Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
You can wait for weeks, months. I’d guess you can wait for years if you lived that long. At the Ninety-ninth Street School, Mr. Burnaby, the kids can taste the drinking water isn’t right. They play outside, on the playground, and their eyes burn, and their skin. There’s a field beyond the school, and a ditch, and the boys play there, and get burnt. Billy brought these ‘hot rocks’ home—some kind of phospho-rous rock, the size of a baseball, you throw it at the ground and it pops like a firecracker and smolders, what the hell kind of thing is that for kids to be playing with? I talked with the principal. He isn’t friendly, sympathetic, at all. You’d think he would care about the students in his school, for God’s sake, but no, he’s practically rude to me, like I’m a crazy, pushy mother he hasn’t got time for. He says Billy should stay on school property and not play in the ditch or the field but the fact is, the children are playing in the playground, this black
The Falls
X 201
sludge bubbles up through the cracks. I have photographs of all these things, Mr. Burnaby. I have photographs of Sophia, I want you to see.
Billy? Billy, come here.”
A sniffy tow-headed boy had been hanging in the doorway of the living room, and now came reluctantly forward to meet Mr.
Burnaby—“He’s a lawyer, Billy. A famous lawyer.”
Dirk winced. Famous!
“I want Billy transferred to another school but they refuse to transfer him. Because to give in, to one parent, they’d have to admit there was something to give in to, and they won’t do that. Because then everybody would want their children transferred to a safer school. Because then maybe they’d be ‘liable’—the school administration, the Board of Education, the mayor? They all protect one another, you can see they’re stalling and lying, like at the Health Department, but what can you do, we live here, we just about make our mortgage payments and the car payments and if we have extra medical costs like taking Alice to St. Anne’s instead of where they want to send us for tests, at the county medical clinic, all that adds up, we just can’t afford it on Sam’s salary and if something happens to him, there’s the medical insurance at Parish, and the pension, and Sam is worried they could ‘retaliate’ against him, if we cause trouble—is that possible, Mr. Burnaby? Even with the union—
the AFL?”
Dirk frowned thoughtfully. But he knew: yes it was possible.
Parish Plastics was one of the tough area employers, he knew the old man Hiram Parish, a friend of Virgil Burnaby as Mrs. Parish had been a friendly social acquaintance of Claudine, he knew the reputations of Parish, Swann, Dow, OxyChem, and others. Even with the booming local economy, the labor unions hadn’t gotten the contracts they’d wanted from these companies. Dirk Burnaby wasn’t involved in labor negotiations but he had lawyer friends who were: on retainer for the companies. If he’d taken up labor law, which had never appealed to him, possibly he’d be working for Parish, Inc. He said, “It’s possible, Mrs. Olshaker. I’d have to examine your husband’s contract, to have an idea.”
Was this the first, fatal step, Dirk would wonder. The involuntary 202 W
Joyce Carol Oates
gesture. The introduction of
I,
Dirk Burnaby, into the lives of strangers.
“Mr. Burnaby! Thank you.”
Nina Olshaker gazed at him with those darkly shining mineral-eyes, smiling as if Dirk Burnaby’s words meant more than, in fact, they meant.
The remainder of the visit would pass for Dirk in swift disjointed segments like an interrupted dream. Nina spoke to him in an animated, aggressive way, as if something had been decided between them.
She told him of the “tragic mistake” of the house: they’d signed on for a thirty-year mortgage. The house they’d loved at first, in such a “nice”—“warm”—“friendly”—neighborhood of couples like themselves, lots of children, Billy could walk two blocks to school, a big enough yard in back for Sam to plant a vegetable garden. “He gets so much happiness out of that, you should see him. It must be a gene or something? I’m missing it. I think, if I plant some seeds, probably they won’t come up. If they do, some damned bugs will get them.”
Half-consciously Nina drew her hand across her abdomen. She was thinking of having miscarried, maybe. Or she was thinking of the little girl who’d died.
Dirk listened. He asked few questions, that evening. He was fascinated by Nina Olshaker who was like no other woman he’d encountered close up. Possibly she had some Tuscarora blood, her hair was so very black and without lustre. Her eyes were ringed in fatigue and worry yet shone with a dark scintillant knowledge that drew him as an accomplice. She had the nerved-up scrappy manner of a tomboy.
