The Falls (54 page)

The Falls
X 377

Accident. Chandler was supposed to be grateful the ruling hadn’t been suicide, was that it?

“Maybe you murdered him. All of you. Bastards.”

He’d thought so, as a kid. For a while. Until the thought faded, as the fantasies of adolescence fade, of necessity.

Sixteen years. Amnesia.

Now memories were rushing back, making him wince with pain.

Like sensation returning to frostbitten parts of the body.

Never cry. No tears. No one is worth your tears.

Your mother is the one who loves you
.

He was scientifically-minded, and so he knew: he carried the genes of both his mother and father, equally. He owed his allegiance not to one but to two. Not one, but two contested in his soul.

Yet the contest had always gone to Ariah. The other, the father, was dead, vanquished. The mother had survived and was supreme.

And her opinion mattered so strangely much to Chandler, even now, in his adulthood; often, he felt under her spell, as if something were unresolved between them, unspoken.

Long ago she’d sung to him, cradled him in her arms, adored him.

My first-born son!
Ariah had always been extravagant in her speech, like a doomed figure in a Wagner opera.
There is only the first-born, no one
speaks of second- or third-born
. Yet Chandler was clear-sighted enough to know that of course Ariah favored Royall, of her sons; she tried, tried very hard, to favor Juliet, her daughter, over both her sons.

Chandler, the first-born, had been rapidly demoted. He knew, he didn’t spare himself. But he loved Ariah just the same, and would always love her. He was enough his mother’s son to be grateful for the mere accident of having been born.

Ariah had said dryly, “Einstein says he couldn’t believe in a God who played dice with the universe. I say, that’s all God does is play dice. Like it or lump it, fellas.”

She’d been furious with Chandler over the hostage incident.

Fortunately she hadn’t seen the live coverage on local television, but neighbors had rushed to inform her. And there was the next day’s 378 W
Joyce Carol Oates

Gazette
. Chandler Burnaby, junior high teacher, a “hero.” Ariah had her own ideas about what Chandler was, risking his life for a worthless Mayweather, but she’d forgiven him, as Melinda would not.

Ariah had shrugged, and wiped at her eyes in that Ariah-gesture that conveyed both maternal weakness and contempt for such weakness, and laughed.

“Well. As long as you’re alive to have dinner with us tonight.

That’s something to be grateful for.”

But Chandler was beginning to wonder: was it?

The dead have no one to speak for them except the living.

I am Dirk Burnaby’s son, and I am living
.

On impulse, one day, Chandler drove to l’Isle Grand to visit his father’s sisters whom he had not seen in more than sixteen years. His elderly aunts Clarice and Sylvia, whom Ariah despised. The women were both widows. Wealthy widows. Chandler saw them separately but understood that the suspicious old women had conferred by telephone, for their remarks to him were very similar. Clarice said stiffly, “Our brother Dirk was a reckless man. He died as he’d lived, without caring for others.” Sylvia said stiffly, “Our brother Dirk had been a reckless, spoiled boy, and he died a reckless, spoiled man.” Clarice said, “We loved our baby brother. We tried not to care that he was everybody’s favorite. He joined the army, he served his country, all that was noble, he was a brilliant attorney, but then . . .” Sylvia said, “We loved our baby brother but something went tragically wrong in his life, you see. A curse.”

Chandler assumed they meant the Love Canal case, but when he inquired, Sylvia said guardedly, bringing a scented handkerchief to her nose, “I don’t believe I care to say.”

Clarice, too, spoke mysteriously of a “curse.” When Chandler asked what was this curse, his aunt said, after a moment’s hesitation,

“Dirk fell in love with the red-haired woman, you see. He’d been meant to marry and live on the Island with his family; he’d been meant to oversee us, our holdings, our investments, all of Burnaby,
The Falls
X 379

Inc., but instead he broke his mother’s heart, and stole away a part of her soul, and nothing in our family has been the same since, our children, your cousins, are grown and gone, scattered to the four winds, not one of them has chosen to remain on the Island with us, and why?—because the red-haired woman put a spell on our brother. Her first husband threw himself into The Falls. And so her second husband was fated to die in The Falls. It had to happen. Momma predicted, and so it came to be.”

