Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
Ariah laughed, and leaned over to kiss her son. The things children seem to believe. “If it was that long ago, Royall, she’s dead, too.
Ghosts don’t live forever.”
Royall came home from fourth grade with a different tale of the Gorge. This time, Chandler as well as Juliet were witnesses.
“Mom
my
! The ghost I was telling you about?”
“What ghost, honey? We don’t believe in ghosts here.”
Wide-eyed Royall said, “She lives on this street! People say they see her, she’s
real
.”
Ariah stared at her breathless son. She was handing him a tall glass of King’s Dairy “whole” “homogenized” milk as she always did at this time. Calmly asking, “Who told you that?”
Royall frowned, trying to remember. He wasn’t a child who remembered most things accurately. Names, faces, events were easily jumbled in his head, like dice shaken in a cardboard cup. He became restless sitting at his desk at school, and he became impatient with printed words “jumping all over” in his eyes. It might have been older 310 W
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classmates who’d told him this, about the ghost who lived on Baltic Street. It might have been his teacher. It might have been the mother of one of his best friends, who often invited him into her house after school, and gave him milk and cookies with her son, and let the boys watch TV cartoons, forbidden by Ariah Burnaby at the other end of the block.
Juliet, the most credulous of children, now a first grader, was listening intensely to her brother. She was a somber little girl with a face
“long as a cucumber” and brooding “black-eyed-pea” eyes as her mother described her; the danger was, if Juliet heard tales of ghosts sighted on Baltic Street, she’d be seeing ghosts that very night.
Chandler, a wraith-like adolescent adept at slipping in and out of rooms, sensitive to Ariah’s shifting moods, was preparing to slip from the kitchen now, sensing a scene. And in the corner to which he’d been banished, as a naughty dog who’d raided neighbors’ garbage cans another time, Zarjo was drowsily alert. It was a cold windy November afternoon of no special distinction in the history of the Burnaby family of Baltic Street except as Royall stumbled telling about the ghost, the ghost who was “real”—“a lady ghost”—“walks by The Falls and scares people so they jump
in
”—Ariah interrupted to ask who on earth was telling children such bullshit tales, and Royall protested with a nine-year-old’s earnestness, “Mommy, it’s
true
. She’s a lady-ghost, you can see her by The Falls.”
Ariah laughed. Her laughter was short and shrill as a whip cracking. Only a child as adept at gauging Ariah’s moods as Chandler could interpret her laughter as he might take note of her clenching fists.
Yet Chandler wasn’t fast enough, slipping away. Though Royall was the one who’d told the bullshit tale, it was Chandler who drew Ariah’s wrath. Ariah turned to lunge at him, grabbing his hair in both her hands and yanking him back into the kitchen. “You! That look in your pinched little face! You
spy
.”
Zarjo leapt up, barking excitedly. Royall, jostled by the struggle of Ariah and Chandler, spilled most of his glass of milk onto himself.
Otherwise, an ordinary November afternoon in the history of the Burnaby family of Baltic Street.
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4
T e n y e a r s l at e r , Royall winced thinking of that spilled milk.
The shock of it, and the glass shattering at his feet.
King’s Dairy. Cold milk thrown on Royall Burnaby. He smiled to think maybe it would happen to him every ten years? Some weird crazy-quilt pattern in his life.
Once, Candace had told Royall and Juliet in her breathless fluttering way, “Oh, you’re so lucky! You have the most fascinating mother in the world.”
Brother and sister had exchanged a startled glance.
Juliet said, sighing, “Well. We know that, I guess.”
Ten years after the incident in the kitchen, Royall was standing hesitant on the front porch at 1703 Baltic. He could hear piano music inside. Someone was playing the piano energetically, it sounded like a Mozart rondo, there was a pause like a hiccup, and Ariah’s uplifted, encouraging voice. Ariah’s children had been trained to enter and leave the house quietly during her piano lessons, but Royall lingered on the porch, dreamy and distracted. He wore rumpled khaki pants, a flannel shirt over a T-shirt, a Devil’s Hole Cruise cap pulled low on his forehead. He had a three days’ growth of beard, meanly glinting as steel filings, and his eyes were bloodshot as if he’d been rubbing them with his knuckles, hard. He hadn’t changed his clothes or done much more than wash his hands, forearms, and underarms, since Friday morning, and this was Monday afternoon, late.
