The Falls

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Chandler felt faint. “Royall, my God! Is it loaded?”

  “Sure. But the safety is always on. See?”

  Royall clicked the mechanism off, on. Off, on. He too was needing a shave. Pale stubble glittered on his jaws like mica.

  Chandler thought, chilled My brother holding death in his hand.

  Royall was saying, “In this literature course I’m taking, the professor said that if a gun appears in a play, it has to be fired by somebody, sometime. You can’t set up a false expectation in the audience. But, in life, I don’t believe that.”

  “No. Not in life.”

  “You can hold a gun in your hand, like it’s a practical thing—a hammer, a pliers. A tool of somebody’s trade. But you don’t have to fire it.”

  Chandler pushed gently at Royall’s hand. “Royall, please put that thing away. Make sure the safety is on, and put it away.”

  “It’s just to show you, Chandler. What I might do, if I was desperate. If learning certain things about our father made me desperate. If, you know—you thought that being desperate was how I should be feeling.” When Chandler said nothing, Royall said, “But I’m not desperate, am I? It’s just in theory.”

  Still Chandler said nothing. He drew a deep breath.

  Royall said, watching him closely, “I wouldn’t know which was the target, anyway. Who.”

  “Who? Howell.”

  “Who?”

  Chandler smiled. “We sound like a duet of owls. Whooo. Howww. I think I’m drunk.”

  Royall laughed. “On three cans of beer. Nobody gets drunk on three cans of beer.”

  “On an empty stomach, it’s possible.”

  “I explained why I have the gun, haven’t I? I need it for my job, for protection.”

  “What job?”

  “I’m working part-time for Empire Collection, Inc. A collection agency. I drive around a lot, I make unannounced house calls. Sometimes I repossess cars, motorcycles. TVs, washing machines, there’s a two-man team. My boss is some character, ex-Marine and ex-middle-weight boxer. Says he climbed into the ring with Joey Maxim. And he knew our dad from the ‘old days.’ Not well, at a distance. ‘A gentleman among swine.’ ”

  Chandler was distracted by the gun in Royall’s hand. The more Chandler stared, the uglier it was becoming. Yet he smiled. “My kid brother. My kid brother with a gun.”

  “It’s a thirty-eight Smith & Wesson revolver, six chambers. That isn’t kid stuff. My boss says, if you’re armed, you owe it to your health to be armed.” Royall was holding the gun in the palm of his hand, as if weighing it. “He’s had guys working for him beat up, stabbed, chased in the street and dragged from their cars, shot in the head, kneecaps, ass. But that won’t happen to me because I’m not looking for a fight. Anywhere.”

  “But, Royall—a gun? You’re a university student.”

  “I am! Not full-time, but maybe next year. This job with Empire is only temporary. I feel I should send what I can back to Mom, I left her and Juliet kind of without warning. I felt like I was running for my life.” Royall, seeing that Chandler continued to stare at the gun with a sick, stunned expression, carried it away, and when he returned he was smiling, running a comb through his hair. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  They left Royall’s shabby brownstone building and walked quickly along Fourth Street. It was like emerging from a submarine after hours of captivity. Chandler drew a deep elated breath. He and Royall were friends again, reconciled! He loved Royall, he would try to forget the gun and what it might mean. Wind from Ontario was blowing mist in patches from the Niagara Gorge a quarter-mile away, wetting their warm faces.

  They ate in Duke’s Bar & Grill, in the fluorescent-lit diner amid rock music of the 1960’s that made Chandler’s eardrums throb. Royall moved his body to the beat, unconsciously, though he seemed scarcely to hear the noise. They were talking now of less intense matters. They smiled frequently, they laughed like old friends. It would seem to them afterward that this was new, rare—being in each other’s company outside the house on Baltic Street. Outside their mother’s dominion. Chandler asked about Royall’s courses at Niagara University, and if Royall was lonely living by himself, and Royall seemed embarrassed saying yes, and no, sure he was lonely sometimes, but no, frankly he liked living alone, feeling like a grown-up at last, the serious part of his life just beginning. “Learning about Dad. Y’know? That’s the beginning.”

