City of Light

by Lauren Belfer

  After ten years of keeping secrets, I valued—perhaps too deeply—the sharing of them.

  CHAPTER XVII

  I stood near the base of the American Falls, on the wooden walkway, slippery as ice, perched across the jagged rocks. I gripped the guardrail as best I could, my fingers stiff from cold. I was shivering; by force of will I stopped my teeth from chattering. Billows of mist, radiant white, swept past me in waves, concealing and revealing the cliff that rose one hundred eighty feet before me. My eyes ached from the blinding glare, my neck throbbed from staring upward, my hearing was numbed by the dual roar of raging wind and falling water. That roar enveloped me, and each wind gust soaked my face.

  “Miss Barrett, do you—” Franklin Fiske’s words dissolved in the reverberations around us. He put his arm around my shoulders to steady us, to warm us. The overwhelming power of the Falls—the fear inspired by the Falls—made this closeness possible; made mutual protection our only concern.

  We were dressed alike, in yellow oilskin coveralls and hooded coats. On our feet, in place of shoes, we wore white felt slippers tied with whipcord. Despite these precautions, we were soaked through. Even though the day was warm—it was a bright spring day in mid-May, I reminded myself—Fiske’s wet hand was frigid as he placed it over mine on the railing. We had changed into these useless and absurd outfits up above, at the top of the cliff, in the Goat Island dressing house. They were required attire for the Cave of the Winds tour, which Fiske was set on taking. I had seen the cave with my father and would gladly have let my memories remain unchanged, but Fiske said he wanted to see it with me, and so I acquiesced. After changing, we had made the dizzying climb down the narrow, twisting stairway that led to the bottom of the Falls. Along the way our guide, stocky in his own oilskins, had commenced the standard recitation of foolhardy stunts, gruesome accidents, and never-ending suicides in the history of Niagara: men going over in barrels, children tumbling in by mistake, upright citizens being hypnotized by the rapids and leaping to their death—until Fiske had cut him short.

  “We’re here for God, not the devil,” Fiske said, and only I caught the irony in his voice.

  Our guide, undoubtedly dependent on tips to survive, commenced a new recitation, this one on the holiness of Father Hennepin, the Franciscan friar who had “discovered” the Falls two centuries before. Then he went further back, to the “savages” who were here even before Father Hennepin. “The savages worshipped the Falls, that they did,” he assured us. “Sent their prettiest maidens over in canoes, without their shirtwaists on—or so the story goes. Made their gods very happy, I’m sure.” He turned to wink at Fiske. “Not a fate you’d want for your own little lady, eh, sir?” Beneath the shadow of his hood, the guide’s face appeared a mask of black whiskers.

  Fiske didn’t respond, but the guide wasn’t waiting for an answer anyway. We’d come to the bottom of the stairway, and he led us gingerly down a rocky ledge and onto this precarious walkway leading to the Cave of the Winds. Nearby, three fishermen formed our only company, casting for sturgeon and bass in a sheltered pool formed by a semicircle of fallen rocks. From their enthusiastic expressions, I knew they’d had excellent fishing today.

  “Is it different?” That’s what Fiske seemed to be asking me now. We were alone; the guide had walked on ahead, giving us privacy.

  “Is it different?” Fiske repeated, bits of his words carried off on streams of wind.

  “Is what different?”

  “The Falls.”

  I looked at him uncomprehending.

  “Because of the water they’re taking out to make electricity.”

  Oh. I studied the surging mass, trying to re-create my visit with my father. We’d stood directly here, at the base of the falling water, years before, he with his hand on my shoulder to protect me. A spray like glistening icicles hit my face. No, there was no change; the Falls were exactly the same. The water was alive. Like a primeval beast. What more could Daniel Henry Bates want than what was falling before us? How much more frightening, how much more overpowering did the waters need to be for the transcendence Bates sought? For God to touch us as we walked the earth?

  I turned to Fiske and shook my head. “No, nothing’s changed.”

