Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
Now Dirk never took money from Claudine. But he’d never given back the money she’d given him, either.
Claudine would be deeply wounded if he’d tried. Furious as a spurned woman. She’d have raised a hell of a fuss, and exposed them both.
“Maybe I will marry, Mother. Or try to.”
It was a late, lazy Sunday brunch. Scrambled eggs, smoked salmon, Bloody Marys. They were seated on the flagstone terrace above the river and Claudine wore a wide-brimmed straw hat with a fine-meshed lace veil, to hide her ravaged face from her son.
There was a moment’s pause. Claudine leaned forward as if she hadn’t heard. “Dirk, what?”
“Maybe. Maybe I will.”
Thinking
She won’t want you
.
Why would she want you?
He felt something sick, sliding inside him. He took a large swallow of vodka in the guise of hot-spiced tomato juice.
Claudine laughed thinly. “Who would you—marry?”
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“I’m not sure.”
“You’re not serious, then.” Claudine spoke carefully, with an air of regret.
“Probably not.”
“Is it Elsie?”
“No.”
“Gwen?”
“
No
.”
“Oh, that little blond—‘June Allyson’—”
“Harriet Trauber.”
“Is it?” Claudine exuded an air of mild enthusiasm. Harriet Trauber was one of the Buffalo debutantes, of a past season.
“No, Mother. It is not Harriet Trauber.”
Claudine sighed. She drank her Bloody Mary in slow contemplative sips, daintily lifting her veil. “Not one of your Elmwood Casino showgirls, I hope.”
Dirk, offended, didn’t reply.
Claudine sighed in a pretense of relief. “Well, dear. You do have a wild streak in you, and a taste for wild, exotic women.”
Dirk shrugged. He wasn’t feeling wild or exotic at the moment.
Hungover, you might say, from the night before.
Eyes aching from hours of insomnia. Shielded from the watery glare of the river now by dark-tinted lenses.
Claudine asked, with studied casualness, “Are sexy women more
sexual
? In an actual way?”
“What other way than an ‘actual way’ could there be, Mother?”
Dirk laughed uncomfortably.
“The sexual allure could be just superficial. A game, a simulation.
But then actually, there might be—” Claudine paused, as if embarrassed. Dirk could see her fingering, stroking, the scarred tissue behind her right ear. “—nothing.”
On the river, several tall white sailboats were passing, one of them badly buffeted by the wind. Dirk stared, hoping there wouldn’t be a mishap.
Ethel emerged from the kitchen to bring Claudine and Dirk more hot-buttered rolls, iced tea in tall glasses, freshly quartered citrus 98 W
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fruit with dollops of whipped cream. Claudine, though veiled, managed to eat and drink without evident difficulty. There was the ancient solace of food. Mother-and-child, mother-and-food. Mother providing food to her son. Claudine hadn’t much liked being a mother but she’d enjoyed certain of the rituals, and the respect and deference that came with them.
Dirk recalled similar scenes from his boyhood. Long ago. Or not so long ago. Claudine presiding over Sunday brunch, in summer.
But the table would be filled. Dirk’s father, Dirk’s sisters, relatives, guests. An afternoon of sailing in the channel, past Fort Erie and Buffalo, beneath the Peace Bridge, into the open windy space of Lake Erie, vast as an inland sea. There was blond laughing Claudine in a translucent summer shift partly buttoned over a two-piece floral pink bathing suit. Our Betty Grable, Claudine Burnaby was teased. And there was Claudine upstairs, changing her clothes, and Dirk was summoned to her, he might have been thirteen, sixteen, even eighteen and home for a few days from college. Forbidden to look directly at his mother because she was changing her clothes.
Forbidden to see. In her bright telephone voice Claudine would interrogate Dirk—where had he been all morning? with whom?
where was he going next? when could she expect him home that night?—the questions had been rapidfire, and irrelevant. The exchanges had left Dirk edgy and anxious, sexually aroused and disgusted, eager to escape the shaded, perfumy air of his mother’s bedroom.
He’d had girlfriends, and some of these girls were “older”—by a few, practical years. He’d satisfied his sexual desire with them, those nights. At the time he’d been too young to understand. Now, an adult, hot with chagrin and impatience, he supposed he understood.
