The Falls

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Our Lady of The Falls

  Why can’t it be true? Why can’t we believe? Some things in which we don’t believe must be true…”

  In the spring of 1891 in Niagara Falls there lived a fifteen-year-old dairy maid lately settled to live with relatives in the area from County Cork, Ireland. This girl was said to be of a “neutral” religious disposition: she believed in the Holy Roman Catholic Church and its sacraments, but was not one of those passionate believers who attend mass and take holy communion on days other than Sunday.

  Within a year of the dairy maid’s arrival in Niagara Falls she was deeply troubled, pale and distraught and sleepless. Abruptly she withdrew from the boisterous company of her relatives. She was drawn to The Falls to expiate her sin which was a sin of the flesh perpetrated upon her by the dairy owner’s son. This young man swore he loved the dairy maid, in the early days of their acquaintanceship; in time, he swore he would strangle her with his hands that were toughened from milking the slippery teats of cows lowing and moaning to be milked as (the young man crudely believed) the dairy maid had wished to be “milked” by her lover: ejaculated into, his creamy semen coating her insides as she whimpered and sobbed in pain, thrashed her thighs from side to side, bit her lower lip hard enough to draw blood.

  This girl, a virgin until so seduced, and impregnated, was not the cause of that sin; yet she carried the consequence of it inside her belly hard as a nut that would not be dislodged. (To her shame, the girl did try to abort the unwanted baby in her womb. Oh she tried, she tried! Stamping her heels, striking herself in the belly, running until she collapsed panting like a stricken deer. And in this she knew herself doubly a sinner, and rightly despised by God.) In a delirium of sorrow, malnourished, self-loathing, in the third month of her pregnancy when all who knew her shunned her, and the dairy owner barred her from his property, the shamed girl made her way on foot to the Niagara River, and to The Falls, of which she’d heard it was a place for sinners to cleanse themselves, by way of ridding the world of themselves. She removed her shoes as a penitant walking in dirt, sharp stones, tall grasses to the very edge of the rushing river, that acted upon her like a spell. Never had she gazed upon such a sight as the rapids, The Falls, the Gorge billowing mist like clouds of steam that seemed to her in her distraught state “as if it must be boiling hot, like the bowels of Hell.”

  The dairy maid had made her decision, and was calm in her actions. She would commit herself to the river as, she’d heard, numerous others had done, to be borne swiftly over The Falls. In this way she would spare her family the burden of shame she must bring them, and the unwanted bastard child no one (except perhaps the dairy maid) could love. Yet staring at the clouds of mist the dairy maid smiled to perceive several small rainbows, shimmering in thin rays of sunshine against an overcast sky. And with that innocent smile she felt her “heart leap” and was granted a vision of a radiant female figure rising before her above the great gorge at a distance of perhaps forty feet, hovering in the air. The feet of this figure disappeared in the mist generated by the Horseshoe Falls, and her haloed head touched the very sky. The dairy maid was stricken to the heart, and fell to her knees exclaiming Holy Mary, Mother of God, for she had recognized the Virgin immediately by her serene, beautifully composed face and her royal-blue robe that fell in graceful folds about her slender body. As she had been taught in childhood in the great church of her baptism the dairy maid surrendered herself to this vision with not a moment’s hesitancy or doubt, praying in a loud ecstatic voice Holy Mary, Mother of God! Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death, Amen.

  The dairy maid then begged the Virgin Mary to forgive her, and the Virgin Mary smiled gently upon her and spoke so softly that her words were obscured by the roar of The Falls yet the sense of them was communicated to the dairy maid as clearly as if the Virgin had whispered into her ear saying My child there is nothing to forgive. Love, and you do God’s will.

  At these words, the dairy maid sank into a swoon and lost consciousness and was not discovered on the riverbank for several hours; and was afterward delirious, with a high fever, for days. Carried to a nearby home on Prospect Avenue, she was treated by a physician, and woke weeping in joy; she told her rescuers of the vision she’d been granted of The Virgin of The Falls, repeating her story numerous times to all who would listen, and to priests of the Roman Catholic Church, who were immediately summoned. The Irish dairy maid was uneducated and illiterate and yet, witnesses claimed, she spoke with such certitude, her face radiant, it was impossible to believe that she was not telling the truth. Almost, you could see the Virgin through the dairy maid’s eyes, so singularly did she convey the miraculous vision she’d been granted, and its special message for the faithful. There is nothing to forgive. Love, and you do God’s will.

