The Falls (30 page)

And it was an air, an early evening, possessing an eerie lumines-cence, mingled with the prevailing swampy, tarry odors. The sky was marbled with cloud, partially clearing in the western, Canadian sky where the sun was just descending. It was midsummer: the summer solstice: night was slow to come in this urban area of factories with tall smokestacks rimmed with flame, vast acres of scattered lights.

At Dirk’s car Nina continued to speak to him, more rapidly now, as if sensing she might have offended him, and might have driven him away. “People say there’s an old canal around here that was filled in, nobody knows where it is exactly. By the school, I think. All through here. It was filled in before the Colvin Heights contractor began to build here after the war and I was thinking—what did they fill the canal with? Maybe not just dirt, but waste products? Chemicals?

Swann Chemicals is just out Colvin Boulevard, on the other side of Portage. Nobody will tell us about it. At the Health Department and at City Hall I’ve asked. At the
Gazette
I’ve asked. That’s why I’m trying to get a lawyer interested. Mr. Burnaby, everybody says the best lawyer in Niagara Falls is
you
.”

Dirk frowned. Possibly this was true. On his chess board, playing by the rules he knew, Dirk Burnaby was possibly unbeatable, in the prime of his career as he was in the prime of his life.

“Mr. Burnaby, I know you can’t say ‘yes’ right now. But please don’t say ‘no.’ Please! I know you will have to think about this. And I know that you know, we don’t have much money. We might have—

scraping together, some of the neighbors who are concerned—a couple of thousand dollars. I know you get much more. That nice woman, in your office, was trying to explain. But I wanted to talk to you, and I have. Thank you!”

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Joyce Carol Oates

Dirk said, “Mrs. Olshaker, I’ll be in contact. You’ve given me a good deal to think about.”

Nina boldly seized his hand in both her hands and squeezed it, hard. Her mineral-eyes glittered with a sort of flirtatious desperation. In a lowered voice she said, “I have a confession to make, Mr.

Burnaby. Don’t be angry! Don’t hold it against me! See, I prayed for this. This evening. I prayed for you.
God has sent you to me
.”

The Underworld

Never adultery
.
Never an adulterous husband
.
Nor did I fall in
love with that woman.

Though he would destroy himself, and his marriage, in the doomed cause of Love Canal.

1

A r i a h k n e w, yet didn’t know. As a wife doesn’t know, yet knows.

Or believe she knows.

It was the late summer of 1961, and then it was the autumn, and the start of another winter at The Falls, close beside the Niagara Gorge. A new baby in the house at 22 Luna Park! The mysterious pulsing life of the house this baby daughter seemed to Ariah, the mother. The triumphant, if exhausted mother. There were Chandler and Royall she loved, but it was Juliet who was Ariah’s very soul.

“Our eyes. We have the same eyes. Oh, Bridget! Look.”

Holding the moistly smiling, big-eyed baby beside her head, preening before the mirror. Pebbly-green eyes, glassy-green eyes 210 W
Joyce Carol Oates

lightly threaded with blood, the newly hired Irish nanny blinked from one pair to the other, from Baby to Mother, and, being Irish, and canny, knew to say in her exuberant brogue, “Oh, Mrs. Burnaby! Sure she’s the image of her mother, God has blessed you both.”

And yet.

My husband loves me
.
He would never be unfaithful to me. He knows it would
destroy me
.
And he loves me
.

Damn! The telephone was ringing. Ariah had forgotten to take the receiver off the hook. In the midst of her Thurs. 5 p.m lesson (the pupil was a plumply-pretty middling-talented twelve-year-old neighborhood girl of whom Ariah was rather fond) Ariah called without rising from the piano bench, “Royall, sweetie, will you take that phone off the hook? Don’t say a word to whoever it is, just take the receiver off the hook and put it down gently. That’s a good boy.”

But Royall, being Royall, never obeyed his mother without at the same time disobeying his mother. That was Royall’s game. He was three years old, brimming with games. He picked up the ringing phone in both hands and chattered into the mouthpiece like a demented monkey, “No Momma! No Momma, g’bye!” Giggling, the child let the receiver fall to the carpeted floor with a soft thud, backing off, hands clapped over his mouth with a look of naughty hilarity.

Ariah could hardly scold him, whoever was on the phone would overhear.

