The Falls

by Joyce Carol Oates

“Well, I don’t know. One of your Burnaby things. Some strange mood where you mumble, and won’t look anyone in the eye.”

  A Burnaby thing? Royall had never heard of this before. And hadn’t he just been looking Candace in the eye?

  Candace said, pouting, “You! Sometimes I think you don’t even want to get married. Sometimes I think you don’t even love me.”

  Royall’s head was aching. The cold milk had gotten into the bones of his forehead now. A dull ache, and he had to resist hiding his face in his hands.

  “Well, do you? I don’t believe you do.”

  Tears shone in Candace’s eyes. Her lips were pursed prettily. In the other room, voices lifted. Peals of laughter. The phone rang.

  Candace turned to leave, but Royall gripped her arm.

  His voice croaked. “Honey.”

  “What? What?”

  Royall swallowed hard. Now his tongue had grown cold, and numb. These words had to be summoned from a distance, like hauling a barge along a canal. “Honey, I guess I don’t. Not exactly.”

  “ ‘Don’t’? Don’t what?”

  Royall shook his head miserably.

  Candace’s eyes turned steely, like ice picks. Her pert little nose seemed to sharpen. In that instant, she knew.

  Candace picked up the quart of milk and dumped what remained of it over Royall’s head, shrieked and screamed and slapped and kicked at him until he restrained her. “You can’t! You can’t! I hate you, Royall Burnaby, you can’t!”

  This long day. At last, it was coming to an end.

  3

  If they ask of him tell them: It happened before I was born.

  Royall knew better. And yet, he had no clear memory of the man who’d been his father.

  He had no memory of Luna Park except he knew, from Chandler, that the family had once lived in a “big stone house” facing the park, a long time ago. There were no photographs of that house as there were no photographs of that time. There were no photographs of their unnamed father.

  When Royall tried to remember, his mind seemed to dissolve like vapor. Like spray thrown up by The Falls, scattered and lost in the wind.

  As a boy living on Baltic Street he’d secretly bicycled to Luna Park a few miles away to see if, if he saw the house, he’d remember it. But each time he approached the park he became strangely dizzy, his knees weak, the front wheel of his bike turned sharply, he almost toppled into the street. So he’d given up and turned back. It isn’t meant to be. Mommy is the one who loves you.

  Royall’s memory began when he was four years old and Ariah was half-carrying him sleepy and confused into the “new” house. Up narrow creaking stairs, and into his “new” bedroom. He would share this room with his brother for the next ten years. He would question nothing, he would be Ariah’s happy, healthy boy. In the brick-and-stucco rowhouse at 1703 Baltic Street exuding its mysterious, half-pleasurable odors of old wood smoke, grease, and mildew, where freight cars emblazoned Buffalo & Chautauqua, Baltimore & Ohio, New York Central, Shenandoah, Susquehannah thundered through their skulls.

  Royall came home from Baltic Street Elementary with tales of The Falls.

  Ghosts came out of the Gorge at night, Royall told Ariah excitedly. Some of these were Indians, and some were white people. It was a white man taken by the Indians and made to swim in the river and the river carried him over The Falls, and there was a “red-haired young bride” who searched for him “for seven days and seven nights” and when she found him, drowned and dead, torn into pieces by the rapids, she “cast herself” into the Gorge, too.

  Ariah who was brushing and plaiting Juliet’s long hair, that was wheat-colored but threaded with streaks of dark red, asked dryly, “When did all this happen, sweetie?”

  Royall, in third grade at the time, said, “A hudred hudred years ago, Mommy. I think.”

  “Not ‘hudred,’ Royall. Hun dred.”

  “ ‘Hun dred,’ Mommy. And a thousand, too.”

  Like Zarjo, the child was. Adorable, and eager to please. If Royall had had a stumpy tail like the dog’s, he’d have been thumping it most of the time.

  Ariah laughed, and leaned over to kiss her son. The things children seem to believe. “If it was that long ago, Royall, she’s dead, too. Ghosts don’t live forever.”

  Royall came home from fourth grade with a different tale of the Gorge. This time, Chandler as well as Juliet were witnesses.

  “Mom my! The ghost I was telling you about?”

  “What ghost, honey? We don’t believe in ghosts here.”

