The Falls (26 page)

Dirk complained it was difficult to reach Ariah, sometimes. She’d decided she didn’t want “help” on the premises. Not even a nanny to help with Royall, no thank you. Ariah was all the nanny Royall required.

It was a coolly bright autumn day when Ariah felt herself drawn to Prospect Park. Walking with her eager little puppy Royall who lunged forward and had to be restrained; had to be carried in Ariah’s strong arms across streets, and up hills, as Chandler capably pushed
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the stroller. They were Mommy and two sons. Missing was Daddy, and the little girl.

Juliet,
Ariah would name her. Was there ever so beautiful a name as
Juliet
?

In high school, Ariah was convinced that her life had begun to go wrong when her parents baptized her with such a ridiculous name.

Some old maiden aunt of her father’s, long deceased.

They hadn’t been walking half an hour before both the heels of Ariah’s feet began to blister. Damn, she’d worn impractical shoes. In the grass, she could walk barefoot; on pavement, she was wary of tossed-down, still smoldering cigarette butts, pebbles and bits of glass. And there were such swarms of tourists near the railings overlooking the river, she was in danger of being trod upon. So Ariah sat at a picnic table with Royall while Chandler ran to fetch them root beers. It was their custom to have root beers on these expeditions.

They were close by the churning upper rapids, near the pedestrian bridge to Goat Island. Newlyweds were having their photographs taken on the bridge. A family of barn-sized individuals, laughing and talking in midwestern accents, trooped by. Ariah wanted to warn them not to underestimate The Falls, just because it was midday, and noisy. Beneath the noise, you could hear something finer, like a vibra-tion. If you looked carefully, you could see phantom rainbows winking and glittering above the river. Ariah shivered, and smiled. The roaring of the American Falls, close by, seemed to enter her soul.

This is your happy time. Thirty-nine years old. You won’t have these beautiful young children forever.

(Had God spoken to Ariah, this time? She thought so. But she couldn’t be sure.)

Well, it was so. Children grew up fast. Nearly everyone Ariah met socially, friends and business associates of Dirk’s, had much older children than the Burnabys did. Some of these children were virtually grown.

Ariah thought how disapproving these people would be, how they’d look upon Dirk Burnaby’s eccentric wife with distaste, if they knew how badly she wanted another baby. Oh, yet another!

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Chandler returned with their cold root beers. But Royall was too excited to drink more than a few sips. Brimming with energy, he began to run in circles in the grass, shrieked and stumbled and fell and picked himself up, and ran in another circle, tireless. His fine flaxen hair glowed in the pale sunlight. His perfectly shaped, chubby little arms pumped, helping to keep his precarious balance. How purely in-stinctual this child was, fascinating to watch. The flame of life seemed always at the surface of Royall’s being; his skin was heated with the hard, firm coursing of his blood. No one could mistake this child for a little girl, despite his wavy hair. Ariah recalled how, the previous evening, she’d given him his bedtime bath; how he’d teased her by splashing water onto the floor, and onto her. Washing him gently she’d found herself, not for the first time, dreamily contemplating his soft, small penis that floated in the soapy water. So clean, perfectly shaped. And the tiny sacs of flesh that cushioned it. (Did these sacs, in the sexually mature male, contain the seed?—the sperm? Ariah didn’t know enough about male anatomy. She might have asked Dirk, at one time.) Strange that Royall had the potential to disturb his mother, as Chandler had not. For Chandler’s sex was but an ap-pendage to his thin, awkward body, a body that reminded Ariah of her own, while, in Royall, sex was the center of his compact little body. Sex was the point of his being, or would be one day. His father’s virility, reborn. But strange and disturbing, in a boy so young.

“Royall! You’ll put yourself in a fever.”

At last Royall tired of running in circles and barking like a deranged puppy, but still he was restless, pushing at Ariah when she tried to cradle him in her arms to nap on the park bench with her. No, no! Royall wasn’t ready for a nap. So Chandler offered to push him in the stroller around the park, and Ariah strapped him in, and adjusted his little visored baseball cap, for, like his daddy, Royall was susceptible to sunburn; Ariah warned Chandler not to push his brother too fast, not to go too far and above all don’t go anywhere downhill. She called after them, “And don’t get lost. D’you hear?” But the roaring of The Falls toward which Chandler was moving was so loud, already he was beyond hearing.

