The Falls (53 page)

A toss of the dice. Why not, it had so little to do with him.

Protected, in the police van, by the blinding lights, as well as bulletproof glass, Chandler craned his neck far forward, to consider the blank front of the building. Rainwashed cinderblock ugliness. In the vivid bluish light it had the look of a two-dimensional stage set.

It had the tacky look of something soon to be dismanteled, dis-carded. Chandler would have to act swiftly and decisively, or all his power would be snatched from him, he’d be returned to his own small life.

Chandler wondered where Mayweather was: had he crept out of the room in which he’d been safely barricaded for hours, had he followed Cynthia Carpenter toward the front entrance? Was he, even now, standing behind the broken window, aiming his rifle? Chandler contemplated the oddly shaped window, shards of glass at its edges like teeth. How charged with significance this scene had come to be, in the intensity of the drama, that had no significance otherwise.
The
small life. The inevitable life. The life that awaits.
Even as he stared, Chandler realized that his peripheral vision had narrowed. Even as his eyesight became sharper, at the center of his vision, he was going
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blind at the edges. And yet—he’d become a funnel of super-charged energy. He knew—he knew!—it was his role to speak to Al Mayweather face to face.

To save Al Mayweather. As he’d saved the hostage.

These long exhausting minutes since he’d been handed the bullhorn, Chandler had been seated in a police van, inside the penumbra of shadow. Before anyone could prevent him, he climbed out.

In his weak, raw, human voice he called, “Al? It’s me, Chandler.”

Boldly he stepped into the lighted area in front of the building.

No one had been quick enough to catch hold of him. He could hear shouts and protests on all sides. But Chandler continued forward, raising his arms in appeal.
He
had no weapon—of course.
He
would reveal himself to Al Mayweather, unprotected. He understood that he was doing the right thing.
In the purity of his heart, he could not fail to
do the right thing.
Even as police shouted for him to take cover, cursed at him. Even as TV cameras were trained upon him. He called out,

“Al? Can I come inside to talk to you? I need so badly to talk to you—” Less than ten feet from the partly opened door, Chandler seemed to see movement inside, but wasn’t certain. His vision had so radically narrowed, it was as if he were looking through the wrong end of a telescope. What he saw was a small circle of extraordinary intensity, yet he seemed not to know what he was seeing, he couldn’t have named it. The roaring in his ears grew louder. He was beyond the Deadline, rapidly approaching the Falls. There was a comfort in this. His heart lifted in anticipation. At the edge of consciousness voices were shouting
Take cover!
but these were distant, the shouts of strangers, he needed to show Al Mayweather how he had nothing to do with these strangers; how bonded the two of them were, like brothers, in their shared past.

There came then a single sharp crack, a gunshot.

On TV that evening.
The man worked a miracle, saved our daughter’s life
.

We prayed, we prayed, and he saved her
. So the Carpenters would say of Chandler Burnaby. But Chandler wouldn’t be seeing this interview, or the others. Nor the film footage, on all three TV stations.

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And now the adrenaline tide had retreated, the dank, banal debris of a small life was exposed.

Sleet pelted against the car’s windshield. He had to drive slowly in any case, pain throbbing behind his eyes. He was an hour and a half late, and had never telephoned. To telephone a woman you love, or almost love, or wish to love, you must imagine what you will say to her, and Chandler was emptied of words. The bullhorn had exhausted him. Like an immense ludicrous phallus. You picked such an instrument up in wonder, and set it down in dismay.

Driving to Alcott Street, north and west on Eleventh, where Melinda rented an apartment on the third floor of what had once been a private house, a five-minute drive from Grace Memorial Hospital where she worked. It was past 8 p.m. This day had begun early for Chandler, shortly after 6 a.m. In that other phase of his existence in which he was, affably, reliably, “Mr. Burnaby” who taught ninth grade science at La Salle Junior High. Paid less than the head custodian at the school but he understood that this was nothing personal.
Mr. Burnaby, that’s who you are
.
Play the cards you’re dealt, and
shut up
.

They would be saying of Chandler Burnaby that he’d been a hero, he’d saved a young woman’s life. But Chandler knew better.

