The Falls

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “Fuck him, it’s O.K. with me. See, he wasn’t ever a nice guy. He wasn’t a decent man. That was his actual soul you saw, I wanted you to see. I wanted you to know him. There’s a reason, you need to know. He used to beat us kids. It wasn’t that rare in the family, or in our neighborhood, probably you know this, but he was purely a bastard. He beat my mom. She used to be pretty, he broke her face with my brother’s baseball bat. Another time he would’ve strangled her but we stopped him. Being a cop, he got away with it. And a lot more.

  “He got promoted in the NFPD because he was smart, he knew to look the other way. Lots of the top-rank cops that was true of. It’s supposed to be a cleaner department now. But the same bastard is still police chief. He’s on the mob payroll, the Pallidino family in Buffalo. This is no secret. Everybody knows this.

  “Him and his buddies, they’d pistol-whip Negroes for just the hell of it. A fourteen-year-old kid almost died. They said it was a gang thing. Might’ve been a riot, this was around the time Martin Luther King was shot, but it blew over here. The kid’s family disappeared from here. They knew, you don’t fuck with the cops. Dad used to brag about this. It was what you did, if you were a cop.

  “He beat me till I got too big. I don’t tell people, I’m almost blind in my left eye from him slugging me. ‘Detached retina.’ I’m O.K. now, I don’t hardly notice it. I’m grateful not to be blind, see? If I was blind I couldn’t be a cook. I’m always cutting myself anyway. Burning myself. What the fuck, it’s O.K.

  “Once, he shot a dog in the neighborhood that was barking too much. It was his story, the dog attacked him. So he had to shoot it. This was around the time he killed your father.

  “Him and this other guy, driving a truck. My dad was driving a police cruiser. They ran him off the highway into the river. That’s how your father died, in the river. I guess you know that. Somebody wanted your father dead, see? My dad was contacted and took the job.

  “People say ‘Stonecrops.’ I know that look in their faces. Well, they’re not wrong. And they don’t know the half of it.

  “I always knew it. I mean, I knew something. Living in the same house with him, you picked it up. I’d hear him on the phone. He was never worried he’d be caught. Who’d catch him? Where was the evidence? He did other jobs like that, probably. Then he started getting weird. More weird than the department could handle. Nobody knew it was the syphilis. He’d never go to a doctor, he was scared shitless of doctors, hospitals. He still is. Practically we have to tie him down, taking him to the doctor.

  “He got weird, and pissed people off in the department. So they beat him. Should’ve killed him but they didn’t. It was written up in the paper when my old man retired from the force. The mayor, the police chief, all these guys praising him. What a laugh! You have to laugh. I’m going to kill him for you, Juliet.

  “See, I been thinking about it for a long time. My aunt Ava and me, we’ve discussed it. I mean, sort of. Him dying ‘by accident.’ Or his heart stopping, in his sleep. Nobody would give a fuck. A few times I’ve almost strangled him, he starts screaming and breaking things like he did today. But I wouldn’t, my hands would leave marks. I’d use a pillow. He isn’t strong, I’m a lot stronger. A few minutes pressing a pillow over his face, he’d be dead. And nobody would know.

  “How I knew about your dad for sure, he told me. My aunt Ava came to see me, she says the old man is bawling, saying he did something bad. I asked him what it was and he’s shaking his head like he can’t remember. So I asked him about your dad, and he caved in and told me yes that was him. He’s bawling, he’s kind of crazy. My aunt says maybe we should call a priest, he could confess to the priest, but I said fuck that, no way a fucking priest is coming into our house. So she agreed. So he just told me. ‘This thing I did.’

  “The other guy, driving a truck, he’s dead. I couldn’t make much sense of what my dad said. Maybe he killed the other guy, to shut him up. Or maybe somebody else ordered the hit. The other guy is nobody whose name I know. I only know my dad. I want to kill him for you.”

  Stonecrop ceased speaking. The lake was cobalt-blue below them, white-capped waves washed against the pebbly beach. Juliet had been listening to her friend in astonishment. Never had she heard Stonecrop speak more than a few muttered words, now he’d spilled his guts to her. He was earnest, and anxious. Juliet understood that he was making a gift of his father’s life to her, or wished to make such a gift. It would be the most extraordinary gift offered to her, in her life. She understood that Bud Stonecrop loved her, and this was a declaration of love. Not just that he was in love with her, as anyone might fall in love with her, but he loved her, too. As a brother might love her, out of long knowing, intimacy. As if they’d grown up in the same house. In the same family.

