The Falls

by Joyce Carol Oates

  No, best that Daddy doesn’t know.

  Not that Daddy didn’t adore Baby, he did. But Daddy would not have wished to think of Baby as a male rival, exactly.

  God, thank You. Now I am redeemed, and will ask nothing of You ever again.

  2

  “IT SEEMS I’VE BEEN FORGIVEN, I guess. By the Presbyterians, at least.”

  Within a few weeks, Mrs. Littrell came alone, by train, to Niagara Falls to see her grandson. “Oh, Ariah! Oh my baby.” It was a tearful reconcilation, there in the noisy Niagara Falls train station, like a scene in a maudlin but good-hearted movie of the 1940’s, shot in wartime black and white. Ariah, now a married woman and a mother, and pretty damned proud of herself for coping as well as she did, mimed a face of daughterly emotion as she embraced her mother, startled by the older woman’s soft, warm, bosomy body, but she couldn’t leak out more than a tear or two. Never! Never forgive you for abandoning me when I needed you. “Ariah, dear, can you ever forgive me?” Mrs. Littrell asked anxiously, and Ariah said, at once, squeezing both her mother’s pudgy hands in her own, “Oh, Mother. Of course. There is nothing to forgive.” Dirk Burnaby the beaming son-in-law shook hands with Mrs. Littrell, gallant and kindly. And there was Baby Chandler in his stroller, blinking up at this weepy tremulous middle-aged woman and jamming fingers into his mouth. Mrs. Littrell crouched over him as over an abyss that made her dizzy. She stammered, “Oh, it’s a miracle. He’s a miracle. Isn’t he a miracle, oh what a beautiful little baby.” Ariah wanted to correct her mother, Baby Chandler wasn’t beautiful exactly, no need to exaggerate, but yes, maybe to his grandmother he seemed so. Mrs. Littrell begged Ariah to allow her to hold him, and of course Ariah consented. “Chandler, here’s your grandmother.”

  “ ‘Grandma.’ I hope he’ll call me. Oh, how beautiful he is!”

  Mrs. Littrell had planned to stay just two nights in Niagara Falls, in the guest room at 7 Luna Park, but she ended up staying six nights.

  “Somehow, it’s easier when people aren’t on speaking terms with you,” Ariah said dryly. (Though secretly she was pleased with Baby Chandler’s triumph over her mother. There was a delicious revenge here.)

  Mrs. Littrell had brought two large suitcases with her on the train, one filled with baby things. These were “new and used” baby things including some of Ariah’s own baby clothes from thirty years ago. “Do you remember, dear? This little cap, your own grandma knitted for you.” Ariah smiled and said yes, she thought she remembered, though certainly she didn’t. Why, these old things might have belonged to anyone, for all Ariah knew her mother might have picked them up at a rummage sale in Troy! The church was always having rummage sales in the basement. A sudden rage came over Ariah in the midst of their happy reconciliation, that her mother had no right to re-enter her life, when Ariah was doing so well without her, and without Reverend Littrell. Mrs. Littrell had no more right to re-enter Ariah’s new life than Gilbert Erskine would have had, resurrected from the dead.

  Gilbert Erskine. Ariah never thought of him any longer. Yet in a dream of singular ugliness he’d come to her: doggedly knocking at the front door of her new home. Like the monster-son in “The Monkey’s Paw.” Cowardly Ariah had hidden beneath the bedclothes and sent Dirk to answer the door in her place.

  Obviously, Mrs. Littrell had no idea of Dirk Burnaby’s financial situation, bringing the young couple so many things, both new and second-hand. Ariah had told her virtually nothing of her married life in Niagara Falls; she’d sent only a printed birth announcement and a few snapshots of Chandler. Clearly, Luna Park intimidated the minister’s wife from Troy. The elegant brick homes in the leafy residential neighborhood near the river; the neo-Georgian townhouses facing the park with their small but scrupulously tended lawns and black wrought iron fences; the spare, sleekly modern furnishings of Dirk Burnaby’s bachelor quarters; Ariah’s gorgeous Steinway spinet—all took Mrs. Littrell by surprise. Not to mention the Irish nanny, the housekeeper and the cook, who happened to be male, a Frenchman whom Dirk employed for business dinners several times a month. And there was a Negro who tended the lawn, small as it was. Mrs. Littrell seemed disoriented, as if she’d wandered into the household of another woman’s married daughter, but was in no hurry to leave.

  Several times she murmured in Ariah’s ear, “Dear, you must be so happy, your cup overflowing!”