Ariah’s after-school piano lessons were intended to be, for her, oases of relative calm, sanity, yes even a bit of beauty amid the seething energies of the Burnaby household, but that wasn’t always so.

Ariah turned with a sigh back to her pupil, who was frowning over a tricky exercise of dominant seventh (broken) arpeggios in B� major, which her stubby fingers could almost manage, but not quite. Still, the girl had talent. Or what passed for talent in Ariah’s teaching career these days. With her usual breathy enthusiasm Ariah said, “Very
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good, Louise! Very promising! Now let’s hear it again, keep the notes flowing smoothly, we’re in four/four time—”

A strange sort of consolation it was, somehow. The frequency with which, teaching piano, you hear yourself murmuring
Very good!

Very promising! Now let’s hear it again
.

Her Burnaby in-laws and social acquaintances thought it eccentric, Ariah knew. That the wife of Dirk Burnaby gave piano lessons.

For five dollars an hour. A woman with three young children. Like a genteel spinster in need of an income. Ariah had said in wide-eyed innocence to Dirk’s disapproving sisters, “Oh, I’m preparing for some future time when I might be abandoned and bereft and will have to support myself and my children. Shouldn’t all wives?” It had been worth it, to see the look on their prissy heavily made-up faces. Funny!

Ariah smiled, recalling.

Though Dirk hadn’t been so amused. In fact he’d been furious with her.

Ariah had wanted to protest
But shouldn’t all wives?

There was Louise playing her dutiful arpeggios, broken chords that should have been swift, light, sparkling as water rippling over rock but were deliberate, unevenly struck, each note a tiny mallet.

“Remember the beat, dear: four beats to a measure, and a quarter note gets one beat.” Ariah tapped with her pencil. She’d developed an ambiauditory skill, listening to her pupils with one ear while listening to whatever might be happening in another part of the house with the other ear. This new house Dirk had insisted upon buying was dismayingly large, there were many rooms the older children could drift into, the room designated as “Mommy’s piano room” was a former parlor opening off the living room and near a hallway that led to the kitchen and connected with the stairs. Where was Bridget? Possibly in the kitchen with the baby. She was to keep an eye on Royall, too, but of course Royall wasn’t easy to keep an eye on. By now, Ariah hoped, whoever had called her had hung up.

Yes, it sounded as if Bridget was in the kitchen. Feeding and cooing at the baby in that swarmy way Ariah disliked.
She wants to be that
beautiful baby’s mother
.
Well, I am that baby’s mother.

Ariah didn’t like the way Royall crowded against the Irish nanny, 212 W
Joyce Carol Oates

either. The way the Irish nanny was forever stroking his fine flaxen hair, exclaiming over his blue eyes, hugging him. Chattering away with him, in what sounded like Gaelic babytalk. Ariah wondered if they plotted and laughed together, secrets kept from Mommy.

Chandler was too old for Bridget to fuss over. And he was never home. Luckily!

Ariah liked a telephone off the hook. She felt protected, safe.

Ringing phones made her nervous. Sometimes she walked swiftly away from a ringing phone, clapping her hands over her ears. Suppose it was Dirk, or that velvety-voiced receptionist Madelyn she despised, what would the call mean except that Dirk would be late again for dinner, or absent at dinner, and why should Ariah seek out such hurtful news? Better not to know. Just see what happens. Remove the receiver from the hook and let the dial tone go dead as it does, eventually. Though sometimes the housekeeper interfered, or even Bridget who had no business playing parlor maid. The phone rang jarring the peace of the household and there came the cry—“Mrs. Burnaby?

Phone, ma’am.”

But where was “ma’am?” Upstairs in her bathroom with both faucets running water. Humming loudly.

Ariah’s piano lessons always ran over if there was no next pupil, and so this lesson continued until six-fifteen. Louise seemed uneasy, uncertain. She’d done so poorly with the little Mozart rondo she’d been working on for weeks, Ariah had had to play it for her another time. What a charming, sunny, clockwork sort of piece it was, all sparkling surfaces, no depths or interstices of brooding. “Now try again, Louise. I know you can do it.” But Louise began, struck her first wrong note, and shook her head. “I g-guess I have to leave, Mrs.

Burnaby.” Clumsily the girl rose from the piano bench, gathering her music. Ariah was perplexed. Louise, shame-faced, said, “This is my last piano lesson with you, I guess. I’m sorry.”

