Blackwood Farm - Anne Rice [63]
“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:
“ ‘Don’t you understand, Quinn?’ she said. ‘You live in a gorgeous house and you’re eccentric and gifted like the people in these films. Aunt Queen keeps inviting you to meet her in Europe and you won’t do it. And that’s wrong, Quinn. Don’t make your world small.’
“In fact, Aunt Queen had never invited me to meet her in Europe, or, to put it more to the point, I had not known that Aunt Queen had invited me! No doubt Pops and Sweetheart knew. But I didn’t confess this.
“ ‘You have to keep on teaching me, Lynelle,’ I answered. ‘Make me into somebody who can travel with Aunt Queen.’
“ ‘I’ll do it, Quinn,’ she said. ‘It will be easy.’
“She almost made me believe it. And on she went, running rampant through archaeology and theories of evolution and dizzying lectures on black holes in space.
“She taught me to play some simple Chopin and a few exercises by Bach. She took me through the entire history of music, quizzing me until I could identify a period and a style and, even in Mozart’s case, a composer.
“I was in heaven with Lynelle.
“She taught me many Latin words to show me that they were roots for English words. She taught me to waltz, to do the two-step and the tango, though the tango made me laugh so hard that I would fall down every time we tried.
“Lynelle also brought the first computer into my bedroom, along with the first printer, and though this was long before the days of the World Wide Web or the Internet, I learned to write on this computer and managed to become very fast at typing, using the first three fingers of each hand.
“Goblin was enthralled by the computer.
“At once he took my left hand and pecked out the words ‘IloveLynelle.’ She was very pleased by this, and then, unable to free my left hand from him, I discovered myself typing all manner of words run together without spaces, and I gave Goblin an elbow in the chest and told him to get away. Of course Lynelle soothed his feelings with some kind words.
“It would be a long time before Goblin discovered that he could make words appear on the computer without my aid.
“But let me return to Lynelle. As soon as I could bat out a letter on the computer I wrote to Aunt Queen, who was on a religious pilgrimage of sorts in India, and I told her that Lynelle was a special emissary both from Heaven and from her. Aunt Queen was so pleased to hear from me that we began to exchange letters about twice a month.
“I had so many adventures with Lynelle.
“On Saturday, we went into the swamp together in a pirogue with a vow to find Sugar Devil Island, but at the first sight of a deadly snake, Lynelle