The Falls

by Joyce Carol Oates

  The cement path beside the river was wet from spray. But there were guard railings of course. Mingling with tourist families, Chandler and the stroller would appear to belong to them. No one would identify him as a lone nine-year-old pushing a younger brother in a stroller, and Mommy nowhere near. Such park regulations didn’t apply to a child as mature and canny as Chandler.

  Ariah felt herself drifting into a light sleep. She was in a canoe above the rapids, in an only moderately swift current. From time to time she heard people passing near, raised voices and laughter. A language she couldn’t identify, was it French? (Were these strangers looking at her? Making rude comments about her? A freckle-faced redheaded woman with austere features appearing slender and young as a girl until you drew closer, and saw the streaked hair and fine white lines in her face. The tendons in her white throat. Yet this woman was smiling, was she?) Thinking of how many years ago, more than nine years. She’d been brought to Niagara Falls as a naive, trusting bride. Knowing nothing of love, sex. Knowing nothing of men.

  Since that time, since the death of her young first husband whom she could no longer remember clearly, and did not wish to remember, Ariah had received several letters from his mother, Mrs. Edna Erskine. Ariah had not answered these letters. To her shame, she hadn’t even opened them. She had not dared. The last letter, received when she’d been pregnant with Royall, had so frightened her, like a missive from the dead, she’d printed on the envelope RETURN TO SENDER ADDRESSEE UNKNOWN and dropped it in a mailbox.

  She’d told Dirk nothing of course. Like all wives she lived her secret, silent life unknown to her husband, as to her children.

  Her husband! Dirk Burnaby was her husband, not the other.

  Yet there were times like these, drifting helplessly into sleep, Ariah seemed not clearly to know who the husband was.

  No, certainly her husband was Dirk Burnaby. A man far more real than Ariah herself, if you measured his height, his girth, his position in the world.

  Ariah had not told Dirk about the terrible visit from Claudine. Not even to explain her agitation afterward. The alcoholic stupor he’d found her in. Nor had she spoken to him of Claudine’s accusations. That Dirk was in debt to her, that he gambled, that he’d had mistresses for whom “medical arrangements” had been made…A daughter. Give me a daughter before it’s too late.

  Lying in Dirk’s strong fleshy arms the previous night. She’d been awake, waiting for him. Oh, he’d come home late: past midnight. And he’d been drinking. Ariah knew, and Ariah forgave. Her husband was troubled about something, and Ariah took solace in knowing he wouldn’t involve her. For Dirk Burnaby, too, must have his private life. His secret life. And his work as an attorney, of very little interest to Ariah, was much of that life. She wasn’t the woman he should have married, clearly. She’d seen his face when, in the company of his friends and their wives, she, Mrs. Burnaby, made one of her coolly enigmatic remarks, or, more baffling still, said nothing at all. Ariah was capable of sitting at a dinner party, staring into space and drumming her fingers on the table (in fact, Ariah was practicing piano, on an invisible keyboard) while conversation swirled about her. At l’Isle Grand Country Club, the last time she’d gone, Ariah had drifted away from the others in their party and located a piano in a ballroom, sat and played quietly, dreamily, her girlhood pieces she’d loved, and for which she’d been extravagantly praised, the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata, a minuet by the young Mozart, mazurkas by Chopin of surpassing beauty, and Ariah had so lost herself she’d forgotten where she was; and was rudely awakened by the sudden mocking applause of Dirk’s friends Wenn and Howell who stood grinning behind her. Fortunately, Dirk came into the room at that point, too. Ariah, hurt, humiliated, had simply fled. But I will get my revenge on you. Someday.

  The night before, she’d been in one of her weepy moods. Not unhappy, just weepy. She knew from the other mothers in the park (most of them much younger than Ariah!) that everyone had “weepy” moods from time to time, if you’re female it’s allowed. In fact, Ariah was happy. Lying in Dirk’s arms she wept out of sheer happiness. Why? Their sons were such beautiful children. No one deserves such beautiful children. “But, darling,” Ariah whispered, burrowing her face into the collar of Dirk’s flannel pajamas, “we need a daughter, too. A little girl. Oh, we can’t give up! We need a daughter to make our family complete.” Ariah was holding herself rigid, trying not to tremble, as Dirk prepared to speak. For they’d discussed this subject many times. As a prelude to lovemaking in a way very different from the lovemaking of the earlier years of their marriage, when they’d been spontaneous, playful, ardent. Now, when they made love, Ariah clutched at Dirk with an air of determination, desperation. Her strained face showed the outline of the skull beneath. Her mouth was anguished, her eyes rolled back in her head. At such times Dirk seemed almost fearful of her. A man in fear of a woman who happened to be his wife. He’d sighed, and stroked Ariah’s warm forehead as if to placate her. So deeply in love with Ariah, he could barely see her any longer; as one is unable to see one’s own mirror reflection, pushed too close. “Of course I would love a daughter, too. But do you think it’s wise to try? At our age? And what if we had another son?” Ariah stiffened. Ariah laughed. “My age, you mean.” She spoke lightly to disguise her hurt.

  In the morning she would say, kissing him ardently, “Another son, why not? We’ll have a basketball team.”

  Ariah smiled, drifting downriver in the sunshine. Thinking of this.

  For they’d made love after all. She, the woman, bent upon conceiving, had had her way another time.

  A daughter! Take my sons, and give me a daughter in their place, I will never beg for anything again O God I swear.

  “Ma’am? Wake up, ma’am.”

  A harsh, urgent voice. Whose?

  Ariah was awake, yet somehow her eyes were shut. How her heart strained as she tried to climb the sheer sharp glistening-wet granite walls of the Gorge. Someone was speaking to her, loudly.

  “Ma’am? Please.”

  Ariah felt her shoulder nudged. What was this! A stranger daring to touch her, in this public place where she lay defenseless. Her eyes flew open.

  She stammered, in a panic, “What—is it? Who are you?”

  It has happened. And now.

  A stranger was talking earnestly to Ariah, as she managed to sit up, and to stand. (But why was she barefoot? Where were her shoes?) Hurriedly she adjusted her clothing and ran both hands through her rats’-nest hair. A youngish man in a dark green uniform, a park attendant, spoke sternly to her, which seemed to Ariah very wrong, this man was younger than Ariah. “Ma’am? Are these your children? They were on Goat Island unattended.”

  Chandler slouched close by his mother, shame-faced. And there in the stroller, strapped in, little baseball cap askew on his head, was the baby. Oh, what was his name: Royall. A name I picked out of the paper, the sound of it struck me. Royall Mansion, a winning thoroughbred. Ariah stared at her children as if she hadn’t seen them in a long time. But where had they drifted off to? How much time had passed? Why was Ariah, Dirk Burnaby’s wife, barefoot in this public place being scolded by an impertinent stranger? “Yes, of course they’re my children,” Ariah said hotly. “Chandler, where have you been? I’ve been worried sick about you. I told you not to go far.”

  Chandler mumbled an apology as the park attendant looked on dubiously. You’d almost think, the expression in his face, he didn’t believe that Ariah was these boys’ mother. Chandler’s misbuttoned red plaid shirt and baggy khaki pants were damp from spray. Like a street urchin the child looked, not a son of Dirk Burnaby of Luna Park! Ariah wanted to shake him, hard. And there was Royall not looking like himself but anybody’s baby, snot glistening at his nostrils and drool at his slack baby mouth. His face was soft bread dough that has lost its shape. His demon-energy seemed to have faded, he was groggy, dopey and could barely keep his eyes open.

  Oh, dear. Despite the protective cap, it looked as if Ro
yall’s little pug nose was sunburnt.

  Ariah was scolding Chandler, he’d disobeyed her again. Wandered off. Unreliable! The park attendant listened with a maddening air of severity, shaking his head. Who did he think he was, the F.B.I.? Ariah concluded that if he had the power to arrest her or issue a summons he’d have done it by now, which was a relief. Royall woke from his trance and began to cry loudly. “Mom-my! Mom-my!”

  Ariah knelt before him hastily and gathered him in her arms.

  “Darling, Mommy’s here.”

  And so Mommy was.

  Mommy and Chandler pushed the stroller back to Luna Park, crooning “Little Baby Bunting.” Royall, worn out from crying, slept.

  7

  “MRS. BURNABY. Good news!”

  Oh, but was it? Ariah’s heart turned dry, porous, and cracked like a clump of old clay.

  “Doctor. Oh my God. Thank you.”

  Of course she was astonished, stunned with joy.

  Ariah would calculate she’d been pregnant already, that day in Prospect Park lying in the sun. Dreaming, drifting. Somehow, she’d known: she’d known something. Already the deepest spring of her happiness had begun to flow.

  Juliet would be born in late May 1961.

  My little family, complete.

  Before…

  A vulture the woman seemed to him. Hovering at the edge of his vision. Perched, hunched, staring unblinking at him. Waiting.

  She was the Woman in Black. She was observing him, she was waiting to waylay him. She was patient, relentless. Waiting for him. Waiting for Dirk Burnaby to weaken. She had his name, and she had his number. He dreaded her coming to his home in Luna Park.

  Though his receptionist had several times told Dirk the woman’s name, he’d forgotten it almost at once.

  So he imagined Death. A vulture with an unerring eye and an infinity of patience. So he imagined his conscience, at some distance from his life.

  Don’t get involved. For Christ’s sake.

  The last thing you need, Burnaby.

  “Madelyn, please explain to this woman another time, I’m ‘truly sorry.’ It’s ‘with genuine regret’ that I can’t see her, and I can’t consider taking on her case. Not just now. Not with so many cases piled up. ‘This sort of personal-injury litigation isn’t Mr. Burnaby’s métier.’ ”

  Madelyn, who’d been Mr. Burnaby’s receptionist for eleven years, knew “métier”—it was one of her employer’s pet words, for the moment. Métier meaning specialty, trade; an area of work in which one excels. Métier meaning what Dirk Burnaby the attorney knows he can do with his customary skill and cunning, and win at.

  Another time he said, “Madelyn. No. Please give these materials back to her. Please explain, another time, that ‘Mr. Burnaby sincerely regrets’ etc. This kind of litigation isn’t what I do, and anyway I’m booked solid. For years.”

  Madelyn hesitated. Of course she would do what Mr. Burnaby requested. She was in his employ after all. In love with him, these many years. But her love was the kind of love that expects no reciprocation nor even acknowledgment. “But, Mr. Burnaby, she’ll ask me, Did he read my letter?—Did he look at the photographs, at least? What should I say?”

  “Tell her No.”

  “ ‘No’—just ‘no’?”

  “No. I did not read her letter, and I did not look at the photographs.”

  He was becoming exasperated, annoyed. Beginning to lose his Burnaby poise. Beginning to feel like a pursued man. What most surprised him was that Madelyn of all people should be fixing him with that expression of apology and reproof; as if, independent of him, she’d formed her own opinion on this subject.

  “Oh, Mr. Burnaby, she only wants to see you for a few minutes. She promises. Maybe—you should? She’s such a”—Madelyn paused, blushing at her own audacity, searching for the most accurate and persuasive word—“sincere woman.”

  “Sincere women are the most dangerous. God spare us!”

  Backing off, retreating to his inner office, Dirk succeeded in making Madelyn laugh. But it was a frayed, sad-sounding laugh. A disappointed-with-you-Mr. Burnaby laugh.

  The Vulture. The Woman in Black. She’d taken to waiting for Dirk Burnaby in the lobby of his office building. On the steps outside. On the sidewalk. Even in a lightly falling rain, even at dusk when he’d been working late and not intending to avoid her, simply he’d been working late, lost in concentration.

  At the edge of his vision he saw her, the dark hovering figure, he would not look closely, would not make eye-contact, before she could speak his name, he’d turned, he was walking swiftly away.

  He knew. Not to get involved. Not to be moved by sympathy, or pity.

  If she called after him, he didn’t hear.

  No. I won’t. I can’t.

  Since falling in love with Ariah and marrying her he’d ceased to think of himself as a lone romantic figure crossing a tightrope. A tightrope over an abyss! No more, he was not that man. He’d never been that man. His grandfather Reginald Burnaby’s fate in The Falls would not be his. It was 1961, not 1872. Dirk Burnaby was not alone now, never would he be alone again. He had sealed his fate. Or, his fate had sealed him.

  Ariah confided in him, “Now we’re safe, darling! Even if one is taken from us, we’d have two left. If you leave me”—she laughed her low throaty laugh, mocking her own dread—“I’d have three of them.”

  Dirk laughed, for such remarks of Ariah’s were presented to him as whimsical, meant to amuse. There was the custom between them of Dirk shaking his head in a pretense of severity. “Ariah! The things you say.”

  “Well. Someone has to say them.”

  Ariah’s response was bright, brave. Her green-glassy eyes, her redhead-pallor that gave her, at forty, a look of being young and untried. After more than a decade of living with Ariah, Dirk believed he understood the woman less than he had at the outset. He wondered if this might be true of any woman?

  Of course, Ariah wasn’t “any woman.”

