The Falls (61 page)

obeyed, given in to their authority. The one who’d accosted her on the embankment was telling her now that he had a daughter her age, at St. Mary’s; the driver, a younger man, observed her in the rearview mirror, and told her it wasn’t “one hundred percent safe” for a girl like her, her age, and pretty, and alone, to be wandering in such places even in the daytime. “You understand what I’m saying, miss?”

How like Royall he sounded! Juliet murmured, “Yes, sir.”

They drove her home to Baltic Street. She’d had to tell them her address, and her name. She’d seen a flicker of recognition in their faces when she told them
Burnaby
.

6

S u d d e n ly i n t h e h um i d, gnat-infested summer of 1977

there came into their lives Joseph Pankowski of whom Ariah would speak, with fond derision, as the “shoe-repair man”—“the Jew who likes music.” Sometimes, “the Polish Jew, with the Irish setter.”

It was difficult to discern how Ariah felt about Mr. Pankowski. She forbade Juliet to “breathe a word” of him to Chandler and Royall.

Chandler would brood, and make too much of a casual, inconsequen-tial friendship between two “left-behinds”; Royall would tease. And, Ariah warned, she was in no mood to be
teased
.

Juliet, who was more comfortable with adults than with people her own age, had never met anyone like Joseph Pankowski. He fascinated her as a being from another planet would fascinate. You would wish to tell such a being nothing of yourself, for your “self ” could be of little significance; all that mattered was him, mysterious and elusive; yet you dared not be rude, and ask questions. And there was the man’s wounded, stitched-together face, that drew the startled eyes of strangers, and made children stare.

And the tattoo on his left wrist. Of that, Juliet would never ask.

Yet Joseph Pankowski was not reticent. He talked freely, happily, of certain subjects. He was nervous, ardent, stammering in his enthusiasms. He had a weakness for Hollywood movies of the 1930’s and 1940’s, which he watched on late-night TV. He counted himself a baseball “fan.” He was vehement in his belief that Eisenhower would
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prove to be the “last, great” president of the United States. (Years after the senator’s death, he spoke bitterly of Joseph McCarthy as the

“ugly face of the American Gestapo.”) In his heavily accented English he embarrassed Juliet by telling her that her singing, especially of German lieder, gave him much joy. That Ariah’s “brave” piano playing gave him much joy. That meeting them had “given hope” to his life.

Mr. Pankowski had been a widower for several years. He lived alone above his shoe-repair shop on South Quay. (A “mixed” neighborhood east of downtown.) His children, two sons, were grown and long gone from upstate New York. And no grandchildren, though both were married. “These young people whine, ‘Why should we bring children into such an evil world?’ As if they were us, and had lived their parents’ lives in Europe. They break our hearts.” Ariah, uneasy at such personal revelations, said, “Isn’t that the role of children, to break their parents’ hearts?”

But Mr. Pankowski wished to speak seriously. That was the man’s failing, in Ariah’s eyes: he could not, or would not, make jokes where jokes badly needed to be made.

In Prospect Park where they went for open-air summer concerts, Ariah walked swiftly ahead, impatient to find three seats. Juliet lingered with Mr. Pankowski who walked stiff-legged, rubbing pensively at the nape of his neck. He said, “ ‘Evil,’ ‘good’—what is this vocab-ulary? God allows evil for the simple reason that God makes no distinction between evil and good. As God makes no distinction between predator and prey. I did not lose my first, young family to evil but to human actions, and—only think!—a marvel of its kind, unspeakable!—the actions of lice, devouring them alive in the death camp. And so you must grant to God what is God and not try to think of what you have lost, for that way is madness.”

Juliet would pretend she had not heard some of this.

No, she had not heard. The man’s speech was unreliable, especially when he spoke passionately.

Not that evening in Prospect Park but another evening, when Ariah was out of earshot, Juliet asked boldly to see the tattoo on Mr.

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Pankowski’s wrist that looked like nothing more than dark ink beginning to fade. Yet it would never fade for it was stitched into the man’s very skin.

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Wanting to ask
Why live, then? It’s God that is mad.