  Wide-eyed Royall said, “She lives on this street! People say they see her, she’s real.”

  Ariah stared at her breathless son. She was handing him a tall glass of King’s Dairy “whole” “homogenized” milk as she always did at this time. Calmly asking, “Who told you that?”

  Royall frowned, trying to remember. He wasn’t a child who remembered most things accurately. Names, faces, events were easily jumbled in his head, like dice shaken in a cardboard cup. He became restless sitting at his desk at school, and he became impatient with printed words “jumping all over” in his eyes. It might have been older classmates who’d told him this, about the ghost who lived on Baltic Street. It might have been his teacher. It might have been the mother of one of his best friends, who often invited him into her house after school, and gave him milk and cookies with her son, and let the boys watch TV cartoons, forbidden by Ariah Burnaby at the other end of the block.

  Juliet, the most credulous of children, now a first grader, was listening intensely to her brother. She was a somber little girl with a face “long as a cucumber” and brooding “black-eyed-pea” eyes as her mother described her; the danger was, if Juliet heard tales of ghosts sighted on Baltic Street, she’d be seeing ghosts that very night. Chandler, a wraith-like adolescent adept at slipping in and out of rooms, sensitive to Ariah’s shifting moods, was preparing to slip from the kitchen now, sensing a scene. And in the corner to which he’d been banished, as a naughty dog who’d raided neighbors’ garbage cans another time, Zarjo was drowsily alert. It was a cold windy November afternoon of no special distinction in the history of the Burnaby family of Baltic Street except as Royall stumbled telling about the ghost, the ghost who was “real”—“a lady ghost”—“walks by The Falls and scares people so they jump in”—Ariah interrupted to ask who on earth was telling children such bullshit tales, and Royall protested with a nine-year-old’s earnestness, “Mommy, it’s true. She’s a lady-ghost, you can see her by The Falls.”

  Ariah laughed. Her laughter was short and shrill as a whip cracking. Only a child as adept at gauging Ariah’s moods as Chandler could interpret her laughter as he might take note of her clenching fists.

  Yet Chandler wasn’t fast enough, slipping away. Though Royall was the one who’d told the bullshit tale, it was Chandler who drew Ariah’s wrath. Ariah turned to lunge at him, grabbing his hair in both her hands and yanking him back into the kitchen. “You! That look in your pinched little face! You spy.”

  Zarjo leapt up, barking excitedly. Royall, jostled by the struggle of Ariah and Chandler, spilled most of his glass of milk onto himself.

  Otherwise, an ordinary November afternoon in the history of the Burnaby family of Baltic Street.

  4

  TEN YEARS LATER, Royall winced thinking of that spilled milk. The shock of it, and the glass shattering at his feet.

  King’s Dairy. Cold milk thrown on Royall Burnaby. He smiled to think maybe it would happen to him every ten years? Some weird crazy-quilt pattern in his life.

  Once, Candace had told Royall and Juliet in her breathless fluttering way, “Oh, you’re so lucky! You have the most fascinating mother in the world.”

  Brother and sister had exchanged a startled glance.

  Juliet said, sighing, “Well. We know that, I guess.”

  Ten years after the incident in the kitchen, Royall was standing hesitant on the front porch at 1703 Baltic. He could hear piano music inside. Someone was p
laying the piano energetically, it sounded like a Mozart rondo, there was a pause like a hiccup, and Ariah’s uplifted, encouraging voice. Ariah’s children had been trained to enter and leave the house quietly during her piano lessons, but Royall lingered on the porch, dreamy and distracted. He wore rumpled khaki pants, a flannel shirt over a T-shirt, a Devil’s Hole Cruise cap pulled low on his forehead. He had a three days’ growth of beard, meanly glinting as steel filings, and his eyes were bloodshot as if he’d been rubbing them with his knuckles, hard. He hadn’t changed his clothes or done much more than wash his hands, forearms, and underarms, since Friday morning, and this was Monday afternoon, late.

  Shame, shame! “Royall Burnaby” is the name.

  In fact, Royall didn’t feel all that ashamed, and he didn’t feel repentant in the slightest. Relief filled him like a helium balloon. Free! He could float away, in such freedom. Not a married man at nineteen.

  Of course, Royall felt sorry for Candace. His face burned when he thought of it. He’d hurt her, and the last thing he’d wanted to do was hurt her. He felt almost as sorry for Ariah, too. But why?

