The Falls

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Burnaby said cryptically he never learned of a jumper at The Falls but he didn’t feel a tug somewhere in his soul. “There, but for the grace of God, and plain good luck, go you.” But Colborne didn’t feel that way. He was a businessman, he was selling The Falls. He was selling the idea of The Falls. He wasn’t selling the idea of some twisted neurotic nut jumping into The Falls.

  Still, it was mostly male suicides that aroused his fury. Colborne conceded that females who jumped were desperate for reasons of being female. It was like a birth defect: female. Female suicides were more to be pitied than condemned, as the church condemned them. The majority were young, distraught girls, pregnant and abandoned by their lovers. They were wives mistreated or abandoned by their husbands. Their babies had died. Maybe, somehow, they’d killed their babies. They were mentally ill, deranged. They were only just females. At the height of romantic female suicides at The Falls, in the mid-nineteenth century, all the female suicides had been young, beautiful, “tragic”—at least, as they were represented in newspaper sketches. In the mid-twentieth century, things had changed. A lot. Suicides now were likely to be pathetic girls and women, not heiresses or the spurned mistresses of wealthy men, and their deaths were not romanticized by the media.

  But the men! Selfish sons of bitches. They had to be moral cowards, taking the easy way out. Sullying the reputation of The Falls. Exhibitionists. Look, look at me! Here I am.

  Except: Colborne knew what a body can look like after it has gone over The Falls. After it rises to the river’s surface, sometimes days or even weeks later. Miles downriver, at the lake.

  Yet The Falls exerted its malevolent spell, that never weakened. If you grew up in the Niagara region, you knew. Adolescence was the dangerous time. Most Niagara natives kept their distance from The Falls, so they were immune. But if you drifted too near, even out of intellectual curiosity, you were in danger: beginning to think thoughts unnatural to your personality as if the thunderous waters were thinking for you, depriving you of your will.

  Clyde Colborne liked to think he was spared from such thoughts. As Dirk Burnaby once said, you had to have a deep, mysterious soul to want to destroy yourself. The shallower you are, the safer.

  Colborne had said, laughing, “I’ll drink to that.”

  The Falls was good for one thing: money.

  So this was bad news, anyway not good news, what his employees were telling him. Everyone on the staff was abuzz with it. A certain Reverend Erskine had disappeared, and from all reports it sounded as if he was the man who’d jumped that morning; his bride of hardly more than one day, the red-haired woman with the pale freckled face and distracted manner, had been looking for him in the hotel, and had finally reported him “missing.” The couple was from Troy, on the far side of the state; they’d booked the Rosebud Honeymoon Suite for five days.

  “They were married just yesterday? Jesus.”

  Colborne was incredulous, incensed. He had a twelve-year-old daughter. He had a mother who adored him, forgave him his faults. He was sentimental about women. It infuriated him that any man, let alone a minister, could behave so selfishly on his honeymoon.

  “At least he could’ve waited till he was married a while. Give it a chance. A few weeks. Months. Like the rest of us did. Jesus.”

  Introduced to the widowed bride, Colberne thrust out his hand to take hers. He was wound tight as a spring. He was yearning for a quick drink. The young woman’s fingers were icy in his, and without strength; he had a sudden impulse to warm them energetically in both his hands. “Hello! Hel lo. Mrs. Erskine, I’m Clyde Colborne, proprietor of the Rainbow Grand. I’ve heard of your situation and I’ll be taking you to police headquarters. You’ve called your family, I assume? And Reverend Erskine’s family? And please understand, Mrs. Erskine, under these difficult circumstances you’re welcome to stay on at the Rainbow Grand, compliments of the management, as long as—” Colborne paused, blushing. He meant to say until the body is found, identified, shipped home. But Mrs. Erskine hadn’t yet been told about the man over The Falls. “—as long as required.”

  The red-haired woman lifted her strange glassy-green eyes to his. Though she’d surely been told by his employees who Clyde Colborne was, and where he was now taking her, she seemed to have forgotten. In a scratchy wondering voice she repeated “ ‘As long as required.’ ” As if the words were foreign, or a riddle.

  On the brief drive to Niagara Falls Police Headquarters on South Main, Clyde Colborne at the wheel of his flashy new car (a powder blue Buick with whitewall tires, automatic transmission, beige leather upholstery soft as the inside of a woman’s thigh) was uneasily aware of his passenger Ariah Erskine who sat stiffly, gloved hands clasped together on her lap. (Ariah had retrieved from her hotel room a fresh pair of white crocheted gloves.) Colborne wracked his brains to think of something to say to her. Silence between human beings scared him. He was rehearsing how he’d recount this miserable experience to his old friend Burnaby. Jesus! I’d have been a helluva lot better off going to church with my family. Only when Colborne was parking his car did the woman say quietly, “I haven’t yet called my family. Or his. I have nothing to say to them. They will ask where Gilbert went, and why. And I have no answer.”

