Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
drawer upstairs in her bedroom. The conviction came over him powerful as the onslaught of flu: he loved this woman, his mother, and could not live with her any longer.
Royall rubbed Zarjo’s head again, in parting. The dog’s eyes lifted mournfully to him.
“Tell Juliet I couldn’t stay, Mom. I’ll be calling you.”
Ariah said calmly, “Royall Burnaby. If you leave this house, you’re not welcome to return. Ever.”
“O.K., Mom.”
Strange that Royall was leaving without supper, when he was very hungry. Strange, he hadn’t known until this moment he would be leaving so suddenly, when a part of him, dreamy Royall, the child Royall, wanted so badly to stay. He would leave without taking the much-needed bath his mother had commanded for him. He would leave without going upstairs to take anything from his room; and when, next morning, he returned, he would find his belongings in a heap on the front porch, spilling over onto the sidewalk—clothes, shoes, boots, the guitar with the broken string, Niagara Falls High School ’76 Yearbook, portable radio, record player and dozens of records in their well-worn covers. In one of his scuffed cowboy boots Royall would discover, to his dismay, seven hundred-dollar bills neatly held together by a rubber band.
And not even Zarjo would emerge to acknowledge him this time.
The front door locked, and all blinds drawn.
5
Tell me about him? Our father?
Royall, I can’t
.
Yes you can. Chandler, c’mon!
I promised her
.
I gave her my word
.
When the hell was that? When we were kids? We’re not kids now
.
Royall, I—
He’s my father, too
.
Not just yours. You can remember him, I can’t. Juliet
can’t
.
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Royall, I promised Mom
.
When he died
.
The police came, it was in all the
papers. I was eleven
.
You were four and Juliet was just a baby
.
Mom made me
promise I
—
How did he die? A car accident, right? In the river? It was raining and his
car skidded—and his body was never recovered—is that it? Tell me!
I said I can’t! She made me promise I would never talk about him, ever
.
Not
to you, and not to Juliet. To other people we were supposed to say it all happened
before we were born
.
But it didn’t! We were kids! You knew him! Tell me what our father was
like
.
She would never forgive me if
—
I will never forgive you, Chandler! God damn
.
I gave Ariah my word
.
I can’t go back on that
.
She took advantage of you, being so young
.
That’s why we’re so lonely
.
We
grew up, people looking at us like we’re freaks
.
Like cripples who can dance, and
seem happy
.
People like us that way, they don’t have to feel sorry for us
.
God
damn fuckers! It’s been going on all my life
.
Royall, Mom just wanted the best for us
.
It’s her way, you know what she’s
like. She loves us, she wants to protect us
—
I don’t want to be protected! I want to know
.
Nobody can stop you from knowing whatever you can discover
.
But I can’t
be the one to tell you
.
Why did she hate our father so much? Why was she so afraid of him?
What kind of man was he? I want to know
.
Royall
,
we could talk this over in person. On the telephone, it’s a strain.
No! If you won’t tell me anything about him, I don’t want to see you
.
It
will only fuck me up more, to know that you know things and I don’t.
Royall? Where are you calling from?
What the hell do you care? A phone
.
Mom said you’ve moved out. You broke off the wedding, and you’ve moved
out? If you need a place to stay
—
Go to hell
.
Furious, Royall hung up the phone.
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6
“ I t ’ s — u n d e rg ro u n d ? ”
“Technically, yes.”
This was a surprise, somehow. Royall associated the downtown public library with its Doric columns and rotunda and the open space of its circulation desk. Underground didn’t fit in. But it was “old newspapers” Royall sought, and these were stored in the “periodical annex” on level C.
The librarian regarded Royall doubtfully, yet politely. He might have exuded the air of a young man who’d spent as little time in libraries as he’d been able to manage until now. “What are you looking for, exactly?” Royall mumbled a reply, and backed off.
