The Falls Page 10

  The corpse had been sucked beneath the surface of the river, and had been invisible from shore. Spinning, spinning, spinning for seven days and seven nights inside the Whirlpool.

  Dirk no longer felt that he hated the suicide. Nor was he jealous of him. He hoped the poor bastard had, in fact, been dead when his body had entered the Whirlpool.

  “Ariah, you can’t possibly do this. Stay back.”

  “I will. I must.”

  “Ariah, no.”

  Dirk spoke harshly, as an elder brother might speak. Ariah licked her thin, cracked lips. Her skin was so papery-tight across the bones of her face, it seemed a sudden gesture or movement might tear it.

  “But I must.”

  It was a role she was playing, Dirk thought. And she would play it through to the end.

  The authorities had no choice but to concur. As the probable widow of the dead man, it was Ariah Erskine’s right to see the corpse immediately and to make the identification.

  Downriver, onshore near the Devil’s Whirlpool, a small crowd had gathered. There was more than the usual contingent of reporters and photographers. Reluctantly, emergency workers allowed Ariah to approach the corpse. At about ten yards, Ariah pulled suddenly away from Dirk Burnaby’s restraining arm, nearly running. The canvas covering the corpse was drawn back. Oh, what was that odor? That smell? A look of childlike perplexity came over the widow’s face. The corpse was a classic “floater.” No one had prepared the widow for this experience. Not even Dirk Burnaby who hadn’t had the heart, or the stomach, for the task.

  The remains of twenty-seven-year-old Gilbert Erskine were grotesquely bloated with intestinal gas, and nearly unrecognizable as human. The once-thin body was a balloon-body, naked, hairless, finger- and toenails gone. A dark, swollen tongue protruded from a bizarrely smiling mouth and drooping lower jaw. The eyes were milky, lacking irises, and lidless. The genitalia were similarly bloated, like burst plums. What was most hideous, the outer layer of skin had peeled away and a reddish-brown dermal layer was exposed, tinted by burst capillaries. A stink more virulent than sulfur dioxide lifted from the corpse. Ariah shouted with what sounded like laughter. A rowdy child’s laughter tinged with fright, indignation.

  She recognized her husband, she claimed, by the corpse’s “angry grin.” And by the white gold wedding ring, which matched her own, within which the blackened ring finger had swollen to several times its size.

  “Yes. It’s Gilbert.”

  She spoke in a whisper. Only then did the Widow-Bride lose her remarkable stamina, and her strength. Seven days and seven nights of vigilance were finished. Her eyes rolled back in her head like a shaken doll’s and she would have fallen to the ground except, cursing himself for his fate, Dirk Burnaby caught her in his arms.

  The Proposal

  1

  Abruptly she was gone from The Falls, and from Dirk Burnaby’s life.

  “Thank God! What a nightmare.”

  It was a memory to feed his insomnia. Like a great black-feathered scavenger bird tearing at his entrails. He wouldn’t have believed himself so vulnerable. For after all he’d been in the war, he’d seen ugly sights…There were times when a sick, dizzy sensation overcame him, not memory exactly but the emotion of memory, playing golf with his friends on the beautiful sloping course at l’Isle Grand Country Club, sailing or boating on the river, and he was made to realize that his happiness was solely a consequence of chance, and luck: for how many millions of others, less lucky than Dirk Burnaby, life had been painful, ghastly, cut off prematurely. Seeing now the bloated, discolored body on the riverbank and the impetuous red-haired girl pulling away from him before he could stop her, nearly lunging forward to make her claim.

  Well, she’d regretted that. He supposed.

  Not love. Not my type. He hadn’t heard from her since. Of course he hadn’t. What had he expected, he’d expected nothing. As soon as the body was identified and the vigil was over, Dirk Burnaby’s role in the drama ended. He’d seen Ariah Erskine taken away by ambulance to the hospital, in a state of collapse, but her family was summoned then and took over her care. The body would have been shipped back to Troy and the funeral and burial of the late Reverend Gilbert Erskine must have been immediate.

