Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
By contrast, Skinner and his team had assembled more than thirty expert witnesses to rebuff the argument of “causation.” These included the most highly respected local physicians. The chief of medi-cine at Niagara General Hospital, an oncologist at Buffalo’s Millard Fillmore Health Center who specialized in children’s cancers, a Nobel laureate chemist consultant at Dow Chemical. Their arguments were a single argument, like a single deafening drumbeat comprised of numerous drums: amid a myriad of factors it is impossible to prove that some factors “cause” illness.
Just as it has never been proved that smoking tobacco “causes”
cancer. Not by any science known in 1962.
In the hire of Swann. Swann’s money
.
Bribes. Bastards!
Dirk would not have wished to think that Howell might accept a
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bribe, too. As an attorney Howell had made money, now he was a county judge his yearly income had diminished considerably. It was a fact of public life: judges, politicians, police were in positions to accept bribes, and some of them went so far as to solicit bribes. In Niagara Falls since the Prohibition years, the 1920’s, as in Buffalo, organized crime exerted a powerful influence, too. It was common knowledge, but Dirk Burnaby tried not to know too much.
Years ago, as a young aggressive attractive lawyer with a “good”
surname, that’s to say in no way likely to be confused with an Italian surname, Dirk had been approached by a Buffalo lawyer on the payroll of the Pallidino family, as the organization was called. Dirk had been offered a good deal of money to work with the Pallidinos in preparing a defense against charges by a crime-crusader state attorney general, in the heady era of Kefauver’s senate crime investigating committee, but Dirk hadn’t been tempted, not for a moment.
He hated and feared criminals. “Organized” criminals. And he hadn’t needed the bastards’ money.
Thinking now, God damn he should have tried to bribe a few key witnesses himself. A few thousand dollars more or less, already he’d invested so much of his own money, what difference? Now it was too late. Now his enemies had defeated him. He should have gotten to Swann’s key witnesses, and out-bid Swann. Should’ve risked more than he had in the cause of Nina Olshaker, her dead daughter and her ailing children he’d come to feel a kind of love for, yes and her husband Sam, and the Olshakers’ future murky as the sky above East Niagara Falls. But he’d feared being caught. Not the morality of being caught but the bare blunt fact of being caught, exposed. Behaving unprofessionally. Providing his enemies with grounds to press for his disbarment.
Which now he’d done. Why?
Why, why throw away your career. Your life.
It had to be. I don’t regret it.
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In a ground-floor cell at the Niagara County Jail where he’d been in-carcerated for ten hours in “contempt of court.” In Dirk Burnaby’s first cell he was thinking these thoughts. His blood still raging. The red haze in his brain. Oh, but Christ he was tired: except for his fast pulse he’d have liked to sleep. Sleep like the dead. He’d have liked to have a good stiff scotch. The knuckles of his right hand were skinned, bruised and swollen from connecting with a man’s face: the hard but friable bone behind the face.
Had to be. I don’t regret it
.
Oh, shit: I will always regret it. But it had to be.
Had to be, had to be. What choice?
At about midnight of this day that Dirk Burnaby could not have named the sky above the Niagara River began to clear after a fierce pelting rain and suddenly a full moon emerged, so bright it hurt his eyes. Yet Dirk found himself smiling, to see it. A man who rarely smiled except at such unexpected times. Alone, like this.
Driving alone late at night (or was it very early in the morning) with no clear sense of the hour, the date, except a guilty sense that he was falling behind.
Not quite two weeks after Dirk Burnaby’s public humiliation, his act of “assault” and his arrest.
Driving his luxury car, now splattered with mud, along the broad puddled Buffalo–Niagara Falls Highway. Beside the Niagara River.
West and north in the direction of Niagara Falls. Home! He meant to go home. He saw a night sky above the city mottled with cloud as with a radioactive luminosity.
He wasn’t drunk. Since the age of sixteen he’d been one to hold his liquor, as he was one to accept responsibility for his actions.
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He hoped his children would understand. He believed they would, one day. You might not redeem yourself by accepting responsibility for your actions, but you can’t redeem yourself otherwise.
