The Falls (31 page)

Ariah was smiling into a patch of mist that had somehow drifted into the room. It hovered over objects, obscuring their shapes. It tasted of the cold wet mist at the foot of The Falls.

“Oh, goodness. Dirk ‘sees’ women all the time, Clarice. He could hardly help it, could he? With his eyes?” Ariah laughed, a sound like a chicken as its neck is being wrung. “Why is that un-un-unusual?”

“Ariah, are you sitting down? Sit down.”

Ariah shook her head stubbornly. She would not sit down! Like Royall who disobeyed on principle. She had at least as much pride as her own three-year-old. She was standing at Dirk’s roll-top desk, leaning weakly against it. She hadn’t the motor coordination required to pull out Dirk’s heavy swivel chair and sit down. It was rare for her to enter Dirk’s study. Supposedly it was out-of-bounds to the children. Nor had Ariah the slightest interest in financial records, cancelled checks and receipts and income tax forms. All of Dirk’s personal records were kept in this room, which meant family records too, but Ariah shunned such official documents. Since her marriage she hadn’t paid a single bill, never so much as opened letters containing bills, anything from County of Niagara, State of New York, or the U.S. Federal Government she pushed from her with a shudder, knowing that her capable, good-natured husband would deal with such horrors.

Her sensitive nostrils quivered in this room. She could detect the faint, consoling odor of the cigars Dirk occasionally smoked. His hair lotion, his cologne. A bottle of French cologne for men that Ariah had given him.
He loves me. Knows it would destroy me.

Ariah could hear Bridget carrying Juliet upstairs to the nursery, cooing and crooning in Gaelic. Time for a diaper change! Ariah felt a terrible sense of loss. Diapers, baby pee and baby shit! She was missing her daughter’s babyhood. On the stairs, Royall rushed behind Bridget chattering and thumping his feet like a marching soldier.

Ariah was desperate to be with them. She stammered, “C-Clarice? I have to hang up, my children are calling me.”

Fiercely Clarice said, “No. Don’t you dare hang up, Ariah! You’ve 216 W
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hidden that head of yours in the sand long enough. These ugly rumors don’t concern just you, they concern the Burnaby family, too.

All of us. My poor mother who isn’t well, and would be devastated if she heard how badly her son, her ‘favorite’ child, is behaving. And in public. It isn’t upsetting enough that Dirk is involved with a lower-class woman, a married woman with children, he’s been filing prepos-terous motions in court on her behalf, he’s lost his legal as well as his moral judgment, he seems to have lost his mind, and you, his wife, who has always imagined she’s so clever and cultured and sharp-witted and superior to the rest of us, haven’t noticed? Are you blind, Ariah?”

The mist seemed to be spreading. Ariah rubbed at her eyes.

Maybe she was going blind? A roaring in her ears too, like distant falling water.

On the wall above Dirk’s desk were framed daguerreotypes of his daredevil grandfather Reginald Burnaby the Great. A whippet-lean gypsy-swaggering sexy young man with a close-shaved head and handlebar mustache and intense shiny dark eyes like marbles. Ariah felt his jeering presence.
You too, on your tightrope! You, in a dream of believing yourself safe on land.

These many years, Ariah had been teasing herself, and Dirk, with droll fantasies of his leaving her. But now.

Clarice was saying, “Ask my brother about ‘Nina’ when he comes home. ‘Nina Olshaker.’ If he comes home. Ask him why he’s committing professional suicide for her sake. Initiating a lawsuit against the City of Niagara Falls, the Board of Education, Swann Chemicals, and I don’t know who all else! His own friends, I’d have thought! Men he went to school with! Our parents’ friends! Some of the most powerful people in Niagara Falls and Buffalo! And all this for a woman who isn’t even good-looking, they say. Her husband is a factory worker and a Communist agitator and they have two children, both retarded. But now the Olshakers are separated, Dirk has set up a residence for her in Mt. Lucas, she lives there at his expense and you, Ariah, his wife, know nothing of it, do you? Hiding away playing your precious piano! ‘Steinway spinet’! Your husband’s mistress has a touch of Tuscarora blood, they say. Worse yet, she’s Catholic.”

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Ariah whimpered like a small tormented animal. “I don’t believe you! Leave me alone.” She slammed down the receiver on her sister-in-law’s ravening voice.

On the wall, Reginald Burnaby the Great smiled and winked at her.

“It isn’t true. Not Dirk.”

