The Falls

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “ ‘Clarice and Sylvia,’ ” Dirk said, as if reading engraved names.

  “Two of the three fates. And Claudine is the third.”

  From time to time in the early weeks at Luna Park the telephone would ring and if Ariah answered “Hel-lo?” there was a grim reproachful silence on the other end. “This is the Burnaby residence, hel-lo?” (For possibly Ariah was a little lonely in these new quarters. In this city at the edge of the Niagara Gorge where once the Widow-Bride of The Falls had captivated the public imagination, but where Ariah Burnaby was unknown.) “I know you’re there. I can hear you breathing. Who is it?” Ariah’s hand trembled, holding the receiver. No, she wasn’t frightened: she was annoyed. This was her home, and this telephone number was hers, as well as her husband’s. She could detect female breathing through the phone. “If it’s Dirk Burnaby you want to speak with, I’m afraid he isn’t here.” Ariah considered, but refrained from, adding He’s married now. I’m his wife.

  The calls came sometimes when Dirk was home. Ariah was determined not to listen. Not even to “overhear.” (She wasn’t going to be that kind of wife. She knew her husband had had a bachelor life before meeting her but that was long ago. Months ago.) There was someone persistent named Gwen, and there was someone really persistent named Candy. (“Candy”: a showgirl name, if ever there was one.) Once or twice, someone named Vi who actually identified herself to Ariah before politely asking to speak with “your husband, the litigator.” A perfumed, lavender letter postmarked Buffalo came for Mr. Dirk Burnaby from someone obviously female with the initials H.T., but Ariah wasn’t a witness to her husband opening it. (If in fact he opened it? Possibly, out of respect for Ariah, he’d tossed it away instead.) When the phone began to ring persistently in the early hours of the morning, and Dirk, grumpily awakened from sleep, answered, “Hello? Hello?” and “If this is who I think it is, please desist, this isn’t behavior worthy of you,” the time had come finally for Dirk Burnaby to have his number changed, and unlisted.

  The mysterious calls abruptly ceased. And no more perfumed letters.

  Seated at the Steinway spinet, picking at the perfect ivory keys, Ariah lifted her head hearing, or imagining she heard, the phone ringing. But no.

  3

  Amenorrheic. Slow to mature.

  Telling herself it meant nothing that she was weeks late.

  In fact, months late…

  Always she’d been a thin, you might say a scrawny girl. One of those jumpy all-elbows girls. Such girls do not get pregnant.

  Yet: Ariah had to concede, she was gaining weight. Her belly was strangely bloated. Her hard stingy little breasts were filling out and the nipples were becoming sensitive, she had to concede though this was absurd and she would not think of it.

  She’d been a virgin. Gilbert had splattered his hot furious acid-seed on the outside (not the inside) of his bride’s body. She knew! She would swear! She had been an unwilling witness.

  “It couldn’t make an actual baby. I don’t think so.”

  God you wouldn’t be so cruel would you! Thank you God.

  It was 1950. Ariah Burnaby stayed home.

  She was wife who stayed home while husband drove each weekday morning into the city to his law office.

  A successful lawyer, Dirk Burnaby was. A “litigator.” He had no great passion for the law, he acknowledged, but it was likely work for him, and he thrived on competition.

  Ariah wasn’t by nature a shy woman but she heard her voice go shy, soft, tentative one evening at dinner asking, “Would you mind, darling, if I gave piano lessons here? And voice lessons? I’m a little lonely during the day and I miss my students and I need something to occupy me until…”

  Ariah ceased speaking, appalled. Almost she’d said until the baby.

  Dirk didn’t hear this, of course. Ariah’s unsaid words.

  Ariah wondered if she’d made a blunder in any case. The way her husband was contemplating her. It was the way he gazed at her while she played piano for him, most recently Beethoven’s sonata in C-sharp minor, the so-called Moonlight Sonata she knew Dirk Burnaby would be a sucker for, that slow dreamy opening movement in particular, he’d said he had never heard anything so beautiful, and he meant it. But now Ariah wondered if she’d gone too far. It was 1950, not 1942. American women didn’t work. Especially, married women of Ariah’s social class didn’t work. She could imagine how such a proposal, made by Ariah’s mother, would have been met by Ariah’s father. No women in the Littrell family worked. Not a one. (Except an unmarried aunt or two, elementary schoolteachers. They didn’t count.)

