Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
Bastards. Murderers
.
Cheating him even of dignity
.
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Joyce Carol Oates
He does wonder, about Stroughton Howell. The esteemed state judge. But he seems to know, he will never know.
That music! At the memorial site, a brass quintet playing something solemnly brisk by Purcell. The site is a familiar Prospect Park structure, used for open-air summer concerts and other public events.
Chandler is relieved, the music sounds good. Stately, yet not pompous. Beauty tinged with melancholy. Chandler has always liked the Victorian gazebo, with its steep gabled roof and ornate fretwork, painted several shades of lavender and purple like something in a child’s storybook. Many years ago Dirk Burnaby brought his young family here, to a summer concert. They’d sat in the grass, on a blanket, Ariah was the only one bitten by mosquitoes . . . hadn’t that been their family, the Burnabys?
Another time, further back in time, so far back that Chandler could hardly recall it, like looking through the wrong end of a telescope, Mommy had sent Chandler out to push Royall in his stroller.
This was in Prospect Park, too. Nearer The Falls. Chandler recalls the cold spit-like spray, little Royall’s infant docility. And Mommy who was so beautiful with her red hair glinting in the sun, stretched out on a park bench lazy and luxuriant as a big sleeping cat.
Do as Mommy
says! Go away
.
Chandler stops dead in his tracks. Trying to think. What?
Seeing American flags, of some shiny synthetic fabric, jutting from the gazebo’s eight-cornered roof and fluttering in the breeze.
His heart sinks, just a little. The patriotic atmosphere in this place, outdoors in Prospect Park. Fourth of July fireworks at the Gorge.
“Chandler? Hey.”
It’s Royall. Grabbing at Chandler’s arm, smiling.
In Royall’s blunt handsome face a look of apprehension. Beyond the smile, and the crinky good-heartedness of Royall’s smile. As if the brothers are greeting each other on an ice floe in some bizarrely public place. Not daring to glance down, to see if the ice has begun to crack.
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“Guess who’s here.”
Chandler’s mind is blank. He can’t even recall the name of the high-profile consumer-rights activist whose presence at the memorial has been vaguely promised.
Then Chandler sees: Ariah.
He’s so surprised to see their mother here, he can’t think what to say. Stammering, “Mom! You look—” (But how does Ariah look, in fact? Feverish, distracted. Crimson lipstick outlining her usually pale, small mouth. And a new hairstyle. And what is this fussy, so feminine dress she’s wearing, a bridesmaid’s costume?) Chandler hugs his mother, wincing as the sharp brim of her hat strikes him above the eye, and feeling her stiffen just perceptibly in his embrace. (Yes, Mom blames him. He knows.) Urgently he says, “Mom, it’s going to be all right. We’ll take care of you.”
Ariah pushes at Chandler as if, even in her benumbed state, she must chide. “And who’s going to take care of you, smartie?”
And there’s Juliet: beautiful Juliet.
Chandler is relieved to see his young sister so attractive. The shy, shrinking girl who’d tumbled facedown the cellar stairs into a rusty rabbit cage and cut her mouth and bled and bled and hardly cried. The shy, shrinking girl with the scarred face at whom neighborhood children stared. Juliet is sixteen, taller than Chandler has ever seen her, in stylish high-heeled shoes. Her usually windblown hair has been fastened with clips and she too wears lipstick, which suits her. Her dreamy-lidded eyes fasten upon his in a look of appeal. But she seems poised, not ill-at-ease. Her dress is sheath-like, made of some iridescent green fabric so dark as to appear nearly black; chic and sexy, in contrast to Ariah’s floral-print shirtwaist. Around Juliet’s neck glitter mysterious smoked-glass beads which Chandler has never seen before but seems to know are a gift from a male friend. (Chandler has never met Stonecrop face to face.
But he knows who Stonecrop is. In fact, Chandler believes he just saw Stonecrop here at the park, the shaved-headed young man scowling and pacing at the edge of the crowd, too restless to sit down. From Royall, Chandler has heard that Stonecrop quit his uncle’s restaurant for the last time and is cooking now at Mario’s.)
