Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
“He’s shy, Mrs. Burnaby. He’s—”
The older woman snorted in derision, as if “shy” was a code she knew how to decipher.
“Is he shy around his other grandmother? The one from Troy?”
“He’s very young, Mrs. Burnaby. He won’t be three until next spring.”
“Three.” Mrs. Burnaby sighed. “He will live into the twenty-first century. It’s strange that anyone can be so young, isn’t it, and be human? But he was premature, they say.”
Ariah let this pass. It made her uneasy that Claudine Burnaby should speak so familiarly of Chandler, as if this were her privilege.
Ariah repeated her offer of tea, or coffee, and this time Mrs.
Burnaby said, “A scotch and soda. Thank you.” Ariah escaped into the kitchen to prepare this drink for her mother-in-law and, for Chandler and herself, a root beer. What a relief to be alone! She could 158 W
Joyce Carol Oates
hear Mrs. Burnaby’s raised, ebullient voice encouraging Chandler to open his presents, but there was no audible response from Chandler.
Why are you here. What do you want from us. Go away, back to your spider’s web.
Still, Ariah thought, gamely, the woman was Chandler’s grandmother, and had some rights, perhaps. And Chandler should have the opportunity of acquiring a wealthy older relative. Yes? It was a practical matter. Ariah should set her prejudices aside.
But my prejudices are me! I love my prejudices.
How powerful, the smell of Dirk’s expensive scotch. Ariah considered making a scotch and soda for herself. Or having a quick swallow of undiluted scotch here in the kitchen. But, in this nerved-up state of hers something unfortunate might happen. That flamey sensation of whisky going down, so wonderful, and maybe too wonderful, making Ariah want to cuddle with Dirk, and make love. Or she’d want to cry, because she was lonely. She’d want to seek out a Roman Catholic priest (she’d never in her lifetime so much as spoken to a Roman Catholic priest) and confess her sins.
I am damned, can you save me. I
drove my first husband to kill himself. And I rejoiced, that he was dead!
She wanted to call Dirk at his law office and tell his velvety-voiced secretary (who was in love with Dirk Burnaby, Ariah knew) it was an emergency, and when he came on the line she would scream at him.
Come home! This horrible woman is your mother, not mine. Help me!
She had prepared Claudine Burnaby’s drink with trembling fingers and it smelled so good, Ariah took a sip, but only a small sip, from the bottle before screwing the top back on.
That sweet flamey sensation in her throat. And beyond.
Since the failed visit at Shalott in the summer of 1950, more than three years ago, there had been little contact between Claudine Burnaby and the young couple. When Chandler was born, Ariah had sent a birth announcement to Mrs. Burnaby, who responded by sending a number of lavish gifts to her grandson, including an expensive baby stroller modeled after a Victorian model, oversized, clumsy, ornate and impractical, which Dirk had hauled downstairs into the basement at once. And she’d sent gifts for Chandler at Christmas and Easter. Invariably these were store-wrapped packages addressed to
The Falls
X 159
CHANDLER BURNABY, ESQ. There were no notes inside, no acknowledgment of Chandler’s parents. “Maybe she thinks Chandler lives alone in his dad’s old bachelor quarters,” Ariah laughed. Only joking (of course) and yet Dirk, thin-skinned where his mother was concerned, took offense. “My mother isn’t a well person. I’ve tried to accept that, and you should, too. She doesn’t mean to be rude. She lives in her own airless universe, like a tortoise in its shell.” But a tortoise doesn’t live in an airless universe, Ariah objected, a tortoise lives with other tortoises, surely they communicate. Tortoises don’t control ridiculous amounts of money they haven’t earned, but only just managed to inherit. Ariah wasn’t about to express this opinion to her fretful husband, however.
Ariah hated it that Dirk’s sisters Clarice and Sylvia were forever reporting back to Dirk news of their mother they knew would upset him. Claudine had become a “hopeless hypochondriac.” She was “pathetic, piteous.” Then again, she seemed to be, at times, genuinely ill, with migraines, respiratory infections, gallstones. (Surely no one can imagine gallstones?) Claudine hoped to “manipulate” all of the Burnabys into bending to her will. There was “nothing in the slightest” wrong with her except she was “cruel and vindictive, like a Roman empress.” It was the sisters’ (and their husbands’) belief that Claudine Burnaby was playing a game with them, and their attorneys: egging them to file a motion in district court to wrest from her power of attorney, at which point she would haul them all into court and cause a scandal. In addition to Dirk and his sisters there were a number of other Burnabys and associates involved in the family’s businesses, about which Ariah knew little, and wanted to know less.
