The Day the Falls Stood Still

by Cathy Marie Buchanan

  “Come on, Bess. She asked you to stay for supper twice last week and at least once the week before.”

  “What if my father doesn’t come home and say we’re moving to Buffalo?” I ask, suddenly anxious about our plans not working out.

  “Nothing will change, other than you staying put at Glenview until you’re eighteen.”

  It all seems so effortless, as though each piece of the puzzle will drop into place, as though our future will be quite the same way it is in our talk; still, as I lie in his arms, I am unable to shake a sort of fearfulness that has seemed to follow me about for the months since Isabel’s death.

  I have come to believe that for me grief feels remarkably like fear. There is the same constricted breath, the same muscular tension, the same agitation, the same need to swallow. At the outset, I supposed I was afraid because I had lost Isabel and was beginning to grasp that she was never coming back. Since, though, I have come to realize there is something more, and it has turned my world on its ear, making it disquieting at times, more uncertain than ever before. With the first glimpse of Isabel, lifeless on the stone beach, came a wariness, a wariness that grew heavy and thickened to doubt. And then, one day doubt solidified to conviction and I knew there was no mystery, no magic, nothing of the sort. I knew there was no eye on the sparrow. I knew there was no God.

  “You’re quiet,” Tom says.

  “I’m thinking about Isabel.”

  He pulls the picnic blanket around us a little more tightly. “It’s more than just Isabel,” I say. “Tell me.”

  He stays silent, his palm on the nape of my neck, while I think how to put it. Finally I say, “Every day, one way or another, there are moments when it feels like I’m met head-on by meaninglessness.”

  Tom has never once set foot in a church and has certainly not bought into any run-of-the-mill view of God; still, I am not surprised when he says, “But there’s meaning in everything. In dew. And wind. Even in the birds squawking at dawn.”

  “The birds squawking?” I say.

  “They’re calling their mates, and telling the other birds which branch is theirs.”

  “So?”

  “If the birds couldn’t find their mates, pretty soon we’d have no birds.” I shrug.

  “Knock out a creature, and a long line of other ones lose their prey.”

  “And that’s proof there’s something more than …” I wave my palms through the air.

  “That kind of complexity doesn’t happen by chance.”

  What I saw was a deep respect for nature, tinged with awe, not unlike my own for God, back before Isabel had thrown herself from the brink of the falls.

  Father arrives home from Buffalo well after sunset and, without removing his frock coat, takes the stairs two at a time. “Come on up, Bess. I have news.”

  “Well?” Mother says, as he crosses the threshold of their room.

  “Everything’s set. The first of November I start as head foreman, and Mr. McMicking let it slip that the missus has been at him to step back from running the place and his son isn’t any more interested in leather than in widgets. You ought to see it. He’s expanded into the buildings on either side, and he’s got an order backlog that’s long enough to see him through to the spring.”

  “I knew he’d still have a soft spot for you.” She takes his hand, and the smile I have not seen in weeks comes to her face.

  He sits down on the edge of their bed. “It isn’t aluminum.”

  “It’s enough,” she says. “In the morning, you can telephone Mr. Brimley and ask him to come out and let you know what Glenview is worth.” And I wonder if Mother is so suddenly well that she will have Glenview gleaming by the time Mr. Brimley arrives.

  Father speaks to her and she to him, without glancing in my direction. Why had he even bothered to call me upstairs? In their minds I am still a child, relegated to the sidelines, content to observe while my lot is cast. And so when I speak, their faces do not change. “I have a job here,” I say, “and a beau. A fiancé, actually. And I’ll board here, in Niagara Falls, maybe with Mrs. Andrews, until I’m eighteen, and then I’m marrying Tom Cole.”

  “What?” Father says.

  “That fishmonger?” Mother says.

  “Fergus Cole’s grandson? He’s a bartender at the Windsor, for God’s sake,” Father says.