  Our guide, himself gripping the guardrail, motioned us toward the final walkway that led behind the cascade itself. All at once he was in a hurry; he probably had a daily quota to meet. We followed his direction. The Cave of the Winds wasn’t really a cave, but rather a deeply curved space beneath a wide outcropping ledge. The water surged over the ledge, making a kind of veil in front of the “cave.” As a result, this part of the Falls was known as the Bridal Veil. One day—a day that no one could predict, a day which could be today, this instant—the ledge would break off, the unrelenting force of the water pounding it down, the Falls destroying themselves once more.

  As we walked on, the wind became even stronger than before, beating us back, refusing us passage. Inching along, I felt as if I were pulling myself through a blizzard, the guardrail my only safety rope. Finally we were beside the sparkling sheet of water. I yearned for the shelter of the cave. A few more steps and we were behind the water.

  At first the cave seemed black. Airless and suffocating. My chest ached from the struggle to breathe. Wind-borne sleet slashed my face. Eels which somehow lived in the cave twisted at my feet, around my felt slippers, slimy as they touched my ankles; my father hadn’t known how the eels had gotten here, yet here they always were. Then slowly the fish and the sleet both seemed to disappear. The sunlight became a green-white iridescence through the sheet of water, and the water became a sheet of light, a transparent wall moving with such unflinching speed that it seemed not to move at all. Peace descended upon me—eery, luminous, calm.

  And then I saw the rainbows … in perfect circles on Fiske’s face, and at his feet. Spinning. Turning, end on end. Suddenly he was within them—his entire being, suffused with rainbows….

  He was staring at me, his expression perplexed. I lifted my hands and realized I was covered with rainbows too.

  We saw all the sights that day. We traveled on a small electric train down the gorge that the Falls themselves had excavated. We stood on the cliffs above the whirlpool, where the river turns at a right angle and the water, four hundred feet deep, curves upon itself with tranquil-seeming determination. Later, walking on the slender suspension bridge that led across the lower river to Canada, we paused to watch red-tailed hawks chase each other down the gorge, soaring and lunging before returning to their nests high in the rock face.

  Crossing into Canada, we tried to avoid the hucksters, barkers, and petty thieves who made the Canadian side of Niagara a third-rate carnival. This rapacious atmosphere lessened my appreciation of the Horseshoe Falls, but not Fiske’s. He yearned to admire the twenty-five-hundred-foot-wide Horseshoe from every angle. Finally he exhausted me. So while he took the Maid of the Mist boat trip (to the very base of the Falls), I enjoyed high tea on the still-gracious terrace of Clifton House.

  Fiske and I were perfectly at ease with one another. Almost without noticing, we had begun to address each other informally, using first names. Not for the first time, I envied his confidence, his self-effacing trust in himself. I wished I could be as open to experience as he was. He seemed to take pleasure in observing everything around him, whether he judged it good or ill. A decade ago, I had lost my ability to accept the world with such unmitigated pleasure; I had become a prisoner of myself. Wistfully I wondered, would I ever be able to change, to become more the way he was? The idea felt like a bit of magic glimpsed in a dream, far away and never reachable no matter how fast we run to capture it.

  When Franklin returned to the terrace of Clifton House, searching me out among the crowded tables—several women turning to stare at his handsome profile after he passed them—I couldn’t help but smile at how lucky I’d suddenly become. In my imagination an entire future opened before me, with him at its center—marriage, children, a home
to share. How enjoyable this vision was, even though it would only ever be a fantasy.

  Franklin must have seen the joy on my face. “Are you laughing at me?” he asked.

  “I suppose I am,” I replied. He pulled the brim of my hat over my eyes.

  Late in the afternoon we returned to the American side of the Falls, where Franklin retrieved his photography equipment from the Great Gorge Route train station. We intended to spend what remained of our day exploring Prospect Point, Goat Island, and the Three Sisters.

