Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
his father the Reverend, without either man knowing.
To escape the
wrath of God. Here’s God!
Quietly Dirk said, with an apologetic glance at Mrs. Erskine,
“Sometimes people surprise us. People we believe we know.”
Reverend Erskine said brusquely, “Yes. But not our son. Gilbert isn’t ‘people.’ ”
To this, Dirk had no reply.
“Gilbert would never take his own—life. Never.”
Dirk stared glumly at the plush crimson carpet.
“I expect these newspapers to print retractions. Apologies.
Gilbert
would never.
”
Reluctantly Dirk had left Ariah Erskine sleeping in the back of his car, parked at the rear of his Luna Park town house. The red-haired girl (Ariah had become so frail and wistful during the course of the vigil, Dirk had difficulty thinking of her any longer as a mature, adult woman) had refused to come inside Dirk’s house to freshen up and sleep. She’d refused to accompany him to the Rainbow Grand.
She too
is fearful of these elders. It’s her instinct to survive.
When Dirk left the Erskines’ hotel room, it was Mrs. Erskine who accompanied him to the door, and anxiously squeezed his hand. The woman’s fingers were moistly clammy yet surprisingly strong.
“Mr. Burnaby? ‘Dirk’? I don’t know who you are or why you’ve been so kind to Ariah—and to us—but I want to thank you, and God bless you. Whatever has happened to Gilbert”—her eyes snatched at Dirk’s, shining with terror—“he too would thank you.”
Dirk murmured words of consolation, or commiseration.
How he hated the suicide!
Selfish scheming bastard
.
He walked the half-mile to his brownstone town house in Luna Park.
His mind seethed! He was a man of strong appetites and imagination and it was sometimes held against him that he inflated events and people with sudden significance, like magnified images on a screen.
Later, these might shrink to pinpricks. They might disappear.
So he’d been accused. Frequently in his relatively short life of
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thirty-three years. “As if it’s my fault. But how?” Truly, Dirk couldn’t understand.
She’d refused to come inside his house, to sleep in a proper bed, or even atop a bed. Not once had she called him “Dirk”—nor even “Mr.
Burnaby.”
She didn’t know his God-damned name
.
Seeing Ariah Erskine sleeping peacefully in the cushioned rear of his Lincoln Continental, a skinny muskrat of a girl with papery, bruised skin and a slack drooling mouth, knees drawn up to her scrawny chest, bitten-looking fingernails and faded red hair badly in need of washing, he told himself furiously
You are not. Not falling in
love. Not
.
“Excuse me, Mr. Burnaby? The Coast Guard found it.”
Not
him. It
.
Dirk would be grateful that Ariah Erskine hadn’t been present to hear this crude remark made by a Niagara Falls patrolman.
It was mid-morning of June 19. Bells were ringing: Sunday.
Seven days and seven nights had passed in a vertiginous stream.
At the time of the discovery, the Widow-Bride hadn’t been sleeping but had gone into a women’s restroom in Prospect Park.
Feeling sick, Dirk said, “Jesus! Where?”
“Whirlpool.”
The Devil’s Whirlpool! He’d had a premonition.
So many days of futile searches downriver to Lake Ontario and back to Niagara Falls, and all the while the body of the deceased had been trapped in the Whirlpool, less than three miles from the Horseshoe Falls. His body had been swept downriver, sucked into the whirlpool, and held captive. The Devil’s Whirlpool was as extraordinary a natural phenomenon as The Falls. A mammoth circular basin in the Gorge, two hundred feet in height, in which frothy, foaming water turned in a maddened vortex. Objects of various sizes were sometimes trapped in this vortex for days, weeks. It was rare that a body was trapped as long as Erskine’s had been trapped, but not unknown.
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The corpse had been sucked beneath the surface of the river, and had been invisible from shore. Spinning, spinning, spinning for seven days and seven nights inside the Whirlpool.
Dirk no longer felt that he hated the suicide. Nor was he jealous of him. He hoped the poor bastard had, in fact, been dead when his body had entered the Whirlpool.
“Ariah, you can’t possibly do this. Stay back.”
“I will. I must.”
“Ariah, no.”
Dirk spoke harshly, as an elder brother might speak. Ariah licked her thin, cracked lips. Her skin was so papery-tight across the bones of her face, it seemed a sudden gesture or movement might tear it.