  Juliet said, “Bud, no.”

  “No? You sure?”

  Juliet took Stonecrop’s hands in hers. They were twice the size of hers, big-knuckled hands, with discolored nails, marred with fresh scabs, older scratches, burns from years of kitchen work. She smiled, she’d never seen such beautiful hands.

  “I’m sure.”

  Epilogue

  In Memoriam:

  Dirk Burnaby

  21 September 1978

  1

  I can’t be part of it. Don’t make me.”

  It isn’t like Ariah to beg. Her son Chandler stares at her in disbelief. Later, he’ll feel guilt. (How natural guilt seems, to a devoted elder son of Ariah Burnaby.) When first he tells her about the memorial ceremony being planned to honor Dirk Burnaby. For, as Chandler reasons, someone has to tell her: and soon.

  Poor Ariah. Staring at Chandler as if he has uttered incomprehensible yet terrifying words. Deathly white in the face, groping for a chair. Her eyes wild, glassy-green, unfocused.

  “I can’t, Chandler. I can’t be part of it.”

  And, later: “If any of you love me. Don’t make me!”

  In the intervening weeks, as September approaches, and plans for the memorial for Dirk Burnaby are becoming more ambitious, and are written of in the Niagara Gazette, Ariah will not speak of it. She shrinks from speaking of the future, of the imminent autumn, at all.

  Does the telephone ring more frequently at 1703 Baltic? Ariah refuses to answer it. Only her piano students engage her deepest, most intense and abiding interest. And her piano: at which she sits for long hours playing those pieces, some of them mournful, some of them vigorous and passionate, her fingers have long ago memorized.

  You are gone. You abandoned me. I am not your wife. I am not your widow. No one can make me. Never!

  2

  ALWAYS, Royall will remember: how on the balmy afternoon of September 21, when he pulls his car up to the crumbling curb at 1703 Baltic, there is Ariah waiting with Juliet on the front porch. Like the high school kid he believes, he knows, he has outgrown, Royall exclaims aloud, “Holy shit.”

  Later, he’ll ask Juliet why she hadn’t warned him. Given him a call. And Juliet will say, But I didn’t know, really. Until the very last minute I didn’t know myself that Mom would come. I did not.

  Ariah Burnaby wearing not stylish black, nor even somber dark blue or gray, but a white cotton shirtwaist of a kind fashionable in the 1950’s, with embroidered pink rosebuds scattered in the fabric and a pink silk ribbon-belt and a wide-brimmed straw hat, lacy white gloves, white patent leather pumps. Though by the calendar the season is officially autumn, the weather in Niagara Falls today is warm, sunny, summery, and so Ariah’s eccentric costume is not inappropriate. (Has the dress been purchased at the Second Time ’Round, or discovered at the rear of Ariah’s crammed closet?) And Ariah has made up her wanly freckled middle-aged girl’s face to look almost robust, and glamorous; and Ariah has had her shamefully straggly faded-red hair professionally cut into a glossy bob, to astonish her children.

  Too surprised to be tactful, or mindful that neighbors might overhear, Royall calls out, “Mom? You’re coming with us?”

  In the car, seated b
eside him, Ariah says dryly, with dignity, “Of course I’m coming with you. How eccentric would it appear, if I did not?”

  3

  SHE’S FIFTY-SEVEN YEARS OLD. She lost him so long ago. Fifty-seven! And he died, vanished, in his forty-sixth year. For a woman who accepts it that, yes she is damned, if not doomed, Ariah has lived a stubbornly self-reliant life bringing up three children in the very city of her outrage, sorrow, and shame; and never, so far as she has wished anyone to know, wanting to look back.

  Saying to Chandler, “I told Joseph. You know: Pankowski, with the dog. He’s a widower twice over, fine for him. But I am not a widow. I refuse the status. I think that self-defined ‘widows’ should commit suttee on their husband’s funeral pyres, and give the rest of us a break.” An intake of breath, a wicked smile. “Oh, the look on his face!”

