The Falls Read online

  (“Ever rising like the souls of the damned seeking salvation,” Ariah said to Dirk Burnaby, in one of her rare moments of noticing him. Her fixed, wistful smile made him shudder.)

  Beneath the slicker Ariah wore summer dresses, cotton shirtwaists in light colors, or floral prints; on her legs were stockings that quickly became soaked from spray, as her face and hair were quickly wetted. She gave no sign of noticing. Press reporters and photographers, and as the days passed a ragtag assortment of the curious and morbid-minded, trailed in her wake, though at a respectful distance, as Dirk Burnaby assured. He detested these parasites, as he thought them, though Ariah herself seemed indifferent to their presence. Her concentration was solely upon the river. When a stranger called to her—“Mrs. Erskine? Excuse me, Mrs. Erskine?”—“Hello, Mrs. Erskine? I’m from the Niagara Gazette, may I speak with you for just five minutes?”—she seemed not to hear. Yet so far as Dirk could see she made no effort to hide her face or disguise herself, as she might have easily done. In some of the newspaper photographs of the Widow-Bride, Ariah’s small-boned face, wetted from spray, shone pale and smooth as white marble, so that she appeared to be continually weeping, as a statue might weep, with a look resigned and calm.

  Dirk knew that Ariah Erskine wasn’t crying. She was a canny woman, saving her tears. She would need all the tears she could summon, soon.

  Corpses in the Niagara River were usually found within a week. If they had sunk, the ghastly effects of putrefaction would turn them into “floaters.” It was only a matter of time.

  Once on Goat Island, Ariah made her way to Terrapin Point by the eastern loop of the path, which was the one the suicide had taken. There she stood unmoving for as long as a half-hour, a lone, melancholy figure in her incongruously gaily colored slicker, under the spell of the thunderous Horseshoe Falls. As the morning lightened, the eerie glassy-green aura of The Falls became more distinct. Faint rainbows appeared, shimmering in the mist. The roaring of the cataract at Terrapin Point was so loud it entered your very being, casting out coherent thoughts. You could not recall your name in such a din, and you would not wish to recall it. You felt yourself a heartbeat away from the primal core of being: sheer energy, nameless and inviolate. Photographs of the Widow-Bride at Terrapin Point, the site of the suicide, were very popular, though most showed the grieving woman only from the back, head and face obscured by the wide-brimmed rain hat. Dirk Burnaby himself stood a few yards behind her on the path, watching her uneasily, alert to any sudden reckless movement or gesture. If Ariah pressed too close against the railing, leaning her upper body over it, Dirk took a quick step forward. He was prepared to grab her, close his arms around her and wrest her away from danger. He understood the primitive, malevolent spell of The Falls: he was beginning to feel again the sinister attraction he’d felt years ago, as an adolescent, when his emotions were rawer, closer to the surface. Those feelings of dissolution, loss, panic, very like the sensation of falling in love against one’s will.

  The Falls! You can’t believe it can kill you. When it is pure spirit.

  After her vigil at Terrapin Point, Ariah would turn like one waking slowly and reluctantly from a deep sleep, and make her way along the western loop of the path, past the Bridal Veil Falls and Luna Island, past Bird Island and Green Island; though the suicide hadn’t occurred on this side of Goat Island, yet Ariah lingered at the railing, staring wistfully, hungrily, at the river here, as if, somehow, her lost husband’s body might emerge. So much seemed possible when you stared upriver, and saw the violent, plunging waves moving toward you in a stream that seemed to stretch to the horizon, and infinity. There, at the river’s source, was the future: at your back, it became the past. Only the fleet, ephemeral moment of its passing was alive, and alive in you.

  Ariah Erskine then recrossed the pedestrain bridge, oblivious of the gatekeeper in his kiosk who stared at her in trepidation and dread (he was the man who’d witnessed the suicide, he feared her recognizing him); she passed by the American Falls, and for a long time stared at the plunging water at its base; she turned to follow the path downriver, pausing from time to time, never predictably, to lean over the railing and lose herself in the churning white water. In this way, through the course of a morning, the Widow-Bride of The Falls made her way past the Niagara Observation Tower and the Maid of the Mist boarding dock, which was crowded with tourists, past the site of the Cave of the Winds and the Devil’s Whirlpool, which might engage her interest for as long as an hour.