  4

  Foolish woman, who are you to be spared My justice?

  God’s voice taunting her. Inside her skull. In this place of strangers staring at her. In pity, and suspicion.

  “But how is it justice, God? Why do I deserve this?”

  She waited. God declined to reply.

  How long ago it now seemed, and how remote. She was standing with her thin arms lifted in a pose of crucifixion as the white satin gown with its myriad pearl buttons, tucks and pleats and ingenious lace trim, was fitted onto her like an exquisite straitjacket. Mrs. Littrell had insisted upon the corset, Ariah could scarcely breathe. I take thee Gilbert. My lawfully wedded husband. A sneeze would have shattered the corset, and the wedding.

  At police headquarters, the bride of the “fallen” man was clearly to blame.

  Ariah had washed her face. Rinsed her mouth where panic had left a taste as of copper pennies. How annoyed Gilbert would be to see how another time her damned “French twist” (as her mother called it) had come undone. Strands and wisps of hair made hopelessly frizzy by the humid Niagara atmosphere. Ariah saw with dismay she looked as if she’d only just wakened.

  In that pigsty of a bed.

  You disgust me. I tried to love you.

  This frees both of us now.

  In this new, impersonal place. Not the showy luxury of the honeymoon hotel but an ugly fluorescent-lit room where strangers addressed her urgently. “Mrs. Erskine?” And again, as if this was her name, “Mrs. Erskine? We have something to tell you, please prepare yourself.” The gentlemanly man from the hotel whose name she’d forgotten seemed to have disappeared and she was left now with these strangers, identified as police officers though they were not in uniform. One of them, unexpectedly, was a woman: a “matron.” You would need a female police officer to deal with female criminals, victims. This one was middle-aged, with a blunt ax of a face, a faint dark mustache on her upper lip, in a gray serge suit that fitted her bulk snugly. The woman was saying—what? Ariah tried to listen through the roaring in her ears.

  Gilbert Erskine might have “fallen” into—what? Where?

  “The Horseshoe Falls, a witness has reported. At about six-thirty this morning.”

  Ariah heard these individual words but could make little sense of their significance. And the woman had, amazingly, the wallet photo of Gilbert, too. (How had she gotten her hands on that picture of Gilbert, exactly like one Ariah had in her possession?) Ariah said, slowly, “My husband wouldn’t have gone sightseeing without me. He might have left me, but he wouldn’t have gone sightseeing without me. For weeks we’d been planning this trip. He was planning it, mostly. He’d marked off the tourist sights and the ‘geological’ sights we were going to visit, he even numbered them in the
order we’d be seeing them.” She said, stubbornly, “You’d have to know Gilbert Erskine, to know that he wouldn’t have done such a thing.”

  The woman in the gray serge suit, busty and big-shouldered, was trying not to be argumentative, you could see. But there was an argument brewing here.

  “Mrs. Erskine, we understand. But this photo of Mr. Erskine has been identified ‘almost certainly’ by the witness who saw the man at The Falls this morning. On Goat Island. Shortly after the time you’ve said Mr. Erskine disappeared from your hotel room.”

  “Did I say that? How could I say that?” Ariah asked excitedly. “I’m sure I said I didn’t know the time. I had no idea of the time. The time was not a concern of mine when I was asleep. Someone must be lying.”

  “No one is lying, Mrs. Erskine. Why would anyone be lying? We want only to help you.”

  “If my husband is gone, he’s gone. How can that be helped? How can you help me?”

  “Since your husband is missing, and since a man was witnessed at the Horseshoe Falls—‘falling’ into the river—”

  “Gilbert wouldn’t do such a thing. I know what you’re saying: by ‘fall’ you mean ‘jump.’ I know what you mean. But Gilbert would never have done such a desperate thing, he’s a man of God.”

  “We understand, Mrs. Erskine. But—”

  “You don’t understand! Gilbert turned his back on me, but he wouldn’t have turned his back on God.”

  Ariah spoke adamantly. It seemed to her that these ignorant strangers were deliberately provoking her. Wanting her to admit her complicity in Gilbert’s fate. Wanting her to confess.

  One of the male officers said, clearing his throat, “Mrs. Erskine, had you and your husband—quarreled?”

  Ariah shook her head. “Never.”

  “You had not quarreled. At any time, ever.”

  “Not at any time. Ever.”

  “Was he upset?”

  “ ‘Upset’ in what way? Gilbert kept his feelings to himself, he was a very private man.”

  “Did he seem to you upset? During the hours preceding his ‘disappearance’?”

  Ariah tried to think. She saw again her husband’s contorted, sweaty face. His teeth locked in a grimace like a Hallowe’en jack-o’-lantern. She heard again the bat-shriek that escaped from his lips. She could not betray him, his shame as profound as her own.

