The Falls

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Wenn said hotly, “They don’t make any secret of their intentions, is my meaning. It’s when they go underground, pretending to be ‘ordinary citizens,’ that they’re dangerous.”

  Dirk Burnaby was in an affable mood, having been drinking good scotch and getting more than his share of good cards through the evening, but not such good cards that his friends were demoralized and resentful when he won, and won again. He’d sit a game out. He could sense when luck might fade from his fingertips. With lawyerly sagacity he said, “What ‘these people’ want is compensation—a settlement out of court. The hell with overthrowing the U.S. Government.”

  Had he meant this tossed-off remark? Probably, yes.

  And would he regret having said it?

  The Woman in Black! The Vulture.

  Before the woman had a name, before she was fully human to him. She’d been a threat. She’d caused him to curse under his breath. God damn no I will not. What an asshole I am, if I do.

  Never would Dirk bring up the subject of the Woman in Black with Ariah. Not voluntarily. He knew better—he’d had enough experience by this time!—than to discuss anything problematic with his excitable wife. Their conversations might begin normally enough, but within a few minutes Ariah would begin to be alarmed, agitated. During the past several years she’d become increasingly anxious about the vast world outside their home in Luna Park. She refused to read the front section of the Gazette—“It’s obscene to know too much, if you can’t do anything about it.” She shrank from any mention of “foreign” news because it was always worrisome. She refused to watch TV news, and of the magazines that came into the house she favored the Saturday Evening Post, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Reader’s Digest, not Life and Time. Abruptly she’d excuse herself to leave conversations at social gatherings that drifted onto unpleasant subjects, like wartime reminiscences among Dirk and his fellow veterans. (One of Dirk’s ex-G.I. acquaintances had entered Dresden after the notorious “firebombing.” Another, a banker with a riverfront home on l’Isle Grand, had been present at the “liberation” of Auschwitz.) Ariah listened with morbid concentration, biting her thumbnail until the cuticle bled, as Chandler described the “duck-and-cover” drill (in the event of an atomic attack by the Soviets) at Luna Park Elementary. Even reports of the children filing outside during ordinary fire drills upset her. Yet Ariah saw the wisdom of such procedures—“You have to prepare for the worst.” And yet if Dirk began to speak worriedly of his law practice, if he spoke in any but the most casual, conversational way about his profession, Ariah’s face stiffened. Dirk could amuse her, Ariah loved to be amused. She wanted to be told that the world beyond 7 Luna Park was a region of fools and knaves. If you were neither a fool nor a knave you wanted no part in that world. You held yourself aloof, superior. So Ariah could be entertained, she could be made to dissolve into peals of laughter. She loved Dirk’s mimicry of local judges, politicians, law colleagues and rivals. She had a delightfully malicious sense of humor. But if Dirk began to speak seriously, she stiffened. She never asked about the outcomes of his cases out of a fear, he supposed, that he would have to report to her now and then that he’d lost; or had not won so spectacularly as he and his clients might have wished. She feared his failure, his professional humiliation, his bankruptcy. She feared that his mother would “disinherit” him (even as, as Dirk said repeatedly, he had no wish for his mother’s money, and assumed he was in fact “disinherited.”) Above all she seemed to fear his sudden death (heart attack, car accident), his “disappearing”—“vanishing.”

  Like the first husband, Dirk supposed.

  Except, strangely, Ariah no longer seemed to recall that she’d had a first husband, before Dirk Burnaby.

  After their second son was born, and took up so much space with his lung power and his indefatigable energy, the elegant townhouse at 7 Luna Park was too small. Dirk overrode Ariah’s protests and bought a larger, five-bedroom house almost directly across the way at 22 Luna Park. The new house was of the same vintage as the townhouse, built in the 1920’s, with large rooms upstairs and down, made of sandstone, on an acre of land bordered by elms and Scotch pine, prime real estate in this part of the city. Still, Ariah had been stubborn about moving. She’d been irritable and edgy for weeks. She hated it that, in these new quarters, she had no choice but to allow her husband to hire a full-time housekeeper and nanny. “I guess we must be rich,” she said dryly. “Like all the Burnabys. Tempting fate.”

  Dirk said, “ ‘Fate’ comes to us, Ariah. Whether we’re rich or poor.”

  Ariah shivered. Playfully she slapped Dirk, digging her short, bitten-at nails into his arm. In the matter of morbidity, she didn’t want to be challenged.

