The Day the Falls Stood Still (7 page)

I set my work on the needlepoint seat of my chair, unfasten the buttons at the nape of my neck, and pull my dress over my head. Mother will not come. It is easier for her to cut and baste and sew pretty things, and tell herself she is doing all that she can for the family. I lay my dress over the back of the chair.

A
s my eyes open in the morning, I realize I have not dreamed a single dream. I push myself to sitting and swing my legs over the side of the bed. The beadwork is as I left it, folded on the seat of my chair, but my dress is no longer draped over its back. I open the doors of the wardrobe and find my dress properly hung.

When I next glance at the beadwork, I see each askew bead has been put right. Closer examination makes plain the extent of the rework. Each knot was severed and each bead slid from the thread. Only then, and with great precision, had Mother poked her needle through the organza, wrong side to right, and strung a bead onto the thread. Only then had she poked her needle back through the organza and secured the thread with a knot. She had worked half the night to make sure I knew she would stand for no nonsense from me.

Beadwork in hand, I move my chair to the window and sit down to watch. Beyond the garden, beyond the bluff on which Glenview sits, beyond Mother’s jurisdiction, is River Road, a scenic stretch of macadam used by the tourists and the locals traveling to and from the Queenston docks, and also by a certain fellow who has no idea a quiet battle has begun in the Glenview house.

6

Annie Taylor and her barrel

Niagara Falls Public Library, Niagara Falls, New York.

I
sabel often wore a nightdress until noon, even as we sat on the veranda. It suited me just fine because I have few dresses of my own and it meant I usually had her wardrobe full of dresses to myself, and I wanted to look my best when Tom came to the gate. Sometimes I worried that the fussiness of her wardrobe would put him off. And because she was curvaceous in all the right places before becoming ill and I am not, her dresses mostly fit me too loosely through the bust and hips. Still, after months of solemn Loretto black, I was pleased by what I glimpsed in the mirror.

But a few days ago Isabel began wearing dresses again, sometimes the very dress I was hoping to wear. When I suggested to Mother that I would like to sew a dress for myself, she said, “What about all your socks?” The Red Cross package I sent for had finally arrived, and Isabel and I now spend our afternoons knitting socks on the veranda, at least until she gets to the tricky part of the heel and throws down her needles in a huff.

“I’ll find the time.”

“Can’t you borrow one of Isabel’s? Miss O’Leary’s wedding is just over a fortnight away.”

“When I finish the beading, then?”

She lifted her foot from the treadle, just long enough to rotate the cuff she was stitching. “With a few nips and tucks, one of Isabel’s will do.”

“Which one?”

“Leave me be,” she said, glancing up from her work, giving me a clear view of the darkness around her eyes.

B
reakfast has moved from the dining room to the kitchen. It is easier to clean up, and Father, with his increasingly late evenings, seldom manages to get out of bed early enough to join us. As I lift the teapot, and Isabel removes the cloth from the perpetual biscuits, Mother, all smiles, announces Edward is coming by this afternoon to pick up the remnants of a gown she made for Mrs. Atwell. Her milliner needs them for a matching hat. “Bess, you should put on the tea dress you made for Isabel,” Mother says.

“I’m to pretty myself up for Edward Atwell, then?”

Mother sighs deeply.

“He’s staying for tea?” Isabel says.

“He might.”

“But I’d like to wear the tea dress,” Isabel says.

“You just heard me say Bess could wear it.”

“Go ahead,” I say. “I couldn’t care less.”

Mother’s hand, alongside her plate, curls into a fist.

After breakfast she calls me upstairs, where I assume she will assign me some menial task—ripping out a seam, basting stays into place. But instead she opens the doors of Isabel’s wardrobe, selects two dresses, and holds them out to me. “Try these on,” she says. “Then come and show me in the sewing room.”

The first, which Isabel had not worn in years, is light peach with Juliet sleeves and a princess waistline trimmed in white cotton lace. If it were an inch or two longer, the hem of the skirt would fall fashionably, just above the ankle, but as is, the three-quarter length is better suited to a child.

In the sewing room, I flick the peach cotton of the skirt and say, “You’ve got to be kidding.” Mother appraises me for a moment, her head cocked, her lips pursed. She smoothes her fingers over the sleeve, an unexpected melancholy palpable in the lightness of her touch, in the way her hand drops to her side. “You’ve grown up,” she says.