Shame, shame! “Royall Burnaby” is the name.
In fact, Royall didn’t feel all that ashamed, and he didn’t feel repentant in the slightest. Relief filled him like a helium balloon. Free!
He could float away, in such freedom. Not a married man at nineteen.
Of course, Royall felt sorry for Candace. His face burned when he thought of it. He’d hurt her, and the last thing he’d wanted to do was hurt her. He felt almost as sorry for Ariah, too. But why?
Candace is going to be my wife, Mom. Not yours.
Ariah had not wanted Chandler, aged twenty-five, to “see” a woman friend of his who was separated from her husband, and preg-312 W
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nant. Ariah had expressed shock and repugnance for any such “liai-son” and had made Chandler promise he wouldn’t get drawn into marrying the young woman; Ariah had refused even to meet her. Yet, Ariah had immediately latched upon Candace McCann as a “perfect”
wife for Royall.
This was strange. Yet, knowing Ariah, maybe not so strange.
Now that she was in her mid-fifties, not quite so nervous and excitable as she’d been at a younger age, Ariah was less prone to spectacular flare-ups of temper. (Or “fugues,” as she called them, with clinical detachment. As if such tantrums were a state of mind for which no one was to blame, like being struck by lightning and kicking and flailing out to hurt innocent bystanders as a result.) Still, Ariah’s moods were unpredictable. There were days when she refused to speak to Juliet for some minor infraction of their mother-daughter intimacy that made no sense at all to Royall, who, as a boy, had been allowed much more freedom growing up. Ariah laughed at household misdeeds committed by Royall out of carelessness or clumsiness, that would have thrown her into a fury if they’d been committed by Juliet, or poor Chandler.
(Fortunately for him, Chandler no longer lived at home. But he dropped by often, and sometimes slept in his old bed, as if he needed Ariah’s scolding presence as much as, in her peculiar way, Ariah needed him.)
“Hey Royall! How’s it going?”
A neighbor from across the street whose roof gutters Royall used to clear out for a very minimum wage now called out to Royall, who had no choice but to wave and call back. Royall supposed that everyone in the neighborhood knew of the rudely cancelled wedding, though no one on Baltic Street had been invited.
“Thought you’d be off on your honeymoon this week, eh?”
“Well, no. I’m not.”
The neighbor, an older man with a limping leg, laughed mysteriously and disappeared back into the house. Royall’s face burned.
Maybe this wasn’t a good idea? Returning home, so soon. Royall had to admit he was fearful of seeing Ariah.
Of course he’d called Ariah on Friday evening. Immediately he’d
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told her the wedding was “off.” It had been after nine o’clock and Ariah was reluctant to answer the phone when it rang so late, but she’d answered it on the tenth ring, and had been so astonished by Royall’s news she’d asked him please to repeat it, and when Royall did, saying in a rush of words that he couldn’t marry Candace, he didn’t love Candace and didn’t believe that Candace loved him, Ariah was silent for so long Royall worried she’d had some sort of attack.
Then he heard her harsh, labored breathing, as if she was trying not to cry. Ariah, who scorned tears! Quickly Royall said, “Mom?
Candace is coming to see you. She understands why I’m doing this.
She’s upset, and mad as hell at me, but she understands, I think.
Mom, forgive me, I’m sorry. I’m a bastard, I guess. Mom—” But the voice on the line was Juliet’s. “Royall, she’s run upstairs. She wouldn’t tell me what’s wrong. Royall, you aren’t hurt, are you? Royall?
You
aren’t dying
?”
Next day, Saturday, Royall sent Ariah a telegram, his first.
d e a r m o m i ’ m s o r ry h a d n o c h o i c e w i l l e x p la i n s o m e day lov e roya l l Immediately after the breakup with Candace, Royall had gone into hiding. Three days a fugitive. Out of contact with everyone. He hadn’t called anyone else, knowing that word would spread quickly.
Every one of Candace’s friends and relatives would have been informed within an hour. Like sewers flooding, Ariah used to say of gossip making the rounds. You can count on sewers flooding in Niagara Falls just as you can count on gossip and “wicked news” generally.
Royall didn’t want to think what people were saying of him. Shocked, scandalized, furious. Even Candace’s mother was probably prepared to strangle him.
