The Day the Falls Stood Still Read online

  I straightened myself on the chaise, trying to summon the nerve to point out that he was condemning what was until recently Father’s livelihood.

  “It’s the power companies that brought Carborundum and Oneida and the like to Niagara,” he said. “They were grateful for the cheap electricity, also for a fast-moving river to wash away whatever mess they made.”

  Finally, I said, “What about progress? What about mothers lessening their load with electric ranges and the streets being lit with electric light?” He fell silent, and I brought up the recipe I meant to try for the pike but was unable to set things at ease.

  “I should get going,” he said and stood up to leave.

  Then yesterday I was in the sewing room, listening to Mother’s instructions for making gooseberry jam. Through the window I spotted Tom a ways off on River Road and figured I had only a few more minutes to wait. I recited back the instructions and went to the kitchen as quickly as I dared. Midway through picking the best of the cherries from the colander, I slipped one into my mouth. I slid my tongue over its surface and let it drop to the cherries in the brown paper sack. Then I went out to the veranda, only to wait and wonder what was taking him so long. When I wandered into the yard to look, I saw him plucking daisies and black-eyed Susans from the field beneath the bluff. After gathering a small bouquet, he began the trek up the slope. I watched him glance up at Glenview and then drop the bouquet to the ground.

  “Fine day,” he said at the gate.

  “It is.”

  “I’ve got sturgeon and pike.”

  “I’ve finally got cherries.”

  “Um,” he said, holding out his line. “I think I’ll try another sturgeon.”

  “Your mother is at the window again.” I turned around, and there she was, hands on her hips, not even attempting to hide. I glared, and she folded her arms.

  Eight consecutive days, he came with fish. I boiled pike with salt and vinegar, and served it with hollandaise sauce as is recommended in Mrs. Beeton’s All-About Cookery. Her recipe for crimped and fried pike was less successful. The cornmeal blackened well before the fish flesh had become opaque. Given the chance, I should like to try again with a slower fire. For variety, I twice chose a sturgeon. My first effort was delicious—sturgeon baked in fat, lemon, and finely chopped herbs—even though I had not quite followed the recipe. It called for wine, and I had omitted it; the cache usually in the sideboard was no longer there. I followed her recipe for sturgeon cutlets exactly but did not like the result nearly so well.

  Admittedly, much of the care I took in the kitchen was in anticipation of the few minutes Tom and I would spend at the gate. I usually managed to say how I had prepared the fish from the day before and liked the idea of him thinking I was a capable cook.

  Eight consecutive days, he left with a small brown paper sack in his hand.

  Eight consecutive days, I slipped my hand into my pocket and touched the rosary nestled there while I asked for Mother to announce another trip to Toronto so that I could bake him a pie. It was safe enough to predict Father would not be home to wonder about the sweetness wafting through the house, to expect a pie for dessert.

  Today, shortly before noon, he arrived at the gate. I had not waved from the veranda as I usually did, and he did not say “Fine day,” as he had every day except the day it rained. He stood silent, watching and waiting, until I said, “We don’t need any more fish.”

  “I could bring a hare, already skinned and trussed?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Your mother?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  He looked down and scuffed the earth with the toe of his boot, a small cloud of dust settling on the leather. “We’re saying good-bye, then?”

  I nodded, even though I had consoled myself with pledges of defiance all through the night.

  “That night I carried your trunk …”

  “Yes.”

  “I knew it would come to this.” He lifted his face.

  “And you brought me a fish anyway?”

  “When you waved from the veranda, I figured you for a girl with a little more pluck.”

  His accusation of cowardice smarted, and I blurted out, “I figured you for a gentleman.”

  “I hoped I could learn,” he said and turned away.

  Though sheer, silk georgette has the weight to hang pleasingly draped and the strength not to tear. Because it is supple, it follows curves beautifully but cannot hold heavy beadwork in place. To bead the neckline of a silk georgette gown, you must first knot the beads to a fabric rigid enough for support, yet sheer enough to disappear when sewn into place. Organza perfectly fits the bill.