  But Dirk surprised her by taking up her hand, and kissing it, and saying with boyish eagerness, “Ariah, please do whatever you want to do. Whatever makes you happy, makes me happy. I’m gone so much, and this place must get lonely. You’re a ‘career woman’—I knew that. I’m proud of you. I’ll spread the word in town. I have lots of friends, they have pretensions for their children, and they can afford lessons. You’re in business, darling.” He raised his wine glass in a toast, and Ariah raised hers. They drank. They kissed. Dirk said, “Until we start a family, anyway.”

  God you wouldn’t. Not so cruel. Not twice.

  It was Ariah’s logic that the longer she waited, the more times she and Dirk Burnaby made love, the more likely it would be, must be, that the baby she might (or might not) be carrying was his, and not the other’s.

  She could not bring herself to see a doctor. Could not. For then she would know, inescapably. She would know if she was pregnant (or not) and she would have to tell Dirk and what exactly could she tell him?

  She knew she was becoming a little crazy with this. Brooding!

  The pale peaky face in the mirror. The banshee-streaks of silver in the hair.

  Kneading the pale, tight flesh of her belly. Pinching her breasts. (Well, admit it: her breasts were fuller. Still small, but fuller. And “sensitive.” Possibly that was the consequence of Ariah’s amorous husband kissing, nuzzling, sucking at her nipples like a big mischievous baby. Gently, she would have to discourage him.)

  At the spinet, she heard herself playing those slow exquisite nocturnes of Chopin. Easing-into-sleep, like lullabies.

  They were married, it was 1950 and husband was gone for much of the day, Mondays through Fridays. Wife was home. Wife was beginning to be lonely, even after she started giving music lessons again.

  (These were piano students exclusively, very young. She’d had older, far more talented students in Troy, and she missed them. In Niagara Falls, no one in the musical community knew her.)

  Dirk conscientiously telephoned Ariah in the late morning from his office, at mid-afternoon, and, if he had to work late, or had to meet a client for drinks, he might call at about 6 P.M. “Darling, hello! I miss you.” His voice was tender with love, regret. He was genuinely sorry to be late for dinner. Ariah assured him not to worry, she’d wait dinner for him. As soon as she heard his car pull into the driveway she’d prepare his drink: martini on the rocks.

  And one for Ariah, too. She was acquiring a taste for those tiny olives!

  Her voice was low, seductive. She heard herself murmur things to her husband over the phone she’d never have dared to say face to face.

  “Oh honey.” Dirk groaned, with the air of a man squirming inside his clothes. “Me, too.”

  Sometimes Dirk would insist that Ariah take a taxi into the city and join him. At the Falls Boat Club, or one of the posh Prospect Street hotels, or Mario’s Restaurant & Pizzeria. They’d make an evening of it, drinks and dinner. Ariah was self-conscious among Dirk Burnaby’s friends (he had so many, she hardly troubled to remember their names, she was acquiring a reputation for being aloof), but it was an opportunity for her to wear her new, stylish clothes from Berger’s, in Buffalo, her high-heeled shoes and makeup. She fluffed out her hair and tried to see that the silver streaks were exotic. Back in Troy, she’d have felt like a freak all dressed up; in this new life, on Dirk Burnaby’s arm, she felt glamo
rous. (Was she imagining it, her formerly thin, prissy mouth was fuller now? Swollen from so much kissing.) Dirk lifted her to kiss her: “You’re prettier than Susan Hayward any day, and you’re mine.”

  Susan Hayward! Ariah supposed, yes she could see a likeness.

  Busy, bustling Mario’s was the most popular of Falls restaurants among local residents, especially businessmen, politicians, courthouse and City Hall–connected individuals. The boating crowd, and the gambling crowd. It seemed to be an open secret that Mario’s was connected with a Buffalo crime family. (Ariah had never heard this quaint expression before meeting Dirk Burnaby: “crime family.” The language made of crime something unexpectedly cozy, even tender.) In Mario’s, everyone knew Dirk Burnaby. His signed photograph was on a wall in the barroom, among a gallery of local celebrities. The maître d’ rushed to greet him. The proprietor, Mario himself, shook Dirk’s hand, and escorted him to his favorite table in a rear corner of the main dining room. Waitresses in clingy black silk uniforms smiled at him, and stared at Ariah. And other women stared.

