The Day the Falls Stood Still (14 page)

Eventually he clears his throat. “Someday you’ll know,” he says and taps an oval plaque of Isabel’s bracelet. And I want to believe him but cannot.

I say, “Lie down with me,” and lower myself onto my side.

We lie still a long while, like before, his chest against my back, the tops of his thighs against the undersides of mine. At least it seems a long while, but time has become indistinct. When he next speaks, he says, “Was it busy downstairs?”

“Yes.”

“I take it, then, that you’re no longer marrying someone called Edward Atwell?”

“No,” I say. “I’m not.” My shoulders heave, and Tom strokes my hair. Not for a moment has Edward deserved the likes of me, the way I have bandied about his heart.

M
other and Father and Reverend Tiplin wait beside Isabel’s casket at Fairview Cemetery. It might look as though I am waiting, too, but I am not. I am only standing alongside them, staring at the hole into which Isabel, along with the pearl choker I fastened around her neck, will be lowered. By the light of day, I regret the choker, my first blunder in an evening full of errors, but what am I to do? The casket had already been shuttled from Glenview to the hearse when I woke. The choker and whatever remained of Isabel were gone from the house.

On Ash Wednesdays she and I would kneel in the academy chapel, and Father O’Laughlin would daub a bit of ash on our foreheads and say, “Remember, man, thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return.” The point, he said, was to make us think of our own mortality. Only when we truly understood the fragility of our earthly existence could we begin to seek true spirituality. The message was lost on me, on Isabel, sisters who had sidestepped privation, despair, sisters who had no experience with death. Now, with Isabel gone and mortality all too real, Father O’Laughlin might think me a prime candidate. But a quest seems impossible, even with the vast emptiness in my gut, my heart, my head, the blank page waiting to be filled up where Isabel used to be.

The loam of the hole is hard-packed, threaded with spindly roots, many crisp and white, newly severed by the leading edge of a spade. There are worms, too, teased from darkness by the rain overnight, desperately burrowing now that the sun is out. Reverend Tiplin snaps shut his pocket watch, and Mother squints in the direction of the main gates. “What could be keeping them?” she says.

The Atwells’ absence attests to the vigor of the grapevine in Niagara Falls. It is easy enough to figure out that someone in the saloon had used his bit of gossip to mollify his wife, to make up for the rye whiskey on his breath, the lateness of the hour. “You’ll never guess who showed up at the Windsor,” he might have said. “The Heath girl, that’s who, the one who didn’t jump. She went upstairs, wearing black. It was Fergus Cole’s grandson she was visiting with, for the better part of an hour, had the nerve to ask what room was his.” How many wives had lain awake planning and fussing? Just whom to telephone first?

It was foolish not to consider what would come about, needlessly cruel not to have explained myself to Edward first. Had I waited a day or two, and called off the engagement before I went to the hotel, my parents would have been spared an extra dose of humiliation, at least until after we had buried Isabel. And maybe Kit, who once loved me, though she loves Edward more, would not despise me so much as she surely does just now. Maybe I would have managed to keep my only friend.

“The Atwells won’t come,” I say.

Mother turns her tired eyes to me. “It’s that ne’er-do-well with the fish?”

I stare at my feet, at the August-yellow grass trampled beneath, and I nod.

As I look up she crumples against Father, defeated.