  Unlike the Falls themselves, Prospect Point and Goat Island did look different to me: more lush, more wild than I remembered, the vistas more open. The last time I’d been here, the riverbank had been chockablock with advertising signboards, pulp and paper mills, brick mills, sheds and shops. In addition, every viewing section had been blocked off by competing owners who demanded separate payments to see the Falls. In 1883, however, then-governor Cleveland had signed the legislation to create at Niagara what became the first state park in the nation; this was the first time state funds—public funds—had been used to purchase land to preserve scenery. Designed by Frederick Law Olmsted to reflect his vision of what Niagara must have been like centuries before, the Niagara Reservation opened in 1885 and admittance was free. The reservation encompassed the riverbank for one mile upstream as well as all the islands in the rapids.

  Even before the reservation, however, the Three Sisters Islands had been beautiful. At the stone bridge leading from Goat Island to Asenath, the first of the Three Sisters, Franklin leaned across the balustrade to study the glistening waterfall—only several feet high and about thirty feet wide—known as the Hermit’s Cascade. It was named after Francis Abbott, an English eccentric who was drawn to Niagara around 1830. Abbott lived alone and bathed daily in the tranquil, tree-framed pool beneath the cascade … until June of 1831, when he walked into the river beneath the Falls and drowned, whether by accident or suicide no one knew.

  “The water is so calm,” Franklin said.

  “So it seems.”

  “I feel like I could wade in it. I’d like to, in fact.” The day had become exceedingly warm. “Perhaps I will!” He began to walk around the balustrade to the riverbank.

  “Don’t,” I said harshly, gripping his arm. Suddenly I saw my father, pulling me back. The scene was before me in perfect clarity, turned crystalline by fear: A little girl leans into the water to capture diamonds, and her father pulls her back.

  Franklin looked at me with surprise. “The current is tricky,” I said diffidently, glancing away. Tears smarted my eyes, I remembered my father’s love. Struggling to make my tone sound cheerful, I added, “I wouldn’t want to lose you.”

  For a long moment he said nothing, simply staring at me in puzzlement. Then, “At least I’ll take a picture of the cascade.”

  Lightly, shaking off my tears, I asked, “Oh, Franklin, what are you going to do with all your pictures?”

  “Well, I do need to be faithful to my own disguise. When I get a big pile of them, I’m going to ask John J. Albright to give me an exhibition at his new art museum. You can introduce me to him.”

  “You’re incorrigible.”

  “Thank you—my specialty.”

  While Franklin set up his equipment, measuring the light and adjusting the tripod quite as if he really were a professional photographer, I crossed onto Asenath. I roamed among the quiet streams and overgrown eddies, and I watched mallards frolicking among the reeds and indolent swans gliding as if asleep. I climbed over black boulders as smooth as polished obsidian and slippery damp from the never-ceasing vapor of the cataract. Gradually I wandered across the bridges from Asenath to Angeline and so to the last sister, Celinda Eliza, down paths lightly shadowed by the pale green of spring, amid red-winged blackbirds, blue jays and waxwings; through glades of columbine and buttercups and ferns. Brightly colored butterflies flitted around me.

  I had made my way through a stand of blossoming dogwoods when suddenly I saw before me a living painting, framed by tree limbs: Susannah Riley, painting at her easel, tendrils of her hair tossing in a gentle riot around her face; and beside her, focused on a smaller easel, biting her lip in concentration, her straw hat tied tightly under her chin so it wouldn’t blow away, Grace Sinclair.

  It was a moment of perfection, but all I felt—banishing any other consideration—was jealousy, anger, and loss. Grace had come here with Margaret, had set up her drawing pad, just so, with Margaret. They had told me about their afternoons here, regaled me about every turn of the water, every flight of the red-winged blackbirds, every change of blossom and leaf as spring turned to summer and summer turned to autumn. Filled with pain at the memory, with anguish at the idea that Susannah would dare step into Margaret’s place, I strode forward.

  “Grace, why aren’t you in school?”

  The two of them looked up, startled. But when Grace realized it was me, she shrieked with delight and ran to me, taking my hand.

  “Aunt Loui—I mean, Miss Barrett, what are you doing here?”

  So … she regarded her trip as an extension of school; she would call me “Miss Barrett,” our rule for school. My anger diminished.