  The Devil’s Whirlpool! Dirk Burnaby would think afterward it was as if she’d known. She’d sensed. The dead man inside. Caught by centrifugal force. A gyre of Hell.

  Almost, he’d come to share the woman’s morbid fascination with the river. The possibility of the river’s disgorging, at any moment, the body of the dead man. He hoped that wouldn’t happen, he could not have borne it, in her presence.

  He wanted to stand close beside her at the railing, and put his arm around her. He wanted for himself this ferocity of attention, this loyalty. He couldn’t believe that the Reverend Gilbert Erskine deserved it. He hated the man, detested him, that, though dead, he should so captivate the woman. Yet thinking She’s beyond hurt. Beyond the love of any man.

  A photographer was boldly edging near Ariah Erskine as she leaned over the railing above the Whirlpool and there came Dirk Burnaby to intercede, wrenching the camera out of the man’s hands and tossing it over the railing into the river. When the man protested, mouth opening like a pike’s, Dirk said calmly, “Now get your ass out of here, or you’ll follow it.”

  The photographer said he was with the AP. He would report this to the police.

  “I am the police,” Dirk Burnaby said. “A plainsclothes detective assigned to protect this lady against harassers. So get out of here, you, or you’re under arrest.”

  Shoving the heel of his hand against the photographer’s chest, forcing him backward.

  They didn’t understand what had happened, they were saying. Not to Gilbert. Not to Ariah. It was as if something terrible—demonic—had happened to these young people as soon as they’d gotten married, and started their honeymoon at Niagara Falls. “Why is Ariah behaving so strangely, Mr. Burnaby? Why won’t she spend any time with us?” Mrs. Littrell, a soft-bodied woman of late middle age with a raddled, pleading face and frightened eyes, appealed to Dirk Burnaby to intercede with her daughter, while Reverend Littrell looked on somberly, stroking his chin. They might have believed that Burnaby was associated with the Rainbow Grand, since he appeared to be a partner of Clyde Colborne; they might have believed that he was a Niagara Falls official of some sort, whose job was to comfort the distraught survivors of missing persons and suicides. Dirk felt sorry for the Littrells, and annoyance at Ariah, who was treating them so rudely; at the same time he was pleased to note that the daughter scarcely resembled either of her parents. The red-haired girl was an “original”—he’d known it!

  Gently he told the Littrells that Ariah was in a state of shock, and they shouldn’t take her strange behavior personally. He told them that in the course of his lifetime he’d been a witness to similar behavior in others—when an individual suffers an irreversible loss suddenly, with no warning. (He was thinking of one or two girls with whom he’d been romantically involved, who hadn’t liked being dropped by Dirk Burnaby, and had made quite a fuss over it. He was thinking, too, of his mother, who’d slipped into a morbid state of self-absorption after the loss of her beauty in her fifties, refusing to leave her house on the Island even to see old friends. Even to see her children!) “People behave in extreme ways, after extreme shocks,” Dirk said. “At the present time it isn’t absolutely known that her husband is the man who’d been seen—well, at The Falls. And so Ariah is in a state of suspension, not knowing.” He saw by the startled, fearful expressions on the faces of Reverend and Mrs. Littrell that they wanted not to know exactly what he was saying; they, too, were holding out hope that their son-in-law wasn’t dead but had simply “
disappeared.” (And would “reappear”?) How pathetic the Littrells were! Dirk felt a stab of sympathy for them; for the desperation in their wish to believe that there was yet hope, and that their prayers, quite literal prayers, would be answered by a vigilant God. Dirk said gently, as if he were more intimately acquainted with Ariah Erskine than he was, “It’s better for your daughter, in these circumstances, to be involved in activity, I think. Instead of just waiting helplessly, passively, at the hotel.”

  As a woman is meant to wait, Dirk thought.