  On a hilly site three miles north of The Falls, a shrine was erected to commemorate the dairy maid’s vision: the Basilica of Our Lady of The Falls. In time, after numerous miracles of “healing” and “revelation” were said to occur there, the Basilica grew, and in 1949 a new, thirty-foot statue of the Virgin Mary, executed in Vermont marble and said to weigh more than twenty tons, was erected in such a position that it could be seen for miles, very like a vision, looking toward the city of Niagara Falls and the river. You saw, and you wanted to believe. You saw, and looked away, and laughed, and hot acid spilled into the back of your mouth, you were sickened and ashamed and yet: you wanted to believe. Heal me.

  The Voices

  1

  There’s a curse on our name.

  No. Our name is a curse.

  The voices! The voices in The Falls…In winter The Falls are encased in ice and rainbows of ice glitter across the Gorge and mist is frozen like spun glass covering the trees and there is a frail ice bridge that forms across the river between Luna Island and Bridal Veil Falls and you want to believe you can cross that bridge and the voices are muted, almost inaudible, you have to hold your breath to hear. But with the thaw in late March, early April, the voices return, louder, harsher, yet seductive, and by June as the anniversary of his death approaches the voices became clamorous and impatient and you hear them in your sleep far from the rushing river. Juliet! Juliet! Burn-a-by! Shame, shame’s the name. You know your name. Come to your father in The Falls.

  “Zarjo, no. Stay.”

  Juliet whispers goodbye to Zarjo, roused from his warm inert sleep at the foot of her bed. Buries her face in the dog’s familiar coarse fur and allows him to lick her face, her hands, panting silently, shivering with doggy enthusiasm wanting to be taken with her—where?

  In the stillness before dawn. In a twilight of rain that has gradually lightened to mist, to fog.

  She must leave quickly before Ariah knows. Before Ariah can prevent her. For in her bed that night, as she tried to sleep, the voices pushed near, jeering, derisive Burn-a-by! Burn-a-by! and among them his voice, she’s convinced, the single voice among the others that’s calm, gentle—Juliet! It’s time.

  (Is that his voice? Juliet believes it is.)

  (Though born too late. Her memory of him is transparent as falling water.)

  Yet when she sings, Juliet sings for him. Secretly, for him.

  In recitals, she imagines him somewhere in the audience. Not in the first several rows with parents and relatives and classmates, but somewhere, in the darkness. He would be sitting alone, and he would be listening attentively. When she sings beautifully, it’s because he listens so attentively.

  Her solo in “The Messiah.” At the Music Hall. For which she’d been praised. And such applause. For him!

  A shy girl, her eyes welling with emotion. Swiping at her eyes seeing him smile, a look of fatherly pride.

  At other times, unpredictably, her voice quavers and loses its strength, she feels that panicked sensation, her throat on the verge of shutting up: she knows the futility of singing for a man she can’t remember, who died sixteen years ago.

  We’re happy, but only while the music lasts.<
br />
  So Ariah has conceded. And so it must be true.

  (It was after Juliet’s solo in “The Messiah” that Madame Ehrenreich spoke with her about studying at the Buffalo Academy, where Madame teaches. A scholarship for the study of voice. A scholarship for Juliet Burnaby who was only sixteen. Juliet would not have to transfer to another high school but could commute into the city twice a week after classes, not a lengthy bus ride, the Academy would pay her expenses. A golden opportunity! her teachers said. Smiling at Juliet Burnaby as if expecting the frightened girl to smile back.)

  Did this house have a daddy she would ask Mommy, and Mommy would say No.

  Did this house have a daddy she would ask her brothers when she was just old enough to be desperate to know and Chandler said Yes but he went away. She asked Why? Did he hate us? and Chandler said evasively It was just something that happened, I guess. Like weather. Mommy doesn’t want us to talk about it, see, Juliet? And there came Royall hot-faced, childish fists clenched, who knew little more than Juliet knew but had formed a boy’s judgment I hate HIM! I don’t miss HIM! I’m glad he’s gone away.

  Zarjo follows her to the foot of the stairs, his toenails clicking with melancholy precision, an older dog, breathing hoarsely, with an older dog’s economy of motion, sensing that his hind legs might not retain the power to keep him balanced at such a steep angle, and Juliet is moving decisively away from him, she’s serious about not taking him with her and he won’t, cannot, bark inside the house: he’s a very obedient dog, trained not to bark at trifles.