The second dress is entirely white with intricate lace inserts, embroidered panels, and cutwork. As I slip it over my shoulders, I cannot help but think what a lot I have yet to master with needle and thread.

Mother lifts my arms from my sides and guides me in a slow rotation. She frowns, seemingly unimpressed by the skillfulness of the embroidery and the neatness with which the ground fabric is cut away from the design. “It’s really beautiful,” I say, and then, as it occurs to me the work is her own, I wish I could take back the words.

I follow her to Isabel’s bedroom where she pulls open the drawer housing Isabel’s underclothes. “It’s time you wore a corset.”

“It’s only tea,” I say, feigning a bit of resistance.

“Try it on.” She hands me a bundle of pale pink.

Stays run the length of the side seams; also over the ribs, front and back; and alongside the hooks and eyes of the front opening, and the grommets of the back opening through which the lace is pulled. In my camisole and drawers, I fasten hooks and eyes from just beneath my sternum to well below my hips. I have heard of the fainting and know the complaints, also the rhetoric of the suffragettes, yet a corset is a rite of passage, which places me a step closer to making decisions for myself. As Mother begins to tighten the laces, the irony in such thinking strikes me, and then, with the final tug, any notion linking a corset with independence seems entirely foolish.

“Are you comfortable?” she asks.

In the mirror, I glimpse the extra fullness across the bust, the soft draping of the bodice to my narrowed waist, the gently undulating curve of my hips and say, “Comfortable enough.”

She pinches the extra fullness from the sides of the cutwork dress, takes it up with a line of pins. “It won’t take but a minute,” she says, but I know it is not true. The seams to be opened up and restitched are part of an underbodice veiled by the cutwork.

I
n the kitchen just past noon Mother says I ought to bake Scotch shortbread or macaroons. The biscuit tins are empty, and Edward might want a cookie with his tea. She tells me not to change from the cutwork dress while I bake, in case he arrives. “It’s just Edward,” I say, Edward with whom Kit and I have climbed in the crab apple trees and rolled down the steep slope of the bluff, my hair strewn with twigs and dry grass, my cheeks ruddy with heat and dirt. And what about the war? Are we suddenly baking with white flour and sugar and butter again? But then it hits me, he is not
just Edward
anymore. Not to Mother. Not to Isabel.

Isabel comes into the kitchen, wearing the tea dress, and says how lovely I look. I feel as transformed as a girl can be by a corset, a perfectly made dress, and painstakingly upswept hair, but Isabel outshines me as the sun does the moon. Even now, though her skin is still slightly sallow, especially when she first rises for the day, and her jawline and cheekbones too angular, her beauty easily tops my own diluted version of it.

Way back, the afternoon Isabel tried on the tea dress so that I could mark the hem, what had struck me most was how well-suited it was to a figure as nearly perfect as hers. I had admired my handiwork, the way the filmy layers clung ever so slightly to her curves. But thin as she is, the bodice gapes at the neckline yet somehow fits too snugly across the bust. Maybe I am learning more than I think, as I hand Mother pins and chalk, and listen to her speak of puckers and pulls, and the proper hang of a skirt. Maybe it was only inexperience that led me to think the dress fit as it should.

Isabel and I decide on macaroons because they bake in a cool oven and the embers from the morning’s round of biscuits will do. Also, Mother will not veto a custard for tomorrow, not when the set-aside egg yolks would otherwise go to waste. I grind almonds in a porcelain mortar while Isabel measures the castor sugar and separates the whites from three eggs.

“You know what Mary Egan told me a while back?” she says. “She said Mr. Cruickshank was going around telling everyone Boyce and I were never engaged. He admits we courted, but only for a short while. He’s saying Boyce broke up with me ages before he did.”

“He thought he could make his son look like less of a cad,” I say.

“Sometimes I think I imagined the whole thing.” She forces breath from her nose, making a rough, huffing sound, likely meant to be dismissive but coming off as full of doubt.

“Oh, Isabel,” I say. “He gave you a ring.” I remember the night. I had woken to the ping of a pebble on the window of my room at the academy. I opened the shutters, and there were Isabel and Boyce down below.

“We’re engaged,” Isabel called up.

“What?” I said, half-asleep.

“Your sister has promised to marry me,” Boyce called back.

“You’ll be my maid of honor, won’t you, Bess?”

