary tapes for us to watch by VHS and also introduced into my head the idea that in the day and age of cable television nobody ought to be uneducated. Even a boy hermit on Blackwood Farm should know everything just from watching TV.

“ ‘People in trailer parks are getting these channels, Quinn, think of it—think of it, waitresses watching the biography of Beethoven and telephone linemen going home to watch documentaries of World War II.’

“I wasn’t quite as convinced as she was on these points, but I saw the potential, and when she persuaded Pops to give me a giant-size television I was overjoyed.

“She insisted on the scientific documentaries which I, in the course of things, would have skipped, and she took me through the magnificent film Immortal Beloved, in which Gary Oldman plays Beethoven to such perfection that every time we watched it I cried. Then there was Amadeus with Tom Hulce as Mozart and F. Murray Abraham as Salieri, a masterpiece of a film that left me breathless, and she reached back into history for Song to Remember with Cornel Wilde as Chopin and Merle Oberon as George Sand, and Tonight We Sing, all about S. Hurok, the great impresario, and there were dozens of other films by which she opened my world.

“Of course she showed me The Red Shoes, which ignited me with fire to be around people of grace and culture, and then The Tales of Hoffmann, which transformed my dreams. Both of these movies caused real physical pain in me, so vibrant, so lofty, so exalted was their world. Ah, it hurts me now to think about them, to see images in my head from them. It hurts. They were like spells, those two movies.

“Picture me and Lynelle on the floor in this room with no light except the giant television, and those movies, those enchantments flooding our senses. And Goblin, Goblin staring at the screen, stultified by the patterns he must have been perceiving, Goblin quiet for all his struggle to understand why we were so stricken and so quiet.

“When I cried in pain, Lynelle said the kindest thing to me: