The Heroines (19 page)

M
other ran to the window and saw the family wagon, with its dolphin-blue finish and shining chrome fins. Her father honked twice—which meant,
We’re here!
The first glimpse she had of her mother was a shot of red light, the sparkle of a ruby on her right hand, which she tapped against the frame of the open window, waiting. Her father, who was lean, red-haired, and dressed in a seersucker suit, ran around the front of the car and opened the passenger-side door. Grandmother stepped out of the car and pulled a cigarette from a silver case and tapped it three times against the cover. In 1960, Edith Entwhistle was forty-five years old, but she was still a perfect size six. She arrived at the Homestead dressed for chance encounters with the ladies of Prairie Bluff. She wore a magenta linen dress and pearls, and her lipstick matched her dress perfectly. Her long brown hair was swept away from her head and tied at back in a chignon. Anne-Marie always thought her mother’s penciled-on eyebrows were exactly like the wings of a seagull. Grandfather pulled a lighter from his pocket and lit her cigarette, then he reached back in and shook a Winston out of his pack. Edith shielded her eyes with her hand and looked up toward Anne-Marie’s window.

Anne-Marie pulled Catherine’s arm and they ducked beneath the window. Then Anne-Marie peeked out again. As her mother pointed at the window, her ruby caught the sun again. “The trim around the window is starting to peel, Henry.”

And thus, the inspection began. The screen door slammed and Gretta emerged on the front step. “Herr und Frau Entwhistle. Your trip, it was good?”

“No problems,” Grandfather said. “Though it got a little muggy! I could do with a stiff one.”

“Come inside, I get you a scotch.”

Edith blew cigarette smoke out the side of her mouth, then waved it away. She smoked as if disgusted by her own habit. “Did Anne-Marie arrive safely?”

“Yes. She met friend on train. English girl. They are upstairs together.”

“That’s terrific!” Henry said. “How nice for A-M to have a girl her own age around.”

Mother gave a silent cheer; her father would lay the groundwork for Catherine’s stay. Trust him to see things from Anne-Marie’s perspective.

“How in the world does Anne-Marie know an English girl who happens to be riding the commuter train?” Edith took a final drag, then pushed her cigarette butt into the antique milk pail filled with sand on the front porch. Grandmother never smoked indoors or inside cars.

“From school up the road.”

“The Academy? Why in the devil would an English girl be stuck at that old convent during the summer? Don’t people usually go to the Isle of Man or Brighton?”

Gretta shrugged. “I don’t know, ma’am. You have to ask her.”

Anne-Marie pulled Catherine from the window and sat her on the bed. Her mother’s skepticism set her nerves on edge. She held Catherine’s hands and stared into her eyes as if casting a spell. “You have to tell my mother your family’s going to the Isle of Man in August. And you’ve been asked to stay at school to…I know! Because your parents are traveling in Egypt! No, that’s too weird. But it can’t be Europe, because otherwise, why couldn’t you join them?” Mother dropped Catherine’s hands and paced the Persian runner between the beds. She snapped her fingers. “Tell them your mother’s ill and having special treatment. No, then they’ll have all these questions about medicine—”

“You’re confusing me, Anne-Marie!” Catherine’s face buckled. “How can I keep any of this right in my mind when Heathcliff is out there alone somewhere? Chased away by that wench with the pistol.”

“I’m sorry!” Mother sat back down on the bed and breathed deeply to calm herself. “Let me make this simple. Tell them school isn’t over in England till the end of June. You’re joining your family on the Isle of Man when your brother’s classes are finished at Cambridge.”

“Yes, Heathcliff’s at Cambridge.”

From the bottom of the stairs, Edith called Anne-Marie’s name.

“
Maybe
don’t call him Heathcliff. How about Heath or Cliff?”

“Cliff—that sounds like a rocky outcrop. But Heath is too soft for a man like—”

“Cliff, then. Like Clifford.”

“Anne-Marie! Come down here, please!”

“Cliff doesn’t really suit him.”

“It doesn’t matter!” Anne-Marie said, exasperated. “They won’t ever see him. If he comes raging at the door again, Gretta’ll shoot him.”

“We must find him tonight!”

“We will. I promise. Later, after they’re all in bed. Now come and meet my parents.”

From what Gretta told me much later, the dinner went fine. Edith interrogated Catherine about her family, but Catherine managed to make it sound plausible; when she stammered, Anne-Marie filled in the blanks with both truth and invention. Catherine’s father was a businessman who owned a large estate; her mother died when she was young. When Edith heard that Catherine’s brother Cliff was at Cambridge, and that the family planned to spend the end of summer on the Isle of Man, Edith nodded triumphantly at her husband. Everything fit her notion of gentrified English people, right down to the widowed and wealthy landowner. The wine left Grandmother in good form, and she praised Gretta’s cooking, while damning her Lincoln Park housekeeper, who routinely overcooked the steaks into “tough, inedible hides.”