  He considered her words. “Now we’re safe.” What did this mean? Was this the basic principle of domestic life, of the terrible need to propagate one’s kind? The human wish, as in a fairy tale, to live longer than one’s lifetime, through one’s children. To live longer than one is allotted, and to matter. To matter deeply, profoundly to someone.

  Not to be alone. To be spared the possibility of knowing oneself, in aloneness.

  He was a married man in his mid-forties, a man deeply in love with his wife. A man who has fathered children whom he loves. A responsible citizen of his time and place. Who I am there’s no doubt. No longer. I know.

  Sometimes this love came so strong, almost he couldn’t breathe. He felt his chest constrict. His young sons, his baby daughter. Their mother’s eyes lifting to his in triumph; yet a fearful, perilous triumph. They are my tightrope now Dirk thought tenderly. Unless they are my abyss.

  This woman, the Woman in Black had appealed to other attorneys in Niagara Falls. For weeks she’d been making the rounds of law offices. Strange that she would come to Dirk Burnaby so late: he supposed she knew she couldn’t afford his fees, it wasn’t likely she could afford the fees of any attorneys with offices in his building. Two Rainbow Square this new tower of a building was called. At the heart of downtown, Rainbow Boulevard and Main Street.

  She’d presented her case to the Niagara County Health Department. She’d tried to speak with the editor of the Niagara Gazette, and had in fact spoken with a reporter. Word spread quickly in the city, which, despite its burgeoning population of factory workers and manual laborers, was a small, tight community. Its nucleus, those individuals who had power and who mattered, consisted of less than fifty persons, all men. Dirk Burnaby was among these men of course. And most of them were friends of his, or friendly acquaintances. Men of the older generation had been friends or friendly acquaintances of his father, Virgil Burnaby. Dirk belonged to the same private clubs to which they belonged. Their women adored him.

  How could h
e explain to the Woman in Black My friends are your enemies. My friends can’t be my enemies.

  Dirk didn’t know the details of the lawsuit this desperate woman was hoping to bring against the City of Niagara Falls except that such a lawsuit hadn’t a chance to be resolved in her favor, or even to be seriously considered by a judge. The rumor was that her family had serious health problems, possibly she’d had miscarriages; or such was the claim. She was trying to organize a homeowners’ association in her neighborhood, in the vicinity of Ninety-ninth Street and Colvin Boulevard, protesting health conditions at a local elementary school. He’d seen in the Niagara Gazette a brief, neutral feature beneath the misleading headline PARENTS ORGANIZE TO PROTEST 99TH ST. SCHOOL.

  The mayor of Niagara Falls, Dirk’s old friend “Spooky” Wenn, firmly believed that the Woman in Black—whose name he, too, had difficulty recalling—was a “known Communist.” In fact she was the daughter of a “notorious” Communist, a CIO organizer of the 1930’s in North Tonawanda who’d died in a confrontation with strikebreakers and police. “These people” had caused plenty of trouble in the past. The woman and her husband, supposedly an assembly worker at one of the plastics plants, were “professional agitators.” Obviously, they were Jewish. They “took orders from Moscow.” They’d been involved in demonstrations in Buffalo at the time of the Rosenbergs’ execution. Probably the two weren’t married, but had “set up shop together” as “part of a commune.” Everybody knew that communism was “godless”—that was a fact. This couple had a mortgage on a tract-house bungalow on Ninety-third Street as a “front.” They were from New York, or maybe Detroit. The woman had a “history of mental illness.” The man had a “prison record.” They had children living with them they claimed were theirs. As the woman claimed she’d had miscarriages, and that this was the fault of the city, not her own fault. She claimed that her children were sick because of city water, or the soil, or the air, or the playground at the Ninety-ninth Street Elementary School, who knew all that she’d claimed? Already she had caused trouble at the school and at the Niagara County Health Department. Wenn spoke at length, vehemently as if he’d been personally threatened by the Woman in Black. It was 2 A.M. of a Sunday morning, an interlude between poker games at Stroughton Howell’s newly purchased white colonial house overlooking Buckhorn Island. Clyde Colborne, Buzz Fitch, Mike MacKenna, Doug Eaton whose older brother was married to Dirk’s sister Sylvia, and Dirk were also there. Wenn said, “These Reds! Like the Rosenbergs, their dream is to overthrow the U.S. Government and replace it with communes and free love, that’s what this ‘complaint’ is really about. The end justifies the means. Plain as day in old Marx’s Mein Kamp.” Stroughton Howell exchanged a glance with Dirk, laughed and said, “In Adolf’s Das Kapital, too.”