They were married, and lived in Niagara Falls in the brownstone townhouse in Luna Park. There, they made love all the time. Or nearly.
He would leave her one day, she knew. But she never thought of it, so happy.
Do not think of it. Do not be morbid-minded.
So Ariah instructed herself. She meant to be, in this miracle-marriage, a practical down-to-earth woman.
She meant to be a loving woman, uninhibited. Every evening at dinner there was wine, poured by Dirk into sparkling crystal glasses.
That wicked, lovely sensation. Coursing through Ariah like molten honey. “I love love love you.” Sometimes, laughing, he’d lift her in his arms, fling her over his shoulder, carry her upstairs.
She wasn’t pregnant yet. Or, maybe she was?
Do not be morbid-minded, Ariah!
Often she took the bottle of wine upstairs with them. Especially the Chianti. As long as it was open, and hadn’t been entirely finished, you wouldn’t want it to go sour.
They were married, and never looked back.
That jiggly-creaking brass bed on the top, third floor of the house at 7 Luna Park! In the French silk-wallpapered bachelor bedroom with the deep-piled mint-green Chinese carpet so delicious to sink your bare toes into. In the neo-Georgian townhouse less than a half-mile from the Niagara Gorge. In the house where, summer nights with opened windows, moths throwing themselves against the window screens like soft palpitating thoughts, they could hear, in the distance, the ceaseless murmur of The Falls.
They were married, and became young.
Younger than either recalled having been as a child.
“I grew up in ‘Shalott.’ ”
“I grew up in the rectory.”
“We were privileged, we had money.”
“We were privileged, we had God.”
They laughed, shivered, and held each other close. They were naked as eels. So many toes (twenty!) beneath the covers at the foot of the bed.
Neither wished to think how accidental it was, they’d met, and fallen in love, and married.
Neither wished to speculate how bereft their lives would be, if the other husband hadn’t thrown himself into the Horseshoe Falls.
No. You will not be morbid-minded ever again.
They were married, and each became the other’s best friend.
And each realized he hadn’t had a true best friend, until now.
They were married. Dirk Burnaby’s legendary insomnia disappeared.
Though he was a big man, and with Ariah’s delicious home cooking he’d be getting bigger, yet Dirk discovered in himself a knack for snuggling in the bony curve of his wife’s side; a knack for burrowing, and burying his face in her neck; a knack for drifting to sleep in utter contentment, not a thought (of his profession, his finances, his increasingly eccentric mother) to plague him. Oh, life was so simple. Life was this.
Ariah remained awake, cradling him in her arms. She wanted to stay awake, to luxuriate in him. To gloat over him. Her husband! Her man! He was quite the most wonderful man she’d ever met, let alone come to know. Let alone touched, and kissed. He was quite the most wonderful man any girl might have dreamt of, in Troy, New York. She saw how women glanced after him in the street. She might be jealous one day, but not yet.
Tenderly she stroked his shoulders, his forehead, the stubbly underside of his jaw. She loved it that Dirk Burnaby was a big man, that he took up so much space in her life. She was baffled to recall what her life had been before him. It wasn’t a life. It hadn’t yet begun. She stroked his hair, brushing it out of his eyes. His fair flaxen hair, thick and springy and not a gray hair in it she could discover. Sometimes she felt a pang of envy. For her own so-called red hair was fading fast. Invaded by gray, silver, even white hairs. You could tell (you could speculate) she’d had a shock of some kind. A girl’s face but streaked-gray hair. Soon, she’d look like a banshee. But she was too vain to dye her hair. (Maybe she wasn’t vain enough?)
Dirk slept, and in his sleep seemed to grow heavier. He breathed through his mouth, a wet whistling sound. She loved that sound. She kissed his forehead. She heard him murmur to her in his sleep, words not quite audible or intelligible but they sounded like ’Riah love you. Then he sank into sleep again. Rarely less than eight hours a night. Now that they were safely married. Ariah tried to ease her naked-sticky body into such a position that her arm, her leg, her side didn’t become numb, circulation cut off by her husband’s weight. She loved that weight. When he made love to her she wanted to be crushed, flattened. Smothered. “Oh come inside me! Deeper.” It was curious that the man entered her body, yet seemed to surround her body. It was curious that they fitted together so perfectly, a hand in a glove, though anyone could see at a glance that they were the wrong sizes for each other.