  Tonight I have beaded for less than two hours, yet the beads knotted into place on the organza outnumber any other evening’s work. With such cavalier methods, I have made short work of the task. Still, time has trudged along and I cannot bear to thread another bead. And now, what am I to do? Should I sit with needle poised and wait for Mother to come into the room all smiles and compliments until she sees what I have done? Do I flop down onto my bed and weep, hoping she has the good sense to leave me alone? It seems a cruel trick that time contracts when you want to savor it and expands insatiably when you do not.

  I set my work on the needlepoint seat of my chair, unfasten the buttons at the nape of my neck, and pull my dress over my head. Mother will not come. It is easier for her to cut and baste and sew pretty things, and tell herself she is doing all that she can for the family. I lay my dress over the back of the chair.

  As my eyes open in the morning, I realize I have not dreamed a single dream. I push myself to sitting and swing my legs over the side of the bed. The beadwork is as I left it, folded on the seat of my chair, but my dress is no longer draped over its back. I open the doors of the wardrobe and find my dress properly hung.

  When I next glance at the beadwork, I see each askew bead has been put right. Closer examination makes plain the extent of the rework. Each knot was severed and each bead slid from the thread. Only then, and with great precision, had Mother poked her needle through the organza, wrong side to right, and strung a bead onto the thread. Only then had she poked her needle back through the organza and secured the thread with a knot. She had worked half the night to make sure I knew she would stand for no nonsense from me.

  Beadwork in hand, I move my chair to the window and sit down to watch. Beyond the garden, beyond the bluff on which Glenview sits, beyond Mother’s jurisdiction, is River Road, a scenic stretch of macadam used by the tourists and the locals traveling to and from the Queenston docks, and also by a certain fellow who has no idea a quiet battle has begun in the Glenview house.

  The Reporter, June 30, 1848

  NEAR TRAGEDY ON ELLET’S BRIDGE

  Workmen constructing the first bridge to span the Niagara Gorge skirted disaster last Wednesday when a wind squall flipped one of the workers’ footbridges upside down. The damaged structure wafted backward and forward like the broken web of a spider, while four helpless men dangled above the raging Niagara waters in constant expectation of a headlong plunge. Fellow workman Fergus Cole—the same Fergus Cole who fearlessly cleared the riverbed the day the falls stood still—leapt to their aid. In the face of pelting rain and gusting wind, he swung a ladder under his arm and climbed into an iron basket that had been rigged up to a cable for transporting supplies across the gorge. He then hollered at the dazed onlookers to ferry him to the stranded men. Upon reaching the wreck, he balanced the ladder between the basket and the overturned footbridge, careful to place the burden of each man’s weight, as they made their way across the ladder, on the basket rather than on the ruined footbridge. All were brought back to firm ground, uninjured in person but well nigh scared to death.

  “We’ve a true hero in our midst,” remarked Clifford Lawson, one of the rescued men. “I owe my life to Fergus Cole.”

  6

  Annie Taylor and her barrel

  Isabel often wore a nightdress
until noon, even as we sat on the veranda. It suited me just fine because I have few dresses of my own and it meant I usually had her wardrobe full of dresses to myself, and I wanted to look my best when Tom came to the gate. Sometimes I worried that the fussiness of her wardrobe would put him off. And because she was curvaceous in all the right places before becoming ill and I am not, her dresses mostly fit me too loosely through the bust and hips. Still, after months of solemn Loretto black, I was pleased by what I glimpsed in the mirror.

  But a few days ago Isabel began wearing dresses again, sometimes the very dress I was hoping to wear. When I suggested to Mother that I would like to sew a dress for myself, she said, “What about all your socks?” The Red Cross package I sent for had finally arrived, and Isabel and I now spend our afternoons knitting socks on the veranda, at least until she gets to the tricky part of the heel and throws down her needles in a huff.

  “I’ll find the time.”

  “Can’t you borrow one of Isabel’s? Miss O’Leary’s wedding is just over a fortnight away.”

