The Day the Falls Stood Still (9 page)

“So soon,” Mrs. Atwell says, quickly on her feet.

Leaning over the crokinole board, Edward takes a shot, knocking one of my disks from the board. “Well done,” Kit says.

He and Kit lag behind Isabel and me by twenty-five points, yet I fling my disk carelessly, eager to abandon the game. But no sooner has my disk bounced from a peg and skidded across the board into the gutter than Father says, too harshly, “Let them finish,” and Mother obediently reseats herself on the arm of the chair. I suppose she has judged the situation and decided it better to risk another ounce of rye whiskey than to have her daughters and the Atwells witness a spat.

O
n River Road, Father drives too quickly and Mother clutches her hat to her head, her jaw set as she refuses to ask him to slow down. The sun is low, setting beyond the rail yards and roundhouse to the west of the Lower Steel Arch Bridge. Shadows are deep and colors gold-tinged, vivid versions of their earlier washed-out selves. Father’s lips part, and quiet words intended for Mother’s ears are delivered by rushing air to Isabel and me in the backseat. “Why wasn’t Isabel seated beside Edward?” he says.

“Shush.”

“I’ll say what I please.”

“And do as you please, too, it seems.”

He snorts exaggerated laughter, his head falling backward.

“The Atwells are prohibitionists,” she says, “and you’re well aware of it.”

“How it is, then, that there was a decanter of rye whiskey sitting out?”

“You know as well as I do that it wasn’t meant to leave the smoking room.”

“A little hypocritical, I’d say.” He takes the corner onto Buttrey Street too quickly. In unison Mother and I grip the doors adjacent to each of us, and Isabel’s hand lands protectively on my ribs.

Neither speaks another word until the Cadillac is parked at Glenview and the engine turned off. “What a lovely evening,” Mother says to Isabel and me.

“I think it went rather badly,” I say, glaring.

“Bess,” Isabel says ever so quietly, laying a warning hand on my thigh.

In a momentary lapse of manners, Father steps toward the house but then remembers Mother still seated, waiting to be escorted from the Cadillac.

He opens the automobile door and takes her hand as she reaches a foot to solid earth.

7

Niagara Falls (Ontario) Public Library.

I
walk River Road, uncertain why I stoop to pick up a number of the stones in my path and slip them into my pocket. I tread southward, upriver, until I reach the Lower Steel Arch Bridge. Then I turn and retrace my steps.

Just opposite Glenview, I rest, leaning against a tree, gazing up at the house. What might Tom see as he passes by on River Road, that is, if he even bothers to look? Faded glory? The eaves could use a fresh coat of paint, several of the supporting brackets show signs of rot, and a pane of the pediment window is cracked. I know these flaws exist yet can see no evidence from the road. Maybe he sees grandeur. Glenview does loom large, even more so because of its position atop the bluff. The skirting homes could almost be the shanties of a manor, a flock of goslings seeking shelter under the wing of mother goose.

I remember the day Isabel and I were first shown the house. Mother held our hands as she led us from one empty room to the next, describing where the furniture would be placed, the wallpaper she would hang. She spent a good deal of time in each of the bedrooms that would become ours, pointing out the loftiness of the ceilings, the grace of the plaster moldings, the quarter-cut oak of the floors, the view of the gorge, and then joined in when Isabel and I galloped each room, marveling at the breadth.

Might Tom look up at Glenview and decide he was a fool to have ever handed over the best of his sturgeon and pike? Such thinking seems an acquiescence to Mother, and I suppose in our quiet battle she has gained the upper hand. There is, after all, a hole in my day that used to be filled by a minute or two at the gate, a hole that is becoming clogged with self-reproach. Before I snapped back, accusing him of lacking gentlemanliness, he had said only that he had figured me for a girl with a little pluck. And is a bit of courage so wrong a thing for him to want from me when any friendship between the two of us demands it on my part?

I take a stone from my pocket and place it on the side of the road. I place another, and another, until I have spelled out the word
Hello
with gray, jagged stones. He will come upon the stones as he passes by on his way to his fishing camp at the whirlpool, today or tomorrow or the day after that. I stand back surveying my work, and unsure he will know the message is for him, I add just beneath it his name,
Tom.