“You’re wet,” I said. The two of them were standing arm in arm, laughing like a couple of hyenas, soaked to the bone.

“It’s just mist,” she said. “He proposed at the falls.”

“I was on my knee in a puddle,” Boyce said. “The tourists got a good show.”

There was a sharp rap on my door, and I turned to see a wimpleless Sister Bede bustling into my room. “Quiet,” she said, reaching to close the shutters. “And back to bed.”

“Sister Bede,” Isabel called up. “Congratulate me. I’m engaged.”

Kit had woken up in the bed across from my own and was propped on her elbows, snickering into her sheets.

“Gracious me,” Sister Bede said, leaning from the window. “Isabel’s down there.”

“And Boyce,” I called out, “the luckiest fellow in the world.”

“That I am,” he called back to peals of laughter from Isabel.

“Hush. You’ll have all the girls up any minute. Mother Febronie, too,” Sister Bede said. “I’m closing the shutters.”

“Wait. Please,” I said to Sister Bede and turned back to the window. “Yes,” I called down. “I’ll be your maid of honor. I’d like to, very much, more than anything.” No doubt there would be a flock of bridesmaids, but she had singled out me.

I
sabel smoothes a length of wafer paper over a baking sheet and says, “When Boyce broke off our engagement, I reminded him about the ring, that he’d made a promise. He stammered out some nonsense about the ring being a token of affection. Not a promise.”

“Then why did he take it back?”

“I threw it at him,” she says. “It chipped his tooth.”

“He loved you. He was with you at my window that night, saying he was the luckiest fellow in the world.”

“Never mind,” she says, waving her hand. “Water under the bridge.”

W
hen we hear the Runabout, Isabel unties the strings of her apron and hangs it in the pantry, and Mother signals for me to do the same. All this for Edward, who is unlikely to notice a thing and who would only find it embarrassing on the off chance that he did. “Hurry up,” Mother says. I walk to the pantry slowly, all the while contemplating wiping the flour from my hands on my pretty dress.

“Edward,” Isabel says in the yard. “What a treat.” Her outstretched hand squeezes his left, which hangs witlessly at his side.

As I watch him take in the length of me, heat flares in my cheeks. “Heading out?” he asks.

“No,” I say, “just playing dress up.”

“Oh.”

“You’re too used to us in black,” Isabel says.

His expression remains unchanged, vaguely blank. He has entirely missed the reference to the wool crepe of the academy. In his defense, it has been two years since Isabel graduated. Still, only a month ago he visited his six younger sisters in the Loretto parlor, all of us in somber black.

“You remember our Loretto dresses?” I say.

“Of course.” He nods recognition, at long last.

“Sit down for a bit,” Mother says, nudging the wicker rocker toward him. Once he is seated in the rocker, and Isabel and I in less comfortable chairs, Mother excuses herself and goes into the house.

A moment later Isabel, in the role of attentive hostess, says she has left the kettle boiling and would he like a cup of tea? She is on her feet and through the screen door before he has a chance to refuse, leaving just the two of us.

“Well,” I say.

“Well.”

I smile, just barely, like a child from behind her mother’s legs, and he glances away. We sit quietly, unable to look each other squarely in the face, until he says, “I hear they took another floater out of the whirlpool yesterday.”

Like most children in Niagara Falls, Edward and I grew up trading stories about the bodies pulled out of the river and the dreadful men who undertook the task. They were bleary-eyed and lecherous, and would tell you to throw yourself over the brink if you asked. It meant a bottle of rye whiskey as payment, a little wet on their tongues. For generations there had been at least one on the river, waiting to spy a bit of yellow-pink, a bit of flesh, bobbing in a pool. If only the floater could be gotten to and pulled in before the river whisked it away.

I have long since outgrown such talk; still, the familiar terrain is a relief and I say, “The summer months always mean a rash of suicides.”

Then we are back to averted eyes and bashful smiles until he jumps up from the rocker, saying he forgot something in the Runabout.

As he lopes toward the automobile, I sit as straight as a pin, take several large breaths, and wonder about our new awkwardness. Is it only that we are both used to having Kit around? Or is it because Mother fussed with my hair? Or has he noticed the corset? He is well-mannered and I like him well enough, but Kit will head the family business for good reason. Right there, alongside the sisterly fondness I feel for him, is pity. And it is the more defining sentiment of the two.