He had not turned on the car radio, and would not. He had no wish to hear local news. In the morning, he would have to read the front page of the
Gazette,
that was unavoidable.

He felt sick, disgusted. His eyes ached. This was his punishment for having ascended to the high wire, this failure.

And so he tried to think of the baby.

Melinda’s baby, that was not Chandler’s. Another man had fathered this baby, and departed. Before the baby’s birth, early in the pregnancy, he’d departed. Chandler could not comprehend such behavior, yet he knew it wasn’t altogether uncommon. Melinda’s husband, from whom she’d only recently become divorced, had been a medical student at the University of Buffalo, and was now an intern
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in the area. He had no custodial rights to the baby, he’d wanted none.

Melinda would say only that the marriage hadn’t worked out, she’d made a mistake.

You? You made the mistake?

My judgment. I misjudged.

The implication was, in Melinda’s steely jawline, she would not misjudge another time.

The baby, Danya. Of whom (this was ridiculous, but true) Ariah was jealous, so that Chandler no longer dared speak of the baby, or of Melinda, to his mother.

“Hey. I love you. Know who I am?”

She did not, of course. Who exactly was Chandler Burnaby, in Danya’s life?

Chandler was feeling a little better, less desperate, thinking of Danya. The warm, intense body. So hot, sometimes. And heavy. As if an entire life, a lifetime, were already compacted into that small body.

The eyes, open, conscious, darting curious and alert, insatiable.

Almost, when he held Danya, he could feel the infant taking in information, hungry to absorb all of the world.

She could be mine. She could love me as a father. I am not required to justify
my life.

But when Chandler arrived at Melinda’s apartment, it was otherwise. Yes, he was required to justify his life.

Possibly he’d known, he’d anticipated such a scene, that was why he had not telephoned.

Melinda confronted him at the door, tight-faced, furious. She was a strong, fleshy young woman two years older than Chandler, with a fair, frank, attractive face, hair of no distinct color, wanly brown, trimmed short to fit beneath her nurse’s cap. She was of only moderate height, five feet four or five, yet exuded an air of authority, as if she were taller; as, though a warmly emotional young woman, she could detach herself, with alarming swiftness, from a scene in which others were emotional. Chandler had met her in the most romantic of settings: at the Armory, where he’d gone to give blood in the annual Red Cross drive, in a swoon hardly typical of him he’d smiled up 374 W
Joyce Carol Oates

dreamily at the attractive young nurse, tried to make conversation from the gurney on which he’d been urged to lie.
Promise you won’t
drain it all, my blood? I’ve put myself in your hands.

Melinda was saying she’d seen him on TV. She’d seen what he had done, and she’d been terrified for him. But afterward, thinking it over, she was angry. She was disgusted. “You risked your life for—

what? Who? That stranger? ‘Somebody from your high school’—bullshit! A pathetic loser, that’s what he was. That’s all he was. He killed himself, he could have killed you. For what? Exactly for what, Chandler? Tell me: for what?”

Chandler hadn’t expected this greeting. Oh, in his heart he was a romantic, wishful fool, he’d hoped for something so very different though knowing (for Chandler always knew: Chandler was a scientist at heart, and pitiless) that he didn’t deserve it.

Going outside the family. Betraying.

Bullshit.

Chandler tried to explain, but he wasn’t going to apologize.

Melinda interrupted, Melinda knew his heart. Hotly she said, “This has to do with your father, yes? But I don’t give a damn about your father. I can’t be involved with a man who doesn’t care more about me, and my baby, and our life together, than he cares about a stranger, I can’t be involved with a man who doesn’t care if he lives or dies!

Who’d toss his life like dice, as if it was worthless. Goodnight, Chandler. Goodbye.”

And she pushed him out the door, and shut it in his stunned face.

3

Forced move.
He vowed then, in the spring of his twenty-eighth year, he would take his life in hand.

He’d been drifting, passive. Like one hypnotized by The Falls.

