The Day the Falls Stood Still

by Cathy Marie Buchanan

  “If I’m not mistaken, you were in a play?” Father says.

  I pause a moment, thinking of the picture Mother has set. “It went really well,” I say.

  “Jolly good.” He lifts the cloth from the basket.

  Before heading upstairs, Mother pours his tea and sets the pot on the table so I can help myself. She no longer has the time to ask about my plans for the day and then sit listening as though foraging for wild rhubarb were the most interesting activity in the world, to cram a year’s worth of mothering into a few short months as Isabel and I used to tease.

  Father is a small man, with large ears, a slender face, and a narrow chin. His eyebrows are bushy and separated by a crevice that deepens when he shifts his attention to some unshared thought. It can happen during a meal, a game of crokinole, or even midsentence as he speaks. Today, as he spreads butter on biscuits and stirs sugar into tea, his focus stays with me, but the crevice remains.

  I bite into a biscuit, and while it is edible, I am struck by its heaviness and again bemoan that Bride has been let go.

  “Your mother’s victory biscuits,” Father says. “She’s saving the white flour for the boys overseas.” Then he moves on to inquiring about my grades, about my progress in geometry and algebra and my lack of the same in harp, which I took up to escape sitting alongside Sister Louisa at the piano explaining, yet again, my failure to master Bach’s “Minuet in G.” Unruffled, he asks about the daughters of several of his former business associates. I nod and smile and say, “She’ll win the prize for elocution next year” or “She’s off to Boston for a holiday,” as Mother would expect me to. He even brings up the tea dress I made for Isabel’s trousseau.

  “The dress turned out wonderfully,” I say, even though it is balled in a corner of my trunk, wrinkled and out of sight.

  “Jolly good.”

  I am at a loss for words. I cannot mention the power company, a topic once guaranteed to trigger a lengthy response. And his colleagues and associates might be precarious terrain. And though it is what I most want to know, I am afraid to ask where he is headed, dressed as he is.

  He picks up yesterday’s Evening Review from beside his plate and flips it open. “That Beck,” he says. “He’s at it again.”

  Most of Father’s colleagues in the hydroelectric industry have nothing but loathing for Sir Adam Beck, and it is easy to understand why. He had given up politics and become the chairman of the Hydro-Electric Power Commission, set up by the premier to build the transmission lines that would carry Niagara’s power all over Ontario but also to keep a watchful eye on the power companies, like Father’s onetime employer.

  Even so, Father admires him. We have had a Conservative government in Ontario for the last ten years, and Father insists it was Beck’s campaign—that Niagara’s water power should belong to the people of Canada—that got them in. Before Beck, nearly every bit of the electricity made by the powerhouses on the Canadian side of the river was shipped off to the United States. More than once I had watched as Father lifted whatever tumbler was nearby and said, “Here’s to Beck. Without him, there’d be no Hydro-Electric Power Commission, no transmission lines, not much in the way of industry in Ontario.”

  “What’s he up to?” I say, hopeful that, as in the old days, Father will have plenty to impart.

  “He hasn’t given up on building a powerhouse at Queenston.” He swallows the last of his tea and wipes his mustache free of biscuit crumbs. “He’ll get his way. And you know what else? Any powerhouse he builds will dwarf the rest of them.”

  “But isn’t he supposed to stick with transmission lines?” I say, certain I had once heard Father thank his lucky stars Beck’s mandate had not included the generation of electricity.

  Father lifts an open palm in my direction, halting me. “Beck made sure all the newspapers covered it when word got out our powerhouses were charging more in Canada than in the U.S. And then he kicked up a fuss about the powerhouses siphoning off more water from the river than their charters set out.”

  “The newspapers had a heyday,” I say, remembering.

  “He’s been at it for a while, making sure everyone thinks the private power companies are as unscrupulous as they come. He’ll get his mandate changed. Clever old Beck, he’ll have it put to a vote. People love him. He’s taken on the stuffed shirts and brought them cheap electricity, and you’re too young to remember the coal famine, but plenty of voters do and plenty of them think it’s Beck who’ll keep them from ever again shivering in the dark.” With that he gathers his top hat and portfolio from the bench in the entrance hall, says, “I’m off,” and disappears out the front door.