All day I am anxious. Mother would be furious if she were to come upon the stones. She would say I had disobeyed her, and while I could argue that she only said for me to tell Tom not to bring any more fish, we would both know I understood what she meant. I was to see no more of him. His credentials were not up to snuff. I would never have the courage, but here is what I would like to say to her: Jesus collected the less fortunate, even the destitute, and called them his friends. He would say Mother was wrong.

In the evening the sky is particularly red and strewn with strands of flat, orange-pink cloud, and I pray for the courage to say to Mother that I will go down to River Road, that from there I will take in the setting sun. As I stand in the doorway of the sewing room saying what I had planned, my heart does not race, my voice does not tremble, my palms do not grow damp. And Mother busily waves me away without a second thought.

The stones have not been knocked about the roadside by a careless passerby but stacked in a neat pyramid. I squeeze a handful of the stones, then study the indentations and chalky white residue on my palm, but cannot read whether it was Tom who shaped the monument. I restack the stones, but a foot or so closer to the edge of the gorge, on trampled grass rather than hard-packed dirt.

The following afternoon I am on River Road again, returning from the shops with a roasting chicken and a concoction of rice, rye, and whole wheat flours recommended for wartime in the newspaper. As I approach the spot in front of Glenview, I squint to see the stone pyramid, but the struggling grass appears unmarred except by a fallen branch. A few steps farther on, I speed up, almost sure the side of the road has been somehow altered.

The stones I come upon are much prettier than those I gathered, each seemingly selected for some particular quality. One is pale pink, another prettily speckled, the next translucent and white. All the stones are worn smooth, their contours rounded by the water and grit of the river over time. They are laid on the ground to form the word
Bess
.

I gather the stones quickly and run up the steep rise of Buttrey Street, panting and sweating, and thinking all the while of what I will next leave for him.

As I had hoped, Mother is not in the sewing room. I take six small beads meant for Miss O’Leary’s wedding gown from the box sitting on the windowsill and clutch them in my fist as I dash from the house.

But on River Road, my choice seems poorly thought out. He had left me a bit of his world, and I intended to leave him a bit of my own, but I can hardly expect him to find six small beads amid packed dirt and broken stone. I walk in slow circles on the trampled grass until I find a half walnut shell. I make a small basin in the roadside using a stone and set the shell into it, upright. In the sunshine, the bead-filled shell glistens, and surely he will be looking. He will find it.

I
t is well past midnight as I lie awake in bed. I do not toss and turn, my body one minute too warm and the next chilled. I lie contentedly, even blissfully awake, thinking of what I will next leave.

In response to the beads, he leaves two pieces of flat shale with an assortment of pressed ferns sandwiched between. I consult Mother’s guide to flora, looking for some secret meaning in the names of the ferns. The first one I identify is lady fern, which seems a compliment of sorts, even more so when I discover the second to be called maidenhair. But the next is narrow-leaf spleenwort and the one after that common polypody. Still, the ferns were fed by his river, cut from the shady depths of his gorge.

In return I leave a swatch of green-blue charmeuse, the color and luster of the fabric much like sunshine on the river. Does he ponder my leavings the way I do his? Does he understand how the swatch of fabric implies the meeting of our worlds?

I find a feather at our roadside spot, held upright there by a ring of supporting stones. The shaft of the feather in one hand, I pull the flattened mesh of the vane through my fingers, mulling over the gift. Herons are known to wade in the shallows of the Niagara, and the feather is in fact oversize and gray-blue. Does he somehow know the great blue heron is a bird I adore? Vast wings spread in flight, lengthy legs angled behind, elongated neck held in an S-curve, the heron seems otherworldly or maybe from an earlier time.

Even so, the feather disappoints me. I thought he would hint his understanding of the message underlying the charmeuse. I decide to be more blatant and pull threads from the frayed edge of the charmeuse and braid them together with a lock of hair snipped from my head.

He leaves a wooden container, rather like a pencil box, with a sliding panel. When I open it, a small cinnamon-colored butterfly flutters from the box, escaping its confines. In this I find meaning, also the courage to leave him a note.

I compose as I lie in bed, but in the morning, fountain pen put to paper, I am not satisfied. Rather than go down for breakfast, I work on the note, which causes Mother to rap on my door and me to hurl myself into bed and claim a headache.

