The Falls

by Joyce Carol Oates

  He would feel at times like those early, doomed explorers, who’d paddled their canoes along the wide river linking two gigantic lakes, not realizing until it was too late that the current was accelerating rapidly, and that they’d entered the “Deadline”—the rough, white-water rapids just above Goat Island. At first you think that your actions are propelling your little boat along at such speed; then you realize that the speed, the propulsion, has nothing to do with you. It is something happening to you.

  Dirk woke himself from such trances he drifted into, often in the County Hall of Records, or in his big luxurious boat of a car like Charon’s barge crossing the Styx into a region unknown to him.

  Crossing into that other region, the industrial city of Niagara Falls. How unlike the gleaming tourist-city on the Niagara River. The scenic city at the edge of the renowned Niagara Gorge. The Wonder of the World, Honeymoon Capital of the World. Prospect Avenue with its old, grand hotels of another era, only just beginning to be replaced, in the early 1960’s, by more modern hotels and “motels.” And Prospect Park and gardens. And the continuously rising mist and roaring of The Falls. Dirk could not see that the second city, the underworld region, that stretched out for miles to the east, had any relationship to the dwellings on the river. It was a twin, yet a misshapen twin. There was The Falls, and there was the city of Niagara Falls. The one was beauty and the terror of beauty; the other, mere expediency and man-made ugliness.

  Man-made poison, death.

  “Where it’s deliberate, it’s murder. It’s beyond negligence. ‘Depraved indifference to human life.’ ”

  The only connection between The Falls and the thriving industrial city was the massive energy diverted from The Falls to operate certain of the industries of Niagara Falls. But you had to know that this connection existed, and was a multi-million-dollar business: Niagara Hydro. To the uneducated eye such connections were invisible.

  To the uneducated eye, much was invisible.

  “They have no conscience. My kind.”

  My kind Dirk Burnaby would be discovering at every turn.

  Where Nina Olshaker had been rudely rebuffed, thwarted, and lied to in her inquiries, Dirk Burnaby fared much better. He was an attorney licensed to practice law in New York State, and he knew the rights of both citizens and attorneys. He demanded to see county records, deeds of ownership. He demanded to see county health records. And transcripts of meetings of the Niagara County Board of Zoning. He knew his way around both city and county buildings, the Niagara County Courthouse, the Office of the Niagara Falls District Attorney. He asked questions, and he insisted upon answers. He not only threatened to subpoena witnesses, he did. He wasn’t one to accept obfuscation—“bullshit”—from subordinates and flunkies including Mayor Wenn’s staff. Including Dirk Burnaby’s fellow attorneys, in the hire of local government and the executive officers and board of directors of Swann Chemicals, Inc.

  The chief attorney for Swann Chemicals was a man named Brandon Skinner, whom Dirk knew at a distance, warily. As Skinner knew Dirk Burnaby. Between them was mutual respect if no warmth. Skinner was Burnaby’s elder by ten or twelve years, a wealthy man with a riverside estate not far from Shalott.

  “At least, we’ve never pretended to be friends. There isn’t that pretense to maintain.”

  Dirk was feeling hopeful. Optimistic. He knew the symptoms: the excitement preceding a good, fair fight.

  Of course he knew that Skinner and other attorneys for the defense would stall, stall, stall. He knew the tricks, he’d used them often enough himself. Tricks are a staple of the lawyerly trade, like surgical instruments to a surgeon. But the defense couldn’t trick him. Nor could the defense break the backbones of the plaintiffs by causing them to run up devastating legal costs because he, Dirk Burnaby, was working for no fee.

  Possibly, he was beginning to see, he’d end up paying expenses out of his own pocket.

  “What the hell. I’m rich.”

  Into the underworld. Where I would drown.

  For there came the hour when Dirk discovered the name “Angus MacKenna” in startling proximity to the name “Hiram S. Swann.” Angus, Virgil Burnaby’s benefactor! The kindly-seeming old man had been a virtual grandfather to Dirk, long ago.

  And there came the hour when Dirk discovered that MacKenna Laboratories, Inc., a company in which Virgil Burnaby was a partner, had been, reconstituted in 1939 as MacKenna-Swann Chemicals, Inc.; in 1941, Swann bought out MacKenna’s investment, and the company would be known subsequently as Swann Chemicals, Inc. It would become, in the boom years of wartime defense manufacturing, one of the most prosperous businesses in upstate New York.

