The Day the Falls Stood Still

by Cathy Marie Buchanan

  Which part of our returned intimacy have I most missed? Is it early on, when pleasure and anticipation are inseparable, when I ache for more but have no wish to alter in the slightest the stroking, the murmured endearments, the hands and mouth on my skin? Or is it later, when our bodies are entwined, moving together, when anticipation fades and the pleasure of the moment reigns? Or afterward, when we share a pillow, when there is a feeling of fullness, of completeness, that I have become whole?

  At breakfast Tom is in high spirits, chuckling to himself because Jesse, still in his pajamas, is waiting at the back door, fishing rod in hand. It has become their routine, setting off for the river each morning, coming back in time for supper. Every few days I will catch him in the doorway, golden in the late afternoon sun, eyes glinting, filled with wonder and awe. “Jesse spent half the morning tossing twigs and stones into a pool, figuring out what floats,” he will say, or “The standing wave off Thompson’s Point was as wild as I’ve ever seen it” or, most notably of all, “I felt Fergus out there with us today.”

  Other days he comes in, and there is sorrow in his voice and I know he is again mourning the river, the river we have not yet lost.

  Lake Erie sits a full three hundred feet above Lake Ontario, a drop nearly twice that of the falls, and the clever engineers of Beck’s Hydro-Electric Power Commission have figured out how to put an end to the power and money still running to waste. More water will be diverted and much farther back from the brink, as far upriver as Chippawa. And it will be put back only once the river flattens out at Queenston Heights, the farthest reach of the gorge, twelve miles away. In between they are digging a canal and making their own waterfall, hidden inside the penstocks delivering the plunging river to the turbines of the powerhouse. The newspapers say the Queenston-Chippawa power project dwarfs any hydroelectric scheme yet undertaken in the world. They say it rivals the Panama Canal. They say eight thousand men toil day and night, blasting, shoveling, hauling away solid rock.

  I have heard Tom’s distress and said, “But only the other day you were saying how spectacular the standing wave off Thompson’s Point was.”

  “Not for long. The river is changing. Remember the American channel all jammed up with ice.”

  Goat Island divides the Niagara River into two channels at the brink of the falls, and during spring thaw the American channel became so congested that in places the cliff face of the American Falls was bone dry. Tom said that the channel was shallower than the Canadian one, that with all the canals and powerhouses the river level had dropped, that there just was not enough water to carry the ice over the brink.

  “Open any newspaper,” he said. “You’ve seen the ads.”

  For weeks he has made a habit of pointing out the Hydro-Electric Power Commission advertisements telling us we ought to be using electric griddles and kettles and irons, and cranking up the electric heaters when a sweater would do. And then he stopped in at the Windsor Hotel to say hello the other day and struck up a conversation with a small group of men meeting there, among them a tour operator, a pair of lawyers, several merchants, and an alderman.

  Afterward he stood, wild-eyed, nearly filling the doorway of the sewing room. “All of them are against the Queenston-Chippawa power project, or at least that there’s no one keeping an eye on Beck,” he said. “They say the Niagara Falls Park Commission’s a joke, and they’re right, considering it was set up to preserve the area around the falls.”

  “The commission’s done wonders with Queen Victoria Park,” I said. And they had. There were drinking fountains and restrooms and livery stables and picnic grounds with a tennis lawn, a ball field, and a bowling green. There was a decent road and no one stopping you to pay a toll.

  “You know where they get their money?” He folded his arms, rocked back on his heels. “By selling the rights to siphon off water to the power companies.”

  I set down the collar I was understitching. “Before the commission, we had a bunch of hucksters charging the tourists a fee just to look at the falls, and burning down each other’s property every chance they got.”

  “It gets worse,” he said. “The chairman of the commission is Philip Ellis, and he used to head up the Toronto Hydro-Electric Power Commission. Some watchdog. He’s a crony of Beck, for God’s sake.”