Within seconds Chandler and the stroller disappeared amid a flock
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of camera-laden tourists, heading for the
Maid of the Mist
cruise. In the near distance, a high-flying American flag whipped in the wind at the edge of the Gorge.

Thanks to God, these blessings.

Ariah sighed, yawned, stretched like a big lazy cat and lay on the park bench in the sun. Wriggled her bare, white toes. Oh, this was heavenly. She deserved this. So tired! Comets danced against her shut eyelids.

The cement path beside the river was wet from spray. But there were guard railings of course. Mingling with tourist families, Chandler and the stroller would appear to belong to them. No one would identify him as a lone nine-year-old pushing a younger brother in a stroller, and Mommy nowhere near. Such park regulations didn’t apply to a child as mature and canny as Chandler.

Ariah felt herself drifting into a light sleep. She was in a canoe above the rapids, in an only moderately swift current. From time to time she heard people passing near, raised voices and laughter. A language she couldn’t identify, was it French? (Were these strangers looking at her? Making rude comments about her? A freckle-faced redheaded woman with austere features appearing slender and young as a girl until you drew closer, and saw the streaked hair and fine white lines in her face. The tendons in her white throat. Yet this woman was smiling, was she?) Thinking of how many years ago, more than nine years. She’d been brought to Niagara Falls as a naive, trust-ing bride. Knowing nothing of love, sex. Knowing nothing of men.

Since that time, since the death of her young first husband whom she could no longer remember clearly, and did not wish to remember, Ariah had received several letters from his mother, Mrs. Edna Erskine. Ariah had not answered these letters. To her shame, she hadn’t even opened them. She had not dared. The last letter, received when she’d been pregnant with Royall, had so frightened her, like a missive from the dead, she’d printed on the envelope RETURN TO

SENDER ADDRESSEE UNKNOWN and dropped it in a mailbox.

She’d told Dirk nothing of course. Like all wives she lived her secret, silent life unknown to her husband, as to her children.

Her husband! Dirk Burnaby was her husband, not
the other
.

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Yet there were times like these, drifting helplessly into sleep, Ariah seemed not clearly to know who
the husband
was.

No, certainly her husband was Dirk Burnaby. A man far more real than Ariah herself, if you measured his height, his girth, his position in the world.

Ariah had not told Dirk about the terrible visit from Claudine.

Not even to explain her agitation afterward. The alcoholic stupor he’d found her in. Nor had she spoken to him of Claudine’s accusations. That Dirk was in debt to her, that he gambled, that he’d had mistresses for whom “medical arrangements” had been made . . .
A
daughter. Give me a daughter before it’s too late
.

Lying in Dirk’s strong fleshy arms the previous night. She’d been awake, waiting for him. Oh, he’d come home late: past midnight. And he’d been drinking. Ariah knew, and Ariah forgave. Her husband was troubled about something, and Ariah took solace in knowing he wouldn’t involve her. For Dirk Burnaby, too, must have his private life. His secret life. And his work as an attorney, of very little interest to Ariah, was much of that life. She wasn’t the woman he should have married, clearly. She’d seen his face when, in the company of his friends and their wives, she, Mrs. Burnaby, made one of her coolly enigmatic remarks, or, more baffling still, said nothing at all. Ariah was capable of sitting at a dinner party, staring into space and drumming her fingers on the table (in fact, Ariah was practicing piano, on an invisible keyboard) while conversation swirled about her. At l’Isle Grand Country Club, the last time she’d gone, Ariah had drifted away from the others in their party and located a piano in a ballroom, sat and played quietly, dreamily, her girlhood pieces she’d loved, and for which she’d been extravagantly praised, the first movement of the
Moonlight Sonata,
a minuet by the young Mozart, mazurkas by Chopin of surpassing beauty, and Ariah had so lost herself she’d forgotten where she was; and was rudely awakened by the sudden mocking applause of Dirk’s friends Wenn and Howell who stood grinning behind her. Fortunately, Dirk came into the room at that point, too. Ariah, hurt, humiliated, had simply fled.
But I will get my revenge on you.

Someday.