  Chandler nodded, wanting to believe this.

  Royall said, “I miss Candace sometimes, and Mom and Juliet…But not being married, I sure as hell don’t miss that.”

  “You never were married, Royall. You can’t be missing it.”

  “The idea of it. Having to love somebody twenty-four hours a day and be God to her. The pressure.”

  Chandler was thinking the reverse. He’d like that pressure. He was trying to imagine what that might be.

  Royall said delicately, “Juliet told me about you and Melinda breaking up. You miss her, I guess?”

  Chandler winced. “Miss her like hell. And the baby.”

  Royall shook his head marveling, as if baby was beyond him.

  “Well. Melinda’s O.K. Always nice to have a nurse in the family, as Mom says.”

  “Mom says?”

  It was too funny. Chandler rubbed his jaws, startled to discover stubble. What day was this? Hadn’t he shaved that morning, for school?

  Like friends reluctant to say goodnight they talked of various things. Though this was a Wednesday night, and Chandler had class preparations for the next day. (How restless he was becoming, as a junior high science teacher! Dirk Burnaby would have expected much more of his son.) And there was the possibility of another emergency call from the Crisis Center, or the Samaritans, since Chandler had volunteered for the weekend. He couldn’t bear being alone with his thoughts! He was concerned he might call Melinda, and she would hang up without speaking to him.

  Can’t be involved with a man who doesn’t care if he lives or dies.

  That wasn’t true. It would not be true.

  Despite the late hour, past 11 P.M., the diner was nearly full, noisy and smoky. A swinging door connected it with Duke’s Bar, a popular hangout for Niagara Falls police officers and hospital workers. Behind the counter, at the grease-splattered grill, was a hulking shaved-headed young man with a blunt, familiar face. (A Mayweather? Someone from the neighborhood, in any case.) He glanced repeatedly at the Burnaby brothers in their booth, as they ate; but when Chandler tried to meet his eye, he frowned and turned away. The young man was about six feet three inches tall, and must have weighed two hundred twenty pounds. Yet his movements behind the counter were deft and coordinated. Chandler was curious who this person was, and Royall told him: Bud Stonecrop.

  “His father was a NFPD sergeant who got beaten up pretty badly and had to retire a few years ago. They live on Garrison. Budd was a couple of years ahead of me at school. He quit without graduating and he’s the cook here, kind of.”

  “He’s the cook?”

  “You like the chili? Budd makes the chili.”

  Chandler had devoured a large bowl of hotly spiced chili, he’d laced with crumpled oyster crackers. He’d been so hungry at first his hands shook. He’d scarcely noticed the chili except that it was unusually good. Royall nudged him, “If you like the food, let Budd know. He takes a lot of shit from his uncle who runs the place.” Chandler signaled the hulking young man in the soiled white cook’s costume, indicating he’d liked the chili; but Stonecrop, blushing, unsmiling, left the grill abruptly and disappeared back into the kitchen. Royall laughed. “Stonecrop is shy. He’d break your head with his fist but he’d have a helluva hard time talking to you.”

  Out on the street, the brothers hesitated before parting. Chandler’s car was parked in one direction, Royall’s apartment was in the other. The mist from the river was thicker. The sky was occluded, invisible. They’d been avoiding the crucial subject and now Royall lowered his voice, that quavered sli
ghtly, so that Chandler knew what he would ask. “Chandler, hey: you think there’s something to it, what some people say—that Dad was killed?”

  Chandler took a deep breath. “No.”

  “No? You don’t?” Royall sounded surprised.

  “No, Royall. You asked me, and I’m telling you. No.”

  Chandler would say nothing more on the subject. He’d prepared just these words.

  Royall stared at him, considering.

  They shook hands, parting. As they’d rarely done before in their lives. (Had they ever shaken hands, in fact? Chandler doubted it.) Impulsively he hugged Royall. “Royall, call me all the time, any time. Let’s eat together once a week, at least. Budd Stonecrop’s chili, O.K.? I want to hear from you, O.K.?”

