The Day the Falls Stood Still

by Cathy Marie Buchanan

  When 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.

  On his return he hands me a square envelope. “An invitation,” he says. “We’d like your family to have dinner with ours.”

  “Fine,” I say, though I have had supper at the Atwells’ more times than I can count and never once been given a formal invitation. “I’ll give it to Mother.”

  Rather than set the envelope aside, I head indoors with it, pleased at a chance to escape. I meet Isabel in the hallway with a dish of macaroons. “We’re invited to dinner at the Atwells',” I say, untucking the flap of the envelope and sliding a card from the opening.

  She is delighted, and as her sister I ought to be, too. But what if the invitation has more to do with kindliness and our reduced circumstances than anything else? And then, there is Father, who used to be the life of any party, the first to tell a joke, the first to turn on the Victrola and whisk his wife around the room, the first to forget that Isabel and I were not in bed. He continues to leave Glenview midmorning and return late at night, once I am tucked beneath the coverlet, listening for his key in the lock.

  “Can you get the rest of the tea things?” Isabel says.

  “Sure.”

  “Take your time,” she says, winking, her irresistible wink.

  I do take my time, not only because I was asked to by Isabel but because Mother is hurrying me along. As I walk toward the pantry with a canister of sugar, she says, “I’ll put it away.” And as I line up the teaspoons on the tray, she says, “He won’t notice.” When I slop a bit of milk from the creamer and set down the tray to wipe up the mess, she says, “Honestly, Bess.”

  When I finally get back to the veranda, Edward is standing, stammering out some engagement he forgot, and Isabel is sitting with her dress hiked nearly to her knees. Her middle and ring fingers are hooked around her gaping neckline, exposing the lace trim of her camisole.

  “You came for the fabric,” I say, pivoting away quickly and again slopping milk. Feeling quite as unsettled as it seems Edward does, I set the tray on a table in the hallway and dash up the stairs to the sewing room. I find Mrs. Atwell’s fabric quickly but flop down onto Mother’s sewing bench. Am I catching my breath? Am I giving Isabel her chance? One thing for certain, my imagination had not run wild. She had in fact laughed too heartily as he droned on about shooting himself in the foot. She was pursuing him.

  Peering through the small gap between the window casing and the draperies, I watch Edward retreat from Isabel until his backside is just several inches from the Runabout. The pace with which she approaches slows but does not altogether stop until she is close enough to tend his disheveled collar, which she offhandedly does. She wraps her arms around her waist and rocks from side to side, like a sulking child. A few seconds later he is stepping aside, clearing the way to the passenger seat of the Runabout. They are off in no time, Edward looking straight ahead, Isabel laughing with an arm reached around her head, holding her hair in place.

  I envy Isabel. I envy her nerve, her get-up-and-go, her readiness to shape her world.

  I only watch for Tom. For over a week. From the veranda, from the yard, from the window of the sewing room. Once while watching at the gate I saw a lone figure in the distance on River Road, tall and broad-shouldered like him, and wearing a flat cap and neckcloth as he does. I hurried into the house and sat on my hands in a chair. When I was certain he had passed, I ventured into the yard and gawked after the figure, by then too far gone to say whether it was in fact Tom, Tom who had quite rightly accused me of lacking pluck.

  When I step away from the window, Mother is in the doorway of the sewing room, hands on her hips, looking tired and cross. “Where on earth are they off to?”

  They had turned left, downriver, at River Road, which ruled out the falls as a destination and set the glen with its secluded woods as the more likely spot. Though the distress such a suggestion would bring Mother is tempting, I will not turn in Isabel. “The falls, I guess.”

  Mother shakes her head, too tired for more questions.

  To my relief and, I admit, disappointment, the Runabout is back within ten minutes. Isabel climbs down from the automobile and stands at the gate, saying, “What fun” and “Maybe next visit we’ll have more time,” while I cross the yard with Mrs. Atwell’s bundled fabric and hand it to him.

  “I almost forgot,” he says, tipping the package to his brow.

  Mother paces the kitchen at half past five on the Sunday afternoon of the Atwell dinner. “Where is he?” she says. Isabel and I say nothing, just stand in our finery, our hands folded behind our backs pressed against the wall, waiting for Father.

