The Falls

by Joyce Carol Oates

  To save Al Mayweather. As he’d saved the hostage.

  These long exhausting minutes since he’d been handed the bullhorn, Chandler had been seated in a police van, inside the penumbra of shadow. Before anyone could prevent him, he climbed out.

  In his weak, raw, human voice he called, “Al? It’s me, Chandler.”

  Boldly he stepped into the lighted area in front of the building. No one had been quick enough to catch hold of him. He could hear shouts and protests on all sides. But Chandler continued forward, raising his arms in appeal. He had no weapon—of course. He would reveal himself to Al Mayweather, unprotected. He understood that he was doing the right thing. In the purity of his heart, he could not fail to do the right thing. Even as police shouted for him to take cover, cursed at him. Even as TV cameras were trained upon him. He called out, “Al? Can I come inside to talk to you? I need so badly to talk to you—” Less than ten feet from the partly opened door, Chandler seemed to see movement inside, but wasn’t certain. His vision had so radically narrowed, it was as if he were looking through the wrong end of a telescope. What he saw was a small circle of extraordinary intensity, yet he seemed not to know what he was seeing, he couldn’t have named it. The roaring in his ears grew louder. He was beyond the Deadline, rapidly approaching the Falls. There was a comfort in this. His heart lifted in anticipation. At the edge of consciousness voices were shouting Take cover! but these were distant, the shouts of strangers, he needed to show Al Mayweather how he had nothing to do with these strangers; how bonded the two of them were, like brothers, in their shared past.

  There came then a single sharp crack, a gunshot.

  On TV that evening. The man worked a miracle, saved our daughter’s life. We prayed, we prayed, and he saved her. So the Carpenters would say of Chandler Burnaby. But Chandler wouldn’t be seeing this interview, or the others. Nor the film footage, on all three TV stations.

  And now the adrenaline tide had retreated, the dank, banal debris of a small life was exposed.

  Sleet pelted against the car’s windshield. He had to drive slowly in any case, pain throbbing behind his eyes. He was an hour and a half late, and had never telephoned. To telephone a woman you love, or almost love, or wish to love, you must imagine what you will say to her, and Chandler was emptied of words. The bullhorn had exhausted him. Like an immense ludicrous phallus. You picked such an instrument up in wonder, and set it down in dismay.

  Driving to Alcott Street, north and west on Eleventh, where Melinda rented an apartment on the third floor of what had once been a private house, a five-minute drive from Grace Memorial Hospital where she worked. It was past 8 P.M. This day had begun early for Chandler, shortly after 6 A.M. In that other phase of his existence in which he was, affably, reliably, “Mr. Burnaby” who taught ninth grade science at La Salle Junior High. Paid less than the head custodian at the school but he understood that this was nothing personal. Mr. Burnaby, that’s who you are. Play the cards you’re dealt, and shut up.

  They would be saying of Chandler Burnaby that he’d been a hero, he’d saved a young woman’s life. But Chandler knew better.

  He had not turned on the car radio, and would not. He had no wish to hear local news. In the morning, he would have to read the front page of the Gazette, that was unavoidable.

  He felt sick, disgusted. His eyes ached. This was his punishment for having ascended to the high wire, this failure.

  And so he tried to think of the baby.

  Melinda’s baby, that was not Chandler’s. Another man had fathered this baby, and departed. Before the baby’s birth, early in the pregnancy, he’d departed. Chandler could not comprehend such behavior, yet he knew it wasn’t altogether uncommon. Melinda’s husband, from whom she’d only recently become divorced, had been a medical student at the University of Buffalo, and was now an intern in the area. He had no custodial rights to the baby, he’d wanted none. Melinda would say only that the marriage hadn’t worked out, she’d made a mistake.

  You? You made the mistake?

  My judgment. I misjudged.

  The implication was, in Melinda’s steely jawline, she would not misjudge another time.

  The baby, Danya. Of whom (this was ridiculous, but true) Ariah was jealous, so that Chandler no longer dared speak of the baby, or of Melinda, to his mother.

  “Hey. I love you. Know who I am?”

  She did not, of course. Who exactly was Chandler Burnaby, in Danya’s life?