The content of the note settled, I copy it onto stationery and, after three attempts, am finally happy with my penmanship. I hold the stationery an arm’s length away, trying to see what he might. My name, along with “Glenview,” appears in embossed type at the bottom of the page, which would be disastrous if it ended up in the wrong hands, but, more important, he might be unnerved by it. I copy the words onto plain paper. The final product is simple, laughable, considering the effort.

Dear Tom,

Perhaps we might spend an afternoon together. On Thursday, Mother will go to Toronto to purchase yard goods.

Bess

I tuck the note between two rocks and return to Glenview but twice make excuses and head back to River Road. Both times, I slide the note from the rocks and reread it, though I know the content by heart. Then, with just enough of a corner protruding, I replace the note between the rocks.

A day later, I glimpse a bit of white between the same two rocks. From a few steps closer, I know by the tattered edge of the paper that it has been exchanged for my note. I snatch quickly, and, paper trembling in my hands, I read.

Dear Bess,

Thursday, then. i o’clock at the Canadian end of the Lower Steel Arch Bridge.

Tom

Did he struggle with the reply? Has he an outing in mind? Does he lie awake with my note pressed to his heart?

Will Thursday ever arrive?

8

Niagara, copyright 1902 by A. Wittemann, Brooklyn, New York.

T
om waves as I approach at exactly one o’clock on Thursday afternoon. Last night I slept poorly, my mind endlessly looping, becoming more and more irrational as each hour passed. What if Isabel had been playing a practical joke and left the ferns and pretty stones? What if I waited for no one at the bridge? By daylight it was unimaginable, but in that place between sleep and wakefulness where the mind churns without the clarity of daylight, even the most unlikely can seem possible. So, I am both relieved and highly anxious to see him waiting at the foot of the bridge.

He is dressed as always, in a flat cap, and matching waistcoat and jacket. Only the absence of his usual neckcloth hints at today being different from all the rest. I had stood in front of the wardrobe mirror at least an hour, one dress after another held up to my collarbones and eventually dismissed. Too long; I might stumble. Too tailored; a certain status is implied. Too low a neckline; I have little to flaunt. I settled on a light pink dress with a small turned-down collar and a sash set just higher than the natural level of the waist.

His eyes flit from my tidy hair to my ankles and then back to my face. He smiles, his handsome lopsided smile, and I think I have chosen well.

“I have tickets for the Great Gorge Route,” he says.

The Great Gorge Route has been called the most delightful electric trolley ride in the world, yet I have never completed the circuit that most every visitor to Niagara Falls has. “I’ve wanted to go for years,” I say.

“You’ve never been?”

I have ridden the trolley on the Canadian side, where the tracks stretch atop the gorge from the falls to Queenston Heights, and then descend to the base of the escarpment and the wharf where the Toronto steamboats dock. The tracks cross the river there, at the suspension bridge linking Queenston and Lewiston, New York. The portion of the circuit along the American side of the river is at the base of the gorge wall, just above river level. “I haven’t crossed to the American side,” I say. “My mother says it’s dangerous, and I’ve never been able to change her mind.”

Years ago, just opposite where Tom and I stand, an avalanche of ice fell to the river-level tracks during spring thaw, killing the conductor and eight passengers. Another time two passengers were injured when a pair of trolleys collided head-on. And just several weeks back, Mother slapped the
Evening Review
down on the table in front of me as though her point was now irrefutably made. The headline read
TROLLEY CAR ACCIDENT AT QUEENSTON.
It seemed rain had interrupted the Sunday school picnic of a Toronto church at Queenston Heights and the group’s homeward journey began with an overloaded trolley car. Thirteen people were killed and dozens more injured when wet brakes failed while descending the escarpment. Ironically, calamity struck on a portion of track that Mother had always considered safe. She routinely used it on her way to the Toronto steamboats at the Queenston wharf. Just this morning, she had stood in the back garden, dressed for traveling in a serge bolero and skirt. “Maybe I should postpone the trip,” she said, gazing at a lone, wispy bit of cloud. “Do you think it might rain?” She had been anticipating the journey for a week, ever since the unremittingly loyal Mr. Coulson had given Mrs. Coulson carte blanche to order as many dresses as she pleased.

