The Day the Falls Stood Still (18 page)

“You don’t send the laundry out?” I said, once I was awake enough to be sure of what I was seeing.

“It’s only a few things.”

“But where do you hang the clothes to dry?” Bewildered as I was, the question had somehow risen to the top of the list.

“I’ve attached a few lines to the underside of the dining table.” She looked up from the laundry tub and smiled as though I ought to be impressed with her ingenuity.

I shifted to sitting on the cot. “I thought Father was as good as running the tannery?”

“He’s earning plenty,” she said, “more than enough.”

I nudged the laundry tub with my toe and turned up my palms.

She handed me a basket of wrung-out bloomers and camisoles, and a tin of clothespins. “Would you mind?” she said, pointing toward the table. “It’s his latest mania. Saving.”

“Mania?” I said, no less confused than a minute earlier.

“First it was aluminum. Then it was rye whiskey, and now it’s saving up enough to buy the tannery.” She tossed another pair of bloomers into the basket beside me. “He doesn’t have it in him to do anything halfway. Never has.”

I knew what she meant. Always, it had struck me that he loved her, and not in an everyday sort of way but with a rapt, enviable intensity. Even so, he was not giving her enough money to run the household.

“I prefer penny-pinching to rye whiskey,” she said, clearing a stray lock from her forehead with the back of her hand.

In the evening Father came through the doorway with Sir Charles Lyell’s
Travels in North America
in his hand. “I’m sending it over to Tom,” he said. “There’s a chapter where he uses the distance between the edge of the escarpment and the falls, and the rate they’re eroding back to calculate the age of the Niagara Gorge.”

I knew the book. Kit had complained bitterly when Mother Febronie pitched a copy that had snuck its way onto the shelves of the library at the academy. If Lyell were right, the date of creation set by Saint Bede using the Bible as a guide was entirely wrong.

I slipped my arms around Father’s neck and glimpsed an approving smile come to Mother’s lips. “He’ll love it,” I said, squeezing him like I had not since I was a child. A book was an extravagance, something my penny-pinching father would surely not have bought if he thought Tom had drowned in the mud.

It was the next morning when Mrs. Andrews called, breathlessly hollering into the telephone that a whole slew of letters from Tom had arrived, that she had opened all of them, that the most recent was dated November 17. “He survived Passchendaele,” she said, her voice beginning to crack. And then it was some nonsense about someone at her door. She would make me wait until she had pulled herself together to hear another word.

T
here are plenty of fellows who will not step onto the railway station platform at Niagara Falls today, plenty of fellows who had not survived Ypres and the Somme, Vimy Ridge and Passchendaele: Fred and George Anderson, whom I knew from Morrison Street Methodist; Walter Canfield and Frank Romea, who worked for Father at the Niagara Power Company; James Muir and Clement Swan and Thomas Wood, who visited their sisters at the academy; Gordon Dobbie, who delivered the flowers from his father’s shop; William Hewson, who courted Isabel for a while; 124 others, including Edward Atwell, who was once my betrothed.

His death was reported in the
Evening Review.
“Killed in action,” it said. I cried balled up on my bed until Mrs. Andrews brought me a cup of tea with brandy and said that Jesse was waiting in the hall, but in another five minutes she was sending him in and that it was not right for a child to see his mother carrying on so.

I sent a heartfelt condolence to Kit and did not receive a reply. I thought about dropping in on her at one of the Erie Avenue shops she now ran on her family’s behalf and had very nearly worked up the nerve when I saw her, lounging on a blanket in Queen Victoria Park, listening to the Niagara Falls Citizens Band. She was leaning against a fellow fifteen years her senior and tall with a hollow chest and a dusting of freckles and sparse, tan hair. Surely he was Leslie Scott, her husband, who had been sent home from the war early with chlorine gas—damaged lungs and then come to Niagara Falls from Toronto as the Hydro-Electric Power Commission’s chief hydraulic engineer. Midconcert I caught her eye. There was a moment of recognition, and then pursed lips and her hard gaze lingering too long before shifting from mine. Edward was not going to come home from the war and marry a pretty girl and set to work on a brood of his own. He was not coming home, not at all, and there was no hope of me becoming a mere hiccup along the way to a full life.

