Ariah stared speechless as her mother-in-law, in impractically high-heeled pumps, made her way down the front walk, joined by the chauffeur who hurried to assist her into the rear of the limousine.
When she returned to the living room there was Chandler absorbed again with his Tinkertoys. Beside him the pile of gift-wrapped presents lay ignored.
Ariah took the bottle of scotch upstairs with her, where Dirk would find her later that evening in their bedroom, in their yet-un-made bed, when he returned from work.
The Little Family
1
It was only logical, wasn’t it?
Knowing that your first-born might be snatched from you at any time by an Act of God, you must have a second child. And if you fail to love your first-born as much as a mother should love, you certainly should have a second child, to make things right.
“Though some things probably can’t ever be made right.”
By the same logic, if your first two babies are boys, you are compelled to try again in the hope of having a daughter.
It was only logical. Knowing that your husband might one day leave you, or be snatched from you, you must have several children at least.
It was only logical. Ariah Burnaby was a logical woman. She would become, through the years, a woman who expected the worst, to relieve herself of the anxiety of hope. She would become a woman of calm, fatalistic principles, anticipating her life with the equanimity of a weather forecaster. She would risk (she supposed she knew this, for at her most neurotic she remained an intelligent woman) driving her husband from her by her expectation that he would one day “vanish” from her life.
Even as she clutched him tight in her arms. Yet never tight enough.
It was only logical wasn’t it? Yet how many times during the next decade would the strangled prayer leap from her who did not believe in prayer.
“God, You would not be so cruel—would You? Please let me be pregnant this time. Oh, please!”
It was a logical wish. Yet it would require years.
“You do love me, Dirk? Don’t you?”
In her wistful voice she inquired. In the night, in the stupor of half-sleep when we utter things we would not utter by day.
He was too mired in sleep to reply. Except with his body curving about her, heavy, warm, consoling. She lay in the crook of his arm plotting. Another baby!
They never loved each other less (at least, Ariah believed that this was so) but they made love less frequently with the passage of time. And less passionately. They surprised each other less often in their lovemaking. There must have been a day, an hour, when they made love during the daytime for the final time; when they made love impulsively somewhere other than their big, comfortable bed for the final time; when Ariah pressed her anguished mouth against Dirk’s sweaty chest to keep from crying out too loudly.
And once Ariah made the decision she must never, never drink again after that terrible visit from Claudine Burnaby, not even a single glass of her favorite red wine at dinner, not even a single glass of Dom Pérignon to celebrate a precious anniversary, the sweet yearning sensation in her loins faded as if it had never been and she began to embrace her husband with less desire, and sometimes with no desire at all except the grim female desire to conceive, to become pregnant, to have a baby.
To have a baby.
Maybe it wasn’t logical, such a wish. But it would appear so in retrospect, after the children were born.
For in retrospect, the most random and desperate toss of the dice can be made to seem inevitable.
How many years. “Yet I didn’t doubt. Never.”
And so I was born. And why?
2
A MIRACLE! Ariah at last conceived a second child, and gave birth to him in September 1958. She was thirty-seven years old.
“Almost too late. But not quite!”
This pregnancy, Ariah would recall as suffused with happiness as with an unwavering golden light. How unlike the nightmare of the first pregnancy, long ago! Royall Burnaby was born exactly on schedule, a healthy seven-pound nine-months’ baby with his daddy’s unmistakable flaxen hair and cobalt-blue eyes. Born to his mother’s unbidden thought This one is truly ours. This baby, we can love.
Born at a time when his daddy was riding the crest of a booming economy in Niagara Falls.
Born at a time in history when it seemed that the very universe was expanding, to infinity.
If Ariah’s marriage was beginning to “drift”—“fray”—these were words that came to mind, less cruel than others—the birth of Royall Burnaby would make things right, for a while.
“Now you truly can’t leave me, Dirk, can you?—now we have two of them.” So Ariah teased, swiping roughly at her eyes.
Dirk winced. He never knew what to make of his wife’s teasing except he didn’t like it, much. But he knew better than to speak sharply to her.