  Ariah, blushing, could all but hear them. Her? That scrawny redhead, what’s Dirk Burnaby see in her?

  She gripped Dirk’s arm tighter. He squeezed her hand.

  It was even more unsettling to be introduced to Dirk’s old, old friends. Who blinked at Ariah as if trying to place her. There was a drifting haze of foul bluish smoke in Mario’s that made Ariah’s eyes water and didn’t help her perception. She knew that Dirk badly wanted her to like his friends, and he wanted his friends to like her. Fortunately most of these men gathered at Mario’s without their wives. Dirk’s closest friends were a hard-drinking rowdy crew who’d played poker together since high school at Mount St. Joseph’s, with time out for the war. These were shrewd-eyed individuals, a few years older than Dirk. They had an air of money and entitlement that caused Ariah to see her husband in a new light. He’s one of them. His loyalty is to them.

  Gamely Ariah tried to keep these men straight, with mixed results. There was big-boned balding Clyde Colborne who looked unnervingly familiar, like a minor character in the comic strip Dick Tracy; there was Harold (“Buzz”) Fitch, a high-ranking officer in the Niagara Falls Police Department; there was plump, moist-eyed Stroughton Howell, a “fellow lawyer,” who squeezed Ariah’s hand earnestly and congratulated her on her marriage; there was Tyler “Spooky” Wenn, gregarious and comical as Ed Wynn, who’d been a Marine lieutenant in the war and decorated with a Purple Heart (“To replace my own, that was shot to hell”) and had just been elected comptroller of Niagara County. Ariah required a drink, or two drinks, to feel minimally comfortable with these loud-talking loud-laughing men. Their conversation mostly excluded her. In their midst, Dirk Burnaby was moderately subdued. He was their flaxen-haired younger brother of whom they were proud. They liked to touch him, gesturing and poking. No joke was worth telling unless Dirk was listening. Ariah understood that, because she was Dirk’s wife, they would respect her and be kind to her; one or two even flirted with her. But she knew that they would never accept her as worthy of Dirk Burnaby.

  Ariah understood, she wasn’t jealous. Not just yet.

  Returning to Luna Park after her first evening at Mario’s, a long giddy evening that didn’t break up until 1 A.M., Ariah murmured, her head resting on Dirk’s shoulder as he drove, “That big bald man. Colborne? Am I supposed to know him, darling? He behaved as if he knows me.”

  Another evening at Mario’s, there was a shivery flurry of attention as a dark-haired middle-aged man of no evident distinction entered the dining room with an entourage of other men: Ariah heard the murmured name Pallidino.

  Afterward she said to Dirk, “You didn’t shake that man’s hand, I noticed. When he came by the table.”

  Dirk said, “You don’t miss a thing, sweetie, do you? I didn’t think it was that obvious.”

  “Is he evil? Does he belong to the ‘crime family’?”

  Ariah spoke impulsively. Her head was spinning, a little. As Dirk drove along Rainbow Boulevard the headlights of oncoming traffic swam and burst against her eyeballs in soft soundless explosions.

  “He’s a businessman, he’d say. But not my kind of business.”

  Another evening at Mario’s, after Ariah greedily devoured a platter of something doughy and delicious called gnocchi, having downed a martini, and two and a half glasses of wine, she’d had to excuse herself and hurriedly retreat from the table to the women’s room where, intermittently for ten arduous minutes, she vomited everything up.

  Everything, it felt like!

  Afterward, though pale, shaky, and exhausted, she felt much better.

  Don’t be ridiculous. Make an appointment, see a doctor. If you’re pregnant it will be Dirk’s child. Who else?

  4

  THEY WERE MARRIED. Why wasn’t that enough?

  What need of family, in-laws? In-laws!

  Ariah secretly liked it that her husband had been “disinherited” because of his marriage. She respected him, that he’d shrugged and laughed when he’d heard. You don’t marry for money, you marry for love. You marry for life.

  It was true, Ariah missed her parents, sometimes. Oh, not really—she wouldn’t have been able to discuss her problem with her mother, anyway. And Reverend Littrell? Never.

  In weak moments Ariah recalled the sting of her father’s words.