  They wear shock and distaste on their faces, and I see there will be coldness toward both Tom and me, but there will be no lasting rift. I am their only child, their last hope. And Tom and I are a package now. My job is to make sure they see it that way. “He’s the most honorable man I’ve ever met.”

  “You’re being rash,” Mother says.

  “You married Father when you were eighteen,” I say, “and I won’t need consent.” Now the upturned corners of her lips drop and her mouth forms a straight line. Very likely she is remembering her own resolve at eighteen, a resolve that was no doubt formidable. Almost certainly, she knows there is nothing that can be done, that I will marry Tom.

  17

  Today I become Mrs. Tom Cole. At ten o’clock. I know it the moment I wake in my bedroom at Mrs. Andrews’s house. I know it before I remember it is my birthday, so trivial in comparison, except that, at eighteen, I am suddenly seen as fit to decide whom I will wed. I throw back the coverlet and feel the hardwood cold beneath my feet. From the window I see the day is as I had hoped, bright with a high blue sky and beneath it newly fallen snow, white and pristine.

  Mrs. Andrews must have been listening for water gurgling in the drain, because the minute I am back from my bath, she arrives carrying a tray with toast, tea, and a precious orange. While I eat she combs my hair and expertly loops and pins locks of it into place, all the while complaining about how unruly it is. For a moment I feel wistful. It should be Kit and Isabel buttoning me into my dress, dabbing a bit of rouge onto my cheeks. Oh, Mrs. Andrews is doing a fine job. It is not that. Brashness and all, she could not be any kinder, even if I were her daughter, rather than a substitute landed on her doorstep already fully grown. It just seems I should be giggling, whispering, remembering with girls I have known my entire life. As I clasp Isabel’s bracelet around my wrist, it occurs to me if she were here, alive, fastening the bracelet, I would not be marrying Tom at all. It was her death that led me back to him. A final parting gift.

  Last week Mrs. Andrews gave Tom and me what amounted to a first-rate trousseau. For him there was a canvas fishing vest with a dozen buttoned pockets, two of which were lined with rubber. She said she had seen something like it in a shop window in Toronto and had stopped then and there to sketch what she saw. For me there were two pretty housedresses, the practical sort I do not own. The week before she had asked me to model each while she pinned and marked the final adjustments and claimed the dresses were for a Mrs. Fenwick, who she said was built like me, rather like a boy. There were stacks of pillowcases and sheets with delicately crocheted or embroidered trim, and tablecloths and serviettes with bands of fine drawnwork, and intricately patterned quilts, also tea towels and aprons with rows of cross-stitch. It seemed a lifetime’s work, work begun by Mrs. Andrews as a young girl with dreams of her own. “You’re sure?” I said.

  “I was going to give it to the Daughters of Rebekah,” she said, “but I hardly thought a pack of orphans would appreciate the workmanship.”

  The wedding dress I have made for myself might best be described as charming or sweet. It is not a bit showy, not like the gown I beaded for Miss O’Leary. An overblouse of fine cotton tulle prettily drapes the fitted bodice. Three-quarter-length faux sleeves fall open at the shoulder, romantically so. The skirt is layered, long, filmy tiers of tulle. And the embroidery bordering the neckline and hem is my finest yet, but the fabric is inexpensive, suitable for kitchen sheers. I cannot help but think the dress exactly right, a sort of metaphor for the honest life Tom and I will live.

  We will be married at Town Hall. Mrs. Andrews will witness, also a fellow from the Windsor Hotel called Sean
Garvey. Mother and Father made the trip from Buffalo yesterday and will head back after the ceremony. Tom and I met them at the train station, and it all started off really rather well, with Father shaking Tom’s hand warmly, and Mother saying he has made a habit of telling everyone I was marrying Fergus Cole’s grandson. But then on the walk from the station to Mrs. Andrews’s we came upon a group of women crowded around the Hydro Circus, the caravan that travels from community to community promoting the advantages of electric appliances on behalf of Sir Adam Beck and his Hydro-Electric Power Commission. Father said, “That Beck, he’s certainly figured out how to make sure we’ll always need more electricity.”

