The Falls

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Nor had he understood why his grandmother had said that Chandler wasn’t her grandson. (He’d heard, or thought he’d heard these words. Or had he imagined them?) Grandmother Burnaby had left presents for him, he hadn’t much wanted to open, and after her departure Mommy tore the presents open, tore the tinsel wrapping paper, and the items of clothing, tore sleeves from little shirts, legs from pajamas, ripped and tossed and muttered and laughed to herself. She’d hugged him so tight he almost couldn’t breathe but when she took a bottle from Daddy’s cabinet and ran away upstairs she locked the door against him and so Chandler returned downstairs to the safety of his Tinkertoy village which would grow into the most elaborate village he’d ever built and which would topple into pieces only when Chandler decreed “Earthquake!” and made Daddy laugh.

  4

  Evidence. He was trained in science education, and he should have been trained in law, too. For (he was beginning to see) the world is a continuous trial, arguments among adversaries in search of (elusive, seductive) justice.

  “Jesus. That was a painful experience. The judge was obviously biased, and your father was over-involved with the case, he did what no lawyer can afford to do: lost control in the courtroom. That was the end for him.”

  “Sure we were suspicious. But nobody had any way of knowing at the time. As soon as Howell threw out the case, ‘Love Canal’ was discredited for years. It was a litigator’s joke. There were variations on it, the word love, it became a dirty joke in some circles. But things have come to light since then…unofficially, you might say. Your father’s witnesses were under pressure from Skinner and his aides not to testify. Possibly they’d been threatened. (Was there a tie-in with the mob? This is Niagara Falls–Buffalo: does a fish swim? Does a bird fly? Since the 1950’s this has been a mobbed-up region, kid.) So, sure, they’d been threatened. The Board of Health and the Board of Education stonewalled. The defense paid ‘expert witnesses’ to stack the deck for their side. Everybody knew Howell would roll over like he did except possibly Dirk Burnaby. And your poor father, Christ it was a shame, I’d known Dirk since law school and it was hell to see that man wearing down. He said to me, I’ll never forget it was the day before Howell dumped the case down the toilet, ‘Hal, it’s the pettiness of it, that breaks my heart.’ He was drinking, frankly. You could smell it on his breath. So finally they provoked him into losing control in the courtroom. And that was it for Dirk Burnaby.”

  “It was a disgraceful act. Howell profited by it, and look at him now: state appellate court. And your father has been dead for, how long—fifteen years.”

  “Your father! I still can’t believe he’s gone…He was the kindest, most considerate employer. I have never worked for a man so gentlemanly, and good. He didn’t want people to know how much of his own money he put into that terrible case, and he put his soul into it, and you could foresee what would happen, like a train wreck in slow motion, but no one could dissuade him. ‘Now, Madelyn,’ he’d say, when I was looking worried, ‘Dirk Burnaby doesn’t know what it is to lose.’ And that was his tragedy: he didn’t know. All his life he’d been successful and that blinded him to certain facts, like the nature of the people around him, men he’d gone to school with and believed he knew. He would not listen even to his lawyer friends, why’d he listen to me? Of course, I never said a word to your father about such things. It wasn’t my place. I’d tried to send that Olshaker woman away but somehow she found your father, and got her talons in him. See, he was always a gentleman, and the others—the others were politicians. That mayor, Wenn! They acquitted him a few years ago on that charge of taking kickbacks but everybody knows what he is, and the others. The lawyers, and that hypocrite judge your father had reason to believe was a friend of his. I never thought your father killed himself, not for a moment. Other people who knew him well felt the same way. Mr. Burnaby was not that type…The type to despair, and make things worse. Mr. Burnaby was the type to want to help, to make things better. You know, Chandler, I was telling your brother these things, too. He came by a few months ago. ‘Roy’ he calls himself? Your younger brother, I guess? A handsome young man, a student at Niagara University.”