  Chandler was feeling a little better, less desperate, thinking of Danya. The warm, intense body. So hot, sometimes. And heavy. As if an entire life, a lifetime, were already compacted into that small body.

  The eyes, open, conscious, darting curious and alert, insatiable.

  Almost, when he held Danya, he could feel the infant taking in information, hungry to absorb all of the world.

  She could be mine. She could love me as a father. I am not required to justify my life.

  But when Chandler arrived at Melinda’s apartment, it was otherwise. Yes, he was required to justify his life.

  Possibly he’d known, he’d anticipated such a scene, that was why he had not telephoned.

  Melinda confronted him at the door, tight-faced, furious. She was a strong, fleshy young woman two years older than Chandler, with a fair, frank, attractive face, hair of no distinct color, wanly brown, trimmed short to fit beneath her nurse’s cap. She was of only moderate height, five feet four or five, yet exuded an air of authority, as if she were taller; as, though a warmly emotional young woman, she could detach herself, with alarming swiftness, from a scene in which others were emotional. Chandler had met her in the most romantic of settings: at the Armory, where he’d gone to give blood in the annual Red Cross drive, in a swoon hardly typical of him he’d smiled up dreamily at the attractive young nurse, tried to make conversation from the gurney on which he’d been urged to lie. Promise you won’t drain it all, my blood? I’ve put myself in your hands.

  Melinda was saying she’d seen him on TV. She’d seen what he had done, and she’d been terrified for him. But afterward, thinking it over, she was angry. She was disgusted. “You risked your life for—what? Who? That stranger? ‘Somebody from your high school’—bullshit! A pathetic loser, that’s what he was. That’s all he was. He killed himself, he could have killed you. For what? Exactly for what, Chandler? Tell me: for what?”

  Chandler hadn’t expected this greeting. Oh, in his heart he was a romantic, wishful fool, he’d hoped for something so very different though knowing (for Chandler always knew: Chandler was a scientist at heart, and pitiless) that he didn’t deserve it.

  Going outside the family. Betraying.

  Bullshit.

  Chandler tried to explain, but he wasn’t going to apologize. Melinda interrupted, Melinda knew his heart. Hotly she said, “This has to do with your father, yes? But I don’t give a damn about your father. I can’t be involved with a man who doesn’t care more about me, and my baby, and our life together, than he cares about a stranger, I can’t be involved with a man who doesn’t care if he lives or dies! Who’d toss his life like dice, as if it was worthless. Goodnight, Chandler. Goodbye.”

  And she pushed him out the door, and shut it in his stunned face.

  3

  Forced move. He vowed then, in the spring of his twenty-eighth year, he would take his life in hand.

  He’d been drifting, passive. Like one hypnotized by The Falls. Melinda had forced him to see. She’d held up a reflecting surface to Chandler he hadn’t been able to shield his eyes from, as one must shield one’s eyes from the terrible visage of Medusa, stunned by a truth that has been both obvious and elusive. Toss your life like dice, as if worthless. It was uncanny, Melinda must love him. She had plumbed the depth of his soul.

  When had it begun, this strange trance-like passivity, this drifting he’d mistaken for loyalty, or for self-penance. Since his father’s disappearance from his life, perhaps. (Chandler had never seen his father’s lifeless body. There h
ad been no body. How, then, could he “believe” in his father’s death?) Yet he’d prided himself on being a rational individual. By far the most rational individual in his family. He’d believed himself supremely in control, responsible, mature. Since the precocious age of eleven he’d been a loyal son to his (widowed, difficult) mother. He’d been a loving, patient, and protective older brother to his (fatherless, immature) brother and sister.

  Promise! Ariah had whispered, gripping both his hands in hers.

  Give me your heart! Give me your life!

  Since junior high, Chandler had been a promising, if erratic chess player. He’d taught Juliet to play, and on wretched winter days when even his restless younger brother was confined to the house on Baltic Street, he’d taught Royall. (Ariah rarely played any board games with her children. She might have been afraid of losing to them.) Neither Juliet nor Royall cared enough for the game to play shrewdly or with patience, but they were intuitive, and sometimes lucky. Chandler wasn’t one to trust luck. He would find himself in a position in which, to prevent a lethal move by his opponent, he had to sacrifice a valuable piece. This was the forced move: a sacrifice in the short run, for a win in the long run.