Can you believe! Royall Burnaby doing such a thing! On the
night before the wedding!
Royall knew that Candace would be bitter about having to return the wedding presents, injury on top of insult.
She would never forgive him, he knew. What he’d done was worse than any act of sexual betrayal. If he’d told her about the woman in black she would have been hurt, dismayed, disgusted, she’d have wept and struck at him, and told him she hated him, she didn’t want 314 W
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to marry him; yet in the end, and fairly quickly, Candace would have forgiven him, and married him. But what he’d done now, out of conscience, and knowing it was the right thing for them both, she would never forgive.
Had the piano lesson ended? It was almost six o’clock. But Ariah sometimes went over the hour. She was a diligent, exacting teacher who, after more than thirty years of teaching piano, still had the capacity to be surprised by mistakes. Ariah had long embarrassed her children, especially Juliet who felt such slights keenly, by caring more about her pupils’ piano lessons than the pupils themselves cared. She was forever being hurt, stunned, devastated by modestly talented adolescents who broke off lessons, or by their parents’ decisions not to continue. It had nothing to do with money: Ariah sometimes carried a student for months, for no fee. She loved music and could not comprehend that others took music so casually.
This is just
throwing money down a rat hole
was the crude (but possibly accurate?) expression used by the father of one of Ariah’s students, when he’d decided to discontinue lessons. Ariah took up the expression with her usual grim humor.
Throwing money down a rat hole, that’s what we’re
all doing. That’s life!
On Baltic Street, among working-class and “welfare-class” neighbors, some of them living in badly decayed rowhouses spilling over with children, the graying red-haired woman who lived at 1703 was known to be a widow, bringing up three fatherless children by herself, dignified, polite, somewhat disdainful and aloof with her neighbors, very reclusive, “eccentric.” It was acknowledged that Ariah Burnaby was someone special, an “educated”—“talented”—woman; it was understood that she feared intruders, even a friendly knock at the door could upset her.
Like a ghost she is. Looks right through you
.
“Missus” Burnaby you can’t call her, she gets a look in her face like you stabbed
her in the heart.
Since he’d been old enough to play with the children next-door, Royall had been a popular presence on the street, a sort of cheerful semi-orphan. He made friends everywhere and was always welcome in his friends’ homes where sometimes, casually, their mothers would interrogate him (“Royall, your mother doesn’t go out much, does
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she?”—“Royall, you don’t remember your father, I guess?”). Feelings oscillated between resentment of Ariah Burnaby for her purported superiority and sympathy for her predicament. Was she someone to dislike, or someone to pity? The woman could play piano beautifully, but she hadn’t a husband, had she? She’d been married to Dirk Burnaby, but she lived on Baltic Street now, didn’t she? And where were her family, her relatives? Why were she and her children so alone?
When Royall was a child, there were months-long phases when Ariah couldn’t bring herself to leave the house even to shop for food—“I just feel so weak, can’t breathe, I know I’ll faint if I get on that bus”; at such times, neighbors quietly offered to help. They took Chandler and Royall to the A & P with them, Ariah’s carefully printed grocery list in hand; they drove the children to the doctor, or the dentist, or shopping for clothes and shoes. Ariah had to be grateful for such kindnesses, but bitterly resented them. “Don’t tell family secrets!” she warned the children. (Who had to wonder, what were these secrets?) “People just want to pry. When they sense weakness, they pounce.” When, shortly after her fiftieth birthday, Ariah had to have emergency surgery for the removal of gallstones, neighbors invited the children to share meals with them; and when Ariah was discharged from the hospital and convalescing at home, they sent casseroles, turkey left-overs (this was at Thanksgiving), cakes and pies. Chandler was designated to thank them politely, even as Ariah seethed with indignation. “Jackals, in a pack! They see that I’m
‘down.’ They think I’m one of them now.” Ariah’s pale skin gleamed coldly. Her glassy-green eyes glimmered with commingled pain and triumph. “But they’re wrong, see? We’ll show ’em.”
Chandler, ten at the time and beginning to be independent-minded, objected. “Mom, they’re just trying to be nice. They feel sorry for us.”
“ ‘Feel sorry for us’!” Ariah said scathingly. “How dare they! Tell them to feel sorry for themselves.” Even in her convalescent’s bed, her skin deathly pale and her voice cracking, Ariah managed to wound her elder son.