Real estate, investments in local factories, a property-management company in Niagara Falls. Patents? Dirk said peevishly, “We don’t require a penny more than I make as an attorney. And I don’t want to discuss it.” Ariah, who hadn’t the slightest interest in discussing it, stood pertly on her tiptoes to kiss her husband’s incensed, heated face, and wrapped her arms as far around him as she could.
Oh, she loved him! Sure did.
Thinking now, maybe she could be polite, if not charming, to Claudine Burnaby; maybe even (summoning up her Christian-love 160 W
Joyce Carol Oates
training, Sunday school classes taught indefatigably by her own mother) she could become fond of the woman. “I’ll try!” One more small—very small—sip of Dirk’s smooth-tasting scotch, and Ariah returned to the living room where Mrs. Burnaby had “helped” her grandson open two of his presents, which were in fact clothing, for a child younger than Chandler’s age. Chandler was making only a feeble effort to pretend to be interested in these gifts, and showed little curiosity about the others. Ariah hoped to make amends. Mrs. Burnaby accepted her scotch and soda without comment, and drank thirstily, as if this were her reward, while Ariah knelt beside Chandler to share her root beer with him. But something in the air had altered, while Ariah was out of the room.
Mrs. Burnaby said in an ironic voice, “Bringing gifts, one is bringing oneself. The ‘heart-on-the-sleeve’ sort of thing. But the ‘heart-on-the-sleeve’ is not always wanted.”
Ariah opened her mouth to protest. But the scotch she’d swallowed so quickly in the kitchen made her want to laugh instead.
Mrs. Burnaby continued: “I did play piano once, but not Chopin, Mozart, Beethoven. I lacked the technique. I was groomed as a debutante—I was a ‘great beauty’—to use an expression of that era. You, Ariah, have been spared that, at least.”
Ariah did laugh, this insult was so clumsy. Or—wasn’t it an insult at all, but a backhanded compliment? Mrs. Burnaby was twirling her forefinger in her drink. “My daughters and their husbands are hoping to inherit Shalott, and the land that goes with it, but Shalott is destined for Dirk. For a son. Dirk is the only one of my children expansive enough to fit that space. Do you see? Though he has broken my heart. Though he is not reliable as a son, nor probably as a husband.
As you’ll discover, my dear.”
Stung, Ariah said quietly, “I don’t think I want to discuss my husband with you, Mrs. Burnaby. Especially in the presence of his son!
You can understand that, I hope?”
Mrs. Burnaby ignored this remark, taking another large swallow of her drink. “My daughters say that you’re quite the amateur pianist.
They’ve
heard you, evidently. I wonder if you’ll play for me?”
“Well. Sometime, maybe. At the moment—”
The Falls
X 161
“And you ‘give lessons’ in this house, as you’d ‘given lessons’ back in Troy? Is there some reason for this, dear?”
“For ‘giving lessons’? I like to teach young students. And I—I need something to do. Beyond being just a wife and a mother.”
“ ‘Just a wife and a mother’! What does Dirk say to that?”
“Why don’t you ask him, Mrs. Burnaby? I’m sure he’ll tell you.”
“You taught music before you were married, they say. Before the first of your marriages. I realize you’ve been married more than once, Ariah. A widow at a young age. It was more common during the war.
On my son’s income, it seems just slightly peculiar that his wife would be ‘giving’ piano lessons, but perhaps I don’t know what Dirk’s income is any longer. He has ceased to inform me. He has his reasons, but no one knows what they are. The careless boy still owes me $12,000 but since I’m not charging him interest there’s no urgency on the borrower’s part to repay any loan. Oh, you look surprised, Ariah? Yes but it’s pointless to ask Dirk about these matters because he simply won’t tell. He has never confided in any woman. He’s morbidly secretive. Playing one woman against another. Some of them would come to me, the respectable ones I mean. Broken-hearted, and of course furious though they didn’t know it at the time. I was not directly involved—nor was Dirk’s father, I want you to know—but there were arrangements made, ‘medical’ arrangements of a kind, in order that Dirk might be extricated from the potentially embarrass-ing situations he found himself in. And found others in. Do you follow my words, Ariah? Except for your freckles, which I find very attractive, you look disconcertingly blank.”