That night, Dirk Burnaby was driving in the direction of Luna Park and so naturally the speculation would be that Dirk Burnaby had been headed home.
Anxious in wondering if he’d be welcome at that home.
May I
speak with Mommy?
he’d inquired of Royall and the child ran away breathless and returned after at least ten long seconds breathless and chagrined crying
Daddy! Mommy says she isn’t home. Daddy, you can talk to
me!
And so Daddy did talk to Royall, until at the other end of the line someone came up silently (Dirk tried not to envision who, and with what expression on her pale freckled face) and took the receiver from the four-year-old and hung up.
Dirk had been absent from 22 Luna Park for several days. He’d been in Buffalo, conferring with lawyer-colleagues. Defeated in the Love Canal case but only temporarily, he believed. He could initiate an appeal, and he could help raise money for the Colvin Heights Homeowner’s Association, though disbarred from practicing law himself. Since that afternoon in the courtroom Dirk Burnaby’s life had become mysterious to him, he had only his instinct to follow.
He’d become a specimen in a jar. He smelled of formaldehyde. Yet as a specimen he wasn’t quite dead.
Disbarment was certain. He’d decided to enter a plea of guilty in the assault. He had posted $15,000 bail and he was “free” and he would be sentenced in less than a week, and he would accept the sentence. Probation, or prison time.
Prison! In more than twenty years of Dirk’s law practice, not one of his clients had gone to prison.
He’d had to plead guilty to the charge of assault because he was guilty. He might have claimed self-defense, but it had not been self-defense, only just a vicious reflexive blow. Breaking the face of an innocent man. Dirk was ashamed, and knew the shame would outlive him. Yet in the
Niagara Gazette
as in the Buffalo newspapers Dirk Burnaby was emerging as something of a heroic figure, however reckless, self-destructive.
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love canal lawyer burnaby
protests judge’s decision
Courtroom Assault Leads to Arrest
And,
love canal lawsuit dismissed,
attorney burnaby charged with
courtroom assault
Since that day, Ariah had not spoken to him. Dirk understood that Ariah might never speak to him again.
He was driving at about sixty-five on the nearly deserted highway when he saw the reflection of a large truck in his rearview mirror, no more than twelve feet from his rear bumper. An enormous diesel rig it appeared, with an unnaturally high cab. Dirk pressed down on his gas pedal and accelerated to pull away. The heavy Lincoln plowed into and through puddles of water, sending up sheets of blinding spray like a racing boat. Dirk switched on his windshield wipers, beginning to panic. The vehicle behind him accelerated as well. It couldn’t be a coincidence, there was the truck looming again in Dirk’s rearview mirror, nearly nudging his bumper. Again, Dirk pressed down on the gas pedal. He was now traveling at seventy, seventy-five miles an hour. Dangerous, under these road conditions. Of course, he could outspeed the truck, if necessary; but why was it necessary? Though he couldn’t identify the truck the chilling thought came to him
Swann
Chemicals. One of their rigs.
The Lincoln was traveling now at eighty. Dirk gripped the steering wheel tight with both hands. Beside the highway, on Dirk’s left, the Niagara River rushed, raged. Always it was a shock to see the river so close beside the road, here at the upper rapids. The Deadline.
Beyond was Goat Island, deserted and featureless in the dark; and beyond Goat Island, The Falls and the Gorge lit up in carnival colors for the summer tourist trade, shifting as in a kaleidoscope Dirk found distasteful, vulgar. He had not intended to follow the highway past 270 W
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Goat Island, he’d intended to turn off onto Fourth Street, which would take him to Luna Park.
“Hey. What the hell are you doing!”
Dirk managed to keep a safe distance between his speeding car and the speeding rig behind him, but the Lincoln had begun to shudder with the strain. Dirk’s hands gripping the steering wheel were suddenly clammy with sweat. He couldn’t calculate how he might slow to exit the highway with the God-damned truck so close behind, already he was in the right-hand lane and had nowhere to go except the shoulder. And the shoulder of the highway was deeply puddled, and dangerous. And Dirk seemed to know that the driver in the truck, invisible behind his high windshield, wouldn’t allow Dirk to ease over onto the shoulder.
