The Day the Falls Stood Still

by Cathy Marie Buchanan

  But I have been asleep and Isabel was not in my dreams. “No,” I say, shielding my eyes from the brightness of the window, from the day I am not yet awake enough to meet.

  “What about last night? Did you look in on her after we got home?”

  She is looking at me intently, her eyes pleading. She wants me to say yes, and I do.

  “Thank goodness.” She pats the coverlet draping my hip, and only then do I understand the question she asked.

  She hurries into the hallway and calls down the stairs, “She was here last night. Bess checked when we got home.”

  “I’ll take a look outside,” Father calls up from below.

  The kitchen door bangs shut, and Mother’s footsteps move from room to room and then down the staircase.

  The evening before, Mother, Father, and I went to the Clifton House as the Atwells’ guests. Isabel had surprised the three of us by climbing into bed a few minutes before we were set to leave. “A headache,” she said.

  “Get up,” Mother said. “I just pressed that dress.”

  “It’s your sister’s engagement party,” Father said.

  “I’m not going.”

  “Suit yourself,” Mother said and marched off with Father on her heels.

  “I’m sorry, Bess,” Isabel said. “Why aren’t you coming?”

  “My headache.” From her wrist, she unclasped the aluminum bracelet Father had given her as a graduation gift.

  Mother called me from the bottom of the stairs. “Really?” I said to Isabel.

  She pressed the chain of delicate, oval plaques into my palm and said, “Wear it so I’ll be there in spirit.”

  She pulled me into her arms and held me until Father called up, “Right this minute, Bess,” and I wriggled loose. The moment I was in the Cadillac, sitting behind Mother in a hat she had overhauled with a bit of tulle and a few rosettes, and Father in his best frock coat, I forgot all about Isabel.

  We pulled into the circular drive at the Clifton House, and instantly a doorman appeared, tipping his hat to Father and opening doors for Mother and me. The Atwells met us on the veranda, and Edward put his hand on my elbow and the two of us led the way to the table with the best view of the falls. Father declined an aperitif, and it seemed we all relaxed a little after that. We sipped iced tea and said the falls were stunning and glorious and magnificent. I quoted a line about our cataract from the Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe, one of the books Sister Ignatius had given me. “Oh, it is lovelier than it is great; it is like the Mind that made it: great, but so veiled in beauty that we gaze without terror.”

  Mrs. Atwell’s face lit up. “It’s always lovely to hear from Mrs. Stowe,” she said.

  We moved inside to the dining room, and for a moment I stood taken aback. Despite the war, the scene was the same as always—chandeliers, and tables laid with silver, and gentlemen handsome in their frock coats, and women head to toe in embroidered taffeta, velvet ribbon, flouncing, and lace.

  I was wearing the pearl choker, and everyone said how well it suited me, how the pearls made my complexion glow. There were toasts and more toasts, and Kit’s eyes welled with tears as she said she had wished I were her sister ever since we were little girls. It made our spat the evening of the pilau of mutton feel like aeons ago. Old acquaintances came up to our table and offered congratulations and best wishes to Edward and me, also to Father and Mother, who accepted graciously, as though they had forgotten the slights our family has endured.

  Eventually the talk turned to setting a date, which caused me to twist the serviette on my lap. I said, “I’d like to wait until I’m eighteen, which isn’t until the new year,” but then Edward said, “I’m enlisting with the next battalion raised in Niagara Falls and might be overseas by then.”

  Kit and Mr. Atwell turned toward Mrs. Atwell. I watched the knuckles of her clasped hands go white. “Sooner rather than later, then,” she finally said.

  “Bess, you could finish up at Loretto while I’m gone,” Edward said. Faces turned in my direction, awaiting my response, and because Father’s eyes were among those trained on me, I finally understood what it seemed everyone else already did. When I was Edward’s wife, Loretto was not out of the question. The expense would be his.