  What mattered was that the Burnabys’ new house, like the old, was miles away from Ninety-ninth Street and Colvin Boulevard, as Luna Park Elementary, where Chandler was now in fifth grade, was miles away from the Ninety-ninth Street School.

  …And After

  And yet it would happen: in September 1961 Dirk Burnaby would take on the “doomed” lawsuit after all. The legal action known initially as the Olshaker case; subsequently, and more notoriously, referred to as “Love Canal.”

  Quickly—incredulously!—word spread through Niagara Falls. Through the tightly knit legal community in which everyone knew everyone else, or wanted to think they did; through City Hall and the City-County Courthouse; through the social set to which Dirk Burnaby belonged, or might have belonged if his eccentric red-haired wife had been more sociable. In some quarters the news was greeted with disbelief, and in others with outrage.

  “Dirk Burnaby? Is the man crazy? He must know that suit can’t win.”

  And, “Burnaby! You have to hand it to him, the guy has guts.”

  And, “Burnaby! That bastard. That traitor to his class. This is the end of his career.”

  Love Canal. As Dirk Burnaby would say, “It isn’t a canal. It was never a canal. And it has nothing to do with love.”

  He’d believed he had made his decision: not to speak with the Woman in Black. (Whose name he seemed incapable of remembering.) He shunned this impetuous individual when she dared to approach him outside his office and he refused to return her calls to his office and by mid-June of 1961 she had ceased trying to contact him. She’d ceased appearing to him in that stealthy vulture-way of hers that had begun to enter his sleep; to contaminate his dreams and make him moan aloud like a frightened child. Ariah, hearing him, would nudge him awake demanding to know what was wrong? was he having a nightmare? a heart attack? In the night, in their bed at the top of the house, there was Ariah cupping her anxious hand to his chest, to the wiry-haired flesh of his upper torso slick and clammy with nightmare sweat; where, a few inches away inside his shuddering body, his heart beat like the clapper of a bell.

  Dirk would murmur, “Ariah, no. It’s nothing. Go back to sleep, darling.”

  He’d made a decision, he believed. In any case the Woman in Black had vanished from his life. If she’d finally gotten a lawyer to take her on, Dirk hadn’t heard. He dreaded finding out.

  Then in late June driving home in a sudden thunderstorm, beneath a roiling, blackened sky, Dirk was waiting for a traffic light to change at the intersection of Main and Ferry, near St. Anne’s Hospital, when he saw a young woman and a small child huddling beneath an umbrella, waiting at a bus stop. They weren’t wearing raincoats, only just summer clothes. The storm had blown up swiftly, as usual: within a few minutes the mild June temperature had plummeted twenty degrees. Rain pelted like machine-gun fire, gutters rushed with dirty water. The woman was crouched over the child trying to hold the umbrella at an angle to shelter her, but without much success. A vicious rain slashed at them, blown almost horizontally. Dirk pulled alongside the curb and called out, “Hey, want a ride? Get in.” The woman hesitated only a moment before climbing into the front seat of the big luxury car, settling the shivery little girl on her lap and collapsing the umbrella. She was breathless and seemed a little disor
iented. “Tell the nice man thank you, Alice! Mister, you are a true samaritan.” She was wiping at the girl’s face, brushing wet strands of taffy-colored hair out of her eyes. The woman’s hair was very black, in wet tatters. She was perhaps twenty-eight years old, exuding an air of vigor, busyness; her skin was olive-pale, she wore no makeup, her eyes were dark, and glittery-vivid as minerals; there were bruise-like indentations beneath her eyes but otherwise, Dirk thought, she looked pretty good. Considering.

  She, or the girl, smelled of something fruity like chewing-gum or Popsicle, jarringly mixed with an odor of disinfectant.

  Politely Dirk asked where he could take them, and the woman gave an address and apologized it was so far—“Why don’t you just take us to the bus station, mister? We’d be grateful.” Something about the address made Dirk wince. It was no part of Niagara Falls he knew, miles away to the east. That no-man’s-land of new housing developments, factories and warehouses, raw gouged earth and toppled trees. But of course he would drive this poor woman and her child home. It was the least he could do, in his expensive new-model seagreen Lincoln Continental with whitewall tires, automatic transmission, velvety cushioned interior that put Ariah in mind, as she had several times observed, of a swanky casket. He felt pity for this attractive woman and her daughter, no doubt they’d been at the hospital, forced to take city buses in such weather. He saw a wedding band on the woman’s finger and an engagement ring with a pea-sized stone and felt a stab of disapproval, almost of moral repugnance, that any man, any husband, couldn’t provide a little better for his wife and child.