  The third time Mrs. Littrell made this breathless observation, as Dirk lifted Chandler to demonstrate for Grandma his son’s remarkable kicking and flailing “helicopter stunt” as Dirk called it, wicked Ariah retorted, “Do you think my cup is so small, Mother? That it overflows so easily?”

  Within the year, Reverend Littrell began to accompany Mrs. Littrell to Niagara Falls. Ariah’s father, too, fell under the spell of the Burnaby household.

  Especially, he fell under the spell of the new baby.

  Ariah’s father seemed to have aged in the past year. Ariah supposed she was to blame. He was a proud man, for all his Christian pulpit-humility, and Ariah’s behavior had scandalized him. His face was deeply creased and his Teddy Roosevelt jaws jutted with less confidence. He appeared shorter. His belly was more pronounced. He’d acquired an annoying nervous habit of clearing his throat before and after he spoke, as if to obscure his words. Unlike Ariah’s tearful mother he never quite apologized to Ariah, nor did he embrace her as her mother had done. The most he could manage was to inform Ariah, when they were alone together, as if the statement were a biblical revelation, “Sometimes to act in haste is not to act unwisely, I see. You are blessed in your husband and child. Ariah, every hour of my life I thank God, that things have turned out for you as they have.”

  Ariah said quietly, “Thank you, Father.”

  Wanting to add, with a mischievous smile Yes but I’m still damned. That won’t change.

  Well, Ariah was grateful. For her father’s words, however grudging. At a time in her life when she no longer needed them.

  (Why should she care about anyone, really? Now that she had her baby. Hers.)

  “What good, decent people your parents are.” Dirk spoke with his usual enthusiasm, and Ariah detected in his voice, in his smiling face, not the slightest hint of irony. She knew he was thinking How different from my mother and so of course the Littrells might seem to him good, decent, ideal in-laws.

  “Well. They are Christians, obviously.”

  Ariah spoke lightly. No, she wasn’t being sarcastic!

  In fact she was grateful, very grateful, that her husband, ever the gracious host, was so courteous to her parents. This gave her space to lapse into silence when she wished. It gave her opportunities to slip away with Chandler for a nap.

  She liked it that, in the presence of his tall, confident son-in-law, who spoke casually and with authority of business, politics, the economy, law, and who seemed to know a good deal about the imminent development in the Niagara region of “hydro-power,” Reverend Littrell tended to be deferential. “Yes. I see. Oh, I see.” Where in Troy he would have asserted his own personality, here in Luna Park he was subdued. Dirk Burnaby was of a social class unknown to the Littrells, as his religious beliefs were undefined, and his sense of humor difficult to decode. Even Chandler, suddenly a toddler, was unpredictable. Competing with Grandma Littrell for their grandson’s fickle attention, Grandpa usually lost. The child regarded the old man with slow-blinking curiosity, unsmiling. Sometimes he pushed frantically away from Grandpa. In her father’s face at such times Ariah saw a look of genuine loss.

  The power of a thoughtless child, to reject. To outlive.

  So one generation grinds another into the earth. Into bones, dust. Into oblivion. Ariah smiled cruelly to think how little the promise of heaven must mean, if you’ve lost earth.

  “Chandler! That’s a naughty boy. Grandpa is going to read to you, see? Here’s your Big Lion book, your favorite.” Gaily Ariah hauled her son back to her father, and deposited him on the sofa beside the clumsily smiling old man.

  Aria
h was fearful of sailing, and didn’t greatly love the forty-foot Valkyrie riding the crest of choppy waves upriver, downriver, to Lake Erie and back, yet she pretended for Dirk’s sake to enjoy these excursions, or mostly. She foresaw a time when she’d stay home, and Dirk and Chandler could go out by themselves; but that time wasn’t just yet.