  Ariah shook her head, with dignity.

  “And he left no note behind, you’ve said?”

  “No note.”

  “No hint of—why he might wish to leave you? Where he might be going?”

  Ariah shook her head, brushing a strand of hair out of her warm face. Oh, she was perspiring! Vulgarly put, sweating. Like a guilty woman, under interrogation. For hours she’d been chilled, shivering. Now suddenly this place was airless, and very warm. The bowels of the earth opening in steamy gassy warmth. Ariah saw with a startled smile that she was wearing the white crocheted gloves her elderly great-aunt Louise had given her for her trousseau.

  Trousseau! Ariah bit her lip to keep from laughing.

  “Prior to your honeymoon trip to Niagara Falls, while you were planning your wedding, for instance, there was no suggestion of a—disagreement? Unhappiness on Mr. Erskine’s part, or yours?”

  Ariah scarcely listened to this rude question. No.

  The police officers regarded her with neutral assessing eyes. It seemed to Ariah that they exchanged glances with one another, so subtly she couldn’t detect them. Of course, they were practiced at this sort of thing. Interviewing guilty individuals. They’d become skilled at it as a trio of musicians. String trio. Ariah was the visiting soloist, the soprano who kept hitting wrong notes.

  “We’ve sent out an emergency bulletin concerning your husband, Mrs. Erskine. And search teams are out along the river, on both sides, looking for the body of the—fallen man.” The woman in the gray serge suit paused. “Would you like us to notify your family now? And Mr. Erskine’s?”

  The woman spoke in a kindly voice. But Ariah had an urge to slap her homely, bossy face.

  “You keep asking me that,” she said sharply. “No. I don’t care to notify anyone. I can’t bear a crowd of relatives around me. I threw away that damned corset in a trash can. I won’t return to that.”

  There was a startled pause. This time it was much more evident that the police officers were exchanging significant glances.

  “ ‘Corset,’ Mrs. Erskine? I don’t understand.”

  Because she was trussed up in one herself, she couldn’t comprehend how Ariah had escaped hers.

  “Gilbert chose to leave me alone, and I will remain alone.”

  But the policewoman was as stubborn as Ariah, and not to be dissuaded. She said, “Mrs. Erskine, we have no choice. You’ll need your family for support and we must notify Mr. Erskine’s family, immediately. It’s standard procedure in a case like this.”

  In a case like this.

  It was then that the heavy mug slipped from Ariah’s fingers and fell to the floor, spilling water and cracking into pieces. Ariah wanted to protest to these strangers who were blaming her and pitying her and trying to manipulate her that she was not “a case like this”—nor was Gilbert Erskine “a case like this”—but the floor beneath her feet tilted suddenly, and she couldn’t get her balance to stand. There was a flickering of fluorescent lights like heat lightning and though Ariah’s eyes were opened wide she could not see.

  Foolish woman, don’t despair. My justice is My mercy.

  5

  “HELLO, BURNABY. Thank God you’re there!”

  He was making the call from a pay phone in the lobby. He was in need of help. A drink also. Moral support. Dirk Burnaby was the man to consult at such dire times. Just to talk, maybe. Ask for expert advice. Solace. Any hour of the day or night. Poor bastard’s an insomniac, since the war. Likes to hear from his buddies. A bachelor gets lonely almost as much as a married man. Burnaby, the youngest in their crowd, is the lone bachelor. Always has women, some of them gorgeous showgirls from the Elmwood Casino, or models. Lucky bastard, but one day his luck will run out.

  Colborne was wishing he’d brought his pocket flask with him, dying for a drink. They’d all had quite a few on Burnaby’s yacht last night. The Valkyrie. Beautiful forty-foot boat, gleaming white. Anchored in the river above l’Isle Grand, within sight of the Burnabys’ estate on the southeastern end of the island. Not that Burnaby lived in the old mansion. Burnaby a little drunk, joking he’s the Flying Dutchman of The Falls. What’s that mean?

  Colborne was saying, “This poor woman. A guest at the Rainbow. I’m thinking she’s sort of my responsibility. Till her family shows up. It looks as if her husband killed himself. Just this morning. Dirk, you listening? A Presbyterian minister.”

  At the other end of the line Burnaby made a noncommital sound.

  “We’re at police headquarters, they’re trying to interview her. I assured her she could keep the suite as long as she needs it.” Colborne paused. Good public relations he was thinking. But he was being charitable, too. He wanted Dirk Burnaby to understand that. In their circle, Burnaby was a generous, even reckless spender. He lent money he knew would never be repaid. He took on law clients he knew would never pay him, as he took on cases he knew he couldn’t win, or couldn’t win lucratively. Burnaby wasn’t a Christian but he behaved like a Christian is supposed to behave which made Colborne, a Christian, uncomfortable. So Colborne wanted Burnaby to know about the suite. “It’s a honeymoon suite she has,” he added. “Not cheap.”

