The Falls (37 page)

Mommy, please! Mommy,
no
.”

So they begged. For frenzied minutes they begged! Royall wept, kicked, pounded his little fists, which in fact weren’t so little any longer, against the floor, as Ariah tried to lift Zarjo to hand back to Daddy. “Mommy,
no
.
Mommy
.” Already Mommy was weakening, for who could resist blue-eyed Royall begging as if for his life? And there was Chandler, unexpectedly emotional too. “Mommy, Zarjo must be meant for us! If Daddy hadn’t picked him out at the SPCA he might be put down. You know what that means, Mommy, don’t you? ‘Put down.’ ” Chandler’s myopic eyes swam behind their glasses.

Royall, suddenly sobered, alertly asked, “What’s that? ‘Put down’? ‘Put down’
where
?”

Chandler said grimly, “It means killed. Put down into the ground, and buried. Like anything dead.”

Royall bellowed in protest. “Mommy, no. Mommy, NO.”

By this time Juliet was crying, too. Though at one year old the baby was too young (at least, Ariah hoped so) to know what was going on, what sort of emotional blackmail-terrorism this was. The adulterous husband and father rushing home after forty-eight hours’

absence to dump a squirmy, squealing, teary-eyed pee-piddling five-week-old adorable beagle-spaniel puppy in her lap, and rushing out again into the fragrant spring evening.

“Dirk? Don’t you dare! Stop! You can’t seriously intend to—”

But yes, Dirk was leaving. He’d left his car running in the driveway. He had work to do at the office, he couldn’t stay. He’d grab a bite to eat later. He wasn’t hungry. “Goodnight, everyone! Daddy loves you! Be good to Zarjo. Ariah, darling, I’ll call you tomorrow after”—Dirk’s brave voice faltered only now, perceptibly—“the decision.”

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The man was in a manic state. That neon glare in his tawny eyes, the quavering voice. Yes, he was trying to bargain with God. As if you could bargain with God! Oh, Ariah knew better. If this man hadn’t betrayed her and broken her heart, Ariah might have taken pity on him.

Ariah called in his wake, “Don’t you ‘darling’ me! I want a divorce.”

A madhouse in the kitchen. The tuna casserole dinner was ruined.

The boys were clamoring, “Mommy can we keep him! Mommy can we keep him!” The baby was crying at the top of her tiny lungs, and a disheveled Bridget was crooning at her in frantic Gaelic. The puppy Zarjo was barking and yelping like the “Anvil Chorus,” or “Welling-ton’s Victory,” the most appalling music ever penned by man. A chorus of beggars plucking at the taut stingy strings of Ariah’s heart.

What choice did she have, this was damned unfair! Wanting to scream at them all but instead she pulled out a chair, and sat, and lifted the struggling five-pound Zarjo onto her lap. Splashes of puppy-pee had already soaked into her skirt, what difference would a little more make?

Sternly Ariah scolded, “Don’t ‘Mommy’ me. I refuse to be this little thing’s ‘Mommy.’ It’s bad enough I’m your ‘Mommy.’ If we keep him—”

“Mommy! Oh Mommy
can we
!”

“—you, Chandler, and you, Royall, will take care of him. You will feed him, take him for walks, clean up his messes beginning with right now, that puddle on the floor. Do you promise?”

What a question.

“Yes, Mommy! We promise!”

“We promise, Mommy!”

Ariah, who should have known better, sighed, and petted the puppy’s lunging head. His ears, his pink floppy tongue. His little rear end was wriggling on her lap as if Zarjo was trying to do the samba.

“He is sort of cute, I suppose. If you like puppies. Chandler, shut the doors to the rest of the house. Royall, put newspaper pages down on the floor here. We’ll give Zajo a forty-eight-hour trial. Not a minute more.”

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Joyce Carol Oates

Chandler, wiping tears from beneath his glasses, said, “Mommy, thank you.”

Royall, hugging both Mommy and the puppy, cried, “Mommy!
I
love you
.”

In this way Zarjo came to live in the Burnaby household shortly before the time Dirk Burnaby, who was Daddy, was to depart.

The Fall

The tightrope walker begins his brave doomed journey across the abyss
.

Soon obscured by rising mist, fog. Blown off-balance by a gust of
wind, or shot in the back
.
Falling, so strangely silent.