7

Y e t, i n s e c r e t, Juliet wishes to believe. Desperately, Juliet wishes to believe.

A vision! Such visions came, sometimes, to Christians who were special, “devout.”

Ariah had taken Juliet to a dozen churches in Niagara Falls by the time Juliet was twelve, and in each of these churches Juliet had watched the others, the “worshippers,” through her linked-together fingers brought up to partly hide her face, thinking
Are they serious? Is
this real? Why can’t I feel what they are feeling?
Especially, Juliet was baffled by worshippers sobbing with evident joy, tears streaming down their contorted faces. And Ariah tried to believe, too. Often Ariah volunteered her services as an organist or a choir director. But within a few months, or weeks, Ariah would grow bored, restless.
Such silly
people. I can’t respect them.

Growing up in Niagara Falls, Juliet has been aware for years of the local legend of Our Lady of The Falls. The story of the little Irish dairy maid and the Virgin Mary who appeared to the dairy maid in the mists of the Horseshoe Falls. In ninth grade, she made a (secret) pilgrimage to the shrine three miles north of the city, on foot; she has brooded over the dairy maid’s fate, which was to have been taken in by well-to-do Catholics who took care of her during her pregnancy and adopted her baby when it was born, and found employment for her in a family-owned canning factory. With a part of her mind Juliet is skeptical yet with another part of her mind she identifies with the fifteen-year-old scorned by everyone, even relatives; the girl who’d
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been drawn to the river hoping to cleanse the world of herself but who was granted, instead, a miraculous vision.

Ariah has said there is no God, and numerous are His prophets.

Juliet is too much Ariah’s daughter to believe in Roman Catholic superstitions and yet: in her loneliness she has fantasized that a vision might come to her if she were utterly sincere about wanting, needing, intending to die.

I would not need to be saved if the vision came to me. The vision would be
enough.

She has wondered if, at the instant of his death, as his car skidded into the guard railing, smashed through and plunged into the river, her father, Dirk Burnaby, had experienced a vision.

And what that vision might be.

She has wondered
Is Death itself a vision?

Luckily, Ariah never learned that Juliet had made a pilgrimage to the Shrine of Our Lady of The Falls. Or Chandler, or Royall who would have teased her.

The shrine was a stunning disappointment. Naively Juliet had expected something very different, more inward, spiritual. But Our Lady of The Falls swarmed with tourists. There were chartered buses, enormous parking lots, the “Pilgrim Center Restaurant” and souvenir shop; curiosity-seekers toting cameras, ailing individuals of various ages and degrees of disability in wheelchairs being pushed gamely up ramps, and the faithful on their knees reciting the rosary with bowed heads, conspicuously meek and adoring of the colossal Virgin Mary, thirty feet high, looming above them from the basilica dome. The statue was solid white marble, visible for miles, grotesque as a mannequin amid the hilly countryside; promotional material for the shrine boasted it weighed more than twenty tons. Juliet stared at the Virgin’s vapid female face with its blind eyes and smile bland as that of a woman in a TV commercial. “You! You are not the one.”

What a betrayal of the dairy maid’s vision of 1891! Juliet was angry on behalf of the girl, a girl so like herself, yearning and helpless.

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The Irish girl had had her vision and it had been stolen from her, debased even as it was magnified, just as the girl had had her baby and the baby was taken from her.

Nothing to forgive. Love, and you do God’s will.

On this mist-shrouded June morning as she makes her way barefoot as a penitent to the river Juliet is thinking not of the shrine, not of the tourists and the ugly looming statue but of the dairy maid, her lost sister; and of the vision that is promised.
Come! Come to your father in
The Falls.

8

“ W h o i s — ? ”

Ariah wakes with a start, thinking there’s someone in the room with her. Or in her bed.

Among the twisted sheets. (Which husband? Which year is this?) Her ridiculous heart is thudding. Like most chronic insomniacs Ariah often lies awake for hours, wretched interminable hours, then falls into a stuporous sleep for an hour or two only to wake exhausted, with a thudding heart and a parched mouth as if she’s been dragged by nightmare-horses across an acrid, stony plain.

