The Falls

by Joyce Carol Oates

  And the tattoo on his left wrist. Of that, Juliet would never ask.

  Yet Joseph Pankowski was not reticent. He talked freely, happily, of certain subjects. He was nervous, ardent, stammering in his enthusiasms. He had a weakness for Hollywood movies of the 1930’s and 1940’s, which he watched on late-night TV. He counted himself a baseball “fan.” He was vehement in his belief that Eisenhower would prove to be the “last, great” president of the United States. (Years after the senator’s death, he spoke bitterly of Joseph McCarthy as the “ugly face of the American Gestapo.”) In his heavily accented English he embarrassed Juliet by telling her that her singing, especially of German lieder, gave him much joy. That Ariah’s “brave” piano playing gave him much joy. That meeting them had “given hope” to his life.

  Mr. Pankowski had been a widower for several years. He lived alone above his shoe-repair shop on South Quay. (A “mixed” neighborhood east of downtown.) His children, two sons, were grown and long gone from upstate New York. And no grandchildren, though both were married. “These young people whine, ‘Why should we bring children into such an evil world?’ As if they were us, and had lived their parents’ lives in Europe. They break our hearts.” Ariah, uneasy at such personal revelations, said, “Isn’t that the role of children, to break their parents’ hearts?”

  But Mr. Pankowski wished to speak seriously. That was the man’s failing, in Ariah’s eyes: he could not, or would not, make jokes where jokes badly needed to be made.

  In Prospect Park where they went for open-air summer concerts, Ariah walked swiftly ahead, impatient to find three seats. Juliet lingered with Mr. Pankowski who walked stiff-legged, rubbing pensively at the nape of his neck. He said, “ ‘Evil,’ ‘good’—what is this vocabulary? God allows evil for the simple reason that God makes no distinction between evil and good. As God makes no distinction between predator and prey. I did not lose my first, young family to evil but to human actions, and—only think!—a marvel of its kind, unspeakable!—the actions of lice, devouring them alive in the death camp. And so you must grant to God what is God and not try to think of what you have lost, for that way is madness.”

  Juliet would pretend she had not heard some of this.

  No, she had not heard. The man’s speech was unreliable, especially when he spoke passionately.

  Not that evening in Prospect Park but another evening, when Ariah was out of earshot, Juliet asked boldly to see the tattoo on Mr. Pankowski’s wrist that looked like nothing more than dark ink beginning to fade. Yet it would never fade for it was stitched into the man’s very skin.

  B6115

  Wanting to ask Why live, then? It’s God that is mad.

  7

  YET, IN SECRET, Juliet wishes to believe. Desperately, Juliet wishes to believe.

  A vision! Such visions came, sometimes, to Christians who were special, “devout.”

  Ariah had taken Juliet to a dozen churches in Niagara Falls by the time Juliet was twelve, and in each of these churches Juliet had watched the others, the “worshippers,” through her linked-together fingers brought up to partly hide her face, thinking Are they serious? Is this real? Why can’t I feel what they are feeling? Especially, Juliet was baffled by worshippers sobbing with evident joy, tears streaming down their contorted faces. And Ariah tried to believe, too. Often Ariah volunteered her services as an organist or a choir director. But within a few months, or weeks, Ariah would grow bored, restless. Such silly people. I can’t respect them.

  Growing up in Niagara Falls, Juliet has been aware for years of the local legend of Our Lady of The Falls. The story of the little Irish dairy maid and the Virgin Mary who appeared to the dairy maid in the mists of the Horseshoe Falls. In ninth grade, she made a (secret) pilgrimage to the shrine three miles north of the city, on foot; she has brooded over the dairy maid’s fate, which was to have been taken in by well-to-do Catholics who took care of her during her pregnancy and adopted her baby when it was born, and found employment for her in a family-owned canning factory. With a part of her mind Juliet is skeptical yet with another part of her mind she identifies with the fifteen-year-old scorned by everyone, even relatives; the girl who’d been drawn to the river hoping to cleanse the world of herself but who was granted, instead, a miraculous vision.

  Ariah has said there is no God, and numerous are His prophets.

  Juliet is too much Ariah’s daughter to believe in Roman Catholic superstitions and yet: in her loneliness she has fantasized that a vision might come to her if she were utterly sincere about wanting, needing, intending to die.