Ariah began to search through Dirk’s desk, blindly. She was looking for—what? Her husband’s secrets. The desk was a handsome old piece of furniture, carved mahogany and so heavy it left deep indentations in the rug; it had come to Dirk not from his father Virgil Burnaby but from his father’s wealthy benefactor Angus MacKenna.

Ariah knew little of these dead people, and wished to know less. She had married Dirk, not his family. She hated his family! Oh, a roll-top desk is a hive of secrets. Masculine secrets. There were numerous pigeonholes, drawers. Scattered about the desk were cellophane-wrapped cigars, Sweet Coronas mostly. There were wads of cancelled checks, receipts, bills held together by rubber bands. Bank statements, IRS forms, business letters, insurance policies. (No personal letters? That was suspicious.) Whimpering to herself like a kicked dog, Ariah pulled open drawers, rifled through them frantically.
This is
not the person I am
.
This is not Ariah.
Mist from The Falls had gotten into the room, nasty as cold spit. Ariah was having difficulty seeing.

She fumbled through Dirk’s checkbook, panting. Evidence? Evidence of a husband’s betrayal? She’d forgotten the woman’s name.
But there
can’t be any woman.

In his careful printed handwriting Dirk had noted he’d made out checks of $500 to “N. Olshaker” in August, September, October, and most recently November 1961. Ariah was panting, dazed. “ ‘N.

Olshaker.’ If she’s his client, why is he paying
her
?”

Paying her for what?

Services rendered?

There were other mysterious—suspicious—notations. Monthly payments of $365 to Burnaby Property Management, Inc. Why was Dirk making out a check to his family’s business? What sense did this make? “ ‘A residence in Mt. Lucas.’ Where he has put his mistress.

Oh, my God.”

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There was a movement behind Ariah, she turned guiltily and saw in the doorway of the study a bony-faced boy of no distinctive age, too grave in his expression to be a child, yet too small of stature to be an adolescent, with a sallow, furrowed skin and worried eyes glinting like fish scales behind his wire-rimmed glasses. (Oh, those damned glasses! They were only a few weeks old and Ariah never saw them without wanting to snatch them off the boy’s nose and break them in two.) The boy’s flannel shirt was rumpled and misbuttoned and there were stains on both knees of his school trousers though certainly these items of clothing had been freshly laundered and ironed when he’d put them on that morning. For a panicked moment Ariah couldn’t remember this child’s name.

He’s mine, my penance.

The boy asked anxiously if something was wrong?

That scratchy voice: if sandpaper could talk, it would talk like this.

Ariah managed to recover, to a degree. “Chandler, for God’s sake.

You frightened the life out of me. Creeping up behind me like a—a turtle!” Ariah clasped her hands together to prevent their shaking.

Her face must have been deathly pale, the freckles standing out like exclamation points. Yet Ariah addressed Chandler in her usual chiding voice, as if the child warranted, and would feel comfortable with, no other.

Chandler said hesitantly, “I—heard you crying, Mother. I heard you—scream.”

Ariah said hotly, “You did not hear me scream, Chandler. Don’t be ridiculous.
That wasn’t me
.”

2

Into the underworld then I descended. Where you can’t see, can’t breathe.

Suffocating in black muck. In shame.

These weeks, months. Exhausting and yet exhilarating days that began for Dirk Burnaby early in the morning, and ended early in the morning. Neglecting his other clients, his paying clients, in the cause of Love Canal.

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It was true, Dirk Burnaby was filing motions in Niagara County District Court. In the service of his clients he was going to war against the City of Niagara Falls, the Niagara Falls Board of Health, the Niagara Falls Board of Education, Swann Chemicals, the Office of the Mayor of Niagara Falls and the Office of the Medical Examiner of Niagara Falls. Never had he written such eloquent, forceful prose.

But mostly he was an explorer, in his car and occasionally on foot, descending into the underworld.

He would feel at times like those early, doomed explorers, who’d paddled their canoes along the wide river linking two gigantic lakes, not realizing until it was too late that the current was accelerating rapidly, and that they’d entered the “Deadline”—the rough, white-water rapids just above Goat Island. At first you think that your actions are propelling your little boat along at such speed; then you realize that the speed, the propulsion, has nothing to do with you. It is something happening to you.

Dirk woke himself from such trances he drifted into, often in the County Hall of Records, or in his big luxurious boat of a car like Charon’s barge crossing the Styx into a region unknown to him.

Crossing into that other region, the industrial city of Niagara Falls. How unlike the gleaming tourist-city on the Niagara River.

