The Falls

by Joyce Carol Oates

  But Royall, being Royall, never obeyed his mother without at the same time disobeying his mother. That was Royall’s game. He was three years old, brimming with games. He picked up the ringing phone in both hands and chattered into the mouthpiece like a demented monkey, “No Momma! No Momma, g’bye!” Giggling, the child let the receiver fall to the carpeted floor with a soft thud, backing off, hands clapped over his mouth with a look of naughty hilarity. Ariah could hardly scold him, whoever was on the phone would overhear.

  Ariah’s after-school piano lessons were intended to be, for her, oases of relative calm, sanity, yes even a bit of beauty amid the seething energies of the Burnaby household, but that wasn’t always so.

  Ariah turned with a sigh back to her pupil, who was frowning over a tricky exercise of dominant seventh (broken) arpeggios in B major, which her stubby fingers could almost manage, but not quite. Still, the girl had talent. Or what passed for talent in Ariah’s teaching career these days. With her usual breathy enthusiasm Ariah said, “Very good, Louise! Very promising! Now let’s hear it again, keep the notes flowing smoothly, we’re in four/four time—”

  A strange sort of consolation it was, somehow. The frequency with which, teaching piano, you hear yourself murmuring Very good! Very promising! Now let’s hear it again.

  Her Burnaby in-laws and social acquaintances thought it eccentric, Ariah knew. That the wife of Dirk Burnaby gave piano lessons. For five dollars an hour. A woman with three young children. Like a genteel spinster in need of an income. Ariah had said in wide-eyed innocence to Dirk’s disapproving sisters, “Oh, I’m preparing for some future time when I might be abandoned and bereft and will have to support myself and my children. Shouldn’t all wives?” It had been worth it, to see the look on their prissy heavily made-up faces. Funny! Ariah smiled, recalling.

  Though Dirk hadn’t been so amused. In fact he’d been furious with her.

  Ariah had wanted to protest But shouldn’t all wives?

  There was Louise playing her dutiful arpeggios, broken chords that should have been swift, light, sparkling as water rippling over rock but were deliberate, unevenly struck, each note a tiny mallet. “Remember the beat, dear: four beats to a measure, and a quarter note gets one beat.” Ariah tapped with her pencil. She’d developed an ambiauditory skill, listening to her pupils with one ear while listening to whatever might be happening in another part of the house with the other ear. This new house Dirk had insisted upon buying was dismayingly large, there were many rooms the older children could drift into, the room designated as “Mommy’s piano room” was a former parlor opening off the living room and near a hallway that led to the kitchen and connected with the stairs. Where was Bridget? Possibly in the kitchen with the baby. She was to keep an eye on Royall, too, but of course Royall wasn’t easy to keep an eye on. By now, Ariah hoped, whoever had called her had hung up.

  Yes, it sounded as if Bridget was in the kitchen. Feeding and cooing at the baby in that swarmy way Ariah disliked. She wants to be that beautiful baby’s mother. Well, I am that baby’s mother.

  Ariah didn’t like the way Royall crowded against the Irish nanny, either. The way the Irish nanny was forever stroking his fine flaxen hair, exclaiming over his blue eyes, hugging him. Chattering away with him, in what sounded like Gaelic babytalk. Ariah wondered if they plotted and laughed together, secrets kept from Mommy.

  Chandler was too old for Bridget to fuss over. And he was never home. Luckily!

  Ariah liked a telephone off the hook. She felt protected, safe. Ringing phones made her nervous. Sometimes she walked swiftly away from a ringing phone, clapping her hands over her ears. Suppose it was Dirk, or that velvety-voiced receptionist Madelyn she despised, what would the call mean except that Dirk would be late again for dinner, or absent at dinner, and why should Ariah seek out such hurtful news? Better not to know. Just see what happens. Remove the receiver from the hook and let the dial tone go dead as it does, eventually. Though sometimes the housekeeper interfered, or even Bridget who had no business playing parlor maid. The phone rang jarring the peace of the household and there came the cry—“Mrs. Burnaby? Phone, ma’am.”

  But where was “ma’am?” Upstairs in her bathroom with both faucets running water. Humming loudly.

