Did this house have a daddy I asked when I was old enough to know that houses like ours had daddys. And Mommy told me No. And I could see in Mommy’s eyes that I shouldn’t persist but I asked Where did Daddy go? and Mommy would press her forefinger against my lips and say Shh! And if I continued to persist Mommy would frown and say Daddy left us before you were born, he’s gone and he isn’t coming back.
And a cold heavy sickish feeling came into me like dirty water oozing through the cellar walls and I thought Now you know. You asked, and now you know.
3
Shame, shame. Your name!
Already in first grade the others seemed to know. (But what did they know?) Almost, you’d think they knew by instinct. Their eyes following Juliet in curiosity at first. Later, in suspicion. Later, in derision. And then Royall was in junior high, at another school, and Juliet was left behind. And alone. A strange dreamy stammering child with not one but two scars on her small pale face. Two scars! Her teachers considered her, not knowing what to make of her. Burnaby? Is she related to—? For she was one of those children who stammered in class, sometimes; at other times she spoke normally, and intelligently; at other times, unpredictably, she spoke in what seemed to them a sullen mumble. A spiteful little girl. Not nice. But when she sang, she never stammered. When she sang, her voice was remarkably clear, a lovely voice, though wavering, uncertain.
Burn-a-by. Burn-a-by. Hey!
On the playground, in the neighborhood, there was no protocol in considering “strange” children. There was no sympathy, mercy.
That one. Burn-a-by. Shame!
You spoke to her, she didn’t hear. Stood close to her, she didn’t see. Looked right through you, like she was listening to something far away. To get her attention you had to clap your hands in her face, pinch her, poke her, tug at her hair until she cried. Burn-a-by. Your father drove his car into the river, your father was gonna go to jail. Burn-a-by, shame-shame! Older brothers and sisters must have told them. Adults must have told these older brothers and sisters. (But what?)
So childhood was endured. She would think of those years in retrospect as if they’d been lived by someone else, a brave, stubborn little girl, unknown to her.
4
A shadow-child Ariah calls her. Trailing a shadow-self.
Speaking of her adolescent daughter critically yet with a look of perverse sympathy as if she understands such an affliction in a young female and can’t entirely condemn it. Seated at the spinet playing one of her favored musical compositions, Debussy’s mordant, mysterious La Cathédrale engloutie. Oh, the beauty of La Cathédrale engloutie! A breathless hushed beauty like that of The Falls in winter when the rushing water is muted and all is obscured in mist. Sonorous rising chords that seem to shimmer with life through Ariah’s thin, skilled fingers. Profondément calme. Is it strange, Juliet will one day wonder, of a mother to call out to her daughter, fourteen at the time, who’s just come home from school, “Juliet! Hear? This is your music. Your soul. You are the sunken cathedral, no one can reach you. This is the music you were born to sing.” In a tone of stoic hurt suggesting I’ve given up on you. Go away!
Juliet slinks away, but only upstairs. She and Zarjo, huddling and murmuring together.
As Ariah continues to play Debussy, below.
(Why does Ariah say such wounding things to Juliet, whom in fact she loves? Does she, mother of an attractive adolescent daughter, imagine a secret, sexual life in the daughter; does she yearn for that secret, sexual life she long ago lost, ripped out of herself like an ungainly, unsightly weed? Is she frankly jealous of her daughter? Of that very voice, a rich warm alto, she has wanted so badly to “train”?)
Royall has seen. Juliet’s shadow-self.
Most distinctive in slanted light. Close behind her, like a reflection of rippling water, an apparition that moves with the unconscious, slightly awkward grace of the girl herself.
Like a sleepwalker Juliet often seems, out-of-doors. Her heavy-lidded eyes, her wavy hair falling past her shoulders like an uncombed mane. This hair exudes an odor of something romantic and melancholy as wetted autumn leaves, or violets beaten and ravaged by rain; a fragrance that draws older boys and men to her. Royall has seen, and hasn’t liked what he has seen: the stricken expressions on male faces in Juliet’s presence, as if they are reminded of something crucial lost to them.