  Though Miss O’Leary’s wedding gown is still incomplete and Mother had already spent the better part of a morning altering the cutwork dress, she fussed again, nipping and tucking one of Isabel’s dinner dresses to snugly fit my newly induced curves. Isabel had worn the dress twice, first to a dinner at the Clifton House in honor of the visiting
Duke and Duchess of Connaught and then to a concert put on by the Mendelssohn Choir at the Massey Music Hall in Toronto. None of the Atwells have yet glimpsed the soft rust of the featherweight silk, the crossover bodice, the narrow tiered skirt trimmed in wide bands of ecru lace, or the décolletage Mother has made just prim enough by moving a rosette.

  “I’ll kill him,” Mother says, continuing to pace.

  I am not enjoying Mother’s agitation in the least, not when it is matched by Isabel’s and my own. Polite excuses will be made, Father’s absence explained away. Even so, I will know he has become capable of ditching the three of us for a pint of ale.

  Isabel steps forward. “We’ll go without him. We’ll say he’s ill.”

  Mother looks up from the linoleum. “Will we take the trolley, then?”

  “No,” Isabel says. “Edward will pick us up.”

  “Bess, can you telephone?” Mother asks.

  The switchboard operator puts me through, and one of the Atwell girls—I am never sure which—answers. As I wait for Kit to come on the line, I hear an automobile and glimpse Father’s Cadillac climbing the bluff on Buttrey Street.

  “Where are you?” Kit asks.

  “We’re running late is all,” I say. “We’re leaving now.”

  “I’ll tell Mother.”

  “Kit?” I lean my forehead against the wall. “Yes.”

  “I’m wearing a corset,” I say. “Don’t laugh.”

  “I might.”

  “Don’t.”

  “Hurry up,” she says.

  Father comes into the entrance hall in a tweed lounge jacket, double-breasted waistcoat, and white trousers. Mother looks him up and down, then steps toward him and takes the walking stick and Panama hat tucked under his arm. “You haven’t forgotten?” she says.

  “Ladies,” he says, bowing slightly to Isabel and me. “Shall we be off to the Atwells'?”

  Mother smoothes the shoulder seams of his jacket. “I think,” she says, “with such pretty daughters to escort, you should put on a suit.”

  He turns to Isabel and me. “Excuse me a minute. I’ve been told to change.”

  As he makes his way toward the staircase, Mother says, “You’re most handsome in the one with the jacket edged in silk grosgrain.”

  “Then it’s the suit I’ll wear,” he calls from the stairs, and it occurs to me that Mother might be just as able as Isabel to shape her world.

  “Get his top hat,” Mother says to Isabel, “the one with the moleskin band.”

  Mother shifts her attention to me. “Turn.” Her index finger draws a semicircle in the air. As I shuffle my feet in a slow circle, she says, “Stand up straight.”

  “I can’t slouch in this contraption.”

  “All the more reason to wear it,” she says.

  She gathers the tin of walnut toffee Isabel and I made and, from the table in the entrance hall, her handbag and hat. As she places her hat on her head, she lets go a great sigh. “I’m so fond of the Atwells,” she says, “and Edward’s turned out to be such a gentleman.”

  “Except that Kit got his share of the brains,” I say. The words are cruel, the worst she has heard from me in a long while. Still, she only presses her lips closed.

  As Father comes down the stairs, Mother watches him closely. I watch, too, trying to figure out just what she is looking for, to see what she does. “You haven’t changed your collar,” she says.

  “Enough.” He snatches his top hat from Isabel.

  At the Atwells’ there are anchovy fingers, foie gras toast, and deviled chickens’ livers to start. Each entrée is fussy: chicken and béchamel jellied and then turned from timbale molds; baked tomatoes stuffed with ham, Parmesan, parsley, and bread crumbs; a mold with an outer layer of asparagus spears and sliced tongue, an in-between layer of quenelle, and an interior of roughly diced sweetbread; and, my favorite, pilau of mutton, a dish Mrs. Atwell tells us is Indian. It is chock-full of the ordinary—mutton, onions, and cloves—and also the exotic—nuts called pistachios, and spices called cumin and cardamom—all of which she has saved since before the war.

  “The missus starved us last week,” Mr. Atwell says. “Not a speck of beef, no milk, no butter, not a single egg, not an ounce of white flour. She said, ‘If we’re to feast on Sunday, we’ll do our bit by making up for it now.’”

  The table around which we sit is finely laid with linen and cut crystal, silverware and Limoges china. The youngest Atwells are gathered around a smaller table, shuttled into the dining room for the meal but just as beautifully laid. Mr. and Mrs. Atwell are at each end of the main table. After weeks of Father arriving long after supper has been cleared away, I am pleased to be placed next to him. But Edward is seated on my opposite side and Isabel far off, catercorner to him.