Lifting Royall kicking and flailing in both Daddy’s big hands. Lifting Royall who was a robust little dynamo of a baby, already defining himself as a distinct personality. And very different from Chandler. Ariah, watching them, knew that Dirk could not be thinking This one is mine, my son yet the expression in his face of rapt, wounded love suggested exactly this.
The 1950’s. “Boom times.”
It would be an era, local historians claimed, like the 1850’s in Niagara Falls. But where tourism was developed in the 1850’s, industrial Niagara Falls would be developed in the 1950’s. By 1960, the population of the area would double to more than 100,000.
By 1970, the area would boast the highest concentration of chemical factories in the United States.
Inland from the Niagara River and the fantastical mist-shrouded Gorge the city of Niagara Falls and its outlying suburbs was aggressively developed. Royall Burnaby’s world.
If there was another, Royall would not know of it.
Ariah had but a dim, vague notion of what was happening, for she took little interest in “local politics.” (In fact, she took very little interest in politics. Why bother, it was a man’s world.) Yet even Ariah came to realize how open land, wooded land, farmland at the edge of the city was being excavated, leveled, made over into industrial sites covering hundreds—no, it must have been thousands—of acres. “What happened, Daddy? Where are we?”—so Chandler asked, baffled, as on their Sunday drives Daddy drove the little family out north along the river, or inland toward Lockport. (Chandler was interested in the Erie Canal, and in the great locks at Lockport.) But familiar sights were becoming unrecognizable, torn up and jumbled like a Tinkertoy earthquake.
“Chandler, you’re looking at progress.”
So Dirk said, gesturing through the car windshield. In the back seat, Ariah held Royall on her lap, cooing and singing in his ear.
It was a profound fact: raw earth was becoming cement. Trees were toppled, sawed into pieces and hauled away. Giant cranes and bulldozers were everywhere. The old two-lane road to Lockport was expanded to three lanes. Highways appeared through fields, over-night. There were new bridges, brisk brutal gunmetal-gray. Ariah observed in distaste, and at a distance. The “progress” was taking place miles away from Luna Park, why should she care? Luna Park was in the area of Rainbow Avenue and 2nd Street, the oldest residential neighborhood in the city; the changes were all to the east and north, beyond Hyde Park, out Buffalo Avenue, Veterans Road, Swann Road, in the area of 100th Street and beyond, which might have been on the moon so far as Ariah was concerned.
A no-man’s-land, claimed for factories, warehouses, employee parking lots. Auto parts manufacturers, refrigerating unit manufacturers, chemical factories, fertilizer factories. There were gypsum plants. Tanneries and leather goods factories. Detergent, bleach, disinfectant and industrial cleanser factories. Asphalt, asbestos. Pesticides, herbicides. Nabisco, Swann Chemical, Dow Chemical, United Carborundum, NiagChem, Occidental Chemical (“OxyChem”). Giant power stations were being erected south along the river with the much-publicized intention of “harnessing”
as much as one-third of the water power of The Falls. Ariah read in the Niagara Gazette of hundreds of prime acreage sold to Niagara Hydro by an entity called Burnaby, Inc., and was so shocked she let the newspaper slip to the floor.
“My God, is that us? Are we rich?”
The possibility filled her with dread.
At this time Royall was a five-month baby, brimming with appetite and energy, nursing at Ariah’s breast. Chandler, seven years old, a slightly clumsy child made shyer and clumsier by the arrival of a baby brother, hung back in the nursery doorway, worriedly watching his mother. Seeing her look of surprise and distress he asked what was wrong and Ariah said quickly, “Oh, honey. N-Nothing! Nothing is wrong.”
Since the birth of Royall, Ariah seemed often to be disconcerted by Chandler’s presence. She loved him of course but had a tendency to forget him. In the confusion of sleep-deprivation she thought of him as the other, temporarily forgetting his name.
Ariah had vowed not to love Chandler less than Royall. Yet this vow, too, she tended to forget.
