The Falls

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “Dirk, you won’t stop loving me, will you? Darling? You won’t wake up one day and change your mind?”

  “Ariah, don’t be silly.”

  “Because if you do, I might just go out. ‘Out’ like a light.”

  Dirk glanced about uneasily, as if he feared they might be overheard. Windows looking out onto the terrace were shaded by white louvre blinds through which one might observe the terrace without being seen, and most of these windows were open. He’d lighted a cigarette, and was on his second drink. And where the hell was Claudine?

  Dirk walked Ariah down the sloping lawn to the river and out onto the dock and talked to her, somewhat distractedly, of his boyhood boats. His love of sailing, and the river. When his father had been alive. “I was a reckless kid, I guess. I had some close calls.” Dirk spoke wistfully. Ariah wondered if he were regretting his past behavior, or the past itself. The wind lifting from the river was fresh and wonderfully invigorating. In the near distance sailboats glided past without seeming effort. Here, on the dock at Shalott, you couldn’t hear the ominous thunder of The Falls; The Falls were miles away downriver. You might swim off this dock, the current here wasn’t lethal. You wouldn’t be carried away screaming to your doom. I could live here. And our children. Why shouldn’t we inherit? It was an unexpected, unworthy thought. Ariah didn’t know what to make of it.

  The dock was in need of repair, shifting and creaking perceptibly beneath their weight. The only boat moored there was an old formerly white sailboat. The thought of climbing into that boat, of being rocked and jolted by the river, filled Ariah with alarm and yet she leaned flirtatiously against her husband’s arm and said, “Your old sailboat looks abandoned. Why don’t you take me out, Dirk? After brunch?”

  “Yes. I’d like that.”

  Dirk spoke with forced enthusiasm. Ariah could see he was distracted, glancing at his watch and back toward the house. It wasn’t like him not to focus upon her, in her presence. She felt the tug of the other woman, in that house.

  “I think your mother has come outside? Isn’t that—”

  “No. It’s just Ethel, wondering where we are.”

  It was nearly 1 P.M. Dirk, sullen and sulky, his hair disheveled from the wind, led Ariah back toward the terrace. The sun, not quite directly overhead, was surprisingly hot. In this climate there were perpetual cloud formations, hazy and humid, through which a whitish sun shone in patches. Between the two Great Lakes, Erie and Ontario. Always the sky was shifting, uncertain. In this pale glare the lawn at Shalott was exposed as brown, dry, weedy in places. Roses bushes were tainted with black spots. You could see that the grounds were becoming neglected, as if life were being withdrawn. And the stately limestone house, viewed from the rear, as from backstage, looked weatherworn. There were cracks in the stone. Slimy green moss like a long skinny snake grew in the rusted rain gutter that stretched the full width of the house.

  Ariah laughed nervously. “Maybe this is the wrong Sunday, Dirk?”

  “I’m thinking maybe it is,” Dirk said grimly.

  Ariah had never seen her tall handsome confident husband so distracted, edgy. Angry. They returned to the terrace, and Claudine still hadn’t appeared. The embarrassed housekeeper apologized as before. Dirk said, “If my mother expects me to search for her, and beg her to join us, she’s mistaken.” Ariah, picking at the appetizers, tried not to overhear. She poured herself a little more of the delicious blood-red peppery drink, since Dirk seemed disinclined to pour it for her. She ate crab croissants, washed down with her Bloody Mary. Her mouth flooded with saliva, she was ravenously hungry, even as a mild wave of nausea stirred in her stomach.

  Dirk said suddenly, “Ariah, we’re leaving. Where’s your handbag?”

  Ariah stood very still, breathing deeply. She would conquer this moment of weakness. She would not succumb. Her eyelids fluttered. She didn’t want to see the forlorn left-behind sailboat bobbing and rocking at the dock, the ceaseless motion, idiotic in repetition. Nausea was like seasickness. She turned away from the river, and saw, or imagined she saw, a ghostly face in a window about twelve feet away. But immediately the face was obscured by a drawn blind.

  She hoped Dirk hadn’t seen.

  “Ethel? Tell your mistress she’s insufferably rude. And not to invite my wife and me back here again, ever.”