  He would take his life in hand from now on. He was through with being ashamed of who he was, whom he’d been born.

  Through the spring of 1978 he made inquiries into Dirk Burnaby’s life, and into his death. To understand one, he must understand the other. He wrote brief, thoughtful letters to his father’s former law colleagues and friends, whom he knew primarily as names from the newspaper. Please, may I see you? Speak with you? It would mean so much to me as Dirk Burnaby’s son. He tried to locate the couple so central to Dirk Burnaby’s final year, Nina and Sam Olshaker, and was sorry to hear that the couple had divorced in 1963, following the strain of the court case; it seemed that Nina Olshaker had taken her children away to live in the northern part of the state, outside Plattsburgh, and had no listed telephone number. He tried to speak with several of the expert witnesses who’d given Dirk Burnaby depositions in the Love Canal case, and was told that these individuals, who’d been under pressure at the time of the lawsuit and had been frequently questioned about their relationship with Dirk Burnaby after his death, no longer cared to discuss the subject. He tried to speak with the doctor who’d headed the County Board of Health in 1961, but was informed that this well-to-do gentleman was “retired to Palm Beach, and incommunicado.” So too, other physicians who’d served on the Board at that time and had ruled in support of Swann Chemicals refused to speak with Chandler, or were elderly, or no longer alive. And so too, the defendants’ attorneys, most of whom were still practicing law in Niagara Falls, very successfully. And so too, former mayor “Spooky” Wenn, now an executive in the state Republican party, and former Niagara County judge Stroughton Howell, now a justice of the New York State Appellate Court in Albany. He made an appointment to speak with an emeritus professor of biochemistry at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and he made an appointment to speak with Dirk Burnaby’s former receptionist, Madelyn Seidman, and with the bailiff, now retired, whom Dirk Burnaby had pleaded guilty to having assaulted in Judge Howell’s courtroom at the time of the preliminary hearing. He tried to make appointments to speak with the chief of police, Fitch, who’d been a friend of Dirk Burnaby, and with the the county sheriff, and with the detectives involved in the investigation of Dirk Burnaby’s alleged accident, but none of these men would see him.

  Of course, what had he expected? He was an adult, he knew the ways of the world. The male world of power, intrigue, threat.

  And yet: after having refused to take calls from Chandler for weeks, Chief of Police Fitch telephoned Chandler directly to inform him that the NFPD investigation in 1962 “turned up plenty you wouldn’t want to know about but we spared your family, see? We ruled ‘accident,’ the insurance company had to pay out.” Before Chandler could respond, Fitch hung up.

  Accident. Chandler was supposed to be grateful the ruling hadn’t been suicide, was that it?

  “Maybe you murdered him. All of you. Bastards.”

  He’d thought so, as a kid. For a while. Until the thought faded, as the fantasies of adolescence fade, of necessity.

  Sixteen years. Amnesia.

  Now memories were rushing back, making him wince with pain. Like sensation returning to frostbitten parts of the body.

  Never cry. No tears. No one is worth your tears.

  Your mother is the one who loves you.

  He was scientifically-minded, and so he knew: he carried the genes of both his mother and father, equally. He owed his allegiance not to one but to two. Not one, but two contested in his soul.

  Yet the contest had always gone to Ariah. The other, the father, was dead, vanquished. The mother had survived and was supreme. And her opinion mattered so strangely much to Chandler, even now, in his adulthood; often, he felt under her spell, as if something were unresolved between them, unspoken.

  Long ago she’d sung to him, cradled him in her arms, adored him.

  My first-born son! Ariah had always been extravagant in her speech, like a doomed figure in a Wagner opera. There is only the first-born, no one speaks of second- or third-born. Yet Chandler was clear-sighted enough to know that of course Ariah favored Royall, of her sons; she tried, tried very hard, to favor Juliet, her daughter, over both her sons. Chandler, the first-born, had been rapidly demoted. He knew, he didn’t spare himself. But he loved Ariah just the same, and would always love her. He was enough his mother’s son to be grateful for the mere accident of having been born.