15

T
hese weeks following Isabel’s death, I am mostly confined to Glenview, to the dusty, still rooms, to a silence seldom broken by anything other than my feet on the hardwood floors of an empty house. There is no longer the drone of the sewing machine, unless it is my foot on the treadle. Nor are there the noises of a kitchen where meals are prepared and afterward dishes washed up. Mother seldom emerges from her room, and when she does it is to wander aimlessly, quietly. Twice each day Father brings her tea, and slices of the loaves and salty ham—prosciutto, I was told—that Mrs. Calaguiro or one of her entourage bring to the door. Mostly he sits with the newspaper spread before him, sometimes stuck on the same page for the better part of an hour, sometimes startling when I speak. Late in the afternoon, he leaves Glenview, returning before the sun sets to join me in the dining room for a meal of thick soup—minestrone, Mrs. Calaguiro said—or whatever the women at the base of the bluff have guessed we might like. We have lapsed back into only occasional visits from Loretto girls and garden society friends, possibly because I am awkward and Mother is unfriendly and Father is seldom home, possibly because the crowded drawing room at Isabel’s visitation had more to do with the good manners of well-bred men and women than anything else. Tom says Father no longer goes to the Windsor, and I have watched closely and have seen nothing to make me think he has moved on to another hotel. I believe he is out walking, thinking, planning how to best salvage what is left of our family. I am almost certain I am right; depending on the day’s weather, the cuffs of his trousers are caked with dust or splattered with mud.

The mornings when it seems entirely impossible to throw back the curtains and squint into sunshine, those are the mornings when it is most important to get out of bed. I force myself to rise quickly, and wash and dress in somber black. I have come to think of mourning clothes as a blessing of sorts, one less decision to make, one less decision to weigh on the coverlet that must be pushed aside in order to get out of bed.

To pretend it is personal fortitude that enables me to face each day would be entirely false. I am lured by the contentment, delight, even bliss I feel each time I meet Tom in the woods of the glen.

At first I told Father I was going for a walk, or returning loaf tins and such, but he seemed not to hear, so now I just leave and no one questions where I go daily between the hours of eleven and three. I meet Tom at the base of the stairs descending into the glen, and he takes my hand. At first, he led me to the river, stopping only when we reached a limestone boulder flat enough for sitting and with footholds enough to climb. More recently, though, we have been taking our time getting to the river, often settling for a while at a quieter place, a sun-dappled spot where the violet anemones are in bloom or a patch of undergrowth where the ferns grow exceptionally thick. He has kissed me and put his hands on my ribs, atop the black wool, and then slid them upward along my sides until the heels of his palms were at my breasts. He has apologized more times than I can say and dropped his hands from where I want them to be.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“I don’t mind.”

“It’s just that…”

“I’m fine,” I say, “really, I am.”

I have crawled on top of him when he is lying on his back in the glen, and felt the hardness between his legs and seen his embarrassment.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“I don’t mind,” I say, staying put.

I have opened my mouth to his and said, “Unbutton my dress,” when I feared he would not, and slipped the straps of my camisole from my shoulders when his fingers hesitated too long. “I just want to look,” he has said, and I have wanted his hands on my bare skin and told him it was so, though soon it was not enough. I wanted more and drew him closer and thought it was ecstasy when his mouth finally reached my breasts. I have hiked my skirts and petticoat and sat straddling him, a knee on either side of his hips as he lay on his back. I have moved with him, rhythmically, and waited for pleasure to overcome grief or at least push a good piece of it aside. I have watched his face change from contorted to serene and felt his body move from rigid to spent, all the while his trousers remaining buttoned and my bloomers in place. “I’m sorry,” he says.

Once we went to the whirlpool. Rather than settling on the wooded slope, Tom stopped only when we had reached the stone beach, which had little in the way of privacy. I was baffled until he said, “I thought maybe Isabel would seem closer here.” He sat me down on a flattish rock and then retreated a few steps. I stared at frothy white. I stared at rushing green. I stared at a massive standing wave, and then at the hollow near its base. Did he think if I stared long enough I would eventually conjure Isabel? Would he ever guess that mostly my mind was occupied with just how long I had been sitting on the rock and whether there was still time for the glen? When it seemed I had sat still long enough, I swiveled toward him and shrugged.

“Maybe some other time,” he said.

“Maybe.”

“Sometimes geese fly in circles, squawking away, when one of their flock dies,” he said. “I’ve seen a couple of them keep at it until they’re lost.”