  “Zarjo, I said no. Stay.”

  Juliet leaves by the front door. The farthest door from Ariah’s bedroom at the upstairs, rear of the house.

  The last of Ariah’s children to leave. To flee.

  The last of Ariah’s children to love her, so much it can’t be borne. I am not you, Mother. Let me go!

  Barefoot, running. Her numbed feet barely feel the pavement. And the chill, dewy grass, and the hard-packed dirt. As if she feels, not frightened now, but exhilarated. The decision having been made, and not by her. And hurriedly: she’s in her white eyelet cotton nightgown smelly from bad dreams, her frayed trench coat over it belted tight.

  Shame, shame. Know your name.

  Commit the Act & be done with it.

  In the stillness before dawn. Shifting walls of mist before dawn. When the world is dreamlike and, running through it, you are both the dreamer and the dream. Long ago the warrior-gods of the Ongiaras and Tuscaroras prowled this landscape, they were tall, cruel gods, more powerful than any human beings, but now these gods are gone and only their ghosts remain, mist-shapes drifting and fading in the corner of an eye. Chandler has said the landscape is always changing, The Falls are continually changing. Time, erosion. The Indian gods are gone, but no other gods have taken their place.

  Except: the Niagara Falls City Transit buses, lighted from within like living organisms, gliding as if underwater and passing with harsh pneumatic exhalations of breath. Buses marked for Ferry St., Prospect Ave., Tenth St., Parkway & Hyde. Juliet is furtive, shrinking from being seen, crossing Baltic Street to the park which is deserted at this hour, shrouded in fog. Runs, runs! She’s a strong girl, her lungs are strong from singing. A slight girl, always looking younger than her age. She has been told not to walk alone in Baltic Park, her brother Royall has scolded her, but at this hour there’s no one, she’s running through a field of wet grass, now at the edge of a softball field that looks small, truncated in scale as a child’s board game in the hazy light. If her body isn’t found. No one will know. Like her father, gone. Ariah will say, gone and not coming back, and so we won’t think of her any longer, we will forget her. A block away, a freight train is passing. The familiar noise of rattling boxcars. There’s comfort in this familiar sound. Shame’s the name, know your name, what’s your game? In a dream Juliet Burnaby is being transported to The Falls by boxcar. This is because of something Mr. Pankowski said. The sound of trains in this city, the noise of boxcars a nightmare to him he could not expect any American to understand, but Juliet said yes she understood, it’s boxcars that, if you were going to be taken away, like cattle for the slaughterhouse, would take you away. And the train would be going so fast, you couldn’t leap off.

  The sky above the Niagara River, a mile away, is a great chasm streaked with sudden light. Flames, filaments of light from the sun at the horizon. No. Not afraid!

  2

  THE VOICES! The voices in The Falls I heard when I was a little girl and Mommy pushed me in the stroller close to the edge where the cold spray wetted our faces, our eyelashes and lips and we licked our lips and laughed in excitement.

  Oh, delicious!

  See, Juliet darling? This is happiness.

  She loved me best, Mommy said. I was her daughter, her baby girl and my brothers were boys. I was a girl like Mommy, and my brothers could never be girls. This time I will do it right. This time, conceived without sin.

  Mommy sang to me. Mommy played the piano, and sang to me. And Mommy sat me on her lap at the piano, and held me tight inside her arms, and placed my pudgy baby fingers on the keys, and we played piano together; and Mommy urged me to sing, Mommy rewarded me with kisses when I sang in my baby-girl breathy voice.

  These were magic times. There was no one but Mommy.

  Singing Girls and boys come out to play. The moon doth shine as bright as day. Singing Lavender blue, dilly-dilly! Lavender green. When I am King, dilly-dilly! You shall be Queen. And Mommy’s favorite which she sang at the piano, but also when I was in bed and slipping into sleep Hush-a-bye baby in the tree-top! When the wind blows, the cradle will rock. When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall. Down will come baby, cradle and all! But Mommy laughed, and showed how she would catch me in her arms if I fell.

  But later. When I was bigger. When the voices came into the room. And Mommy said There’s nothing. Stop! And Mommy pressed her hands against my ears, and against her own ears. And next morning if I said the voices had come into the room, Mommy would scold me; or would stand up suddenly, and walk away. And one of my brothers would take care of me.