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Chandler squeezes Juliet’s hand to reassure her. That this isn’t a terrible mistake. The Burnabys of Baltic Street blundering out into a public place, naked and exposed.
Juliet smiles slyly at Chandler, biting her lower lip. “Too late now.”
“Too late—?”
“To have not come here.”
The program is scheduled to begin at 4 p.m. It’s nearly that now, still people are arriving; mostly strangers, with here and there a familiar, startling face. In case of rain the event is to be held in a nearby hall but the sky is reasonably clear, only to the north above Lake Ontario are there banks of dark cloud. Chandler realizes he’s been digging his fingernails into his palms, with worry that no one will turn out for Dirk Burnaby’s memorial but there appears to be, thank God, a decent audience. His scientist’s rapid brain counting sixteen rows of folding chairs, twenty-five chairs in each row, four hundred in all.
Four hundred! Chandler feels a fresh stab of panic, so many seats will never be filled.
Neil Lattimore, high-energy, thrumming with adrenaline, the quintessential lawyer-activist, comes to shake Chandler’s hand, nearly breaking his fingers, wanting to be introduced to the Burnabys. But Ariah is frowning and distracted, listening with cranky attentiveness to the brass quintet: is it Ives they’re playing now? Copland? A slow march that sounds a little too American-optimistic for Ariah’s refined taste. Programs are being passed out: DIRK BURNABY 1917–1962. Young volunteers for an organization called the Niagara Frontier Coalition are soliciting signatures on a petition. Glaring-yellow buttons urging VOTE YES AMENDMENT
“CLEAR WATER” are suddenly conspicuous in the audience.
Lattimore has a request to make, murmured into Chandler’s ear, all right, Chandler hasn’t much choice but to ask Ariah to consent to be photographed, it’s unavoidable, might as well respond graciously. To Chandler’s surprise, Ariah agrees. But she will not speak with the half-dozen reporters who are hovering nearby, and she will not pose
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alone. “Royall! Juliet! Chand
ler
! Come here.” This is one of the few privileges of motherhood, that you can summon your brood in a public place like a hen summoning her chicks, and they have to obey.
Beside the flower-garlanded gazebo Ariah stands between her tall handsome sons, her slender arms linked through theirs; Juliet, the youngest in the family, stands partly in front of Royall, the tallest.
Flashbulbs, TV cameras. The Burnabys of Baltic Street, impossibly exposed. Ariah will avoid searching out these images in the media with one exception: it’s impossible to avoid the flattering front-page picture in the next day’s
Gazette
where she and her children will appear with solemnly smiling faces above the caption—
Family of Dirk Burnaby attends Prospect Park memorial.
This simple declarative statement will be read and reread by each of the Burnabys as if it were poetry of surpassing beauty, containing a hidden meaning.
7
Champagne has a strange effect upon me
.
How so?
A wicked effect.
The consequence is, Ariah is seated with three children, apparently hers, in the first row, center of the audience at the memorial for Dirk Burnaby 1917–1962. Should she smile? Laugh aloud? A screaming laugh, or a laughing scream? Or should she sit quietly, with her unwieldy straw hat now removed, between Chandler and Juliet, clutching their hands in hers?
The quintet is concluding its last piece. The slow march has turned, in its final movement, into something brisk and distinctly American, as Ariah foresaw.
The microphone is being adjusted. It’s 4:12 p.m. Miles away at the lake there’s a drum-roll of thunder. Unless it’s a freight train closer to home. The Burnaby children recall their father’s legendary sense of 480 W
Joyce Carol Oates
humor, possibly this sound is distant laughter? You do have to laugh.
Vindication, validation, redemption, and so forth. Sixteen years too late.
Chandler hears Juliet whispering to Ariah, “Mom, it’s going to be all right. We’ll take care of you.” Chandler waits for Ariah’s cutting retort, and is hurt when none comes.
Always, she has loved them both, better than me.