  “When I finish the beading, then?”

  She lifted her foot from the treadle, just long enough to rotate the cuff she was stitching. “With a few nips and tucks, one of Isabel’s will do.”

  “Which one?”

  “Leave me be,” she said, glancing up from her work, giving me a clear view of the darkness around her eyes.

  Breakfast has moved from the dining room to the kitchen. It is easier to clean up, and Father, with his increasingly late evenings, seldom manages to get out of bed early enough to join us. As I lift the teapot, and Isabel removes the cloth from the perpetual biscuits, Mother, all smiles, announces Edward is coming by this afternoon to pick up the remnants of a gown she made for Mrs. Atwell. Her milliner needs them for a matching hat. “Bess, you should put on the tea dress you made for Isabel,” Mother says.

  “I’m to pretty myself up for Edward Atwell, then?”

  Mother sighs deeply.

  “He’s staying for tea?” Isabel says.

  “He might.”

  “But I’d like to wear the tea dress,” Isabel says.

  “You just heard me say Bess could wear it.”

  “Go ahead,” I say. “I couldn’t care less.”

  Mother’s hand, alongside her plate, curls into a fist.

  After breakfast she calls me upstairs, where I assume she will assign me some menial task—ripping out a seam, basting stays into place. But instead she opens the doors of Isabel’s wardrobe, selects two dresses, and holds them out to me. “Try these on,” she says. “Then come and show me in the sewing room.”

  The first, which Isabel had not worn in years, is light peach with Juliet sleeves and a princess waistline trimmed in white cotton lace. If it were an inch or two longer, the hem of the skirt would fall fashionably, just above the ankle, but as is, the three-quarter length is better suited to a child.

  In the sewing room, I flick the peach cotton of the skirt and say, “You’ve got to be kidding.” Mother appraises me for a moment, her head cocked, her lips pursed. She smoothes her fingers over the sleeve, an unexpected melancholy palpable in the lightness of her touch, in the way her hand drops to her side. “You’ve grown up,” she says.

  The second dress is entirely white with intricate lace inserts, embroidered panels, and cutwork. As I slip it over my shoulders, I cannot help but think what a lot I have yet to master with needle and thread.

  Mother lifts my arms from my sides and guides me in a slow rotation. She frowns, seemingly unimpressed by the skillfulness of the embroidery and the neatness with which the ground fabric is cut away from the design. “It’s really beautiful,” I say, and then, as it occurs to me the work is her own, I wish I could take back the words.

  I follow her to Isabel’s bedroom where she pulls open the drawer housing Isabel’s underclothes. “It’s time you wore a corset.”

  “It’s only tea,” I say, feigning a bit of resistance.

  “Try it on.” She hands me a bundle of pale pink.

  Stays run the length of the side seams; also over the ribs, front and back; and alongside the hooks and eyes of the front opening, and the grommets of the back opening through which the lace is pulled. In my camisole and drawers, I fasten hooks and eyes from just beneath my sternum to well below my hips. I have heard of the fainting and know the complaints, also the rhetoric of the suffragettes, yet a corset is a rite of passage, which places me a step closer to making decisions for myself. As Mother begins to tighten the laces, the irony in such thinking strikes me, and then, with the final tug, any notion linking a corset with independence seems entirely foolish.

  “Are you comfortable?” she asks.

  In the mirror, I glimpse the extra fullness across the bust, the soft draping of the bodice to my narrowed waist, the gently undulating curve of my hips and say, “Comfortable enough.”

  She pinches the extra fullness from the sides of the cutwork dress, takes it up with a line of pins. “It won’t take but a minute,” she says, but I know it is not true. The seams to be opened up and restitched are part of an underbodice veiled by the cutwork.

  In the kitchen just past noon Mother says I ought to bake Scotch shortbread or macaroons. The biscuit tins are empty, and Edward might want a cookie with his tea. She tells me not to change from the cutwork dress while I bake, in case he arrives. “It’s just Edward,” I say, Edward with whom Kit and I have climbed in the crab apple trees and rolled down the steep slope of the bluff, my hair strewn with twigs and dry grass, my cheeks ruddy with heat and dirt. And what about the war? Are we suddenly baking with white flour and sugar and butter again? But then it hits me, he is not just Edward anymore. Not to Mother. Not to Isabel.