She wanted him a boy, still. An immature hot-blooded male. He was a seducer, a sexual conqueror. Her rivals were defeated by his lust and his indifference for the objects of his lust. He was a sexually empowered adult man and yet something of a eunuch, a puppet-eunuch of his mother’s.
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“No. I must leave.”
Yet she would plead with him to stay a little longer, to stay the night. As always she pleaded when Dirk was preparing to leave, though beforehand they’d agreed when he would leave. It was a comically familiar exchange that wasn’t any less strained for being familiar, and for Dirk knowing it would come.
He had work to do, Dirk said. He’d missed days in the office, as a volunteer at The Falls.
Claudine crinkled her nose in distaste. She knew there’d been a suicide, and she wasn’t going to inquire. She wasn’t going to inquire if her son had been one who’d discovered the body or touched it.
As she wasn’t going to inquire about—which city?—a small upstate city where the Burnabys knew no one.
Claudine accompanied Dirk to the driveway, to his car. She wore the veiled straw hat, which was quite an attractive hat, with a blue velvet ribbon and artificial flowers, and a floral print blue sundress, that fitted her softening body loosely. Saying goodbye, Dirk felt a stab of pity, and annoyance, that Claudine continued to hide herself behind that ridiculous veil. She was playing the role of the wounded recluse, and maybe she was trapped in that role. The Lady of Shalott waiting to be rescued. Awaiting a lover who would release her from her spell; or, at least, tear off the veil.
Impulsively, Dirk tugged at it. “Mother, come
on
. There’s nothing remotely wrong with you.”
But Claudine cried out in surprise and anger, resisting. She lunged away, and Dirk followed. She clung to the hat with both hands, and Dirk knocked it askew, laughing. Was this a game? All right: a game. Deftly he removed the hat—and the veil—and there was a pale-skinned, dazed-looking woman staring at him with mildly bloodshot eyes, faded blond hair brushed back flat, her unlined but sallow face stiff and af-frighted and the mouth perversely lipstick-red. Furious, Claudine slapped at Dirk, and when he only laughed, she raked his left cheek with her nails. “God damn you, how dare you! Get out of here!
I hate you!
”
Dirk drove away from Shalott laughing, and trembling.
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He was haunted by his mother’s expression of hurt, dismay, outrage, chagrin. And by her face that unnerved him, it was so unexpectedly young.
2
E i g h t e e n d ay s a f t e r the end of the vigil at The Falls, Dirk Burnaby drove across the width of the glacier-sculpted landscape of New York State to Troy.
He had no clear plan. He was excited, exhilarated, and yet morbidly fatalistic.
What will be, will be. You only live once.
As a rising young litigator he was fanatic about legal strategy yet this morning, his life in the balance, he had no more thought ahead than to take with him an address for the Littrell family, provided by the manager of the Rainbow Grand Hotel. There was a telephone number included but he hadn’t called the red-haired woman who stood before him yet would not look at him. Maybe he simply wanted to force her, for a final and first time, to look at him.
It was a journey of more than three hundred miles. He was wearing new clothes from out of his closet, he hadn’t remembered purchasing. A navy blue blazer with brass nautical buttons, a striped sport shirt, white cord trousers and a white yachting cap. A hemp belt with a small rectangular brass buckle. Navy blue canvas shoes.
Dirk Burnaby, a page out of glossy
Esquire
.
Yet, driving along the Mohawk River, he was forced to stop more than once by the roadside to urinate. Hiding out of sight of the highway near the villages of Auburn, Canastota, Fort Hunter. (Nervous!
His bladder felt pinched.) Insomnia flickered and flared like malicious blue flames in even this, his wakeful state.
“God damn. This is enough. No more!”
Outside the village of Amsterdam a field of wind-tossed daisies caught his eye. These were in fact flowers with eyes. He laughed, his life seemed so simple. Knee-high in grasses he waded, picking flowers in ragged clusters and clumps for the red-haired girl, to make her look at him. He tugged at a tough, sinewy wild flower (chicory? with small blue petals?), he tore at thorny stems, vines, that stung his hands.
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Wild rose, white and pale pink blossoms. But his hands were bleeding!
He picked more daisies, and clumps of buttercups. These were small golden flowers he guessed were buttercups. In a ditch he discovered a pale anemone-like flower that reminded him of the red-haird girl’s complextion, naturally he tore these up by the roots. In a trunk of his car was a glass quart jar which he filled with water from the ditch, and in this he crammed as many wild flowers as he could. A large, ungainly bouquet. As many as one hundred flowers. His heart beat rapidly and with an absurd hope.