The distant murmur of the Gorge. The murmur of their blood.
Maybe she was pregnant? How surprised Dirk would be.
Or maybe not surprised. They’d taken no precautions in Ariah’s residence in Troy, and they’d been taking no precautions since. It must have been understood between them that they wanted children?
You only live once. This phrase Ariah had picked up from Dirk, that seemed to her both fatalistic and optimistic.
You only live once. It made her smile, it seemed to release you to anything you wanted.
They were married, and each night was an adventure.
The man was so new in her inner, secret life, he didn’t always have a name.
Husband would do.
She clutched this husband tight. Her lightly freckled arms were slender, but strong. The strength of cunning and desperation. She’d been playing piano since age eight, which means playing scales tirelessly, fanatically, and that strengthens your arms, wrists, and fingers. She marveled that she’d seized for herself, in these arms, so remarkable a man. But she was humble, too. Perhaps she was even frightened. Knowing from past experience that God (in Whom she didn’t believe, in the daytime at least) could snatch him back at any time.
There was daytime lovemaking, and there was nighttime lovemaking. By degrees, so gradually the change was almost imperceptible, the daytime lovemaking (with its air of being illicit, like chocolates before a meal) would fade, as the excited newness of married life must fade, but the nighttime lovemaking would continue, passionate and reverent, for some time. After love, Ariah would cradle her husband, who burrowed against her in a sweaty infantile bliss; she would stroke his big magnificent body, smooth his springy hair out of his eyes, murmur I love you! My husband. She could not have believed that any wife had ever so adored any husband. She could not have believed that her mother and father, from whom she was now estranged, had ever so adored each other. Always, the elder Littrells had been middle-aged. Ariah pitied them. Ariah was frightened by their example. That will never happen to me. To this man and me.
She smiled to think that Ariah Littrell had been such a sullen sulky petulant girl growing up in the rectory under the watchful gaze of her elders, such a sharp-tongued and sharp-elbowed schoolgirl always a straight-A student, (secretly) bored and restless in church during her very father’s sermons. Yet, somehow, undeserving as she was, she was now happy.
One night when she’d been Mrs. Dirk Burnaby for just fifteen days, she saw through the lattice window beyond their bed a sickle moon glowing through columns of mist like a winking eye. She was cradling her deeply sleeping husband in her arms. She meant to protect him forever! Yet her eyelids began to flutter. Her eyes were shutting. She opened them wide to see her husband crossing the immense Niagara Gorge on—what was it? A tightrope? A tightrope? His back was to her. His fair flaxen hair blew in the wind. He wore a black costume, ministerial. He was carrying a twelve-foot bamboo pole to balance himself. It was a performance appropriate to a circus but, here, deadly. And there was the wind. Why was he doing such a thing, why when they loved each other so much?
At shore, Ariah leaned over an iron railing that dug into her waist and cried out to him
in a raw, terrified voice. Come back! I love you! You can’t leave me!
2
THEY WERE MARRIED, in love and in haste.
Amid whispers, murmurs, accusations. Tearful proclamations of disapproval. How can you? What are you thinking of? Only of yourself? So soon after Gilbert’s death? Have you no shame?
Married in a brief civil ceremony, not in a church. Not in the bride’s hometown, Troy, but in Niagara Falls. A private ceremony at City Hall and no relatives invited. Shame!
Ariah’s heart pumped hard. Damned if she would cry.
She intended never to cry again, she was so happy.