The scenic city at the edge of the renowned Niagara Gorge. The Wonder of the World, Honeymoon Capital of the World. Prospect Avenue with its old, grand hotels of another era, only just beginning to be replaced, in the early 1960’s, by more modern hotels and “motels.” And Prospect Park and gardens. And the continuously rising mist and roaring of The Falls. Dirk could not see that the second city, the underworld region, that stretched out for miles to the east, had any relationship to the dwellings on the river. It was a twin, yet a mis-shapen twin. There was The Falls, and there was the city of Niagara Falls. The one was beauty and the terror of beauty; the other, mere expediency and man-made ugliness.

Man-made poison, death.

“Where it’s deliberate, it’s murder. It’s beyond negligence.

‘Depraved indifference to human life.’ ”

The only connection between The Falls and the thriving indus-220 W
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trial city was the massive energy diverted from The Falls to operate certain of the industries of Niagara Falls. But you had to know that this connection existed, and was a multi-million-dollar business: Niagara Hydro. To the uneducated eye such connections were invisible.

To the uneducated eye, much was invisible.

“They have no conscience. My kind.”

My kind
Dirk Burnaby would be discovering at every turn.

Where Nina Olshaker had been rudely rebuffed, thwarted, and lied to in her inquiries, Dirk Burnaby fared much better. He was an attorney licensed to practice law in New York State, and he knew the rights of both citizens and attorneys. He demanded to see county records, deeds of ownership. He demanded to see county health records. And transcripts of meetings of the Niagara County Board of Zoning. He knew his way around both city and county buildings, the Niagara County Courthouse, the Office of the Niagara Falls District Attorney. He asked questions, and he insisted upon answers. He not only threatened to subpoena witnesses, he did. He wasn’t one to accept obfuscation—“bullshit”—from subordinates and flunkies including Mayor Wenn’s staff. Including Dirk Burnaby’s fellow attorneys, in the hire of local government and the executive officers and board of directors of Swann Chemicals, Inc.

The chief attorney for Swann Chemicals was a man named Brandon Skinner, whom Dirk knew at a distance, warily. As Skinner knew Dirk Burnaby. Between them was mutual respect if no warmth.

Skinner was Burnaby’s elder by ten or twelve years, a wealthy man with a riverside estate not far from Shalott.

“At least, we’ve never pretended to be friends. There isn’t that pretense to maintain.”

Dirk was feeling hopeful. Optimistic. He knew the symptoms: the excitement preceding a good, fair fight.

Of course he knew that Skinner and other attorneys for the defense would stall, stall, stall. He knew the tricks, he’d used them often enough himself. Tricks are a staple of the lawyerly trade, like surgical instruments to a surgeon. But the defense couldn’t trick him.

Nor could the defense break the backbones of the plaintiffs by caus-The Falls X 221

ing them to run up devastating legal costs because he, Dirk Burnaby, was working for no fee.

Possibly, he was beginning to see, he’d end up paying expenses out of his own pocket.

“What the hell. I’m rich.”

Into the underworld. Where I would drown.

For there came the hour when Dirk discovered the name “Angus MacKenna” in startling proximity to the name “Hiram S. Swann.”

Angus, Virgil Burnaby’s benefactor! The kindly-seeming old man had been a virtual grandfather to Dirk, long ago.

And there came the hour when Dirk discovered that MacKenna Laboratories, Inc., a company in which Virgil Burnaby was a partner, had been, reconstituted in 1939 as MacKenna-Swann Chemicals, Inc.; in 1941, Swann bought out MacKenna’s investment, and the company would be known subsequently as Swann Chemicals, Inc. It would become, in the boom years of wartime defense manufacturing, one of the most prosperous businesses in upstate New York.

“Why did I never know this? My father—”

But Dirk’s father had rarely spoken of such matters to Dirk. In the last years of his life he’d seemed to have lost interest entirely in business and public life, or to have been revulsed by it. His life was boating, fishing, golfing. His life was drinking, in an affable gentlemanly manner that masked (Dirk supposed, now: at the time he hadn’t a clue) a profound melancholy. Dirk’s parents led increasingly separate lives in middle age, Claudine aggressively social and Virgil stubbornly withdrawn. Dirk recalled most vividly sailing excursions with his father when, alone together, they’d communicated wordlessly as if reduced to a common identity by the windy, choppy river where anything might happen. At other times, Virgil Burnaby had been smiling, distant.
A man who has lived another man’s life.