Royall, in late adolescence, now sexually active, and yet exasperated by his sister. Sometimes!
By chance Royall has seen Juliet on the street, occasionally with girls from school, but most often alone. Trailing home in that dreamy brooding way of hers. Seeing her, you’d wonder where Juliet’s mind is; Royall guesses she’s hearing music in her head, shaping notes in her throat. Yet: alone in Baltic Park, being covertly watched by men. Or, taking an inexplicable, perverse detour along Garrison Street (where the Mayweathers, Stonecrops, and Herrons live), or through a no-man’s-land of tall grasses and briars adjacent to the Buffalo & Chautauqua yard. Another time following Juliet as she drifts along a brackish, evil-smelling ditch beside the chain-link railroad fence, a solitary, alluring figure, no more conscious of herself than a cat is conscious of itself, yet stepping with deliberation, fastidiously, pausing to examine—what? (Blue chicory flowers? Something impossibly alive, skittering on the surface of the brackish water? Or is it Juliet’s own reflection she stares at, without recognition?) Royall would swear he can see the shadow-Juliet floating just behind his sister.
Royall isn’t imagining this. It’s as Ariah has said: there’s something sunken, secret about Juliet. Something feral and untrustworthy. Royall feels a stab of embarrassment, seeing his sister at such an intimate moment. Yet he can’t leave her, he’s her brother and he loves her; he understands how vulnerable she is, in this rough neighborhood, unprotected except for him.
The fatherless Burnaby children.
Shame, shame. We know your name!
(Strange: no one has ever dared tease or taunt Royall Burnaby about his name. Yet he knows that Chandler was once harassed, and that Juliet is now, sometimes.)
(Royall is offended thinking about this. His name?)
He follows Juliet at a short distance, marveling that she hasn’t glanced around, noticed him. Anyone could approach her: any predator! She crosses a field, crosses railroad tracks and slides down a graveled embankment and comes out at Forty-eighth Street which is partly a residential neighborhood of shabby brick and brownstone rowhouses like theirs, and partly a commercial neighborhood of small stores, taverns, a gas station. He sees, or believes he sees, the shadow-Juliet hovering beside her. And he sees guys watching her. Guys his age, and men. Some of these men are old enough to be their father. If not older. Bastards! Juliet walking without haste, listening to music inside her head, dreamy, distracted. Her lips are moist and slightly parted and there’s the small scar on her upper lip and another, only just visible, at her left temple. Her breasts are clearly defined by the purple cotton sweater she’s wearing, which is too tight for her, like her black flannel skirt, a year or more outgrown. Royall is offended: doesn’t their mother notice how Juliet looks, leaving the house? Is he the only one who sees?
Juliet is passing the gas station where guys in their early twenties are hanging out, guys Royall knows, Juliet is unaware of them staring openly at her, nudging and grinning at one another. Jully-ett. Burn-a-by. Oh baby! Royall can’t bear this any longer, he catches up with his sister, jarring her shoulder with his own. “Oh, Royall! Where’d you come from?” Juliet smiles, mildly startled, as a cat might blink when touched by a familiar hand, in an unfamiliar place.
Royall smells that Juliet-fragrance, wetted leaves, or bruised flowers. This, too, is maddening! Probably Juliet hasn’t washed her heavy, windblown hair in a few days, or bathed. A flame passes over Royall’s brain, of protest, outrage. He can’t bear to see his sexually alluring younger sister so unconscious of herself, on Forty-eighth Street. Doesn’t she know what guys are like? Doesn’t she have a clue what sex
is?
“Juliet. Where the hell are you going?”
“I’m going home.”
“The long way around?”
Juliet smiles uncertainly. “Is it?”