“But I
must
.”
It was a role she was playing, Dirk thought. And she would play it through to the end.
The authorities had no choice but to concur. As the probable widow of the dead man, it was Ariah Erskine’s right to see the corpse immediately and to make the identification.
Downriver, onshore near the Devil’s Whirlpool, a small crowd had gathered. There was more than the usual contingent of reporters and photographers. Reluctantly, emergency workers allowed Ariah to approach the corpse. At about ten yards, Ariah pulled suddenly away from Dirk Burnaby’s restraining arm, nearly running. The canvas covering the corpse was drawn back. Oh, what was that odor? That
smell
? A look of childlike perplexity came over the widow’s face. The corpse was a classic “floater.” No one had prepared the widow for this experience. Not even Dirk Burnaby who hadn’t had the heart, or the stomach, for the task.
The remains of twenty-seven-year-old Gilbert Erskine were grotesquely bloated with intestinal gas, and nearly unrecognizable as human. The once-thin body was a balloon-body, naked, hairless, finger- and toenails gone. A dark, swollen tongue protruded from a bizarrely smiling mouth and drooping lower jaw. The eyes were milky, lacking irises, and lidless. The genitalia were similarly bloated,
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like burst plums. What was most hideous, the outer layer of skin had peeled away and a reddish-brown dermal layer was exposed, tinted by burst capillaries. A stink more virulent than sulfur dioxide lifted from the corpse. Ariah shouted with what sounded like laughter. A rowdy child’s laughter tinged with fright, indignation.
She recognized her husband, she claimed, by the corpse’s “angry grin.” And by the white gold wedding ring, which matched her own, within which the blackened ring finger had swollen to several times its size.
“Yes. It’s Gilbert.”
She spoke in a whisper. Only then did the Widow-Bride lose her remarkable stamina, and her strength. Seven days and seven nights of vigilance were finished. Her eyes rolled back in her head like a shaken doll’s and she would have fallen to the ground except, cursing himself for his fate, Dirk Burnaby caught her in his arms.
1
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bruptly she was gone from The Falls, and from Dirk Burnaby’s life.
“Thank God! What a nightmare.”
It was a memory to feed his insomnia. Like a great black-feathered scavenger bird tearing at his entrails. He wouldn’t have believed himself so vulnerable. For after all he’d been in the war, he’d seen ugly sights . . . There were times when a sick, dizzy sensation overcame him, not memory exactly but the emotion of memory, playing golf with his friends on the beautiful sloping course at l’Isle Grand Country Club, sailing or boating on the river, and he was made to realize that his happiness was solely a consequence of chance, and luck: for how many millions of others, less lucky than Dirk Burnaby, life had been painful, ghastly, cut off prematurely. Seeing now the bloated, discolored body on the riverbank and the impetuous red-haired girl pulling away from him before he could stop her, nearly lunging forward to make her claim.
Well, she’d regretted that. He supposed.
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Not love. Not my type.
He hadn’t heard from her since. Of course he hadn’t. What had he expected, he’d expected nothing. As soon as the body was identified and the vigil was over, Dirk Burnaby’s role in the drama ended. He’d seen Ariah Erskine taken away by ambulance to the hospital, in a state of collapse, but her family was summoned then and took over her care. The body would have been shipped back to Troy and the funeral and burial of the late Reverend Gilbert Erskine must have been immediate.
“Accident” it would be called, probably. The reckless young man with an interest in “scientific exploration” had “fallen” into the Niagara River. Local newspapers would be discreet. The coroner would rule “misadventure.” For in the absence of a clear-cut motive for suicide, a note left behind . . .
He’d never been to Troy. A city of no special distinction, three hundred miles east along the Mohawk River, beyond Albany.
Not love
. This was a fact: if Dirk Burnaby had sighted Ariah Erskine at a social gathering, his gaze would have drifted over her without snagging. When his friends asked about her, Dirk was evasive except to say emphatically that he’d had no contact with the woman since the vigil, it had been an impulsive gesture on his part and nothing more. She’d never thanked him. She’d never seemed to see him.
Clyde Colborne said, “She told me she was damned. And the look in her face, I wasn’t going to argue with her.”