  Dirk seized Ariah by the upper arm. He’d never gripped her so hard! She began to protest, stumbling in her high-heeled shoes, and suddenly to her horror she was choking, gagging. Suddenly she was sick to her stomach. Helpless, wracked by spasms of nausea, vomiting up all that she’d unwisely drunk and devoured, staining the front of her pink linen dress and splattering the glass-topped table and flagstone terrace.

  “Ariah, God damn,” Dirk said miserably, “didn’t I warn you?”

  5

  IT WAS 1950 and everyone was pregnant.

  Bouts of nausea, especially in the morning, became more frequent with Ariah.

  Three months, twelve weeks and two days after her marriage to Dirk Burnaby, Ariah at last saw a doctor. A name out of the Niagara Falls telephone directory: Piper.

  “Mrs. Burnaby, good news!”

  Ariah burst into tears. Oh, she’d practiced this moment, her smile and her stoicism, she was even wearing stylish clothes to impress Dr. Piper and his nurse, but now that the moment had come, rushing upon her like a locomotive, she had no strength, she had no control. She hid her burning face in her hands. Dr. Piper, a dignified oldish gentleman with an office in downtown Niagara Falls, a brisk fifteen-minute walk from Luna Park, stared at her in astonishment.

  Ariah pleaded, “Doctor, don’t tell me how long I’ve been pregnant. Don’t tell me when I’m due. No!”

  “But, Mrs. Burnaby—”

  Ariah tried to explain. No, she couldn’t explain. She was weeping, blowing her nose. Oh, why couldn’t that man have killed himself before their wedding night, not after? She stammered:

  “Dr. Piper, yes—I’m happy. I am married, and I’m h-happy. I love my husband—we were just married in July—and we want children—but I’m not sure—I mean, I don’t want to know—who the father is.”

  Seeing that Dr. Piper regarded her now with horror, in that way of Reverend Littrell regarding her with horror, Ariah tried to explain the circumstances of her first marriage—its brevity, “tragedy.” Squirming with embarrassment she told him of how her husband had “ejaculated” onto her, between her legs. Oh, she’d been a virgin—but she knew that virgins can become impregnated. In high school such crude practical wisdom circulated, even a Presbyterian minister’s daughter might overhear such wisdom, in astonishment and dread, and file it away for future reference thinking But not me. Never me. Oh, no!

  “I don’t want to know, doctor. If I’ve been pregnant sixteen weeks, my first husband is—would be—would have been—the father. If I’ve been pregnant just twelve weeks, my second husband is the f-father. Maybe the baby will be born premature? Maybe it will be born late?” Ariah couldn’t bear to look at Dr. Piper, knowing the poor man was stricken with embarrassment, and knowing she, in the messiness of her female being, was to blame. “Doctor, please: I don’t need to know absolutely, do I? My husband doesn’t need to know?”

  Dr. Piper pushed a box of Kleenex toward Ariah, who took a tissue gratefully to wipe her face. It seemed from previous remarks of his that he knew the Burnaby name, if not Ariah’s husband personally, and was impressed by that name. He spoke now with more authority than Ariah expected, and immediately she was reassured: “Mrs. Burnaby, the baby in your womb is no more than thirteen weeks old. This is my estimate, and I’m rarely wrong. I may be off by a few days, a week, but no more. Mr. Burnaby is therefore the baby’s father. Your due date will be April of next year. I can be more specific next time you come in, if you wish.”

  Ariah said faintly, “No, doctor. That’s specific enough. April.”

  Dr. Piper rose from his desk, and shook Ariah’s hand which was a cold-clammy dead woman’s hand, and neede
d reviving. In a kindly voice he said, “I suggest that you cease these ridiculous speculations, Mrs. Burnaby. Tell no one what you’ve told me. Inform your husband of the good news, go out and celebrate, and I’ll see you again soon. And congratulations.”

  They were married, and pregnant. They celebrated.

  First-Born

  1

  By the calendar, I was a spring baby.

  Born a week premature. Possibly two.

  Except, late March in Niagara Falls, New York, was blustery, snowy, subfreezing as it had been since Thanksgiving. Snowdrops and crocuses at 7 Luna Park, and across the street in the small gated park, daring to bloom prematurely, had been rudely covered in yet another gritty layer of snow.

  Much was made of the fact that one hundred eight inches of snow had fallen in the Niagara region that winter. Most of this snow, by March 26, had not melted.

  On their way home from the hospital, Ariah in a glow of elation asked Dirk to please drive by the river, so that their week-old son, Chandler, could see The Falls.