  He unrolled a magazine he had kept clenched in his fist since coming home. “It’s called The Hydro Lamp, and it’s Beck’s,” he said, thwacking it against the frame of the door. “It’s him behind the sales effort. He’s got the Hydro Circus and Hydro stores and floats in parades, advertisements everywhere you look, and now he’s got a magazine all about upping the demand for electricity.”

  “No need to raise your voice,” I said, irked that I might never own an electric iron.

  “As long as he keeps the blackouts coming, everyone will keep clapping him on the back for getting the Queenston- Chippawa project under way.”

  Mostly I admire Tom’s allegiance to the river. Still, when I am tallying our unpaid bills and working out how many more gowns I need to take on in order to put aside even a dollar or two for a house of our own, or when Mother calls, always getting around to asking whether I have spoken to Tom about employment with the Hydro, there is a part of me that wishes he was just as pleased with the Queenston-Chippawa power project as nearly everyone else. The canal is only partially dug. The penstocks do not exist. Twice already I have dipped into the money my parents gave us as a wedding gift. And soon there will be another mouth to feed, another body to clothe, another round of bills from Dr. Galveston to pay.

  And now, with breakfast finished and Tom laughing and saying to Jesse, “Maybe I’ll put my pajamas back on. Maybe we can trick the fish into thinking we’re not fishermen,” it seems as good a time as any to pass along what I had promised Mrs. Coulson I would.

  “There’ll be no fishing in your pajamas,” I say to Jesse, and then, when he is halfway up the stairs, I turn to Tom, still sitting at the table. “You know I’ve been sewing for Mrs. Coulson.”

  He nods.

  “I’ve told you Mr. Coulson used to work for my father, that Father took him under his wing.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s why she comes to me,” I say. I would never say to Tom that I sometimes wonder if she is trying to guard me from the ruin she feels is inevitable without her guiding hand.

  He pushes his chair back from the table. “She comes to you because you’re good.”

  “It’s not why she came in the first place. She didn’t even think I could sew; her first order was for a skirt I could have made when I was ten.”

  “I know all this, Bess. I know the Coulsons are indebted to your father, to your family.”

  “He’s with the Hydro, top brass on the Queenston-Chippawa project.” It is something more he would already know, as would anyone who picked up the Evening Review every now and then.

  “He’s offering me a job?” Tom says. “Is that what this is about?” He plunks his mug down on the table.

  “I know it isn’t ideal, but there’s not much out there and there’s the baby on the way.” There is pleading in my voice, a whiny, breathless want, and so I pause, clear my throat. “We did talk about a place of our own, way back when we were first engaged.”

  “We talked about trapping and fishing and chickens in the yard, too.” He folds his arms, tips his chair onto its hind legs.

  “It’s our old dream,” I say, remembering—a small house with a view of the river and a garden to keep us in vegetables, a couple of chickens to keep us in eggs, a cow to keep us in milk. It is more than enough.

  His face softens, and he tilts his chair back to upright.

  “You’d be a foreman. You wouldn’t start on the bottom rung.”

  “A foreman?” Bewilderment comes to his face.

  “That’s what Mrs. Coulson said. She’s been after me to send you along to Mr. Coulson for ages, and then ever since the ice bridge, she’s been badgering me nonstop.”

&n
bsp; “It doesn’t make sense.”

  I shrug, smile.

  His brow knits. His lips become a thin line. “I’ll think about it,” he finally says.

  22

  Iwalk beneath the maples of Fairview Cemetery, pausing at Sadie’s and Fergus’s headstones, laying a handful of daisies at the base of each, and then continue on. I am here for Isabel today, the fourth anniversary of her death.

  From a ways off I see a bouquet propped against her headstone, and I remember Mother saying she and Father had stopped by the Sunday before. The day had been hot, and she had complained about the grass. “As dry and as bleached as straw,” she said. “Thank goodness for the maples. Thank goodness Isabel has a bit of shade.”

  I pick up the bouquet—irises, pale yellow with dark yellow throats—and I am perplexed. The petals are fresh, despite the heat, despite the drought and the three days that have passed since Mother and Father were in town. Also, they are the dwarf variety, and I am sure I remember Mother saying the shortest of the irises come first, with the daffodils, the next with the tulips, and the tallest no later than July. But it is August, and the irises are less than a foot in length. Someone had bothered with a florist, and it was not Mother, even if she could somehow have managed to coax a few coins from Father. No. There is no Mason jar of water on the yellow grass, nothing to have kept the blooms from collapsing in the heat for three days.

