Florida(55)

But Flaubert had loved Guy truly, finding in the boy the ghost of his closest friend, Alfred Le Poittevin, Guy’s uncle. Alfred had been a poet who died too young, and Flaubert never got over the shock of it. When Guy grew up, he became close to Flaubert and pressed himself into Flaubert’s mold: disciplined on the page and obscene in the life. Guy was called by the family to prepare and dress Flaubert’s body when the master died of apoplexy; Guy wept in anger when the hole dug for the corpse was too short for the coffin. Later, a grieving Guy wrote to Turgenev: The great old soul is following me. His voice haunts me. His sentences are in my ears, his love, which I look for and can’t find because it is gone, has made the entire world seem empty around me.



* * *



—

The mother and the boys go out to the boardwalk. The red flags are up, which means bathing is a no-go, as if anyone sane would brave these waves, wild and crashing white. This beach is like Yport’s, only supersized. Here, though, the great cliffs take her breath away. On the left side, there is a needle, one huge pointed rock, as well as a giant’s archway somehow carved out of the bone-white stone; on the right, a smaller archway has a church like a brown chapeau up top.

When they grow too cold in the wind, they walk the town, but something about the aesthetics of the buildings feels off to her, close and mean. There are brown timbers everywhere, tight streets, second and third stories that tilt frighteningly far off their foundations into the road. The native style seems so ornate and dark and airless that the effect is almost disdainful. She feels the buildings leaning like women watching behind her back, whispering.

She takes the children to the villa Les Verguies, where, after their parents’ divorce, Guy and Hervé were raised by their suffering mother, but there is nothing to see there, and a great gate blocks the way. She takes the children down the long road to La Guillette. The only thing to see there is a sign that says La Guillette. She takes a picture of it, then of the boys in front of it, and then, not finding herself capable of trespass, they walk back. Some writer named Maurice Leblanc was a much bigger deal in étretat than Guy de Maupassant, it appears; he’d written some detective named Arsène Lupin. The arsenic wolf; the name could be applied to Guy, who had taken arsenic among many other medications for his syphilis and was predatory sexually, reportedly able to make himself erect at will.

She walks her boys up the long climb toward the church atop the cliff. She carries the little one when he grows too tired to go on, and feels her muscles burn pleasantly. When she’s too tired, the older boy carries his brother for a spell, and, God, this makes her want to cry with love. Up at the stone church, she stands closest to the drop like a sheepdog to keep her boys from nearing the lip of the cliff but lets them run and play around the church, climbing the steps, leaping down.

They drift down and eat a margarita pizza for lunch. They buy water shoes for the painful stones on the beaches, a mat so they can sunbathe, floaties, their own blue-and-white mariner’s sweatshirts because cold like this was impossible to imagine in the hellmouth that is summer in Florida. They buy a postcard for the boys’ father that will remain in the bottom of her bag, staining and shredding at the corners, unwritten, until they are home.

There is nothing else to do so they walk down, across the boardwalk, up to the top of the other cliff, where there is a staircase carved into the rock and a winding pathway with no guardrail to keep people from tripping and falling three hundred feet into the evil.

Ow, says the older boy, trying to rip his hand away from hers, but she won’t let him go.

Keep me safe, she says to give him a job, pretending to be afraid. I don’t want to fall.

Then both boys hold her hands and steer her around rocks and talk to her in the gentle voices she heard them use once to urge a baby gosling out of a gutter, which they tried to do for hours, until the chick got hungry and darted out and they caught him and released him into their neighborhood’s duck pond, where he was never seen again, where, she thinks now, he was probably eaten immediately by a hawk, as he had no mother goose to protect him.

When they cross a narrow bridge over a vast drop, the wind nearly blows the sunglasses off her face, and she becomes genuinely frightened. She squeezes her sons’ hands, having visions of their shirts filling with wind, pushing them up and into the air like kites, their little faces first dazzled and delighted and then the slow dawn of dread as they begin to blow away. She would tether them here, to the earth, with her body.

I’m not scared, the smaller boy says, pressing close to her leg.

Me neither, the older one says.

Mommy’s scared, the smaller boy says. Though we’re not.

Oh, Mommy’s scared of everything, the older one says, but pets her leg with his free hand.

From here, the other cliff they climbed earlier shows itself to be perilous, the church ready to fall off in a gust of wind. She can’t believe she let her boys run around up there. The nausea rises in her throat. She has dragged her children across the world; she is risking their death, and for what? For a long-dead writer whom she finds morally repugnant, whose work she likes only about five percent of, filled as it is with white male arrogance and anti-Semitism and misogyny and flat-out celebrations of rape.

This town, from up here, feels malevolent, an outgrowth of Guy’s bad heart.

The nausea stays until they descend and she finds the car. She drives out of étretat with a sense of relief, and the boys fall asleep, and she reads a book, parked in the casino lot back in Yport, because her boys are too beautiful, asleep like this; she can’t disturb them when there’s such peace in their faces.