  “The mutton is lovely,” I say to Edward, trying to ignore my uneasiness with the seating arrangement.

  “Quite.”

  “You’re lucky to have such a daring mother in the kitchen.” He nods.

  “I’m learning to cook.”

  He stabs a bit of asparagus and mutters a few words.

  I lean toward him. “I didn’t hear?”

  This time his words are intelligible. “I’d like a wife who can cook.”

  I focus my attention on my plate. Is he attempting to flirt? I steal a sideways glance. He is shoveling mutton onto his fork, his eyes on the meat, his cheeks lifted in a grin, pleased as punch with himself. I turn to the opposite end of the table, cock my head, and, for the remainder of dinner, feign great interest in all Mr. Atwell and Father have to say.

  “I hear one of your clerks was shipped off to the Petawawa camp,” Father says.

  “Istvan Szabo,” Mr. Atwell says.

  I knit my brow, and Father, noticing, says to me, “He was circulating an enemy rag.”

  Mr. Atwell sets down his fork. “A cousin of his in Winnipeg publishes the Canadian Hungarian, which no one in the Department of Justice even bothered to translate. Istvan handed out the half dozen copies his cousin mailed him to the Hungarian families in Niagara Falls.”

  “It isn’t an easy job, figuring out who’s a threat, with all the foreigners we’ve got living here, half of them from enemy countries,” Father says. “Over Fallsview way the streets are full of them.”

  “I sent a character reference off to the director of internment operations. Istvan’s got a wife and three boys to support.” Mr. Atwell pushes himself ever so slightly away from the table, away from Father. “This unfettered patriotism, ever since Ypres, it makes me ashamed.”

  Father’s head bobs from side to side, neither a shake nor a nod.

  When dinner finally ends, I manage to drag Kit out to the veranda, though she wanted to stay inside, playing crokinole with Edward and Isabel. We sit on the stairs, I with the stays of the corset digging into my thighs. “Edward said something strange at dinner,” I say. “He said he’d like a wife who can cook.”

  She shrugs.

  “I’d just finished saying I was learning to cook.”

  “He thinks a lot of you,” she says.

  I keep my gaze on her, though it seems she would rather I not, as though she were an ant caught under a magnifying lens in the sun. As I wait for her to say more, Mother comes to the front door and says Kit and I ought to join Isabel and Edward in the drawing room. “In a minute,” I say.

  Once she is gone from the doorway, I turn back to Kit and say, “I like Edward. I like him a lot, but not like that.” I peer through the screen door, making sure the coast is clear. “It’s Isabel who’s got her eye on him.”

  “That’s obvious enough,” Kit says, getting to her feet, “but Edward isn’t interested in her, not a bit. He’s interested in you.”

  In my panic I nearly step on Kit’s heels as I follow her indoors. My mind flits to the possibility of a conversation between Mother and Mrs. Atwell. Mother would have promoted Isabel; she is older and a graduate and her trousseau is very nearly complete. Had Edward put his foot down
? Had Kit held undue sway?

  In the entrance hall she stops abruptly. “You’d better pay attention, Bess. He’d be good to you,” she says.

  “You’d never compromise.”

  “Compromise? He’s kind. He’s good. He’s financially set. You won’t get another chance, not like this.” She reaches for my hand, but I snatch it away.

  I am short of breath in the corset I should never have worn, in the contraption I will never wear again. It was pride that caused me to put it on, and more than likely my newfound curves are at least a little responsible for Edward’s sudden interest in me. A fondness for pretty things, vanity itself, is surely a snare.

  Ilook up from the crokinole board when Father steps into the drawing room from the smoking room with a decanter of amber liquid in his hand. Mrs. Atwell folds her arms, and Mr. Atwell signals his helplessness to her with a shrug. Then I miss my shot.

  I watch, disheartened, as Father becomes loquacious, his gestures more sweeping, as though it were the old days. I watch my poised mother, perched on the arm of the chair where he sits, his hand at rest on the scrimshaw eagle crowning his walking stick. It makes a pretty picture, if one does not look too closely, if one avoids the flat-bottomed glass tipped to his lips, nearly drained a fourth time, if one ignores the slight tremor at the corner of Mother’s mouth. “Best be off,” she says, rising from the arm of the chair. “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.

  On 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.