First husband? Threw himself into The Falls?

Chandler left l’Isle Grand shaken and exhausted vowing never to return.

He knew: Claudine Burnaby, his grandmother, had died several years before, an elderly, ill woman. He’d known, not from Ariah (who would never speak of the Burnabys) but from an obituary in the
Gazette
. Claudine Burnaby had left the family estate Shalott to the Episcopal Church to be used as a school or retirement home. Most of her money, too, had been left to the church, not to her children and grandchildren, which Chandler supposed had been a shock to them, and an insult.

He had to smile. Grandmother Burnaby: who’d refused to be
Grandma Burnaby
.

The days were long gone when Grandmother Burnaby had had the power to upset her daughter-in-law Ariah. Chandler recalled how the haughty older woman had swooped upon him in the first Luna Park house, smelling of a powerful perfume. Black sunglasses like a beetle’s shiny opaque eyes, and a very red, glistening mouth; her hair an unearthly silver blond, that smelled of something harshly chemical.

Chandler had stared up blinking from his Tinkertoy village to see a remarkable face looming above him fierce and glaring as a mask. On his grandmother’s head perched something squat and velvety black like a spider, he’d feared might leap onto him. The red-lipstick mouth moved stiffly pronouncing words Chandler would recall through his life, without understanding.
He will live into the twenty-first century.

Strange that anyone can be so young, and still human
.

380 W
Joyce Carol Oates

Nor had he understood why his grandmother had said that Chandler wasn’t her grandson. (He’d heard, or thought he’d heard these words. Or had he imagined them?) Grandmother Burnaby had left presents for him, he hadn’t much wanted to open, and after her departure Mommy tore the presents open, tore the tinsel wrapping paper, and the items of clothing, tore sleeves from little shirts, legs from pajamas, ripped and tossed and muttered and laughed to herself.

She’d hugged him so tight he almost couldn’t breathe but when she took a bottle from Daddy’s cabinet and ran away upstairs she locked the door against him and so Chandler returned downstairs to the safety of his Tinkertoy village which would grow into the most elaborate village he’d ever built and which would topple into pieces only when Chandler decreed “Earthquake!” and made Daddy laugh.

4

Evidence.
He was trained in science education, and he should have been trained in law, too. For (he was beginning to see) the world is a continuous trial, arguments among adversaries in search of (elusive, seductive) justice.

“Jesus. That was a painful experience. The judge was obviously bi-ased, and your father was over-involved with the case, he did what no lawyer can afford to do: lost control in the courtroom. That was the end for him.”

“Sure we were suspicious. But nobody had any way of knowing at the time. As soon as Howell threw out the case, ‘Love Canal’ was discredited for years. It was a litigator’s joke. There were variations on it, the word
love,
it became a dirty joke in some circles. But things have come to light since then . . . unofficially, you might say. Your father’s witnesses were under pressure from Skinner and his aides not to testify. Possibly they’d been threatened. (Was there a tie-in with the mob? This is Niagara Falls–Buffalo: does a fish swim? Does a bird fly? Since the 1950’s this has been a mobbed-up region, kid.) So, sure, they’d been threatened. The Board of Health and the
The Falls
X 381

Board of Education stonewalled. The defense paid ‘expert witnesses’ to stack the deck for their side. Everybody knew Howell would roll over like he did except possibly Dirk Burnaby. And your poor father, Christ it was a shame, I’d known Dirk since law school and it was hell to see that man wearing down. He said to me, I’ll never forget it was the day before Howell dumped the case down the toilet, ‘Hal, it’s the pettiness of it, that breaks my heart.’ He was drinking, frankly. You could smell it on his breath. So finally they provoked him into losing control in the courtroom. And that was it for Dirk Burnaby.”

“It was a disgraceful act. Howell profited by it, and look at him now: state appellate court. And your father has been dead for, how long—fifteen years.”