  I would not need to be saved if the vision came to me. The vision would be enough.

  She has wondered if, at the instant of his death, as his car skidded into the guard railing, smashed through and plunged into the river, her father, Dirk Burnaby, had experienced a vision.

  And what that vision might be.

  She has wondered Is Death itself a vision?

  Luckily, Ariah never learned that Juliet had made a pilgrimage to the Shrine of Our Lady of The Falls. Or Chandler, or Royall who would have teased her.

  The shrine was a stunning disappointment. Naively Juliet had expected something very different, more inward, spiritual. But Our Lady of The Falls swarmed with tourists. There were chartered buses, enormous parking lots, the “Pilgrim Center Restaurant” and souvenir shop; curiosity-seekers toting cameras, ailing individuals of various ages and degrees of disability in wheelchairs being pushed gamely up ramps, and the faithful on their knees reciting the rosary with bowed heads, conspicuously meek and adoring of the colossal Virgin Mary, thirty feet high, looming above them from the basilica dome. The statue was solid white marble, visible for miles, grotesque as a mannequin amid the hilly countryside; promotional material for the shrine boasted it weighed more than twenty tons. Juliet stared at the Virgin’s vapid female face with its blind eyes and smile bland as that of a woman in a TV commercial. “You! You are not the one.”

  What a betrayal of the dairy maid’s vision of 1891! Juliet was angry on behalf of the girl, a girl so like herself, yearning and helpless. The Irish girl had had her vision and it had been stolen from her, debased even as it was magnified, just as the girl had had her baby and the baby was taken from her.

  Nothing to forgive. Love, and you do God’s will.

  On this mist-shrouded June morning as she makes her way barefoot as a penitent to the river Juliet is thinking not of the shrine, not of the tourists and the ugly looming statue but of the dairy maid, her lost sister; and of the vision that is promised. Come! Come to your father in The Falls.

  8

  “WHO IS—?”

  Ariah wakes with a start, thinking there’s someone in the room with her. Or in her bed.

  Among the twisted sheets. (Which husband? Which year is this?)

  Her ridiculous heart is thudding. Like most chronic insomniacs Ariah often lies awake for hours, wretched interminable hours, then falls into a stuporous sleep for an hour or two only to wake exhausted, with a thudding heart and a parched mouth as if she’s been dragged by nightmare-horses across an acrid, stony plain.

  This day in June. These days. Infamy. Oh, if she could sleep her stuporous sleep for a solid month!

  A freight train has wakened her, damned Baltimore & Ohio boxcars rattling through her skull. And something scratching at her bedroom door, with shy persistence. Zarjo?

  Ariah would snap, “Bad dog!” Except she knows that this intelligent, sensitive animal who has lived with her for sixteen years, trained by Ariah herself, would not dare wake her for a trifle.

  What time is it? Just past 6 A.M. An overcast morning. A few birds call tentatively to one another in the jungly back yard. For a dazed sullen moment Ariah can’t recall if this is supposed to be a season of warm weather, or cold; if both her sons have left her, or only just Chandler.

  No. Royall has left, too.

  But there’s Juliet: her daughter.

  And there’s Zarjo, her best friend, sensing sh
e’s awake, scratching more emphatically at the door, and beginning to whimper.

  9

  Between us there’s a secret.

  For years he has been watching her. Not continuously, not every day. But often. Juliet has never consciously looked for him, sensing that she should not, she must not. Ariah has warned her not to “make eye contact” with strangers or any others “who might do a young girl harm.” And so Juliet has shyly looked away, Juliet has purposefully turned away, learning to be unknowing, unconscious. More and more she lives inside music. In her head music plays continuously, coming from a mysterious source as light comes from a mysterious source called “sun”—“the sun.”

  Yet, he’s there. The shaved-headed boy. Waiting.

  Juliet first became aware of him, the something strange, something special about him, when she was in fifth or sixth grade. The slow realization, gradual as the change of season, that she sees him just a little too often, at approximately the same distance, observing her in silence: on Baltic Street, on Forty-eighth, on Ferry. On Garrison (where he lives in a barn-sized clapboard house at the intersection of Veterans’ Road). Sometimes she sees him when she’s waiting at the bus stop, to go downtown. And outside the public library downtown. Perhaps she sees him most frequently when she’s trailing dreamily through Baltic Park, coming home from school.

