Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
“How lawyers make work for one another! You’re all priests, worshipping the same god. No wonder you adore one another.”
“At the moment, in Niagara Falls, no one much adores
me
.”
Dirk spoke lightly, not bitterly. Did he give a damn that he was becoming a pariah among his colleagues, God damn he did not. But he wanted the love and support of his wife, at least. He deserved that, at least. He said, as if he’d been derailed from a crucial argument,
“When we finally do win the case, Ariah, which I believe we will, by next fall at least—”
“Fall of which year? This year?”
Ariah’s question stunned him. It was meant as thinly veiled sar-242 W
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casm, he knew; yet,
which year
? It was possible that Love Canal would not be resolved for a long, long time.
“Ariah, the case is complicated. It’s very complicated. I’ve been consulting expert witnesses, I’ve hired doctors, scientists to help me with the preparation. We’re trying to assemble data to rebuff the Board of Health’s claim that there is ‘no problem’ at Love Canal; or, if there was a problem, they’ve solved it. But I’ve been running into resistance because there are local doctors, even in Buffalo and Amherst, who are afraid of testifying against their colleagues in the AMA. And an organic chemist at the University of Buffalo, I thought I’d hired, decided suddenly he couldn’t risk testifying for the Love Canal residents, his laboratory is dependent upon grants from the State of New York. And I can’t get the State of New York Health Department involved in this, the bastards won’t cooperate.” As Dirk spoke with increasing emotion Ariah stood silently, curling her bare white toes into the carpet.
Dirk continued, urgently: “It’s a question of faith, Ariah. You must know, darling, that I love you and the children more than anything else in the world, and—”
Ariah opened her eyes, and for the first time regarded Dirk, unblinking. “And yet you’re endangering us. You’re endangering our marriage. Our family.”
“Ariah, I am not.”
“You’re going outside the family for—I’m not sure what it is: something you want, and need. We aren’t enough for you.”
Ariah drifted away, gripping the bottle of Black & White firmly.
She was sylph-like, floating. Dirk had no choice but to follow. Wanting to seize her arm, to make her stop, listen to him. Ariah made her unerring way barefoot along a darkened corridor toward the front of the house. The house at 22 Luna Place was large, and this corridor was lengthy. Through the leaded mullion windows of the vestibule there was a glaring pale moon, and there was a surprisingly rough, muscular wind in the trees. The perpetual wind off the Gorge! Dirk was thinking how it wore out all resistance. You might become as stone, smooth-worn, impersonal and beyond hurt.
Outside, the beautiful old elms of Luna Park were being buffeted
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by this wind. Centuries of elms and centuries of wind and yet in this new decade the elms were beginning to falter, just perceptibly. Their stately limbs beginning to dry out, fracture.
Ariah said, now with an air of pleading, “Dirk. I want you to drop this ‘Love Canal.’ Just now, tonight, I—I think you should.”
Dirk protested, “Ariah, no! What are you asking? Darling, I can’t.”
“ ‘Can’t.’ ”
“I can’t, and I won’t. These poor people require my help. They deserve justice. Everyone lies to them, and I’m not going to lie to them.
I’m not going to abandon them.”
“ ‘Can’t.’ ‘Won’t.’ I see.”
“No lawyer with any integrity drops a case like this. Not when the circumstances are so grim, and the plaintiffs so helpless.”
“And who is paying legal costs? Not these ‘helpless’ plaintiffs, I suppose.”
“Well, no.”
“Mr. and Mrs. Olshaker?”
Dirk said impatiently, “Sam Olshaker works shifts at Parish Plastics. He supports a wife and two children. He makes less in a year than I make in—” Dirk paused, uncertain. (He hadn’t meant to boast, exactly. But was this a boast? Lately, Dirk Burnaby hadn’t been bringing in any income at all. The cash flow in his office account was in one direction only.) “They have no money saved. They have to pay medical costs that go beyond Parish’s benefits. And those benefits don’t go far. They bought a house on a thirty-year mortgage and like their neighbors in Colvin Heights they’re trapped there, unless Swann Chemicals, or the county, or the state, can be forced to pay reparations. Unless somebody buys out their mortgage for them. And in the meantime, their health is being affected. Try to have pity on these people, Ariah. If you met them, and their children—”
Ariah said hurriedly, “But I haven’t. And I won’t. I have nothing to do with them, and they have nothing to do with me. There are starving people in China, in India, in Africa! I have to care for my own children, I have to protect my own children. They come first, and—
nothing comes second!”
