“That might sound ambiguous now, but it didn’t then.

“I think, all in all, the six years I had with Lynelle were some of the happiest in my life.

“Naturally, I was drawn away from Pops and Sweetheart, but they were proud and relieved to see me learning things and didn’t mind a bit. Besides, I still spent time with Pops, playing the harmonica after lunch and talking about ‘old times,’ though Pops was hardly an old man. He liked Lynelle.

“Even Patsy was drawn to Lynelle and joined us for some of our adventures, at which time I had to squeeze into the tiny backseat of the sports car while the two women chatted away up front. My most poignant memory of Patsy’s joining us has to do with Goblin, to whom I talked all the time, and the shock of Lynelle when Patsy cursed at me to stop talking to that disgusting ghost.

“Lynelle softened and intimidated Patsy, and something else happened which I think I only understand now as I look back on those years. It is simply this: that Lynelle’s respect for me, not only as Goblin’s friend but as little Tarquin Blackwood, had the effect of causing Patsy to respect me and to talk to me more sincerely and often than she had in the past.

“It was as if my mother never ‘saw’ the person I was until Lynelle really drew her attention to me, and then a vague interest substituted for the condescending and arrogant pity—‘You poor sweet darlin’ ‘—that Patsy had felt before.

“Lynelle was a great watcher also of popular movies, particularly those which were ‘gothic’ or ‘romantic,’ as she called it, and she brought tapes of everything, from Robocop to Ivanhoe, to watch with me in the evenings, and sometimes this brought Patsy into the room. Patsy enjoyed Dark Man and The Crow, and even Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast.

“More than once we all watched Coal Miner’s Daughter, all about Loretta Lynn, the wonderful country-western star whom Patsy so admired. And I observed that Lynelle could talk ‘country’ pretty easily with Patsy. It made me jealous. I wanted my romantic and mysterious Lynelle to myself.

“However, I learned something about Patsy during these years, which I should have foreseen. Patsy felt stupid around Lynelle, and for that reason the connection petered away and at one point threatened to break. Patsy wouldn’t stay around anyone who made her feel stupid, and she didn’t have an open mind with which to learn.

“This turning away of Patsy didn’t surprise me and didn’t matter to me. (I think it was Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal that proved the death knell of our little movie-watching triangle.) But something else good happened as regards to Patsy, and that was that Lynelle liked Patsy’s music and asked if we could come in to listen, and then praised Patsy a lot for what she was doing with her one-man band, a ‘friend’ by the name of Seymour, who played harmonica and drums.