  “Please, darling? He might remember it forever. It might be his first visual memory.”

  Dirk might have hesitated for a brief moment. His wife’s moods were wayward and inscrutable and yet, he’d come to know, they were determined by a subterranean logic as firm and unyielding as the steel girders beneath the poured concrete of a bridge. And Dirk was in such a transport of dazed joy, wonderment, relief at the birth of a healthy son, of course he gave in.

  He was clean-shaven. He’d had his shaggy hair trimmed. For several days he’d been a disheveled, distraught man. But no more.

  At this time of year, The Falls was deserted as the moon. Except for a lone municipal snowplow grinding through Prospect Park, spewing exhaust in its wake, there was no one.

  “No tourists! What a pleasure.”

  Dirk drove into Prospect Park, and parked at the Point. He kept the car’s motor running, and the heater turned up high. Most of the rear of the Lincoln Continental was filled with flowers, tulips, hyacinths, paperwhites, past their first bloom but still fragrant, festive. These were flowers from Ariah’s hospital room, and most of them were flowers Dirk had brought her.

  Fred Astaire bringing his darling Ginger Rogers flowers in the hospital. His red-haired dancing partner, not dancing now. But soon to revive.

  And bringing home with her a boy-baby so small, yet at five pounds, seven ounces so perfectly formed, Dirk knew that his life would be complete from now on. Yes, forever!

  There was a northerly wind from Canada, and what they could see of the sky was the bright ceramic blue of winter. Ariah, shaky and pale from her ordeal, an eleven-hour labor, an alarming loss of blood, a brief but fevered hospital infection, cooed and kissed the flush-faced baby. “See, sweetie? Where Daddy and Mommy have taken you? The Falls.” Ariah laughed and held Chandler up in her arms that trembled just slightly. (Dirk was keeping a close watch on her. He’d steady her grip on the baby if necessary. In the hospital, in the throes of her fever delirium, Ariah had cried out certain things. You might call them warnings. He would be warned, vigilant.)

  Chandler was snugly swaddled in a blue cashmere baby blanket and his miniature, flailing hands were protected by matching mittens. Quizzically he peered through the car’s broad windshield. His tiny fish-mouth gaped wetly and his round, dark eyes bulged. He blinked, and squinted. His face was a small rubbery doll’s face with a forehead that sloped strangely, like a wedge of cheese, Ariah thought, and a chin that receded like something melted, but he was a beautiful baby, he was Dirk’s and hers and had been worth all that blood.

  Ariah said excitedly, “He can see. I mean, it’s more than just his eyes are open. He’s processing sight. It’s like he’s devouring the landscape, with those eyes.”

  Almost, you would think that Chandler understood what he was seeing. Where mist rose from the Gorge, ice had formed in a filigree on the tall leafless elms and oaks on the riverbank, and glittered in the sun like Mozart’s treble notes. As in a fairy tale there was an ice-bridge that had formed across the Niagara River, and ghost-rainbows appeared and disappeared in an eye blink. Even in the subfreezing temperature, hot-looking steamy mist continued to rise.

  It was the American Falls they were looking toward. The larger falls, the Horseshoe, was farther away, south and west of Goat Island and not visible from Dirk’s car except as a confusion of mist.

  For several minutes they sat in the car in silence.

  Chandler squirmed, murmured. His little mittened fists flailed. He would be an inquisitive baby, inclined to restlessness, querulousness. His face puckered in a sort of animal anxiety. His fish-mouth gaped. Soon he would want to be fed again: nursed. Nursing was a new, astonishing and overwhelming experience for Ariah, a lovemaking experience for which the new mother hadn’t been prepared.

  Ariah smiled dreamily to think of it.

  After a moment she said, “What do you think has brought us here, Dirk? The three of us.”

  Ariah spoke in a neutral, matter-of-fact voice. She might have been a client asking her attorney a practical question. She was jiggling Chandler’s warm weight against the bosom of her coat, pressing her slightly chapped lips against the top of his head. He wore a tiny knitted cap one of Dirk’s relatives had given them, but the heat of his scalp came through against Ariah’s lips.

  Dirk said, “What has brought us here?—d’you mean literally here? I’ve brought us here, darling. By your request.”

  Dirk spoke lightly, for lightly was the way in which to speak to a new mother at such a time.