  Ariah’s piano lessons always ran over if there was no next pupil, and so this lesson continued until six-fifteen. Louise seemed uneasy, uncertain. She’d done so poorly with the little Mozart rondo she’d been working on for weeks, Ariah had had to play it for her another time. What a charming, sunny, clockwork sort of piece it was, all sparkling surfaces, no depths or interstices of brooding. “Now try again, Louise. I know you can do it.” But Louise began, struck her first wrong note, and shook her head. “I g-guess I have to leave, Mrs. Burnaby.” Clumsily the girl rose from the piano bench, gathering her music. Ariah was perplexed. Louise, shame-faced, said, “This is my last piano lesson with you, I guess. I’m sorry.”

  Ariah was so taken by surprise, she hardly knew how to react. “Louise, what? Your last lesson—?”

  “My m-mother says…”

  “Your mother?”

  “My dad told her, I guess. No more piano lessons after today.”

  The girl, blushing fiercely, not meeting Ariah’s eye, fled.

  Ariah trailed after her to the front door, and shut it quietly behind her, and stood then in the vestibule for several minutes dazed as if she’d been struck on the head. Why, Louise Eggers was one of Ariah’s most promising students. The Eggers family lived across the park in a handsome old colonial in which, several times in the past several years, the Burnabys had been guests. Ariah had been her usual somewhat reserved self in the face of Mrs. Eggers’s sociability, but she’d always assumed that Mrs. Eggers liked her. Mr. Eggers, chief executive officer of Niagara Hydro, was a friendly business acquaintance of Dirk’s.

  Or had seemed so.

  “Oh, damn.” Ariah winced in pain.

  Someone must have put the receiver back on the hook. The telephone was ringing.

  The well-intentioned pest from County Galway summoned “ma’am” to the phone with her lilting lyric brogue. Numbly Ariah took the call in Dirk’s study. “Yes.” She hadn’t the strength to pose even a ritual question.

  But here was a shock. Ariah’s sister-in-law Clarice.

  Clarice! The elder of the two Burnaby sisters, and the one who frightened Ariah the more. A glaring-eyed Joan Crawford type with tightly permed hair like tiny sausages and a habit of turning her lip up at Ariah even as she smiled at her in a pretense of warmth. Clarice was in her early fifties, a stolid woman, with something of Claudine Burnaby’s air of entitlement and reproach. “Ariah? Are you there?”

  “Oh. Yes.”

  Ariah’s response was weak, nearly inaudible. She was trying to summon strength to behave in that way—but what was that way?—the smug world designates as normal.

  Oh, dear. Rapidly Ariah’s mind skittered about. Had she and Dirk been invited to bring the children to Clarice’s house on l’Isle Grand, and had they neglected to go? Again? (To Ariah’s shame, this had happened on Easter Sunday of that year. Ariah accepted the blame, she’d forgotten to mark the date on her calendar.) Two or three times a year Dirk’s sisters made the charitable effort to be friendly, inviting their brother and his burgeoning young family to their homes for one or another “holiday” occasion. Ariah dreaded these occasions and sometimes, pleading a sick headache, or a re-scheduled piano lesson, failed to attend. Claudine Burnaby, now in her seventies, stubbornly reclusive and rumored to have become a religious fanatic, never visited her childrens’ homes but was obsessively talked-of and worried-over to the point at which Ariah wanted to clap her hands over her ears and run out of the room.

  (Why was it such “eccentric” behavior, hiding away in your home if you wanted to? If you had the financial means? Especially if you lived in an estate like Shalott, overlooking the Niagara River.)

  Politely Clarice asked Ariah how she was, how were the child
ren; invariably Clarice bungled the childrens’ names, but Ariah never troubled to correct her. Ariah quickly told her fine, fine, everyone is fine, though in the confusion and unease of the moment Ariah hadn’t the faintest idea what she was saying: if Chandler had been missing from home for days, if Royall had lighted matches in the basement to set the house on fire, and Bridget had run off with beautiful Baby Juliet, Ariah would have answered brightly, “Oh, fine!” But she hadn’t the energy to ask Clarice how her family was.

  “Well. The reason I’m calling, Ariah,” Clarice said, in a voice like poured concrete, “is to ask if you’ve been hearing some of the ugly rumors I’ve been hearing.” There was a dramatic pause. Ariah pressed the phone receiver against her ear hard, as if the rumors were inside the phone, and she was supposed to hear them?

  Clarice pressed grimly forward. “About my brother Dirk.”

  Desperately Ariah quipped, “Oh, your brother Dirk! Not my husband Dirk. That’s a relief.”