  Burnaby, come on: poor people can’t help it.

  He had to remind himself frequently of that fact. If it was a fact.

  In the fierce thunderstorm Dirk was driving east on Ferry, past Tenth Street, past Memorial Parkway, beyond Hyde Park that seemed to float like a luminous green island in the failing light, into this region of the city of his birth that was nonetheless scarcely known to him, where the air was beginning to smell like a gritty intensification of his passengers’ curious scent. A mixture of sweetness, and something harshly chemical beneath. The Lincoln’s windshield wipers were straining to keep the broad windshield clear. Dirk was uneasily aware of the black-haired woman staring at the side of his face.

  In a voice of childlike surprise she said, “Mr. B-Burnaby?”

  “Yes? You know me?”

  The woman’s eyes widened. She smiled a wonderful smile. “Do I know you! Mr. Burnaby, I’m that nervy woman who was trying to get you to talk with me for weeks. Remember?”

  Dirk stared at her. The Woman in Black! And he hadn’t recognized her.

  Her name was Nina Olshaker, she wasn’t wearing black, only ordinary light summer clothes, cotton shirt and slacks, straw shoes on her bare feet, soaked from the rain. There was nothing reproachful or vulture-like in her manner, only eagerness, apprehension.

  Dirk was feeling ashamed, he’d so exaggerated the threat of this poor woman. She’d been wearing a black dress or dark, more formal clothing each time she’d come to his law office, the clothes of a woman in mourning. For in fact she was in mourning.

  That first glimpse of her, weeks ago, and Dirk hadn’t wanted to see more. He’d known who she was or had thought he’d known. He’d known what she wanted of him or had thought so. And like a coward he’d shrunk from meeting her gaze.

  “I owe you an apology, I guess. Mrs. Olshaker.”

  “Me? You owe me an apology? Mr. Burnaby, no.”

  He was too embarrassed to explain, and so he acquiesced to his fate. It would happen swiftly. Afterward he would recall how he’d had the opportunity to drop the woman off at the bus station downtown; he’d had the opportunity, at her house, simply to drop her off and decline her invitation to come inside. And having come inside, listening to her impassioned plea, he had the opportunity to tell her he’d consider her case, and retreat. All these opportunities he’d let pass in his zeal to do the right thing.

  For his heart was moved by her. And by the beautiful wan little girl with the taffy-colored hair who seemed to Dirk unnaturally lethargic, passive.

  How different from his three-year-old Royall, that child of boundless energy and good spirits!

  So Dirk drove Nina Olshaker and her daughter home, to a small woodframe bungalow at 1182 Ninety-third Street, near Colvin Boulevard and a brackish waterway called Black Creek. The house, pale yellow with dark green trim, was set close to the street in a narrow, truncated yard in a neighborhood, or tract division, of similar low-priced homes. Like a toy or model house it seemed, so compact. It might have fitted into the Burnabys’ two-car garage at 22 Luna Park.

  Colvin Heights this subdivision in east Niagara Falls was called, though in subsequent years and decades it, and the phenomenon it represented, would be designated by a blunt sort of shorthand—Love Canal. At the time, Dirk had no awareness of any canal; there was no canal visible. No canal existed. Colvin Heights appeared to be fairly new, few trees of any substance grew on the homeowners’ grid-measured properties and those Dirk saw looked stunted, with papery leaves. He was conscious of a swampy, sweetly sulfurous atmosphere as if by degrees he’d been descending in his big luxury car, a seagreen gondola designed to float. When he left the sanctuary of the car a dark stinging rain was flung against his unprotected face but he whooped and laughed as if this were an exuberant game, trotting around with his large black golfing umbrella open, to attempt to shield Nina Olshaker and her daughter as they hurried into the house.

  There, Dirk would stay for nearly two hours. In his zeal to do the right, gentlemanly thing.

  “Ariah? It’s me. I’m working late, honey. An emergency has come up.”

  Ariah’s voice lifted faintly, as if she were hundreds of miles away, not less than ten. “ ‘Emergency’?”