  This captured Burnaby’s attention.

  “Honeymoon? Why?”

  “They were on their honeymoon. Married yesterday.”

  Burnaby laughed.

  Colborne reacted indignantly. “Hey, Burn! God damn this is no joke. The woman is left alone here and she’s in a state of shock and is saying she doesn’t want to see her own family, even. I said I’d help her, but—what the hell am I supposed to do?”

  “Well, is she you
ng? Good-looking?”

  “No!” Colborne paused, incensed. “But she’s a lady.”

  At Burnaby’s end of the line there was an ominous silence.

  Why was Colborne calling his friend Burnaby, why from police headquarters, it must be he was in an anxious state. The previous night on The Valkyrie he’d lost at poker, $1,400 and most of it to Burnaby. Signing a check to his friend with a good-natured flourish. Colborne had played shrewdly and seriously but the cards had gone against him. Burnaby had had all the cards. Whether Burnaby dealt or not, he had all the cards. His friends acknowledged Burnaby’s good luck, over the years. Most of the men in their circle had known one another since the early 1930’s, Mount St. Joseph’s Academy for Boys in Niagara Falls. Burnaby had been two classes behind Colborne, Wenn, Fitch, and Howell, but he’d played on varsity teams with them, football and basketball primarily. When he won, he was a gracious winner; when he lost, he was a gracious loser. But he rarely lost. Possibly his friends were a little jealous of Burnaby’s success with women. He was a serial polygamist, they joked. Not that he married any of these women or even got inveigled into “engagements.” Somehow, Burnaby walked away clear. And he remained on friendly terms with the women, or usually.

  As long ago as Mount St. Joseph’s, Dirk Burnaby had been the Peacemaker. One of the priests had called him that: “Peacemaker.” In fact, Burnaby had a temper himself. But his anger quickly passed, he was always more thoughtful, smarter than the other boys. Deeper. More spiritual, maybe. Burnaby had a strange habit of apologizing with such sincerity you felt a thrill of happiness that you’d put him in the wrong, even if often he wasn’t exactly in the wrong. It seemed to pain him that someone might dislike him and that his friends might dislike one another. What if one of us dies? Burnaby would say. And he meant it! He was a guy who wanted his friends to be friends. And you wanted to please Burn, so you gave in. Burn made you a better person than you truly were, to please him. So it was even now. Adulthood hadn’t changed any of them much. A dozen times in the past twenty years Colborne had called Burnaby for help. A few years ago when Irma had ordered Clyde out of their house, Irma was filing for divorce, citing infidelity on Colborne’s part. Infidelities! As if the women had meant anything to Colborne, they had not. It seemed impossible to drum into Irma’s head, they had not. But women like Irma are slow to forgive. Stingy in forgiving. Colborne had been plunged into a sorry state. Living in a suite at the hotel (and trying not to see how his employees gawked and grinned at him behind his back), drinking too much. Eating too much. Losing money at the racetrack. The women he’d been seeing had no time for him when he hadn’t money to spend on them, not that they were call girls exactly (though maybe they were, to speak frankly) but they could sniff out a lost cause. In eighteen months he’d bled away somewhere beyond fifty thousand dollars with nothing to show for it but a genital rash and a tendency to puke unexpectedly. Clyde had been sick with worry that his children would turn again him, though he supposed they’d be justified in doing so. A daughter, two sons. He wasn’t worthy of these kids. Irma was poisoning them with her tears and hurt feelings, and Clyde loved his kids, too, but God damn (he vowed) if he was going to crawl on his belly to beg forgiveness, he was not. This was tearing him up! So one night he bared his ulcerous soul to Dirk Burnaby, knowing that Burnaby would make things right. Burnaby had a successful law practice in Niagara Falls and Buffalo predicated upon his ability to help other lawyers with cases that were too complicated for them, or that they’d frankly screwed up. Burnaby, the man to call. A man you could trust not to betray your secrets. So Colborne went to Burnaby, and confessed his situation. And Burnaby listened, and immediately took action. Told Colborne to sober up, and Colborne did. (To a degree.) Told Colborne to keep away from the race track over in Fort Erie, Ontario, and Colborne did. Told him how to behave—“warmly, sincerely, like you love them”—with his family, and Colborne did. And Burnaby spent time with Irma, just the two of them. Which was flattering to Irma. Burnaby told Irma that Colborne loved her so much, he had to test that love. And he would never hurt her again. And so the crisis passed. The Colbornes were reconciled. Sometimes Clyde wasn’t all that certain that had been a good thing, but he guessed it was. Had to be.