Boyce Cruickshank had survived the war; at least his name had not appeared in the death notices of
The Buffalo Evening News,
which my parents watched as closely as I did those of the
Evening Review.
We knew he had enlisted early on with the American Expeditionary Forces because Father had seen him in uniform a short while after the United States finally joined the Allies and began shipping ten thousand men a day to France.

“Your father ran into Boyce the other day,” Mother had said.

“Boyce Cruickshank?” As far as I knew it was the first they had seen of him since he left Isabel high and dry.

“He said Boyce cut clear across the street to speak to him. He’s got more backbone than his father. I’ll give him that.”

“Was he rude?” The more senior Mr. Cruickshank had looked the other way when he met Mother on the street and turned his back when he came upon Father at the bank.

“He hung his head and said he was sorry, that he had been a great disappointment to Isabel, that she deserved better. Apparently he was wearing a soldier’s uniform.”

A
mid influenza and the ballot for the power commission, amid worry and grief over men too far away or ruined or altogether lost, there has been pleasure, often short-lived, sometimes persisting for an hour or a day or a week. There is Jesse, who is happy, who claps his hands in delight when I step into a room. At two years old he is clever enough to know limestone from shale, agile enough to have scaled a handful of the boulders in the glen, spirited enough to have thrown himself into a pool at Dufferin Islands, certain that he could swim, which turned out to be right.

There is the work that has kept the two of us afloat, the needle between my fingers like a tiny magic wand. There are the dresses that cause women to marvel, the really special ones that cause me to marvel as well. I have a handful of clients who are my very own, rather than Mrs. Andrews’s with me as assistant. It began one morning with Mrs. Andrews answering the door and me in the sewing room, my foot stock-still on the treadle once I recognized Mrs. Coulson’s precise enunciation, almost British though she was born in Niagara Falls. “I’ve heard you’ve taken on Bess Cole as an apprentice,” she said. Of course Mrs. Coulson knew, her ear all but pressed to the ground. Of course she had come. She needed to see for herself what had become of the girl who had discarded the bit of advice hurled at her in the backseat of an Oldsmobile and married the likes of Tom Cole.

“I have.” I could picture Mrs. Andrews—her spectacles perched low on her nose, her chin indiscreetly inching upward as she took in Mrs. Coulson’s full height.

“I’m an old friend, a benefactor, some might say.”

“How so?”

“I’m not sure it’s any of your business.”

“You brought it up.”

“I was wondering whether I might order a skirt,” Mrs. Coulson said. “I’d want Bess to do more than run up the seams.”

“Why not just say you’d rather her make the skirt than me?”

Mrs. Coulson cleared her throat. “All right,” she said. “I’d rather Bess made the skirt.”

Was I wrong about her? Was it possible Mrs. Coulson was extending the favor she had shown Mother to me? To have a client of my own would be a streak of good luck. And that it was Mrs. Coulson, who had the height and curves to be the perfect model for a perfect dress, also the social connections to bring news of my old world at a time when the cocoon of just Mrs. Andrews, Jesse, and me was sometimes too snug, at least partially offset my dislike of her busybody ways.

I made the skirt, a straightforward affair, six panels, a yoke. She was pleased and ordered a blouse, no pleats, no ruffles, nothing for me to mess up. That was before I showed her a design I had come up with for an evening gown. She settled on pale blue-green silk for the main body and an ivory shadow lace for the neckline and sleeves. After that more women came to the door, saying, “I heard you sew for Mrs. Coulson.”

With Mrs. Coulson ordering an evening gown or a dinner dress nearly every month, it seemed there was no shortage of funds in the Coulson household, and it was hardly a surprise. Mr. Coulson had been hired away from the Niagara Power Company for what everyone said was a top-brass position with the Hydro-Electric Power Commission. And then, a few days after the Armistice, Mrs. Coulson confirmed he was in fact senior enough to hire anyone he pleased. I was fitting her for a velvet evening coat and had just finished adjusting the bodice darts to fit her ample bust when she said, “You should send Tom to see Mr. Coulson about work once he’s home.”

It had occurred to me that Mr. Coulson might have the clout to add another man to the payroll, and I had thought how simple it would be to ask Mrs. Coulson to put in a word on Tom’s behalf, even if it meant handing her on a silver platter the opportunity to gloat. Until that moment in the fitting room, though, I had always reminded myself that the Hydro-Electric Power Commission was not for Tom, at least not until necessity made it so, and pressed my lips shut until the notion passed. “He’ll need to find something,” I said, aiming for just enough enthusiasm to keep the Hydro-Electric Power Commission as an option. “I’ll tell him when he gets home.”