As soon as Royall left the first-floor, well-lighted area of the old library, he found himself alone. His hiking boots made clumsy noises on the spiral metal staircase, like hooves, and a smothering smell, like sawdust mixed with backed-up drains, lifted to his nostrils. He felt his first moment of panic. What was he looking for, exactly?
Since dawn it had been raining steadily. Dreamy October had turned from mild and sunlit to autumnal chill and a smell like wetted newspaper. In the distance above Lake Ontario thunder rumbled ominously, like a great freight train gathering steam. Royall hoped the storm would hold off until he was finished at the library.
As if his task would be a matter of a half-hour, or less.
Being furious with his brother was a new experience for Royall.
Being “angry” with anyone, in fact. And expelled from home. Expelled from home! Maybe he’d join the Marines. They were recruiting boys just like him. Maybe he’d change his name: “Roy” was more fitting than “Royall” if you were on your own at nineteen, nobody’s son. If you were “Roy,” you wouldn’t smile so quickly, and so affably. You wouldn’t always be whistling and humming and hooking your thumbs in your belt like a sweet version of James Dean. You’d look adults—
other adults—frankly in the eye and tell them what you wanted.
Maybe.
On level C, Royall felt as if he’d descended into a submarine. The 332 W
Joyce Carol Oates
periodical annex was a pitch-black cavernous space where visitors had to switch on their own lights. Royall worried that someone might come along, a librarian or a custodian, and switch off the stairwell lights, leaving him stranded underground. Jesus! No wonder he’d avoided libraries all his life.
Royall fumbled for the switch. A blurred, flickering fluorescence seemed to glare from all surfaces equally. The smell of drains was stronger here. And that melancholy smell Royall recognized from his days as a delivery boy for the
Gazette,
wet newsprint. Royall had forgotten how much he’d hated that smell, how bound up with a child’s helplessness it was, and how deeply it was imprinted in his soul.
“That’s why I hate you. One of the reasons. You went away, and left me to that smell.”
He made his way past cartons of books and periodicals in towering stacks. Some were shoulder-high, others to the ceiling. Discarded items they must have been, waterlogged from leakage and unread for decades. The floor of level C was dull dirty concrete. Here and there, books and magazines lay spreadeagled, as if kicked. Royall was put in mind of the cemetery on Portage Road. Most of the annex was taken up with unpainted metal shelves in rows, floor to ceiling, with narrow walkways between. The shelves were marked alphabetically but there seemed to be little actual order. Waterstained, dog-eared copies of
Life,
dating back to the 1950’s, were mixed with more recent issues of
Buffalo Financial News;
the
Niagara Falls Gazette,
the primary object of Royall’s search, had been shelved in various places, with papers from Cheektowaga, Lackawana, Lockport, Newfane. Someone had scattered pages of the
Lockport Union Sun & Journal
underfoot. Everywhere dates were confused, as in the aftermath of a violent wind-storm. It was sometime in early 1962 Royall believed he wanted, but where to begin?
The woman in black had brought him here. He felt a stab of revulsion for her. Touching him as she had.
It would take Royall nearly a half-hour to locate any issue of the
Gazette
for 1962; and this issue, he saw to his disappointment, was December. A Sunday edition, front-page headlines that had nothing
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to do with his father, or with Love Canal. Royall let the newspaper drop back onto the floor, squatting on his haunches.
“Shit. I’m thirsty.”
He hadn’t had a beer that day. It was early afternoon. He’d wait until later. When he’d accomplished something.
Royall understood that his father—“Dirk Burnaby”—had been involved in the original Love Canal lawsuit, but he’d never known details. That early lawsuit had ended in defeat, so that “Love Canal” became a local joke, but later in the 1970’s when Royall started junior high, litigation was renewed. Not the same individuals, maybe. New lawyers. New litigants. There were more lawsuits, some of them directed against chemical companies other than Swann. Royall was only vaguely aware of these matters. His friends and classmates had sometimes spoken of such things because their families were involved in them, but their knowledge too was haphazard and scattered.