  “Yeah, it was the biggest surprise of my life: your father hauled off and hit me! Square in the face. Just about broke my face. It felt like Walcott’s right must’ve felt on Marciano’s nose, smashing it and throwing blood all over. I’d had other men try to fight me in the courtroom, sure, but a bailiff is usually forewarned, and I wasn’t, with him, I mean—a lawyer! Usually, a hot-headed or volatile defendant, the deputies have him in shackles. You’re prepared. But there was an actual lawyer wheeling around and punching me in the face! Afterward, Mr. Burnaby apologized. He telephoned me, and said how sorry he was, and he sent me a check for a couple of thousand dollars dated on that very day before he died and damned if I was going to cash it, but then I thought, what the hell, and I did…By then, Dirk Burnaby had been gone six months. I never believed he was dead, somehow. But nobody could survive going over The Falls so I guess he must’ve…must be dead. See, what I regret is I never said I forgave him, I was pissed as hell at him, hitting me for doing my job, when it was Howell’s face he wanted to smash in, so I was sorry for that, I mean for not telling your father it was O.K., I understood.”

  “What can I say, son? You know, your dad was my oldest friend in the city. I guess—the world. We went to the Academy together, joined up in the army together, born a few days apart in this very month though in different years, so, sure, I miss him like hell this time of year, it kind of hurts…But there was no way I could help him. He was like one of those big beautiful moths you see at night, flying into a spider web he not only didn’t appreciate how tough it was, how nasty, but he didn’t even know it was there. Like your dad was flying blind, those last few weeks. And he was drinking, and got to that point we all get to eventually, where it’s like soil soaked through, saturated, and you take in an ounce more and the poison goes straight into your blood because your liver can’t filter it anymore. He’d had warnings, but he didn’t listen. He was like a pioneer in that kind of law, now people look back on it. At the time it just seemed sort of crazy. Everybody went around saying the same kinds of things, like how’d you tell if a man is sick from where he lives or works, or from just smoking? (Everybody smoked.) Or drinking. Or heredity, or bad luck. See? At the time people said things like this, that was how they were thinking, the archbishop talked that way on TV, doctors talked that way, every politician getting paid big bucks to talk that way, didn’t matter which party they belonged to, and of course judges, so it didn’t take much imagination to see that Dirk was going to be shot down, but when it happened it was quite a shock, let me tell you. He’d alienated most of his friends, our friends. Our mutual friends. He’d sort of alienated me, to tell the truth. All this publicity about ‘tainted air, tainted water and soil,’ et cetera, it was very bad for business. Very bad for the tourist trade…Sure I hated what the city was turning into, air smelling like a cesspool on certain days, and honeymoon couples from all over checking in my hotel and expecting, I don’t know, some kind of paradise, plus tourists from Germany, Japan, coming to see The Falls and not knowing what the city is. Sure we had complaints. Through the 1970’s it’s been getting worse. People like me, my family, we’d been in the ‘luxury hotel trade’ as it used to be called, for a long time. Now the business is mostly ‘tourist trade.’ Thank God, I got out from under the Rainbow Grand just in time, like the Titanic it would’ve been, mid-1960’s when all of the country was going to hell. (It’s still going to hell but at least they ran out of people to assassinate and drop napalm on.) Now Colborne, Inc., our family business, is diversified as all hell, like this great country of ours. We’ve got the Journeez End and the U-R-Here motels on Buffalo Avenue and Prospect. We’ve got three Tastee-Freezes and The Leaning Tower of Pizza. Bowling alleys we’ve got, Top Hat Disco & Shore Café at the Lake. In Alcott we’ve got a few concessions on the beach, plus Bingo Tent Bona
nza. The Banana Royalle franchise we’re looking into. Miniature golf! Kind of an asshole ‘sport’ I grant you, but tourists are crazy for it, Japs love it (you can figure why, eh?) so we’re building a few of those. Two Peking Villages in the area, and that Hollywood Haven Disco the cops busted, we’re possibly going to take over. The Niagara Wax Museum we bought last year, ‘heroes and victims of The Falls,’ we’re renovating, and the Cross-the-Gorge, where you ‘walk’ on a tightrope over a wild waterfall and light display, holding a pole, and there’s fans blowing wind trying to dislodge you, we’ve got terrific ideas for, this promises to be a real money-maker…Hey, sorry. You get the picture, I guess. I was at Mario’s last night and thinking how your dad loved that place. He had a weakness, like me, for Italian sausage risotto, and for Mario’s thin-crust pizza, and he’d be happy as hell to know that not much has changed there. Except for us being older and some of us dead, Mario’s hasn’t changed at all.”