  What is more perplexing still is that irises were Isabel’s favorite, and of the lot she preferred the dainty blooms and slender leaves of the dwarfs. She preferred pale yellow. I remember that.

  Mother had provided the flowers for the May Day celebrations at the academy every year, and every year Isabel and I were chosen to help out. After all, it was our mother’s garden that had been stripped bare, Glenview’s flowers that we would twist into crowns, bind into bouquets, tie to the maypole around which we would later dance.

  I remember Isabel at the far end of a long table in the academy dining hall, her fingers knotting a bit of twine around a simple bouquet. She works, spreading the stalks, fanning the pale yellow blooms. She holds up the bouquet to inspect it and sees me approach. “My very favorite,” she says. “Like winter butter, except the throats. They’re more like lemon drops.”

  Iraise the bouquet, the one left behind on her grave, to my chin. “Who?” I say, a bloom brushing my bottom lip. Who would know the anniversary? Who would know she liked the pale yellow dwarfs? Mary Egan? Grace Swan? Maeve O’Neill? Vivian Spence? Each had come to view Isabel laid out in the drawing room. Each had said she would call again, and Mary Egan had, but only a few times. Mrs. Coulson? She had been hit hard by Isabel’s death; still, I could hardly imagine her wandering in a cemetery, and irises would be an improbable guess. Kit Atwell? A warming thought, but only wishful thinking on my part.

  I set the bouquet back against the headstone and gather my skirt, arranging myself on the yellow grass. At Fairview, more often than not, my thoughts linger on Isabel and I am able to lose myself in some memory: the time she balanced a penny atop every hymnal in the academy chapel, so that when we picked up the books to sing, the pennies clattered to the ground; the time she sent an anonymous valentine to Father O’Laughlin; the time she challenged Boyce to a game of one-on-one and whipped him eleven baskets to six. My most troubled moments come when I realize I have not thought of her for several days or more. It is then it seems that her life was inconsequential, that mine may be as well and everyone else’s, too. We all matter so very little, not at all after a generation or two. And it is the same for all mankind; not even the greatest of men amount to anything that will survive the forward march of time. It is in these moments of despair I most miss the idea of God, the idea that life has meaning, the idea that we are something more than the products of the random variations and natural selection Charles Darwin put forth.

  I wait, fingers quietly raking the grass, but today nothing comes. Mother has said that she often whispers a prayer, that she sometimes talks to Isabel as though she were still here. “About what?” I asked. “Whatever I need to sort out,” she said.

  “Isabel,” I say, shredding the seeds from a stalk of grass with my fingernail. I want to tell her about Tom, that we are married, that I have found true love. I want to tell her about the Queenston-Chippawa power project, about the position Tom has not yet seen Mr. Coulson about. “Is it wrong to want my husband to work?” I want to ask. “Is it wrong, when there is a second child on the way?”

  “Is it wrong, when it is what eight thousand men do every day, when the project is steamrolling forward with or without Tom?”

  Oh, how I want to put these questions to Isabel, to watch her mull them over, to hear her reply. What would I give for a single word? Any word. A sigh. A throat cleared.

  But nothing has changed in four years. I live without Isabel. I weigh options and make decisions, and know Isabel cannot so much as hint what is best. Nor is there some other shepherd tending and guiding, nudging me onto the right path.

  In the evening I telephone Mother and say, “I went to the cemetery today, and there was a bouquet on Isabel’s grave.”

  “Maybe one of the girls from the academy?”

  “It was irises, pale yellow dwarfs.”

  “Oh,” Mother says and then moment later, “Could it have been Boyce?”

  “Boyce?” I lean my forehead against the wall and hear Father, his voice muffled in the background, ask who is paying for the call.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” Mother says, likely waving him away.