Ariah wasn’t a superstitious woman but she felt a pang of something like terror. For it seemed dangerous somehow to be “harnessing” The Falls. Diverting millions of tons of beautiful rushing river water, converting it into electricity for “consumers.”
Hauling Royall into the bedroom, where there was a telephone, she called Dirk at his law office. Oh, why was Dirk never home! Never home when she needed him. The velvety-voiced receptionist told her coolly that “Mr. Burnaby” was away at City Hall, at a meeting with the mayor and the Niagara County Zoning Board of which he was a new member. (Was Ariah supposed to know this? Had she forgotten?) “And what is the number there? Please.” The velvety-voiced receptionist sounded reluctant, but provided Mrs. Burnaby with the number of the mayor’s office; the recently elected mayor of Niagara Falls was Tyler (“Spooky”) Wenn; Ariah believed that she had a right to call her husband, since Dirk so rarely called home now, as he’d done when they were newlyweds, and when Chandler had been an infant. Ariah’s hand was shaking. Royall, squirming on Mommy’s lap, flailing his little fists, was getting upset; no doubt he’d soaked his diaper again. Ariah bit at her thumbnail deliberating whether to call Wenn’s office and demand to speak with her husband at once, saying it was a family emergency; this was a stratagem Ariah had used in the past, perhaps once or twice too often; but sometimes she couldn’t help herself, alone with two young children and prone to emotions that alarmed her.
She’d been happy those nine months, pregnant with Royall. They hadn’t known it was a boy of course. Ariah was crazy with love for Royall but couldn’t help thinking that her happiness would be complete if she’d had a daughter instead.
“Ariah? Hello? What is it?”
Dirk’s voice was loud and urgent in her ear. Ariah couldn’t remember having called him. Royall was gasping for breath, preparing to bellow. Hurriedly she pushed her breast into his mouth, her sore, chafed nipple that looked as if someone mean had been pinching it, and Royall began to suck.
“Ariah? Darling? Is something wrong?”
He must love her, then. Ariah heard the rising desperation in his voice.
Ariah fumbled with the receiver and tried to speak but her words spilled out like pebbles. She knew there was a specific reason she’d called Dirk out of a meeting with the mayor of Niagara Falls but damned if she could remember. She said, “There was a problem—the baby wasn’t breathing right—but he’s breathing now, he’s fine now.”
“Honey, I can’t hear you. Is something wrong with the baby?”
“He wasn’t breathing right. But now he is breathing right. I’m sorry to have disturbed you. I didn’t know what to do.”
“He’s all right now? Royall is all right?”
“Royall is fine. Listen.”
Ariah held the receiver to Royall’s damp little mouth and poked him into gooing, chortling. One of his sounds was a high-pitched noise like a peacock’s shriek.
“Ariah? Is that—Royall? Is Royall all right?” Dirk sounded dazed, like a blind man trying to see.
“Darling, Royall is fine. He’s the most wonderful baby in the world.”
“He’s all right? You’re sure?”
Ariah laughed angrily. “I’m sure. If you’re so doubtful of me, come home and see for yourself.”
There was a brief startled pause.
“Well. You scared the hell out of me for a moment.” Dirk spoke carefully, not wanting to upset her more. Ariah knew: her cautious lawyer-husband didn’t want to upset his unstable wife. In a framed photograph in Dirk’s study there was a faded daguerreotype of his notorious grandfather Reginald Burnaby, a tightrope walker captured in the act of crossing the steamy Niagara Gorge, holding a twelve-foot pole across his shoulders for balance. Ariah understood the precariousness of that balance.
As Royall sucked and tugged at her teat, Ariah felt a sudden discomforting stab of something raw, wet, yearning at the pit of her belly, and moaned aloud. “Oh, Dirk. I miss you. Come home and make love with me, darling.”
“Ariah? What?”
“I miss you, Dirk. I want to make love with you. The way we used to. Before the babies. Remember?”
There was another pause. Ariah could hear her husband’s quickened, alarmed breathing.
“I’m in a meeting, darling. It’s an important meeting. If I’m not there for the vote, Christ knows what will happen. So I’d better say goodbye, Ariah, if you and the baby are all right?” Dirk paused, as if trying to think of something. “And Chandler?”
