The Falls

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Suddenly he was at the railing.

  At Terrapin Point.

  So soon?

  His hands groped and closed about the topmost rung of a railing. He lifted his right foot, a slippery-soled shoe, nearly lost his balance but righted himself, like an acrobat positioning himself on top of the railing even as a part of his mind recoiled in disbelief and bemusement thinking You can’t be serious, Gil! This is ridiculous, you graduated top of your class, they’ve given you a new car, you can’t die. But in his pride he was over the railing, and in the water, swept instantaneously forward with the rushing current powerful as a locomotive and within swift seconds his skull was broken, his brain and its seemingly ceaseless immortal voice extinguished forever, as if it had never been; within ten swift seconds his heart had stopped, like a clock whose mechanism has been smashed. His backbone was snapped, and snapped, and snapped like the dried wishbone of a turkey clutched at by giggling children and his body was flung lifeless as a rag doll at the foot of the Horseshoe Falls, lifted and dropped and lifted again amid the rocks and sucked downward amid churning water and winking miniature rainbows, lost now to the appalled sight of the sole witness at the railing at Terrapin Point—though shortly it would be regurgitated from the foot of The Falls and swept downriver three-quarters of a mile past the Whirlpool Rapids and into the Devil’s Whirlpool where it would be sucked downward from sight and trapped in the spiraling water—the broken body would spin like a deranged moon in orbit until, in His mercy, or His whimsy, God would grant the miracle of putrefaction to inflate the body with gases, floating it to the surface of the foaming gyre, and release.

  The Widow-Bride of The Falls:

  The Search

  1

  Damned, she would speak of herself.

  Yes you could see it. In her eyes. Poor woman!

  No one among the staff of the Rainbow Grand could state with certainty when she’d first appeared downstairs in the lobby: the young red-haired woman soon to be known, in popular imagination, as the Widow-Bride of The Falls. It was about 10:30 A.M. of June 12, 1950 when some of them began to notice her, but without taking particular note. The lobby of the Rainbow Grand was spacious, and crowded. A passing bellboy may have stepped into her wavering path and nearly collided with her, quickly apologizing, but as quickly continuing on his way. A waitress in The Café would speak of seeing her—“Or someone just like her”—at about that time. But it was June, season of weddings. It was honeymoon season in Niagara Falls and the lobby of the old Victorian Rainbow Grand on Prospect Street was festive with people, mostly couples. There were lines at the registration counter with its ornate gilt scrollwork and, overhead, a sun-burst clock held aloft by a smiling Cupid. AMOR VINCIT OMNIA. In the center lobby, in cushioned wicker chairs, men were seated with crossed legs, smoking cigars, pipes. Cigarette smoking was general. Leading off the lobby was the Rainbow Terrace, an expensive dining room serving Sunday brunch. At the rear of the lobby, late breakfast and other refreshments were being served in The Café, a casual but elegant area surrounded by potted trees and tropical flowers; on a raised platform, an ethereal long-haired young woman harpist played Irish airs—“Danny Boy,” “The Rose of Tralee,” “An Irish Lullaby.” Frequently, guests were paged over an amplifying system by a disem-bodied male voice. What a commotion! Like the comforting humming buzz of a hive. Or the murmurous vibratory roar of The Falls.

  Almost, you could drift and eddy in this space mesmerized, unthinking. You could fall under the spell of the harp’s long delicate stroking notes, barely discernible above the crowd noise. You could find yourself standing transfixed in one spot not knowing where you were, or why.

  She was alone. That stood out. Everyone else with someone, or in a hurry to get somewhere. But not her.