This day in June. These days. Infamy. Oh, if she could sleep her stuporous sleep for a solid month!

A freight train has wakened her, damned
Baltimore & Ohio
boxcars rattling through her skull. And something scratching at her bedroom door, with shy persistence. Zarjo?

Ariah would snap, “Bad dog!” Except she knows that this intelligent, sensitive animal who has lived with her for sixteen years, trained by Ariah herself, would not dare wake her for a trifle.

What time is it? Just past 6 a.m. An overcast morning. A few birds call tentatively to one another in the jungly back yard. For a dazed sullen moment Ariah can’t recall if this is supposed to be a season of warm weather, or cold; if both her sons have left her, or only just Chandler.

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No. Royall has left, too.

But there’s Juliet: her daughter.

And there’s Zarjo, her best friend, sensing she’s awake, scratching more emphatically at the door, and beginning to whimper.

9

Between us there’s a secret
.

For years he has been watching her. Not continuously, not every day. But often. Juliet has never consciously looked for him, sensing that she should not, she must not. Ariah has warned her not to “make eye contact” with strangers or any others “who might do a young girl harm.” And so Juliet has shyly looked away, Juliet has purposefully turned away, learning to be unknowing, unconscious. More and more she lives inside music. In her head music plays continuously, coming from a mysterious source as light comes from a mysterious source called “sun”—“the sun.”

Yet, he’s there. The shaved-headed boy. Waiting.

Juliet first became aware of him, the something strange, something special about him, when she was in fifth or sixth grade. The slow realization, gradual as the change of season, that she sees him just a little too often, at approximately the same distance, observing her in silence: on Baltic Street, on Forty-eighth, on Ferry. On Garrison (where he lives in a barn-sized clapboard house at the intersection of Veterans’ Road). Sometimes she sees him when she’s waiting at the bus stop, to go downtown. And outside the public library downtown. Perhaps she sees him most frequently when she’s trailing dreamily through Baltic Park, coming home from school.

Rarely, in fact never, has Juliet noticed the shaved-headed boy watching her when she’s with other people. Only when she’s alone.

A big boy, impassive, ugly. Unsmiling. She glances up to see, at a distance of thirty or more feet, something fixed and fanatic in his eyes.

Between us there’s a secret.

One day you will know
.

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Why hasn’t Juliet told anyone, not Ariah, not Chandler, not her brother Royall, about the shaved-headed boy? She might have told a teacher at school. She might have told a classmate, a girlfriend.

Why, Juliet doesn’t want to think.

From childhood she seems to have known that to speak of the shaved-headed boy to another person would be futile.

He has never approached her. He has never spoken her name in derision, like other boys. He has never harassed her, threatened her.

One day you’ll know.

This past year, Juliet has seen the boy, now grown into a hulking young man, at her choral concerts at the high school and elsewhere.

She has even (this is more alarming, of course) seen him at rehearsals in the high school auditorium. Stonecrop always sits by himself in the last row, in the shadows. He’s big, but can pass still for a high school student. Juliet wants to think that he doesn’t hate her, doesn’t want to harass her or ridicule her. Where other boys murmur
Jully-ett!

Burn-a-by!
making lewd sucking noises with their mouths, the shaved-headed boy is silent. Waiting.

This, too, is a secret: how, several years ago when Juliet was twelve, in seventh grade, Stonecrop intervened when a gang of older boys were tormenting Juliet on her way home from school.

These were ninth graders with surnames like Mayweather, Herron, D’Amato, Sheehan. They teased and harassed other girls, not exclusively Juliet, but Juliet had become their favorite target.

Why do they hate me, is it my face? My name?
The boys were noisy and gregarious and resented it that Juliet Burnaby seemed indifferent to them. Her dreamy distracted manner provoked them. Her way of staring at the ground, or into the distance. (Hearing music in her head?) The scars on her mouth and forehead seemed to intrigue them.

They were boys with their own scars. They brushed near her, jostled her. Like dogs crowding her.
Jully-ett
.
Hey: who bit your face?
Not knowing if she was a disfigured girl, a freak, or if she was attractive, sexy.