With dignity Ariah explained: “Actually, there is shame. The world is heaped with shame like spoiling garbage. The death camps? Remember the Nazi death camps? Corpses stacked like firewood. ‘Survivors’ like skeletons. You saw the same photographs I did, in Life. You lived through the same history as I did. There you have shame. And more than shame. But Dirk Burnaby and I don’t share in that shame, you see. We love each other and we see no reason to pretend that we don’t. Especially we see no reason to pretend that our private behavior is anyone’s business except our own.”
It was a brilliant little speech, and almost flawlessly delivered. A slight tremor in Ariah’s lower lip betrayed some emotion.
Mrs. Littrell was taken ill. Reverend Littrell, furious as Christ driving the moneylenders from the temple, forbade his daughter to return to the rectory, ever.
They were married, with no need to vow Till death do us part.
They were married, and God had nothing to do with their happiness.
They were married, and possibly the bride was pregnant.
In the bliss of first love Ariah tried not to think of the consequences of love. In those early days and weeks her brain was in a fever of love. She was a giddy young girl dancing! dancing! dancing! through the night, never tiring.
I could not say to my husband: I may be pregnant. You may not be the father. No more than I could say to this man: I know you will leave me one day. I know I’m damned. But until then, I mean to be your loving wife.
They were married, and in marriage you expect children. Sooner or later.
Married, which is to say mated. Mating was the physical consequence of marriage, and there was little that was abstract about it.
“I must be realistic.”
So Ariah scolded herself. In her bliss of married contentment yet she had to brood upon certain facts that weren’t going to go away.
One of these: she hadn’t had a “period” in weeks. (How she hated that word! Her nose crinkled in distaste.) Her last “period” had been before Easter: April 15. Long before her disastrous tenure as Mrs. Erskine. Ariah didn’t doubt, she’d ceased menstruating because of panic and dread over her wedding. She’d lost weight, she’d never been what the medical literature calls “normal.” Her puberty (another ugly word) came late, she hadn’t developed breasts, hips, or begun to menstruate (this ugly word she hated most of all) until the age of sixteen. The last girl (anyway, one of the last) in her high school class. And then she’d never been “regular.” (Yet another ugly humiliating word!) If Mrs. Littrell, a woman with ample bosom and hips, was concerned about her daughter’s physical condition, she must have been too embarrassed to speak of it. When Ariah began to miss “periods” in high school, Mrs. Littrell took her to their family physician who mumbled, staring at a paperweight on his desk, that Ariah was “like some girls who grow up slow”—“mature slow”—she inclined to a condition called amenorrhea.
Amenorrhea! The ugliest word yet.
Ariah sat mortified in Dr. Magruder’s office, staring at her freckled hands, with bitten-at nails, in her lap.
Amenorrhea. This was nearly always, Dr. Magruder fumblingly said, typical of a girl who was underweight, “slow” to mature.
Yes it did mean that Ariah might have difficulty conceiving, when at last she did get married.
(Or it might mean, as Ariah was guessing now, that the onset of pregnancy would be difficult to determine. Unless you rushed to a doctor to ask for a pregnancy test, which Ariah wasn’t about to do.)
(Oh, God. She’d have been mortified to speak to Dirk Burnaby about such grim female matters. “Female troubles.” The Burnabys were a romantic couple like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. When one entered a room in which the other waited, you could hear dance music begin.)
They were married, and so became husband, wife.
These roles awaited them in the house at 7 Luna Park like his, hers monogrammed robes which each slipped into, happily. And gratefully.
Dirk said in awe, “I can’t imagine my life before you, Ariah. It must have been so shallow…It must have been a life without oxygen.”
Ariah wiped tears from her eyes but couldn’t think how to reply. She could well recall her life before Dirk, the minister’s daughter’s tidy busy circumscribed life like an apron tied tight over her body. She’d had her music of course. Her students. Her parents, family. Yet thinking of that life now, she felt her throat constrict; she felt as if she might choke. No oxygen!
She ran to her husband (she was barefoot, they were in their bedroom dressing on a mist-muggy August morning) and pressed her wiry little body into his surprised arms, hugging him around the waist.