Royall tries to keep his tone light, he loves his kid sister and maybe he’s exaggerating, a little, the danger she’s in, he doesn’t want to offend or alarm her, but saying, “Hey, I’m serious: you need to wake up, see how guys are watching you. Don’t you know where you are?” And Juliet says, hurt, “Royall, don’t scold. I know where I am: Forty-eighth Street. Where are you?”
One of the guys watching Juliet Burnaby is the shaved-headed boy. Tramping through the undergrowth in the no-man’s-land beside the railroad yard, following Juliet at a distance, discreetly, so that not even her jealous sharp-eyed brother Royall has seen him.
5
Shame, shame!
In the late winter of 1977 when the thaw began. When the monkey-voices began their jabbering and jeering. When Juliet wasn’t happy with her classes, and with a song by Robert Schumann she was trying to learn (“An den Sonnenschein”) and so abruptly she walked out of school, without an excuse cutting two afternoon classes and girls’ chorus which was the most important single thing in her life (of which she dared speak) and she hitched a ride to the river (was hitchhiking dangerous for a lone girl of fifteen in the waning years of the druggy 1970’s in Niagara Falls, New York, climbing into a car with a stranger behind the wheel giving you a sidelong smile like a cat contemplating cream?) and hiked along the steep embankment above the river breathless in the wind, behind the guard railing (approximately eighteen inches high) that must have been replaced (where, exactly?) when Dirk Burnaby’s car swerved out of control in a heavy rainstorm fifteen years ago and smashed through the railing to careen into the river.
“I’m here. This is it.”
Never had she come to this place before. A forbidden place. Her heart beat violently, in exaltation. Ariah hovered near, furious with her.
“If I love you, must I hate him? I won’t.”
There, it was said.
On the highway connecting Niagara Falls with Buffalo, by way of l’Isle Grand, traffic passed in a steady stream. It was mid-afternoon, and no rain. Vehicles in the outside right lane passed close beside the rushing Niagara River, separated by a gravel shoulder, the guard railing, and a few yards of steeply banked soil.
Juliet didn’t know where her father’s car had skidded and left the highway. It must have been somewhere along here. The guard railing appeared weathered and rusted uniformly, as if no section were newer than the rest. Of course the accident had happened long ago.
The car had plunged into the river just below the Deadline, where the river accelerated its speed, rushing by in a churning white-water rapids. And now with the spring thaw, the river was high. Juliet found herself staring at it, mesmerized. You could think that at any moment out of sheer exuberance or malevolence, the river might over-flow the bank and flood the highway.
You could almost believe as the Indians once believed, that the Niagara River was a living thing, a spirit. There was a god of the river, and a god of The Falls. There were gods everywhere, invisible. Chandler said that the old gods were human appetites and passions and that these were never vanquished, only re-named. Yet the river required no name. “Naming” was silly, ridiculous. Useless. The river might come alive and all that you would know was that its nature was nothing human, and that no human being could survive for more than a few minutes, or seconds, in it.
A terrible death, in such a place. And alone.
Juliet felt weak suddenly. Her strength of defiance, arrogance, walking out of Niagara Falls High and hitching a ride and not giving a damn who saw her, faded. She understood the horror, for the first time. It did happen. Here. A man died. My father.
What a relief to think these words! Even the pain of the words, that left her faint, confused, was a relief.
For the next several minutes Juliet lost track of her surroundings, and of time. Slipping into one of her trance-like states, that often accompanied her music. When she sang, when she breathed, in a specific way. Dreamy though open-eyed. Unconsciously she moved from side to side, keeping a deliberate beat. If I love my mother, I can love my father, too. And he needs me.
The sound of the rushing water entered her trance. Juliet perceived a subtle, secret rhythm in this sound. Consolation, solace. Juliet! Burn-a-by! Come to your father in the river. She had never heard this voice so distinctly. In a tone so urgent yet matter-of-fact. The sun shifted in the sky. It had become a wan sullen sun, withdrawing. On the highway, truckers slowed to get a closer look at the solitary girl with the windblown hair standing so still at the edge of the river; but the girl was oblivious of them. Attentive, fiercely concentrating on something she heard, the girl was oblivious of her surroundings.
