Heathcliff Redux. Lily Tuck

       Heathcliff Redux

      Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know: I scarcely think it is. But this I know: the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master—something that, at times, strangely wills and works for itself.

      —Charlotte Brontë

      Of course I had read Wuthering Heights. I read it years ago in high school, but, in my late twenties, I decided to read it again. I also had seen the movie version with Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier, and I particularly remember the scene, early on in the film, that presages the characters’ tragic misconceptions: Catherine tells Heathcliff how she thinks he is a prince in disguise and that his father must have been the emperor of China and his mother an Indian queen.

      I first saw Cliff—everyone called him that—in April, at a steeplechase race. Charlie, my husband, and I and Meryl and Frank, our neighbors, had driven over there together. The back of our truck was loaded with hampers filled with food, wine, and bottles of bourbon. The race was a popular annual event, attended by people (mostly gentry) from all over the county. Originally a single race with gentlemen riders, the event had grown to include several races and the riders were no longer necessarily gentlemen. The course was four miles long and the fences were tall and timber. Charlie and I were both riders and we owned a couple of Thoroughbred hunters. We knew a lot of the horse people at the race—after all, we had been going there for several years—and before one of the races, Charlie and I walked over to the paddock where the horses and their riders were getting ready, tightening girths, adjusting stirrups, and mounting their horses, and it was there that I first saw—no, stared at—Cliff. My husband saw him, too, because he made some comment—I don’t remember exactly what he said. Something like “Jeez, look at how that guy gets on his horse.” That was it exactly. Instead of getting “a leg up” the way most of the riders did, Cliff just jumped into the saddle. Like he was a Cossack or something. A leap, I would call it. And his horse was at least sixteen hands tall. It was impressive. I remember how it looked to this day—to my dying day, probably.

      Charlie and I lived on a four-hundred-acre farm in Albemarle County, Virginia—one of the richest counties in the country. Charlie had grown up on the farm and now he managed it for his parents, who had retired to Florida. Besides the horses, he raised beef cattle. Black Angus. For a while he kept a bull, but then artificial insemination became popular and more convenient. It was also cheaper and Charlie got rid of the bull. His name was Hannibal. I was glad, because even if he was kept separate in a field, I was afraid of him.

      During the steeplechase race, a big bay gelding named Patrick’s Dream fell after clearing a jump and broke his front leg—both front legs, someone later told Charlie—and they had to put him down. Luckily I didn’t see that. I just saw the truck dragging the harness go out onto the field. Always an upsetting sight. Briefly I wondered whether it was the leaper’s horse who had broken his legs but it wasn’t. The leaper had been riding a gray horse. I have always been partial to gray horses.

      Native Dancer, who won the Preakness and the Belmont, was a gray. He just missed winning the Kentucky Derby and getting the Triple Crown (Eric Guerin, his jockey, was blamed for taking him all over the track except the ladies’ room), but he was named U.S. Champion Three-Year-Old Colt in 1953 and U.S. Horse of the Year in 1954.

      From our house, I could see the Blue Ridge Mountains in the distance. (The reason the mountains appear blue and hazy, I