The man’s fist-sized heart thumping against Ariah’s ear like a metronome.
Dirk. Darling I think I’m…I might be…I have this sensation sometimes, I might be…pregnant?
But no. Ariah couldn’t speak of her fear, and risk that look of alarm in her husband’s face. Not just yet.
They were married, and all of the remainder of their lives would be their honeymoon. They were certain!
They were married, and Dirk Burnaby gave his red-haired wife the most exquisite gift she’d ever received: a Steinway spinet made of cherrywood. He’d lighted candles in the living room and small flames were reflected in the burnished wood.
“But why? What have I done to deserve this?”
Ariah’s outcry startled her husband, it sounded so frightened.
The piano was an anniversary present, Dirk explained. Three months to the day since they’d “first laid eyes on each other.”
Three months. Ariah would not calculate what that might mean.
Three months. No, she would not think of it.
She was feeling faint, dizzy, giddy. But probably that was the Chianti.
And that warm honey sensation in the loins. The Chianti.
Ariah kissed her husband, hugged him so hard he laughed. “Whoa!” He eased her gently away. He wanted her to play for him, he said. She hadn’t played piano, not a note, since that day he’d driven to Troy to claim her.
So Ariah sat at the spinet and played for her husband. Sipping wine between pieces, from a sparkling crystal glass. This spinet was quite the most beautiful instrument Ariah had ever touched, let alone played. Tears flooded her eyes and ran down her cheeks. As Dirk listened gravely, his big head bowed and nodding with the beat, Ariah treated him to a concert of her old favorite girlhood recital pieces. A Mozart minuet, Chopin waltzes and mazurkas, Schumann’s “Träumerei,” Debussy’s “Clair de Lune.” As each piece ended, Dirk exploded into applause. He was deeply and sincerely moved. Truly he believed that his wife was a gifted pianist, not only just a moderately talented girl pianist from Troy, New York. He often went to concerts in Kleinhan’s Music Hall in Buffalo, he said. He’d heard performers in Carnegie Hall in Manhattan. He’d gone to the Metropolitan Opera where he’d seen spectacular productions of Carmen and La Traviata. His father, the deceased Virgil Burnaby, whom Ariah would never meet, had owned Caruso records which Dirk had heard often as a boy. Caruso singing The Barber of Seville, The Flying Dutchman. Caruso as Otello.
Ariah couldn’t see how her polished, earnest piano technique had led them to the great Caruso, but the connection was flattering.
He loves me. He’d believe anything.
A strange precious truth this was. Like opening your h
and and discovering in the palm a tiny, speckled robin’s egg.
They were married. Abruptly, and without apology. Without giving notice. Without a thought for how things are done. Or how things are not done. “At least,” Ariah said, “we didn’t elope.”
Dirk threw down the newspaper he’d been reading, in mock-disgust.
“God damn, Ariah, why didn’t you think of it in time?”
They were married, and some weeks later there came for Mrs. Ariah Burnaby at 7 Luna Park, Niagara Falls, a handwritten letter with the return address Mrs. Edna Erskine. The three-cent stamp on the envelope was upside down.
“Gilbert’s mother. Oh my God. She wants to know. If I am pregnant. No, it isn’t possible!”
Cowardly Ariah threw away this letter without opening it.
They were married, and the woman who was Ariah’s mother-in-law, Claudine Burnaby, gave notice, through Dirk’s sisters Clarice and Sylvia, that she was “thinking seriously of disinheriting” her renegade son.
They were married, and lived in Dirk Burnaby’s townhouse at 7 Luna Park where, it came to seem to Ariah, other women had, from time to time, visited, if not actually dwelt. She knew this was so because neighbors allowed her to know. Mrs. Cotten who lived next-door, Mrs. Mackay who lived across the Park. Such glamorous women, some of them! Showgirls, evidently. Dirk’s older sisters whom Ariah had met only twice had allowed her to know. We never thought Dirk would break down and marry anyone. Our kid brother was always such a spoiled immature brat.
The Falls Page 13