  It was a festive occasion, however, when Dirk took his in-laws on a yachting trip to Lake Erie, five miles to the south, and dinner on the splendid outdoor terrace of the Buffalo Yacht Club. Ariah took a kind of pride in seeing how startled, how impressed, her father was with the sleek whitely gleaming yacht, when Dirk first brought them to the marina. She supposed he was wondering how much it cost. (Never could he have guessed.) Mrs. Littrell was excited, anxious. There were many other boats on the river on this bright windy day, sailboats, yachts, speedboats, what if there was a collision, what if waves swamped and oveturned their boat? Ariah saw that her mother was genuinely frightened. She spoke in a lowered, embarrassed voice not wanting her son-in-law to hear. Ariah said airily, “Impossible, Mother. Dirk is an experienced yachtsman.” Yachtsman! So casually uttered by one who, before Dirk Burnaby and this new life of hers at The Falls, had never so much as cast her eyes upon a vessel like the Valkyrie, let alone stepped on its lavishly appointed deck. In any case, once they were out on the river, Ariah and Mrs. Littrell stayed inside the cabin, with Chandler. The wind on the Niagara River was relentless; Dirk insisted upon maintaining a certain speed; he hated to “poke along”; when clouds were blown across the sun, the temperature dropped ten degrees. Ariah worried about gathering clouds over the lake toward which they were headed, but said nothing to her mother, of course. In the region of the Great Lakes, weather changed rapidly: forecasters were always making mistakes. Chandler was thrilled by Daddy’s big boat but tended to become overstimulated by it, and tired quickly. He became cranky, fretful, teary, babyish. “He’s a high-strung, sensitive child,” Mrs. Littrell said protectively. “He takes after his mother.”

  Ariah laughed. “Is that how you see me, Mother? ‘High-strung, sensitive’?” She didn’t know if she should be flattered, or insulted. She was feeling damned proud of herself these days, a first-time mother.

  For a while after Chandler’s birth, she’d been not-herself, you might say. Exhausted, melancholy. Wanting to crawl into a nest of bedclothes and hide. But she hadn’t, had she? Her hard little breasts had ballooned with milk, sweet delicious milk demanding to be sucked.

  Mrs. Littrell was saying quickly, “But also very talented, Ariah. Very—intelligent. Mysterious, a bit. Your father and I have always thought so.”

  Mysterious! Ariah liked that, a little better. She asked:

  “And how does Chandler take after his father, d’you think?”

  “His father? Why—he has his eyes, I think. There’s something of Dirk about his mouth. The shape of his head.” But Ariah’s mother sounded uncertain.

  Ariah said, “When Chandler was born, his hair was dark. Dark swaths like seaweed. Now it’s becoming lighter, like Dirk’s. He’ll grow into his father, I think. He likes numbers, and Dirk says he used to play with numbers at Chandler’s age, too. Dirk’s mother says Chandler is very like Dirk at his age.” This was so stunning a lie, Ariah couldn’t quite believe it was hers. “Of course, Chandler was born a few weeks premature, he has catching up to do. But he will.”

  Thank God, Ariah’s worries about her baby’s paternity were behind her now. She recalled them only dimly, as you might recall a blurred movie sequence from long ago. Seeing Dirk with Chandler you knew they were father and son. Chandler adored his daddy, and Daddy adored him. Ariah saw her anxiety, in retrospect, as a symptom of her pregnancy like morning sickness, or her cravings for peculiar foods (cold oatmeal, pickle sandwiches, “fish fingers” with mustard, hot cross buns from DiCamillo’s Bakery). A first-time mother fantasizes the worst, Dr. Piper assured her. Imagining they might give birth to deformed infants, monsters. At least, Ariah hadn’t been that crazy.

  Fretful Chandler had put aside his numbers game and dropped off to sleep. Mrs. Littrell was squinting through the spray-lashed cabin window at the men on the deck. Mrs. Littrell marveled, “I never thought I’d live to see the sight, your father in a life preserver. Like a sea captain.” She tried to laugh though the Valkyrie, in the wake of an enormous Great Lakes coal barge that had passed dangerously near, was beginning to rock. With a ghastly smile Mrs. Littrell said, “Ariah, you married such a wonderful man. You were right not to despair.”

  Not to despair? Was that what her love for Dirk was?

  “Yes, Mother. We don’t need to discuss it.”

  Ariah shut her eyes. This damned boat! Rocking, lurching. It was seasickness she feared, more than drowning.

  But Mrs. Littrell persisted, raising her voice to be heard over the noise of the boat’s motor. “Oh, Ariah. God’s ways are inscrutable as the Bible says.”

  Ariah said, “Maybe God just has a wicked sense of humor.”

  The Littrells never spoke to Ariah of the Erskines, whom they knew well in Troy; they never spoke to her of Gilbert Erskine. It was as if, when the Littrells were visiting at Luna Park, under the spell of the Burnaby household, a part of the past had ceased to exist.

  The night of the yachting trip to Lake Erie and back, undressing for bed and discussing the excursion, which Dirk believed had gone very well, Ariah had a sudden wish never to see her parents again, or anyone. Her soul was worn thin and soiled as an old, used towel. She heard herself say in a droll voice, “Well. It seems I’ve been totally forgiven now. The Valkyrie did it, with the Reverend.” Peering into a mirror she discovered several new, very visible silver hairs sprouting from her head. Like stark melancholy thoughts they were, the kind you want to tear out by the roots. “But guess what? I’m the same sinner as always.”

