The Falls (27 page)

Ariah knelt before him hastily and gathered him in her arms.

“Darling, Mommy’s
here
.”

And so Mommy was.

Mommy and Chandler pushed the stroller back to Luna Park, crooning “Little Baby Bunting.” Royall, worn out from crying, slept.

7

“ M r s. B u r na b y. Good news!”

Oh, but was it? Ariah’s heart turned dry, porous, and cracked like a clump of old clay.

“Doctor. Oh my God. Thank you.”

Of course she was astonished, stunned with joy.

Ariah would calculate she’d been pregnant already, that day in Prospect Park lying in the sun. Dreaming, drifting. Somehow, she’d known: she’d known something. Already the deepest spring of her happiness had begun to flow.

Juliet would be born in late May 1961.

My little family, complete.

Before . . .

A
vulture the woman seemed to him. Hovering at the edge of his vision. Perched, hunched, staring unblinking at him.

Waiting.

She was the Woman in Black. She was observing him, she was waiting to waylay him. She was patient, relentless. Waiting for him.

Waiting for Dirk Burnaby to weaken. She had his name, and she had his number. He dreaded her coming to his home in Luna Park.

Though his receptionist had several times told Dirk the woman’s name, he’d forgotten it almost at once.

So he imagined Death. A vulture with an unerring eye and an infinity of patience. So he imagined his conscience, at some distance from his life.

Don’t get involved. For Christ’s sake
.

The last thing you need, Burnaby
.

“Madelyn, please explain to this woman another time, I’m ‘truly sorry.’ It’s ‘with genuine regret’ that I can’t see her, and I can’t consider
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taking on her case. Not just now. Not with so many cases piled up.

‘This sort of personal-injury litigation isn’t Mr. Burnaby’s métier.’ ”

Madelyn, who’d been Mr. Burnaby’s receptionist for eleven years, knew “métier”—it was one of her employer’s pet words, for the moment.
Métier
meaning specialty, trade; an area of work in which one excels.
Métier
meaning what Dirk Burnaby the attorney knows he can do with his customary skill and cunning, and win at.

Another time he said, “Madelyn. No. Please give these materials back to her. Please explain, another time, that ‘Mr. Burnaby sincerely regrets’ etc. This kind of litigation isn’t what I do, and anyway I’m booked solid. For years.”

Madelyn hesitated. Of course she would do what Mr. Burnaby requested. She was in his employ after all. In love with him, these many years. But her love was the kind of love that expects no reciprocation nor even acknowledgment. “But, Mr. Burnaby, she’ll ask me, Did he read my letter?—Did he look at the photographs, at least? What should I say?”

“Tell her No.”

“ ‘No’—just ‘no’?”

“No. I did not read her letter, and I did not look at the photographs.”

He was becoming exasperated, annoyed. Beginning to lose his Burnaby poise. Beginning to feel like a pursued man. What most surprised him was that Madelyn of all people should be fixing him with that expression of apology and reproof; as if, independent of him, she’d formed her own opinion on this subject.

“Oh, Mr. Burnaby, she only wants to see you for a few minutes.

She promises. Maybe—you should? She’s such a”—Madelyn paused, blushing at her own audacity, searching for the most accurate and persuasive word—“sincere woman.”

“Sincere women are the most dangerous. God spare us!”

Backing off, retreating to his inner office, Dirk succeeded in making Madelyn laugh. But it was a frayed, sad-sounding laugh. A disappointed-with-you-Mr. Burnaby laugh.

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Joyce Carol Oates

The Vulture. The Woman in Black. She’d taken to waiting for Dirk Burnaby in the lobby of his office building. On the steps outside. On the sidewalk. Even in a lightly falling rain, even at dusk when he’d been working late and not intending to avoid her, simply he’d been working late, lost in concentration.

At the edge of his vision he saw her, the dark hovering figure, he would not look closely, would not make eye-contact, before she could speak his name, he’d turned, he was walking swiftly away.

He knew. Not to get involved. Not to be moved by sympathy, or pity.

If she called after him, he didn’t hear.

No. I won’t. I can’t.

Since falling in love with Ariah and marrying her he’d ceased to think of himself as a lone romantic figure crossing a tightrope. A tightrope over an abyss! No more, he was not that man. He’d never been that man. His grandfather Reginald Burnaby’s fate in The Falls would not be his. It was 1961, not 1872. Dirk Burnaby was not alone now, never would he be alone again. He had sealed his fate. Or, his fate had sealed him.