  “I’m not sure,” I said, but I had grown used to the idea that I would not return to Loretto and graduate with the girls I had known since I was a child. I had convinced myself I did not much care. Harp and elocution were for the frivolous. And I was not interested in crocheting pretty doilies and tatting snowflakes to hang on a Christmas tree, not anymore.

  Inever once thought of Isabel, not the whole evening through, and now that she has stomped off, it seems I should have gone to her room, afterward, and described everything she missed. Instead I went straight to my bed, leaving her to wonder whether the Clifton House had changed, whether the women were as chic as always, whether the filbert tartlets were still divine, whether with my good fortune I had completely forgotten her.

  I find Mother in the kitchen, rolling out biscuits in her dressing gown. In one fell swoop she unties her apron and tosses it to me. “I’m going to look for her,” she says, stepping around me and taking the stairs to the second-floor bedrooms two at a time.

  I sink my fingers into the concoction of mixed flours on the counter, then run my palms over a disk of partially rolled dough. I ought to tell, to explain that I was half-asleep, that I was not at all clear about what I was being asked. I sprinkle a bit of flour over the dough and roll the pin across its surface. Surely Isabel is simply out of sight behind the peonies or walking on River Road or sitting in a sunny spot, away from the breeze, wondering if we have missed her yet.

  On her way out the front door, Mother calls into the kitchen, “Forget the biscuits. Come and help.”

  By midday I have looked in the fruit cellar and attic, opened each wardrobe, and lifted the skirt of each bed. I have stood upstairs and downstairs in the empty house, pleading with Isabel to give up the game, telling her I am sorry if she is angry, that she can wear my pearl choker any time she likes as long as she shows herself. I have peered up each tree and behind each shrub and knocked on the doors of a dozen neighbors I have never before met.

  Out of breath, I climb the bluff a final time. Mother and Father halt their clipped exchange on the veranda and turn to face me. They wait, as still as pillars, as wanting as starved dogs. “I didn’t look in on Isabel last night,” I say. “I should never have said that I did.”

  Mother eyes me warily, and I do not glance away until tears spill onto her cheeks. Father’s arms are around her then, until she throws them off, saying, “For God’s sake, call the police.”

  Constable Peters arrives on foot nearly two hours later and has little to say other than that with the war he is short of men and that young women are subject to bouts of hysteria, which generally pass. “Young, employed girls seldom have the disease,” he says, “but indolent girls are prone to it.” He has seen it time and again, the irregular muscle action, the laughter interrupted by cries.

  “You aren’t describing Isabel,” Mother says. “She isn’t ill.”

  “You said she doesn’t eat.”

  “She’s missing, not ill.”

  “Hysteria usually comes at a certain time of the month,” he says.

  “Look,” Father says, stepping closer to Constable Peters, who does not back away. “You will take her description, and canvass the neighborhood or organize a search party, whatever it is you usually do.”

  “There’s a war on, sir. I’m short of men.”

  “The war is an excuse.”

  “Has she recently lost a beau?”

  “You can go,” Father says, his voice steady and cold.

  Mother and Father stand in the doorway as Constable Peters makes his way down the bluff. “Maybe we should go around to some of her friends,” Mother says.

  Isabel was forever passing notes in study hall, forever being caught. And more times than I can count
, her whispers were interrupted by the slap of the presiding sister’s palm against a tabletop. Still, she was well-liked by the sisters, who seemed to welcome a bit of fun. By the girls, she was adored. They linked their arms with hers as she strolled the academy grounds and arranged themselves in the dining hall only once she had selected a seat. Mother had mentioned visitors in the spring, but the visits dwindled and then, before I had come home, altogether stopped. Even so, I jot down the name of each of the local girls from Isabel’s graduating class: Mary Egan, Grace Swan, Maeve O’Neill, Vivian Spence.

  Father waits in the Cadillac while Mother puts on her hat. The last pin slid from her lips, she says, “Stay put,” and quickly embraces me.

  The Cadillac descends Buttrey Street, turns onto River Road, and disappears. I stand a long while—fingering Isabel’s aluminum bracelet, gazing after the automobile—until the telephone rings, startling me.