  Candace is going to be my wife, Mom. Not yours.

  Ariah had not wanted Chandler, aged twenty-five, to “see” a woman friend of his who was separated from her husband, and pregnant. Ariah had expressed shock and repugnance for any such “liaison” and had made Chandler promise he wouldn’t get drawn into marrying the young woman; Ariah had refused even to meet her. Yet, Ariah had immediately latched upon Candace McCann as a “perfect” wife for Royall.

  This was strange. Yet, knowing Ariah, maybe not so strange.

  Now that she was in her mid-fifties, not quite so nervous and excitable as she’d been at a younger age, Ariah was less prone to spectacular flare-ups of temper. (Or “fugues,” as she called them, with clinical detachment. As if such tantrums were a state of mind for which no one was to blame, like being struck by lightning and kicking and flailing out to hurt innocent bystanders as a result.) Still, Ariah’s moods were unpredictable. There were days when she refused to speak to Juliet for some minor infraction of their mother-daughter intimacy that made no sense at all to Royall, who, as a boy, had been allowed much more freedom growing up. Ariah laughed at household misdeeds committed by Royall out of carelessness or clumsiness, that would have thrown her into a fury if they’d been committed by Juliet, or poor Chandler.

  (Fortunately for him, Chandler no longer lived at home. But he dropped by often, and sometimes slept in his old bed, as if he needed Ariah’s scolding presence as much as, in her peculiar way, Ariah needed him.)

  “Hey Royall! How’s it going?”

  A neighbor from across the street whose roof gutters Royall used to clear out for a very minimum wage now called out to Royall, who had no choice but to wave and call back. Royall supposed that everyone in the neighborhood knew of the rudely cancelled wedding, though no one on Baltic Street had been invited.

  “Thought you’d be off on your honeymoon this week, eh?”

  “Well, no. I’m not.”

  The neighbor, an older man with a limping leg, laughed mysteriously and disappeared back into the house. Royall’s face burned.

  Maybe this wasn’t a good idea? Returning home, so soon. Royall had to admit he was fearful of seeing Ariah.

  Of course he’d called Ariah on Friday evening. Immediately he’d told her the wedding was “off.” It had been after nine o’clock and Ariah was reluctant to answer the phone when it rang so late, but she’d answered it on the tenth ring, and had been so astonished by Royall’s news she’d asked him please to repeat it, and when Royall did, saying in a rush of words that he couldn’t marry Candace, he didn’t love Candace and didn’t believe that Candace loved him, Ariah was silent for so long Royall worried she’d had some sort of attack. Then he heard her harsh, labored breathing, as if she was trying not to cry. Ariah, who scorned tears! Quickly Royall said, “Mom? Candace is coming to see you. She understands why I’m doing this. She’s upset, and mad as hell at me, but she understands, I think. Mom, forgive me, I’m sorry. I’m a bastard, I guess. Mom—” But the voice on the line was Juliet’s. “Royall, she’s run upstairs. She wouldn’t tell me what’s wrong. Royall, you aren’t hurt, are you? Royall? You aren’t dying?”

  Next day, Saturday, Royall sent Ariah a telegram, his first.

  DEAR MOM I’M SORRY HAD NO CHOICE WILL EXPLAIN SOMEDAY LOVE ROYALL

  Immediately after the breakup with Candace, Royall had gone into hiding. Three days a fugitive. Out of contact with everyone. He hadn’t called anyone else, knowing that word would spread quickly. Every one of Candace’s friends and relatives would have been informed within an hour. Like sewers flooding, Ariah used to say of gossip making the rounds. You can count on sewers flooding in Niagara Falls just as you can count on gossip and “wicked news” generally. Royall didn’t want to think what people were saying of him. Shocked, scandalized, furious. Even Candace’s mother was probably prepared to strangle him. Can you believe! Royall Burnaby doing such a thing! On the night before the wedding! Royall knew that Candace would be bitter about having to return the wedding presents, injury on top of insult.

  She would never forgive him, he knew. What he’d done was worse than any act of sexual betrayal. If he’d told her about the woman in black she would have been hurt, dismayed, disgusted, she’d have wept and struck at him, and told him she hated him, she didn’t want to marry him; yet in the end, and fairly quickly, Candace would have forgiven him, and married him. But what he’d done now, out of conscience, and knowing it was the right thing for them both, she would never forgive.