  The Widow-Bride, when first seen, looked nothing like a bride, still less like a widow. She was wearing a floral-print organdy shirtwaist with a flared skirt, of the kind a high school girl might wear to her graduation. Its sash was a crimson ribbon, limply tied in a bow. Its mother-of-pearl buttons were elaborately but crookedly buttoned to her throat as if she were cold. She appeared to be wearing a white glove, and carrying the other. Her hair, the hue of faded rust, had been fashioned into an inexpert French twist, and was already loosening; she’d pinned a pink rosebud to the twist, and the rosebud was drooping. Her stockings were a size or two too large for her extremely slender legs, and were baggy at the ankles. Her shoes were white patent leather with a medium heel: Sunday church shoes. Her face was sallow, and sprinkled with freckles like dirty raindrops; at times it appeared smudged, partly erased like a pastel drawing. As the hotel concierge would later recount to Clyde Colborne, proprietor of the Rainbow Grand, this strange, solitary figure moved slowly and haltingly “like a sleepwalker” amid the hubub of the lobby. For a while she stood by the elevators looking anxiously at the opening doors as if waiting for someone to appear; after about twenty minutes, when the harpist took her break from playing, the red-haired woman was perceived to awaken and glance about, startled. At once she left the café area and disappeared from view. But a while later, there she was again: in the center lobby, in the lounge area where guests convened, standing and seated, reading newspapers, smoking. Here, the red-haired woman was observed gazing with childlike intensity, yet a kind of blindness, at the faces of certain of the male guests, who were made to feel uncomfortable. Several of these men spoke to the red-haired woman, no doubt politely, but she drew quickly away, with a shake of her head as if no, now she realized, this individual wasn’t anyone she knew, or was seeking. “I could see she wasn’t propositioning them. Nothing like that. Not a one of them complained.” (Though afterward several of these men, remembering the encounter, would grant interviews to local media. Yes you could tell. It was her husband she was looking for. But she was too shy to say. To say his name. Or it was like, maybe, she’d forgotten his name. But she knew somehow he was dead. She was in shock. My heart went out to her!)

  Bellboys would later recount that the red-haired woman turned up again in the elevator corridor where she stood to one side, her head averted, to watch, at a furtive angle, guests coming and going, passing around her like swift-flowing water around a rock. Later, she drifted to the entrance of the Rainbow Terrace, where the maître d’ spoke to her—“It was like speaking to a zombie. She was polite, but inside her eyes, not-there.” When he saw her partly ascending the crimson-carpeted staircase that led to the mezzanine, and hesitating as if she’d become light-headed, the concierge asked an assistant to approach her to ask if he could be of help, but when he did, the red-haired woman shook her head no—“Real gracious, like she was sorry to disappoint me.” Again she disappeared (into the women’s lounge, as the attendant there would later recount) only to reappear a few minutes later, her face washed, at the lobby entrance; here she took a position a few yards from the main, revolving door, which was in continuous motion.

  “It was like she was waiting for someone to come through that door. But she knew he wasn’t going to come. So—she stood there.”

  By this time—it was after noon, busier than ever in the Rainbow Grand with churchgoing patrons arriving for the popular Sunday brunch—the drooping pink rosebud had fallen from the red-haired woman’s head. The clumsy French twist was coming undone in wisps and strands of thin hair. The white glove she’d been carrying was gone. Though she must have been exhausted, yet the red-haired woman stood with the resolve of a department store mannequin—“like she wasn’t even blinking”—staring at the revolving door. How long the solitary woman would have stood there if the concierge hadn’t at last approached her, he wouldn’t have wanted to think.

  “Ma’am? Excuse me? Are you a guest at the Rainbow Grand?”

  The red-haired woman seemed not to hear the concierge at first. When he entered her line of vision she stepped to one side, to continue to gaze at the revolving door. It was “like she was hypnotized—and didn’t want to be wakened.” He repeated his question, polit
ely but forcibly, and this time the red-haired woman glanced at him and nodded, just discernibly, yes.

  “May I be of assistance, then?”

  “ ‘Assistance.’ ” In a scratchy, almost inaudible voice she spoke slowly. It was as if the word was foreign, puzzling.

  “Help? May I help you?”

  The red-haired woman’s eyes lifted to the concierge’s face slow as glass eyes turning upward in a doll’s head. The skin beneath the eyes was discolored, bluish. There was a reddened mark on the underside of the woman’s slender jaw as if she’d injured herself, or had been injured. (“A man’s fingers it looked like. Just the shape of them. Like he’d grabbed her, tried to strangle her. But maybe not. Maybe it was my imagination. Afterward, it must’ve faded.”) The woman squinted, and adjusted her rings. Apologetically she shook her head, no.