Her dark skin was slightly coarse, yet attractive. Oh, Dirk Burnaby found Nina Olshaker attractive. He had to admit. She was special, she thought of herself as special. She had a mission, even in defeat she would have a mission. Those inexpensive summer clothes, barefoot amid the cozy clutter of her household and not much embarrassed by her (not very clean) feet as she wasn’t much embarrassed by the household clutter, or her children’s runny noses, or the prevailing
The Falls
X 203
odors of something dank and rotted in the air: she told Dirk Burnaby her story without the slightest consciousness that she was of a type and a class ordinarily invisible to him.
Not that Dirk Burnaby wasn’t a believer in democracy. All men, and some women, created equal. In the eyes of God. (If not the economy.) Under the U.S. Constitution guaranteed the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If not actual happiness. (Whatever happiness is. A snug house built of compacted cash made to resemble bricks.)
As Claudine Burnaby would say with snide humor
Such people don’t
exist. And if they do, what have they to do with us?
Nina was saying how the house had turned out to be a trap and it had made Sophia sick and it was making them all sick and now some of the neighbors were turning against Nina saying she’d caused trouble at the school scaring people and promoting “hysteria” and “lowering property values”—actually accusing her and Sam of being Communists. “Can you believe it, Mr. Burnaby? Sam and me? Isn’t that ridiculous? We’re Catholics.”
Dirk said, “Yes. That’s ridiculous.”
“I mean, it is ridiculous! It’s bullshit. All we want is honest answers to our questions, not people lying to us, how’s that make us Communists for God’s sake?”
Dirk was thinking uneasily of the epithets tossed at lawyers who’d defended men and women blacklisted or “under suspicion of subversion” in the early 1950’s. Those few faculty members at the University of Buffalo who’d refused to sign loyalty oaths. A Protestant minister, a
Gazette
columnist, local union officials. There weren’t many. The lawyers who’d defended them were scorned as
Commie-lawyers, Red-lawyers. Jew-lawyers.
Dirk said heartily, “Well. It’s 1961 now, Nina. We’re much more advanced.”
Next, Nina Olshaker showed Dirk a portfolio of snapshots. Wiping at her eyes, trembling. She’d herded Billy and Alice into another room to eat a heated-up casserole and watch TV, she didn’t want them seeing these. Dirk steeled himself to see a succession of photos of the beautiful lost Sophia. An infant, a toddler, a leggy little girl 204 W
Joyce Carol Oates
held proudly aloft in her daddy’s sinewy tanned arms. (Sam, a wiry young man, smiling in sunshine; a baseball cap on his head, T-shirt and shorts. Dirk felt a moment’s stab of sexual jealousy.) Next, the child was in a hospital bed, her skin whitely translucent and her pale blue eyes clouded. Next, the child was dead, a waxen-skinned doll in a white satin-lined casket. Dirk half-shut his eyes no longer listening to Nina Olshaker’s quavering voice.
Thinking of his daughter, Juliet. Barely six weeks old. He swallowed hard, he felt a pang of terror.
Already Dirk had forgotten, he hadn’t much wanted another child. He’d been appalled by his wife’s raw need. He’d been a little frightened of her.
Make love to me! For God’s sake, do it. Do it!
Not Ariah but the fierce ravenous female. Not the Ariah he’d married but another in her place.
Yet: of that union, Juliet was born.
“I have a daughter, too.”
“Oh. What’s her name?”
“Juliet.”
“Such a pretty name! H-How old is she?”
“Just born.”
Strange to have said! It wasn’t true, exactly. The frailty of infant life struck him in that instant. How precarious the hold on life.
Sucking at a mother’s breasts or at a bottle, utterly dependent upon others, lacking strength, mobility, language. For an instant he felt the absurd terror that, in his absence, as punishment for Dirk Burnaby not coming directly home, something would happen to his daughter.
Nina was showing him photographs she’d taken at the Ninety-ninth Street School. The playground where black “sludge” bubbled through cracks in asphalt. The “smelly sludge” ditch. The open field of tall weedy grasses and thistles, laced with brackish water. Billy Olshaker’s puffy reddened eyes, his “burnt” hands and the “burnt”
hands of other children. “The principal told us mothers, ‘Make sure your children wash their hands. There won’t be any problem then,’ ”
Nina said angrily. She spread many more snapshots, covering a tabletop, taken in the neighborhood and in the Olshakers’ basement and
The Falls
X 205
back yard. Dirk considered these, dismayed. There had been lawsuits in recent years against certain of the chemical companies, Dow, Swann, Hooker, OxyChem, personal-injury suits initiated by workers that were virutally always rejected by district judges or settled out of court for undisclosed sums, none of them very high. It was understood that you took a risk working in certain factories, and for this risk you were paid.
