Mrs. Burnaby seemed scarcely aware of Ariah, however, looking pointedly around. “It has been years. Dirk never invites me. He’s always been a strange vindictive child, spoiled in the cradle. No one expected him to marry. Of course, there are reasons to marry, and some of them are good ones. You’ve changed the wallpaper in here, I see. And the tile floor is new. Not one of them prior to you actually lived here in Luna Park, so far as I know. Remarkable. ‘Dirk is getting married, Mother,’ my daughters informed me, ‘you’d never guess who because you don’t read the newspapers.’ Their idea of humor. And who’s this?” In her high-heeled pumps, just perceptibly swaying, Mrs. Burnaby swept into the living room, where Chandler glanced up startled from his Tinkertoys. The chattery woman with the metallic-blond hair, vividly made-up mouth, and shiny black sunglasses loomed above him like an apparition. Her voice lifted gaily:
“Is this—Chandler? I think it is.”
Ariah hurried to crouch beside Chandler, who stared at Mrs. Burnaby in wide-eyed silence. Under cover of caressing him, she tidied up his clothing and smoothed down his fine flyaway hair. “Chandler, this is Grandma Burnaby. Daddy’s mommy? Say hello to—”
Mrs. Burnaby said, pleasantly but firmly, “ ‘Grandmother Burnaby,’ if you don’t mind. I don’t feel like anyone’s grandma, thank you.”
Ariah stumbled, “ ‘G-Grandmother Burnaby.’ Chandler, say hello.”
Chandler jammed fingers into his mouth, leaned his meager little body toward his mother as if to hide in the crook of her arm, blinked up at his grandmother, and murmured, barely audibly, what sounded like “H’lo.”
In her Mommy voice Ariah said, as if this were happy, astonishing news Chandler must be delighted to hear, “This lady is your Grandmother Burnaby, Chandler. You’ve never met Grandmother Burnaby, have you? So this is a nice surprise, she’s come to see us! Darling, what do you say when people come to see you? A little louder, honey—‘Hello.’ ”
Chandler tried again, shrinking. “H’lo.”
Mrs. Burnaby said, “Hello, Chandler. You’re getting to be a big boy, aren’t you? Almost four? Or—not quite? And what have you built there, Chandler? An ingenious little city of sticks?” Mrs. Burnaby was breathing audibly as if she’d just run into the room. She carried a leather handbag and a shopping bag with a number of gift-wrapped packages; she handed the shopping bag to Ariah as one might hand over a burdensome object to a servant, without looking at her. “But why are you playing down here, Chandler? You must have your own play room upstairs? Surely there’s a nursery upstairs? It can’t be very convenient for your parents or comfortable for you, can it, playing down here? Getting in the way? And the furniture gets in your way, Chandler, doesn’t it?”
This seemed to be so urgent a question, Mrs. Burnaby spoke with such sudden concern and irritation, Ariah felt obliged to reply, as Chandler squirmed against Mommy. “Oh, Chandler plays anywhere he wants. He plays upstairs, and he plays down here. Sometimes I play with him, don’t I, Chandler? And he uses the furniture, too, in very clever ways. See, Mrs. Burnaby—”
The older woman said flatly, “Please do call me ‘Claudine.’ As I said, everyone can’t be Mrs. Burnaby at one time.”
“ ‘C-Claudine.’ ”
Ariah’s impulse was to say what a beautiful name, for it did truly seem to her a beautiful name, but her throat shut up, refusing.
“And you are ‘Ariah.’ Dirk’s wife, from Troy. I’ve misplaced the last name, I apologize. Your father is a preacher?”
“A minister. Presbyterian.”
“But he does preach, also? Or don’t they preach in that sect?”
“Well, yes. But—”
“Well. At last we are meeting. I’ve seen snapshots of you of course, my daughters have shown me.” Mrs. Burnaby paused. It was a pause that called for a smile, or a thoughtful frown. But Mrs. Burnaby’s face remained inexpressive. “My dear, you look different in each snapshot; and now that I’ve met you, why—you’re someone else.”
It wasn’t often that Dirk and Ariah visited with Dirk’s married sisters and their families. Ariah dreaded these occasions which were usually centered around a holiday: Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter. From the start she’d sensed the disapproval, even the dislike, of her sisters-in-law Clarice and Sylvia, and had resolved not to care. Now she dreaded to think what they might say of her, to their mother.
