The Falls

by Joyce Carol Oates

  But there was Chandler, indefatigable Chandler, a diligent newspaper-reader. How quick to spy the name “Burnaby” amid columns of newsprint. “Dad? This is you in the paper, isn’t it?” The child’s voice quavered with excitement.

  Dirk steeled himself to read. “Burnaby” didn’t invariably get a good press in Niagara Falls these days.

  COLVIN HGTS HOMEOWNERS FILE SUIT

  AGAINST CITY, SWANN CHEMICALS

  “Depraved Indifference” Charged

  “Yes, Chandler. It is.”

  “This ‘Love Canal’—it isn’t a real canal, is it?”

  “No. It never was.”

  “How far away is it from us?”

  “About twelve miles. That way.” Dirk pointed.

  “Is twelve miles close?” Chandler frowned, crinkling his forehead. You could see how he needed to know, beyond the statement of fact, what fact meant.

  “I think it’s too close. But no, it isn’t dangerously close.”

  Dirk smiled, to reassure Chandler. Though his smile wasn’t so confident as the Burnaby smile of months ago.

  Chandler said, with a shy dip of his head, “Dad? Could I—help you?”

  “Help me? How?”

  “I don’t know. Somehow. Like a ‘paralegal.’ ”

  Dirk laughed. “No, Chandler. You’re a little too young. And not exactly trained. But thanks for asking, I appreciate it.”

  Dirk was touched. Eleven-year-old Chandler was a somber, quizzical boy with a precocious air of adult responsibility. His near-sighted eyes were of the unsettling hue of mist and their focus seemed blurred, even with his new glasses. He was a straight-A student in eighth grade (so Dirk was informed, by Ariah) but hadn’t many friends, and wasn’t entirely at ease at school. His smile was quick, shy, tentative. Always he seemed to be inquiring of his parents Do you love me? Do you know who I am? The younger children, Royall and Juliet, were so much more the focus of their mother’s scrupulous attention, Chandler tended to be overlooked. Dirk, who rarely spent time alone with him, wanted now to touch him, hug him; wanted to reassure him Yes of course your daddy loves you. How he dreaded turning into his own father…

  In a lowered voice Chandler said, “Don’t worry, Dad. I won’t tell Mom. What I read in the paper about you, I never tell Mom.”

  A preliminary hearing in the Love Canal case had been set for mid-February in the Niagara County District Court. But the date was postponed for several weeks, by request of the defense. And another time the date was postponed, to late April. The Niagara County Board of Health was updating its findings, for the defense. Plaintiff’s attorney registered displeasure at such unconscionable stalling even as plaintiff’s attorney privately felt vast relief. The motion Dirk had written was the longest and most statistically documented of his career, yet (he conceded) it might have been longer, more fully documented.

  “Oh, Mr. Burnaby! Why are people so evil?”

  How young she seemed, Nina Olshaker. Wiping tears of grief and outrage from her eyes. Her question was a legitimate one. Dirk Burnaby whose lucrative profession was words could not think of an answer.

  Well. There was the Holocaust, he’d discovered certain facts about human nature as a result of what he knew of the Holocaust, and he was certain he didn’t know all there was to know of the Holocaust. The role of scientists, doctors, nurses, helpful managerial types, even teacher-types, and (especially) legal-minded types. Messianic leaders, mystics. You could not even say that some of these individuals were selfish, for “self” seems hardly the point. You could not say that the Nazis were insane, for the record shows that they were fully, calculatingly sane. In the service of madness, and yet sane. In a court of law, demonstrably sane. The crude, cruel bullies, the born sadists, murderers, and executioners of the race, you could comprehend, but not these others. How to comprehend these others!

  My kind, some of them. Oh, obviously.