  Royall backed off, smiling. His eyes were teary, evasive.

  “Sure, Chandler. O.K.”

  7

  CHANDLER WROTE LETTERS to Melinda he never sent. That night, he wrote to Royall.

  Dear Royall,

  No I will not.

  I will not urge us into a brothers’ shared obsession.

  I will not urge us into that sickness.

  Discovering our father’s murderer/murderers.

  (If they exist. If they are still living.)

  I will not ask such a thing of you, and I will not ask such a thing of myself.

  Royall, I love you. Your brother,

  Chandler

  A letter never sent, a memento. Like the scented letter from the young woman hostage, never answered.

  8

  HE RESOLVED: he would confront Ariah and demand to know all that she knew of his father’s death. For sixteen years he’d yearned to say the forbidden name to her: Dirk Burnaby. He wanted to hear his mother speak of his father tenderly, with love. He rehearsed what he would say to her:

  “Ariah, you did love him once. You can’t hate him. He was your husband. Our father!”

  But when Chandler drove to the house on Baltic Street, and waited on the front porch for Ariah’s piano lesson to end, he began to relent. Or was it his nerve he was losing. It was a Saturday evening in late April. The weather had been unseasonably mild, for Niagara Falls. Chandler sat on the steps, petting Zarjo who was excited to see him, stroking the old dog behind the ears. Inside, at the rear of the house in Ariah’s music room, someone was playing Grieg’s “Morning” from Peer Gynt. Chandler listened, fascinated. Not Ariah, but a student. Playing with a headlong plunging energy. A talented but undisciplined young pianist. Most of Ariah’s students were teenagers; sometimes Chandler would overhear Ariah talking and laughing with a student, and feel a tinge of jealousy. Had Ariah ever been so flirtatious and relaxed with him? Always she’d seemed on the brink of flinching when she saw Chandler. Reflexively her hand would reach out to straighten his collar, rebutton his shirt. She’d touseled and smoothed down his cowlicked hair in the way she touseled and smoothed down Zarjo’s wavy fur. She’d sigh, “Chandler, what am I going to do with you?”

  Chandler had always believed that Ariah hadn’t loved him. More recently he’d begun to wonder: she certainly loved Zarjo.

  Zarjo, the puppy Dirk Burnaby had brought to his family, on the eve of his death.

  Zarjo, panting and squirming with pleasure, as Chandler absentmindedly stroked behind his ears. The dog’s spaniel eyes were a rich yearning brown, brimming with emotion. “You love us all, Zarjo, don’t you? Never asking why.” Chandler put his arm around the quivering dog, and buried his face in his fur. Zarjo’s heartbeat was accelerated, his breathing rushed and urgent. Chandler felt emotionally shaky, he’d been so since the Mayweather suicide: that single gunshot, and the silence following.

  Chandler had (almost) thought Am I hit?

  No doubt, in the confusion of the moment, he’d glanced down at himself. He’d touched his head, his hair. It was a reflex, cops and emergency workers did it without thinking. No. Not me. Not this time.

  Had he been expecting Al Mayweather to shoot him, through the broken window? A way of concluding, ending. Never asking why.

  The rapidly played Grieg piece broke off without any ending. There was a brief pause, then another pianist began again, from the beginning. This was the instructor, demonstrating to the student how the piece might be played. The notes were struck with force and precision, flowing, swelling in a way to catch the heart. But Chandler found the music disturbing.

  You wept for Dirk Burnaby in secret, didn’t you. Yet you forbade his children to weep for him. You cheated us of grief.

  It had to have been Juliet who’d set out geraniums in clay pots on the porch railing. Juliet who’d repainted the old, not very comfortable wooden porch chairs, a steely gray. There were rain-stained pillows on these chairs in which few people ever sat. Baltic Street was a neighborhood in which residents sat on porches in warm weather, sometimes late at night, drinking and eating, but not Ariah Burnaby, of course. To her, such behavior was “common”—“crude.”

  Nothing more alarmed Ariah than “strangers knowing our business.”

  Nothing was more disgusting than “casting your pearls before swine.”