And how eerie it was, Claudine Burnaby looked scarcely older than her daughters who were in their early forties.
Ariah had invited her mother-in-law to please take a seat several times but each time the woman affected not to hear; she’d suggested making tea, but Mrs. Burnaby seemed to prefer to prowl about the downstairs, asking if items of furniture or wall hangings were new, and if Ariah had selected them; she professed to admire the spinet, which was heaped with lesson books; she struck several loud chords that made Ariah grit her teeth as if she were hearing fingernails scratched on a blackboard. “I used to play once. Long ago. Before the babies came.” Next she drifted into the dining room, and peered through French doors at the back yard; she spent some minutes in the kitchen, as Ariah looked on anxiously from the doorway, wincing at the condition of the sink, the gas stove, the refrigerator. Ariah wanted badly to say The cleaning woman is coming tomorrow but though this was true, it had the air of a falsehood. She wanted to protest Don’t judge me by what you see!
Back in the living room, Mrs. Burnaby sat in a chair close by her grandson, stiffly, like a waxworks figure with limited flexibility in its lower limbs. She tried again to engage Chandler in conversation. She lifted one of the brightly wrapped presents out of the bag as if to tease, but Chandler merely cringed against Ariah, as before. The presents Mrs. Burnaby had brought for him, both Chandler and Ariah seemed to know beforehand, by their size and relative lightness, were unpromising. Clothes, stuffed animals. Ariah worried that Chandler might squirm out of her arms and escape. Interrupted at his play he sometimes became peevish, and sometimes strangely wounded, fearful. Especially he disliked being interrogated as Mrs. Burnaby was doing. And how strange this grandmother was, so unlike his other grandmother; regarding him through shiny, opaque black glasses and expecting him to smile at her though she wasn’t smiling at him. Her sandpaper face was unlined yet sallow-skinned, and her mouth was too bright, drawn to exaggerate the fullness of her lips, or to disguise their thinness. When she spoke, it seemed as if she had marbles in her mouth she was trying not to spill out. When she leaned forward to touch his hair, Chandler shrank back. He would have skidded across the carpet on his bottom, escaping into the next room, except Mommy caught hold of him with a gay little laugh.
“He’s shy, Mrs. Burnaby. He’s—”
The older woman snorted in derision, as if “shy” was a code she knew how to decipher.
“Is he shy around his other grandmother? The one from Troy?”
“He’s very young, Mrs. Burnaby. He won’t be three until next spring.”
“Three.” Mrs. Burnaby sighed. “He will live into the twenty-first century. It’s strange that anyone can be so young, isn’t it, and be human? But he was premature, they say.”
Ariah let this pass. It made her uneasy that Claudine Burnaby should speak so familiarly of Chandler, as if this were her privilege.
Ariah repeated her offer of tea, or coffee, and this time Mrs. Burnaby said, “A scotch and soda. Thank you.” Ariah escaped into the kitchen to prepare this drink for her mother-in-law and, for Chandler and herself, a root beer. What a relief to be alone! She could hear Mrs. Burnaby’s raised, ebullient voice encouraging Chandler to open his presents, but there was no audible response from Chandler.
Why are you here. What do you want from us. Go away, back to your spider’s web.
Still, Ariah thought, gamely, the woman was Chandler’s grandmother, and had some rights, perhaps. And Chandler should have the opportunity of acquiring a wealthy older relative. Yes? It was a practical matter. Ariah should set her prejudices aside.
But my p
rejudices are me! I love my prejudices.
How powerful, the smell of Dirk’s expensive scotch. Ariah considered making a scotch and soda for herself. Or having a quick swallow of undiluted scotch here in the kitchen. But, in this nerved-up state of hers something unfortunate might happen. That flamey sensation of whisky going down, so wonderful, and maybe too wonderful, making Ariah want to cuddle with Dirk, and make love. Or she’d want to cry, because she was lonely. She’d want to seek out a Roman Catholic priest (she’d never in her lifetime so much as spoken to a Roman Catholic priest) and confess her sins. I am damned, can you save me. I drove my first husband to kill himself. And I rejoiced, that he was dead! She wanted to call Dirk at his law office and tell his velvety-voiced secretary (who was in love with Dirk Burnaby, Ariah knew) it was an emergency, and when he came on the line she would scream at him. Come home! This horrible woman is your mother, not mine. Help me! She had prepared Claudine Burnaby’s drink with trembling fingers and it smelled so good, Ariah took a sip, but only a small sip, from the bottle before screwing the top back on.