  But if Boyce is remembering Isabel’s favorites, and then finding dwarf irises in the summertime and making the trek to Niagara Falls, does it mean he loved her even as she was swept over the brink of the falls? Would he eventually have defied his father and made her his wife? Had she misjudged?

  Surviving adversity was the furthest thing from my mind as I tramped the Loretto corridors from one predictable day to the next. Still, I can say with near certainty, if I had been asked to bet on one of us, it would have been Isabel. Even now it seems a sort of bullheadedness is chief among the traits necessary to prevail, a trait Isabel had in spades. I had marveled as she worked her magic, as Mother added my entire class to the wedding list though my own pleas had been turned down, and marveled again when Isabel brought about a letter-writing campaign, the net of which was the Duchess of Connaught and Princess Patricia standing in the academy cupola, taking in the view of the falls. Even Mother Febronie had acquiesced and hung the basketball hoop Isabel had not given up on despite two years of “It isn’t seemly, Isabel, girls ruddy and hot, panting and out of breath.”

  “I should be getting Jesse into bed,” I say to Mother before hanging up the telephone.

  I remember Isabel and me in the central foyer at Loretto, looking at the painting of Saint Michael the Archangel hanging on the wall. Head cocked, she says, “It hints at womanly strength. That’s why the sisters put it up.”

  In the portrait Saint Michael’s sandaled foot firmly pins an enemy’s head to the earth. His right arm is held high, brandishing a sword. His abdomen is muscled, his chest well defined, his thighs sculpted, his calves taut. “You’re daft,” I say “He’s wearing a frock. It’s proof enough for me.”

  His tunic is short and its bodice sheer, just a wash of blue, and I suppose it really could be described as an immodest dress. I consider his golden locks, his full lips, his rounded chin, his feathery wings. Beyond the muscled body, he is feminine, androgynous at least. “Maybe,” I say.

  “Women aren’t so meek. The suffragettes know it. And the sisters, too.”

  Isit curled up beneath the telephone, elbows on my knees, palms cupping my chin. If only Isabel had tapped into the girl she had been and persevered, just for a bit. It is nothing new, me thinking that Isabel could have managed, that happiness was a hairbreadth away. After all, I have become a mother and a wage earner. I have survived, and she could have done the same. Yes, I have Tom, but she would have had me. And n
ow, though it is devastating even to think it, there is the possibility she would have had Boyce.

  23

  Tom is in the kitchen washing up after breakfast when the telephone rings. I am in the sewing room, an ear cocked, wondering about the likelihood of Mr. Coulson calling so soon. It was only yesterday that Mrs. Coulson had been in for a fitting. As usual she inquired about Tom, and when I said, “No, he hasn’t found anything, not yet,” she said, “Bess, do you think he’d mind very much if Mr. Coulson gave him a call?”

  I hear Tom say, “Hello,” and “Yes, of course, I know who you are,” and then after a long pause, “The newspaper lays it on pretty thick, but thanks anyway,” and after a longer pause still, “Yes, it’s a lot of money. I need a bit of time though. I want to talk it over with Bess.”

  Then he is on the stairs and, a moment later, in the doorway of the sewing room. I look up from the lapel I am turning right side out.

  “It was Mr. Coulson,” he says. “The Queenston-Chippawa power project still needs a foreman, and the job pays thirty-five dollars a week.”

  “Thirty-five dollars.”

  “It’s a lot,” he says. I hear uncertainty rather than delight.

  “He’s grateful to my father.”

  “There’s more to it than that,” he says.

  And he is right. There are telephone calls when the river rises, stranding a fisherman on a rock, and more calls when migrating whistling swans, having settled on the upper river for rest, find themselves swept over the brink and then, moments later, maimed and exhausted below. When an empty rowboat turns up in the river, when a boy does not show up for a meal, when someone other than Tom spots a body, the telephone rings, and he and Jesse head out the door. Cecil Randal reports the rescued swans and fishermen in the Evening Review, and it makes sense that Mr. Coulson would see the articles and be just as impressed as everyone else. “Everyone loves a hero, Tom,” I say.