Before he sits beside Juliet, Royall turns to scan the crowd for her: the woman in black. The woman he met, made love to, in the cemetery on Portage Road. Since that morning Royall has not seen her though he has seen women who resemble her, teasingly and fleetingly.
He almost could believe the meeting, the intense lovemaking, had been a dream. A dream of that cemetery, and that time. Yet so real, he’s sexually aroused, stirred to the point of pain recalling it. In public places like this he habitually looks for her though guessing, nearly a year after their meeting, that he won’t ever find her. He sits now with his long legs outstretched, jamming his fists into his trouser pockets. His heart beats hard and sullen, but why? He knows that this is a happy occasion. His pale blue eyes, skeptical, yet yearning to believe, glance upward. Those strangers on the gazebo platform, who are to speak this afternoon of Dirk Burnaby’s “legacy.” He should be grateful for them, he knows. There’s Lattimore (whose crushing handshake Royall made certain he countered with a more crushing grip of his own), and there’s the “reform” mayor of Niagara Falls, adjusting the microphone, inquiring is it on? Yes, yes! The damned thing is on.
Flags fluttering in gusts of wet air. Smelling of the Gorge.
Earth, water, rock. A mysterious
livingness
to these, that seem to superficial eyes inanimate. One morning Royall woke to the excited realization that he would study these phenomena; that he preferred them to the world of mankind. Law, politics. Men in their futile striv-ing to conquer men. How strange for Royall Burnaby of all people, who is, but mostly is not, his father’s son.
And for a brief hallucinatory time was not Royall either, but Roy.
Roy, working for Empire Collection Agency. He’d had a permit to carry a gun but he had not ever fired that gun—had he? And now the
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gun has been returned safely to his employer and Roy has ceased to exist.
Royall remembers, with a faint smile. Sure he’s a university student now, much better off. He has a future, not just a past. He isn’t a desperate young man. But sometimes at moments like this, quiet, meditative, a little restless, he misses the weight of that revolver in his hand. And he misses Roy.
It’s a fact: elsewhere in Niagara Falls the air of September 21, 1978
is muggy, hardly breathable; of the texture of rotted fabric filtered through a corrosive mustardy sun. But here in Prospect Park, close by the Niagara Gorge, the air is fresh as if charged with electricity. You want to live: you want to live forever. The brass players, withdrawing from view, shaking spittle out of their gleaming instruments, are emissaries of wonder. On the gazebo platform, as the first stranger speaks, a vase filled with ice water glows with refracted light.
Airborne particles of moisture, blown from The Falls, quiver with light. From time to time during the ninety-minute memorial for Dirk Burnaby 1917–1962 as the sun disappears and reappears between strips of tattered clouds, rainbows become visible above the Gorge.
So faint, so frail, hardly more than optical illusions they seem. Look a second time, they’re gone.
Lois Marie Gibbs’s
Love Canal: My Story
(1982) and
Love Canal: The
Story Continues
(1998) were consulted in the preparation of this novel.
“The Gatekeeper’s Testimony” appeared in a special limited edition published by Rainmaker Editions, 2003.
“The Fossil-Seeker” appeared in
Conjunctions,
2002.
Portions from Book III appeared under the title “Stonecrop” in
Raritan
, 2002.
An excerpt from Book III appeared under the title “Juliet” in
Narrative,
fall 2003.
JOYCE CAROL OATES
is a recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers
We Were the Mulvaneys
and
Blonde
, which was nominated for the National Book Award. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978. In 2003 she received the Common Wealth Award for Distinguished Service in Literature and the
Kenyon Review
Award for Literary Achievement.
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Other Ecco/HarperCollins Books by Joyce Carol Oates
novels
Blonde
Middle Age: A Romance
I’ll Take You There
The Tattooed Girl
short story collections
The Assignation
Where Is Here?
Faithless: Tales of Transgression
I Am No One You Know
novella
I Lock My Door Upon Myself
nonfiction
George Bellows: American Artist
On Boxing
plays
The Perfectionist and Other Plays
memoir ⁄ essays
The Faith of a Writer