Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
Seven-year-old Chandler hurried to pick up his thrashing baby brother, and lay him carefully on the bed where he continued to bellow without pause. Ariah backed off, barefoot, into a corner of the room. She could feel milk leaking from both her teats, running in rivulets down her hot skin; she was naked inside her grubby bathrobe. Chandler said earnestly, “We could take him back, Mommy, couldn’t we? Where you got him?”
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N o w t h e r e w e r e two little boys in the Burnaby household, and Ariah felt more lonely than ever: lonely for a daughter.
This yearning began soon after Royall was weaned. Oh, she missed a baby at her breast! Begging
Give me a daughter. A daughter to
redeem me, to make things right.
For it seemed to Ariah that she’d failed, somehow. She was a female (obviously!) and yet somehow not a womanly woman, not a good woman.
So emotional did Ariah become, as months passed, months and years, and she was so in terror of coming to the end of her childbear-ing life, that Ariah nearly confided in her own mother. “Did you have these feelings too, Mother? Did you want a daughter?” But Mrs.
Littrell merely smiled, and shook her head. “Why, I ‘wanted’ whoever God sent me, Ariah. And so did your father.”
A smug fool. Ariah hated her.
(No, Ariah wasn’t “close” with her mother, though the Littrells drove frequently to Niagara Falls to visit at 7 Luna Park, and, at least once a year, the Burnabys drove to Troy for one or another “festive”
occasion. Ariah gritted her teeth and played her role as a Daughter who’d become a Mother, to her parents’ approval. She supposed that Mrs. Littrell believed that she and Ariah were “close” but it was a misunderstanding on the older woman’s part. Ariah had talked it over with Dirk rationally: “Chandler and Royall need grandparents, and these are devoted grandparents. So I think we should continue to see them, for the boys’ sake.” Dirk appeared shocked by this casual argument. “But I thought we all liked one another, Ariah? I thought we’d agreed we were all friends?” Ariah shook her head, bemused by her affable husband. “Of course we ‘agreed,’ darling. I always agree. But it isn’t so. We do what we do for the sake of the children.”
(At least there was no possibility of a misunderstanding on Claudine Burnaby’s part. There was a woman who had cut herself off completely from Ariah. What a relief !)
Two little boys in the Burnaby household. One, the younger, so
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clearly took after his daddy; the other, the older, possibly resembled his mother. In temperament, at least.
Chandler did very well in school. His grades were high, but he never seemed satisfied. Even in grade school he was always turning in extra-credit assignments to his teachers, usually on scientific subjects like the Ice Age, woolly mamoths and saber-toothed tigers, Neanderthal Man, Haley’s Comet, the Solar System. (For a replica of the Solar System, Chandler designed an ingenious wire-collage contraption in which the sun was a grapefruit, and the planets smaller fruits culmi-nating in a grape, which was Pluto. For a replica of the orbit of Haley’s Comet, Chandler designed a yet more ingenious mobile contraption in which the comet was a spark plug and the planet Earth a painted rubber ball. For this, Chandler won a prize at the Niagara County Science Fair, competing with children ten years and younger.) Dirk was proud of Chandler, and Ariah supposed she was, too. But the child annoyed her so! He had not a shred of musical talent, though he was always at the piano, in emulation of Ariah’s younger pupils. Ariah pressed her hands over her ears begging him to cease: “Honey, my pupils don’t play any better than you, but at least, listening to them, Mommy gets paid.” Chandler’s shirts were often misbuttoned, even when Ariah could swear she’d buttoned them herself, with care. He came back from school looking like a street urchin, with shabby clothes, old dried food stains on his trousers, when Ariah had sent him off in freshly laundered, pressed trousers. His shoes were always muddy, it seemed, even in fair weather. His shoelaces were often untied, he tripped on his own disproportionately long feet, fell down stairs and opened a terrible cut on his chin, which turned by degrees into a white, fossil-like scar. In this climate of perpetual shifting skies, sudden rains, sleet, hailstones, where healthy natives seem to have developed antibodies for colds and flu, poor Chandler was always coming down with respiratory ailments and stomach flu. He ran sudden fevers out of sheer perversity, knowing how his mother was terrified of meningitis and polio. Yet, with a temperature of 102.2°F, Chandler insisted upon trekking eight blocks to school in the rain because he feared “falling behind”; he put up such a protest, Ariah had to give in. “But if you come down with meningitis 174 W
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or polio, Chandler Burnaby, Esquire, you can take yourself to the emergency room, and you can dig your own little grave, and on your tombstone you can carve: SMART ALECK. I wash my hands of you.”