Ariah was so taken by surprise, she hardly knew how to react.

“Louise, what? Your last lesson—?”

“My m-mother says . . .”

“Your mother?”

“My dad told her, I guess. No more piano lessons after today.”

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The girl, blushing fiercely, not meeting Ariah’s eye, fled.

Ariah trailed after her to the front door, and shut it quietly behind her, and stood then in the vestibule for several minutes dazed as if she’d been struck on the head. Why, Louise Eggers was one of Ariah’s most promising students. The Eggers family lived across the park in a handsome old colonial in which, several times in the past several years, the Burnabys had been guests. Ariah had been her usual somewhat reserved self in the face of Mrs. Eggers’s sociability, but she’d always assumed that Mrs. Eggers liked her. Mr. Eggers, chief executive officer of Niagara Hydro, was a friendly business acquaintance of Dirk’s.

Or had seemed so.

“Oh,
damn
.” Ariah winced in pain.

Someone must have put the receiver back on the hook. The telephone was ringing.

The well-intentioned pest from County Galway summoned “ma’am”

to the phone with her lilting lyric brogue. Numbly Ariah took the call in Dirk’s study. “Yes.” She hadn’t the strength to pose even a ritual question.

But here was a shock. Ariah’s sister-in-law Clarice.

Clarice! The elder of the two Burnaby sisters, and the one who frightened Ariah the more. A glaring-eyed Joan Crawford type with tightly permed hair like tiny sausages and a habit of turning her lip up at Ariah even as she smiled at her in a pretense of warmth. Clarice was in her early fifties, a stolid woman, with something of Claudine Burnaby’s air of entitlement and reproach. “Ariah? Are you there?”

“Oh. Yes.”

Ariah’s response was weak, nearly inaudible. She was trying to summon strength to behave in that way—but what was that way?—

the smug world designates as normal.

Oh, dear. Rapidly Ariah’s mind skittered about. Had she and Dirk been invited to bring the children to Clarice’s house on l’Isle Grand, and had they neglected to go? Again? (To Ariah’s shame, this had happened on Easter Sunday of that year. Ariah accepted the blame, 214 W
Joyce Carol Oates

she’d forgotten to mark the date on her calendar.) Two or three times a year Dirk’s sisters made the charitable effort to be friendly, inviting their brother and his burgeoning young family to their homes for one or another “holiday” occasion. Ariah dreaded these occasions and sometimes, pleading a sick headache, or a re-scheduled piano lesson, failed to attend. Claudine Burnaby, now in her seventies, stubbornly reclusive and rumored to have become a religious fanatic, never visited her childrens’ homes but was obsessively talked-of and worried-over to the point at which Ariah wanted to clap her hands over her ears and run out of the room.

(Why was it such “eccentric” behavior, hiding away in your home if you wanted to? If you had the financial means? Especially if you lived in an estate like Shalott, overlooking the Niagara River.) Politely Clarice asked Ariah how she was, how were the children; invariably Clarice bungled the childrens’ names, but Ariah never troubled to correct her. Ariah quickly told her fine, fine, everyone is fine, though in the confusion and unease of the moment Ariah hadn’t the faintest idea what she was saying: if Chandler had been missing from home for days, if Royall had lighted matches in the basement to set the house on fire, and Bridget had run off with beautiful Baby Juliet, Ariah would have answered brightly, “Oh,
fine
!” But she hadn’t the energy to ask Clarice how her family was.

“Well. The reason I’m calling, Ariah,” Clarice said, in a voice like poured concrete, “is to ask if you’ve been hearing some of the ugly rumors I’ve been hearing.” There was a dramatic pause. Ariah pressed the phone receiver against her ear hard, as if the rumors were inside the phone, and she was supposed to hear them?

Clarice pressed grimly forward. “About my brother Dirk.”

Desperately Ariah quipped, “Oh, your brother Dirk! Not my husband Dirk. That’s a relief.”

“Ariah, dear, I hope you’ll think this is amusing.”

Ariah laughed. “Clarice, I hope it will be. I’ve had three piano lessons this afternoon and I’m in a mood to laugh at something.”

“Well, you won’t laugh at this: Dirk is involved with another woman.”

Involved! What a curious expression.

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“Ariah? Did you hear me? People are saying, Dirk is seeing another woman.”