  “Accident” it would be called, probably. The reckless young man with an interest in “scientific exploration” had “fallen” into the Niagara River. Local newspapers would be discreet. The coroner would rule “misadventure.” For in the absence of a clear-cut motive for suicide, a note left behind…

  He’d never been to Troy. A city of no special distinction, three hundred miles east along the Mohawk River, beyond Albany.

  Not love. This was a fact: if Dirk Burnaby had sighted Ariah Erskine at a social gathering, his gaze would have drifted over her without snagging. When his friends asked about her, Dirk was evasive except to say emphatically that he’d had no contact with the woman since the vigil, it had been an impulsive gesture on his part and nothing more. She’d never thanked him. She’d never seemed to see him. Clyde Colborne said, “She told me she was damned. And the look in her face, I wasn’t going to argue with her.”

  Damned? Dirk didn’t ask about this. He was dealing cards, an action his skillful hands performed flawlessly, except suddenly he dropped a card, and it fell to the floor. His friends smiled at this and said nothing. That night (the poker game was at Tyler Wenn’s, on the river) Dirk won $3,100 and pushed it back to his friends, not wanting it. He was sick of poker, he said. He’d known these men for twenty years, and more—Buzz Fitch, Stroughton Howell, Clyde Colborne, Wenn. They were like brothers to him, and he didn’t care if he never saw them again.

  Not lovesick. Not Burnaby! Skimming through newspapers and news magazines, staring at photographs, headlines. He knew this would disgust him but he couldn’t resist.

  THE VIGIL OF THE WIDOW-BRIDE OF THE FALLS

  WIDOW-BRIDE’S 7-DAY VIGIL ENDS IN TRAGEDY

  BODY OF 27-YEAR-OLD TROY MINISTER

  HAULED FROM NIAGARA GORGE

  Missing 7 Days

  Sought by Bride

  Life, Time, and The Saturday Evening Post had printed sympathetic features. Nowhere was the word suicide used.

  Dirk paid little attention to the articles themselves, it was the photographs that engaged him. He frowned to see himself in some of these. An indistinct, shadowy figure. You could recognize Dirk Burnaby if you knew him, he had a certain physical stature, a blunt, handsome profile, fair hair that lifted from his forehead in springy, flaring wings. In one of the grainy newspaper photos Dirk was blurred in motion as if caught in the act of trying to prevent the photographer from taking the photo, as Ariah Erskine in her rain slicker and hat stood at a railing, poised as a statue. 29-YEAR-OLD TROY WOMAN JOINS SEARCH FOR HUSBAND IN NIAGARA GORGE. How strange it seemed to Dirk, the myriad actions and impressions of the long vigil reduced to such simple statements. And not one of the photos depicted Ariah Erskine as Dirk recalled her.

  The Widow-Bride had become another Niagara legend, but no one would remember her name.

  It wasn’t a good day for Mrs. Burnaby, Dirk’s mother. She was sixty-three years old and few days were good any longer.

  “You never visit me, Dirk. Almost, I’d think you were avoiding me.”

  Mrs. Burnaby laughed cruelly. That sound, familiar to her son, of a silver ice pick stabbing at ice. For the older woman knew well that her son was avoiding her and that, to demonstrate how he was not avoiding her, he drove to the Island more frequently than he would have if he hadn’t hoped to avoid her.

  “Dirk, dear! Your mother knows, and forgives.”

  Claudine Burnaby now lived alone on l’Isle Grand, with a housekeeper, in the twenty-three-room “manor house” Dirk’s father had built in 1924, rich from investments in local businesses and real estate. The Burnaby house, on six acres of prime riverfront property, was a smaller replica of an English country estate in Surrey, built of dark-pink limestone on a knoll overlooking the Chippawa Channe
l (facing Ontario, Canada) of the Niagara River. On bright days its tall stately windows shone with the sparkle of mysterious lives within; in more typical Niagara Falls weather, overcast and ponderous, the limestone resembled lead, and the steep slate roofs weighed down heavily. Like other 1920’s-era mansions on the Island it boasted a romantic, pretentious name: “Shalott.” Dirk had fled Shalott at eighteen, to Colgate University and law school at Cornell; he’d never returned to Shalott to live for any extended duration of time but his mother kept his old room in perpetual readiness, like a shrine. In fact, it was now a suite of rooms, an apartment remodeled and handsomely furnished. Dirk’s father had died (suddenly, of a heart attack), twelve years before, in 1938, and his mother had begun her unexpected and perverse retreat from the world shortly afterward.