  “Why did I never know this? My father—”

  But Dirk’s father had rarely spoken of such matters to Dirk. In the last years of his life he’d seemed to have lost interest entirely in business and public life, or to have been revulsed by it. His life was boating, fishing, golfing. His life was drinking, in an affable gentlemanly manner that masked (Dirk supposed, now: at the time he hadn’t a clue) a profound melancholy. Dirk’s parents led increasingly separate lives in middle age, Claudine aggressively social and Virgil stubbornly withdrawn. Dirk recalled most vividly sailing excursions with his father when, alone together, they’d communicated wordlessly as if reduced to a common identity by the windy, choppy river where anything might happen. At other times, Virgil Burnaby had been smiling, distant. A man who has lived another man’s life.

  Years later, Dirk wondered if his father, a member of l’Isle Grand Country Club, married to an heiress, had been ashamed of Reginald Burnaby the Great. That mustachioed daredevil who’d died in The Falls, for glory and a few hundred dollars. Or maybe Virgil had been proud, secretly. Dirk felt the loss, his father had never told him anything of his personal, emotional life.

  Growing up, Dirk had known vaguely that his father was involved with Angus MacKenna and his sons Lyle and Alistair in various business ventures. One of their successes was the development of insecticides and herbicides; MacKenna Laboratories owned several patents which were retained when the company was sold, and from these patents, at the present time, Virgil’s heirs still received dividends. (And rather large dividends.) Two years before Swann bought out McKenna and associates the company acquired at auction the uncompleted seven-mile canal locally known as Love Canal, for use as a waste dump. The mysterious canal had never existed as a waterway. Its construction began in 1892, as a project by a local developer named William T. Love; the ambitious plan was to link the upper and lower Niagara River and bypass the Gorge. But Love had gone bankrupt and the canal was left only partly dug. It was located in a no-man’s-land at the eastern edge of what was at that time a city of about twenty thousand inhabitants where industrial development was only just beginning. As in the much larger lakeport city of Buffalo, and in the industrial suburbs of North Tonawanda and Lackawana, the boom in local development would begin with the outbreak of war in 1941. Military vehicles, aircraft, munitions, canned goods and boots, gloves, uniforms, even flags! And chemicals of all kinds. The war was the best thing to happen to Niagara Falls, even better than tourism in the 1850’s.

  Dirk recalled the excitement of that time, as at the age of twenty-four he’d rushed to enlist, with his friends, in the U.S. Army. It hadn’t occurred to him that, for those Americans remaining at home, including Virgil Burnaby and his business associates, the war was a very good thing.

  From 1936 until 1952 the so-called Love Canal, an open ditch, was used as a municipal and chemical disposal site. Swann Chemicals dumped tons of waste there, and sold dumping privileges to the City of Niagara Falls for the dumping of garbage and, in the 1940’s, to the U.S. Army, which dumped classified (radioactive) chemical warfare wastes relating to the Manhattan project. In 1953, Swann Chemicals abruptly ceased dumping and covered the hazardous waste with dirt, and sold the seven-mile contaminated property to the Niagara Falls Board of Education for one dollar. One dollar!

  And the contractual st
ipulation that Swann Chemicals, Inc. was exempt in perpetuity from any damages—“physical harm or death”—suffered as a consequence of the hazardous waste.

  Dirk read and reread, appalled.

  How had this happened? How was this allowed to happen? So recently as 1953? Eight years after Hiroshima, Nagasaki. When certain of the consequences of radioactive poisoning were known.

  Swann Chemicals was the principal polluter, but the dumping had begun in the era of MacKenna-Swann. Insecticides, herbicides, poisons. Chemicals. Dirk saw that the dividends his family received were to be traced back to such origins. Those patents he’d professed not to care about, but had taken for granted like all the Burnabys.

  Dirk felt sick, ashamed. He was involved in this, too.

  All his life he’d been involved, unknowing.

  (But how unknowing?)

  In her chiding murmur Ariah spoke of the “rich Burnabys.” It wasn’t clear to Dirk if Ariah was teasing him or taunting him. If her remarks were playful, or cruel. Certainly she exhibited a maddening air of moral superiority. (No wonder Clarice and Sylvia disliked their sister-in-law. Dirk couldn’t blame them, really.) But Ariah’s disdain for money was the result of her having married Dirk Burnaby, who provided her and their children with a comfortable life. Where was the moral superiority in that?

  It was Nina Olshaker he dreaded, discovering that he, Dirk Burnaby, was connected in any way with Love Canal. However indirectly, blamelessly.

  (But how blameless?)