  “No, ma’am? I can’t help you?”

  “Thank you but no one can help me. I believe I am—damned.”

  The concierge was shocked. At this moment an exuberant family burst through the revolving doors like fireworks and he wasn’t sure he’d heard what he’d heard, or that he wanted to hear it.

  “Ma’am? Excuse me, what?”

  “Damned.”

  Her lips moved numbly. She spoke matter-of-factly. She would have turned away except the concierge touched her wrist, and led her into a quieter corner of the lobby. Clearly, the woman was unwell. Emotionally disturbed, mentally deranged. She was of a good background, you could tell. Not wealthy but solidly middle-class, or a little above. A small-town patrician. The accent was unmistakable: upstate New York, but not western New York. Somewhere east, maybe north. A married woman, a well-bred woman. Something had happened to her or had been done to her and the concierge was fervently hoping that whatever it was, whoever the perpetrator had been, it hadn’t happened on the hotel premises. Or, if it had, the Rainbow Grand would not be liable.

  “Ma’am, I wish you’d tell me what’s wrong? So that I could try to help?”

  The red-haired woman asked earnestly, “What’s wrong with me? Or with him?”

  “Who is him?”

  “My husband.”

  “Ah! Your husband’s name is—?”

  “Reverend Erskine.”

  “Reverend Erskine? I see.” As he would tell Mr. Colborne, the concierge now had a recollection of having seen this woman in the company of a youngish man the previous day, when they’d checked into the hotel. He’d had no exchanges with the couple and didn’t know their names, however. “Has something happened to him?”

  (The concierge felt a stab of apprehension. Of course, you expected the worst. Unlocking a door upstairs, discovering a man hanging from a lighting fixture. A man who’s slit his wrists in the bathtub. It wouldn’t be the first time a man had committed suicide in the Rainbow Grand, with or without a spouse, though such a fact was kept very quiet.)

  The red-haired woman said in a whisper, turning her rings around her finger, “I don’t know. You see—I’ve lost him.”

  “ ‘Lost him’—how?”

  “Where things are lost. Gone.”

  “Just—gone? Where?”

  The red-haired woman laughed sadly. “How on earth would I know where? He didn’t tell me.”

  “How long has Reverend Erskine been missing?”

  The woman stared at a wristwatch on her slender wrist, without seeming to comprehend the time. After a while she said, “Maybe he drove away. The car is his. He left our room sometime before dawn. I think. Or maybe…” Her voice trailed off.

  “He left? Without saying a word?”

  “Unless he spoke to me. And because I was, I was sleeping, because I was sleeping, you see, I—didn’t hear him.” She seemed about to burst into tears but recovered. She wiped her eyes with her gloved fingers. “I didn’t know him that well. I don’t know his—practices.”

  “But, Mrs. Erskine, have you looked for your husband outside? He may simply have stepped outside.”

  “Outside.” Mrs. Erskine shook her head slowly as if the concept of such vastness overwhelmed her. “I wouldn’t know where to look. I wouldn’t know where to begin. The car is his. There’s all the world.”

  “Maybe he’s just outside on the veranda, waiting for you? Let’s go look.” The concierge spoke heartily. Hopefully. He would have led Mrs. Erskine through the revolving door except she shrank back with a look of fear, warding him off with her arm.

  “I—I’m not sure that he would want that, you see. If he was outside. On the veranda.”

  “But why not?”

  “Because he has left me.”

  “But, Mrs. Erskine, why do you think your husband has left you, if he left no word? When he might be just outside? Isn’t it an extreme conclusion to come to? Maybe he just went sightseeing. Over to the Gorge.”

  “Oh, no.” Mrs. Erskine spoke quickly. “Gilbert wouldn’t go sightseeing without me, on our honeymoon. He’d marked off things for us to see. He’s scrupulous about things like that. Very well organized. He’s a collector, or was. Fossils! And he wouldn’t do things by half. If he’s gone, he’s gone.”