Grandfather drained his wineglass and motioned to Gretta for brandy. He’d been drinking more lately, which made him sentimental and flush-faced. “Sounds lovely, Catherine. And we’re honored to have you here with us.” When he hiccupped, Grandmother rolled her eyes at him.

“Henry, really!”

Over the previous month, Anne-Marie had been so caught up in the whirlwind of graduation parties in Chicago that she hadn’t noticed the change in her father. Although she’d heard her parents arguing lately about money, she hadn’t really paid attention, sailing along on the flotilla of her accomplishments: valedictorian, admission to Vassar, top honors in biology. She suddenly feared that the isolation at the Homestead would accentuate the tension between her parents. Edith wasn’t the type of mother to confide in her daughter about her marital difficulties: they weren’t the least bit chummy. But her parents had been fighting that morning about a property on the west side of the city, and Anne-Marie had been glad to escape them by taking the train. She’d hoped that Catherine’s presence would temper her mother’s blatant disdain, but Edith never felt compelled to censor herself in her own home.

Edith clapped her hands to hasten the end of dinner and thus the end of Grandfather’s drinking. “Gretta, come clear, please. Anne-Marie, give her a hand. And watch the goblets!”

That night, after everyone had finally headed to bed, Anne-Marie and Catherine set up cots on Anne-Marie’s sunporch. The humidity had suddenly climbed, and the bedroom air was stifling. Anne-Marie also used their sleeping on the cots as an excuse to raid the linen closet for extra sheets. She worked in the dark, knotting three sheets together so she and Catherine could lower themselves from the porch onto the roof below. From there, it was an easy shimmy down the wisteria trellis to the garden. Her parents’ suite was on the other end of the house, but Anne-Marie could see the square of light from their window lighting up the dark lawn below.

As the girls waited for the light to disappear, they lay on their cots listening to the wind in the big elm tree outside. The sky between the branches turned midnight-blue. It was June 15, nearly the first day of summer, so the lengthening days meant an even longer wait for dark. Something boomed in the distance. Anne-Marie hoped it was a firework, though Catherine feared it was a cannon. The noise soon distinguished itself as thunder. Lightning flashed in the distant trees, the trunks and branches in black relief.

“It’ll pass,” Mother said. “Sometimes it’s just an electrical storm. It doesn’t even rain.”

“To think of Heathcliff in such a storm!”

The thunder and lightning grew closer and the wind picked up. The elm leaves rustled, then stopped, then rustled again. The nighthawks ceased their calls, though the bullfrogs continued to chirp and croak. Usually Anne-Marie delighted in thunderstorms, but not on this night. A few raindrops plinked against the metal window frames of the sunporch, and then the downpour began. Sheets of rain angled through the screens. The girls jumped up and pushed their cots against the wall of the house.

“Jump in your sleeping bag!” Mother ordered. She gathered up the sheet rope and climbed onto her own cot.

“Poor Heathcliff!”

“He’ll figure something out,” Mother said.

Catherine pushed down her sleeping bag and tried to wiggle her feet free. “I must go now!”

“You can’t! Their light’s still on!” Mother jumped out of bed and rushed toward Catherine. “You’re shivering. Come on. You’ll catch your death in the rain. Come back in the house.”

Catherine argued for immediate departure, but Mother felt Catherine’s burning and sweaty forehead, and coaxed her to lie down inside. She pulled back the bedspread and patted the sheet, as if cajoling a pup to jump up. Catherine succumbed quickly to Anne-Marie’s care. Having lost her mother at a young age, Catherine longed for mothering; Anne-Marie knew precisely the kind of mothering she wished she’d received. She gave Catherine aspirin and cool water, she stroked her hair with the hairbrush, uttered soothing remarks. Mother knew how easily Catherine could drive herself mad, and that neither her maid nor Edgar could ever talk her out of it. Isolation from society on the gloomy moors hadn’t helped Catherine’s volatile disposition. So Mother stroked Catherine’s hair and plied her with soporific words, until the distraught young Heroine fell asleep.