“I know the river,” Tom says. “I can tell when it isn’t safe.” He speaks quietly, with humility, as though he is uncomfortable with making such a claim. Still, there is a confidence. So far as he is concerned, the claim is a statement of fact.

As I stand at the Lower Steel Arch Bridge, a trolley ride in his company so close to the river seems as thrilling an afternoon as I have ever spent, but no sooner have I said “I’m not afraid” than I imagine Mother climbing onto a trolley as she returns from Toronto. I imagine her relief at setting down packages, heavy with silk and wool and trim. I imagine her rubbing a strained forearm as her gaze drifts to me, also on the trolley, seated alongside Tom.

“What is it?” he says.

“My mother will be coming home from Toronto.”

“I thought of that,” he says. “We’ll head downriver first, crossing at Queenston.”

He and I are usually alone in the scenarios I play out in my head, but I like the idea of an outing in the company of others. A walk in some lonely place would seem furtive, an admission of wrongdoing, and there is enough stealth in avoiding Mother.

“It’ll be my first time seeing the rapids up close,” I say.

“You haven’t hiked in the glen?”

“Only midway, never to the river.”

“It’ll be like nothing you’ve ever seen, not as wild as in the spring, but fierce enough.” He touches my elbow. “Let’s go,” he says.

With the war keeping the tourists away, the trolley is less than a quarter full, just a few families with small children held back from the open sides of the car and a handful of young couples, mostly honeymooning soldiers and war brides, judging by the uniforms and the intimacy.

Once we are settled and traveling north through the pleasant, wooded country atop the almost vertical walls of the gorge, Tom pokes his chin in the direction of one of the uniformed men. “He’ll be off soon enough.”

“Suppose so.”

“I wasn’t raised to think much of wars,” he says, “but I can’t see myself holding out much longer, not with the chlorine gas at Ypres and now all the rot about the
Lusitania.”

The newspapers are back to carrying stories about the ocean liner that sank in eighteen minutes, killing more than half of the two thousand civilians aboard. They say that, from the outset, ships like the
Lusitania
were deemed unfit for war—too much coal, too easy targets, too large crews to put at risk. “It sounds like the Germans knew it wasn’t a warship and torpedoed it anyway,” I say.

“That Schwieger fellow who gave the order…I can’t just wait around, hoping he gets what he deserves.”

I have seen the posters addressed “To the Women of Canada,” instructing them to think about the Germans invading their homes, imploring them to “help and send a man to enlist,” but now that I have my first chance, it seems too personal a decision for me to attempt to tip the scales either way. “The only good news about the whole mess is that it might help convince Woodrow Wilson it’s high time the Americans joined the Allies,” I say.

After that we are quiet and solemn, and I try my best to concentrate on the views of the rapids far below. The panorama is splendid, yet I look to his hands, folded in his lap. They are large, like the rest of him, and entirely masculine, just sinew and sturdy bone in a jacket of bronzed, chapped skin. I lift my gaze to the side of his face. In profile, his nose is not entirely straight but slightly curved at the bridge. His hair is thick and a little unruly, and I suppose he could use a haircut, but there is something appealing about a man who does not fuss, though all men ought to be clean-shaven, which he certainly is. His lashes are thick and dark, accentuating the paleness of his eyes. Soft lines radiate from the outside corners, causing me to wonder for a moment if he is more than a few years older than I. But on closer inspection, I see the lines are only streaks of pale from squinting into sunshine.

He turns and catches me studying him but does not seem to mind. “Was it much of a hike for you to the bridge?” I say.

He shakes his head. “I’ve got a room at the Windsor Hotel.”

The Windsor Hotel is three-story and square, featureless except for the swirls of wrought iron enclosing a narrow, second-floor veranda, and an ungainly fire escape. It is home to foreigners and drifters and whoever else does not much mind living above a saloon.

“There’s not much to it, but it’s comfortable enough,” he says. “I’m at the end of the hall, so I don’t hear anyone else.”

A rented room at the Windsor Hotel? What had I expected? The truth is I had not much considered an existence beyond the fictitious one where we steal away from Mother and he takes me by the hand and pulls me in close.

