The Falls (59 page)

The Falls
X 413

(It was after Juliet’s solo in “The Messiah” that Madame Ehrenreich spoke with her about studying at the Buffalo Academy, where Madame teaches. A scholarship for the study of voice. A scholarship for Juliet Burnaby who was only sixteen. Juliet would not have to transfer to another high school but could commute into the city twice a week after classes, not a lengthy bus ride, the Academy would pay her expenses.
A golden opportunity!
her teachers said. Smiling at Juliet Burnaby as if expecting the frightened girl to smile back.)
Did this house have a daddy
she would ask Mommy, and Mommy would say
No
.

Did this house have a daddy
she would ask her brothers when she was just old enough to be desperate to know and Chandler said
Yes but he
went away
. She asked
Why? Did he hate us?
and Chandler said evasively
It was just something that happened, I guess. Like weather
.
Mommy doesn’t
want us to talk about it, see, Juliet?
And there came Royall hot-faced, childish fists clenched, who knew little more than Juliet knew but had formed a boy’s judgment
I hate HIM!
I don’t miss
HIM! I’m glad
he’s gone away.

Zarjo follows her to the foot of the stairs, his toenails clicking with melancholy precision, an older dog, breathing hoarsely, with an older dog’s economy of motion, sensing that his hind legs might not retain the power to keep him balanced at such a steep angle, and Juliet is moving decisively away from him, she’s serious about not taking him with her and he won’t, cannot, bark inside the house: he’s a very obedient dog, trained not to bark at trifles.

“Zarjo, I said no.
Stay
.”

Juliet leaves by the front door. The farthest door from Ariah’s bedroom at the upstairs, rear of the house.

The last of Ariah’s children to leave. To flee.

The last of Ariah’s children to love her, so much it can’t be borne.

I am not you, Mother
.
Let me go!

414 W
Joyce Carol Oates

Barefoot, running. Her numbed feet barely feel the pavement. And the chill, dewy grass, and the hard-packed dirt. As if she feels, not frightened now, but exhilarated. The decision having been made, and not by her. And hurriedly: she’s in her white eyelet cotton nightgown smelly from bad dreams, her frayed trench coat over it belted tight.

Shame, shame. Know your name
.

Commit the Act & be done with it
.

In the stillness before dawn. Shifting walls of mist before dawn.

When the world is dreamlike and, running through it, you are both the dreamer and the dream. Long ago the warrior-gods of the Ongiaras and Tuscaroras prowled this landscape, they were tall, cruel gods, more powerful than any human beings, but now these gods are gone and only their ghosts remain, mist-shapes drifting and fading in the corner of an eye. Chandler has said the landscape is always changing, The Falls are continually changing. Time, erosion. The Indian gods are gone, but no other gods have taken their place.

Except: the Niagara Falls City Transit buses, lighted from within like living organisms, gliding as if underwater and passing with harsh pneumatic exhalations of breath. Buses marked for
Ferry St., Prospect
Ave., Tenth St., Parkway & Hyde.
Juliet is furtive, shrinking from being seen, crossing Baltic Street to the park which is deserted at this hour, shrouded in fog. Runs, runs! She’s a strong girl, her lungs are strong from singing. A slight girl, always looking younger than her age. She has been told not to walk alone in Baltic Park, her brother Royall has scolded her, but at this hour there’s no one, she’s running through a field of wet grass, now at the edge of a softball field that looks small, truncated in scale as a child’s board game in the hazy light.
If her body
isn’t found. No one will know. Like her father, gone
.
Ariah will say, gone and
not coming back, and so we won’t think of her any longer, we will forget her
. A block away, a freight train is passing. The familiar noise of rattling boxcars. There’s comfort in this familiar sound.
Shame’s the name, know
your name, what’s your game?
In a dream Juliet Burnaby is being transported to The Falls by boxcar. This is because of something Mr.

Pankowski said. The sound of trains in this city, the noise of boxcars a nightmare to him he could not expect any American to understand, but Juliet said yes she understood, it’s boxcars that, if you were going
The Falls
X 415

to be taken away, like cattle for the slaughterhouse, would take you away. And the train would be going so fast, you couldn’t leap off.