  “Your father made one mistake a litigator can’t make: he underestimated the moral rot of the adversary. He was of that caste and he hadn’t grasped how corrupt they were because he looked at them and saw men like himself. And that was true, to a degree. But they were—they are—evil. They hired lawyers, doctors, ‘research scientists,’ health inspectors to do their evil for them. Telling a mother her child has ‘congenital leukemia’ not something caused by benzene, and that benzene bubbling up in her own back yard on the Love Canal. Telling men and women in their thirties they have ‘pathogenic livers’—‘pathogenic kidneys’—they were born with, when it was what they’d been eating out of their own gardens, poisoned by the Love Canal. Brain tumors almost certainly caused by tetrachloroethylene they attributed to ‘third-degree television tube radiation.’ Kids with asthma, weak lungs, bladder infections, these were ‘congenital deficiencies.’ (You look up congenital in the dictionary: ‘dating from birth.’) Women having miscarriages, babies born with had hearts, missing part of their colons, you ascribe to more ‘congenital deficiencies.’ When the state finally ordered blood tests for the Love Canal residents, finally in 1971, in the Armory, people were asked to come at 8 A.M. and waited all day, and at 5 P.M. half were still waiting. There was a ‘needle shortage.’ ‘Nurse shortage.’ Three hundred blood samples were ‘contaminated.’ Lab results were ‘inconclusive’—‘misfiled.’ Some of us have been criticized for suggesting these doctors are not much different from the Nazi doctors doing experiments on human beings, but I hold to that charge. The case the Coalition is presenting builds upon your father’s but of course it’s much larger in scope. You’ve been reading about us, I assume. We have five full-time lawyers including me. We have investigators, and a team of paralegals. We’re not funded like the adversaries, but we are funded. We have the new findings of the State Board of Health—finally!—and in our favor. There are one hundred twenty people represented in this class-action suit. The Love Canal Homeowners Association, they call themselves now. ‘Love Canal’—it’s like waving a red flag. We’re demanding $200 million to settle, minimum. The judiciary is much more sympathetic with this kind of litigation in 1978. There’s pressure on Carter to declare Love Canal a ‘disaster area’—the federal government would then buy out homeowners, help pay compensation. This will happen, it’s only a matter of when. Dirk Burnaby is a hero to us, even with—well, his mistakes. When this is over, and we win, I want to organize a memorial for him, a man like that should not be forgotten…My theory is, your father began to fall apart when he realized how deep the rot was. I was just a kid at the time, growing up on the east side. My dad and uncles worked at the chemical factories, including Swann and Dow. ‘Better Living Through Chemistry.’ I’ve always seen the bastards for what they are, their PR tactics don’t fool me. They’d still be manufacturing the sticky-stuff, napalm, if anybody’d pay them to, and the ‘research scientists’ are right now working on biological warfare weapons within a few miles of this office. You teach that at La Salle, Chandler? Well, maybe you should, if your subject is science…Do I believe that Dirk Burnaby killed himself? No. Died in an ‘accident’? No. The bastards killed him. You’ll never prove it, though.”

  5

  A SWEETLY SCENTED LETTER came addressed to Chandler Burnaby at La Salle Junior High. Handwritten, purple ink on lavender stationery.

  Dear Chandler Burnaby—

  I owe my life to you. I want so badly to see you and thank you in person. I have come to your school and waited outside but went away again out of shyness. I hope you will not misunderstand! I want only to see your face, the goodness in your face. Not in photographs but in actual life. May I?

  I am not engaged to marry anyone. I was recently, but am no longer.

  Your friend forever,

  Cynthia Carpenter

  Chandler foresaw: a fumbling, emotional meeting. An impressionable young woman primed to fall in love with him. A very attractive young woman primed to worship him as a hero.

  Unlike Melinda who knew his heart. Melinda who’d shut a door in his face.

  Chandler put away the scented letter from Cynthia Carpenter, as a memento.

  A memento of this strange season in his life in which he was both a savior and a fool, revered and held in contempt, adored and despised in about equal measure.

  6

  THERE CAME A DAY in that season, an hour when Chandler’s loneliness became so acute, he yearned to speak with Royall. Suddenly, for Chandler, there was no one but Royall. His heart was full to bursting.

  But Royall didn’t want to see him, did he? Royall hated him.