Melinda had forced him to see. She’d held up a reflecting surface to Chandler he hadn’t been able to shield his eyes from, as one must shield one’s eyes from the terrible visage of Medusa, stunned by a truth that has been both obvious and elusive.
Toss your life like dice, as if
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worthless.
It was uncanny, Melinda must love him. She had plumbed the depth of his soul.

When had it begun, this strange trance-like passivity, this drifting he’d mistaken for loyalty, or for self-penance. Since his father’s disappearance from his life, perhaps. (Chandler had never seen his father’s lifeless body. There had been no body. How, then, could he “believe”

in his father’s death?) Yet he’d prided himself on being a rational individual. By far the most rational individual in his family. He’d believed himself supremely in control, responsible, mature. Since the precocious age of eleven he’d been a loyal son to his (widowed, difficult) mother. He’d been a loving, patient, and protective older brother to his (fatherless, immature) brother and sister.

Promise!
Ariah had whispered, gripping both his hands in hers.

Give me your heart! Give me your life!

Since junior high, Chandler had been a promising, if erratic chess player. He’d taught Juliet to play, and on wretched winter days when even his restless younger brother was confined to the house on Baltic Street, he’d taught Royall. (Ariah rarely played any board games with her children. She might have been afraid of losing to them.) Neither Juliet nor Royall cared enough for the game to play shrewdly or with patience, but they were intuitive, and sometimes lucky. Chandler wasn’t one to trust luck. He would find himself in a position in which, to prevent a lethal move by his opponent, he had to sacrifice a valuable piece. This was the
forced move
: a sacrifice in the short run, for a win in the long run.

He would take his life in hand from now on. He was through with being ashamed of who he was, whom he’d been born.

Through the spring of 1978 he made inquiries into Dirk Burnaby’s life, and into his death. To understand one, he must understand the other. He wrote brief, thoughtful letters to his father’s former law colleagues and friends, whom he knew primarily as names from the newspaper.
Please, may I see you? Speak with you? It would mean so much
to me as Dirk Burnaby’s son.
He tried to locate the couple so central to Dirk Burnaby’s final year, Nina and Sam Olshaker, and was sorry to hear that the couple had divorced in 1963, following the strain of the 376 W
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court case; it seemed that Nina Olshaker had taken her children away to live in the northern part of the state, outside Plattsburgh, and had no listed telephone number. He tried to speak with several of the expert witnesses who’d given Dirk Burnaby depositions in the Love Canal case, and was told that these individuals, who’d been under pressure at the time of the lawsuit and had been frequently questioned about their relationship with Dirk Burnaby after his death, no longer cared to discuss the subject. He tried to speak with the doctor who’d headed the County Board of Health in 1961, but was informed that this well-to-do gentleman was “retired to Palm Beach, and in-communicado.” So too, other physicians who’d served on the Board at that time and had ruled in support of Swann Chemicals refused to speak with Chandler, or were elderly, or no longer alive. And so too, the defendants’ attorneys, most of whom were still practicing law in Niagara Falls, very successfully. And so too, former mayor “Spooky”

Wenn, now an executive in the state Republican party, and former Niagara County judge Stroughton Howell, now a justice of the New York State Appellate Court in Albany. He made an appointment to speak with an emeritus professor of biochemistry at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and he made an appointment to speak with Dirk Burnaby’s former receptionist, Madelyn Seidman, and with the bailiff, now retired, whom Dirk Burnaby had pleaded guilty to having assaulted in Judge Howell’s courtroom at the time of the preliminary hearing. He tried to make appointments to speak with the chief of police, Fitch, who’d been a friend of Dirk Burnaby, and with the the county sheriff, and with the detectives involved in the investigation of Dirk Burnaby’s alleged accident, but none of these men would see him.

Of course, what had he expected? He was an adult, he knew the ways of the world. The male world of power, intrigue, threat.

And yet: after having refused to take calls from Chandler for weeks, Chief of Police Fitch telephoned Chandler directly to inform him that the NFPD investigation in 1962 “turned up plenty you wouldn’t want to know about but we spared your family, see? We ruled ‘accident,’ the insurance company had to pay out.” Before Chandler could respond, Fitch hung up.