In Albany, he stopped for a drink. In a wine and liquor store he bought a bottle of champagne. He told the smiling sales clerk, “Wait.
Make that two.”
“Two
Dom Pérignons?
Yes
sir
.”
Shortly afterward he crossed a bridge over the Hudson River and entered the hilly city of Troy where he would be informed that the daughter of Reverend and Mrs. Littrell no longer lived with them in the rectory beside the First Presbyterian Church of Troy. It was Mrs. Littrell who opened the door, breathless and blinking at Dirk Burnaby whom she recognized. Her daughter was now rent-ing an apartment near the Troy Academy of Music, and living alone.
This was a good sign, Dirk thought. Was it?
Dirk found his way across town to the old neo-Gothic Academy of Music, and to Ariah’s red-brick residence a block away. On the gravelled walk to the house he paused, hearing a woman singing. The sound seemed to descend from overhead; he glanced up to see a second-floor window, open. He stood gripping the quart jar of spilling flowers in both hands, listening intently. A pure, clear, sweet if wavering soprano voice, put to the most unlikely of impassioned battle songs:
“Mine eyes have seen the glory
of the coming of the Lord!
He has trampled out the vintage
where the grapes of wrath are stored!
He has loosed the fateful lightning—”
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Yet, how like Ariah! Impulsively Dirk lifted his voice, untrained but deep-chested: “—of his terrible swift sword!”
He had not sung loudly enough for Ariah to have heard him, he was certain. Yet she didn’t continue with the chorus, there was no
Glory, glory Hallelujah,
only an abrupt silence.
Dirk stood on the front stoop, ringing the bell. Pretending not to notice a woman peering at him from the window overhead.
She will answer, or not
.
In this way my life will be decided
.
How calm Dirk Burnaby felt. This was good, this was right. He had put his life in the hands of this woman he scarcely knew.
Yet it was a shock, unexpected, when Ariah actually opened the door.
The two stared at each other, for a long moment unable to speak.
Dirk’s first impression was: Ariah looked nothing like the Widow-Bride now. Her faded-red hair was charmingly disheveled as if windblown, feathery, in curls and tendrils about her slender face. In the unsparing sunshine it was streaked with silver like miniature lightning streaks. The red-haired girl was going gray!
Still, this was no mourner. Her skirt was a light summer fabric, a pattern of bright-green parrots with golden beaks, her T-shirt was white, fresh-laundered, sporty-plain as a teenager’s. She was bare-legged, and barefoot. There was nothing in her smooth freckled face of loss, or regret; the color was up in her cheeks, a blush rising from her throat in the confusion of the moment. Her eyes, no longer bloodshot, with fine, pale-red lashes, were that pure glassy green, like the river, that so haunted Dirk Burnaby. Immediately these eyes widened, recognizing him.
Dirk heard himself stammer, “Mrs. Erskine—?”
“No. No longer.” She spoke calmly, though she seemed frightened.
Her fingers, with short, bitten-looking nails, fretted with a fold of the parrot-skirt. “ ‘Ariah Littrell’ I call myself, again. I wasn’t ever really that other.”
That other
was pronounced with an air of puzzled detachment, like a not entirely comprehensible foreign phrase.
Dirk Burnaby, eloquent and forceful as a litigator, deadly as a pit bull in court, was swallowing hard, mouth dry as sand. Oh, what was
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happening to him! He was conscious of having spilled water on his smart navy blue blazer. “Do you—remember me? Dirk B-Burnaby. I was the one who—I mean, I am—”
Ariah laughed. “Of course I remember you.”
“You—
do
? I—wouldn’t have thought so . . .”
An asinine thing to say, why was he saying it? Yet Ariah Littrell seemed to overlook his clumsiness, and invited him inside.
There was further clumsiness, as in a scene from a Bob Hope movie, as Dirk handed Ariah the dripping, unexpectedly heavy jar of flowers. He mumbled apologetically, “I hope you don’t mind.”
“Oh. Thank you.”
Some of the flowers were spilling from the jar. Daisies with broken stems, a spray of pale pink wild rose studded with tiny thorns. There were exposed roots, clumps of dirt. Weeds mixed with wild flowers.