  “Come and look,” she insisted. “I’m doing an oil painting! Look!” She pulled me to her canvas. It was a rendering of the scene before us: the quiet, flower-filled glen, the rocky inlet with its tracery of sunlight. Although the underlying sketch was confident, the colors were muddy, obviously the work of a beginner. “Miss Riley keeps telling me to keep the colors pure, but it’s hard.”

  Breathing deeply, I forced myself into equanimity; I’d been foolish to become upset, but Margaret’s presence was so immediate to me still. “You’ve made a fine start, Grace.”

  Susannah Riley’s picture of the same scene was fluid and alive. She had focused on the light, on the distinctive shading of every object in its path and on the spectrum of shadows in its absence. She had re-created the scene by transforming it.

  “This is extraordinary, Miss Riley,” I said.

  “Thank you,” she replied simply, stepping back to stare at the painting. “The hardest thing to capture, for me at least, is the way the light bounces off the water onto the lower leaves of the trees. To me, that’s the most beautiful part about being by the water.”

  “I feel that way too,” I said, surprised that here, of all places, we might find common ground with one another.

  “But it’s so hard to get that reflection just right. Each bit of light is like a different facet—”

  Now it was Grace’s turn to be jealous. “This is the first time I’ve painted en plein air, Miss Barrett,” she interrupted. “That’s French for ‘outdoors.’ And it’s the first time I’ve used oils!”

  “Grace Sinclair!” Susannah said in the strict schoolmarm tone which I managed to use with every student except Grace. “You should know better than to interrupt when adults are speaking—or when anyone is speaking, for that matter.”

  Grace looked properly cowed, staring at her feet. “Yes, Miss Riley.” Probably I had hurt Grace at school over the years by my inability to be strict with her; I’d let her become headstrong and willful, because I couldn’t bring myself to discipline her strongly. Even now, I couldn’t bear to see her unhappy.

  “You’ve picked a fine subject for your first oil painting, Grace,” I reassured her. “The best possible.” Then I remembered. “Why aren’t you in school?” I didn’t let myself say what I felt, which was, Miss Riley, how dare you take Grace out of school and bring her here alone?

  “Miss Barrett, it’s Friday! Remember? We get out early on Friday.”

  Ah, yes. She was right. She was here on Friday afternoon for the very reason I was here on Friday afternoon. My upset had made me forget.

  “After I got home Miss Riley came to fetch me and we came here on the train. We were here before we knew it!”

  So theoretically everything was fine. And yet … there was something about their presence here that I didn’
t like, something beyond my yearning for Margaret. I sensed something inappropriate which I couldn’t precisely identify.

  “Miss Barrett, did you know the train is run with electricity from Papa’s power station?”

  “Yes, I did know that.”

  “Maybe we can all go home together. On the train.”

  Well, that pleased me. I glanced at Susannah to learn whether she had other plans, but she was staring at the rapids and either hadn’t heard or didn’t object.

  “Yes, Grace, that would be lovely,” I said. “Why don’t you finish your work. I’ll continue my walk, and we can meet again later.”

  Susannah bestirred herself. “I’ll come with you a few paces, Miss Barrett.” She put down her brush and palette. “Grace, you work hard and surprise us with all you’ve done when we get back,” she instructed.

  As we began to meander along the shore, Susannah said, “It surely is a beautiful day for a trip to the Falls, Miss Barrett. I understand why you came. I always come out here on days like this.” When we were safely out of Grace’s hearing, she continued. “I’m glad to have a few minutes to talk to you alone. Francesca—I mean, Miss Coatsworth, mentioned that you were worried about my beliefs….” After only a few years among us, Susannah had already learned to speak in ellipses.

  “Your beliefs don’t worry me.” Consciously I took on the manner of Mr. Rumsey.

  “Well, she said you thought I shouldn’t be fighting for what I believe in.”

  “That’s entirely up to you.”

  “But Francesca thought it might be better—I mean, she thought you might prefer, that I shouldn’t be so public.”

  “The issue is entirely what you prefer. The school continues forward, with or without any particular individuals. You are the only one who can decide your own … priorities, is the best way to describe them.”

  “Oh.” She thought for a moment. “Yes, I understand.”