  I thought there might be an argument. Father’s admiration of Beck was easily matched by Tom’s disdain. The earliest of the power companies took water from the Niagara just upriver from the falls, then whisked it through penstocks to turbines and returned it to the lower river just beneath the brink. The falls themselves were diminished, but the lower river was left intact. But if Beck’s powerhouse were to be built at Queenston, more water would be siphoned off, and this time it would be diverted around the falls, and also the rapids and whirlpool of the lower river.

  “If he gets his way, there’ll be nothing left to go over the falls,” Tom said.

  I waited on tenterhooks. How many times had I heard Father comment on the water still running to waste over the brink? “Maybe so,” he said, “but all that water would rise again as power and light.”

  Tom jutted his chin toward the caravan. “He’s pumping up demand, telling people like Bess and I we’re not keeping up if we haven’t got an electric dust collector.”

  “It’s called progress,” Father said.

  “That’s enough from the both of you,” Mother said, and then after a moment, “Tom, it’s ‘telling people like Bess and me’ not ‘Bess and I.’”

  “Mother!” I said.

  Mrs. Andrews hosted a supper for the five of us—roast beef, braised parsnips, and, for dessert, apple tart. Afterward she made herself scarce, and Mother and Father presented Tom and me with a bank draft for three hundred dollars. I found myself wondering, unkindly, if the generosity of the gift might be their way of telling me that they were doing just fine, that I had been mistaken not to follow them to Buffalo.

  It was the first I had seen of them since late autumn, since the near silence of the weeks spent packing up Glenview. While Father busied himself with finding suitable accommodation in Buffalo and then selling the many possessions that would not fit into the three rooms he had leased, Mother and I sorted out Isabel’s room. I had proposed the task before, but Mother had been unwilling. My own uneasiness became obvious once we began. To disturb Isabel’s things seemed to risk erasing some telltale detail of her life. Was there significance in the position of the dresses in her wardrobe? Had the book on her bedside table meant anything? What about the pages flanking the embroidered bit of ribbon she used to mark her page?

  I made discoveries, too, that caused me to wonder whether I had really known her at all. There was the spinster’s thimble from the birthday cake, for instance, tucked into a handkerchief, hidden in the back corner of a drawer. At her birthday party she had held it aloft, laughing and unperturbed, already engaged. And yet, she had been unable to toss the cheap bit of metal into the wastebasket.

  There was a newspaper clipping, too, about the Victor Home for Women in Toronto, where pregnant girls and unwed mothers were given shelter and sent to a laundry each day to learn the trade that would set them on the path to self-sufficiency. Penciled into the margin in Isabel’s untidy hand was “341 Jarvis Street.” I sat on her bed, the clipping bunched in my fist, unable to imagine her thinking the Victor Home enough of a possibility to have sought the address.

  Most of her clothes, even the ones I did not think I would use, went into the several trunks I would take to Mrs. Andrews’s house. It was easier than giving them away and certainly better than deciding a chemise, showing signs of wear, was to be pitched. Mother would sigh, holding up a dress. I would nod, remembering Isabel off to a concert or a luncheon in the mint dupioni or ivory lace. We both wept as Mother tucked the wedding gown she had painstakingly beaded for Isabel into one of my trunks. By the time we finished with the house, none of us had an ounce of energy to spend on a wrenching good-bye. They waved from the railcar window—Father had sold the Cadillac to Mr. Coulson—and I waved back. Though I felt melancholy afterward, the dominant emotion was relief.

  “Husband.” I try out the word I have wanted to say ever since we left Town Hall. I waited, until now, until we were behind the closed door of his room at the Windsor Hotel. In all honesty, the spot falls far short of my ideal for a wedding night, but when Mother asked a month ago, I smilingly said, “Tom’s room at the Windsor Hotel, of course,” and afterward could hardly have suggested to him that we splurge. But more than that, twice he had teased me about my spendthrift ways, once when I said I was tired of pike and suggested he bring less fish to Mrs. Andrews, and a second time when I paid twenty-five cents for the lemons I needed to make his beloved lemon squares.

