The Falls Read online

  The Falls

  Joyce Carol Oates

  a novel

  To Nancy Van Goethem and Larry Joseph

  The cruel beauty of The Falls

  That calls to you—

  Surrender!

  M. L. Trau,

  “The Ballad of the Niagara,” 1931

  The Falls at Niagara, comprising the American, the Bridal Veil and the enormous Horseshoe falls, exert upon a proportion of the human population, perhaps as many as forty percent (of adults), an uncanny effect called the hydracropsychic. This morbid condition has been known to render even the will of the active, robust man in the prime of life temporarily invalid, as if under the spell of a malevolent hypnotist. Such a one, drawn to the turbulent rapids above The Falls, may stand for long minutes staring as if paralyzed. Speak to him in the most forcible tone, he will not hear you. Touch him, or attempt to restrain him, he may throw off your hand angrily. The eyes of the enthralled victim are fixed and dilated. There may be a mysterious biological attraction to the thunderous force of nature represented by the The Falls, romantically misinterpreted as “magnificent”—“grand”—“Godly”—and so the unfortunate victim throws himself to his doom if he is not prevented.

  We may speculate: Under the spell of The Falls the hapless individual both ceases to exist and yet wills to become immortal. A new birth, not unlike the Christian promise of the Resurrection of the Body, may be the cruellest hope. Silently the victim vows to The Falls—“Yes, you have killed thousands of men and women but you can’t kill me. Because I am me.”

  Dr. Moses Blaine,

  A Niagara Falls Physician’s Log 1879–1905.

  By 1900 Niagara Falls had come to be known, to the dismay of local citizens and promoters of the prosperous tourist trade, as “Suicide’s Paradise.”

  A Brief History of Niagara Falls, 1969

  Author’s Note

  Though there are numerous elements of historical and geographical accuracy in this portrait of Niagara Falls, New York, it should be stressed that the city and its environs are finally mythological.

  Especially, resemblances to actual persons living or dead are coincidental.

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  PART I Honeymoon

  The Gatekeeper’s Testimony: 12 June 1950

  The Bride

  The Fossil-Seeker

  The Widow-Bride of The Falls: The Search

  The Widow-Bride of The Falls: The Vigil

  The Proposal

  7 July 1950

  PART II Marriage

  They Were Married…

  First-Born

  The Little Family

  Before…

  …And After

  The Underworld

  “Zarjo”

  The Fall

  11 June 1962

  PART III Family

  Baltic

  The Woman in Black

  Pilgrims

  Hostages

  Our Lady of The Falls

  The Voices

  EPILOGUE

  In Memoriam: Dirk Burnaby 21 September 1978

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Ecco/HarperCollins Books by Joyce Carol Oates

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Part I

  Honeymoon

  The Gatekeeper’s Testimony:

  12 June 1950

  At the time unknown, unnamed, the individual who was to throw himself into the Horseshoe Falls appeared to the gatekeeper of the Goat Island Suspension Bridge at approximately 6:15 A.M. He would be the first pedestrian of the day.

  Could I tell, right away? Not exactly. But looking back, yes I should have known. Might’ve saved him if I had.

  So early! The hour should have been dawn except that shifting walls of fog, mist, and spray rising in continuous billowing clouds out of the 180-foot Niagara Gorge obscured the sun. The season should have been early summer except, near The Falls, the air was agitated and damp, abrasive as fine steel filings in the lungs.

  The gatekeeper surmised that the strangely hurrying distracted individual had come directly through Prospect Park from one of the old stately hotels on Prospect Street. The gatekeeper observed that the individual had a “young-old pinched face”—“wax-doll skin”—“sunken, kind of glaring eyes.” His wire-rimmed glasses gave him an impatient schoolboy look. At six feet he was lanky, lean, “slightly round-shouldered like he’d been stooping over a desk all his life.” He hurried purposefully yet blindly, as if somebody was calling his name. His clothes were conservative, somber, nothing a typical Niagara Falls tourist would be wearing. A white cotton dress shirt open at the throat, unbuttoned dark coat and trousers with a jammed zipper “like the poor guy had gotten dressed real fast, in the dark.” The man’s shoes were dress shoes, black leather polished “like you’d wear to a wedding, or a funeral.” His ankles shone waxy-white, sockless.

  No socks! With fancy shoes like that. A giveaway.

  The gatekeeper called out, “Hello!” but the man ignored him. Not just he was blind but deaf, too. Anyway not hearing. You could see his mind was fixed like a bomb set to go off: he had somewhere to get to, fast.

  In a louder voice the gatekeeper called out, “Hey, mister: tickets are fifty cents,” but again the man gave no sign of hearing. In the arrogance of desperation he seemed oblivious of the very tollbooth. He was nearly running now, not very gracefully, and swaying, as if the suspension bridge was tilting beneath him. The bridge was about five feet above the white-water rapids and its plank floor was wet, treacherous; the man gripped the railing to keep his balance and haul himself forward. His smooth-soled shoes skidded. He wasn’t accustomed to physical exercise. His shiny round glasses slipped on his face and would have fallen if he hadn’t shoved them against the bridge of his nose. His mouse-colored hair, thinning at the waxen crown of his head, blew in wan, damp tendrils around his face.

