The Falls (14 page)

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Joyce Carol Oates

Coolly Claudine said, “No, Dirk. I never forget.”

Claudine had become a mother who flirted with her son, yet maintained an air of moral reproach. She could say things to Dirk that no other living person could say to him; and he would have to tolerate it, and continue to adore her.

She’d become a beautiful exotic spider in her web of rooms, waiting at Shalott.

Long ago, in 1907, Claudine Burnaby had been a Buffalo debutante. In the fashion of the time she’d had an ample, bosomy body with a cinched-in waist and hourglass figure; her hair was naturally blond, her face childlike, with beestung petulant lips. She’d married a Niagara Falls entrepreneur named Virgil Burnaby, the (adopted) son of well-to-do Niagara Falls residents. Like most beautiful, rich women she was forgiven her faults and failings of character, and only after she’d begun to lose her fabled looks had she attempted, for a desperate year or two, to be “good.” Maybe it was too late, or maybe “goodness” bored her. Certainly, religion bored her. If Sunday services weren’t an opportunity for Claudine Burnaby to display herself to an admiring public, there was no purpose in going. As a relatively young widow she’d had numerous male friends, escorts, lovers (?), but none of these lasted more than a few months.

In her early fifties she became obsessed with her appearance, the effects of aging on her fair, thin skin, and for years she considered a facelift, exhausting her family with her worries, for what if something went wrong during the operation?—what if it didn’t turn out well? It did no good for Claudine’s children to assure her that she was still a beautiful woman, though in fact she was a beautiful woman, now middle-aged. But Claudine refused consolation. “I hate it. This. I hate
me
. I hate to look in the mirror at
me
.” For Claudine knew best what the mirror should have been reflecting, and now did not.

Yet there was genuine heartbreak here, Dirk thought. Where his mother had once been so sociable, now she was becoming a recluse. If she accepted invitations to the homes of old friends, she often left early without explanation or farewell. At the private, exclusive clubs of l’Isle Grand, Buffalo, Niagara Falls where she and her late husband
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had been promiment members for decades, she complained she’d become invisible: “People look toward me, but not at me. And no one really sees
me
.”

It was a child’s lament, in the mouth of an older woman.

Dirk’s sisters Clarice and Sylvia protested, Claudine wasn’t invis-ble to them, or to her grandchildren. By the bored, glazed look in Claudine’s face, hearing this, you understood that being visible in such eyes meant nothing to her.

Clarice and Sylvia complained bitterly to Dirk. They recalled that, when they were children, their mother hadn’t cared much for mothering them, when nannies could do as well. Though Claudine had quite enjoyed her son Dirk, a husky handsome good-natured boy with a sweet disposition. His sisters said, in disgust, “It’s just masculine attention Mother misses. With her, everything is
sex
.”

Dirk thought privately, no. For Claudine nothing is, or ever was, sex. Only just vanity.

He’d always felt guilty, his mother had so clearly favored him over his sisters. She’d given him money, surreptitious gifts, he’d taken for granted as an adolescent. Even as a young man in his twenties, when he’d made a show of being self-supporting . . .

In her late fifties, after a spell of depression, Claudine decided impulsively to have a facelift after all, in a Buffalo clinic. Afterward, her sensitive skin was bruised and swollen for weeks, her eyes were bloodshot, the left side of her face was frozen and without expression. Now she didn’t dare smile or show emotion, for only one half of her face would register it. “A zombie! That’s what I’ve become. Outside and in,” she said bitterly, yet with an air of satisfaction. “This is my punishment. Virgil would laugh. ‘Did you think you’d remarry?’—‘Did you think any man would ever love you again?’ It’s no more than I deserve, an old woman trying to be
young
.”

The surgery was irrevocable, Dirk learned. Nerves had been damaged. Tissues in Claudine’s face and behind her ears had been permanently “traumatized.” And she’d signed a release waiving all possibility of a malpractice suit.

There followed then spells of illness. Bronchitis, anemia, fatigue.

What fatigue! Though Claudine abhorred exercise of any kind, yet 92 W
Joyce Carol Oates

she was so exhausted sometimes she could hardly dress herself. Often she slept for twelve hours at a time. When, after weeks of insisting, Claudine convinced Dirk to bring home with him, to meet her, an attractive young woman whom (he’d thought) he might marry, Claudine had sent word downstairs via Ethel to explain that “Mrs.