For another mile they traveled like this, Dirk’s Lincoln and the unidentified rig, as if locked together.
Then Dirk saw, moving swiftly from behind, at his right, noiseless as a shark, a second vehicle. A police cruiser? No light was flashing on the roof, and Dirk heard no siren. Yet he recognized the vehicle as an NFPD cruiser. It was moving up beside him, on the shoulder, at Dirk’s speed of eighty-two miles an hour.
Dirk glanced over at the driver in alarm, and saw an individual in dark glasses, visored cap pulled low over his forehead. A single police officer? That struck Dirk as a bad sign. He’d switched on his right-turn signal, but couldn’t maneuver to exit. He couldn’t increase his speed sufficiently, and he couldn’t slow down, he was boxed in by the cruiser to his right, the diesel rig behind him.
They want to kill me
.
They
don’t know me!
The thought came swift and almost calm and though it was a thought as logical as the geometry theorems Dirk had memorized in high school, and had taken solace in, somehow he didn’t believe it, his lips drew back from his gritted teeth in a smile of derision. It couldn’t be! It could not be. Not like this, with such rude abruptness.
Not now. Not when I have so much more work to do. I’m still
young. I love my wife. I love my family. If you knew me!
The police cruiser was edging into Dirk’s lane. Dirk sounded his horn, shouting and cursing. His bladder pinched. His body was flooded with adrenaline like neon acid. The Lincoln was up to eighty-six miles an hour, faster
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than Dirk had ever driven any vehicle. It could not go faster, yet Dirk pressed down on the gas pedal harder. He was trying to save his life, steering away from the cruiser, aiming for the middle lane of the highway, and at last the left-hand lane, hoping to Christ no one would slam into him head-on. The Lincoln’s tires plowed into a wide, deep puddle, water streamed over his windshield like flame, he saw the guard rail rushing toward him, illuminated by his headlights. The car was shuddering, skidding. He saw the Niagara River choppy and wind-ravaged in the unnatural glare from the sky, so strangely close to the highway you would think the river was flooding.
And that was all Dirk Burnaby saw.
Poor fool
.
Threw away your life, and for what?
F
amily is all there is on earth. Seeing there’s no God on earth.”
We went to live in a crumbling brick-and-stucco rowhouse at 1703
Baltic near Veterans’ Road. In a residential neighborhood that bordered, on the east, acreage belonging to the Buffalo & Chautauqua Railroad. We were below Fiftieth Street, miles from Love Canal. Our house had been built in 1928. A house of “poignant ugliness” Ariah would call it.
The other house, on Luna Park, had had to be sold soon in the late summer of 1962. Anyway, our mother sold it.
“Near-destitute” she described us. We would grow up clinging to this mysterious phrase without knowing what it meant, exactly.
Except that
near
-
destitute
was a permanent condition, possibly a spiritual condition, special to us. The fatherless Burnaby children.
“If they ask of him, tell them: it happened before I was born.”
Always there was a
they, them
. Always there was
we, us
.
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Ariah shut the door upon
them
. Locked all the windows and pulled down the blinds. Only her piano students were welcome into the house at 1703 Baltic, ushered into the parlor which was the music room for years, until a porch at the rear of the house was remodeled and winterized and became the “new” music room.
It happened before I was born.
So many times we spoke these words, they came to seem true.
“Our catechism for today is: do you get what you deserve, or do you deserve what you get?”
Her eyes like green gasoline on the verge of igniting and yet: you’d remember afterward that Ariah was smiling.
Years of smiling. And her thin strong arms hugging us. And hot fierce flamey kisses to dispel a child’s nighttime terror of loss, dissolution, chaos.
“Mommy’s here, honey. Mommy’s always here.”
It was so. And Zarjo was her companion, bristly-haired, with alert anxious spaniel eyes. Nosing, nudging, clumsily caressing with paws that seemed almost human, in yearning.