  After the hazardous-waste property was sold to the Niagara Falls Board of Education for one dollar, the Board promptly resold much of the land to a local developer named Colvin, and began construction on an elementary school. By the time the Ninety-ninth Street School was opened in the fall of 1955, much of Colvin Heights had been built and many of the small woodframe bungalows had been sold. Dirk supposed that the administration and faculty of the school knew nothing of the building site—the fact that they were working on a toxic waste dump. The principal of the school couldn’t have known, even. The Board of Education must have kept secret the deal with Hiram S. Swann and associates. Colvin, the contractor, would have kept the secret too, for surely he’d known?

  According to county health records, residents of Colvin Heights began to complain almost immediately of nauseating odors, “black sludge,” leaking basements, spongy lawns, “burnt” children and pets; “surfacing barrels” in their yards that contained a virulent kind of tar. Colvin arranged to clean up some of the worst areas, as did the City of Niagara Falls. A crescent-shaped sector, adjacent to Swann Chemicals two miles to the east, was dezoned for residential housing and kept undeveloped. (Though it was fenced off, children played there. It began to be used as an unofficial dump for homeowners wanting to get rid of filthy mattresses, broken household items, old building materials and combustible Christmas trees.) In 1957, medical investigators for the county health board “examined” the site of the Ninety-ninth Street School and declared the area “without hazard to health.” They examined those residents of the subdivision with medical complaints and found “no grounds” for alarm. Their conclusion was unanimous: there was no problem in Colvin Heights, and if there was, the problem had been taken care of.

  Dirk checked the records of the Board of Education for 1952. The chairman at the time of the Swann Chemicals sale was a local businessman, now deceased, named Ely; Dirk recalled that Ely, or someone with that name, had been a business associate of Hiram Swann’s. He would have been an acquaintance of the MacKennas, and surely of Virgil Burnaby.

  That was why the Board of Education had accepted Swann’s unprecedented stipulation that his company be absolved of blame in perpetuity. These were friends aiding friends. Men who belonged to the same private clubs, who were linked with one another by ties of commerce and perhaps even by marriage and blood. And possibly there’d been money changing hands. Ely might have been a secret investor in the subdivision to be known as Colvin Heights. Ely might have been a poker buddy of Hiram Swann. Or a golfing partner of the MacKennas. He’d have been a guest at Shalott, very likely. Membership on the Board of Education was political in some cases, volunteer-philanthrophic in others. There were no salaries. The chair was honorific.

  Dirk was sitting with his head in his hands. His heavy, dazed head. He had no clear idea where he was, which municipal building he’d entered hours before, a lone prowler amid echoing dust-grimed aluminum stacks like those of a library, shelved not with books but with documents. He’d been taking notes furiously, now his right hand was a claw. Hardly could he hold a pen. The interior of his nose, mouth, throat felt singed, as if he’d been breathing the fumes of a furnace. What would he tell Nina Olshaker? For he must tell Nina Olshaker. How he yearned for the river! The river of his boyhood. The sky over the river, patches of broken concrete giving way as he stared, as the wind blew, to a pale autumn sun. But it was the sun. And the wind from Ontario was fresh, clearing his nostrils. He and his father were on the wet, slippery deck of Virgil Burnaby’s thirty-foot Chris-Craft Luxe II. A trim, whitely glistening boat it was, beautiful to Dirk’s eye, though as a boy he much preferred his father’s sailboat. But Virgil hadn’t wanted to take out the sailboat in the last years of his life, sailing was too strenuous for one in his weakened condition. (A heart condition? Dirk hadn’t ever known.) They were alone, what a relief to be alone. This was their longest trip, through the vast width of Lake Erie and up the astonishing length of Lake Huron to Sault Sainte Marie hundreds of miles away in northern Michigan, at the Canadian border. Virgil Burnaby, Dirk Burnaby. Father and son. Dirk shaded his eyes watching his father at the prow of the boat, staring out at the lake and the hazy horizon. There was something in the older man’s posture, the stoop of his shoulders and the incline of his head, that made Dirk uneasy. “Dad?” Dirk called, cupping his hands to his mouth. “Hey, Dad?” His voice was young and desperate. But with the noise of the boat’s motor, and the wind, Virgil Burnaby didn’t hear.

  3

  Not in love with Nina Olshaker. And yet.