  “Ariah, dear, I hope you’ll think this is amusing.”

  Ariah laughed. “Clarice, I hope it will be. I’ve had three piano lessons this afternoon and I’m in a mood to laugh at something.”

  “Well, you won’t laugh at this: Dirk is involved with another woman.”

  Involved! What a curious expression.

  “Ariah? Did you hear me? People are saying, Dirk is seeing another woman.”

  Ariah was smiling into a patch of mist that had somehow drifted into the room. It hovered over objects, obscuring their shapes. It tasted of the cold wet mist at the foot of The Falls.

  “Oh, goodness. Dirk ‘sees’ women all the time, Clarice. He could hardly help it, could he? With his eyes?” Ariah laughed, a sound like a chicken as its neck is being wrung. “Why is that un-un-unusual?”

  “Ariah, are you sitting down? Sit down.”

  Ariah shook her head stubbornly. She would not sit down! Like Royall who disobeyed on principle. She had at least as much pride as her own three-year-old. She was standing at Dirk’s roll-top desk, leaning weakly against it. She hadn’t the motor coordination required to pull out Dirk’s heavy swivel chair and sit down. It was rare for her to enter Dirk’s study. Supposedly it was out-of-bounds to the children. Nor had Ariah the slightest interest in financial records, cancelled checks and receipts and income tax forms. All of Dirk’s personal records were kept in this room, which meant family records too, but Ariah shunned such official documents. Since her marriage she hadn’t paid a single bill, never so much as opened letters containing bills, anything from County of Niagara, State of New York, or the U.S. Federal Government she pushed from her with a shudder, knowing that her capable, good-natured husband would deal with such horrors.

  Her sensitive nostrils quivered in this room. She could detect the faint, consoling odor of the cigars Dirk occasionally smoked. His hair lotion, his cologne. A bottle of French cologne for men that Ariah had given him. He loves me. Knows it would destroy me.

  Ariah could hear Bridget carrying Juliet upstairs to the nursery, cooing and crooning in Gaelic. Time for a diaper change! Ariah felt a terrible sense of loss. Diapers, baby pee and baby shit! She was missing her daughter’s babyhood. On the stairs, Royall rushed behind Bridget chattering and thumping his feet like a marching soldier. Ariah was desperate to be with them. She stammered, “C-Clarice? I have to hang up, my children are calling me.”

  Fiercely Clarice said, “No. Don’t you dare hang up, Ariah! You’ve hidden that head of yours in the sand long enough. These ugly rumors don’t concern just you, they concern the Burnaby family, too. All of us. My poor mother who isn’t well, and would be devastated if she heard how badly her son, her ‘favorite’ child, is behaving. And in public. It isn’t upsetting enough that Dirk is involved with a lower-class woman, a married woman with children, he’s been filing preposterous motions in court on her behalf, he’s lost his legal as well as his moral judgment, he seems to have lost his mind, and you, his wife, who has always imagined she’s so clever and cultured and sharp-witted and superior to the rest of us, haven’t noticed? Are you blind, Ariah?”

  The mist seemed to be spreading. Ariah rubbed at her eyes. Maybe she was going blind? A roaring in her ears too, like distant falling water.

  On the wall above Dirk’s desk were framed daguerreotypes of his daredevil grandfather Reginald Burnaby the Great. A whippet-lean gypsy-swaggering sexy young man with a close-shaved head and handlebar mustache and intense shiny dark eyes like marbles. Ariah felt his jeering presence. You too, on your tightrope! You, in a dream of believing yourself safe on land.

  These many years, Ariah had been teasing herself, and Dirk, with droll fantasies of his leaving her. But now.

  Clarice was saying, “Ask my brother about ‘Nina’ when he comes home. ‘Nina Olshaker.’ If he comes home. Ask him why he’s committing professional suicide for her sake. Initiating a lawsuit against the City of Niagara Falls, the Board of Education, Swann Chemicals, and I don’t know who all else! His own friends, I’d have thought! Men he went to school with! Our parents’ friends! Some of the most powerful people in Niagara Falls and Buffalo! And all this for a woman who isn’t even good-looking, they say. Her husband is a factory worker and a Communist agitator and they have two children, both retarded. But now the Olshakers are separated, Dirk has set up a residence for her in Mt. Lucas, she lives there at his expense and you, Ariah, his wife, know nothing of it, do you? Hiding away playing your precious piano! ‘Steinway spinet’! Your husband’s mistress has a touch of Tuscarora blood, they say. Worse yet, she’s Catholic.”