That sweet flamey sensation in her throat. And beyond.
Since the failed visit at Shalott in the summer of 1950, more than three years ago, there had been little contact between Claudine Burnaby and the young couple. When Chandler was born, Ariah had sent a birth announcement to Mrs. Burnaby, who responded by sending a number of lavish gifts to her grandson, including an expensive baby stroller modeled after a Victorian model, oversized, clumsy, ornate and impractical, which Dirk had hauled downstairs into the basement at once. And she’d sent gifts for Chandler at Christmas and Easter. Invariably these were store-wrapped packages addressed to CHANDLER BURNABY, ESQ. There were no notes inside, no acknowledgment of Chandler’s parents. “Maybe she thinks Chandler lives alone in his dad’s old bachelor quarters,” Ariah laughed. Only joking (of course) and yet Dirk, thin-skinned where his mother was concerned, took offense. “My mother isn’t a well person. I’ve tried to accept that, and you should, too. She doesn’t mean to be rude. She lives in her own airless universe, like a tortoise in its shell.” But a tortoise doesn’t live in an airless universe, Ariah objected, a tortoise lives with other tortoises, surely they communicate. Tortoises don’t control ridiculous amounts of money they haven’t earned, but only just managed to inherit. Ariah wasn’t about to express this opinion to her fretful husband, however.
Ariah hated it that Dirk’s sisters Clarice and Sylvia were forever reporting back to Dirk news of their mother they knew would upset him. Claudine had become a “hopeless hypochondriac.” She was “pathetic, piteous.” Then again, she seemed to be, at times, genuinely ill, with migraines, respiratory infections, gallstones. (Surely no one can imagine gallstones?) Claudine hoped to “manipulate” all of the Burnabys into bending to her will. There was “nothing in the slightest” wrong with her except she was “cruel and vindictive, like a Roman empress.” It was the sisters’ (and their husbands’) belief that Claudine Burnaby was playing a game with them, and their attorneys: egging them to file a motion in district court to wrest from her power of attorney, at which point she would haul them all into court and cause a scandal. In addition to Dirk and his sisters there were a number of other Burnabys and associates involved in the family’s businesses, about which Ariah knew little, and wanted to know less. Real estate, investments in local factories, a property-management company in Niagara Falls. Patents? Dirk said peevishly, “We don’t require a penny more than I make as an attorney. And I don’t want to discuss it.” Ariah, who hadn’t the slightest interest in discussing it, stood pertly on her tiptoes to kiss her husband’s incensed, heated face, and wrapped her arms as far around him as she could.
Oh, she loved him! Sure did.
Thinking now, maybe she could be polite, if not charming, to Claudine Burnaby; maybe even (summoning up her Christian-love training, Sunday school classes taught indefatigably by her own mother) she could become fond of the woman. “I’ll try!” One more small—very small—sip of Dirk’s smooth-tasting scotch, and Ariah returned to the living room where Mrs. Burnaby had “helped” her grandson open two of his presents, which were in fact clothing, for a child younger than Chandler’s age. Chandler was making only a feeble effort to pretend to be interested in these gifts, and showed little curiosity about the others. Ariah hoped to make amends. Mrs. Burnaby accepted her scotch and soda without comment, and drank thirstily, as if this were her reward, while Ariah knelt beside Chandler to share her root beer with him. But something in the air had altered, while Ariah was out of the room.
Mrs. Burnaby said in an ironic voice, “Bringing gifts, one is bringing oneself. The ‘heart-on-the-sleeve’ sort of thing. But the ‘heart-on-the-sleeve’ is not always wanted.”
Ariah opened her mouth to protest. But the scotch she’d swallowed so quickly in the kitchen made her want to laugh instead.
Mrs. Burnaby continued: “I did play piano once, but not Chopin, Mozart, Beethoven. I lacked the technique. I was groomed as a debutante—I was a ‘great beauty’—to use an expression of that era. You, Ariah, have been spared that, at least.”