  You will not be welcome here. You and him. This is a terrible thing you are doing. Marrying in such haste, a man you don’t know. And poor Gilbert has been gone less than a month. Ariah, shame!

  Ariah had wanted to cry out she hadn’t known Gilbert Erskine yet they’d urged her to marry him.

  No. No defense, no apologies. Better to walk out of the rectory with dignity. Farewell to the obedient-daughterly life.

  Mrs. Ariah Burnaby hadn’t the burden of parents. In 1950, this was most remarkable, like walking about with a missing eye or limb you don’t, somehow, miss.

  Yet there they were, Ariah and Dirk, driving to Shalott—“Shalott!”—what a pretentious name for a house!—on a cloud-splotched Sunday in September.

  Somehow, Claudine Burnaby seemed to have changed her mind about disinheriting her renegade son. And she was curious about the daughter-in-law. Finally.

  One glance at me, and she’ll know. She’ll think this is why we got married so quickly.

  For this doomed visit to the mother-in-law, Ariah was wearing a pink linen shift so shroud-like, the sleeves seemed to trail belatedly behind her. Her wrists, poking out, were alarmingly bony. She’d powdered over the freckles on her face, and carefully applied vivid red lipstick to her mouth.

  “Oh, Dirk. I’m worried sick your mother won’t like me.”

  “Oh, Ariah. I’m worried sick you won’t like my mother.”

  Ariah was sincere, Dirk was teasing. But she saw the tension in her husband’s jaws. The stoic glisten of his eyes. Uneasily she guessed that, though Dirk Burnaby strongly disapproved of his difficult mother, he loved her, too.

  He would want his wife to love her, too.

  Dirk had showed Ariah photographs of Claudine Burnaby: a striking, strong-jawed blond woman with intense eyes, an ironic smiling mouth. A tight Joan Crawford look about the mouth, as if it held too many teeth. How surprised Ariah was when Dirk said, laughing lightly, “Don’t be deceived by Mother’s sweet look, darling.”

  This was Ariah’s first visit to l’Isle Grand, which seemed to float in the rushing Niagara River, midway between Niagara Falls and Buffalo. Shalott had been built at the southeastern edge of the largely rural block-shaped island, looking toward Ontario, Canada.

  (Ontario! Ariah recalled for the first time since Gilbert Erskine’s death that he’d been planning part of their honeymoon in Ontario: west of Niagara Falls in a wilderness area bordered by the Thames River where there were said to be rich fossil fields.)

  Ariah bit at her thumbnail, surreptitiously she thought until her husband, reaching out as he drove, not even turning to frown at her, slapped h
er hand away from her mouth. “Ariah. Give me the word, and I’ll turn right around and go back. I hate to see you anxious.”

  “Anxious? I am not anxious.” Ariah stared through the windshield at whatever it was she was seeing: open fields, woods, the river at a distance. And houses. Such houses! You’d have to call them mansions. Ostentatious. “Conspicuous consumption.” Part of her bridled against such material displays. She was a small-town minister’s daughter, she knew vanity when she saw it. “I’m fascinated. Seeing how you lived as a boy.”

  Dirk laughed uneasily. As if he’d never thought of himself in such terms.

  When Dirk turned into the hilly driveway of Shalott, Ariah bit her lip. Why, this was silly. A house so large! She decided she disliked Mrs. Burnaby on principle.

  They’d been invited for brunch at noon, but by twelve-thirty Mrs. Burnaby hadn’t yet appeared. A glass-topped table had been set for three on a flagstone terrace overlooking the river. “Mrs. Burnaby will be down soon, she apologizes for keeping you waiting,” an older woman in a housekeeper’s uniform told them, at intervals. They were to make themselves “comfortable.” They were invited to have appetizers and drinks: tomato juice out of a chilled pitcher, which turned out to be, not tomato juice, but Bloody Marys. A delicious drink Ariah had never before tasted, and quite liked.

  Dirk said, “Ariah, take care. Vodka can be lethal.”

  Ariah laughed gaily. She had been mildly nauseated that morning and hadn’t eaten even a light breakfast and found herself strangely hungry now, devouring tiny crab croissants and radishes dipped in sour cream. She’d ceased biting her thumbnails. She caught sight of herself reflected in a window and was encouraged, she truly did look pretty: her husband’s love had worked the miracle.