Unless amid the noise of The Falls his screams went unheard
.

Dirk Burnaby would not fall in silence. His protests would be heard, and recounted by, more than sixty witnesses.

The judge ruled. The lawsuit was dismissed. A red haze throbbed in Dirk’s brain. Suddenly his legs propelled him upward. He knocked aside the chair in which he’d been sitting at the plaintiff ’s table, facing the judge’s bench. On his feet, and furious. Like a maddened bull, furious. He would be heard “threatening” Judge Stroughton Howell.

He would be heard uttering such phrases as “mendacious bastard”—

“corrupt son of a bitch”—“bastard hypocrite”—“on the take”—

“I’ll expose you”—“of all people, you!” Seized by the arm by a 260 W
Joyce Carol Oates

shocked bailiff, a man with whom Dirk Burnaby had more than once spoken, even joked, he would turn blindly upon the bailiff and strike him so square in his face, with such strength, the bailiff ’s nose, left cheekbone, and left eye socket would be shattered, and blood would splash onto Dirk Burnaby’s gray-striped sharkskin suit and starched white cotton shirt.

“Pandemonium” in the courtroom, as the
Niagara Gazette
would eagerly report. A “brief, intense struggle” as sheriff ’s deputies “wrestled” the plaintiff ’s attorney Dirk Burnaby into submission, arrested him on a charge of assault, and led him forcibly away.

The red haze throbbing. Seeking release. And in that instant a professional career ruined. A life ruined. In no more time than the time required to strike a match: to produce a small blue-flaring flame out of what had been mere inert mineral.

If you could relive that instant.

Would I do it again, God damn yes. Yes! Except I wouldn’t hit the bailiff
I’d have gotten to Howell himself. Punched in that hypocrite bastard’s face
.

“Berserk”—“out of control”—so witnesses would say of Dirk Burnaby in Howell’s courtroom. Some would claim that they’d seen him drinking in a nearby restaurant during the noon recess. Others would say this wasn’t true. It would be reported how, behind the judge’s high bench, a clammy-faced Stroughton Howell in his judge’s robe had cringed in fear until Dirk Burnaby was subdued.

Then, Howell declared Dirk Burnaby in contempt of court.

In contempt! It’s contempt I have for this court. For this thoroughly rotten legal
community. For judges on the payroll of criminal defendants. That bastard
Howell
.

Hypocrite bastard, used to be my friend
.

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As he was led struggling, stumbling, cursing out of the courtroom by a phalanx of men in the gray-blue uniforms of the county sheriff ’s department, Dirk Burnaby heard Nina Olshaker call after him. She tried to follow him, tried to touch him; was detained by deputies; wept and cried, “Mr. Burnaby! Dirk! We’ll try again, won’t we? We’ll appeal? We won’t give up.
We won’t give up
.”

Several witnesses claimed that Nina Olshaker had also cried, “Mr.

Burnaby, I love you! Oh God, Dirk, I love you!”

Never. There was no personal feeling between us. None on my side and none on
Nina’s
.
We are both happily married. I swear.

The first of the Love Canal class-action suits, it would come to be designated. The first in a disjointed succession that would not end until 1978. But in May 1962 it was the sole Love Canal suit, and it had been summarily dismissed.

By the decision of a single judge, a judge clearly prejudiced in favor of the powerful defendants, the labor of ten months had been dismissed as of no worth. Nearly one thousand pages of plaintiffs’ and expert witnesses’ depositions, scientific and medical data, photographs, documents. Dirk Burnaby’s carefully composed, passionately argued motion for a trial.

Now there would be no trial. There had been no offer of a settlement for those residents of Colvin Heights suffering from illnesses, medical conditions, loss in property value. And with plaintiff ’s counsel charged with assault, there would be no appeal.

Sure I pleaded guilty
.
What choice, I was guilty. Hitting that poor bailiff, the
wrong man
.
God damn my bad luck
.

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Joyce Carol Oates

Witnesses to Dirk Burnaby’s outburst and arrest were much interviewed by local media, and none more frequently than Brandon Skinner, chief defense counsel for Swann Chemicals and co-defendants. Skinner described himself as “an old friend and rival” of Dirk Burnaby. He’d never seen Burnaby, a brilliant lawyer, so obsessed—“morbidly obsessed”—with any case as he’d been with this one, which Burnaby was allegedly litigating for a contingency fee which was to say, since the case was generally conceded to be un-winnable, pro bono. In itself, this was such imprudent, reckless behavior, you could see that Burnaby had lost all sense of proportion.