Burnaby is unwell, and sends her apologies.”

Now Claudine rarely left Shalott. And rarely did she invite visitors, even relatives. Her grandchildren were noisy and got on her nerves, her daughters were quarrelsome, and boring. Dirk saw that she cultivated
woundedness
as if it were a spiritual value; she’d become a martyr to her own vanity, which she interpreted as the cruelty of others in withholding their adulation of her, which she’d long taken for granted. She said, incensed, “I envy plain women. ‘Pretty’ women who were only just that—‘pretty’—and anything special. They don’t know what they’ve missed, and
I do
.”

At the end of June, Dirk drove out to the Island to spend a weekend at Shalott. He was exhausted from his ordeal at The Falls. Insomnia raged about him in his Luna Park townhouse like flames. The Niagara Gorge was so near, you could hear the roaring of The Falls mingling with the roaring of your own blood and you could taste spray borne by a northerly wind, even in summer. With misgivings, Dirk fled back to Shalott where his mother awaited him, the velvety black spider quivering in her web.

But Claudine greeted him through a crack in her bedroom door.

For it wasn’t one of her “good” days. She wouldn’t allow her son to greet her, still less to kiss her. Though she was very excited about his arrival. Instead, to his dismay, Dirk was allowed to visit with Claudine only by sitting with his back to her as she lay on a chaise lounge in her bedroom, holding wetted cloths against her head to forestall a migraine. In a shaky, reproachful voice she said, “Darling, you can speak with me perfectly well without staring at me. We don’t need always to be
face to face
.”

Obsessed with her face. Dirk wanted to laugh, but was this funny?

Later that evening, when Claudine felt stronger, they would dine
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together in a shadowy, romantically candlelit room downstairs.

Though at this time, too, Dirk was forbidden to
stare
.

Except for Ethel, the housekeeper who’d worked for Mrs. Burnaby for more than thirty years, no one, evidently, was allowed to see her
face to face
any longer.

Dirk hated it, that his attractive, sensible mother should be turning strange. At the age of only sixty-three!

Claudine plied him with questions, as always. The two drank a good deal of tart red wine, which Dirk poured. It had become a joke between them, Claudine’s reiterated surprise when her wine glass was empty.

Dirk alluded to his “ordeal” at The Falls. A seven-day search for a young man who’d jumped over the Horseshoe Falls. As a volunteer, Dirk had been involved . . . to a degree.

Claudine said, with a shiver of disapproval, “Isn’t that just like you, darling, involved with strangers. In such a gruesome adventure.”

A native of the Niagara Falls region, she was indifferent to The Falls and disdainful of tourists “from all over the world” flocking to it; possibly, she’d never even visited The Falls. (“I’ve seen postcards, I’m sure. Very striking, if you like that sort of thing.”) Like every other native Claudine had grown up conscious of suicides but these she associated with failure in love or business, or outright madness; they had nothing to do with her. If she knew of her legendary daredevil father-in-law Reginald Burnaby who’d plunged to his death in the Gorge in 1872, she never alluded to him, even in jest.

Dirk’s father Virgil Burnaby had been raised in unusual circumstances: he and his young mother had been taken into the home of a Niagara Falls banker and philanthropist, an officer of the Christian Charities Alliance named MacKenna.

It was typical of Claudine to show little interest in Dirk’s recent ordeal. Dirk knew that his sisters had sent her clippings from newspapers and magazines, no doubt they’d indicated Dirk’s shadowy figure in some of the photographs, but Claudine must have tossed everything away without reading it. “ ‘The Widow-Bride of The Falls’—I saw the vulgar headline. That was enough.”

Later, when Dirk tried to steer the subject of their conversation 94 W
Joyce Carol Oates

back to The Falls, Claudine said irritably, “One suicide more or less, what does it matter? Please don’t spoil this lovely meal by dragging in ugliness like a dead cat, Dirk,
I beg you
.”

Dirk smiled. Claudine wasn’t a woman to beg.

Still later, when Claudine brought up the familiar, wistful subject of Dirk marrying, coming to live with his wife and family at Shalott, Dirk said casually he’d met a woman the previous week at The Falls.

“A minister’s daughter. From Troy. Not very religious, though. A music instructor, in fact.” But Claudine, sipping scotch and water, didn’t seem to have heard.