“Mr. Coulson would keep an eye on him,” she said. “He’d make sure he was treated well.”

I ran a bit of chalk along the length of a newly marked dart. “I really appreciate it, both Mr. Coulson’s help and all the orders you send my way.”

“Your father was always looking out for Mr. Coulson, and Mr. Coulson doesn’t forget very much.” She glanced in the mirror, sliding her hands from ribs to hips.

I remembered Isabel saying Mr. Coulson was as ambitious as they come, and Mrs. Coulson, too, and the thought sent me back to her tirade in the Oldsmobile. She was a woman used to doling out orders, a woman used to having everything work out just as she had planned. She turned, suddenly, to admire her profile, causing me to stick myself with a pin.

Mother knew I was sewing for Mrs. Coulson and was always wanting to hear about whatever pretty frock I had on the go for her. Given the dearth of new frocks in Mother’s life, I tended to gloss over the imported lace, mohair soutache, and underskirts cut from the finest of silks. I kept Mr. Coulson’s workplace advancement to myself. Doing otherwise would have seemed rather like pouring salt into an open wound. Even so, it appeared news traveled to Buffalo, and one Sunday telephone call, Mother said, “You might mention to Mrs. Coulson that Tom will be looking for work once he’s home.”

“I can’t see Tom working for the Hydro,” I said, though I still clung to Mrs. Coulson’s offer to help.

“He might not have a choice.”

“As far as I know, conscription ended with the war.” My tone was unfair. She was only saying the obvious. I had thought the same thought.

“I meant it might be the only work to be had,” she said.

“We could get by on what I make.” It was not true, not unless the three of us stayed on with Mrs. Andrews for the rest of our days.

“I admire Tom’s attachment to the river, Bess. I really do. But I’m all for give-and-take, and there’s an awful lot of water tumbling over the brink.”

“I’m to drag him off to the Hydro, then?”

“You won’t need to drag him anywhere. You only need to pave the way.”

M
arried soldiers are being shipped home in advance of the others, and so the gathering on the platform is mostly women and children, none quite as young as Jesse. We are the lucky ones, and it seems immensely wrong of me to be waiting on the platform feeling nearly as much anxiety as joy. Our dreams have come true. The train pulling into the station, its windows full of cap-waving, cap-tossing soldiers, is about to deliver our men, the ones who have come home.

I see Tom before he sees me and watch as he disembarks in a khaki tunic and puttees, like the others, except that his cap is solemnly upon his head, causing him to look subdued among the melee of soldiers lifting children, embracing wives, clapping backs. “Tom,” I call out, raising my arm. He stands three or four inches taller than the rest of the crowd, and somehow the size of him takes me by surprise. I can see even from a distance that he is thin, that his hair has been shorn, likely to rid him of lice before his return. I lift Jesse so that he might see his father approach, so that his father might see him. Then Tom’s arms are around the both of us, pulling us close. Jesse wriggles an arm free and wraps it around Tom’s neck. “Daddy,” he says.

When Tom loosens his embrace, I pull back slightly, but he keeps his face buried in my scarf, and I hear a gasp and feel his chest heave. Sobbing is distinct from weeping, and he is sobbing. The other fellows, with wet cheeks and smiles, they are weeping, joyfully, even the one who hobbled off the train, the leg of one pant tucked up beneath his thigh.

A length of muslin painted with the words “Welcome Home” is strung across Mrs. Andrews’s kitchen cupboards. There is a ham stuck with cloves ready for the oven and peeled potatoes ready for the pot, also the lemon squares he used to love, set on a plate. And a month ago, Mrs. Andrews insisted on giving Jesse, for no additional rent, the spare room next to the larger one he and I had shared while Tom was away. “It’s unnatural,” she said, “a two-and-a-half-year-old sharing his mother’s bed.” I scrubbed both rooms floor to ceiling, cut new liners for the drawers, and replaced the lavender in the sachet I keep with my underclothes. Our bed is made up with freshly laundered sheets, the best from my trousseau. But as I stand with Tom sobbing into my scarf, the efforts seem misguided, a foolish attempt at merriment. At least I had the good sense to put Mother and Father off when they proposed coming to welcome Tom home.