Of course, you weren’t paid enough. Never enough. But that was another issue.
The pollution of a neighborhood, of earth, soil, water, and the subsequent effect upon individuals, was something very different, and new. Dirk Burnaby had never given it much thought. His practice of law had nothing to do with such amorphous cases, he was a litigator trained to argue small but devastating points based upon the New York State statutory law. His clients were usually well-to-do businessmen wishing to protect or extend their status. Occasionally Dirk represented a client declaring bankruptcy, and occasionally he did pro bono, charity work. But that wasn’t his métier. He was a master chess player on a game board he knew intimately as, on that game board, he, Dirk Burnaby, was known, respected and feared.
He felt a stab of excitement, and of dread. A new game! This, too, Dirk Burnaby would master.
“In my own hometown.”
Dirk must have spoken aloud, for Nina Olshaker said grimly, “Yes!
In your hometown.”
Some of the snapshots had fallen onto the floor, and Dirk picked them up. His face pounded with blood. Nina was saying, “This should be evidence, Mr. Burnaby, shouldn’t it? In a court of law, if jurors saw it, it should matter. Children should matter. People’s lives should matter.” Dirk was thinking no, scientific evidence should matter, doctors’ testimonies should matter, or could be made to matter. A calm though tearful mother on the witness stand, describing such things, describing her child’s death, her own and her children’s illnesses, could be made to matter.
“Mr. Burnaby! C’mere. Before you leave.” Nina seized Dirk’s arm and led him into the kitchen, ran water from both faucets into a glass, 206 W
Joyce Carol Oates
asked him to smell, to taste. Dirk smelled but declined to taste, though (he was thinking) the water didn’t smell very different from the water he and his family drank in Luna Park. Nina laughed and poured the water into the sink. “Well, why should you? Nobody blames
you
.” Next, Nina hauled him into the basement, Christ what a smell here, and the cheaply carpentered wooden steps creaking beneath their weight. In the harsh overhead light the basement was an ugly cave smelling of backed-up drains and something tarry, nauseating. On the floor were dark web-patterns, glistening. There were streams of rain water, small puddles. The barely six-foot concrete walls oozed a shitty sort of muck. A sump pump worked noisily, like a heart about to burst. “When it rains hard like it is now, the basement floods. Sam is the one to check the sump pump but by the time he comes home it might be broken. Damn!” Nina was panting, incensed.
She gripped Dirk’s arm firmly as if to prevent him from running away upstairs. “See, Mr. Burnaby? I’m not imagining this. People in the neighborhood say it’s ‘just what happens’ in Niagara Falls when it rains, even Sam tries to say so, he was born here he says, it’s always like this he says, nobody wants to admit this is something else, afraid of ‘lowering property values’—bullshit! This is more than rain water and dirt, it’s more than sewage backing up, it should be tested, all the land and water out here in Colvin Heights should be tested, I keep telling people. I never used to be a sickly person. I’m not a sickly person but I get migraines from living here, I’m getting asthma like poor Billy, and Sam, I don’t talk about myself much because who gives a damn, it isn’t about me it’s about children we need to care about, don’t we? Sam gets pissed with me, says I’m imagining a lot of this but I didn’t imagine having a miscarriage, did I? I didn’t imagine my daughter dying of leukemia, did I?
Did I?
”
Nina had become emotional, wiping tears from her eyes. Her face was contorted with grief, rage. Dirk, trying not to breathe in this foul place, couldn’t comfort her, had to escape back up the steps where, in the doorway, the child Billy was crouched.
Jesus! A close call, he’d almost gagged. A sudden headache had caught him between the eyes. And his eyes were stinging with moisture.
The Falls
X 207
Nina caught up with him in the kitchen, and apologized. “I’m sort of used to the smell, I guess. What it would be like to somebody else, I can’t imagine.” She laughed awkwardly.
When Dirk left the house, desperate now to escape, Nina accompanied him. The heavy rain had lightened. Dirk didn’t bother to open his umbrella. Thank God, he could breathe again. After the stink of that basement, which he wouldn’t forget for a long, long time, the viscous air of east Niagara Falls tasted almost fresh.