  Dirk had been assured numerous times by his mother that he, not his older, married sisters, would inherit Shalott. Of course he would live at Shalott, and raise his children there. And if this would one day be so—Mrs. Burnaby reasoned, with flawless logic—why not now? Why didn’t he marry, settle down like everyone else his age? Claudine would continue to live at Shalott, in “her” part of the house, and Dirk and his family would live in the rest, which was certainly large enough. There was the river, and the dock, the speedboat no one used any longer, the sailboat Dirk had loved as a boy, only just think how Dirk’s sons would love it. Their daddy taking them out on the river, teaching them to sail…

  “Except I’m not married yet, Mother. Not even engaged.” Dirk was embarrassed to point out this detail. “You forget.”

  Coolly Claudine said, “No, Dirk. I never forget.”

  Claudine had become a mother who flirted with her son, yet maintained an air of moral reproach. She could say things to Dirk that no other living person could say to him; and he would have to tolerate it, and continue to adore her.

  She’d become a beautiful exotic spider in her web of rooms, waiting at Shalott.

  Long ago, in 1907, Claudine Burnaby had been a Buffalo debutante. In the fashion of the time she’d had an ample, bosomy body with a cinched-in waist and hourglass figure; her hair was naturally blond, her face childlike, with beestung petulant lips. She’d married a Niagara Falls entrepreneur named Virgil Burnaby, the (adopted) son of well-to-do Niagara Falls residents. Like most beautiful, rich women she was forgiven her faults and failings of character, and only after she’d begun to lose her fabled looks had she attempted, for a desperate year or two, to be “good.” Maybe it was too late, or maybe “goodness” bored her. Certainly, religion bored her. If Sunday services weren’t an opportunity for Claudine Burnaby to display herself to an admiring public, there was no purpose in going. As a relatively young widow she’d had numerous male friends, escorts, lovers (?), but none of these lasted more than a few months. In her early fifties she became obsessed with her appearance, the effects of aging on her fair, thin skin, and for years she considered a facelift, exhausting her family with her worries, for what if something went wrong during the operation?—what if it didn’t turn out well? It did no good for Claudine’s children to assure her that she was still a beautiful woman, though in fact she was a beautiful woman, now middle-aged. But Claudine refused consolation. “I hate it. This. I hate me. I hate to look in the mirror at me.” For Claudine knew best what the mirror should have been reflecting, and now did not.

  Yet there was genuine heartbreak here, Dirk thought. Where his mother had once been so sociable, now she was becoming a recluse. If she accepted invitations to the homes of old friends, she often left early without explanation or farewell. At the private, exclusive clubs of l’Isle Grand, Buffalo, Niagara Falls where she and her late husband had been promiment members for decades, she complained she’d become invisible: “People look toward me, but not at me. And no one really sees me.”

  It was a child’s lament, in the mouth of an older woman.

  Dirk’s sisters Clarice and Sylvia protested, Claudine wasn’t invisble to them, or to her grandchildren. By the bored, glazed look in Claudine’s face, hearing this, you understood that being visible in such eyes meant nothing to her.

  Clarice and Sylvia complained bitterly to Dirk. They recalled that, when they were children, their mother hadn’t cared much for mothering them, when nannies could do as well. Though Claudine had quite enjoyed her son Dirk, a husky handsome good-natured boy with a sweet disposition. His sisters said, in disgust, “It’s just masculine attention Mother misses. With her, everything is sex.”

  Dirk thought privately, no. For Claudine nothing is, or ever was, sex. Only just vanity.

  He’d always felt guilty, his mother had so clearly favored him over his sisters. She’d given him money, surreptitious gifts, he’d taken for granted as an adolescent. Even as a young man in his twenties, when he’d made a show of being self-supporting…

  In her late fifties, after a spell of depression, Claudine decided impulsively to have a facelift after all, in a Buffalo clinic. Afterward, her sensitive skin was bruised and swollen for weeks, her eyes were bloodshot, the left side of her face was frozen and without expression. Now she didn’t dare smile or show emotion, for only one half of her face would register it. “A zombie! That’s what I’ve become. Outside and in,” she said bitterly, yet with an air of satisfaction. “This is my punishment. Virgil would laugh. ‘Did you think you’d remarry?’—‘Did you think any man would ever love you again?’ It’s no more than I deserve, an old woman trying to be young.”

