Blackwood Farm - Anne Rice [62]
“Lynelle was tall and slender with long curly brown hair, which she pinned back casually from her face. She wore a perfume named Shalimar and what she called ‘romantic’ dresses with high waists and flowing skirts, suggestive of the time of King Arthur, she explained to me, and she adored the color sky blue. She was thrilled that my ancestor Virginia Lee, for her portrait in the dining room, had chosen a gorgeous dress of sky blue.
Lynelle wore very high heels—Aunt Queen no doubt approved heartily—and had extremely full breasts and a tiny waist.
“Lynelle was enchanted by Blackwood Manor. She danced in circles in the big rooms. She explored everything with ebullient interest and was most gracious in her casual meetings with the guests.
“She pronounced me to be a ‘rare intellect’ at once. I opened my arms to her—and my world, as you can see, was very much influenced and punctuated by embraces and kisses, and Lynelle fell into this style with no inhibition at all.
“Lynelle bewitched me. I feared to lose her the way I’d deliberately lost all the other teachers, and experienced perhaps the greatest change of heart toward an aspect of my world that I’d ever known.
“Lynelle talked so fast that Pops and Sweetheart privately grumbled that they couldn’t understand her. And I remember some deadly kibitzing that Aunt Queen was paying Lynelle three times what the other teachers had been paid, all because they had met in an English castle.
“So what? Lynelle was unique. Lynelle used Goblin’s talents, inviting him to teach me new words and addressing her long cascades of lovely speech to both of us, her two ‘elves.’
“That Lynelle had six young children, that she had been a French teacher, that she had returned to college to make up a pre-medical degree, that she was a scientific genius of sorts, as well as a sometime concert pianist—all this made Pops and Sweetheart all the more suspicious. But I knew Lynelle was a truly unique individual. I couldn’t have been fooled.
“Lynelle came five evenings a week for four hours, and within a matter of a month, she conquered everybody on Blackwood Farm with her energy, her charm, her optimism and her effervescence, and she positively altered the course of my life.
“It was Lynelle who really taught me the basics—phonetic reading of big words and diagramming of sentences so I could grasp the scaffolding of grammar, and the only arithmetic I now confess to know.
“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