  Quickly Dirk said, “Nothing serious, Ariah. Nothing personal.”

  “Well. All right then. Come home when you can, Dirk. The children will probably be asleep. I’ll keep dinner warm for you.”

  Dirk felt a mild stirring of nausea. No appetite!

  He said, “Darling, that’s very thoughtful of you. Thanks so much.”

  Ariah laughed. “Well, we are married. I am your wife. It’s my duty to keep things warm, isn’t it?”

  Dirk would learn: Nina Olshaker had been married for ten years to Sam Olshaker who currently worked the night shift at Parish Plastics, one of the largest factories in the county. They’d moved to Colvin Heights six years before. They had a nine-year-old son Billy and six-year-old Alice and they’d had a younger daughter Sophia who’d died of leukemia in March 1961, at the age of three. “This place poisoned her, Mr. Burnaby. I can’t prove it, the doctors won’t say so, but I know.”

  Nina’s and Sam’s families were from the region. Sam had been born in Niagara Falls, where his father worked for Occidental Petroleum; Nina had been born in North Tonawanda where her father had worked for thirty-five years at Tonawanda Steel and had died last summer of emphysema at the age of fifty-four. She said, bitterly, “And Daddy’s death, too. Tiny bits of steel in his lungs. He’d cough up blood. He could hardly breathe, at the end. He knew what was causing it, all the men at the steel mill know, they’re resigned. The pay is good, that’s the catch. And maybe, though they know what’s happening to them, they don’t exactly believe it. We felt that way with Sophia. She was getting weaker, losing weight, her white blood cells were failing, but we kept praying, and always we were thinking she’d be getting better. It was like me, having a miscarriage: I’d think, it’s just this one, wrong thing. It’s something gone wrong, once. Like bad luck. But next time things will be different. When Sophia died I wanted an autopsy done on her, I mean I thought I did, until it was explained to me what an autopsy is, and I changed my mind. Now I wonder if I did the right thing? If it was leukemia, just that, like something you inherit in the blood, like the County Health Department told us, or maybe it was something else, too? Some poison here? I can taste it, myself. In wet weather l
ike this. But they told us there’s nothing, no poison in the air, or in the drinking water, they’ve done tests. Or so they claim. Oh Mr. Burnaby, I’m worried sick about Alice, now. She doesn’t gain weight, doesn’t have much appetite, I take her for blood tests and she has ‘fluctuating low-white cell counts’—what’s that mean? And Billy gets headaches over at the school, his eyes are sore and he’s coughing a lot. And Sam.” She came to an abrupt dead stop, considering Sam.

  Dirk murmured his condolences. He was very, very sorry. And how feeble his voice sounded, as Nina continued impatiently:

  “I just want justice, Mr. Burnaby. I don’t want money, I want justice for Sophia. I want Billy and Alice protected from harm. I want whoever is responsible for Sophia’s death and for other children sick or dying in this neighborhood to say they are responsible. I know there is something wrong here. You can smell it, sometimes it burns your eyes and nostrils. In the back yard, in lots of back yards here, there’s this strange disgusting black sludge that oozes up, like oil, but thicker than oil. I’ll show you, it’s in our basement. In wet weather it oozes through the walls. You call the city government, you get a secretary or somebody who tells you to wait, and you wait and the line goes dead. You go down there, to City Hall, and you wait. You can wait for weeks, months. I’d guess you can wait for years if you lived that long. At the Ninety-ninth Street School, Mr. Burnaby, the kids can taste the drinking water isn’t right. They play outside, on the playground, and their eyes burn, and their skin. There’s a field beyond the school, and a ditch, and the boys play there, and get burnt. Billy brought these ‘hot rocks’ home—some kind of phosphorous rock, the size of a baseball, you throw it at the ground and it pops like a firecracker and smolders, what the hell kind of thing is that for kids to be playing with? I talked with the principal. He isn’t friendly, sympathetic, at all. You’d think he would care about the students in his school, for God’s sake, but no, he’s practically rude to me, like I’m a crazy, pushy mother he hasn’t got time for. He says Billy should stay on school property and not play in the ditch or the field but the fact is, the children are playing in the playground, this black sludge bubbles up through the cracks. I have photographs of all these things, Mr. Burnaby. I have photographs of Sophia, I want you to see. Billy? Billy, come here.”