Heathcliff Redux. Lily Tuck

reached 100 degrees, and the humidity made the heat feel a lot worse. Always, in the air, there was the threat of rain or, worse, of a thunderstorm. (One summer, it hailed—hail as big as grapefruits­—­breaking car windshields and most of the storefront windows in town.) At midday, I drove the truck down to the field bringing the men cold lemonade and ham sandwiches. I usually wore shorts and I can still recall how my legs stuck uncomfortably to the plastic seat. My hands, too, were sweaty, which made it difficult to hold the wheel and steer.

      “How’s it going?” I asked.

      “Hot as hell,” Charlie would answer.

      “Next time, bring me a beer,” he also said.

      The hired hands took the sandwiches and the lemonade without saying a word and without looking at me.

      Both of them were black.

      “I think it’s going to rain,” I said, looking up at the sky and trying to engage.

      “You better get back in the truck and go home,” Charlie said.

      The year was 1963, and the early ’60s was still a relatively innocent time—innocent, at least, for middle-class people like Charlie and me. We did not do drugs, we did not get divorced, and we did not have abortions or extramarital love affairs, or, if we did, we did not talk about them.

      As yet, Martin Luther King Jr. had not been shot and killed. Nor had anyone whom I knew or had heard of.

      The next time I saw Cliff was at the Keswick Hunt Club Ball. (I normally tried to avoid those events. Not only did I have to get dressed up, but I had to get a babysitter. Also, Charlie tended to drink too much, and I’d have to drive the truck home at God knows what hour in the morning.) Cliff was dancing cheek to cheek with a woman I knew slightly. Her name was Sally. When Sally saw me looking at her and Cliff, she waved at me with the hand that was resting on Cliff’s shoulder and I waved back.

      Sally was a rich widow in her late forties. She owned a grand historic house that had once been a plantation and was often compared to Monticello. The house was open to the public a few times a year to benefit a local charity and, several times, it had been written up and photographed in fashion magazines. Sally’s husband, who died the year before in a car accident (his car overturned in a drainage ditch at night, and he was pinned inside it and not found until the next morning, when it was too late), had been at least fifteen years older than Sally, and he had made his fortune with some paper products—I’ve forgotten what they were exactly. Packaging, I think. They did not have children. Sally wasn’t beautiful, but she was attractive and had a good, trim figure. She was an excellent sportswoman—she rode (she was a whipper-in at the local hunt), was a good shot, played golf and tennis, and I don’t know what else. She was also on a bunch of committees—at the library in town, a small liberal arts college in Lynchburg, the hospital—because she gave to them generously. I couldn’t fault her for that. In fact, I couldn’t fault her for anything—not even for dancing with Cliff.

“Banish him from your thoughts, miss . . . He’s a bird of bad omen; no mate for you,” Nelly, both narrator and housekeeper in Wuthering Heights, warns.*

      * Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (London: Penguin Books, 2003), p. 103.

      Hannibal, our bull, was not an Angus but a Charolais. The Charolais is one of the top meat-producing breeds, and Charlie had bought him with the hope of improving our herd. The Charolais comes from Charolles, France, and was imported to Mexico in 1930. Hannibal, according to an article I read, could trace his lineage back to two Mexican bulls called Neptune and Ortolan.

      (Ortolan? An ortolan is a tiny bird, the size of my thumb, that weighs less than an ounce. It is a French delicacy prepared by first throwing the bird into a vat of Armagnac to both marinate and drown it, then cooking it for eight minutes and serving it whole. Traditionally, diners eat ortolans—heads, bones, and all—with a napkin thrown over their heads.)

      “What does ‘Cliff’ stand for?” I asked, when, at last, I met him. “ ‘Clifford’?”

      “Something like that,” he answered, smiling.

      It was at a cocktail party celebrating Sally’s forty-ninth birthday; I was drinking my second glass of wine and wearing a sleeveless white dress.

      “Or does it stand for ‘Heathcliff’?” I persisted. “You know, Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights.”

      “Heathcliff? Who’s that?” Cliff asked, still smiling.

      “You’ve never read Wuthering Heights?” Right away, I regretted saying that. I was afraid of sounding superior and assuming he did not read books and was not, like me, educated. Since he did not answer, I said lamely, “It’s one of my favorite novels. I’m rereading it now.”

      “Is that so?” Cliff said.

      Nervous, I nodded, and in spite of feeling myself start to blush, I went on. “Heathcliff is the hero, or, more accurately, the antihero, who—”

      “Sounds interesting,” Cliff interrupted me softly. “Maybe I should read it. And you know something? You are a pretty woman.”

      Maybe he had not read Wuthering Heights and maybe he was not educated, but he was very handsome. There was no getting around that.

      In bed that night, I asked Charlie if he knew who Heathcliff was.

      “Yeah, of course. Why are you asking me? He’s the character in the novel—what’s it called—the novel with the crazy wife in the attic.”

      “Do you mean Jane Eyre?”

      “Yes, Jane Eyre.”

      “You don’t mean Mr. Rochester?” I said.

      “What is this? An exam?” Charlie asked, sitting up.

      “You must mean Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë,” I said.

      “Okay, okay. I meant the guy in Wuthering Heights,” Charlie said, lying down again and turning over and away from me in bed.

      “Go to sleep,” he also said.

      Hindley had asked for a fiddle, Cathy for a new whip, but when their father, Mr. Earnshaw, returned from Liverpool, he brought them Heathcliff.

      And true, as I would learn later, Cliff never did read Wuthering Heights.

      At the time—a time of unapologetic social-class labeling and bias—the good people of Albemarle County were divided into three groups: “town,” “gown,” and “county.” We were “county,” while Cliff was definitely “town.”

      Our neighbors, Meryl and Frank—actually, they lived across the road from us—did a number of things, including running the diaper service in town and boarding horses. They also had a lot of apple trees on their property. One time, when they let some of the horses out into a field where apples were lying rotting and fermenting on the ground, the horses ate them and got drunk. It was kind of funny to watch them staggering around and falling down, but it was pretty awful, too. Like the whole world had all of a sudden gotten unsteady. Meryl and Frank had several children, all of them girls.

      Emily Brontë was also a poet:

      No coward soul is mine

      No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere

      I see Heaven’s glories shine

And Faith shines equal arming me from Fear . . .**

      ** Emily Brontë, The Complete Poems (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 182.

      At that cocktail party celebrating Sally’s birthday, I learned that the gray horse Cliff had ridden in the race was hers. I should have guessed that. I also found out that he and Sally were sleeping together. I should have guessed that, too. Apparently, Cliff came in fourth in the race—not