  And Royall, living downtown, had no telephone. Juliet advised, Just see him. Go there, knock on his door, he’ll let you in. You know Royall.

  Chandler wasn’t so certain any longer, did he know Royall?

  Juliet laughed. “Royall is asking new people he meets to call him ‘Roy.’ What if he asks us? I never could! He’ll always be Royall to me.”

  Chandler did as Juliet suggested, showed up at Royall’s apartment on Fourth Street, knocked firmly at the door. When Royall opened it, the brothers stared at each other for a startled moment, without speaking. Then Royall said, trying to smile, “Well, hell. It’s you.” Chandler said, “Royall, or is it ‘Roy’? May I come inside?” Royall’s face reddened. “Sure. C’mon in! I wasn’t exactly expecting anybody.”

  Royall had been reading at the kitchen table, taking notes in a spiral notebook. His handwriting was childlike, large and careful. The book he was reading was a paperback edition of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. He pushed these aside and yanked out a chair for Chandler.

  Royall, reading Hamlet! Chandler smiled.

  It was a cubbyhole of a kitchen, not much larger than the table. Several rinsed glasses, plates, and stainless steel cutlery lay neatly on a counter, readied for Royall’s next meal. There were cooking odors, a predominant smell of something soft, mealy, and susceptible to scorch—oatmeal? Through a partly opened cupboard door Chandler had a glimpse of canned soups, a bottle of tomato juice, a box of Quaker Oats. His heart went out to his younger brother as to a child bravely playing house, having run away from home. On his side, Royall saw with surprise that his schoolteacher brother was looking uncertain, brooding, red-eyed in a way he’d rarely seen him; Chandler’s jaws had been carelessly shaved, and his jacket was buttoned crookedly. He was breathing through his mouth, having hurried up two flights of stairs. Without a word Royall took two beers from a dwarf refrigerator beside a two-burner gas stove, and the brothers sat knee to knee at a battered Formica-topped table purchased, as Royall boasted, for five dollars at Goodwill.

  They would sit at this table, they would speak earnestly together for several hours. By which time night came on, and Royall’s six-pack of beer was depleted.

  In a lowered, quavering voice Chandler told Royall all that he’d learned about their father. These past several weeks. Royall then told Chandler all that he’d learned about their father. These past several months.

  Chandler said, “Jesus! Sometimes it se
ems to me he only just disappeared, the other day. It’s still so raw and—” (But what was the word Chandler sought? He shook his head, baffled.)

  Royall said, “No. It was long ago. Like Mom tried to make us believe, it seemed to have happened before I was born.”

  “That’s not your fault, Royall. You were only four.”

  “Four is old enough to remember something. But I can’t. I keep trying, and I can’t.”

  “Maybe that’s better—”

  “Don’t say that! Shit.”

  Royall ran his hands roughly through his hair. Chandler could see that he’d been thinking of this, tormenting himself with this. He spoke in a slow, pained manner more typical of Chandler than of Royall. “All this winter, I’ve been having weird dreams about him. But I don’t even remember the dreams when I wake up. I can feel what they are, like my guts are sick, but with no memory.”

  Chandler was thinking, yes. He’d been bombarded with dreams, too. And no memory, only sensation. Anger, and despair.

  Royall said, “Dad shouldn’t have died. He didn’t deserve to die like that. Some people say, maybe he was killed.” Royall’s voice trembled.

  Chandler got stiffly to his feet, feeling his heart kick.

  He’d rehearsed what he would say, when it came to this. He had known it must come to this.

  Royall glanced up at Chandler, narrowing his eyes as if he were peering into a bright light. He drained the last of his warm beer and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “I’m trying to wake up, though. From the dream. My whole life, a dream. Or whatever it was. This ‘Royall’ I used to be, that Mom loved. Lots of people loved. I didn’t think I was strong enough, but I am.” Royall left the kitchen, and returned with an object for Chandler to examine. “I wouldn’t ever use this,” he said. Chandler stared in disbelief. A gun? Royall had a gun? It was snub-barreled with a sullen bluish-oily gleam and a worn walnut handle, and was about nine inches in length. Royall was saying, “It belongs to my boss. I mean, he has more than one ‘firearm,’ he’s lent me this. I have a permit to carry it, don’t worry. He took me to the precinct station in person. But, Chandler—I wouldn’t ever use it.”