The night before, she’d been in one of her weepy moods. Not un-The Falls X 183

happy, just weepy. She knew from the other mothers in the park (most of them much younger than Ariah!) that everyone had

“weepy” moods from time to time, if you’re female it’s allowed. In fact, Ariah was happy. Lying in Dirk’s arms she wept out of sheer happiness. Why? Their sons were such beautiful children. No one deserves such beautiful children. “But, darling,” Ariah whispered, burrowing her face into the collar of Dirk’s flannel pajamas, “we need a daughter, too. A little girl. Oh, we can’t give up! We need a daughter to make our family complete.” Ariah was holding herself rigid, trying not to tremble, as Dirk prepared to speak. For they’d discussed this subject many times. As a prelude to lovemaking in a way very different from the lovemaking of the earlier years of their marriage, when they’d been spontaneous, playful, ardent. Now, when they made love, Ariah clutched at Dirk with an air of determination, desperation. Her strained face showed the outline of the skull beneath. Her mouth was anguished, her eyes rolled back in her head. At such times Dirk seemed almost fearful of her. A man in fear of a woman who happened to be his wife. He’d sighed, and stroked Ariah’s warm forehead as if to placate her. So deeply in love with Ariah, he could barely see her any longer; as one is unable to see one’s own mirror reflection, pushed too close. “Of course I would love a daughter, too. But do you think it’s wise to try? At our age? And what if we had another son?” Ariah stiffened. Ariah laughed. “My age, you mean.” She spoke lightly to disguise her hurt.

In the morning she would say, kissing him ardently, “Another son, why not? We’ll have a basketball team.”

Ariah smiled, drifting downriver in the sunshine. Thinking of this.

For they’d made love after all. She, the woman, bent upon conceiving, had had her way another time.

A daughter! Take my sons, and give me a daughter in their place, I will
never beg for anything again O God I swear.

“Ma’am? Wake up, ma’am.”

A harsh, urgent voice. Whose?

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Ariah was awake, yet somehow her eyes were shut. How her heart strained as she tried to climb the sheer sharp glistening-wet granite walls of the Gorge. Someone was speaking to her, loudly.

“Ma’am?
Please
.”

Ariah felt her shoulder nudged. What was this! A stranger daring to touch her, in this public place where she lay defenseless. Her eyes flew open.

She stammered, in a panic, “What—is it? Who are you?”

It has happened. And now
.

A stranger was talking earnestly to Ariah, as she managed to sit up, and to stand. (But why was she barefoot? Where were her shoes?) Hurriedly she adjusted her clothing and ran both hands through her rats’-nest hair. A youngish man in a dark green uniform, a park attendant, spoke sternly to her, which seemed to Ariah very wrong, this man was younger than Ariah. “Ma’am? Are these your children? They were on Goat Island unattended.”

Chandler slouched close by his mother, shame-faced. And there in the stroller, strapped in, little baseball cap askew on his head, was the baby. Oh, what was his name: Royall.
A name I picked out of the paper, the
sound of it struck me. Royall Mansion, a winning thoroughbred.
Ariah stared at her children as if she hadn’t seen them in a long time. But where had they drifted off to? How much time had passed? Why was Ariah, Dirk Burnaby’s wife, barefoot in this public place being scolded by an impertinent stranger? “Yes, of course they’re my children,” Ariah said hotly. “Chandler, where have you been? I’ve been worried sick about you. I told you
not to go far
.”

Chandler mumbled an apology as the park attendant looked on dubiously. You’d almost think, the expression in his face, he didn’t believe that Ariah was these boys’ mother. Chandler’s misbuttoned red plaid shirt and baggy khaki pants were damp from spray. Like a street urchin the child looked, not a son of Dirk Burnaby of Luna Park! Ariah wanted to shake him, hard. And there was Royall not looking like himself but anybody’s baby, snot glistening at his nostrils and drool at his slack baby mouth. His face was soft bread dough that has lost its shape. His demon-energy seemed to have faded, he was groggy, dopey and could barely keep his eyes open.

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Oh, dear. Despite the protective cap, it looked as if Royall’s little pug nose was sunburnt.

Ariah was scolding Chandler, he’d disobeyed her again. Wandered off. Unreliable! The park attendant listened with a maddening air of severity, shaking his head. Who did he think he was, the F.B.I.? Ariah concluded that if he had the power to arrest her or issue a summons he’d have done it by now, which was a relief. Royall woke from his trance and began to cry loudly. “Mom-
my
! Mom-
my
!”