  Instinctively Ariah drew away from his touch. His breath. His grinding guilt-sick brain. As one might shrink from a subtly toxic odor. An invisible, yet palpable, radioactive aura. Dirk told Ariah nothing of Love Canal for he knew she wanted to hear nothing of his deepest, most profound life that excluded her and their children. She’d become the most fiercely protective of mothers. Her instinct was unfailing, ever vigilant. Hadn’t she noticed—she must have noticed!—that Dirk was working longer hours, and often on weekends; that he’d lost much of his ebullience, and his appetite. He smoked more. He slept less. At home, he was locked away in his study and on the telephone well past the children’s and Ariah’s bedtime. Most astonishingly, he’d dropped his poker nights, that tradition he’d begun in 1931. Prior to this, poker night had been cut back to approximately once a month. But now, it seemed that Dirk had dropped poker altogether. Ariah was so absorbed in Juliet and Royall, she seemed scarcely to take notice of her husband except to murmur, with her small, hurt smile, “Well! We’re honored you’re back in Luna Park for a few hours, Mr. Burnaby.” She joked with the children, in Dirk’s presence, “D’you know the one about the high-priced lawyer and his client? ‘Client calls up on the telephone and lawyer answers, and client says, “Hello! How are you?” and lawyer says, “Fifty dollars.” ’ ” Ariah laughed heartily, a signal for the older children to laugh, which they invariably did. Juliet, just a baby, waved her pudgy little fists in excitement. Laugh, laugh! Dirk laughed, too.

  Like all lawyers, he loved lawyer jokes. The more unfair, the funnier.

  Some nights, sharp-eyed Ariah must have noted crescents of fatigue beneath Dirk’s smiling eyes, and she must have smelled whisky on his breath. But she never asked where he’d been, or with whom. Or if he’d been in his office all these hours, working. Drinking alone.

  Ariah seemed to have few friends and no intimate friend. So she heard no rumors. That Dirk Burnaby was neglecting or putting
off his paying clients, that several had left him in disgust and more were preparing to leave. Not only wasn’t Dirk Burnaby taking on paying clients, he was the one who was paying now, the expenses of a unique and difficult lawsuit that was turning out to require far more preparation than he’d anticipated back in July. But Ariah was oblivious, in her intense, narrowly circumscribed and comforting world of children, household, piano lessons.

  Sometimes in the night they held each other, Ariah pressed monkey-like and playful into her husband’s brawny arms, the couple wordless, oddly content, on the edge of sleep as of a vast abyss. It was the habit of years, this embrace. Ariah dropped off to sleep as Dirk, his old, sour insomnia rolling back upon him like despoiled waves, found himself thinking of—who? The Woman in Black?

  Ridiculous to have thought of Nina Olshaker in such terms. How we demonize what we don’t know, and fear.

  Dirk was ashamed to recall how close he’d come to denying Nina, as every other attorney in the city had denied her.

  How close he’d come to losing her.

  “I won’t fail. I can’t.”

  Ariah, asleep in Dirk’s arms, heard these murmured words and wriggled in childish pleasure.

  “Mmm, darling. I love you, too.”

  Days, Ariah avoided answering the phone. She sorted mail into neat piles on the vestibule table, but frequently put off opening her own mail, rare as it was. (A letter from her mother for instance. Reverend Littrell had died suddenly of a stroke that fall, and Mrs. Littrell, feeling lonely and useless in Troy, was hinting how she’d like so very much to come to Luna Park to live—“to help out with the children”—but Ariah was not encouraging.) She never watched TV news or read the front pages of newspapers where “disturbing” news might be printed. Quickly she turned to features, to women’s pages, entertainment, comics. She, Royall, and Juliet enjoyed the comics: the Katzenjammer Kids, Li’l Abner, and Donald Duck were their favorites. If she’d read certain pages of the Gazette or the Buffalo Evening News she’d have discovered articles, interviews, even editorials on the subject of the Colvin Heights Homeowners’ controversial lawsuit, and she’d have discovered Dirk Burnaby’s name. But she didn’t, and wouldn’t. Sometimes, turning newspaper pages quickly, Ariah shut her eyes and bit her lower lip. No, no! Local news no more tempted her than news of a massive earthquake in Mexico, the crash of an American Airlines jetliner in Jamaica Bay, a tenement fire in Buffalo killing eleven children, a covert invasion of Cuba by American-armed Cuban refugees (“ ‘Bay of Pigs’?” Ariah would inquire innocently for years. “Couldn’t they have named it something else?”), an insurrection, or a civil war, or an invasion, whatever it was, worsening on the far side of the earth in—what was the country? Somewhere Asian, remote as the moon.