Summary
A floribunda of mutilated light blooms across the mangrove dusk: Jerry Wendover, once the town’s cherub-faced prodigy, now a living gargoyle, drapes his burn-scarred flesh in mosquito-netting twilight inside a crumbling Backwater manse whose verandas sag like broken violins. Out of the swamp’s mercury breath drifts Barbara Seaforth—sightless, moon-pale, her cane tapping Morse code on cypress knees—until she collapses against the warped threshold of the hermit who fears mirrors more than mortality. What unfurls is no pastoral convalescence but a chiaroscuro courtship: he reads Shelley aloud through a mouthful of shame; she answers with fingertips that map the corrugated landscape of his cheek as though Braille could rewrite cartilage. Matrimony arrives on a hurricane’s hem, consummated in a candleless room where darkness itself becomes witness and veil. Their infant son—half chord, half wound—cries in C-minor beneath a ceiling of rotting angels. Salvation, that itinerant quack, knocks in the form of a Viennese oculist promising retina resurrection; the grafted corneas bloom like opals, but the price is a lifelong dusk—any blaze of day could yank her back into night. Barbara, eyes bandaged, intuits the arithmetic of dread on her husband’s breath: love multiplied by disfigurement equals abandonment. On the vernal equinox she steals the nursery’s oil lamp, lifts the glass, and stares into the filament until the world combusts into permanent eclipse, choosing to inhabit the same night that already owns his silhouette. The final tableau—mother and father rocking a sightless child between them—renders sunlight itself an obsolete currency.
Synopsis
Jerry Wendover, disfigured since childhood after his act of heroism in saving a little girl from a fire scarred his face, secludes himself in an old house in the Backwater district of Florida. One night he finds Barbara Seaforth, a young blind girl, lost in the swamps and takes her home. The two unfortunates fall in love, marry, and have a child. One day, a visiting doctor tells Jerry that Barbara's sight can be restored. The operation is performed successfully, but the doctor warns his patient to shield her eyes from the light or risk reversal of the surgery. Barbara, realizing her husband's dread of exposing his disfigurement to her, looks at her child and then permanently blinds herself by staring into the light, thus sacrificing her sight for the love of her husband.
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