By that time, the rain had stopped, and the lawn outside Anne-Marie’s parents’ window was dark. This was her chance. She looked at the sleeping Catherine and realized she’d have to go find Heathcliff by herself. She put on clam diggers and laced up her tennis shoes. In truth, leaving Catherine behind was a relief. Though Mother worried about Catherine’s fever, she secretly wished to encounter the handsome Hero by herself. The image of his dark and ruddy face, seen through the kitchen window, flashed in her mind. She’d made little effort to convince Catherine not to wed Edgar so far (and there had been ample opportunity while they lay on the cots, waiting for her parents’ light to switch off). Of course, she was too naïve to admit she had ulterior motives, but at eighteen, having finished high school without incident, my mother yearned for an adventure. She was so close to being free from her mother, yet it was still months away. She couldn’t wait! She wanted something to transform her, to drown out her dawning fears about her family’s financial situation. She knew she was missing something, but she didn’t know what it was. She could only recognize girls who had it, and Catherine Earnshaw definitely did: men vying for her affection, striking beauty. Experience. Now adventure had landed on Mother’s doorstep.

She tied back her hair with a scarf, then tiptoed to the sunporch and raised a screen. Looping the sheets around the beam between two windows, she secured it with the best Girl Scout knot. As she lowered the sheet out the window, she pretended there was no self-interest in her going alone to find Heathcliff. She felt proud of her pure motives. She’d get a happy ending for the principal characters in
Wuthering Heights.
She stepped over the window ledge and rappelled down to the first knot. She shimmied down the soft sheets and landed quiet as a cat on the living room roof. The air had cooled significantly. She tiptoed across the tar, careful not to slip in the puddles, then climbed down the wisteria trellis, her face in the wet and fragrant blossoms. When she landed on the slippery grass, she fell to one knee, then stood up. Everything smelled clean and earthy. Being back in the country exhilarated her, as did the prospect of seeing the handsome man whom she’d glimpsed behind the kitchen curtain.

M
other ran straight down the path, the prairie alive with its usual nighttime creatures: the fireflies throbbing between the cattails, the rattling cicadas, the crickets. The thunderclouds had cleared, and the Big Dipper popped out of the blackness, along with the rest of the many constellations that Mother could name on sight. One of her favorite childhood wishes—one she passed on to me—was that the Dipper would scoop her onto its ladle and swing her through the Milky Way. On that night she made no such wish. In fact, her deepest wishes were coming true. She was having a daring adventure. She focused not on the stars, but on the woods that blocked the horizon and sheltered Emily Brontë’s troubled Hero.

Taking a bridle path through the trees, Mother called Heathcliff’s name, wiping silky spider webs from her legs and face. At first she kept her voice low, but soon realized that it didn’t matter. Who would hear her out there? The wind shook the trees and splashed so much rain on her head, she thought it had begun to storm again. Soon her shoes were soaked, her shins and calves splattered with mud. She sat on a fallen tree trunk to catch her breath. Acorns and pinecones fell through the trees around her. Twigs snapped and small animals scampered through the fallen leaves. The extent of her solitude suddenly struck her. She was alone and not alone. For all she knew, Heathcliff might be out there watching her.

She pulled the wet scarf off her head and wrung out the rain. The dampness enlivened every smell in the woods, giving the air an earthy scent. “It’s no use,” she said, almost feeling skittish enough to tear back to the Homestead. If Catherine awoke, she might go downstairs and wake up everyone in the house. But having climbed out the window and gotten this far into the woods, it would be pathetic to give up now. If Heathcliff showed up tomorrow and pounded the door while her parents were home, anything could happen. If he wound up in jail, or shot by Gretta, what would happen to the novel? How could
Wuthering Heights
exist with a slain Heathcliff? She had to warn him.

“I know you’re out there!” she yelled. The strength of her voice surprised her.

“What do you want, girl?”

His voice startled her even more than her own. She jumped to her feet and looked around. “Where are you?”

A freight train blasted its horn just then, the wheels rattling against the steel rails as it sped down the distant track. The horn sounded again, its warning moan. She couldn’t tell if Heathcliff had answered. It sounded as if his voice had come from the right of her, so she stood up and headed down the path. “Where are you?” Then a bit of genius struck. “I’m here about Catherine Earnshaw.”

She heard footsteps crunching through the leaves, and suddenly a black silhouette stepped onto the path. In his cape he cut a dramatic figure, and his deep voice seemed to make the leaves tremble. “Where is she?”

As he stood on the path, his hand on his cane, his strong masculine presence overwhelmed Mother. In the book, Nelly the housekeeper had said that Heathcliff had the tough air of a soldier of fortune. There was nothing soft about him, and he stirred longings she’d never felt before. She was drawn to him, felt a reckless attraction, physical and aggressive. The urge to press against him, to feel his weight against her, to be lifted in his arms.

Making him forget about Catherine would be like asking the wind to forget how to blow, Mother thought, but he had to prefer a girl whose attraction to him was complete, undivided. It occurred to her that maybe she wouldn’t need his love—only a few nights of experience, something to gird her against the family’s troubles, the anonymity of college life that awaited her.

“I asked, where is she?”

“Back at my house.”

“Is that wench with the firearm still on the premises?”