  Dirk chuckled, reaching for her. “Darling, I hope so.”

  3

  NO WARNING!

  A weekday afternoon in October 1953, too early for Ariah’s after-school piano student, the doorbell rang and Ariah went to answer it. She felt only a mild uneasiness. It wouldn’t be the postman ringing the door at this hour, and not a delivery man. Ariah wasn’t so friendly with her Luna Park neighbors that one of them might drop by unexpected and uninvited. (She had a reputation, she supposed, for being unfriendly, aloof. And maybe that wasn’t misleading.) Apart from a few hours of piano instruction a week, Ariah spent her days with Chandler. She was a devoted, consecrated mother. She’d dismissed the Irish nanny Dirk had hired for her, and cut back the hours Dirk’s housekeeper worked for them. “This is my house. I hate to share it with strangers.” She loved to observe Chandler from a little distance, watching as the child played for long periods of time oblivious of her. He muttered, argued, laughed to himself, patiently creating remarkably intricate towers, bridges, airplanes, then, with a terse little cry of judgment (“Now you go!”) in mimicry of Daddy’s voice, he caused them to crash, disintegrate, topple into a heap.

  The game had a secret name, he’d whispered in Mommy’s ear if she promised not to tell: “Earthquake.”

  At two years, seven months, Chandler was thin, inclined to nervous excitement, shy and mistrustful in the presence of other children. His face was small and triangular as a ferret’s. His eyes seemed to Ariah ferrety—shifting, restless. “Chandler, look at me. Look at Mommy.” And so he might, but you could see that his rapidly working little brain was fixed on something more urgent.

  Before Ariah could get to the front door, the bell rang again, sharply. Ariah was annoyed, opening the door—“Yes? What do you want?” On the step stood an elegantly dressed, perfumed older woman who looked familiar in a blurred bad-dream way. She was someone Ariah had never seen before and yet (she knew!) knew.

  Moving her mouth strangely, the woman said, in a self-consciously cultured voice that sounded as if it hadn’t been used in some time, “Ariah. Hello. I’m Dirk’s mother Claudine Burnaby.” Affecting not to notice Ariah’s look of astonish
ment and dismay, she extended a gloved, languid hand. The pressure of her fingers was nearly nonexistent. She regarded Ariah through sunglasses so darkly tinted, Ariah couldn’t see even the glisten of her eyes. Her mouth was a rich lustrous fire-engine red but it was a mouth reluctant to smile.

  Her! The mother-in-law.

  For a long terrible moment Ariah stood paralyzed. This was an unlikely, improbable meeting of the sort a morbid-minded daughter-in-law might already have fantasized, for more than three years, yet now that it was happening, clearly it was happening for the first time; and the mother-in-law was in charge.

  Parked at the curb, solemn as a hearse, was a chauffeur-driven car.

  Ariah heard her voice faltering like an amateur singer’s. She reached for notes that weren’t there. “Mrs. Burnaby! H-Hello. Please—come inside?”

  The woman laughed pleasantly. “Oh, now, my dear—we can’t both be ‘Mrs. Burnaby.’ Not at the same time.”

  Ariah would consider this remark afterward, in the way of an individual examining bruises and cuts he hadn’t quite understood he’d suffered.

  Ariah stammered something about Dirk not being home, Dirk would be sorry to miss her, even as, with a part of her mind, she knew that Mrs. Burnaby had come deliberately at a time when Dirk wouldn’t be home, why was she presenting herself as naïve, obtuse? She offered to take Mrs. Burnaby’s coat, fumbling with the garment, in fact it was a cape of buttery-soft wool, an exquisitely beautiful heather color that matched the suit Mrs. Burnaby wore beneath; the suit suggested high fashion of the mid-1940’s, boxy shoulders and a tight waist and flared skirt to mid-calf. On her stiff metallic-blond hair Mrs. Burnaby wore a black velvet hat with a small cobwebby veil. An odor of aged gardenias and mothballs hovered about her. Ariah was deeply mortified to be exposed to this woman’s eyes as one who’d so let herself go since her wedding. She was wearing an old cardigan sweater and shapeless slacks and “mocassins” so rundown at the heel they were, in effect, bedroom slippers. The cuffs of Ariah’s slacks were stained from an Easter egg-dyeing session with Chandler months before. And of course Ariah’s (graying) hair was brushed back flat from her pale, plain face, and needed shampooing. She’d intended to freshen herself up a bit for the five o’clock piano student…