  “Hello,” I say.

  “It’s Mrs. Coulson. It’s Bess, isn’t it?”

  “It is,” I say, struck by her composure. It is our first contact since the episode in the Oldsmobile. “I’m afraid Mother’s out.”

  “Well, it’s you I ought to be congratulating at any rate.”

  For a moment I am clueless. “Oh,” I say and then remembering myself, “Thank you. Thank you very much.”

  “I ran into Mrs. Woodruff, and she said you were absolutely beaming at the Clifton House.”

  “How kind of her. And very nice of you to call,” I say, wanting to free up the line.

  “I’m just so pleased; Mr. Coulson, too,” she says. “The Atwells are a lovely family, and Edward is well-positioned.”

  “I’ll tell my mother you called.”

  “Just a moment, Bess. About the other day, our little chat.” No doubt she is patting herself on the back, chalking up my engagement to her bit of spat advice. “I hope I didn’t cause much of a fuss with your mother?”

  “None whatsoever,” I say. No chance will I mention the lecture I was delivered on the veranda, the tears that followed it, certain proof, in her eyes, of yet another notch in her belt.

  “Tell your father congratulations from Mr. Coulson, too.”

  Once I am off the line, I move out to the veranda, my gaze sweeping the yard, the bluff, River Road. But Isabel is nowhere to be seen. Eventually I sink to the chaise and pull my feet up alongside me.

  When I next glance toward the river, a lone figure is sprinting up the bluff. Before I am on my feet, I know it is Tom. Soaking wet and hatless, he bounds up the steps of the veranda, saying, “Are you alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “You should come with me.”

  Although he is out of breath from the climb, there is firmness in his voice, an almost irresistible certainty. Still, I am equally certain I should not follow him. It is a test. “I won’t.”

  “Just come.” He grasps my upper arm.

  Shaking loose his grip, I say, “I’m staying here. I’m waiting for Isabel.”

  He inhales, long and slow. His fingers splay, then curl into loose fists.

  “It’s Isabel?” I say.

  “Yes.”

  FALLS

  August 1915–January 1916

  13

  Isabel seems peaceful, lying there on the stone beach, her wet hair smoothed from her face and fanned about her head. Her skin is too white, tinged with blue, not unlike watery milk. The tea dress I made for her is torn from breast to hem but carefully arranged to cover her flesh. The cotton is laden with water and clings to her frame, to the bony shoulders, protruding collarbones, and wasted thighs, to the swollen breasts and the exaggerated roundness of her belly. Her eyelids have been shut.

  It is her, yet it is not. She is so very alive, so utterly unlike the body laid out before me, and it is not possible for her to have become nothing at all.

  I drop to my knees and then onto Isabel, sobbing, kissing her cold skin, her wet hair. Tom stands quietly aside, at the fringe of the woods abutting the whirlpool’s stone beach. He speaks to a group of boys who have made their way down the bank, sends them off to a fishing hole farther downriver, not that I care in the least what sort of spectacle I have become.

  Why did I not guess it? It should have been so easy, with her morning pallor and unwillingness to eat, and the tea dress that fit the day it was hemmed but before long was too large for her shrunken frame except across her swelling breasts. And there was our conversation the final time she came to the academy. She had said, “I need a favor from his father and Boyce is afraid to ask,” and then, “I’ll convince Boyce. It’ll just take a bit of work.”

  She had given herself to Boyce Cruickshank. And exacted a promise from him: He would talk to his father about ours. To lie on her back for him must have seemed a small price. And maybe Boyce Cruickshank had followed through. Maybe he just did not hold as much sway as she had thought.

  Isabel is gone. It seems a mantra of sorts, the words echoing in my head. Never again will she throw her head back in laughter. Never again will she wink her own special wink. Never again will she lie with her cheek resting between my shoulder blades. Then a fresh, chilling thought flies into my head: She wanted to die. She chose to inflict death. But inflict implies something unwelcome, and it must have looked otherwise to her, at least in the beginning. As she waded into the upper river, was she thinking of the fiancé who turned his back, the mother who seldom takes her foot from the treadle, the father who drinks? Or was it me, rushing off to the Clifton House? From the place in the river where she first knew there was no turning back, was there a moment when she did not want to die? Or was she thinking only of the belly swelling beneath her skirts?