  Consider atomic testing, in Nevada. Preliminary to and following Hiroshima, Nagasaki. The decade of the 1950’s was the decade of (classified) nuclear testing. You wanted to be patriotic. You needed to be American-patriotic, it was the golden-glow aftermath of a just war. A war that (everyone agrees) had to be fought, could not be not fought, and was fought, and was won. And he, Dirk Burnaby, had been part of that winning. And so not wanting to know too much about the government for which he’d fought. It was never good for a patriot to know too much. How, as Dirk had heard from a Buffalo Evening News reporter who hadn’t been able to publish his information, that in Nevada at the Nellis testing grounds in 1952 to 1953 some soldiers were provided with protective gear, and some were not. Films were made of their “witnessing” the explosions at varying distances. Some soldiers, with and without protective gear, were driven in Air Force vehicles to ground zero immediately after the A-bomb explosions, while others were positioned at calibrated distances. How far from ground zero was “safe”? How close was “dangerous”? Scientists and politicians were eager to know.

  My kind was in charge there. High-ranking military men, privileged and highly paid scientists. Dirk knew.

  Why then his surprise at Love Canal. Why his naïveté, perverse in a forty-five-year-old man of intelligence and experience.

  Yet he shared in Nina Olshaker’s dismay, disgust. He tried, he was trying damned hard, Ariah could not have begun to suspect how hard, to separate himself from this “case.” He was trying not to become emotional. He was Nina Olshaker’s attorney, not her protector. He would not be her lover.

  Never. That won’t happen. That would be madness.

  This remarkable woman unlike any other woman he’d known. Though she suffered from migraine headaches, chronic coughs and infections, the onset of what appeared to be asthma, and “bad nerves,” yet Nina was out daily canvassing Colvin Heights. With little help she’d organized the Colvin Heights Homeowners’ Association, to which about seventy people now belonged, out of approximately three hundred fifty who might belong. Nina was tireless, or seemed so. She was energetic, optimistic, devoted to her cause. If she was sickened by what she discovered, she tried not to become demoralized. From Dirk she was beginning to learn shrewdness. Cunning you might call it. He’d provided her with a tape recorder, for instance, to tape interviews with her neighbors, not to rely upon schoolgirl note-taking which might be challenged at a later date, in court. Aided by a paralegal in Dirk’s employ she was recording a list of instances of illnesses, chronic medical conditions, and deaths in the Colvin Heights subdivision since 1955. She was interviewing parents of children who’d been attending the Ninety-ninth Street School, and she was trying to interview teachers. The principal of the school forbade her to “set foot on school property.” Sometimes, doors were shut in her face. She was accused of being a “trouble maker”—an “agitator”—a “Commie.” She and the homeowners’ association were “lowering property values”—“stirring up negative publicity.” She and her lawyer were “out to make a killing”—“looking for a big settlement.” She told Dirk, “Some of the people who won’t talk to us, they’re pathetic. They’re coughing, their eyes are puffy and red like Billy’s. On Ninety-ninth Street there’s a guy, couldn’t be more than fifty, he’s shaking all over like with nerve gas. They’re on crutches. Wheelchairs! One guy works at Dow, he’s using an oxygen mask. Emphysema. ‘From smoking,’ his doctor told him.”

  But Nina Olshaker was amassing data, covering some of the same territory the Niagara County Board of Health had claimed to have covered a few years before. The data was damning, Dirk thought. Any fair-minded judge, and certainly any typical selection of jurors, would be impressed. Nina’s focus was One Hundred Eighth Street to Eighty-ninth Street. Colvin Boulevard to Veterans Road. Here there were strange clusterings of maladies on streets that bisected the (hidden, buried) Love Canal, and the frequency of occurrence of these maladies was strikingly disproportionate to the frequency of occurrence elsewhere in the city, and in the general population of the United States. Miscarriages, still births,
birth deformities. Neurological disorders, stroke. Cardiac problems, respiratory problems. Emphysema. Liver, kidney, gallbladder trouble. And miscarriages. Eye infections, ear infections, strep throat. Migraine headaches. More miscarriages. Cancers! Cancers of all kinds. A cornucopia of cancers. Lung, colon, brain, breast, ovarian, cervical, prostate, pancreatic. (Pancreatic was a rare cancer, but not in Colvin Heights.) Leukemia. Childhood leukemia. (Seven times more frequent than average.) High blood pressure, morbidly low blood pressure. Nephrosis, nephritis. (Illnesses extremely rare in children, but not in Colvin Heights.)