  Rarely, in fact never, has Juliet noticed the shaved-headed boy watching her when she’s with other people. Only when she’s alone.

  A big boy, impassive, ugly. Unsmiling. She glances up to see, at a distance of thirty or more feet, something fixed and fanatic in his eyes.

  Between us there’s a secret.

  One day you will know.

  Why hasn’t Juliet told anyone, not Ariah, not Chandler, not her brother Royall, about the shaved-headed boy? She might have told a teacher at school. She might have told a classmate, a girlfriend.

  Why, Juliet doesn’t want to think.

  From childhood she seems to have known that to speak of the shaved-headed boy to another person would be futile.

  He has never approached her. He has never spoken her name in derision, like other boys. He has never harassed her, threatened her.

  One day you’ll know.

  This past year, Juliet has seen the boy, now grown into a hulking young man, at her choral concerts at the high school and elsewhere. She has even (this is more alarming, of course) seen him at rehearsals in the high school auditorium. Stonecrop always sits by himself in the last row, in the shadows. He’s big, but can pass still for a high school student. Juliet wants to think that he doesn’t hate her, doesn’t want to harass her or ridicule her. Where other boys murmur Jully-ett! Burn-a-by! making lewd sucking noises with their mouths, the shaved-headed boy is silent. Waiting.

  This, too, is a secret: how, several years ago when Juliet was twelve, in seventh grade, Stonecrop intervened when a gang of older boys were tormenting Juliet on her way home from school.

  These were ninth graders with surnames like Mayweather, Herron, D’Amato, Sheehan. They teased and harassed other girls, not exclusively Juliet, but Juliet had become their favorite target. Why do they hate me, is it my face? My name? The boys were noisy and gregarious and resented it that Juliet Burnaby seemed indifferent to them. Her dreamy distracted manner provoked them. Her way of staring at the ground, or into the distance. (Hearing music in her head?) The scars on her mouth and forehead seemed to intrigue them. They were boys with their own scars. They brushed near her, jostled her. Like dogs crowding her. Jully-ett. Hey: who bit your face? Not knowing if she was a disfigured girl, a freak, or if she was attractive, sexy. They dared one another to kiss her. Scar-face! Burn-a-by! If no adults were around their play became rougher. Their faces became flushed, their eyes shone with a greedy hunger. That afternoon Juliet had not been able to elude them and they’d forced her into an alley just off Baltic Street, hardly two blocks from her home. The Mayweather boy tugged at Juliet’s hair, the Herron boy tugged at the collar of her new sweater. If she’d been hearing music in her head, imagining her own voice lifted in song, it was a crude awakening now, these grinning boys surrounding her. Why couldn’t she scream, why did her throat shut up in panic? She was desperate to escape but could only push and shove and weakly slap at their busy hands. When she tried to run they blocked her, encircling. Loudly laughing and jeering, egging one another on. Jully-ett! Jully-ett! Burn-a-by! Who bit your face? Juliet’s sweater was ripped, her school books knocked to the ground and kicked about. The attack by these boys was more protracted than it had ever been before, Juliet was beginning to panic. She knew what boys can do to girls: if the girls are alone, and helpless. She had no clear knowledge yet she knew.

  Yet she was trying not to cry. Never give your enemies the satisfaction, Ariah warned. Never show them tears.

  “Hey. Little shits!”

  There came into the alley, on the run, fists swinging, Bud Stonecrop the cop’s son, bearing down on the boys like a pit bull. He moved swiftly and without warning. He seized Clyde Mayweather’s head in one big hand, as you’d grab a basketball, and slammed it against Ron Herron’s head. He struck the D’Amato kid with his fist, breaking and bloodying his nose. He kneed the Sheehan kid in his puny groin, followed this with a kick to his belly. The boys stumbled back, astonished by the attack, and by the ferocity of the attack. Those who could run, ran scattered and bawling. Stonecrop outweighed the biggest of the ninth grade boys by more than thirty pounds. He stood panting and wordless above Juliet who crouched, still shielding her head against her assailants. Her sweater, a pink embroidered cardigan she’d bought with baby-sitting earnings, was torn at the neck, and buttons were gone. Stonecrop mumbled what sounded like, “Shit-faced fuckers. Should of killed ’em.” He stooped to retrieve one of Juliet’s buttons on the ground. And another. These were pink mother-of-pearl buttons, tiny in the palm of Stonecrop’s massive hand. Seeing that Juliet was trying awkwardly to hold her ripped sweater together, Stonecrop swiftly removed his T-shirt, and handed it to her grunting what sounded like, “Here.”