“Your father! I still can’t believe he’s gone . . . He was the kindest, most considerate employer. I have never worked for a man so gentlemanly, and good. He didn’t want people to know how much of his own money he put into that terrible case, and he put his soul into it, and you could foresee what would happen, like a train wreck in slow motion, but no one could dissuade him. ‘Now, Madelyn,’ he’d say, when I was looking worried, ‘Dirk Burnaby doesn’t know what it is to lose.’ And that was his tragedy: he didn’t know. All his life he’d been successful and that blinded him to certain facts, like the nature of the people around him, men he’d gone to school with and believed he knew. He would not listen even to his lawyer friends, why’d he listen to me? Of course, I never said a word to your father about such things.

It wasn’t my place. I’d tried to send that Olshaker woman away but somehow she found your father, and got her talons in him. See, he was always a gentleman, and the others—the others were politicians.

That mayor, Wenn! They acquitted him a few years ago on that charge of taking kickbacks but everybody knows what he is, and the others. The lawyers, and that hypocrite judge your father had reason to believe was a friend of his. I never thought your father killed himself, not for a moment. Other people who knew him well felt the same way. Mr. Burnaby was not that type . . . The type to despair, and 382 W
Joyce Carol Oates

make things worse. Mr. Burnaby was the type to want to help, to make things better. You know, Chandler, I was telling your brother these things, too. He came by a few months ago. ‘Roy’ he calls himself ? Your younger brother, I guess? A handsome young man, a student at Niagara University.”

“Yeah, it was the biggest surprise of my life: your father hauled off and hit me! Square in the face. Just about broke my face. It felt like Walcott’s right must’ve felt on Marciano’s nose, smashing it and throwing blood all over. I’d had other men try to fight me in the courtroom, sure, but a bailiff is usually forewarned, and I wasn’t, with him, I mean—a lawyer! Usually, a hot-headed or volatile defendant, the deputies have him in shackles. You’re prepared. But there was an actual lawyer wheeling around and punching me in the face!

Afterward, Mr. Burnaby apologized. He telephoned me, and said how sorry he was, and he sent me a check for a couple of thousand dollars dated on that very day before he died and damned if I was going to cash it, but then I thought, what the hell, and I did . . . By then, Dirk Burnaby had been gone six months. I never believed he was dead, somehow. But nobody could survive going over The Falls so I guess he must’ve . . . must be dead. See, what I regret is I never said I forgave him, I was pissed as hell at him, hitting me for doing my job, when it was Howell’s face he wanted to smash in, so I was sorry for that, I mean for not telling your father it was O.K., I understood.”

“What can I say, son? You know, your dad was my oldest friend in the city. I guess—the world. We went to the Academy together, joined up in the army together, born a few days apart in this very month though in different years, so, sure, I miss him like hell this time of year, it kind of hurts . . . But there was no way I could help him. He was like one of those big beautiful moths you see at night, flying into a spider web he not only didn’t appreciate how tough it was, how nasty, but he didn’t even know it was there. Like your dad was flying blind, those last few weeks. And he was drinking, and got to that point we all get to eventu-The Falls X 383

ally, where it’s like soil soaked through, saturated, and you take in an ounce more and the poison goes straight into your blood because your liver can’t filter it anymore. He’d had warnings, but he didn’t listen.

He was like a pioneer in that kind of law, now people look back on it.

At the time it just seemed sort of crazy. Everybody went around saying the same kinds of things, like how’d you tell if a man is sick from where he lives or works, or from just smoking? (Everybody smoked.) Or drinking. Or heredity, or bad luck. See? At the time people said things like this, that was how they were thinking, the archbishop talked that way on TV, doctors talked that way, every politician getting paid big bucks to talk that way, didn’t matter which party they belonged to, and of course judges, so it didn’t take much imagination to see that Dirk was going to be shot down, but when it happened it was quite a shock, let me tell you. He’d alienated most of his friends, our friends. Our mutual friends. He’d sort of alienated me, to tell the truth. All this publicity about ‘tainted air, tainted water and soil,’ et cetera, it was very bad for business. Very bad for the tourist trade . . .

Sure I hated what the city was turning into, air smelling like a cesspool on certain days, and honeymoon couples from all over checking in my hotel and expecting, I don’t know, some kind of paradise, plus tourists from Germany, Japan, coming to see The Falls and not knowing what the city is. Sure we had complaints. Through the 1970’s it’s been getting worse. People like me, my family, we’d been in the