  Ariah whimpered like a small tormented animal. “I don’t believe you! Leave me alone.” She slammed down the receiver on her sister-in-law’s ravening voice.

  On the wall, Reginald Burnaby the Great smiled and winked at her.

  “It isn’t true. Not Dirk.”

  Ariah began to search through Dirk’s desk, blindly. She was looking for—what? Her husband’s secrets. The desk was a handsome old piece of furniture, carved mahogany and so heavy it left deep indentations in the rug; it had come to Dirk not from his father Virgil Burnaby but from his father’s wealthy benefactor Angus MacKenna. Ariah knew little of these dead people, and wished to know less. She had married Dirk, not his family. She hated his family! Oh, a roll-top desk is a hive of secrets. Masculine secrets. There were numerous pigeonholes, drawers. Scattered about the desk were cellophane-wrapped cigars, Sweet Coronas mostly. There were wads of cancelled checks, receipts, bills held together by rubber bands. Bank statements, IRS forms, business letters, insurance policies. (No personal letters? That was suspicious.) Whimpering to herself like a kicked dog, Ariah pulled open drawers, rifled through them frantically. This is not the person I am. This is not Ariah. Mist from The Falls had gotten into the room, nasty as cold spit. Ariah was having difficulty seeing. She fumbled through Dirk’s checkbook, panting. Evidence? Evidence of a husband’s betrayal? She’d forgotten the woman’s name. But there can’t be any woman.

  In his careful printed handwriting Dirk had noted he’d made out checks of $500 to “N. Olshaker” in August, September, October, and most recently November 1961. Ariah was panting, dazed. “ ‘N. Olshaker.’ If she’s his client, why is he paying her?”

  Paying her for what?

  Services rendered?

  There were other mysterious—suspicious—notations. Monthly payments of $365 to Burnaby Property Management, Inc. Why was Dirk making out a check to his family’s business? What sense did this make? “ ‘A residence in Mt. Lucas.’ Where he has put his mistress. Oh, my God.”

  There was a movement behind Ariah, she turned guiltily and saw in the doorway of the study a bony-faced boy of no distinctive age, too grave in his expression to be a child, yet too small of stature to be an adolescent, with a sallow, furrowed skin and worried eyes glinting like fish scales behind his wire-rimmed glasses. (Oh, those damned glasses! They were only a few weeks old and Ariah never saw them without wanting to snatch them off the boy’s nose and b
reak them in two.) The boy’s flannel shirt was rumpled and misbuttoned and there were stains on both knees of his school trousers though certainly these items of clothing had been freshly laundered and ironed when he’d put them on that morning. For a panicked moment Ariah couldn’t remember this child’s name.

  He’s mine, my penance.

  The boy asked anxiously if something was wrong?

  That scratchy voice: if sandpaper could talk, it would talk like this.

  Ariah managed to recover, to a degree. “Chandler, for God’s sake. You frightened the life out of me. Creeping up behind me like a—a turtle!” Ariah clasped her hands together to prevent their shaking. Her face must have been deathly pale, the freckles standing out like exclamation points. Yet Ariah addressed Chandler in her usual chiding voice, as if the child warranted, and would feel comfortable with, no other.

  Chandler said hesitantly, “I—heard you crying, Mother. I heard you—scream.”

  Ariah said hotly, “You did not hear me scream, Chandler. Don’t be ridiculous. That wasn’t me.”

  2

  Into the underworld then I descended. Where you can’t see, can’t breathe. Suffocating in black muck. In shame.

  These weeks, months. Exhausting and yet exhilarating days that began for Dirk Burnaby early in the morning, and ended early in the morning. Neglecting his other clients, his paying clients, in the cause of Love Canal.

  It was true, Dirk Burnaby was filing motions in Niagara County District Court. In the service of his clients he was going to war against the City of Niagara Falls, the Niagara Falls Board of Health, the Niagara Falls Board of Education, Swann Chemicals, the Office of the Mayor of Niagara Falls and the Office of the Medical Examiner of Niagara Falls. Never had he written such eloquent, forceful prose. But mostly he was an explorer, in his car and occasionally on foot, descending into the underworld.