  It was an irony of Ariah’s life that, being so reclusive among her neighbors, so intent upon preserving her privacy, she drew attention to herself as few other residents of Baltic Street did. Chandler guessed that everyone above a certain age knew whose widow she was; everyone had an opinion of Dirk Burnaby. Yet there was something touching (Chandler supposed) in his mother’s pride. In her refusal to be humble, “ordinary.” Rarely in sixteen years had she visited any of her neighbors, even to thank them for taking care of her children when she’d been hospitalized; instead, Ariah had written formal thank-you notes on expensive cream-colored stationery, and sent Juliet out to deliver them. She’d rarely accepted invitations from the parents of her most gifted piano students, and had strongly disapproved of her children eating meals with, let alone spending nights with, friends. Her tremulous pronouncement was: “We may be near-destitute, but we don’t need charity.” And, in an incensed voice each of her children could perfectly mimic, “I was self-supporting long before I was married, and long after.”

  Cheated us of our grief. Why?

  Chandler recalled his grandmother Littrell and several other relatives, whom he’d never seen before and would not see afterward, coming to Niagara Falls to stay with Ariah in the early, devastated phase of her widowhood. These good-hearted people, all of them female, had hoped to persuade Ariah to return with them to Troy, where it was believed she “belonged.” Why on earth should Ariah stay in Niagara Falls? She disliked her rich Burnaby in-laws and they seemed clearly to dislike her. She had virtually no friends here, and no reputation as a music teacher. Her children could only grow up haunted near The Falls…Her home was with her family in Troy.

  But Ariah had said quietly, “No. My home and my children’s home is here.”

  Ariah played piano as she’d played her life—with a forced fluency, bright, brittle, polished. Allegretto, molto vivace—joyous notes leapt from her fingers upon command. She could do maestoso, and she could do tranquillo with equal dexterity. When she struck wrong notes, her fingers moved so swiftly onward, you couldn’t be certain what you’d heard.

  Zarjo broke away suddenly from Chandler’s embrace, and trotted out to the sidewalk to greet a dog being walked by a stiff-kneed man with eyes like raw eggs in a dignified ruin of a face. “Zarjo! Good evening,” the man said, in accented English. The dogs were clearly acquaintances, sniffing and nudging at each other excitedly. Zarjo even barked, which was rare for him. Though not young, Zarjo had always been an optimist of a dog, primed to believe the best of other dogs. His beagle tail swung like a pendulum, and his spaniel eyes swam with emotion. Ariah called Zarjo her shadow-self—all that was good in her, sentimental and soft-hearted, was embodied in Zarjo.

  The visitor dog was a mixed-breed setter with coarse hair the color of oxblood shoe polish, rheumy eyes and a seemingly useless left hindleg, yet he, too, wagged his tail hop
efully. “You know Zarjo?” Chandler asked the man with the tragic eyes, and the man nodded formally, somewhat shyly. “Yes. Very well. We do, Hugo and I. And Zarjo’s mistress, your mother I think?”

  Chandler’s ears pricked at something here. Mistress? Mother?

  It was the first Chandler had heard of Ariah befriending anyone in the neighborhood.

  Inside the house, piano notes flew like rapturous birds.

  In an uncertain, heavily accented voice the man said, “I am Joseph Pankowski. Chandler, is it? Yes. You are a science teacher, Ariah has said. Sometimes I stand here and listen, on warm evenings when the windows are open. Your mother is an accomplished pianist, it gives me happiness to hear her. So alive…”

  Pankowski wore tasteful dark clothing, a serge jacket that fitted his sloped shoulders loosely, and dark trousers, baggy but pressed; his shoes were polished black leather of unusual quality. He was in his late fifties, of moderate height and weight, looking as if he’d once been larger. His face, Chandler saw uneasily, looked stitched together; his skull seemed to be pushing through his scalp in ridges and bumps. He breathed audibly, harshly. The floating damp eyes shifted in a kind of anguish of feeling, baffling to Chandler at the time though afterward he would realize He wanted badly to impress me. Her son.