The sky above the Niagara River, a mile away, is a great chasm streaked with sudden light. Flames, filaments of light from the sun at the horizon.
No. Not afraid!

2

T h e vo i c e s ! The voices in The Falls I heard when I was a little girl and Mommy pushed me in the stroller close to the edge where the cold spray wetted our faces, our eyelashes and lips and we licked our lips and laughed in excitement.

Oh, delicious!

See, Juliet darling? This is happiness
.

She loved me best, Mommy said. I was her daughter, her baby girl and my brothers were boys. I was a girl like Mommy, and my brothers could never be girls.
This time I will do it right. This time, conceived without sin.

Mommy sang to me. Mommy played the piano, and sang to me.

And Mommy sat me on her lap at the piano, and held me tight inside her arms, and placed my pudgy baby fingers on the keys, and we played piano together; and Mommy urged me to sing, Mommy rewarded me with kisses when I sang in my baby-girl breathy voice.

These were magic times. There was no one but Mommy.

Singing
Girls and boys come out to play. The moon doth shine as bright as
day.
Singing
Lavender blue, dilly-dilly! Lavender green. When I am King,
dilly-dilly! You shall be Queen.
And Mommy’s favorite which she sang at the piano, but also when I was in bed and slipping into sleep
Hush-a-bye baby in the tree-top! When the wind blows, the cradle will rock. When the
bough breaks, the cradle will fall. Down will come baby, cradle and all!
But Mommy laughed, and showed how she would catch me in her arms if I fell.

But later. When I was bigger. When the voices came into the room.

And Mommy said
There’s nothing. Stop!
And Mommy pressed her hands against my ears, and against her own ears. And next morning if I said the voices had come into the room, Mommy would scold me; or 416 W
Joyce Carol Oates

would stand up suddenly, and walk away. And one of my brothers would take care of me.

For Mommy ceased to love me when I was no longer a baby. Too big to be carried in her arms like a doll, and too big to fit on her lap at the piano. I think that was when. Calling out
Mommy!
in the night.

And Mommy didn’t want to hear. And I learned finally to hide such cries in the pillow. But the pillowcase became stained which Mommy didn’t like and which disgusted Mommy, like other stains I could not help. And I would crawl away to hide. And when they called me, I would not answer. The voices were whispers sometimes, I pressed my ear against the wall to hear, or against the windowpane, or the floorboards. Royall tried to hear, but could not. Royall said there was nothing, not to be afraid. That time I went where Mommy said not to go, into the cellar, in the dark, and fell from the steep wooden steps and cut my lip and crawled away to hide from the voices mixed with the wind and the freight cars and it was Zarjo who found me; except Zarjo didn’t know I did not want to be found, to Zarjo everything was a game. And so he poked me with his moist nose, he kissed and tickled me with his slippery tongue. Zarjo barked, which he rarely did inside the house and so they found me where I was huddled on the floor behind a stack of old rabbit cages. My brothers calling
Jully-ett!

And Mommy hurried downstairs shining the flashlight in my face, my eyes that were blind. Mommy screamed when she saw my bleeding mouth
Juliet, what have you done to yourself, oh you bad girl you’ve done
it on purpose haven’t you!
In her widened green eyes I saw that Mommy wanted to shake me, Mommy wanted to hurt me because I was not her baby daughter now, I had disappointed her not once but many times, and yet she was Ariah and not another woman in the neighborhood who would scream at her children, slap and spank them, she was Ariah Burnaby the piano teacher and she was not one to strike any child and so her hands seizing me were gentle, her voice was low and controlled telling me I must never disobey her again, I must never come down into this filthy place again, or Mommy would give me away.