Though that night before going to bed Claudine said dryly, “We know no one from Troy, Dirk. We never have.”

When Dirk visited Shalott he always drank more than he intended.

He’d take a bottle of scotch with him to his room, with Claudine’s blessing.
You only live once
was her philosophy. There was a grim twitchy joy in her jaws, uttering this; Dirk had just a glimpse before she shielded her face.

Yes, the face was partially frozen. But with Claudine, you couldn’t have guessed which part.

At Shalott, Dirk was struck by the beauty of the setting. Not the pretentious manor house (which he disliked on principle: he was a man of modern tastes, not pseudo-European but Frank Lloyd Wright–American) but the grounds, the landscaping, the river. The river of his boyhood. The Niagara River that split at l’Isle Grand, as, miles downstream at The Falls, it would split at the much smaller Goat Island. It was said that the Niagara River was dangerously polluted from Buffalo industry, but less polluted in the Chippawa Channel which was on the western side of l’Isle Grand, than on the eastern, the Tonawanda Channel, bordering the industrial suburb of North Tonawanda.
Of pollution, you don’t want to think. If you can’t actually smell it, taste it, see it.
Too many of Dirk Burnaby’s friends were factory owners or investors, many of his clients were of this class, it was an area he’d learned to circumnavigate. Gazing at the river, at sailboats and yachts on the river, you thought of beauty; of the grace
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of man-made objects that had a look, in the waning sunlight of a summer day, of natural objects. You didn’t think of poisoned water any more than you thought of the deadly falls downriver. Here, the Niagara River seemed no different from any other wide, swift-flowing river. On clear days it reflected a cobalt-blue sky; at other times it was of the hue of lead, but a restless, scintillant lead, like a living thing twitching its hide. The white-water rapids didn’t begin for several miles. Where the river broke at Goat Island, the current became treacherous; two miles above The Falls, this area was known as the

“Deadline.”

Once a boat moved into the Deadline, its occupants were doomed.

Once a swimmer allowed himself to be swept into the Deadline, he was doomed.

The Deadline.
Dirk drank scotch, and considered what this might mean.

When Dirk visited Shalott he was forced uneasily to recall how, through most of his twenties, except when he’d been in the U.S.

Army overseas, he’d drifted into a relationship with his mother of which he was ashamed. Not that he’d spent much time with her. He had not. But he’d accepted money from her, secretly. Without his father, who would have disapproved, knowing. Claudine had insisted in her lavish emotional way upon paying off the $12,000 loan Dirk had taken out for law school at Cornell; afterward there’d been living expenses, gambling debts . . . For several years Dirk had bet heavily at Fort Erie, playing the horses. It was an addiction, he’d come to realize. Not needing to win, but needing to play. He was more skilled at poker, luckily. He rarely lost at poker. He’d been a popular young bachelor-socialite, he’d bought a townhouse in the exclusive residential neighborhood of Luna Park, an expensive car and a new sailboat and a forty-foot yacht. He’d joined the private clubs to which his parents and friends belonged and he’d entertained at these clubs, often. The mothers of debutantes sought him avidly. Their fathers invited him to play golf with them, squash, ra-quetball, tennis. Poker. Dirk was an innocently genial poker player, his boyish smile and frank eyes masked his competitiveness, he seemed almost to win by accident. He became known as a young 96 W
Joyce Carol Oates

man of luck, a man with a charmed life. (Few people knew of his losses at Fort Erie. By 1949 he’d limited himself to small, three-digit bets there.) In time Dirk Burnaby made money as a lawyer but his expenses were in excess of his earnings and Claudine, far from discouraging him, seemed to be encouraging him. “You only live once. You didn’t get killed in Italy. You have the looks of a taller, more manly Alan Ladd. Why shouldn’t everyone adore you?” Dirk had accepted his mother’s money in secret, partly because his accepting made her happy; and so few things made Claudine happy any longer. But he felt guilty about it. He’d dreaded his father discovering these transactions, and, in time, his sisters. (Dirk supposed that Clarice and Sylvia knew by now. You couldn’t keep secrets from them, vigilant as vultures.) Though Dirk’s father had been dead for more than a decade, still Dirk had the vague sense that he knew, somehow, and was disgusted with his son. Dirk came to hate it that he and Claudine were co-conspirators. What exactly did it mean
You only live once
.