  Had the piano lesson ended? It was almost six o’clock. But Ariah sometimes went over the hour. She was a diligent, exacting teacher who, after more than thirty years of teaching piano, still had the capacity to be surprised by mistakes. Ariah had long embarrassed her children, especially Juliet who felt such slights keenly, by caring more about her pupils’ piano lessons than the pupils themselves cared. She was forever being hurt, stunned, devastated by modestly talented adolescents who broke off lessons, or by their parents’ decisions not to continue. It had nothing to do with money: Ariah sometimes carried a student for months, for no fee. She loved music and could not comprehend that others took music so casually. This is just throwing money down a rat hole was the crude (but possibly accurate?) expression used by the father of one of Ariah’s students, when he’d decided to discontinue lessons. Ariah took up the expression with her usual grim humor. Throwing money down a rat hole, that’s what we’re all doing. That’s life!

  On Baltic Street, among working-class and “welfare-class” neighbors, some of them living in badly decayed rowhouses spilling over with children, the graying red-haired woman who lived at 1703 was known to be a widow, bringing up three fatherless children by herself, dignified, polite, somewhat disdainful and aloof with her neighbors, very reclusive, “eccentric.” It was acknowledged that Ariah Burnaby was someone special, an “educated”—“talented”—woman; it was understood that she feared intruders, even a friendly knock at the door could upset her. Like a ghost she is. Looks right through you. “Missus” Burnaby you can’t call her, she gets a look in her face like you stabbed her in the heart.

  Since he’d been old enough to play with the children next-door, Royall had been a popular presence on the street, a sort of cheerful semi-orphan. He made friends everywhere and was always welcome in his friends’ homes where sometimes, casually, their mothers would interrogate him (“Royall, your mother doesn’t go out much, does she?”—“Royall, you don’t remember your father, I guess?”). Feelings oscillated between resentment of Ariah Burnaby for her purported superiority and sympathy for her predicament. Was she someone to dislike, or someone to pity? The woman could play piano beautifully, but she hadn’t a husband, had she? She’d been married to Dirk Burnaby, but she lived on Baltic Street now, didn’t she? And where were her family, her relatives? Why were she and her children so alone?

  When Ro
yall was a child, there were months-long phases when Ariah couldn’t bring herself to leave the house even to shop for food—“I just feel so weak, can’t breathe, I know I’ll faint if I get on that bus”; at such times, neighbors quietly offered to help. They took Chandler and Royall to the A & P with them, Ariah’s carefully printed grocery list in hand; they drove the children to the doctor, or the dentist, or shopping for clothes and shoes. Ariah had to be grateful for such kindnesses, but bitterly resented them. “Don’t tell family secrets!” she warned the children. (Who had to wonder, what were these secrets?) “People just want to pry. When they sense weakness, they pounce.” When, shortly after her fiftieth birthday, Ariah had to have emergency surgery for the removal of gallstones, neighbors invited the children to share meals with them; and when Ariah was discharged from the hospital and convalescing at home, they sent casseroles, turkey left-overs (this was at Thanksgiving), cakes and pies. Chandler was designated to thank them politely, even as Ariah seethed with indignation. “Jackals, in a pack! They see that I’m ‘down.’ They think I’m one of them now.” Ariah’s pale skin gleamed coldly. Her glassy-green eyes glimmered with commingled pain and triumph. “But they’re wrong, see? We’ll show ’em.”

  Chandler, ten at the time and beginning to be independent-minded, objected. “Mom, they’re just trying to be nice. They feel sorry for us.”

  “ ‘Feel sorry for us’!” Ariah said scathingly. “How dare they! Tell them to feel sorry for themselves.” Even in her convalescent’s bed, her skin deathly pale and her voice cracking, Ariah managed to wound her elder son.

  Usually, Royall was spared. He had to wonder why.

  “You. At least you’re alive.”

  Royall laughed uneasily. Ariah said the damndest things. At last, the piano student had left. Ariah, walking the girl to the front door, hadn’t shown much emotion at seeing her son leaning against the porch railing, the lid of his cap pulled down low to hide his guilty eyes.