  From the upstairs hallway, I call past Isabel’s partially open door, “I’ve brought biscuits and tea.”

  “Bess!” she says, and I push the door fully open with my hip.

  Isabel was flirtatious and charming in the way only the prettiest girls dared to be, the sort of girl it would be easy to dislike. But she was one of the most popular to have graduated from the academy, maybe the only girl ever to have simultaneously held the office of president for both the Athletic Association and the Gamma Kappa fraternity. Her marks were short of excellent, only because she could too often be found in the cozy little clubroom of the Gamma Kappa, chattering over a game of mah-jongg or sneaking off to short-sheet the bed of an unsuspecting dorm mate.

  But as I look at her now, she seems an altogether different person from the sister I know. Her complexion, once as smooth and pale as fresh cream, has lost the hint of ginger that keeps pallor in check. And her hair lies uncombed on her pillow, without the luster that comes with proper care. Worst of all, the bones of her cheeks and shoulders jut at sharp angles from beneath her scant flesh.

  She pushes herself to sitting, struggling with the pillow behind her back. “Thank God you’re home,” she says. “I’ve missed you so much.”

  I set the tray on the foot of her bed and straighten the pillow myself. “You’re so thin.”

  “Never mind about that,” she says.

  “You have to eat.” I hand her the plate with the biscuit on it.

  “Please, Bess. Don’t make a fuss.” She sets the plate on a small table beside her bed. “Mother’s nagging is enough.”

  My fingers bristle, momentarily poised to return the plate to her lap, but I only say, “I’ve missed you, too. No one ever tells me anything except you.”

  “Oh, Bess,” she says, “I wish I had better news.”

  “What’s going on?”

  She unclasps her bracelet, a series of ten linked oval plaques, each delicately embossed with tiny stars and edged with gilded cord, then reclasps it around her thin wrist. Father had given it to her as a graduation gift two years ago. We were in the academy parlor, waiting for a slice of cake, when he pulled a small felt pouch from his pocket and showed the bracelet to Mother, Isabel, and me. He made much of the fact that it was hammered and chipped from a sheet of aluminum a half century ago, back when aluminum was as valuable as gold. As he handed her the bracelet, he said it was only recently that the scientists had figured out how to use electricity to make large quantities of aluminum from bauxite, a plentiful ore remarkably like dirt. It did little to convince the three of us of the bracelet’s worth. His excitement waned momentarily, as he seemed to consider for the first time that Isabel might associate aluminum with the inner workings of an automobile. “Keep it in your jewelry box,” he said, patting her hand, but she fastened the bracelet around her wrist and said, “I’ll wear it every day.”

  The bracelet clatters dully as Isabel’s hand flops onto the bed. “There isn’t going to be an aluminum smelter in Niagara Falls,” she says.

  I had often heard father rhapsodizing in the academy parlor on Sunday afternoons about incomparable aluminum—beautiful to the eye, whiter than silver, indestructible by contact with air, strong, elastic, and so light that the imagination almost refuses to think of it as a metal. He said aluminum would turn Niagara Falls, with its n
ever-ending stream of hydroelectricity, into an industrial power.

  “Father and Mr. O’Reilly and Mr. Woodruff and God only knows who else bet their fortunes on the smelter,” she says. “Everyone says Father prompted all the fuss.”

  “Their fortunes?”

  “A couple of them had been promised orders from the Ministry of Militia and Defense if they sank a bit of cash into retooling their factories. But Father insisted the war wouldn’t last. He made promises, said the smelter was a done deal, a sure bet.”

  I sit down on the edge of the bed. “But he wouldn’t have said it if it wasn’t true.”

  “He thought it was. A bunch of bigwigs from Toronto wanted the smelter, and Father was in on the discussions because his powerhouse was supposed to supply the electricity.”

  “They backed out?”

  She nods, lets out a huff. “Yep, once all but the final documents were signed. And by then Father and his so-called pals had paid top dollar for land around the site and dumped loads of cash into everything from machinery for aluminum cookware to mail-order homes for the workers.”

  “Why’d the financiers back out?” My shoulders inch up.