“Ariah, what a despicable thing to say. That isn’t worthy of you.”
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“It isn’t worthy of your wife, maybe. But it’s worthy of
me
.”
But Ariah spoke hesitantly, as if she repented her harsh words.
She lifted her wine glass another time and drank greedily. Dirk knew he shouldn’t challenge her. It was a mistake to excite her further, at this time. Now she was becoming emotional, he must be cautious.
Since her father’s death she’d become less predictable, less stable; though seeming hardly to have mourned the man, and airily dismissing Dirk’s commiseration, yet Ariah had been deeply affected, Dirk knew. And her mother’s widowhood and loneliness must have weighed upon her, too. Dirk knew he should retreat, cautiously. Or stand wordless beside her. As consolation. Whatever a husband was, is. Whatever that mute mysterious bond between them.
Somewhere close by, overhead, a floorboard creaked. Or seemed to creak. Sharply Ariah called out, “Chandler! Go back to bed immediately.”
But there was silence at the top of the stairs. Even the solemn sonorous ticking of a grandfather clock in the hall seemed to pause for a dramatic moment before continuing.
Dirk touched Ariah’s stiff trembling back, and tried to take her in his arms. In a startled reflex she jammed an elbow against him. She broke free of him, breathing quickly. Dirk said, pained, “Ariah, I can’t give up Love Canal. Don’t ask me. I’ve promised so many people.
They’re depending upon me. This isn’t ordinary litigation, making rich people richer, this is life. Their lives. If I quit now—”
“The pride of Dirk Burnaby would be hurt? I see.”
“—I’d be letting them down. Betraying them. And our adversaries deserve to be exposed. Punished. The only way that hurts them, by paying out money. I’d love to bankrupt Swann and his associates! Those bastards. And the city, and the county, the Board of Education and the Board of Health, these agencies have been in collu-sion for years. The D.A., the judges. I’m the only attorney it seems who will take on this case, to the bitter end. I couldn’t live with myself if—”
“Then who will you live with?
Her
?”
Ariah turned a white, pinched face to Dirk. A face that disconcerted Dirk, it was so contorted by fury.
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“Ariah, I’ve told you. I am not in love with Nina Olshaker.”
“But she’s in love with you.”
“No! Certainly she isn’t in love with me.”
Dirk spoke so vehemently, with such disgust, you could see he had to be telling the truth.
Ariah turned away. She, who had not drunk even wine for years, so far as Dirk knew, now poured more scotch into her wine glass, and drank in a desperate, swaggering gesture. The powerful alcohol was having an effect upon her judgment, her motor coordination, Dirk could see. Yet he hesitated to take the bottle from her. How like a willful child she was, capricious as Royall. But the air of self-hurt, and of revelling in self-hurt, was Ariah’s own. That lethal swerve to the woman’s otherwise lucid intelligence. Dirk recalled how, years ago, at l’Isle Grand Country Club, Ariah had drifted away from their dinner with friends and found a piano in a vacant ballroom and when she was discovered, and her playing applauded, she’d fled the scene like a kicked dog. Dirk’s friends had genuinely admired Ariah’s piano playing, yet Ariah had seemed to hear, or had wished to hear, mockery in their applause. And no amount of explanation or apology could make things right.
Ariah said, her voice trembling, “Very well then. Mr. Burnaby.
Move in with ‘Nina Olshaker’—this paragon of suffering and virtue—who happens to be young enough almost to be your daughter—and her precious children. More precious to you than your own children. Move into this honeymoon cottage in pastoral Mt. Lucas.
We don’t need you here. We never see you anyway. I can support us with piano lessons. Go on, go away.”
“Ariah, don’t say such things. I can’t believe you mean it.”
“You’ve gone outside the family. You’ve betrayed us.”
Dirk reached for Ariah as she turned from him, all he could grab was the bottle of scotch. Ariah ran barefoot and whimpering up the carpeted stairs. “Away, away! I hate you, we all hate you,
go away
.”