  But Ariah persisted, for Ariah must always persist. “I mean what has brought us, the three of us, to this place? And this moment? Out of all of the universe, and an infinity of time?”

  It was a little difficult for Ariah to speak at such length. In the hospital, in her white-walled private room amid banks of flowers, and in the labor room, she’d screamed, begged, threatened. Her sensitive throat was raw with the guttural cries and groans, as of a dying animal, that had been forced from her.

  Dirk said, in that light, insistent way, “You know what has brought us here: Love.”

  “Love! I suppose so.” Ariah reacted as if she hadn’t thought of this. Her husband, stroking her hand as she cupped the baby’s head, helping to cup the baby’s head with his big, somewhat clumsy hand, regarding her sidelong, surreptitiously, as he’d been regarding her in her hospital bed, and felt his heart clutch. Love for her and their son came so strong to him, he couldn’t trust himself to speak.

  Ariah continued, frowning, “Love isn’t less a force in life than gravity, is it? You can’t see ‘gravity’ either.”

  Dirk said, smiling, “You and Chandler are visible. I’m plenty visible.”

  He slapped at his midriff. He’d lost almost ten pounds since Ariah entered the hospital, but he could surely stand to lose ten more.

  Ariah persisted. “But love is chancy. It’s a roll of the dice.”

  “More like poker. You’re dealt cards, but a good player gets good cards. And a good player knows what to do with them.”

  Ariah smiled at Dirk, liking this answer.

  “ ‘A good player knows what to do with them.’ ”

  Playfully she tugged at Dirk’s fingers, that were cupping Chandler’s head. The palm of Dirk’s hand alone was large enough to hold their baby, with no other support. She said, in her new, raw, wistful voice, “You won’t leave me for a while now, I guess? Now Baby is here.”

  “Ariah, why do you say such things?”

  Dirk drew away, offended.

  Ariah looked at her husband in innocent surprise. The big handsome face, tired from the ordeal of the past week, like the face of an American boy who’s had to grow up too quickly, was creased as if aggrieved. For the life of her, Ariah couldn’t understand why.

  At this moment Chandler began squirming and burbling more urgently, filled his tiny lungs with air, and began to bellow. It was nursing time, luckily.

  And so a bab
y came to dwell at 7 Luna Park. A baby!

  He was an angel-baby, sometimes. At other times, a red-faced roaring little demon. Mommy and Daddy gazed at him in wonder. Except he’d squeezed himself out through a far-too-small hole in her body, she’d have sworn he came from another planet. Krypton? Where the laws of nature differe from ours.

  How he loved to cry, exercising those baby-lungs. Furious, purposeful, like one of those madmen-bully Fascist leaders you’d see in newsreels, Hitler, Mussolini, bellowing at their mesmerized audiences packed into public squares. Ariah was going to joke, “Maybe he’ll want a pulpit for his first birthday, he can start giving sermons young.” The allusion was to Reverend Littrell of course. But Ariah bit her lip, and went quiet.

  Nights were not so romantic now at 7 Luna Park, in Dirk Burnaby’s old bachelor quarters. Nights were a very rocky sail on a dark choppy turbulent river leaving you dazed, seasick. Praying for dawn. “At least you can leave for ‘work.’ That’s where Daddys go.” Ariah tried to see the humor of it. Dirk protested he’d stay home and help, if Ariah wanted him to. And he did hire a nanny, to help out when Ariah was totally exhausted. But Ariah rather resented the nanny, for Baby Chandler was hers.

  (She’d never have another one of these again, she vowed. Oh, it had hurt! They say you forget labor pains but she, Ariah, wasn’t going to forget. Ever.)

  A baby-angel, a baby-demon. Waking a half-dozen times in the night. Howling, ravenous. Demanding the breast. Both breasts. Filling his diapers with baby shit. (Which, dopey from lack of sleep and not her usual sharp-elbowed self, Ariah would almost, strange as it sounds, come to not-dislike. “It doesn’t smell bad, exactly. You get used to it. It smells like…well, Baby.”)

  A volcano, Dirk Burnaby marveled, that gushed at both ends.

  Then there was nursing.

  Nursing! Which Mother and Baby did, together, whenever Baby wished. A private matter. Baby’s hungry little fish-mouth suck suck sucking at her fat, milky breast. Another kind of lovemaking Ariah thought. But we won’t tell Daddy.