A male voice sounded harshly—“Miss? What are you doing there?”
A police cruiser marked Niagara Falls Police Department braked to an abrupt stop on the highway shoulder and one of the officers called to Juliet who seemed not to hear. For there was the wind, the incessant wind, and Juliet’s hair whipping in the wind. “Miss? Stay where you are.”
A male voice, loud. A voice accustomed to giving orders and to being obeyed without question.
If Juliet had begun to hear, she gave no indication at first. A sullen teenaged girl. Stubbornly not-hearing a cop yelling at her from a few yards away, and not turning to him; though seeing now the moving uniformed figure in the corner of her eye. He was approaching his quarry cautiously, as he’d been trained. He didn’t want to frighten her and cause her to throw herself into the river.
“Miss? I’m talking to you. Look here.”
The spell was broken. Already the voices had faded, withdrawn. Juliet turned, and climbed the embankment as if finally she’d heard the harsh authoritative voice. But her eyes were heavy-lidded, downcast. She refused to look up. Her mouth worked, silently. The police officer stood squarely in front of her, bulky in his steel-gray uniform. She saw with disdain his booted feet. She saw his polished belt, his holster. The pistol in the holster. She saw his ridiculous badge, conspicuously shiny as a sheriff’s badge in a Hollywood movie. But she would not acknowledge his face, his eyes upon her. Not yet.
He was asking her sternly: why wasn’t she in school? what was she doing in this dangerous place? didn’t she see the warning signs? what was her name?
Juliet stood silent, staring at the ground. She was trapped, she couldn’t escape. You can’t run from a cop. He’d take her into custody, the power of the State was his.
Juliet swiped at her eyes, in a childlike gesture. In this instant she became a child, her mouth tremulous. She murmured she’d just come to the river to be alone—“To think about some things.”
“Miss, didn’t you see the signs out here? ‘Warning: No Pedestrians.’ ‘Dangerous Area.’ You don’t want to get too close to this river, miss. You should know better.”
Juliet nodded, trying not to cry. Oh, she would not cry! And how badly she wanted not to tell these hostile strangers her name.
In the back of the cruiser, separated from the police officers by a crude wire mesh, she wanted to ask Am I under arrest? But the mood was somber, a joke would be misunderstood.
And the police were being unexpectedly kind to Juliet. Once she’d obeyed, given in to their authority. The one who’d accosted her on the embankment was telling her now that he had a daughter her age, at St. Mary’s; the driver, a younger man, observed her in the rearview mirror, and told her it wasn’t “one hundred percent safe” for a girl like her, her age, and pretty, and alone, to be wandering in such places even in the daytime. “You understand what I’m saying, miss?”
How like Royall he sounded! Juliet murmured, “Yes, sir.”
They drove her home to Baltic Street. She’d had to tell them her address, and her name. She’d seen a flicker of recognition in their faces when she told them Burnaby.
6
/> SUDDENLY IN THE HUMID, gnat-infested summer of 1977 there came into their lives Joseph Pankowski of whom Ariah would speak, with fond derision, as the “shoe-repair man”—“the Jew who likes music.” Sometimes, “the Polish Jew, with the Irish setter.”
It was difficult to discern how Ariah felt about Mr. Pankowski. She forbade Juliet to “breathe a word” of him to Chandler and Royall. Chandler would brood, and make too much of a casual, inconsequential friendship between two “left-behinds”; Royall would tease. And, Ariah warned, she was in no mood to be teased.
Juliet, who was more comfortable with adults than with people her own age, had never met anyone like Joseph Pankowski. He fascinated her as a being from another planet would fascinate. You would wish to tell such a being nothing of yourself, for your “self” could be of little significance; all that mattered was him, mysterious and elusive; yet you dared not be rude, and ask questions. And there was the man’s wounded, stitched-together face, that drew the startled eyes of strangers, and made children stare.