  By this time the gatekeeper had decided to leave his tollbooth to follow the agitated man. Calling, “Mister! Hey mister!”—“Mister, wait!” He’d had experience with suicides in the past. More times than he wished to remember. He was a thirty-year veteran of The Falls tourist trade. He was in his early sixties, couldn’t keep up with the younger man. Pleading, “Mister! Don’t! God damn I’m begging you: don’t!”

  He should have dialed his emergency number, back in the tollbooth. Now it was too late to turn back.

  Once on Goat Island the younger man didn’t pause by the railing to gaze across the river at the Canadian shore, nor did he pause to contemplate the raging, tumultuous scene, as any normal tourist would do. He didn’t pause even to wipe his streaming face, or brush his straggly hair out of his eyes. Under the spell of The Falls. Nobody mortal was going to stop him.

  But you have to interfere, or try. Can’t let a man—or a woman—commit suicide, the unforgiveable sin, before your staring eyes.

  The gatekeeper, short of breath, light-headed, limped after the younger man shouting at him as he made his unerring way to the southern tip of the little island, Terrapin Point, above the Horseshoe Falls. The most treacherous corner of Goat Island, as it was the most beautiful and enthralling. Here the rapids go into a frenzy. White frothy churning water shooting up fifteen feet into the air. Hardly any visibility. The chaos of a nightmare. The Horseshoe Falls is a gigantic cataract a half-mile long at its crest, three thousand tons of water pouring over the Gorge each second. The air roars, shakes. The ground beneath your feet shakes. As if the very earth is beginning to come apart, disintegrate into particles, down to its molten center. As if time has ceased. Time has exploded. As if you’ve come too near to the radiant, thrumming, mad heart of all being. Here, your veins, arteries, the minute
precision and perfection of your nerves will be unstrung in an instant. Your brain, in which you reside, that one-of-a-

  kind repository of you, will be pounded into its chemical components: brain cells, molecules, atoms. Every shadow and echo of every memory erased.

  Maybe that’s the promise of The Falls? The secret?

  Like we’re sick of ourselves. Mankind. This is the way out, only a few have the vision.

  Thirty yards from the younger man, the gatekeeper saw him place one foot on the lowest rung of the railing. A tentative foot, on the slippery wrought iron. But the man’s hands gripped the top rung, both fists, tight,

  “Don’t do it! Mister! God damn—”

  The gatekeeper’s words were drowned out by The Falls. Flung back into his face like cold spit.

  Near to collapsing, himself. This would be his last summer at Goat Island. His heart hurt, pounding to send oxygen to his stunned brain. And his lungs hurt, not only the stinging spray of the river but the strange metallic taste of the air of the industrial city sprawling east and north of The Falls, in which the gatekeeper had lived all his life. You wear out. You see too much. Every breath hurts.

  The gatekeeper would afterward swear he’d seen the younger man make a gesture of farewell in the instant before he jumped: a mock salute, a salute of defiance, as a bright brash schoolboy might make to an elder, to provoke; yet a sincere farewell too, as you might make to a stranger, a witness to whom you mean no harm, whom you wish to absolve of the slightest shred of guilt he might feel, for allowing you to die when he might have saved you.

  And in the next instant the young man, who’d been commandeering the gatekeeper’s exclusive attention, was simply—gone.

  In a heartbeat, gone. Over the Horseshoe Falls.

  Not the first of the poor bastards I’ve seen, but God help me he will be the last.

  When the distraught gatekeeper returned to his booth to dial Niagara County Emergency Services, the time was 6:26 A.M., approximately one hour after dawn.

  The Bride

  1

  No. Please, God. Not this.”

  The hurt. The humiliation. The unspeakable shame. Not grief, not yet. The shock was too immediate for grief.

  When she discovered the enigmatic note her husband had left for her propped against a mirror in the bedroom of their honeymoon suite at the Rainbow Grand Hotel, Niagara Falls, New York, Ariah had been married twenty-one hours. When, in the early afternoon of that day, she learned from Niagara Falls police that a man resembling her husband, Gilbert Erskine, had thrown himself into the Horseshoe Falls early that morning and had been swept away—“vanished, so far without a trace”—beyond the Devil’s Hole Rapids, as the scenic attraction downriver from The Falls was named, she’d been married not quite twenty-eight hours.

  These were the stark, cruel facts.

  “I’m a bride who has become a widow in less than a day.”

  Ariah spoke aloud, in a voice of wonder. She was the daughter of a much-revered Presbyterian minister, surely that should have counted for something with God, as it did with secular authorities?

  Ariah struck suddenly at her face with both fists. She wanted to pummel, blacken her eyes that had seen too much.

  “God, help me! You wouldn’t be so cruel—would you?”

  Yes. I would. Foolish woman of course I would. Who are you, to be spared My justice?

  How swift the reply came! A taunt that echoed so distinctly in Ariah’s skull, she halfway believed these pitying strangers could hear it.