At this moment Chandler, unless it was Ariah herself, spilled root beer onto the rug, which required frantic dabbing-at with a napkin.
Mrs. Burnaby continued, “I’m wondering if Dirk still visits Fort Erie? Has he taken you to the track, dear?”
“The—track?” Ariah knew of course that there was a horse-racing track at Fort Erie, a locally famous track; but Mrs. Burnaby’s question stunned her.
“I see he has not? Well.”
By this time pulses were beating painfully in Ariah’s head. The scotch, so smooth going down, was making her stomach queasy. She 162 W
Joyce Carol Oates
felt as if her elegantly dressed mother-in-law in the black velvet hat and opaque sunglasses had leaned over languidly to poke her in the breastbone. And, to her horror, she saw that Chandler was absorbing it all. Usually bored by adult conversation, the child was listening now, peering open-mouthed at his grandmother. “Honey, why don’t you go into the other room, for just a minute? Mommy will be right there—”
“No, no. That isn’t necessary, my dear. I’ll be leaving now.”
Ariah stumbled after Claudine Burnaby, in the woman’s perfumy wake. Lacking the presence of mind to retrieve Mrs. Burnaby’s cape, so Mrs. Burnaby retrieved it herself from the front closet. “Please give my love to Dirk. I don’t know when I will be leaving the Island again. There seems so little reason, and so much effort. And my health is frankly poor.” At the door, Mrs. Burnaby extended her gloved hand another time, not to take Ariah’s hand but simply to nudge it, in farewell. In a lowered voice she said, “My dear, don’t be anxious. Your secret will die with me.”
“My s-secret? What secret?”
“Why, that child isn’t Dirk’s son. You know it, and I know it. He isn’t my grandson. But, as I say, don’t be anxious. I’m not a vindictive woman.”
Ariah stared speechless as her mother-in-law, in impractically high-heeled pumps, made her way down the front walk, joined by the chauffeur who hurried to assist her into the rear of the limousine.
When she returned to the living room there was Chandler absorbed again with his Tinkertoys. Beside him the pile of gift-wrapped presents lay ignored.
Ariah took the bottle of scotch upstairs with her, where Dirk would find her later that evening in their bedroom, in their yet-un-made bed, when he returned from work.
1
I
t was only logical, wasn’t it?
Knowing that your first-born might be snatched from you at any time by an Act of God, you must have a second child. And if you fail to love your first-born as much as a mother should love, you certainly should have a second child, to make things right.
“Though some things probably can’t ever be made right.”
By the same logic, if your first two babies are boys, you are compelled to try again in the hope of having a daughter.
A daughter.
“My life would be complete, then. God, I would ask You for nothing more, I promise.”
It was only logical. Knowing that your husband might one day leave you, or be snatched from you, you must have several children at least.
164 W
Joyce Carol Oates
It was only logical. Ariah Burnaby was a logical woman. She would become, through the years, a woman who expected the worst, to relieve herself of the anxiety of hope. She would become a woman of calm, fatalistic principles, anticipating her life with the equanimity of a weather forecaster. She would risk (she supposed she knew this, for at her most neurotic she remained an intelligent woman) driving her husband from her by her expectation that he would one day “vanish”
from her life.
Even as she clutched him tight in her arms. Yet never tight enough.
It was only logical wasn’t it? Yet how many times during the next decade would the strangled prayer leap from her who did not believe in prayer.
“God, You would not be so cruel—would You? Please let me be pregnant this time. Oh, please!”
It was a logical wish. Yet it would require years.
“You do love me, Dirk? Don’t you?”
In her wistful voice she inquired. In the night, in the stupor of half-sleep when we utter things we would not utter by day.
He was too mired in sleep to reply. Except with his body curving about her, heavy, warm, consoling. She lay in the crook of his arm plotting. Another baby!
They never loved each other less (at least, Ariah believed that this was so) but they made love less frequently with the passage of time.
And less passionately. They surprised each other less often in their lovemaking. There must have been a day, an hour, when they made love during the daytime for the final time; when they made love impulsively somewhere other than their big, comfortable bed for the final time; when Ariah pressed her anguished mouth against Dirk’s sweaty chest to keep from crying out too loudly.