“And my father too!” Anne-Marie was bluffing, of course. Grandpa never fired a gun; Edith Entwhistle was the sharpshooter in the family.

Heathcliff pointed in the direction of the Homestead. “Is that your estate?”

“My family’s summer home.”

“Any male heirs?”

“No,” Mother said, missing the implication, forgetting how he had married Isabella to get her property. Mother stared up at him with wide eyes, her flip-do flat and dripping rain on her shoulders.

“Interesting.” His gaze stirred her, his glance drifting down to her chin, her shoulders, and farther down.

Mother felt exposed, naked. Her mind started to swim. Before she knew what she was doing, she said, “Catherine wants to marry Edgar.”

“That half a man!”

His every movement—the sweep of his arm, the lift of his brows—seemed choreographed to arouse her. Mother’s plan to work for Heathcliff and Catherine’s union was out the window. Who was she to try to effect a happy ending for them? she thought. And now she was more interested in her own story: innocent girl meets dashing man in woods. Her skyrocketing attraction to Heathcliff overpowered all her benevolent aspirations.

“What’s your name, girl?”

Mother told him.

“Are you promised to anyone?”

“I don’t even have a boyfriend. I’m not looking to get engaged.”

“What are you looking for?” he asked.

Heathcliff’s seductive tone flew right over Mother’s head, though she thought his accent made everything he said sound sexy. She was inexperienced, hadn’t done more than neck a few times with her Edith-approved-and-appointed prom dates. She was like many girls in 1960, off to college soon: to lose her virginity would mark her as tainted, a bad girl. The actual mechanics of sexual intercourse were unclear for Anne-Marie, but the tingle she felt around Heathcliff exceeded anything she’d experienced before. “I don’t know what I’m looking for,” she answered.

He stepped forward and took hold of her arm, staring down at her as if deciding whether to fling her to the ground or kiss her. She looked up at him, frozen. He took her other arm and drew her to him, so her head was beneath his chin. Her face nearly touched his chest, but not quite. When he spoke, his chin pressed into the crown of her head. She held herself perfectly still, afraid any false move would anger him or make him step back.

“I have to see Catherine. If only to tell her farewell. She will not scorn me again! She has thrown me off for the last time.”

Mother wanted to stay in this position forever, to smell his damp clothes, to feel his strong arms around her. Even if the man who held her spoke about another woman, it was the closest she’d ever come to a passionate embrace. She understood that her only chance of staying close to Heathcliff was through Catherine. So she fooled herself, as many have done before and since, into thinking that if she became his friend, Heathcliff would eventually see that she was more loyal, stable, and good-natured than Catherine, and thus more worthy of his love. “I’ll help you reach her. I just made her stay inside tonight. She was getting feverish.”

“She’s ill?” He pushed Mother away, yet tightened his grip on her arms.

“She started talking crazy,” Mother said, disappointed her words had precipitated the end of their quiet moment.

“Another bout of mania!”

“No, she just wants you to leave her alone now. She wants a peaceful life with Edgar.”

“She said that?” Heathcliff dropped his hands and took a step away from Mother. “How can she choose that half a man?” He sat on the stump of a tree trunk, and buried his face in his hands.

“I’m sorry.” Mother stepped toward him, then pulled back, genuinely ashamed of her sabotage, unused to this conniving side of herself. She longed to place a comforting hand on his shoulder, but knowing he could be volatile, she held back. So she waited with her hands clasped behind her back while her lie about Catherine sank in, hoping it would work to her advantage. While Heathcliff wept into his hands, she stood in the dark woods, swatting mosquitoes and watching. Good breeding stepped in and told her to leave him for the moment, no matter how much she longed to comfort him. He wouldn’t want a witness to this weakness, and her own guilty conscience made her timid. It was still hard for her to admit she’d deliberately caused this pain.

She walked a few paces down the bridle path, far enough so that she no longer heard his sobs. It was the right move. At Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, people were always poking into each other’s business. Family members shouted and nagged at one another, servants gossiped, dogs yelped. By keeping a respectful distance, Mother gained Heathcliff’s trust. She broke a branch from a pine tree and counted as she pulled off the needles. By the time she’d reached thirty-three, she’d thought she’d blown everything, but then she heard his step on the wood-chip path.

“I must see Catherine.” Again he took Mother’s upper arm, his face lowered, his sharp nose and cheekbones close to her own. He smelled like wool and sweat, with a hint of fresh sage. What she couldn’t see in the darkness were his eyes. But she felt his desperation and how much he needed her.

“I’ll bring her tomorrow night. At midnight.”

“I pray she’s well enough.”

“You can trust me!”

He looked down, his eyebrows heavy over his eyes, a barely veiled sneer on his face. “Can I?”