  And miscarriages.

  Nina said, “I feel less lonely now, what I’m learning. More like I have a right to be angry.”

  Another time Nina said, “Mr. Burnaby, I know what I’m doing, all this.” She spoke aggressively, fixing him with one of her dark, intense, unblinking stares that looked as if they must hurt her eyes.

  Dirk said, “ ‘What you’re doing’—what do you mean, Nina?”

  “It’s got to do with Sophia. I’m mourning my little girl, I guess. That’s why it’s hard for me to stop, to come back home. No matter how tired I am. Sam says I’m going buggy about this and making things worse but if my mind isn’t busy with these things, like trying to talk sense into people, trying to get them to see this is for their own God-damned good, it settles back on her, see? On Sophia. And I can’t do her, or Billy, or Alice, any good that way.”

  By January, the Olshakers’ son Billy had become so allergic to the Ninety-ninth Street School, nauseated, teary-eyed and puffy, prone to asthma attacks, Nina refused to let him attend, and was “in violation” of state law. She was served with a summons, threatened with arrest. “They can’t make me, can they? Mr. Burnaby, can they? That place makes Billy sick. I can feel it coming over him when we walk there. Will they put me in jail? What can I do?” Dirk made threatening phone calls of his own, and dealt with the problem. He rented a bungalow in Mt. Lucas, a rural-suburban town northwest of Niagara Falls, where Nina could stay with her children when she wanted to escape Colvin Heights. (Sam remained in the house on Ninety-third Street, a ten-minute commute to Parish Plastics. Sam considered moving out of their house “giving in.”)

  But Nina was tough, Nina persevered. Dirk marveled at the woman’s tenacity. He was accustomed to clients who never lifted a finger to aid in their cases, simply paid him his fee. He was accustomed to clients who weren’t fighting for their lives. Halfway he wondered if he should offer to buy out the Olshakers’ property, pay off their mortgage, and help the couple buy a house elsewhere in Niagara Falls. But he knew that Sam wouldn’t allow such an act of charity, Sam had his pride that was already threatened by Dirk Burnaby’s presence in Nina’s life. And there was a point to pride.

  Or do I want Nina to leave her husband. Just temporarily!

  Of the outrages that Nina was discovering, the one that most upset her was an account by a housewife who lived on Ninety-eighth Street, behind the school. The woman described an “emergency cleanup” of the playground after torrential rains in the spring of 1957 resulted in a foul-smelling black sludge covering much of the asphalt. One morning, Nina said, the woman watched as a city vehicle pulled up and a work crew in protective gear climbed out, looking like space men, helmets, boots, gloves, and some of them wearing gas masks. Gas masks! And yet, a few days later the school was reopened, and children were playing on the playground as usual. Nina said, her voice quavering, “That’s where our children go! That school! This is where we live! And these adult men, working for the city, they were afraid to breathe the air! But everybody lies to us. The Mayor would deny all this. The Board of Health. They say there’s nothing wrong here, it’s our fault we’re sick, we ‘smoke too much, drink too much.’ That’s what they say. They don’t give a damn if our children live or die, they don’t give a damn about any of us, Mr. Burnaby, why are people so evil?” The young woman, exhausted from strain, began to sob, and to cough. Dirk held her, somewhat stiffly. He felt a nameless emotion for her, not sexual desire, or not desire merely, but sympathy, a shared animal panic that they weren’t strong enough, the enemy would defeat them. If the enemy was evil, the enemy would defeat them.

  They were in the house he’d rented for Nina and her children, in Mt. Lucas. It was eleven o’clock in the evening, the children had gone to bed. Dirk and Nina were in the brightly lit kitchen where they’d spread the Colvin Heights map on the table. Sam was working at Parish Plastics. Dirk was approximately twenty miles from Luna Park and his own home, his family. He held Nina Olshaker as she sobbed, and felt the frantic heat lifting from her skin. A smell of something musty, female perspiration, rage. He felt her erratic heartbeat. He wanted to love this woman, yet could not. Dared not. Stiffly he held her, awkward as if Dirk Burnaby had never held a weeping woman in his arms, any woman not his wife, so clearly yearning for him, or for comfort from him.