Dirk chided Ariah for fussing over the boy too much, making him self-conscious about his health, which was fine for him to say, he and Royall were brimming with health. Ariah protested, “Who else is going to fuss over that child except his mother? Who else gives the slightest damn whether that child lives or dies except his mother?
Because his mother is the one who will be blamed if he doesn’t.
Doesn’t live.” Dirk laughed at her, she was funny as Lucille Ball on TV, another redhead but not so scrappy and sharp-witted as Ariah.
“Oh, Ariah, what is going to happen to Chandler? He’s a perfectly healthy good-natured little boy. A little scrawny in the chest, maybe.” Ariah flared up. “Are you blaming me that your son is underweight? Malnourished? He doesn’t eat, his nose is always in a book.
Maybe he has a tapeworm.”
Worse, Chandler was an absentminded child. While Royall fixed you intensely in his gaze, smiled and bobbed his head and began to
“talk” at twenty months, and by three had learned to shake his parents’ visitors’ hands and ask how they were, Chandler often drifted about in a haze of interior thinking; you could all but hear the ma-chinery of his brain whirr. He wandered into the city or to the Niagara Gorge instead of coming home directly from school, and was returned home in an NFPD cruiser, or by strangers with out-of-state license plates. Young children unaccompanied by adults were not allowed along the river pathways of the Gorge, especially they were forbidden to cross onto Goat Island, but of course Chandler Burnaby turned up at exactly these places; afterward, he would say he was
“just exploring. Seeing what’s there.” Beginning in fourth grade he turned up downtown at the Niagara Falls Public Library where librarians would discover him not in the children’s room where he belonged but in the adult stacks, “skulking” amid books “not meant for a child’s eyes.” Naturally, his embarrassed mother would be summoned to fetch him home. Ariah was furious with the child but supposed she saw the humor of the situation. “If you’re going to run away from home, mister, you’ll have to go a lot farther than down-The Falls X 175
town.” Chandler apologized but so softly and vaguely, Ariah knew he was scarcely listening to his own words.
She was most exasperated when she caught him reading after he was supposed to be asleep. Chandler would make a little tent of his bedclothes, and hunch inside it with a flashlight, reading and surely damaging his eyes. “If you need glasses someday, don’t come belly-aching to me. And if you go blind, mister, you can get a tin cup and go begging out on the street. But don’t come begging to
me
.”
Chandler cringed wide-eyed at her fury. But at once Ariah smiled, and grabbed him to her bosom. “Hey, kid: c’mon. Mommy loves you.”
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A daughter. Amid these rapacious males. And our little family will be complete.
Ariah waited.
5
“ R i d i c u l o u s ! Worse than fairy tales.”
From time to time, pushing the baby’s stroller in Luna Park, pausing to talk beneath the tall splendid plane trees with other mothers or nursemaids, in her bright chattery Lucille Ball manner, that masked Ariah Burnaby’s secret disdain not only for the company she kept at such times (while her gregarious attorney-husband Dirk Burnaby kept a very different company) but for her phony, altered personality, Ariah heard tales of the Widow-Bride of The Falls. But no one recalled the name of the beautiful young red-haired bride who had searched at the Niagara Gorge for seven days and seven nights for her lost, doomed bridegroom who had plunged over the Horseshoe Falls to his death. No one could say with certainty if the tragedy had occurred a few years ago, twenty-five years ago, one hundred years ago.
There was a young Hungarian nursemaid who assured Ariah that the ghost of the Widow-Bride still kept her vigil. “On misty nights.
And only in June. They say, if you see her, don’t speak to her because she will run away. But if you are quiet, she might come to
you
.”
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Ariah laughed. A sliver of ice seemed to enter her heart, this was so absurd.
Ariah laughed, hiding her face. In his handsome baby buggy, little Royall stirred and kicked.
Politely, Ariah asked the Hungarian girl if she’d ever seen the Widow-Bride, herself. The girl shook her head of thick plaited braids vigorously. “I am Catholic, and we are not told to believe in ghosts. It is a sin to believe in ghosts. If I saw a ghost, I would shut my eyes. If I opened them and the ghost was still there, I would run away, fast.”
The girl grinned and shivered, this was all so real to her.
Ariah said, gently skeptical, as if she were speaking to a very young child, “But why, Lena? Why run away? The poor Widow-Bride is dead, isn’t she?”