We reach the whirlpool, a swirling basin of water some sixty acres in extent at the foot of the gorge, and wait as passengers disembark and others step onto the running boards of the trolley and slide along the seats. As we set off, I say, “You’re on your own?” breaking the quiet.

“I have been for six years,” he says, “since I was sixteen.”

“What about your parents?”

He shakes his head. “It isn’t something I much like talking about.” But there is nothing harsh in his voice, nothing callous to suggest case closed.

“I’ll have no choice but to think the worst if you leave it at that.”

“They’re dead, is all.” My hand flits to his arm, lingers a moment, before I pull it back to my lap. His shoulders inch up. The palms of his hands slide over his thighs. “My mother died when I was born and then afterward, my father. A broken heart, they say. My grandparents took me in.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I never felt I missed out.” He looks me square in the face. “Any kid would’ve been lucky to have what I did.”

“And six years ago?”

“Six years ago, in the winter, the three of us came down with influenza. My grandmother held on for a couple of months, until she’d buried my grandfather and seen me through the worst of it.” He turns away. “It’s okay now, mostly, but it was a lot.”

He lives at the Windsor Hotel because he has grit. If I had a sliver of it, I would admit to my life not being quite as it must seem. “I’m not going back to Loretto in the fall.”

He nods, as though he already knows. “I figured out who your father is. Sometimes he comes into the hotel, quite a lot lately.”

“You know him?”

“I work in the saloon a couple of nights a week.”

I nod, trying to keep my face from changing while I wonder what working in a saloon means about his own fondness for drink.

“I heard him talking about Glenview, and that’s when I figured it out,” he says.

A handful of times I have cringed in silence as Father publicly reeled off the most impressive accomplishments of the fellow who built Glenview. I look at Tom and say, “I suppose he was going on about how the fellow who built Glenview also built Town Hall and the transept of Christ Church Anglican on Zimmerman Avenue.”

He nods.

“It’s true.”

“I didn’t doubt it.”

“There’s more you should know.” I put a hand on the seat in front of us, steadying myself. “I might live in a big house, but these days my mother and I sew dresses to keep our family afloat.”

He nods, again as though he already knows. But how can he? I am bewildered for the second it takes me to realize that men are inclined to gloat, particularly after swallowing a mouthful of drink, particularly when someone as proud as Father is down on his luck. “I like him,” he says. “All the boys at work do.”

And then, without considering whether I want the answer I suspect I will get, I say, “How much does he drink?”

“I counted eight ounces of rye whiskey the other night and he still wasn’t slurring his words.”

“A lot, then?”

“I’m no prohibitionist.”

“Too much?” I say.

“Too much.”

I feel no new sorrow. Nor has coming clean steered my thoughts away from the bleakness of the Windsor Hotel.

At the Niagara Glen, he says we will get off for a bit, until the next trolley comes along, in fifteen minutes or so. We step from the trolley and cross the flats. As we peer into a less steep section of the gorge that the locals refer to as the glen, he says, “When I was a kid I thought it was where the fairies lived, in the woods.”

“Your own enchanted forest,” I say.

He smiles. “There are arches and boulders as big as houses, some with potholes worn right through the middle by the river way back, when it was higher than it is now. The ferns are waist deep in places, growing as thick as I’ve ever seen.”

I try to focus on his words, but there is the bristle hair of his forearm tickling the smooth skin of my own, and now I am wondering whether he will kiss me when we part, also whether I want him to.

Back on the trolley, I move over a smidgen because I need to keep my wits about me and I can feel the heat of his thigh through my skirt. A fellow sitting behind us says, “It’s pretty enough but a calamity, really, all the energy still running to waste, all that water tumbling over the brink.”

Tom’s face hardens, and I am reminded of the day we sat on the veranda, partitioned from the world by a curtain of rain. He had spoken of all the affronts the river had suffered, of man’s efforts to truss up the river like a turkey at Christmastime. Afterward I had skimmed the Book of Genesis, looking for a verse I was sure I had read before: “And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it.” It had bothered me then that Tom’s sentiment seemed in opposition to Father’s, let alone God’s. And it bothers me still. “Have you heard about the powerhouse Beck wants?” I say. “My father says as long as Beck’s involved it will be the biggest powerhouse around.”