Ariah did laugh, this insult was so clumsy. Or—wasn’t it an insult at all, but a backhanded compliment? Mrs. Burnaby was twirling her forefinger in her drink. “My daughters and their husbands are hoping to inherit Shalott, and the land that goes with it, but Shalott is destined for Dirk. For a son. Dirk is the only one of my children expansive enough to fit that space. Do you see? Though he has broken my heart. Though he is not reliable as a son, nor probably as a husband. As you’ll discover, my dear.”
Stung, Ariah said quietly, “I don’t think I want to discuss my husband with you, Mrs. Burnaby. Especially in the presence of his son! You can understand that, I hope?”
Mrs. Burnaby ignored this remark, taking another large swallow of her drink. “My daughters say that you’re quite the amateur pianist. They’ve heard you, evidently. I wonder if you’ll play for me?”
“Well. Sometime, maybe. At the moment—”
“And you ‘give lessons’ in this house, as you’d ‘given lessons’ back in Troy? Is there some reason for this, dear?”
“For ‘giving lessons’? I like to teach young students. And I—I need something to do. Beyond being just a wife and a mother.”
“ ‘Just a wife and a mother’! What does Dirk say to that?”
“Why don’t you ask him, Mrs. Burnaby? I’m sure he’ll tell you.”
“You taught music before you were married, they say. Before the first of your marriages. I realize you’ve been married more than once, Ariah. A widow at a young age. It was more common during the war. On my son’s income, it seems just slightly peculiar that his wife would be ‘giving’ piano lessons, but perhaps I don’t know what Dirk’s income is any longer. He has ceased to inform me. He has his reasons, but no one knows what they are. The careless boy still owes me $12,000 but since I’m not charging him interest there’s no urgency on the borrower’s part to repay any loan. Oh, you look surprised, Ariah? Yes but it’s pointless to ask Dirk about these matters because he simply won’t tell. He has never confided in any woman. He’s morbidly secretive. Playing one woman against another. Some of them would come to me, the respectable ones I mean. Broken-hearted, and of course furious though they didn’t know it at the time. I was not directly involved—nor was Dirk’s father, I want you to know—but there were arrangements made, ‘medical’ arrangements of a kind, in order that Dirk might be extricated from the potentially embarrassing situations he found himself in. And found others in. Do you follow my words, Ariah? Except for your freckles, which I find very attractive, you look disconcertingly blank.”
At this moment Chandler, unless it was Ariah herself, spilled root beer onto the rug, which required frantic dabbing-at with a napkin.
Mrs. Burnaby continued, “I’m wondering if Dirk still visits Fort Erie? Has he taken you to the track, dear?”
“The—track?” Ariah knew of course that there was a horse-raci
ng track at Fort Erie, a locally famous track; but Mrs. Burnaby’s question stunned her.
“I see he has not? Well.”
By this time pulses were beating painfully in Ariah’s head. The scotch, so smooth going down, was making her stomach queasy. She felt as if her elegantly dressed mother-in-law in the black velvet hat and opaque sunglasses had leaned over languidly to poke her in the breastbone. And, to her horror, she saw that Chandler was absorbing it all. Usually bored by adult conversation, the child was listening now, peering open-mouthed at his grandmother. “Honey, why don’t you go into the other room, for just a minute? Mommy will be right there—”
“No, no. That isn’t necessary, my dear. I’ll be leaving now.”
Ariah stumbled after Claudine Burnaby, in the woman’s perfumy wake. Lacking the presence of mind to retrieve Mrs. Burnaby’s cape, so Mrs. Burnaby retrieved it herself from the front closet. “Please give my love to Dirk. I don’t know when I will be leaving the Island again. There seems so little reason, and so much effort. And my health is frankly poor.” At the door, Mrs. Burnaby extended her gloved hand another time, not to take Ariah’s hand but simply to nudge it, in farewell. In a lowered voice she said, “My dear, don’t be anxious. Your secret will die with me.”
“My s-secret? What secret?”
“Why, that child isn’t Dirk’s son. You know it, and I know it. He isn’t my grandson. But, as I say, don’t be anxious. I’m not a vindictive woman.”