  Juliet took the shirt from the shaved-headed boy and numbly pulled it over her head. A gray cotton T-shirt, not clean, damp beneath the arms, voluminous on Juliet as a tent. The right sleeve hung over her shoulder at half-mast. Embarrassed, Juliet murmured, “Thanks.” The shaved-headed boy was a little older than Royall, no more than eighteen, but with the thick muscled torso of an adult man. Juliet had a fleeting impression (she was looking away, not at him) that he was covered in a bear-like pelt. His shirt, on her, smelled of briny sweat and fried onions. Juliet would wear it home and enter the house at 1703 Baltic undetected by her usually vigilant mother (Ariah was at the rear, with a piano student) and later that evening she would launder it tenderly by hand and hang it to dry in her room and next day return it in a plain paper bag addressed BUD STONECROP and placed on the front porch railing of the ramshackle house at 522 Garrison Street.

  There would be no further close contact between the shaved-headed boy and Juliet Burnaby, no words exchanged, for more than four years.

  10

  STONECROP! In the Baltic Street neighborhood of Niagara Falls, New York in the late 1960’s he’d begun to acquire a reputation while still in junior high. He was Stonecrop the cop’s son. Sometimes, to those who knew his family, and his father the NFPD sergeant, he was Bud, Jr.

  But you never called Stonecrop by that name. You never called Stonecrop by any name. You avoided Stonecrop, even looking at him. You didn’t want Stonecrop to look at you, to register you in what would appear to be his dim-flickering yet vigilant consciousness, as you would not want a predator of any species, a shark for instance, to register your existence. In childhood, that early instinct to survive by becoming invisible.

  By the age of twelve Stonecrop had grown to a height of nearly six feet and a weight of one hundred eighty pounds and he would continue growing through adolescence. Even among the big-boned Stonecrops he was distinctive. He had the build of an upright, engorg
ed blood sausage about to burst its casing, and his face was of that hue, hot and hard. His natural smile was a grimace. His head suggested the density and durability of a concrete block. His hair, stone-colored, was brutally shaved at the back and sides of his head (by a barber who happened to be an uncle) and was short-cut at the crown, harshly stubbled as a winter cornfield. His eyes were small, steely and alert and antic as pinballs. His discolored teeth were spade-shaped and his nose had been flattened at birth, and could not be broken or made to bleed by any blow. It was said of Stonecrop that already in elementary school he’d begun to sprout ominously thick, wiry hairs on his stocky body. His cock grew weekly. In the boys’ locker room it was observed to be always semi-erect; the other boys soon learned to avoid looking at him with the instinctive terror of an individual armed with a three-inch penknife confronted by an adversary with a machete. Yet, in the presence of girls, Stonecrop was withdrawn, aloof or indifferent. Girls said of him he made them shiver.

  Stonecrop was the youngest son of NFPD sergeant Bud Stonecrop, a locally known, controversial police officer who’d retired young. The Stonecrops were a large Niagara Falls clan, married into the Mayweathers and the O’Ryans, but alliances between families, especially boy cousins, were inconstant. The Stonecrops of Garrison Street were not invariably on good terms with the Stonecrops of Fifty-third Street or their Mayweather neighbors. Bud, Jr. was a reliable friend only when he wished to be; but he could always be counted upon to be a reliable, treacherous enemy. While in school he ran with a select gang of boys of his approximate size, background, and temperament, but more often Stonecrop was alone, a brooding boy. He cut classes frequently but never received any grade lower than C-. No teacher would have wished to flunk him, and “teach” him another year. Yet he was often earnest, even somber in his classrooms. He scowled at textbooks as if they were printed in a foreign language in which he could pick out familiar words now and then. He quit school abruptly after his sixteenth birthday, in his junior year, but before quitting he’d insisted upon being allowed to take a much-derided girl’s course known as “home economics”; in this course, to the surprise and delight of his girl classmates and their teacher, Stonecrop excelled as a cook.