  The surgery was irrevocable, Dirk learned. Nerves had been damaged. Tissues in Claudine’s face and behind her ears had been permanently “traumatized.” And she’d signed a release waiving all possibility of a malpractice suit.

  There followed then spells of illness. Bronchitis, anemia, fatigue. What fatigue! Though Claudine abhorred exercise of any kind, yet she was so exhausted sometimes she could hardly dress herself. Often she slept for twelve hours at a time. When, after weeks of insisting, Claudine convinced Dirk to bring home with him, to meet her, an attractive young woman whom (he’d thought) he might marry, Claudine had sent word downstairs via Ethel to explain that “Mrs. Burnaby is unwell, and sends her apologies.”

  Now Claudine rarely left Shalott. And rarely did she invite visitors, even relatives. Her grandchildren were noisy and got on her nerves, her daughters were quarrelsome, and boring. Dirk saw that she cultivated woundedness as if it were a spiritual value; she’d become a martyr to her own vanity, which she interpreted as the cruelty of others in withholding their adulation of her, which she’d long taken for granted. She said, incensed, “I envy plain women. ‘Pretty’ women who were only just that—‘pretty’—and anything special. They don’t know what they’ve missed, and I do.”

  At the end of June, Dirk drove out to the Island to spend a weekend at Shalott. He was exhausted from his ordeal at The Falls. Insomnia raged about him in his Luna Park townhouse like flames. The Niagara Gorge was so near, you could hear the roaring of The Falls mingling with the roaring of your own blood and you could taste spray borne by a northerly wind, even in summer. With misgivings, Dirk fled back to Shalott where his mother awaited him, the velvety black spider quivering in her web.

  But Claudine greeted him through a crack in her bedroom door.

  For it wasn’t one of her “good” days. She wouldn’t allow her son to greet her, still less to kiss her. Though she was very excited about his arrival. Instead, to his dismay, Dirk was allowed to visit with Claudine only by sitting with his back to her as she lay on a chaise lounge in her bedroom, holding wetted cloths against her head to forestall a migraine. In a shaky, reproachful voice she said, “Darling, you can speak with me perfectly well without staring at me. We don’t need always to be face to face.”

  Obsessed with her face. Dirk wanted to laugh, but was this funny?

  Later that evening, when Claudine felt stronger, they would dine together in a shadowy, romantically candlelit room downstairs. Though at this time, too, Dirk was forbidden to stare.

  E
xcept for Ethel, the housekeeper who’d worked for Mrs. Burnaby for more than thirty years, no one, evidently, was allowed to see her face to face any longer.

  Dirk hated it, that his attractive, sensible mother should be turning strange. At the age of only sixty-three!

  Claudine plied him with questions, as always. The two drank a good deal of tart red wine, which Dirk poured. It had become a joke between them, Claudine’s reiterated surprise when her wine glass was empty.

  Dirk alluded to his “ordeal” at The Falls. A seven-day search for a young man who’d jumped over the Horseshoe Falls. As a volunteer, Dirk had been involved…to a degree.

  Claudine said, with a shiver of disapproval, “Isn’t that just like you, darling, involved with strangers. In such a gruesome adventure.” A native of the Niagara Falls region, she was indifferent to The Falls and disdainful of tourists “from all over the world” flocking to it; possibly, she’d never even visited The Falls. (“I’ve seen postcards, I’m sure. Very striking, if you like that sort of thing.”) Like every other native Claudine had grown up conscious of suicides but these she associated with failure in love or business, or outright madness; they had nothing to do with her. If she knew of her legendary daredevil father-in-law Reginald Burnaby who’d plunged to his death in the Gorge in 1872, she never alluded to him, even in jest.

  Dirk’s father Virgil Burnaby had been raised in unusual circumstances: he and his young mother had been taken into the home of a Niagara Falls banker and philanthropist, an officer of the Christian Charities Alliance named MacKenna.