Ariah laughed at the way Royall was sucking vigorously, causing her pain at the breast, and that aching aroused sensation between her legs. “Your son is quite the lover, Dirk. You’ll be sorry.” Milk leaked out of Royall’s tiny fierce mouth and ran down his chin. Watery milk it seemed to Ariah, thin as skim milk. Maybe it wasn’t good milk. Good mother’s milk. Maybe it was deficient in vitamins. Dirk was saying something, asking her something, Ariah couldn’t hear over the sucking gurgling noise of the baby. In the midst of her confusion she remembered suddenly why she’d called Dirk. “That front-page article in the Gazette? The hydro-power plants? Why is our name involved?”
Quickly Dirk said, “Honey, that deal has nothing to do with us. It’s a branch of the family I’m not connected with. Not actively. Don’t be upset. There’s nothing to it.”
“Nothing to it. I see.”
“I hold some shares in Burnaby, Inc. But I’m not involved, I have my own separate life. My own income.”
Ariah was becoming so aroused, so uncomfortable, she dared to dislodge her breast from the baby’s eager sucking, and for a stunned moment the baby simply continued to suck at the air, his pudding-face blank. His small moist cobalt-blue eyes with their fine, pale lashes seemed to have no focus: here was sheer appetite, thwarted. At the other end of the line the baby’s father was saying he had to return to his meeting, he’d be home around ten, he hoped. “You and the children are all right, yes? I love you.”
“Well, I hate you.”
Ariah laughed angrily, and hung up the phone before Dirk could explain to her why he’d be late again that night, having dinner at Mario’s or the Boat Club or the Rainbow Grand Terrace with his rich business friends.
Chandler had picked up the Gazette pages, and was eagerly reading the article about Niagara Hydro. The child was a precocious reader, he seemed to have taught himself by the time he began school and was now, according to his teacher, the most advanced reader in second grade. But he read often in poor lighting, and Ariah was concerned he would weaken his eyes. He said, “Mommy, is this our name—‘Burnaby’? Or somebody else?”
“Somebody else.”
By this time Royall was screaming with fury. Red-faced as a demon. Ariah could feel his temperature rising and had a frightened thought of a lobster being boiled, turning red. She was terrified of him suddenly. Why had she wanted another baby so badly, when she was too old? When her husband might leave her at any time? She screamed,
and dropped Royall’s agitated weight onto—what was it?—the edge of the bed. It was a cushioned surface and yet, kicking and thrashing in infant rage, Royall somehow bounced, and rolled over onto the floor; striking the carpeted floor about equally on his padded diaper bottom and at the base of his skull. For a fraction of an instant there was silence in the bedroom, the boiled-looking baby had ceased to breathe, then he filled his tiny lungs with a tremendous intake of air and began to cry, shriek, bellow until Ariah pressed her hands over her ears, destroyed.
Seven-year-old Chandler hurried to pick up his thrashing baby brother, and lay him carefully on the bed where he continued to bellow without pause. Ariah backed off, barefoot, into a corner of the room. She could feel milk leaking from both her teats, running in rivulets down her hot skin; she was naked inside her grubby bathrobe. Chandler said earnestly, “We could take him back, Mommy, couldn’t we? Where you got him?”
3
NOW THERE WERE two little boys in the Burnaby household, and Ariah felt more lonely than ever: lonely for a daughter.
This yearning began soon after Royall was weaned. Oh, she missed a baby at her breast! Begging Give me a daughter. A daughter to redeem me, to make things right.
For it seemed to Ariah that she’d failed, somehow. She was a female (obviously!) and yet somehow not a womanly woman, not a good woman.
So emotional did Ariah become, as months passed, months and years, and she was so in terror of coming to the end of her childbearing life, that Ariah nearly confided in her own mother. “Did you have these feelings too, Mother? Did you want a daughter?” But Mrs. Littrell merely smiled, and shook her head. “Why, I ‘wanted’ whoever God sent me, Ariah. And so did your father.”
The Falls Page 18