  When I have emptied myself of tears, I lie on my side on the stone beach, facing her body, shivering though the day is warm. Tom leaves the edge of the woods and sits next to me. When my shivers turn to quakes, he lies down, his chest against my back, the tops of his thighs against the undersides of mine, an arm over my arm, my hand lost in his. “She’s still with you,” he says.

  I survey her skin but am unable to locate the spot where the grappling hook bit into her flesh. It seems that only her dress was snagged and that the cotton held for a while, until it tore clear through to the hem. Remembering him soaking wet and hatless on the veranda, I say, “You went into the whirlpool?”

  “I had her through the worst of it when the dress ripped.”

  The river is wild here, at an elbow where the flow turns ninety degrees. A good portion of the river, attempting to proceed along its original course, is forced back upon itself by the gorge wall, and then whirled round and round, endlessly so. The whirlpool is where a stunter called Maud Willard circled in her barrel, like the driftwood held prisoner there now, until long after she had run out of air.

  Isabel was guided from the whirlpool by expert hands, hands that knew when to slacken the rope and when to coax her toward an eddy that would float her away from the main current to the beach. But he lost her, and, unable to toss the hook another time, unable to risk marring her flesh, he threw himself into the whirlpool after her, swimming with all his might. The revulsion I had felt as I held his tarpaulin by the corners and watched a grappling hook fall to the underbrush was entirely wrong.

  “I don’t want my parents to know she was with child,” I say.

  His chest rises and falls against my back before he speaks. “I can take her to Morse and Son and have her body prepared there, before it’s brought around to your house. It’s what usually happens with the bodies the river gives up. You’ll need to bring new clothes.” As an afterthought, he says, “Something with a full skirt.”

  “I knew Mr. Morse’s daughter at the academy. She was always gossiping about so-and-so’s disfigurement or so-and-so’s underclothes.”

  “The bodies from the river are easy money for him. The city pays for the burial when one isn’t claimed. I’ll warn him: If word gets out, I’ll take the bodies to Patterson’s.”

  “You’re paid for the bo
dies?”

  “Three dollars,” he says.

  “Mary Morse called them floaters.”

  “I never have.”

  A long while later, when the sun slides behind the bank and the beach is cast in shadow, he says, “You should think about getting home.” I ask him to stay with me, at least to River Road, but he says no, that he will follow, I suppose so I will not see Isabel wrapped in the tarpaulin.

  The trudge up the old incline railway ties leading out of the gorge is long, and I am weeping again and tripping on my skirt and not bothering with the mucus coming from my nose. Then I am running, scrambling over ties, panting, my heartbeat echoing in my ears, hurrying to be home.

  But what will I say to Mother and Father when I am there? That she is dead, drowned in the river? They will ask where she was found, and I will say in the whirlpool, and then they will know. The river gives up those who plummet from the brink in one of two places, an eddy at the Maid of the Mist landing or the whirlpool. I catch myself thinking that Isabel will know what to say to Mother and Father. And for a long moment I cannot grasp that I cannot ask her advice.

  As the screen door closes behind me, Father and Mother rush into the entrance hall, and I can almost hear their silent pleas: Say she is well. Say she is well and I will never take another drink. Say she is well and I will be a perfect mother, a mother who has all the time in the world. As I hesitate, as they take in my eyes, surely swollen and red, hope falls away and Mother says, “We’ll sit in the kitchen and you’ll tell us what you know.”

  Mother sobs, great, heaving sobs, her face in her hands, and Father begins to pace, asking questions. “Who found her body?”

  “Where, exactly?”

  “How did you come to know?” I answer vaguely, referring to Tom only as a fisherman who somehow knew where Isabel lived.