  Honeymoon. This fact struck the concierge as ominous.

  “But Reverend Erskine left no note, you say? He left without a word?”

  “Without a word.”

  With what stoic resignation the red-haired woman uttered this.

  “Not in your room, you’ve looked carefully? Not at the front desk?”

  “I don’t believe so.”

  “You did check at the front desk, Mrs. Erskine?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “He wouldn’t have left a note for me there. Not in an open mail box. That wasn’t Gilbert’s way. If he had something private to tell me.”

  The concierge excused himself and went to the registration desk to check. No message for room 419? He asked the staff on duty if they’d spoken with or seen this “Reverend Erskine” but they told him no. He asked to see the ledger, and there it was: Reverend Gilbert Erskine, Mrs. Ariah Erskine, Troy, New York. There was a registration for a 1949 Packard also. The couple was booked into the Rainbow Grand for five nights in the Rosebud Honeymoon Suite.

  Honeymoon. This was not just ominous, it was pathetic.

  “Call Mr. Colborne, will you? Just leave a note with him. No emergency, exactly. A disturbed woman with a missing husband, she thinks.”

  “ ‘Missing’? There was a guy over the Horseshoe, this morning.”

  “Over the Horseshoe.” The concierge would afterward recall hearing this offhand remark from one of the desk clerks as he was turning away, and discounting it in the same moment. Or maybe he hadn’t clearly heard. Or hadn’t wanted to hear.

  You don’t think of clergymen committing suicide at The Falls. Especially not on their honeymoons. You just don’t.

  The red-haired woman seemed unsurprised that there was no message for her at the desk. But she allowed the concierge to escort her outside. In the pale, sunlit air of early afternoon the young woman’s eyelids fluttered as if she were blinded. Her freckled face shone as if she’d scrubbed it, hard. She looked strangely young, yet worn, exhausted. Her eyes were a peculiar glassy green, rather small, shrinking. She was no beauty, with eyebrows and lashes so pale a red as to be nearly colorless, and a translucent skin showing a tracery of small blue veins at her temples. Yet there was something fierce and implacable in her. A stubbornness, almost a radiance. “Like she’d been wounded, real deep. Humiliated. But she was going to see it through, every drop of it.”

  And so she seemed reluctant to glance up at the exuberant guests crowded onto the veranda, a handsome structure that wrapped around three-quarters of the hotel. The concierge took her arm when she stumbled. They were walking on a graveled path below the veranda, between the hotel and a terraced lawn and rose garden. Guests dined in the open air, and in a lavender Victorian gazebo set upon the lawn like something in a child’s storybook. A few of the guests glanced up as they passed, curiously.


  “You don’t see your husband anywhere, Mrs. Erskine?”

  “Oh, we won’t find him. I told you. He’s gone.”

  “But how can you be so certain?” The concierge was trying to remain patient. “If he left no word? It might simply be a misunderstanding.”

  Gravely the red-haired woman nodded. “Yes. I believe it is. It was. A tragic misunderstanding.”

  The concierge wanted to ask if they’d quarreled, but couldn’t bring himself to say the words.

  They passed the tennis courts. They passed badminton players, croquet players. Middle-aged men in sports clothes laughing loudly, drinking beer, smoking. At the large outdoor pool there were numerous swimmers, sunbathers. The atmosphere was festive, even raucous. Popular music was amplified overhead. The red-haired woman shielded her eyes as if she felt pain.

  “We should check your car, ma’am. Just to see.”

  This, the concierge would have done immediately if he’d been Mrs. Erskine, but she didn’t seem to have thought of it. “Do you remember where your car is parked, Mrs. Erskine?” the concierge asked, as they approached the lot behind and below the hotel, and the woman said dreamily, “It was Gilbert who parked it, of course. He wouldn’t allow me to drive his car. I don’t believe he would ever have allowed me to drive his car. Though I’ve had a driver’s license since I was sixteen. But of course it was his car. I mean, it is. There, by the fence—see? The Packard.”