He’d lost his lawyer’s instinct for survival.

Yes, Skinner said repeatedly, Burnaby certainly had had an excellent reputation prior to the “incident.”

Possibly, Skinner conceded, Burnaby had had something of a reputation for a quick temper. But never professionally. He was known as a shrewd poker player, for instance. You “didn’t want to bet against”

Dirk Burnaby’s cards. Until Love Canal.

Possibly too, Skinner said reluctantly, Burnaby had begun to acquire a reputation as a drinker. That is, a “heavy” drinker. This was fairly recent. The past few months.

At least, the public aspect of Burnaby’s drinking was recent.

Asked to comment on the rumor that Dirk Burnaby had been “involved” with his client Nina Olshaker, and that Mrs. Olshaker was currently living in a house in Mt. Lucas rented for her by Burnaby, Skinner said stiffly that he had no idea if this was so, he detested rumors, but if it was so, it would help to explain a great deal.

Why a man throws away a career, for the sake of a gesture.

Did Skinner believe that Burnaby’s career was over?

“Sorry. I have no comment.”

Judge Stroughton Howell would never comment publicly on the “incident” in his courtroom. Nor on the behavior of Dirk Burnaby, his old, ex-friend. On the Love Canal lawsuit he’d commented in detail,
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in his carefully worded written decision to dismiss plaintiff ’s charges and declare no grounds for a trial.

It had been a “difficult” decision, Howell acknowledged. The case, involving so many parties, and presenting so much contradictory evidence, had been “unusually complicated.” Yet the principal issues, Howell said, were just two: was the 1953 contract agreed to and signed by Swann Chemicals, Inc. and the Niagara County Board of Education legally binding in its stated absolution of fault to be laid to Swann Chemicals if “physical harm or death” followed as a consequence of waste materials buried in Love Canal; and, had there been

“absolute and incontrovertible evidence” of a linkage between Love Canal (that is, residence in the subdivision known as Colvin Heights), and numerous reported cases of illness and death in that neighborhood in the years 1955 to 1962.

Judge Howell found the controversial 1953 contract “illegal”—

that is, “not legally binding” under the New York State statute. But he went on to find that the plaintiff had failed to prove its case against Swann Chemicals, the City of Niagara Falls, the Niagara County Board of Education, the Niagara County Board of Health, et al.

Howell came to this decision, as he said, after “carefully considering”

the evidence offered by both sides, which were in sharp disagreement about the nature of “causation” of illness and death; but he ruled finally in concurrence with the 1957 report of the Niagara County Board of Health, updated in March 1962, that there was “no incontrovertible evidence of a link between the reported environmental factors and isolated cases of illness and death” in Colvin Heights.

With that ruling, the case was dismissed.

With that ruling, Dirk Burnaby’s career as an attorney came to an abrupt, unexpected ending.

I could have torn the bastard’s throat out with my teeth. He betrayed justice,
and he betrayed me. Hypocrite lying bribe-taking judge-bastard, I could kill
him even now with my bare hands
.

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Joyce Carol Oates

In truth he hadn’t been surprised. He’d had a premonition. He’d had numerous premonitions. Dirk Burnaby may have been deluded, and he may have been desperate in his delusion, as a man is desperate in a hopeless love, but he’d known what might happen. He knew how powerful his adversaries were, and how prejudiced any Niagara Falls judge would be in their favor.

He’d wondered in private why Stroughton Howell hadn’t recused himself from the case, on the grounds of having been a close, intimate friend of the plaintiff ’s attorney for more than twenty years. And now he knew.

Dirk hadn’t told Nina Olshaker, or the others. He’d shared his misgivings with no one. His slow-dawning realization, that sick sensation in the gut, the opposition had gotten to his expert witnesses, to undermine his principal argument of “causation.” Of nineteen men and women, physicians, medical workers, scientists who’d agreed to give sworn depositions on behalf of the Colvin Heights residents, only eleven had come through. And of these, several spoke tentatively, unwilling to fully commit to the standard of “absolute and incontrovertible evidence.” For always there are genetic factors, behavioral factors like drinking, smoking, overeating, that might be said to “cause” illness in an individual.