It upset Mommy that I was laughing. Or made a sound like laughing. And I was dirty, and wet my panties. And there would be a scar
The Falls
X 417

like a starburst in my upper lip that would never go away, so people’s eyes would always drift onto it and I would sense how they wanted to flick it off as you’d flick off a piece of dust, they would want to brush it off to make me a pretty girl and not a freaky girl with something pale and shiny on her upper lip. And later, when I was going to Baltic Elementary and Ronnie Herron pushed me on a swing too high, and wouldn’t stop when I begged him, and I fell off, and the flying seat of the swing struck the left side of my forehead knocking me unconscious and cutting me so deeply I’d be covered in blood, taken to the emergency room of the Niagara Falls General Hospital by ambulance and the wound stitched up and ever afterward there would be a little sickle moon in my forehead that was pale too, and shiny. And Mommy came to be fearful of me believing me demented, a child who would hurt herself deliberately in order to hurt Mommy; a child who ran away to hide from her groveling in filth in the cellar Mommy could not bear, not the smell of, not the dirt floor that flooded when it rained and the ill-fitting stone walls oozing muck and the stacks of rusted, broken rabbit cages that smelled of rabbit droppings.

She isn’t mine, sometimes I think she isn’t mine
Mommy would say and my brothers would tell her no that wasn’t right, Juliet was their sister and Juliet belonged to Mommy just like they did.

Ariah too has long suffered from insomnia. And now in the rainy spring of 1978 as the anniversary of his death approaches, and the house is empty of her sons, now her insomnia rages like a malevolent fire. Not that she would ever acknowledge such a weakness, even to a doctor. All weakness fills Ariah with disgust, and her own with self-disgust. Her children, growing up in the house at 1703 Baltic, will recall hearing her stealthy footsteps on the stairs in the early morning, before dawn; hearing her in the kitchen setting a tea kettle on the gas stove. And in the chilly unlighted room at the rear of the house as she waits for the water to boil she sits at the spinet lightly touching the keys, depressing the keys as a devout Roman Catholic might it isn’t just music that makes Ariah happy but the mere possibility, the promise, of music.
Music can be your salvation, Juliet
.
You will raise your-418 W Joyce Carol Oates

self from the worst in yourself. Have faith!
But by nine in the evening Ariah is often so exhausted she falls alseep on the living room sofa, Zarjo drowsing across her knees, even as she listens to her much-anticipated broadcast of the New York Philharmonic on the radio.

And her children exchange nervous glances wondering: Should we wake Mom, or let her sleep?—either way Mom will be annoyed with us, and embarrassed.

Did this house have a daddy
I asked when I was old enough to know that houses like ours had daddys. And Mommy told me
No
. And I could see in Mommy’s eyes that I shouldn’t persist but I asked
Where did
Daddy go?
and Mommy would press her forefinger against my lips and say
Shh!
And if I continued to persist Mommy would frown and say
Daddy left us before you were born, he’s gone and he isn’t coming back.

And a cold heavy sickish feeling came into me like dirty water oozing through the cellar walls and I thought
Now you know
.
You asked, and
now you know
.

3

Shame, shame. Your name!

Already in first grade the others seemed to know. (But what did they know?) Almost, you’d think they knew by instinct. Their eyes following Juliet in curiosity at first. Later, in suspicion. Later, in derision. And then Royall was in junior high, at another school, and Juliet was left behind. And alone. A strange dreamy stammering child with not one but two scars on her small pale face. Two scars! Her teachers considered her, not knowing what to make of her.
Burnaby? Is she related to—?
For she was one of those children who stammered in class, sometimes; at other times she spoke normally, and intelligently; at other times, unpredictably, she spoke in what seemed to them a sullen mumble.
A spiteful little girl. Not nice.
But when she sang, she never stammered. When she sang, her voice was remarkably clear, a lovely voice, though wavering, uncertain.

Burn-a-by. Burn-a-by. Hey!

The Falls
X 419

On the playground, in the neighborhood, there was no protocol in considering “strange” children. There was no sympathy, mercy.

That one. Burn-a-by. Shame!

You spoke to her, she didn’t hear. Stood close to her, she didn’t see.

Looked right through you, like she was listening to something far away. To get her attention you had to clap your hands in her face, pinch her, poke her, tug at her hair until she cried.
Burn-a-by
.
Your father drove his car into the river, your father was gonna go to jail. Burn-a-by,
shame-shame!
Older brothers and sisters must have told them. Adults must have told these older brothers and sisters. (But what?) So childhood was endured. She would think of those years in retrospect as if they’d been lived by someone else, a brave, stubborn little girl, unknown to her.