  Mrs. Littrell protested. “But, Mr. Burnaby, Ariah isn’t even sleeping in the hotel, as far as we know. Where on earth is she? She isn’t eating meals here. She informed us and the Erskines that she can’t spend time with us, she ‘hasn’t time.’ Gilbert’s parents are very anxious, but Ariah won’t see them. I caught sight of her in that hideous yellow raincoat in—is it Prospect Park? But when I called after her, she ran away. And there are photographers and reporters everywhere. Radio people hoping to interview us.” Mrs. Littrell shuddered. “Have you seen what they’re writing about her, Mr. Burnaby? Back home in Troy it’s in the papers, too. ‘The Widow-Bride of The Falls.’ Our only child! She was just married this past Saturday.” As she spoke, Mrs. Littrell glanced at Reverend Littrell for support, but her husband seemed scarcely to hear her. Dirk saw that the poor man was disoriented, inert. His bulky middle-aged body seemed to be losing definition, as if melting. He wore a nondescript dark suit with wide lapels, a starched white shirt and a dull “good” necktie. His eyes behind bifocal glasses were moving jerkily about the room (they were in the Littrells’ hotel room at the Rainbow Grand, Dirk had dropped by to speak with them in Ariah’s place), as if he were seeking some confirmation of where he was, what this must mean. Dirk’s heart went out to him. For here was a man accustomed to authority, and without “authority” he was undefined as a flag in windless calm. Mrs. Littrell said, “Mr. Burnaby, will you tell Ariah we are—thinking of her constantly? Anxious about her? Hoping she will, when this is over, come back with us? Come h-home?”

  So Mrs. Littrell knows her son-in-law is dead, Dirk thought.

  A good sign.

  But when Dirk left the Littrells, Reverend Littrell stepped out into the corridor with him as if to speak man-to-man. “Mr. Burnaby, did you say that you did—no, you did not?—know Gilbert? You didn’t know him. I see. You didn’t know, then, that Gilbert has had this strange, unhealthy interest, or hobby, in—what d’you call ’em—‘fossils’? Little skeletons, like snails and frogs, you find in rocks? He’d say they were millions of years old, in fact there’s no way to prove they’re older than six thousand years. And why these things are so important to so-called scientists, what they are meant to prove about God’s creation, and the history of the earth—I don’t know. Mr. Burnaby, do you?”

  Politely Dirk shook his head, no. No idea.

  “I’m no kind of a scientist, Reverend. I’m a lawyer.”

  Reverend Littrell said, frowning, “My son-in-law might have wanted Ariah to join him on some sort of expedition for these things. ‘Fossils.’ Trekking in creekbeds and swamps. And my daughter, who has a stubborn streak, as you’ve seen, might have refused to go with him on her honeymoon…I’m thinking, I’m hoping, that’s what this is? That’s all this is? Mr. Burnaby, what do you think?”

  Dirk Burnaby murmured to the older man that he wasn’t sure. He wasn’t sure what to think.

  Dirk could see why Ariah Erskine hoped to avoid her parents for as long as possible. And her in-laws! Reverend and Mrs. Erskine seemed almost to leap at the younger man when they saw him, rapacious as starving minks. Quickly he had to tell them he hadn’t any news of their son. He wasn’t with the Niagara Falls police or the Coast Guard, he was careful to explain, only just a private citizen trying to help in the emergency, but the Erskines didn’t seem to hear. “Is there any news of my son?” Reverend Erskine asked, an air of reproach in his voice. When Dirk told him no, he didn’t think so, not at the present moment, Reverend Erskine said, “But why? A man is missing, and his bride is distraught and making a spectacle of herself in public, and there is no news? I don’t understand.”

  The Erskines were about the same age as the Littrells, in their mid- or late fifties, but looking older with strain and sleeplessness. Mrs. Erskine was a quiet, stifled-seeming woman with the oblong bony face of Gilbert Erskine in his photograph, but lacking her son’s air of peevish intelligence; Reverend Erskine was a forceful individual with a voice calibrated to ring out from a pulpit, filling a moderate-sized church. In the hotel room, this voice was too loud for Dirk Burnaby’s comfort, he had to resist the impulse to clap his hands over his ears. Dirk was slightly intimidated, too, by the older man’s animosity. “Mr. Burnaby, the things that are being printed! Even in our hometown newspaper! And here in the Gazette, and the Buffalo News—officials too cowardly to identify themselves speculating that Gilbert is the man who ‘threw himself’ into the Horseshoe Falls. When there is absolutely no proof! This is libel, Mr. Burnaby. Please inform your friends.”