Without him, nothing mattered very much at all, and so I did my best to take in what he said, to step beyond the invisible wall that seemed to be keeping me separate from the world. “You think I’m erratic,” I said, knowing he was right.

I had badgered him, asking time and again whether Isabel had drowned in the upper rapids, whether she had survived the plunge from the brink, whether she had been flailing in the lower river when she drew her last breath. I had wanted to pinpoint every detail of her final moments. How else was I to run through the story in my head, again and again, always hopeful of a changed ending?

I had recounted as much as I could of the hours leading up to her death. What she wore. What she said. Her cheek between my shoulder blades. The bit of sleep I had noticed in the corner of her eye. I had told him more than once, and he had commented on how much I was able to recall. He said I saw her final hours through a magnifying glass. Even so, I had wept mercilessly because I could not remember into which teacup I had poured her tea the day she went to the brink of the falls.

I had insisted we walk a half dozen blocks out of our way so that we might avoid Mary Egan’s house, rather than risk some memory of Mary and Isabel at the academy, linked arm in arm. At Table Rock, I turned my back on the falls. And though Tom had been waiting for the new lures to arrive, I would not set foot in Clark’s Hardware, not when Isabel had once delighted me by handing Mr. Clark a few dimes in exchange for a packet of Chinese crackers after Father had said, “Absolutely not.”

I had gone over a dozen times the ways Isabel could be with me still, the ways I could have intervened, the ways I had not.

Sitting on the rock at the whirlpool, I began yet again. “I should have known.”

“She wasn’t showing much,” he said.

“The tea dress I made all of a sudden didn’t fit.”

He held his open palm toward me, telling me to stop. “You were a good sister.”

“I left her alone and went to the Clifton House.”

“She wouldn’t want you blaming yourself.”

“We could have managed. We could have gone to Toronto. They say there’s plenty of work with the war.”

“You can manage now, too. I can help you, Bess.”

He took my hand and helped me up from the rock. “Grief isn’t something to get over,” he said. “It stays with you, always, just not so raw.”

At three o’clock we part on River Road, he to his shift at the Windsor Hotel and I to Glenview, to the half dozen, partially made dresses it seems Mother will not complete. His hands and mouth upon me, I have felt such bliss that afterward, in the sewing room, it seems traitorous to Isabel. Threading a needle, I have questioned whether the happiness is even real. In my grief, have I mistaken oblivion for bliss?

Other times the hours with Tom seem a cruel joke, a scrap, a taste, just enough to fill me afterward with dread. I have not yet lost everything. There is something more to be taken away.

I wonder, too, if I am wanton, whether other women feel desire as I do. I look to the evidence—the well-thought-of girls who disappear for a half year, only to return slightly more full through the hips; the hurried marriages, the babies who arrive before nine months’ time; the tired mothers with ten or more children pawing at their skirts; the forbidding scriptures; the edict that says a young woman should not find herself alone in the company of a young man. I can only conclude that I am not alone, that it is natural for physical intimacy to hold lovers in its grip. And it occurs to me that maybe it was not as large a sacrifice as I had once assumed when Isabel gave herself to Boyce. We are designed to want more, to fill the earth.

I think about Tom’s hesitation, wonder if he feels Fergus’s eye on him. Tom told me once that, with her high cheekbones and shiny black hair, Sadie was often taken for a half-breed, an assumption never confirmed by the missionaries who raised her. She spent a good chunk of her teenage years posing for the tourists in buckskin outside one of the curio shops selling beaded change purses and moccasins, and bark painted with turtles and geese. At eighteen she batted away the hand of the shop owner, who had come to think it his right to cop a feel whenever he pleased. For resisting, she was beaten with a broomstick until Fergus, just passing by, felled the owner with a single slug. She lost her livelihood and, with it, the bit of floor at the back of the shop where she curled up each night. Fergus could hardly believe his good luck when she asked if he might consider giving her room and board in return for cooking and cleaning. She could read to him, too, if he cared about that sort of thing. She had been taught by a missionary and had three books, if he would not mind heading into the curio shop and gathering them up. Back at the cabin overlooking the gorge, Fergus slept on the floor for the month until they were wed. And when Tom was a boy, Sadie told him Fergus was the first gentleman she had ever met. It was years later when Tom finally understood Fergus had not taken advantage, even if she had figured it was the price of room and board.