Royall, who rarely read newspapers, and dreamt and dozed through social studies classes, hadn’t followed any of this closely. Chandler said they were “all right” living where they were on Baltic Street; at least, he hoped so. Ariah never spoke of such matters. If the wind shifted from the east, Ariah shut windows. If soot darkened windowpanes and windowsills, you cleaned them with paper towels. Ariah held newspapers literally at arm’s length, skimming headlines with a look of dread and disdain. She expected the worst from mankind, which allowed her to be pleasantly surprised, fairly often, when the worst failed to happen.
You. At least you’re still alive
.
There was wisdom in that, maybe. Royall was learning.
Pawing through untidy stacks of
Gazettes.
Also the
Buffalo Evening
News,
and the
Buffalo Courier Express,
which had surely covered the Love Canal case. Royall’s hands were smudged from newsprint. He was encountering mouse droppings, tiny black pellets the size of car-away seeds. And the dessicated husks of insects. Occasionally a live, rapidly fleeing silver fish.
The fate of the dead
.
But I’m not dead
.
Back issues of newspapers, 1973, 1971, 1968 . . . How naive he’d been, thinking he could drop by the library here, read about his fa-334 W
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ther, learn some interesting facts, and depart. But his task wasn’t so easy. Somehow, the past wasn’t
there
.
In the near distance was a steady dripping. Every four seconds.
Yet, when Royall listened, the four seconds became five, or more.
Then again the drip came more rapidly. Royall pressed his fingers against his ears. “God damn. Fucker.” Royall missed the Devil’s Hole already, and he hadn’t been off a week. In his waterproof uniform, in his visored cap, passengers depending upon Lieutenant Captain Royall. It was a Disney cartoon and yet: the thunderous water below The Falls was real.
Sometimes, though, Royall felt himself not-real in that place. In the midst of spray, squeals of passengers, the heaving bucking boat.
His thoughts drifted away, he slipped into an eerie dream of flailing his arms and legs underwater. The glassy-green, beautiful water of the Horseshoe Falls. Royall’s long hair trailing like seaweed. He was naked, and his eyes were opened wide, as a corpse’s eyes are opened wide.
Yes, Royall had seen corpses hauled from the Niagara River. He’d seen his first “floater” at the age of twelve. Mom never knew. Like hell, he’d have mentioned this to anyone in his family or even to neighbors on Baltic Street. A floater was a submerged corpse swollen with rot like a meat balloon, rising to the surface.
No, Royall hadn’t thought much about it. That his own father had died in that river. Not ever a morbid-minded boy.
Royall rubbed his aching eyes. Glanced up from blurred columns of newsprint. The drip-drip-drip had entered his bloodstream.
Someone was gliding silently behind a row of steel mesh stacks. He smelled her scent! A warm sensation began in his groin, of hope.
Though his actual arm was too heavy to lift, Royall saw his hand outstretched to the woman in yearning.
“Wake up. C’mon!”
Royall shook his head to wake himself from his trance.
He pushed himself harder. He was frightened of failing. Of giving up, moving back to Baltic Street. He was panting, determined. He returned to the stacks, making his way laboriously on his haunches, checking every paper on the lowest shelf, every date. His thighs
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pounded in pain. Yet, by luck, he finally located copies of the
Gazette
dating back to 1961–1962. Individual pages were missing but the bulk of the newspapers appeared to be intact. Royall carried armfuls to a wooden plank table in the center of the room. He began to search, methodically.
There!—the first Love Canal headline. September 1961.
“You were still alive. Then.”
Two hours and forty minutes Royall read, and re-read. He was beyond exhaustion. He could not have said if he was exhilarated, or frightened. There was so much more than he’d known, so much more than he’d been capable of imagining. He felt as if a door had suddenly opened in the sky, where you had not known there could be a door. A massive opening through which light shone. As light often shone, through fissures in thunderclouds, if only for a few tantalizing minutes, in the sky above the Great Lakes. It was blinding light, hurtful, not yet illuminating. But it was light.