  Dirk faintly protested, these weren’t his friends.

  “Whatever they are saying about our son is not true. Gilbert would never do such a thing as—‘throw himself’ into The Falls.” Reverend Erskine spoke contemptuously. He was a rail-thin man of no more than average height, shorter than Dirk Burnaby by several inches, yet seemed to tower over him, fierce in indignation. The lenses of his glasses flashed. There was spittle in the corners of his mouth. Dirk guessed that Gilbert Erskine had departed this life under orders from his father the Reverend, without either man knowing. To escape the wrath of God. Here’s God!

  Quietly Dirk said, with an apologetic glance at Mrs. Erskine, “Sometimes people surprise us. People we believe we know.”

  Reverend Erskine said brusquely, “Yes. But not our son. Gilbert isn’t ‘people.’ ”

  To this, Dirk had no reply.

  “Gilbert would never take his own—life. Never.”

  Dirk stared glumly at the plush crimson carpet.

  “I expect these newspapers to print retractions. Apologies. Gilbert would never.”

  Reluctantly Dirk had left Ariah Erskine sleeping in the back of his car, parked at the rear of his Luna Park town house. The red-haired girl (Ariah had become so frail and wistful during the course of the vigil, Dirk had difficulty thinking of her any longer as a mature, adult woman) had refused to come inside Dirk’s house to freshen up and sleep. She’d refused to accompany him to the Rainbow Grand. She too is fearful of these elders. It’s her instinct to survive.

  When Dirk left the Erskines’ hotel room, it was Mrs. Erskine who accompanied him to the door, and anxiously squeezed his hand. The woman’s fingers were moistly clammy yet surprisingly strong. “Mr. Burnaby? ‘Dirk’? I don’t know who you are or why you’ve been so kind to Ariah—and to us—but I want to thank you, and God bless you. Whatever has happened to Gilbert”—her eyes snatched at Dirk’s, shining with terror—“he too would thank you.”

  Dirk murmured words of consolation, or commiseration.

  How he hated the suicide! Selfish scheming bastard.

  He walked the half-mile to his brownstone town house in Luna Park. His mind seethed! He was a man of strong appetites and imagination and it was sometimes held against him that he inflated events and people with sudden significance, like magnified images on a screen. Later, these might shrink to pinpricks. They might disappear.

  So he’d been accused. Frequently in his relatively short life of thirty-three years. “As if it’s my fault. But how?” Truly, Dirk couldn’t understand.

  She’d refused to come inside his house, to sleep in a proper bed, or even atop a bed. Not once had she called him “Dirk”—nor even “Mr. Burnaby.” She didn’t know his God-damned name.

  Seeing Ariah Erskine sleeping peacefully in the cushioned rear of his Lincoln Continental, a skinny muskrat of a girl with papery, bruised skin and a slack drooling mouth, knees drawn up to her scrawny chest,
bitten-looking fingernails and faded red hair badly in need of washing, he told himself furiously You are not. Not falling in love. Not.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Burnaby? The Coast Guard found it.”

  Not him. It.

  Dirk would be grateful that Ariah Erskine hadn’t been present to hear this crude remark made by a Niagara Falls patrolman.

  It was mid-morning of June 19. Bells were ringing: Sunday.

  Seven days and seven nights had passed in a vertiginous stream.

  At the time of the discovery, the Widow-Bride hadn’t been sleeping but had gone into a women’s restroom in Prospect Park.

  Feeling sick, Dirk said, “Jesus! Where?”

  “Whirlpool.”

  The Devil’s Whirlpool! He’d had a premonition.

  So many days of futile searches downriver to Lake Ontario and back to Niagara Falls, and all the while the body of the deceased had been trapped in the Whirlpool, less than three miles from the Horseshoe Falls. His body had been swept downriver, sucked into the whirlpool, and held captive. The Devil’s Whirlpool was as extraordinary a natural phenomenon as The Falls. A mammoth circular basin in the Gorge, two hundred feet in height, in which frothy, foaming water turned in a maddened vortex. Objects of various sizes were sometimes trapped in this vortex for days, weeks. It was rare that a body was trapped as long as Erskine’s had been trapped, but not unknown.