The Day the Falls Stood Still (16 page)

17

T
oday 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.”

T
he 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.

M
rs. 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.

“H
usband.” 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.

T
oday 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 stand waving, bereft, already waiting for him to come home.

Book TWO

William James Topley, Library and Archives Canada, PA-008929.

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.

November 2, 1916

My Dear Bess,

My company has set up camp about seven miles back from the front. We’re mostly fixing up a heavily shelled road, easy work, so don’t worry about me.

You have made me into a father and I just about split in two with happiness when I got the news. I only wish I were there to hold my son and you, too. I read your letter over and over, and when I shut my eyes I can picture you cradling our Jesse.

I was born with a caul. Fergus, too. Did I ever tell you that? I bet by now someone has told you being born with a caul means Jesse will never drown. Sailors used to buy them for good luck, and sometimes bits of them were dried out and put in a locket around a child’s neck. When I told the others about Jesse, one of the boys, who’s always got his nose in a book, quoted Dickens. “I was born with a caul, which was advertised for sale, in the newspapers, at the low price of fifteen guineas.” He said it’s from
David Copperfield
, but I’ll bet you already knew that. I remember asking Sadie about cauls and why mine wasn’t saved. She said amulets were a lot of bunk. She said the stripping of the amniotic sac from a child in birth was like a snake going through a tight spot to scrap off its old skin. For her their only use was in figuring out the health of the child. A firm caul and the child was well, a limp one and the child was not. But you have told me that Jesse is pink and fat, that he nurses well.

I guess by the time I meet our son he’ll be old enough to learn all about the river. Until then, daydreams will have to do.

Thank Mrs. Andrews for me. It makes me feel a whole lot better to know she is watching over you and Jesse.

I miss you every day, and now I will miss Jesse, too.

All my love to both of you,
Tom

After I folded the letter, I sat for a while, as I usually did, with it held in my hands. I wondered if he was still out of the trenches, which since he was an infantryman of the Third Division were his fate. He was still alive. I would feel it if he were not. For a moment I questioned whether I ought to have kept a bit of the caul and sent it to him; a talisman tucked into his pocket could bring no harm. But then Sadie’s snake analogy came to me. And its implication—that saving a caul at birth is akin to bringing into the world of the living the dead skin of a snake—made me glad it had disappeared along with the rest of the afterbirth.

T
his morning, after dressing, I compared my reflection in the mirror with the photograph of me on our wedding day. I wanted to know just how much the intervening years showed on my face, to see what Tom might. I suppose I am thinner, maybe not so fresh-faced as I was at eighteen or even as twenty-one-year-old girls used to be, before their beaus and husbands and fathers left, before they waited and grieved and picked up the slack at home. Still, the differences hardly show. There is no hint that I have given birth and become a wage earner and managed on my own; that the larder has never been empty, or the bank account, though Mrs. Andrews hardly charges Jesse and me full freight for room and board. It is not plain to see I can now cook a tasty meal with just a handful of potatoes and a few chicken bones, all the while a child balanced on my hip, or that I can copy any dress from a magazine, that when there is no picture, I draw one myself, often improving upon the design a woman has in her head. The wonderment that sometimes fills me as I watch our son is not obvious, or the ever-present ache called motherhood. I cannot find evidence of the wretched days that followed the news of Passchendaele, the most deadly of the battles in which Tom fought. The intervening years show only slightly, in the thinness of my cheeks, the jawline that is no longer round. Tom will not see the more sweeping changes. Or maybe I am entirely wrong and I have not changed at all. Maybe he knew I would make out all right before I knew it myself. Maybe he knew, even as he held my gaze from the window of his train departing for the war.

The railway station is imposing: redbrick and stone with Gothic windows and massive wood-paneled doors, an expense the city’s forefathers insisted upon, a first impression for the tourists coming to Niagara Falls. Though the interior of the station is warm and spacious, Jesse and I quickly pass through to the wooden-plank platform out back. While the Spanish flu has let up since its arrival in earnest four months ago, it is still upon us. And with so many soldiers coming home from overseas, there is renewed fear: Might they bring with them more of the contagion that has caused so many to die? Surely it is best to wait in the frosty air beneath the wide, overhanging eaves. Mrs. Andrews said that if I had a scrap of sense I would stay home, that it would be entirely my fault if the household began hacking up blood, but I could not bear to let Tom arrive even a tiny bit hopeful and then not find us waiting. I could not postpone by even twenty minutes the moment when he would meet Jesse.

The town has changed while Tom has been away. There is no doubt of that. If I were parachuted to Table Rock, at the brink of the falls, I would see within seconds that all was not as it once was. I would be nearly alone rather than surrounded by a gawking horde proclaiming the falls wondrous, a marvel, a sight well worth the trip. If anyone did happen to be close by, odds are it would be a woman, and more likely than not she would be striding purposefully toward some place of employment, some position that had until recently been considered unsuitable for the weaker sex, some position that she would in all likelihood have to give up with the men coming home. She might be wearing a gauze mask over her mouth and nose, as had just about everyone during October and November, when every day the newspaper reported yet another victim of the Spanish flu, when it was commonplace to hear stories of four women sitting down to a game of bridge in the evening only to be, all four, coughing up blood by midnight and then gulping their final breaths by dawn.

The scarcity of tourists and men seems of little significance when considered alongside Sir Adam Beck’s mammoth undertaking here. Two years ago he had the possibility of a powerhouse at Queenston put to a vote and I agonized over how to mark my ballot, but not because what was best for Niagara Falls, or even all of Canada, was unclear in my mind. As things stand, we need more coal to heat our homes, to cook our meals, to light our rooms so that we might extend a December day beyond five o’clock in the afternoon, and there is a limited supply. To argue differently would be to claim ignorance of lit rooms inexplicably flickering to blackness, machinery suddenly grinding to a halt, windows frosting over when the coal wagon fails to make the rounds. And such occurrences have become regular events.