These are my thoughts as I lift a navy blue skirt in the sewing room and find the chalk markings above its unfinished hem that tell me Mother gave Mrs. Woodruff her final fitting before Isabel disappeared. I am determined to finish the dresses, to keep them moving along from bolt of uncut fabric to beautifully pressed gown. Several times I have gone to Mother’s room and found her fully dressed on the edge of a perfectly made bed. Her hair is tidily pinned up and her cheeks lightly rouged. Only the handful of seconds it takes for her to leave her thoughts and turn toward the doorway hint all is not well. I ask whether a cuff is to be pleated or gathered, whether the opalescent buttons are for the rust chiffon or the mauve taffeta. She answers my questions thoroughly, patiently, and says, “Thank you, Bess.” And I am making progress, although I have cried over a shoulder seam that puckered and a lapel I stitched three times before it lay flat.

I cannot wait much longer for her to return to the sewing room, for Father to implement the plan he is surely working out as he walks. Eventually the few dollars Mother set aside while dressmaking will be used up. Eventually no more prosciutto and minestrone will be brought to the door. Eventually winter will come and there will be nothing for coal. Eventually Mr. Morse will demand what he is due, as will the Municipal Electric Light and Power Company and the City Water Works.

I asked Tom’s advice a while back, and he said I could likely find work as a clerk in an office even though I cannot take shorthand or type. Even in Niagara Falls the businesses are having to make do with so many men overseas. He went on to say he would do his bit, too, and sign on with the next battalion recruited in Niagara Falls. It was the conversation we had circumnavigated time and again but never quite broached. Tears welled in my eyes at the thought of a parting and spilled onto my cheeks at the idea of losing him. “There are sacrifices being made all over the world,” he said. Of course I was proud, but mostly I was afraid and, in the end, altogether sorry we had spoken of work.

I wonder if I could take in sewing, even hire myself out as a dressmaker after I have had the chance to fill in what I do not know. I have never conceived a design from its beginnings, never turned a customer’s vague notion of a “smart coat” into a sketch of a fitted, velvet affair with neck, cuffs, and hem trimmed in wide bands of krimmer fur. Nor have I accompanied Mother to Toronto, to the Spadina Avenue shops full of the finest silks and wools, and even if I was able to find them, I do not have the faintest idea what a yard of charmeuse should cost, much less what a gown cut from it is worth.

When I have finished hemming Mrs. Woodruff’s navy skirt, I push needle into pincushion and flip through the
Niagara Falls City Directory
until I find the handful of entries listed under “Dressmaking.” If Mrs. Goddard or Miss Percy knew the extent of my work in sewing her gown, I could ask for a reference letter. If the tea dress I made for Isabel had not been torn and then incinerated at Morse and Son, I could have shown it alongside the letter. Still, there must be a way, and, because surely Mother knows what it is, I head up the stairs to her bedroom.

Once she notices me in the doorway I say, “I need to find work and I’m thinking about dressmaking.”

“Oh, Bess.” She sits down on the coverlet she was smoothing over the bed.

“It seems to come to me easily enough. I know I have more to learn.”

Mother picks up yesterday’s
Evening Review
from the bedside table and flips through pages until she finds what she wants—a recipe for “Canada war cake.” “No butter, no milk, no eggs,” she says. “I just wonder how long it’ll be before no one will wear anything but the plainest ready-made frock.”

I want to say there will always be women too vain to give up pretty frocks and use the women at the Clifton House as proof, but I have no wish to bring up the night we lost Isabel. “But you were run off your feet with dressmaking.”