  (Chandler wonders: What is the relationship between Ariah and Joseph Pankowski? He has asked Juliet, who must know, but Juliet insists she does not. She doubts that Ariah knows, either.)

  Chandler worried that his mother would blame him for the memorial ceremony, since he’s acquainted with the organizer; not just the fact of the memorial, but its highly public, publicized nature. Yet, unexpectedly, Ariah has said nothing about blaming him, has not accused him of betraying her trust. Responding so weakly to the news, Ariah surprised us all. At first we were relieved, and then concerned.

  “This isn’t normal for Mom.”

  “This isn’t natural for Mom.”

  “Well. Maybe it means—”

  Maybe what? We had no idea.

  We had no idea.

  Even Chandler, who’d believed he’d been kept informed of the progress of the Love Canal Homeowners Association lawsuit.

  Reading, in July 1978, the astonishing front-page interview in the Buffalo Evening News with Neil Lattimore, the aggressive young lawyer who’d recently made national headlines when a Niagara County jury found for his clients in the re-instated Love Canal lawsuit; and seeing, on the front page, beside Lattimore’s photograph, a photograph dated 1960 of Dirk Burnaby.

  “Daddy.”

  The word escaped Chandler, involuntarily. His eyes stung with tears.

  It was repeatedly said that the Love Canal lawsuit had been “re-instated” but in fact the 1978 case, though built upon Dirk Burnaby’s 1962 case, was far more complicated. Many more plaintiffs were represented in the Love Canal Homeowners Association than had been represented in the original Colvin Heights Homeowners’ Association, and they were far better organized, with stronger political ties to the local Democratic party and access to the media. More industry defendants had been named including now Parish Plastics, long a major Niagara Falls polluter, and there were many more lawyers and assistants on each side. The $200 million award, the verdict after a fourteen-week, highly publicized jury trial, was a sum that would have astonished Dirk Burnaby.

  Yet there was Burnaby’s photo on the front page. Through tear-dimmed eyes Chandler stared.

  The photo showed a youthful, bluntly good-looking man of forty-three with a large, broad face, an assured smile, and kindly, slightly shadowed eyes. You could see that he was a man accustomed to being treated with a certain degree of respect; you could guess that he thought well of himself, as others thought well of him. Yet he was dressed casually, in a white shirt with sleeves rolled to his elbows. He was tieless, and his hair appeared to be windblown. Strange it seemed to Chandler that this man was reputed to have been a famously belligerent litigator; that this man had had enemies who’d wished him dead. Neil Lattimore spoke extravagantly of him as “heroic”—“tragically ahead of his time”—a “crusading idealist”—a lawyer of such intellectual and moral caliber, he’d been “persecuted, pilloried, and driven to his death” by an unholy alliance of chemical manufacturing money, political and judicial corruption, and the “ecological blindness” of an earlier decade.

  Anxiously Chandler skimmed the remainder of the interview. But there were no more references to Dirk Burnaby. He was weak with relief, that Lattimore had chosen to say nothing about Dirk Burnaby being blind himself to the “moral rot” of his class, and to his “falling apart” during the trial. Lattimore had said nothing about the possibility, unless it was the probability, of Dirk Burnaby having been murdered.

  4

  Royall. You didn’t, did you.

  Didn’t what?

  I realize, of course you didn’t. Couldn’t.

  Couldn’t what, Chandler?

  I’m not asking you. This isn’t a question. I have no right to ask such a question. And no reason.

  Are you asking a question?

  No. I’m not.

  But if you were, what’s the question?

  This enigmatic exchange, Chandler has never had with Royall. He will not have with Royall. Having read in the papers the shocking news of the midsummer disappearance of Chief Justice Stroughton Howell. Formerly a Niagara Falls resident, more recently a resident of the Albany area, Howell was reported by his wife to have “vanished”—“in thin air”—somewhere between the private parking garage reserved for chief justices at the state capitol complex and his home in Averill Park; his car was found abandoned, keys in the ignition, on a service road near the New York State Thruway. As of September 21, Judge Howell has been missing for seven weeks.