“Ariah—”
Dirk stood panting and perspiring at the foot of the stairs. He could hear his distraught wife running flat-footed, now rather heavily and without grace, into the nursery—was that where Ariah 246 W
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went? No, she’d gone into Royall’s room, next to the nursery. She would wake the dazed little boy from his fathoms-deep sleep, and half-carry, half-drag him into the baby’s room, and there she would astonish the Irish nanny by shutting and locking the door behind her as if she and Royall were pursued by a demon. She would snatch up the sleeping baby out of her cradle, crooning to and comforting the children she was terrorizing, she would warn the frightened Bridget to stay away from the door, and if Dirk dared to ascend the stairs to knock gently and reasonably at the nursery door (but Dirk would not, he knew better) Ariah would scream at him through the door, with the fury of a mother bird protecting her young.
In the hall outside the nursery, there poor Chandler might be standing. Barefoot too, in his rumpled flannel pajamas. Possibly Chandler would have had time to put on his glasses, but probably not. Chandler blinking and squinting at his distraught father, locked out of the nursery by fiery Ariah.
But Dirk knew better than to pursue the woman. Bottle in hand, he fled the house at 22 Luna Place.
Wondering would he ever return? Would Ariah want him, and would he want to rejoin her; had he the strength to rejoin her, and yet continue with Love Canal? He could not give either up. At that moment, pressing down hard on the gas pedal of his car, he could not have guessed where he was headed, what this exhausting conversation with Ariah would mean. Even his gambler’s intuition had drained from him.
Driving in the wind-buffeted night. In the forty-sixth year of his life. At the verge of the Deadline, he was. He could feel the rapid current yet more rapidly accelerating. There was no reversing his course now, nor even swerving to the side. Driving in the large luxurious American car that never ceased to remind him at such times of a boat; a boat manned by Dirk Burnaby himself, on the River Styx. He would drive, drive. He would not sleep. East of Luna Park, away from The Falls and into the interior. Something drew him like a magnet. It wasn’t the woman but something nameless. The lewdly winking teasing lights of Dow Chemical, Carborundum, OxyChem, Swann
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Chemicals. Alliance Oil Refinery, Allied Steel. Pale smoke like drifting bandages. And fog. And mist, obscuring the moonlit sky. East Niagara Falls was a region of perpetual drizzle. Smells that had become visible. Rotted eggs, sour and sweet and yet astringent like disinfectant. A taste of ether. Dirk drove, fascinated. He guessed that he must be driving in the vicinity of Love Canal. One Hundred First Street and Buffalo Avenue. He’d swing around on Buffalo, to Veterans Road. He had all night. He was in no hurry. He had no destination.
Lifting the bottle of scotch to drink, grateful. This consolation a man knew he could rely upon.
Into the underworld that opened to receive me
.
3
O n e b y o n e , in the late winter and early spring of 1962, his brothers turned from him.
There was the day at City Hall when Tyler “Spooky” Wenn stared coldly at him, and passed Dirk Burnaby without a word. “Hello, Mr.
Mayor!” Dirk called after the man’s stiff retreating back, in a phalanx of several other stiff retreating backs, the mayor’s companions. In a voice of perfectly pitched mockery Dirk Burnaby spoke.
There was the day when Buzz Fitch passed him by. Or nearly.
Pausing at Dirk’s table in the Boat Club, unsmiling, A curt nod.
Fitch’s grave, gravelly voice. “Burnaby.” Dirk glanced up, and forced a smile. But he knew not to extend a hand to be rebuffed. “Fitch. Mr.
Assistant Chief of Police Fitch. Congratulations!”
(Did Fitch pack a gun, wearing a suit and tie, dining at the Boat Club with friends? Dirk had to suppose, yes.) There was the day when Stroughton Howell passed him by: Dirk’s old law school friend, newly appointed Judge Howell of the Niagara County District Court, in handsome black judge’s robe worn with a theatrical flair. Yet his moist-eyed glance at Dirk was one, Dirk would afterward recall, of pained regret, as Howell moved toward an elevator in deep conversation with one of his clerks in the high-ceilinged open foyer of the county courthouse, and Dirk Burnaby prepared to leave by a side door. Howell stared, and Howell 248 W
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murmured what sounded like, “Dirk!”, and seemed about to say more then decided no, and moved on. “Judge Howell, hello,” Dirk called after the man.
But Judge Howell, entering the elevator, didn’t glance back.
Congratulations on your appointment, Judge. I’m sure you deserve it, even
more than your esteemed colleagues on the bench.