  Ariah had said dryly, “Einstein says he couldn’t believe in a God who played dice with the universe. I say, that’s all God does is play dice. Like it or lump it, fellas.”

  She’d been furious with Chandler over the hostage incident. Fortunately she hadn’t seen the live coverage on local television, but neighbors had rushed to inform her. And there was the next day’s Gazette. Chandler Burnaby, junior high teacher, a “hero.” Ariah had her own ideas about what Chandler was, risking his life for a worthless Mayweather, but she’d forgiven him, as Melinda would not. Ariah had shrugged, and wiped at her eyes in that Ariah-gesture that conveyed both maternal weakness and contempt for such weakness, and laughed.

  “Well. As long as you’re alive to have dinner with us tonight. That’s something to be grateful for.”

  But Chandler was beginning to wonder: was it?

  The dead have no one to speak for them except the living.

  I am Dirk Burnaby’s son, and I am living.

  On impulse, one day, Chandler drove to l’Isle Grand to visit his father’s sisters whom he had not seen in more than sixteen years. His elderly aunts Clarice and Sylvia, whom Ariah despised. The women were both widows. Wealthy widows. Chandler saw them separately but understood that the suspicious old women had conferred by telephone, for their remarks to him were very similar. Clarice said stiffly, “Our brother Dirk was a reckless man. He died as he’d lived, without caring for others.” Sylvia said stiffly, “Our brother Dirk had been a reckless, spoiled boy, and he died a reckless, spoiled man.” Clarice said, “We loved our baby brother. We tried not to care that he was everybody’s favorite. He joined the army, he served his country, all that was noble, he was a brilliant attorney, but then…” Sylvia said, “We loved our baby brother but something went tragically wrong in his life, you see. A curse.”

  Chandler assumed they meant the Love Canal case, but when he inquired, Sylvia said guardedly, bringing a scented handkerchief to her nose, “I don’t believe I care to say.”

  Clarice, too, spoke mysteriously of a “curse.” When Chandler asked what was this curse, his aunt said, after a moment’s hesitation, “Dirk fell in love with the red-haired woman, you see. He’d been meant to marry and live on the Island with his family; he’d been meant to oversee us, our holdings, our investments, all of Burnaby, Inc., but instead he broke his mother’s heart, and stole away a part of her soul, and nothin
g in our family has been the same since, our children, your cousins, are grown and gone, scattered to the four winds, not one of them has chosen to remain on the Island with us, and why?—because the red-haired woman put a spell on our brother. Her first husband threw himself into The Falls. And so her second husband was fated to die in The Falls. It had to happen. Momma predicted, and so it came to be.”

  First husband? Threw himself into The Falls?

  Chandler left l’Isle Grand shaken and exhausted vowing never to return.

  He knew: Claudine Burnaby, his grandmother, had died several years before, an elderly, ill woman. He’d known, not from Ariah (who would never speak of the Burnabys) but from an obituary in the Gazette. Claudine Burnaby had left the family estate Shalott to the Episcopal Church to be used as a school or retirement home. Most of her money, too, had been left to the church, not to her children and grandchildren, which Chandler supposed had been a shock to them, and an insult.

  He had to smile. Grandmother Burnaby: who’d refused to be Grandma Burnaby.

  The days were long gone when Grandmother Burnaby had had the power to upset her daughter-in-law Ariah. Chandler recalled how the haughty older woman had swooped upon him in the first Luna Park house, smelling of a powerful perfume. Black sunglasses like a beetle’s shiny opaque eyes, and a very red, glistening mouth; her hair an unearthly silver blond, that smelled of something harshly chemical. Chandler had stared up blinking from his Tinkertoy village to see a remarkable face looming above him fierce and glaring as a mask. On his grandmother’s head perched something squat and velvety black like a spider, he’d feared might leap onto him. The red-lipstick mouth moved stiffly pronouncing words Chandler would recall through his life, without understanding. He will live into the twenty-first century. Strange that anyone can be so young, and still human.