Becoming Duchess Goldblatt by Duchess Goldblatt

Becoming Duchess Goldblatt by Duchess Goldblatt

Author:Duchess Goldblatt
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780358216797
Publisher: HMH Books
Published: 2020-07-07T00:00:00+00:00


13

* * *

A fun summer activity in Crooked Path is to pack a picnic basket and a bottle of wine and come out to watch me write on a clay surface.

I TOOK A PICTURE of Lyle the night I met him. It’s one of my most prized possessions. I asked him to turn and look at me and he did, with a huge, beautiful grin. With his permission, Duchess posted the picture, but she waited a week or so and cropped the image so that no one would be able to identify where exactly they’d met. Instead of admitting she’d attended his public performance, she claimed it had been her event; she said she’d done a public reading and book signing, and Lyle had been one of the many fans who’d come out to see her.

Back at home, I framed his picture and hung it up. I thought it would be perfect to hang it alongside a framed picture of Duchess; they’re both honored members of the clan, after all. I printed up one of him and one of her and framed them both, and hung them next to my built-in bookshelves. I didn’t think much of it for a week or two, when I passed by and noticed: his picture was a 5 × 7. Hers had to be 11 × 16. She’d made herself more than twice as big as Lyle Lovett.

“You rascal,” I said out loud to her portrait, shaking my head. If that wasn’t the Goldblattianest move she’d ever made.

Don’t let anyone shame you for your love of an imaginary friend. Religions have been founded on less.

One year, Duchess decided she ought to encourage a gathering of the faithful at the foot of her portrait in the National Gallery in Washington, DC. “DGDC,” she called it, and told people they ought to meet up there. Some of them actually did; they gathered at her portrait and took their pictures there, and then had lunch together, I think. One of them wrote to her about it: “I believed that for me there would never again be friends, or love, or trust, or joy. I thought my life was a matter of waiting for it to stop. The Duchess, her joinings, her faith, her words, her friendship, her insistence I not surrender—she has made a miracle and I can never, ever repay her. Thank you, your grace, for all this love and light you have brought to me.”

“Why do people call her ‘your grace’?” Chuck asked me, reading this over my shoulder.

“They think she’s a real duchess,” I said.

“They think she’s real?”

“Oh, no. They know she’s not real. Not real-real. They think she’s a fictional character who’s supposed to be a duchess. Or they think she’s a fictional character who thinks she’s a duchess.”

“But she’s not?”

“No. She knows Duchess is only her first name. I told you I named her after the dog.”

“Why don’t you correct them?”

“She won’t let me,” I said. “She loves being called ‘her grace.’”

“I think you need more medication,” he said.



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