  “They said they couldn’t make aluminum as cheaply as it’s made at Shawinigan Falls. It’s rubbish, though. With the war, it’s easier to make money churning out explosives and artillery shells.”

  “There’s nothing left?”

  “Nothing,” she says. “And it’s a whole lot easier for everyone to blame Father for their troubles than to admit their own greed. No one’s got time for him anymore, no one except Mr. Coulson. And I’ll bet he’s pleased as punch to have Father’s job.”

  “Mr. Coulson is devoted to Father.”

  “I know. I know,” she says, waving away my words. “Even so, he’s as ambitious as they come. And Mrs. Coulson, too. She hasn’t got the time of day for anyone with a smidgen less clout than Mr. Coulson.”

  “She used to bring us ribbons and paper dolls.”

  “Father was Mr. Coulson’s boss.”

  Not quite ready to adopt Isabel’s view, I pick at a thread on the coverlet. “She still gives Mother the time of day.”

  “Then she must figure Father isn’t down and out for good.”

  “But if she thinks he’ll get his job back …”

  “There’s no chance. Mr. Cruickshank had him sacked. That much I know. He must have gotten wind of the aluminum scheme.”

  “So?”

  “Near as I can tell, he decided he didn’t want his son involved with a bankrupt family, and the break would be a whole lot cleaner if he had Father sacked. At any rate, he could hardly keep Father on, not when he’s on the outs with a half dozen of Niagara Power’s customers.” Her gaze falls to the coverlet.

  “Did Boyce tell you that?”

  “When he broke off our engagement, he just stood there, a great cringing coward, hardly looking up from his feet.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, tucking my heels beneath me so that I am sitting cross-legged on the bed.

  “Don’t be.” She shakes her head. “He’s spineless. He never could stand up to his father. I don’t know why I ever thought that he would.”

  “We’ll figure something out.”

  She raises her fingers to her temples, closes her eyes. “It gets worse,” she says. “Father disappears every day and only comes back after midnight.”

  “He went out this morning, in his frock coat.”

  “He goes to one of the hotels. I’m almost sure. He’s drinking too much. I’ve heard him late at night, stumbling up the stairs.”

  “What?” My voice suggests shock, yet somehow it feels I have only been reminded of what I already knew, at least since the evening before, when I first glimpsed Mother in the dining hall, twisting the program in her hands. She sat alone, an aisle on one side and on the other three empty seats, a gap Mr. and Mrs. Huntington had chosen to leave. Father had lost his job and his fortune, and convinced a handful of his colleagues to gamble away theirs. Even so, there was something more that had caused folks to turn their backs on a woman as respected as Mother, something truly appalling, like a husband whiling away the days with his nose in a pint, particularly with so many young men suffering overseas.

  “Last week I told him I could smell the whiskey on him,” Isabel says. “He said I sounded like a prohibitionist, and I said if prohibition meant keeping fathers sober, then, war or no war, maybe I was. He left after that, some excuse about getting to the post office before the mail was picked up. He’s drinking, and Mother knows it and just pretends everything will be fine as long as she manages five dresses a week.”

  “We could help with the sewing,” I say.

  She folds her arms. “We’ll earn enough for biscuits and tea, and if we work our fingers to the bone, maybe a ham at Christmastime.”

  “Mother used to do all right as a dressmaker.”

  “Father was working as a clerk,” she says, “and they lived behind the slaughterhouse, and smelled blood and entrails all day long. They didn’t have two daughters to support.”

  Dr. Galveston prescribed sunshine and rest and positive thoughts for Isabel, and so far I have only set her worrying whether there will be a ham at Christmastime. “Let’s talk about something else.”

  “I’ve said my news—Father drinks, Mother sews.”

  “Just try, Isabel.”

  She sighs, says, “Tell me about Loretto.”

  There is a pause while I search for some scrap of safe news. “A young man helped Mother and me with my trunk last night. We took the trolley.”

  “Father didn’t show up.”

  “I’d guess he was a couple of years older than I am,” I say, refusing a return to the topic of Father. “He was camping at the whirlpool.”

  “You met him on the trolley?” she says, eyeing me skeptically. “What does he do?”