  This Chandler knows without having to ask Royall: Royall no longer works for Empire Collection Agency. He has become a full-time liberal arts student at Niagara University and his part-time employment has been on campus, as an assistant in the geology department. During the past summer Royall worked, not as a Devil’s Hole pilot, but for the university; his plan is to major in geology. He no longer carries a gun. He no longer has any need to carry a gun. Since that evening in his apartment on Fourth Street, when the brothers spoke together so frankly, Royall has never alluded to any gun, and Chandler has never asked him about any gun. Chandler almost might think Was there a gun? Was it real? He’d been drinking that night, and his memory was muddled.

  5

  AS STONECROP HAS SAID They don’t live forever.

  By which Stonecrop has meant to be optimistic: The Sergeant, that sick old bastard, won’t live forever. But Juliet interprets the remark as a warning to her, that Ariah won’t live forever either. She must try to love Ariah while Ariah is still living.

  “Oh, Mom. You look beautiful.”

  Ariah makes no reply. Doesn’t seem to have heard. Since her brave remark, settling into the passenger’s seat beside Royall, Ariah has been subdued on the drive downtown to Prospect Point. Juliet, in the rear of the bumpy car, observes the back of her mother’s head uneasily. She feels both exasperation and tenderness for Ariah. Since the beginning of the fall term at Niagara Falls High School, and since she has begun voice lessons at the Buffalo Academy of Music, Juliet has felt both detached from her mother, and more affectionate toward her; less intimidated by her, and more forgiving. I am not you. Never will I be you again.

  “Must be my Burnaby face. No I.D. required.”

  Royall has only to utter the name—“Burnaby”—at the parking lot entrance, to be waved inside and directed to a section reserved for special guests.

  Crossing into Prospect Park to the Victorian gazebo where the memorial is to be held, Royall and Juliet realize for the first time how stiffly anxious Ariah is. A gathering crowd of mostly strangers, folding chairs arranged in a semi-circle in the grass. And the grass is freshly mown, as for a special occasion. Ariah clutches at both her children, suddenly pleading. “There won’t be photographers, will there? Please, I can’t endure that again.”

  Royall consoles her: Chandler has promised, no pictures. He’d extracted a promise from the organizers, no pictures without Ariah’s permission.

  Though Royall wonders: how can anyone make such a promise? How reasonable is it for the family of Dirk Burnaby to expect privacy, at a public event? And this can’t fail to be a controversial event, for local feelings run high, on both sides, regarding Love Canal
, and environmental lawsuits and legislation generally. The new mayor of Niagara Falls (who’d won the election on a reform ticket, beating out veteran Republican and Democrat candidates) is scheduled to speak at the memorial, as well as members of the County Task Force on Urban Renewal, the chair of the New York State Board of Health, an officer of the Love Canal Homeowners’ Association. Lawyer friends of Dirk Burnaby will speak, one of them a fellow World War II veteran. Dirk Burnaby’s eighty-nine-year-old Jesuit Latin teacher from Mount St. Joseph’s Academy for Boys will reminisce fondly of Dirk as a schoolboy known as the “Peacemaker.” Clyde Colborne, Dirk’s old friend, now a highly successful local entrepreneur and civic booster, will reminisce, and make the announcement that he is establishing a professorship in Dirk Burnaby’s name at Niagara University, in the new field of ecological studies. The organizers failed to locate Nina Olshaker, but one or two others from the original Love Canal lawsuit will speak. Neil Lattimore, the fiery radical, will be presiding. There is even the possibility, excitedly noted by local media, that the consumer-rights crusader Ralph Nader will appear, if his schedule permits, to speak of Dirk Burnaby’s “legacy.”

  Nader! Who never knew Dirk Burnaby. Royall’s heart sinks. He resents it, this will be more a political rally than a memorial for his father.

  Still, it means a validation of his father and that is what matters: isn’t it?

  Royall says, “Mom, pull down your hat brim. That’s why you’re wearing that silly hat, isn’t it?”

  Juliet protests, “Mom’s hat is not silly! It’s stylish, and beautiful. Like something in a Renoir painting.”

  “ ‘Renoir painting’! That’s classy. Are we all in this painting, or just Mom’s hat?”

  Ariah laughs, wanly. Being teased by Royall usually revives her spirits, but not, somehow, this afternoon.