Damned? Dirk didn’t ask about this. He was dealing cards, an action his skillful hands performed flawlessly, except suddenly he dropped a card, and it fell to the floor. His friends smiled at this and said nothing.
That night (the poker game was at Tyler Wenn’s, on the river) Dirk won $3,100 and pushed it back to his friends, not wanting it. He was sick of poker, he said. He’d known these men for twenty years, and more—
Buzz Fitch, Stroughton Howell, Clyde Colborne, Wenn. They were like brothers to him, and he didn’t care if he never saw them again.
Not lovesick. Not Burnaby!
Skimming through newspapers and news magazines, staring at photographs, headlines. He knew this would disgust him but he couldn’t resist.
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The Vigil of the Widow-Bride of The Falls
widow-bride’s 7-day vigil ends in tragedy
body of 27-year-old troy minister
hauled from niagara gorge
Missing 7 Days
Sought by Bride
Life, Time,
and
The Saturday Evening Post
had printed sympathetic features. Nowhere was the word
suicide
used.
Dirk paid little attention to the articles themselves, it was the photographs that engaged him. He frowned to see himself in some of these. An indistinct, shadowy figure. You could recognize Dirk Burnaby if you knew him, he had a certain physical stature, a blunt, handsome profile, fair hair that lifted from his forehead in springy, flaring wings. In one of the grainy newspaper photos Dirk was blurred in motion as if caught in the act of trying to prevent the photographer from taking the photo, as Ariah Erskine in her rain slicker and hat stood at a railing, poised as a statue. 29-YEAR-OLD
TROY WOMAN JOINS SEARCH FOR HUSBAND IN NIA-
GARA GORGE. How strange it seemed to Dirk, the myriad actions and impressions of the long vigil reduced to such simple statements. And not one of the photos depicted Ariah Erskine as Dirk recalled her.
The Widow-Bride had become another Niagara legend, but no one would remember her name.
It wasn’t a good day for Mrs. Burnaby, Dirk’s mother. She was sixty-three years old and few days were good any longer.
“You never visit me, Dirk. Almost, I’d think you were avoiding me.”
Mrs. Burnaby laughed cruelly. That sound, familiar to her son, of a silver ice pick stabbing at ice. For the older woman knew well that her son was avoiding her and that, to demonstrate how he was not
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avoiding her, he drove to the Island more frequently than he would have if he hadn’t hoped to avoid her.
“Dirk, dear! Your mother knows, and forgives.”
Claudine Burnaby now lived alone on l’Isle Grand, with a housekeeper, in the twenty-three-room “manor house” Dirk’s father had built in 1924, rich from investments in local businesses and real estate. The Burnaby house, on six acres of prime riverfront property, was a smaller replica of an English country estate in Surrey, built of dark-pink limestone on a knoll overlooking the Chippawa Channel (facing Ontario, Canada) of the Niagara River. On bright days its tall stately windows shone with the sparkle of mysterious lives within; in more typical Niagara Falls weather, overcast and ponder-ous, the limestone resembled lead, and the steep slate roofs weighed down heavily. Like other 1920’s-era mansions on the Island it boasted a romantic, pretentious name: “Shalott.” Dirk had fled Shalott at eighteen, to Colgate University and law school at Cornell; he’d never returned to Shalott to live for any extended duration of time but his mother kept his old room in perpetual readiness, like a shrine. In fact, it was now a suite of rooms, an apartment remodeled and handsomely furnished. Dirk’s father had died (suddenly, of a heart attack), twelve years before, in 1938, and his mother had begun her unexpected and perverse retreat from the world shortly afterward.
Dirk had been assured numerous times by his mother that he, not his older, married sisters, would inherit Shalott. Of course he would live at Shalott, and raise his children there. And if this would one day be so—Mrs. Burnaby reasoned, with flawless logic—why not now?
Why didn’t he marry, settle down like everyone else his age? Claudine would continue to live at Shalott, in “her” part of the house, and Dirk and his family would live in the rest, which was certainly large enough. There was the river, and the dock, the speedboat no one used any longer, the sailboat Dirk had loved as a boy, only just think how Dirk’s sons would love it. Their daddy taking them out on the river, teaching them to sail . . .
“Except I’m not married yet, Mother. Not even engaged.” Dirk was embarrassed to point out this detail. “You forget.”