  He kisses the nape of my neck and says, “You’ll tell me, won’t you, when you hear me make a mistake?”

  I am baffled for the second it takes me to grasp that he is talking about the grammar errors Mother is so fond of pointing out. “If you want me to. You hardly ever do.”

  “I want you to be proud.” With that his mouth moves lower, kissing each vertebra of my spine as he unbuttons my dress. When I am standing in only my bloomers and stockings, my dress circling my feet, he picks me up in his arms and lays me on his narrow bed. “Wife,” he says, lying down beside me.

  Then his hands are on me, loosening my hair, sliding over my skin. I lift my hips, and he pushes my bloomers to my thighs and then sits up a minute to slip them past my feet. Lying on his bed in nothing but my stockings and garters, I watch him look at me, at the way his eyes linger, the way he swallows, the way his chest rises and falls. He enters me still wearing his best shirt, and I feel a sharp pain.

  It is all over more quickly than I would have guessed and I suppose, truth be told, a disappointment. When he lifts himself from me, I can still feel his warmth inside me, between my legs. Then he is grinning and stroking my hair and saying that next time will be slower, that next time will be for me.

  He enters me a second time, after much of the touching and kissing that had been confined to the glen. I bend my knees and place my feet flat on the bed, alongside his thighs, and raise my hips, pushing against his weight as it somehow feels I should. After a bit of awkwardness we fall into a rhythm, and soon I am breathless, and then moaning and trembling, and then, at last, still.

  Today I became the wife of a soldier. At ten o’clock. The forms with which he would enlist were in his breast pocket, over his heart, even as we were pronounced husband and wife.

  I was the one who asked him to wait until the afternoon to hand them in, until I was his wife. He had laughed and said, “No one is going to drag me off the minute I sign up, if that’s what you think,” but I said, “Please, Tom, just to be sure,” and he said, “All right, Bess. All right.”

  We went directly from Town Hall to the recruiting office, I still in my gown, Tom still in his suit. He signed the forms and said, “Grandson,” when the officer asked if he was related to Fergus Cole.

  “Remarkable fellow, your grandfather.”

  “He was,” Tom said, sliding the forms along the desktop to me. I wrote out my name. And it was done, as easy as that.

  I know he did not worry, even for a moment, that I might withhold my consent, that as his wife I could. And I did not consider, even for a moment, that I could refuse to sign, that as his wife it was within my rights. I did not think it, not for a moment, even though his leaving is what I fear most.

  He will cross a vast ocean I have never seen and fight in a land I do not know, where already so many have been lost. He will leave me, his train disappearing from view as I sta
nd waving, bereft, already waiting for him to come home.

  Book

  TWO

  LOWER RIVER

  January 1919–August 1923

  18

  F or nearly three years I have waited for this day, the day Tom will at long last return. More times than I can count, I have imagined the crush of his embrace as he lifts me and my feet leave the railway station platform. I have imagined him picking up Jesse, too, and swinging him in a full circle while he shrieks his delight. But in reality, Tom is a stranger to Jesse, as is Jesse to Tom.

  It was early summer, the year we were married, when Tom’s battalion left Camp Niagara, where they had been training and camping out, and by then Jesse hardly showed, only a slight rise between my hips where it used to be flat. He was born in the autumn, and even after six hours of pushing and thinking I would die if the contractions did not let up, I gasped at my first glimpse of him. He was more blue than pink, and his small mouth was struggling for breath beneath a thin, slick veil. Dr. Galveston said it was nothing, only a caul, a portion of the amniotic membrane, and lifted it from Jesse’s face. Some said it was a sign of good luck. Others said it meant Jesse would have second sight. Mrs. Andrews said she mentioned it to the Polish butcher, and he said in his country werewolves came into the world with cauls. I paid little attention to the nonsense, but then a letter from Tom arrived.