  His profession was words, but damned if he could think of any now.

  “Dirk. Hello.”

  This grim greeting. Clarice’s voice grated against his ears like a rusted file against rock.

  It was the morning after Nina Olshaker’s emotional outburst. Dirk had been thinking of her, and of what she’d asked, and felt as helpless now as he’d felt then. Am I going to fail, I am not.

  Dirk’s elder sister telephoned him at his office, demanding of Madelyn that she get “your employer” on the phone, immediately. No matter if he’s already on the phone, get him on. Was it a family emergency, yes it was.

  How long had it been since Dirk had spoken with anyone in the Burnaby family? He couldn’t recall. Months. He’d neglected to return his sisters’ calls (he knew they’d be furious with him, in this matter of Love Canal) and he’d neglected to call Claudine, let alone visit the difficult old woman.

  One day he’d be stricken with guilt, Dirk knew. After Claudine died. But not just yet.

  After a hurried, perfunctory preamble of inquiring after Dirk’s health and family and paying no heed to Dirk’s polite replies, Clarice bluntly attacked. “This female you’re involved with, this woman, she’s married, she has children, she’s a Tuscarora Indian, is she?—a squaw? In the eyes of the world, my brother has no more shame than to shack up in Mt. Lucas with a squaw?”

  Dirk was so stunned by this rush of words, the vulgarity of a woman he’d always believed to be prissy, puritanical, for a moment he sat speechless.

  Clarice said, furious, “Dirk, God damn you are you listening? Are you awake, or are you drunk? Are you trying to destroy the Burnaby family, through some madness?”

  Dirk managed to say, shaken, “Clarice, what the hell are you talking about? ‘Tuscarora squaw’? I’m not going to listen to bullshit like this.”

  “Don’t you hang up! Don’t you dare hang up! It’s impossible to reach you, like it’s impossible to talk to your wife. The two of you in your dream world, oblivious of the rest of us, how ashamed we are, your behavior, and her—‘Ariah’—a ridiculous name—a name no one has ever heard of—you and her, what a perfect match you are—the adulterer and the wife who sees and hears no evil—”

  “What has Ariah to do with this? I forbid you to speak of Ariah.”

  “Of course! ‘Forbid you to speak of Ariah!’ And what of this other woman, ‘Nina’? Do you forbid me to speak of her?”

  “Yes. I’m going to hang up, Clarice.”

  “Fine! Good! Ruin your life! Your career! Make enemies who will destroy you! If Father could see you now, how his ‘favored child’ has turned out.”

  “Clarice, we’ll talk about this another time. There is nothing between Nina Olshaker and me, that’s all I’m going to say. Goodbye.”

  “Ariah hung up on me, too. That woman is blind, as blind as you. As selfish. Mother said of her, ‘She’s a demon.’ What a match, the two of you. A match made in hell.”

  “Clarice, you’re hysterical. Goodbye.”

  Dirk hung up the phone, trembling. He would remember only a few of his sister’s shouted words
. Ariah hung up on me, too.

  “I’m not anyone’s ‘lover,’ darling. I’m your husband.”

  Dirk tried to explain, gently. A headache beginning to rage behind his eyes.

  Yes he was involved in a complicated civil case, the most challenging of his career. No he was not involved with Nina Olshaker, the principal litigant.

  He was representing Mrs. Olshaker, yes. He was not Mrs. Olshaker’s lover.

  “I’m her attorney. I’ve committed myself. It’s no different than any other case of mine, except—” Dirk hesitated, his voice beginning to quaver. For of course the case was different from any he’d ever taken on. “Except it’s more complicated. It has required much more preparation.”

  How misleading, for Dirk Burnaby to speak of Love Canal as if the case were nearly completed. As if the massive preparation was over.

  Ariah listened attentively, with averted downcast eyes. Her face was a girl’s face set in pale marble that had begun to crack very finely. At the edges of the evasive eyes, and bracketing the mouth that seemed to have shrunk to the size of a snail curled inside its shell.