  For Mommy ceased to love me when I was no longer a baby. Too big to be carried in her arms like a doll, and too big to fit on her lap at the piano. I think that was when. Calling out Mommy! in the night. And Mommy didn’t want to hear. And I learned finally to hide such cries in the pillow. But the pillowcase became stained which Mommy didn’t like and which disgusted Mommy, like other stains I could not help. And I would crawl away to hide. And when they called me, I would not answer. The voices were whispers sometimes, I pressed my ear against the wall to hear, or against the windowpane, or the floorboards. Royall tried to hear, but could not. Royall said there was nothing, not to be afraid. That time I went where Mommy said not to go, into the cellar, in the dark, and fell from the steep wooden steps and cut my lip and crawled away to hide from the voices mixed with the wind and the freight cars and it was Zarjo who found me; except Zarjo didn’t know I did not want to be found, to Zarjo everything was a game. And so he poked me with his moist nose, he kissed and tickled me with his slippery tongue. Zarjo barked, which he rarely did inside the house and so they found me where I was huddled on the floor behind a stack of old rabbit cages. My brothers calling Jully-ett! And Mommy hurried downstairs shining the flashlight in my face, my eyes that were blind. Mommy screamed when she saw my bleeding mouth Juliet, what have you done to yourself, oh you bad girl you’ve done it on purpose haven’t you! In her widened green eyes I saw that Mommy wanted to shake me, Mommy wanted to hurt me because I was not her baby daughter now, I had disappointed her not once but many times, and yet she was Ariah and not another woman in the neighborhood who would scream at her children, slap and spank them, she was Ariah Burnaby the piano teacher and she was not one to strike any child and so her hands seizing me were gentle, her voice was low and controlled telling me I must never disobey her again, I must never come down into this filthy place again, or Mommy would give me aw
ay.

  It upset Mommy that I was laughing. Or made a sound like laughing. And I was dirty, and wet my panties. And there would be a scar like a starburst in my upper lip that would never go away, so people’s eyes would always drift onto it and I would sense how they wanted to flick it off as you’d flick off a piece of dust, they would want to brush it off to make me a pretty girl and not a freaky girl with something pale and shiny on her upper lip. And later, when I was going to Baltic Elementary and Ronnie Herron pushed me on a swing too high, and wouldn’t stop when I begged him, and I fell off, and the flying seat of the swing struck the left side of my forehead knocking me unconscious and cutting me so deeply I’d be covered in blood, taken to the emergency room of the Niagara Falls General Hospital by ambulance and the wound stitched up and ever afterward there would be a little sickle moon in my forehead that was pale too, and shiny. And Mommy came to be fearful of me believing me demented, a child who would hurt herself deliberately in order to hurt Mommy; a child who ran away to hide from her groveling in filth in the cellar Mommy could not bear, not the smell of, not the dirt floor that flooded when it rained and the ill-fitting stone walls oozing muck and the stacks of rusted, broken rabbit cages that smelled of rabbit droppings.

  She isn’t mine, sometimes I think she isn’t mine Mommy would say and my brothers would tell her no that wasn’t right, Juliet was their sister and Juliet belonged to Mommy just like they did.

  Ariah too has long suffered from insomnia. And now in the rainy spring of 1978 as the anniversary of his death approaches, and the house is empty of her sons, now her insomnia rages like a malevolent fire. Not that she would ever acknowledge such a weakness, even to a doctor. All weakness fills Ariah with disgust, and her own with self-disgust. Her children, growing up in the house at 1703 Baltic, will recall hearing her stealthy footsteps on the stairs in the early morning, before dawn; hearing her in the kitchen setting a tea kettle on the gas stove. And in the chilly unlighted room at the rear of the house as she waits for the water to boil she sits at the spinet lightly touching the keys, depressing the keys as a devout Roman Catholic might it isn’t just music that makes Ariah happy but the mere possibility, the promise, of music. Music can be your salvation, Juliet. You will raise yourself from the worst in yourself. Have faith! But by nine in the evening Ariah is often so exhausted she falls alseep on the living room sofa, Zarjo drowsing across her knees, even as she listens to her much-anticipated broadcast of the New York Philharmonic on the radio. And her children exchange nervous glances wondering: Should we wake Mom, or let her sleep?—either way Mom will be annoyed with us, and embarrassed.