The girl said earnestly, “The ghost is dead, yes, but she is not where she belongs. So she is a damned soul. That is what a ghost is. So I would run away from her, Mrs. Burnaby, oh yes!”
Ariah had to admit, she’d run away, too. If she had the option.
Chandler came home from Luna Park Elementary with tales that made Ariah’s skin creep.
A long time ago, the Onigara Indians made sacrifices in the Niagara River above the Gorge. Each spring a twelve-year-old girl was brought to the rapids above Goat Island, locally known as the Deadline, and placed in a canoe in her bridal vestments, and a priest of the tribe blessed her, and released her, and the canoe was propelled to the Horseshoe Falls, and over; the girl was then the bride of the Thunder God who lived in The Falls.
Chandler said, excitedly, “That’s why there are ghosts in The Falls. In the mist you can see them, sometimes. That’s why people want to throw themselves into The Falls, it’s the Thunder God. He’s hungry.”
Ariah shuddered. Of course it was true. Or had been true, at one time.
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But she turned a derisive face on her impressionable young son.
You’d have thought she was furious with
him
. “Bullshit. It’s not so romantic and ‘mythic’ if you know that these so-called sacrifices were probably just kids nobody wanted—orphans, or weird crippled kids.
Expendable females.” Ariah spoke with passion. Chandler gaped at her. An adult’s intelligence turned ferociously upon a nine-year-old, a howitzer blasting a hummingbird to bits. Yet there are hummingbirds who are pests, and deserve to be blasted to bits. “ ‘Ritual sacrifice’—‘ritual murder’—‘becoming the bride of the Thunder God’—these are fancy ways of talking about just plain
murder
. Ignorant, primitive, superstitious. Like marrying off a twelve-year-old-virgin to an actual man, except worse. The God-damned Indian
‘braves’ should have been tossed into the Niagara River, too. See how brave they’d be, the bastards. They could have a big powwow with their buddy the Thunder God down in the Whirlpool.” Ariah made a spitting gesture, she was so riled-up and disgusted.
It was uncanny: Chandler’s eyes had no color at all. Sometimes they were the glinting no-color of fish scales, sometimes a swampy muddy brown, or brown-green. When Ariah looked into his face, at times like these, the very irises of Chandler’s eyes seemed to shrink.
(Oh, she knew. He was becoming near-sighted. To spite her.) “Honey, see? Mommy is just trying to train you. Not to believe the bullshit you’ll be hearing through your life.”
Chandler nodded, as a kicked dog might nod. At least the kid was learning. He was learning not to just get straight A’s in grade school but to be thoughtful, skeptical. He was learning to take after his mother who was damned.
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T h e s e w e r e h a p p y t i m e s. Ariah knew.
Warm spring days she took Royall outdoors. In Luna Park, in Prospect Park, and along the misty Niagara Gorge which the toddler seemed to find endlessly thrilling. Already by the age of ten months Royall could “walk” when Ariah held his hand tightly. Proudly they circled the Victorian gazebo at the center of Luna Park, the flaxen-178 W
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haired chubby little boy staggering and lunging and shrieking with excitement beside his mother who never ceased to murmur words of encouragement to him. “Yes, honey. Like that. Very good. Oops! Now up on your feet again, Royall. What a big, good boy Royall is, how well he can walk.” Royall’s eyes lit up, no exaggeration, when one or another observer applauded his efforts, clapping and praising him.
Soon, the other mothers and nursemaids of Luna Park knew Royall by name.
Royall, the beautiful, blessed Burnaby boy.
Ariah’s heart swelled with love of the child. Now he’d outgrown his demanding infancy, now he was developing a distinctive personality, she felt a tenderness for him she’d never quite felt for his older brother. Where Chandler had seemed to cringe at the world as if overwhelmed by its profusion, Royall gazed and blinked and laughed and invited more.
Ariah was in awe of him. This child seemed to know the world was friendly to him. Adored him. Always going to offer him more.
Leaving the house with Royall on their morning expedition, Ariah sometimes heard Chandler call after them, “Mommy? Can I come, too?” She’d forgotten it was summer, and Chandler didn’t have school. Or she’d forgotten that Chandler was in the house. She felt a pang of guilt and said at once, “Of course, honey. We didn’t think you would be interested. You can push the stroller.” For as long as Royall’s strength held, he walked beside Ariah; when he tired, Ariah strapped him into the stroller and pushed. Unless she’d scheduled a piano lesson, she was in no hurry to return to 7 Luna Place. If the telephone or the doorbell rang in her absence, what did it matter?