One afternoon a while before the vote, I was walking through Queen Victoria Park, just opposite the falls. The mist was thick, raining down, and I was doing my best to keep myself dry. But then a moment later I was at the brink, standing there until I was soaked through. I remembered Tom saying if the power companies had their way, Niagara Falls would be reduced to a heap of spent coal. But as I stood there, it seemed he was entirely wrong. What I saw was water and more water, never-ending water tumbling over the brink. It was not a bit like coal. Coal clawed from the earth would never be replaced.

I thought of Isabel, too, swept over the brink, hurled to the plunge pool far below. I knew from Tom it could have been worse: a bloated body trapped behind the falls for days or months, on occasion forevermore. Or worse still, a mangled corpse pummeled by careening water upon the rocks at the base of the falls. Plenty of folks said, “Best not gaze too long,” and there were tales of those who had not heeded the bit of advice and, unable to resist, waded into the treacherous current of the upper river. And for a long moment, I stood there at the brink, shivering and afraid, thinking a whole lot less water suited me just fine.

And while the wartime shortage of men had meant nearly any fellow left behind could choose where he worked, I knew even as I cast my ballot that one day the munitions factories would close, some permanently, others for extended periods while they were retooled. Unemployment and the unrest that comes with it would skyrocket as ever more men were shipped home. It would be the same the country over, from Victoria to St. John’s, unemployment everywhere, everywhere except Niagara Falls. And while I knew the Hydro-Electric Power Commission would never be Tom’s first choice, it was comforting to think of employment there as a safety net of sorts.

I wrote to Tom before the vote to say as gently as I could that it seemed to me the bounty of the river might be twofold. There was the beauty of it, also its usefulness. I carried the letter in my handbag for a week before mailing it, hesitating each time I passed the post office. Might the letter distract him? Might it cause him a sleepless night? In the end, I sent it. I could not stand that the post might find its way to his company at the front without a letter from me, and it seemed entirely wrong to substitute a different letter, one that did not mention the vote.

December 15, 1916

My Dear Bess,

I got your parcel with the sweater and heating coils yesterday, and then today your letter and the bits you clipped from the newspaper. The sweater fits perfectly and is just right to wear under my uniform. I can see that with the heating coils I’ll soon be the most popular fellow in the company.

You should vote however you think you should, but here’s my opinion on what Beck’s proposed.

Remember way back, the afternoon we spent riding the electric trolley in the gorge? We talked about the Boundary Waters Treaty. I’d done some calculations showing that with the powerhouses already on the river taking the water they were allowed, there wasn’t enough left even for the hundred thousand horsepower Beck was talking about back then. He spent the last ten years blowing the whistle every time one of the private companies took an ounce more water than it was allowed. But now that it suits him, he’s all set to chuck the treaty out the door.

You said that the power companies have been told to ignore the limits in their charters, that they’ve been told to develop electricity to the max to help out with the war. It’s Beck’s doing. He’s wrapping himself in the flag, using the war as an excuse to take as much of the river as he wants.

You wrote about blackouts as some sort of justification, but can’t you see that demand has been upped by the war, that it will drop once the war is done? It’s why Beck’s Hydro Circus makes the rounds. He knows that with his powerhouse he’ll be generating way more electricity than we can use, that he’s got to push up the demand.

I have been to the whirlpool twice when there wasn’t a whirlpool at all. Both times the wind was unusual, from the east and strong, and there wasn’t much water flowing into the river from Lake Erie. At both shores of the falls the riverbed was dry. There wasn’t any mist. No thunder either. The water in the river was down, enough so that there weren’t any standing waves. The Niagara wasn’t all that different from any other river in the world, definitely not something that would cause a man walking by to stop, and maybe fill with wonder for a bit and be lifted up from the drudgery of his day. With Beck’s powerhouse, the river will be drained as never before, and those two times when there wasn’t a whirlpool at all, I saw what lies ahead with the river swallowed up by tunnels and canals.

Again, I miss you every day. Last night I fell asleep thinking about some Christmas when I’d take you and Jesse out searching for a tree.

The merriest Christmas possible to both of you.

All my love,
Tom

I thought for a long while about the river and the falls and awestruck passersby, and a few days after reading the letter, I even said to Father, “What about the wonder so many feel at the brink?”

“What about it?” he answered back. “We were given the river, also the ingenuity to harness it.”

Despite Father’s dismissal, despite the many arguments in favor of the project, I agonized over the ballot; marking it as I knew I would seemed traitorous to Tom.

The people of Ontario gave their approval, overwhelmingly, and just as Father had predicted, Beck’s initial concept of a powerhouse producing one hundred thousand horsepower had grown. He promised a scheme that would eclipse any hydroelectric powerhouse already built in Niagara Falls and be larger than any even contemplated elsewhere in the world.

Construction began the spring of 1917, and ever since the landscape of Niagara Falls has been marred. It started with a narrow belt of cleared earth that was soon enough hollowed out to a partially dug canal lined on either side with excavated rock waiting to be hauled away. And then, with the summertime heat, came a new scar, a scar that now seems as permanent as the canal. Quickly and quietly, Beck’s Hydro-Electric Power Commission bought the Ontario Power Company and laid a third conduit from the intake gates at Dufferin Islands to the powerhouse. Left as it was in an open ditch, the conduit was an eyesore. Yet I was thankful for the slapdash construction. When I wrote to Tom, I was able to say it really did seem the Hydro-Electric Power Commission was being truthful in saying the new conduit was temporary, an emergency measure made necessary by wartime manufacturing. Slapdash or not, there was sorrow and anger in his reply.