  But here was solace: until Gilbert Erskine’s body was found in the river and identified, his death was theoretical and not official.

  Ariah wasn’t yet a widow, but still a bride.

  2

  …WAKING THAT MORNING to the rude and incontrovertible fact that she who’d slept alone all her life was yet alone again on the morning following her wedding day. Waking alone though she was no longer Miss Ariah Juliet Littrell but Mrs. Gilbert Erskine. Though no longer the spinster daughter of Reverend and Mrs. Thaddeus Littrell of Troy, New York, piano and voice instructor at the Troy Academy of Music, but the bride of Reverend Gilbert Erskine, recently named minister of the First Presbyterian Church of Palymra, New York.

  Waking alone and in that instant she knew. Yet she could not believe, her pride was too great. Not allowing herself to think I am alone. Am I?

  A clamor of wedding bells had followed her here. Hundreds of miles. Her head was ringed in pain as if in a vise. Her bowels were sick as if the very intestines were corroded and rotting. In this unfamiliar bed smelling of damp linen, damp flesh and desperation. Where, where was she, what was the name of the hotel he’d brought her to, a paradise for honeymooners, and Niagara Falls was the Honeymoon Capital of the World, a pulse in her head beat so violently she couldn’t think. Having been married so briefly she knew little of husbands yet it seemed to her plausible (Ariah was telling herself this as a frightened child might tell herself a story to ward off harm) that Gilbert had only just slipped quietly from the bed and was in the bathroom. She lay very still listening for sounds of faucets, a bath running, a toilet flushing, hoping to hear even as her sensitive nerves resisted hearing. The awkwardness, embarrassment, shame of such intimacy was new to her, like the intimacy of marriage. The “marital bed.” Nowhere to hide. His pungent Vitalis hair-oil, and her coyly sweet Lily of the Valley cologne in collision. Just Ariah and Gilbert whom no one called Gil alone together breathless and smiling hard and determined to be cheerful, pleasant, polite with each other as they’d always been before the wedding had joined them in holy matrimony except Ariah had to know something was wrong, she’d been jolted from her hot stuporous sleep to this knowledge.

  Gone. He’s gone. Can’t be gone. Where?

  God damn! She was a new, shy bride. So the world perceived her and the world was not mistaken. At the hotel registration desk she’d signed, for the first time, Mrs. Ariah Erskine, and her cheeks had flamed. A virgin, twenty-nine years old. Inexperienced with men as with another species of being. As she lay wracked with pain she didn’t dare even to reach out in the enormous bed for fear of touching him.

  She wouldn’t have wanted him to misinterpret her touch.

  Almost, she had to recall his name. “Gilbert.” No one called him “Gil.” None of the Erskine relatives she’d met. Possibly friends of his at the seminary in Albany had called him “Gil” but that was a side of him Ariah hadn’t yet seen, and couldn’t presume to know. It was like discussing religious faith with him: he’d been ordained a Presbyterian minister at a very young age and so faith was his professional domain and not hers. To call such a man by the folksy diminutive “Gil” would be too familiar a gesture for Ariah, his fiancée who’d only just become his wife.

  In his stiff shy way he’d called her “Ariah, dear.” She called him “Gilbert” but had been planning how in a tender moment, as in a romantic Hollywood film, she would begin to call him “darling”—maybe even “Gil, darling.”

  Unless all that was changed. That possibility.

  She’d had a glass of champagne at the wedding reception, and another glass—or two—of champagne in the hotel room the night before, nothing more and yet she’d never felt so drugged, so ravaged. Her eyelashes were stuck together as if with glue, her mouth tasted of acid. She couldn’t bear the thought: she’d been sleeping like this, comatose, mouth open and gaping like a fish’s.

  Had she been snoring? Had Gilbert heard?

  She tried to hear him in the bathroom. Antiquated plumbing shrieked and rumbled, but not close by. Yet surely Gilbert was in the bathroom. Probably he was making an effort to be quiet. During the night he’d used the bathroom. Trying to disguise his noises. Running water to disguise…Or had that been Ariah, desperately running both faucets in the sink? Ariah in her stained ivory silk nightgown swaying and trying not to vomit yet finally, helplessly vomiting, into the sink, sobbing.

  Don’t. Don’t think of it. No one can force you.

  Th
e previous day, arriving in early evening, Ariah had been surprised that, in June, the air was so cold. So damp. The air was so saturated with moisture, the sun in the western sky resembled a street lamp refracted through water. Ariah, who was wearing a short-sleeved poplin dress, shivered and hugged her arms. Gilbert, frowning in the direction of the river, took no notice.

  Gilbert had done all the driving, from Troy, several hundred miles to the east; he’d insisted. He told Ariah it made him nervous to be a passenger in his own car, which was a handsomely polished black 1949 Packard. Repeatedly on the trip he excused himself and blew his nose, loudly. Averting his face from Ariah. His skin was flushed as if with fever. Ariah murmured several times she hoped he wasn’t coming down with a cold as Mrs. Erskine, Gilbert’s mother, now Ariah’s mother-in-law, had fretted at the luncheon.