  “He was wearing a workingman’s clothes, but they were tidy, and plenty of gentlemen wouldn’t have bothered to help.”

  She huffs, a clipped bit of laughter. “A shopgirl could do better if she played her cards right.”

  It is the sort of sentiment I expect from Mother, not from Isabel, who is almost always delighted with any whiff of romance. “No one else offered to help,” I say.

  “I’m surprised Mother didn’t decide the two of you should carry the trunk yourselves.”

  “He carried the trunk on his shoulder, like it was nothing at all.”

  And then for a moment she is her old self, speaking with the impish grin that says “I am in cahoots with you.”

  “Remember the heart from the birthday cake set?” she says. “You were promised true love.”

  I found the heart at Isabel’s last birthday party, hidden inside a forkful of cake I had placed in my mouth. I slid my tongue over the metal, hoping for the heart, the token we all wanted most. But when I felt the hollow place where the two lobes met, I thought I had ended up with the thimble, which meant spinsterhood. I was pleased when I took the heart from my mouth, even more so when Kit picked a tiny, silver wishbone from her slice of cake. The wishbone, along with her good luck, confirmed the prophetic ability of the birthday cake set, even if Isabel was laughing and holding up the spinster’s thimble, unperturbed. By then she was engaged to Boyce Cruickshank and the tokens meant nothing at all.

  The heart is in a square tin in the bottom of my trunk, alongside a mishmash of programs—the Feast of the Nativity of Our Lady, Loretto Day, a Christmas pageant—also, a geometry examination on which I scored one hundred percent, several bits of embroidery I completed as a child, and the ribbon I was given for the prize for sewing. I do not know why I keep the heart. It is not useful or particularly pretty, and I know it is nonsensical and superstitious to believe in a birthday cake set. And it seems entirely wrong to hope for a bit of magic when an implication of the magic is a sister’s spinsterhood.

  I would like the conversation to linger on the heart and true love, but the thimble and spinsterhood are
an easy leap away, so I say, “I bet we could find him. I’ve seen him before, one Saturday outing at the river.”

  “Bess,” she says. “The Boyce Cruickshanks of the world might be out of the question, but you’re pretty and clever and kind. You don’t have to settle, not entirely.”

  “It’s not like I’m marrying him, and besides, Father had nothing when Mother met him.”

  Again, that huff. “Case in point.”

  I want to tell her she is acting like Mother, but she appears fragile against the starched-white linens and the solid wood of the headboard, not at all herself. “I’ll open the window,” I say.

  As I struggle with the window sash, I notice, just beyond the pane, small pieces of biscuit sitting on the windowsill. The birds left the crumbs behind, their bellies already full. I turn to her, my eyes surely saying what I know.

  “If you tell Mother,” she says, “I’ll have to mention your crush.”

  “You’re not well.” I hand her the plate, roughly, so that the biscuit nearly slides onto her lap.

  Suddenly she is weeping, tears silently streaming down her cheeks, unhindered by an attempt to wipe them away. “You’re right,” she says. “I’m not well.”

  What has become of my sister? Where is the girl who once taped a handy list of possible offenses to the confessional wall at the academy, the girl who let me borrow her rose chiffon gown even though she had not yet worn it herself, the girl who took so long to say good night that she regularly fell asleep in my bed? “I won’t tell, but you have to eat the biscuit.”

  She places a small piece into her mouth and chews until it can be nothing more than a watery pulp. With great concentration, she swallows. I watch her throat constrict, also the barely perceptible heave that follows, convincing me she will be sick. Once half the biscuit is gone, I say, “That’s enough.”

  She hands me what remains, and I place it on the windowsill with yesterday’s crumbs.

  Fother is in the spare bedroom, which I suppose I should call a sewing room now. The bed is gone, replaced by bolts of fabric, a dressmaker’s mannequin, and a sewing machine. She is on her knees, pinning a craft-paper pattern of her own making to a length of pale gray silk. I piece together the forms, the almost rectangle of a skirt, the convex cap of a sleeve tapering to the wrist, the four pieces of a bodice, the smaller forms of the waistband, neckline facing, and cuffs.