Blackwood Farm - Anne Rice [81]
“Now, being a country kid I had drunk wine and whiskey plenty of times, though never much in quantity—but very quietly, sitting at the kitchen table—after Jasmine left—I drank a whole bottle of champagne.
“That night I was violently sick, my head hurt as though it was going to burst, the Easter party was over and I was vomiting as Big Ramona stood over me declaring in no uncertain terms that Jasmine was never to set me to drinking wine again.”
10
“IN THE WEEKS that followed I felt better. I don’t think you can feel sheer panic continuously. Your mental system breaks down. It comes in waves, and you have to tell yourself, well, this will end.
“I went back to a leaden misery that was more easily manageable, and my mind was sometimes flooded with memories of Sweetheart, of her singing, and of her cooking, and of little things, unimportant and fragmentary things, that she had said, or would say, and then a terror would follow, as if someone had taken me bodily and put me out on a high window ledge nine stories up above a street.
“Meantime I hadn’t forgotten what Patsy had called me—sissy, Little Lord Fauntleroy, queer. I knew perfectly well from the realm of television and movie watching, as well as books, what that meant, and I had a deepening inevitable adolescent suspicion that that characterization was true.
“Understand, I was too good a Catholic to experiment with sexual stimulation when I was alone, and no good opportunities had come up for experimenting romantically with anybody else. I didn’t think people went blind from self-stimulation, but the contemplation of it filled me with a Catholic shame.
“But I had had wet dreams. And though I’d awakened disturbed and humiliated and cut them short, repressing the memory of what really drove them, I had a deep suspicion that they were about men.
“No wonder Pops had offered two hundred grand to Patsy for a baby. He thought I’d never marry, never have children. He knew from looking at me. He knew from the way I couldn’t hammer a nail into wood that I was queer. What had he thought about me raving over supper about movies like The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffmann? He knew I was queer. Hell, probably everybody who’d ever seen me knew.
“Goblin knew. Goblin was waiting. Goblin was a profound mystery of invisible tentacles and pulsing power. Goblin was queer!
“And what about the palpable embrace of Goblin, and the way that sometimes this embrace sent a cool delicious chill through all my skin, as though someone were stirring the hairs everywhere on my body and telling my body to wake up?
“There was something so eternally intimate about Goblin’s attentions that they had to be sinful.
“Whatever the case, I did nothing but brood about it, and try to keep busy, and the panic grew in me, rising and falling, and it began to come at its very worst at twilight each day.
“Now that summer was coming and the days were longer, I knew the waves of panic longer—sometimes from about four p.m. till eight. There came that image to my mind of me putting a gun to my head and the thought that the bullet would make the pain end. Then I thought of what that would do to Pops and Aunt Queen and I put it out of my mind.
“It was around that period that I made everybody turn on certain lights at four o’clock, come hell or high water, and whether we had any guests at Blackwood Manor or not.
“I was becoming the Lord of Blackwood Manor—the Little Lord Fauntleroy, I suppose.
“Each evening, like a creature driven, I turned on classical music in the parlors and the dining room, and then I checked on the flower arrangements and the placement of furniture and went about straightening out all the pictures on the walls; and, as the panic went away a little, I sat in the kitchen with Pops.
“But Pops didn’t talk anymore. He sat in a straight-back chair, staring out the screen door at nothing. It was awful to be with Pops. His eyes were more and more empty. He wasn’t snapping back the way that Big Ramona had snapped back. There was no consolation I could give or take.
“Then one night, when