  Isabel comes into the kitchen, wearing the tea dress, and says how lovely I look. I feel as transformed as a girl can be by a corset, a perfectly made dress, and painstakingly upswept hair, but Isabel outshines me as the sun does the moon. Even now, though her skin is still slightly sallow, especially when she first rises for the day, and her jawline and cheekbones too angular, her beauty easily tops my own diluted version of it.

  Way back, the afternoon Isabel tried on the tea dress so that I could mark the hem, what had struck me most was how well-suited it was to a figure as nearly perfect as hers. I had admired my handiwork, the way the filmy layers clung ever so slightly to her curves. But thin as she is, the bodice gapes at the neckline yet somehow fits too snugly across the bust. Maybe I am learning more than I think, as I hand Mother pins and chalk, and listen to her speak of puckers and pulls, and the proper hang of a skirt. Maybe it was only inexperience that led me to think the dress fit as it should.

  Isabel and I decide on macaroons because they bake in a cool oven and the embers from the morning’s round of biscuits will do. Also, Mother will not veto a custard for tomorrow, not when the set-aside egg yolks would otherwise go to waste. I grind almonds in a porcelain mortar while Isabel measures the castor sugar and separates the whites from three eggs.

  “You know what Mary Egan told me a while back?” she says. “She said Mr. Cruickshank was going around telling everyone Boyce and I were never engaged. He admits we courted, but only for a short while. He’s saying Boyce broke up with me ages before he did.”

  “He thought he could make his son look like less of a cad,” I say.

  “Sometimes I think I imagined the whole thing.” She forces breath from her nose, making a rough, huffing sound, likely meant to be dismissive but coming off as full of doubt.

  “Oh, Isabel,” I say. “He gave you a ring.” I remember the night. I had woken to the ping of a pebble on the window of my room at the academy. I opened the shutters, and there were Isabel and Boyce down below.

  “We’re engaged,” Isabel called up.

  “What?” I said, half-asleep.

  “Your sister has promised to marry me,” Boyce called back.

  “You’ll be my maid of honor, won’t you, Bess?”

  “You’re wet,” I said.
The two of them were standing arm in arm, laughing like a couple of hyenas, soaked to the bone.

  “It’s just mist,” she said. “He proposed at the falls.”

  “I was on my knee in a puddle,” Boyce said. “The tourists got a good show.”

  There was a sharp rap on my door, and I turned to see a wimpleless Sister Bede bustling into my room. “Quiet,” she said, reaching to close the shutters. “And back to bed.”

  “Sister Bede,” Isabel called up. “Congratulate me. I’m engaged.”

  Kit had woken up in the bed across from my own and was propped on her elbows, snickering into her sheets.

  “Gracious me,” Sister Bede said, leaning from the window. “Isabel’s down there.”

  “And Boyce,” I called out, “the luckiest fellow in the world.”

  “That I am,” he called back to peals of laughter from Isabel.

  “Hush. You’ll have all the girls up any minute. Mother Febronie, too,” Sister Bede said. “I’m closing the shutters.”

  “Wait. Please,” I said to Sister Bede and turned back to the window. “Yes,” I called down. “I’ll be your maid of honor. I’d like to, very much, more than anything.” No doubt there would be a flock of bridesmaids, but she had singled out me.

  Isabel smoothes a length of wafer paper over a baking sheet and says, “When Boyce broke off our engagement, I reminded him about the ring, that he’d made a promise. He stammered out some nonsense about the ring being a token of affection. Not a promise.”

  “Then why did he take it back?”

  “I threw it at him,” she says. “It chipped his tooth.”

  “He loved you. He was with you at my window that night, saying he was the luckiest fellow in the world.”

  “Never mind,” she says, waving her hand. “Water under the bridge.”