Ariah confided in him, “Now we’re safe, darling! Even if one is taken from us, we’d have two left. If you leave me”—she laughed her low throaty laugh, mocking her own dread—“I’d have three of
them
.”

Dirk laughed, for such remarks of Ariah’s were presented to him as whimsical, meant to amuse. There was the custom between them of Dirk shaking his head in a pretense of severity. “Ariah! The things you say.”

“Well. Someone has to say them.”

Ariah’s response was bright, brave. Her green-glassy eyes, her redhead-pallor that gave her, at forty, a look of being young and un-tried. After more than a decade of living with Ariah, Dirk believed he understood the woman less than he had at the outset. He wondered if this might be true of any woman?

Of course, Ariah wasn’t “any woman.”

He considered her words. “Now we’re safe.” What did this mean?

Was this the basic principle of domestic life, of the terrible need to propagate one’s kind? The human wish, as in a fairy tale, to live
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longer than one’s lifetime, through one’s children. To live longer than one is allotted, and to matter. To matter deeply, profoundly to someone.

Not to be alone. To be spared the possibility of knowing oneself, in aloneness.

He was a married man in his mid-forties, a man deeply in love with his wife. A man who has fathered children whom he loves. A responsible citizen of his time and place.
Who I am there’s no doubt. No longer. I
know.

Sometimes this love came so strong, almost he couldn’t breathe.

He felt his chest constrict. His young sons, his baby daughter. Their mother’s eyes lifting to his in triumph; yet a fearful, perilous triumph.
They are my tightrope now
Dirk thought tenderly.
Unless they are
my abyss.

This woman, the Woman in Black had appealed to other attorneys in Niagara Falls. For weeks she’d been making the rounds of law offices.

Strange that she would come to Dirk Burnaby so late: he supposed she knew she couldn’t afford his fees, it wasn’t likely she could afford the fees of any attorneys with offices in his building. Two Rainbow Square this new tower of a building was called. At the heart of downtown, Rainbow Boulevard and Main Street.

She’d presented her case to the Niagara County Health Department. She’d tried to speak with the editor of the
Niagara Gazette,
and had in fact spoken with a reporter. Word spread quickly in the city, which, despite its burgeoning population of factory workers and manual laborers, was a small, tight community. Its nucleus, those individuals who had power and who mattered, consisted of less than fifty persons, all men. Dirk Burnaby was among these men of course.

And most of them were friends of his, or friendly acquaintances. Men of the older generation had been friends or friendly acquaintances of his father, Virgil Burnaby. Dirk belonged to the same private clubs to which they belonged. Their women adored him.

How could he explain to the Woman in Black
My friends are your enemies. My friends can’t be my enemies.

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Joyce Carol Oates

Dirk didn’t know the details of the lawsuit this desperate woman was hoping to bring against the City of Niagara Falls except that such a lawsuit hadn’t a chance to be resolved in her favor, or even to be seriously considered by a judge. The rumor was that her family had serious health problems, possibly she’d had miscarriages; or such was the claim. She was trying to organize a homeowners’ association in her neighborhood, in the vicinity of Ninety-ninth Street and Colvin Boulevard, protesting health conditions at a local elementary school. He’d seen in the
Niagara Gazette
a brief, neutral feature beneath the misleading headline PARENTS ORGANIZE TO

PROTEST 99TH ST. SCHOOL.

The mayor of Niagara Falls, Dirk’s old friend “Spooky” Wenn, firmly believed that the Woman in Black—whose name he, too, had difficulty recalling—was a “known Communist.” In fact she was the daughter of a “notorious” Communist, a CIO organizer of the 1930’s in North Tonawanda who’d died in a confrontation with strikebreak-ers and police. “These people” had caused plenty of trouble in the past. The woman and her husband, supposedly an assembly worker at one of the plastics plants, were “professional agitators.” Obviously, they were Jewish. They “took orders from Moscow.” They’d been involved in demonstrations in Buffalo at the time of the Rosenbergs’

execution. Probably the two weren’t married, but had “set up shop together” as “part of a commune.” Everybody knew that communism was “godless”—that was a fact. This couple had a mortgage on a tract-house bungalow on Ninety-third Street as a “front.” They were from New York, or maybe Detroit. The woman had a “history of mental illness.” The man had a “prison record.” They had children living with them they claimed were theirs. As the woman claimed she’d had miscarriages, and that this was the fault of the city, not her own fault. She claimed that her children were sick because of city water, or the soil, or the air, or the playground at the Ninety-ninth Street Elementary School, who knew all that she’d claimed? Already she had caused trouble at the school and at the Niagara County Health Department. Wenn spoke at length, vehemently as if he’d been personally threatened by the Woman in Black. It was 2 a.m. of a Sunday morning, an interlude between poker games at Stroughton
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Howell’s newly purchased white colonial house overlooking Buckhorn Island. Clyde Colborne, Buzz Fitch, Mike MacKenna, Doug Eaton whose older brother was married to Dirk’s sister Sylvia, and Dirk were also there. Wenn said, “These Reds! Like the Rosenbergs, their dream is to overthrow the U.S. Government and replace it with communes and free love, that’s what this ‘complaint’ is really about.

The end justifies the means. Plain as day in old Marx’s
Mein Kamp
.”

Stroughton Howell exchanged a glance with Dirk, laughed and said,

“In Adolf ’s
Das Kapital,
too.”

Wenn said hotly, “They don’t make any secret of their intentions, is my meaning. It’s when they go underground, pretending to be ‘ordinary citizens,’ that they’re dangerous.”

Dirk Burnaby was in an affable mood, having been drinking good scotch and getting more than his share of good cards through the evening, but not such good cards that his friends were demoralized and resentful when he won, and won again. He’d sit a game out. He could sense when luck might fade from his fingertips. With lawyerly sagacity he said, “What ‘these people’ want is compensation—a settlement out of court. The hell with overthrowing the U.S.

Government.”

Had he meant this tossed-off remark? Probably, yes.

And would he regret having said it?

The Woman in Black! The Vulture.

Before the woman had a name, before she was fully human to him.

She’d been a threat. She’d caused him to curse under his breath.
God
damn no I will not
.
What an asshole I am, if I do.

Never would Dirk bring up the subject of the Woman in Black with Ariah. Not voluntarily. He knew better—he’d had enough experience by this time!—than to discuss anything problematic with his excitable wife. Their conversations might begin normally enough, but 192 W
Joyce Carol Oates

within a few minutes Ariah would begin to be alarmed, agitated.

During the past several years she’d become increasingly anxious about the vast world outside their home in Luna Park. She refused to read the front section of the
Gazette
—“It’s obscene to know too much, if you can’t do anything about it.” She shrank from any mention of “foreign” news because it was always worrisome. She refused to watch TV news, and of the magazines that came into the house she favored the
Saturday Evening Post, Ladies’ Home Journal,
and
Reader’s
Digest,
not
Life
and
Time
. Abruptly she’d excuse herself to leave conversations at social gatherings that drifted onto unpleasant subjects, like wartime reminiscences among Dirk and his fellow veterans. (One of Dirk’s ex-G.I. acquaintances had entered Dresden after the notorious “firebombing.” Another, a banker with a riverfront home on l’Isle Grand, had been present at the “liberation” of Auschwitz.) Ariah listened with morbid concentration, biting her thumbnail until the cu-ticle bled, as Chandler described the “duck-and-cover” drill (in the event of an atomic attack by the Soviets) at Luna Park Elementary.

Even reports of the children filing outside during ordinary fire drills upset her. Yet Ariah saw the wisdom of such procedures—“You have to prepare for the worst.” And yet if Dirk began to speak worriedly of his law practice, if he spoke in any but the most casual, conversa-tional way about his profession, Ariah’s face stiffened. Dirk could amuse her, Ariah loved to be amused. She wanted to be told that the world beyond 7 Luna Park was a region of fools and knaves. If you were neither a fool nor a knave you wanted no part in that world. You held yourself aloof, superior. So Ariah could be entertained, she could be made to dissolve into peals of laughter. She loved Dirk’s mimicry of local judges, politicians, law colleagues and rivals. She had a de-lightfully malicious sense of humor. But if Dirk began to speak seriously, she stiffened. She never asked about the outcomes of his cases out of a fear, he supposed, that he would have to report to her now and then that he’d lost; or had not won so spectacularly as he and his clients might have wished. She feared his failure, his professional humiliation, his bankruptcy. She feared that his mother would “disinherit” him (even as, as Dirk said repeatedly, he had no wish for his mother’s money, and assumed he was in fact “disinherited.”) Above
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