The Day the Falls Stood Still (3 page)

3

A
t Loretto breakfast consisted of oatmeal or farina, and toast. All the meals at Glenview had been prepared by Bride, our Irish cook. If there was oatmeal, it was served with figs and strawberries, and always a second dish: codfish, creamed or in cakes; eggs poached with spinach; fruit turnovers; pineapple flan. The dining room table was set with linen, and Hilde, the housemaid, poured tea and told me to
eat up
so she could get on with closing the bedroom windows and making up the aired beds.

This morning a basket, covered with a cloth, sits on the dining room table midway between the plates at the spots where Father and I usually sit. I lift a corner of the cloth and find biscuits beneath. I head for the kitchen, thinking there might be a pot of tea warming on the range.

Mother turns toward me from the sink, where her arms had been buried elbow deep in suds. “Good morning,” she says.

“Where’s Father?”

“He’ll be down in a minute.”

“And Isabel?”

“She takes her breakfast in bed.” She looks thoughtful for a moment and then throws her palms upward as though she were at her wits’ end. “She hardly eats a thing, only biscuits and only because I threatened her with Dr. Galveston coming again.”

“Dr. Galveston’s been to the house?”

“She’s used to having things her own way, and, well, life at Glenview has changed. I’ve had to let Bride and Hilde go.” She hesitates a moment, wiping her hands dry, watching me. “I’m so glad you’re home,” she finally says. “Dr. Galveston says Isabel needs rest and sunshine, but mostly she needs to think positive thoughts. And I haven’t spent as much time with her as I should. I’m sewing frocks again.”

“A dressmaker?” Though Mother is a whiz with needle and thread, a skill picked up way back when Father was only a clerk, it is difficult to imagine her bent over a sewing machine rather than ambling about the garden with Hilde in tow, carrying a handful of freshly cut peonies.

“I’ve made seven dresses and have orders for nine more. Mrs. Atwell convinced me I could earn a decent wage, and then she ordered the first three.”

Mrs. Atwell is Kit’s mother, and though I have known her for years, I cannot recall ever having seen her in anything that was not a good decade out of date.

“The dresses really are marvels compared to her usual frocks,” Mother says. “And every time she gets a compliment she hands out one of the cards she insisted on having printed up with ‘Margaret Heath, Dressmaker’ and my telephone number. Mrs. Coulson gave me my next couple of orders.”

Mr. Coulson had been a favored underling of Father’s at the Niagara Power Company, and Father often said how clever and diligent and loyal Mr. Coulson was, which to my mind did little to offset the fact that he was pockmarked and stout, to use the polite word, and very nearly bald though he was ten years Father’s junior. Father had hired him as a clerk, promoted him to floor manager and then to director of operations.

Mrs. Coulson, with her long neck, full bosom, and extraordinary height, is possibly the most daunting woman I know. Isabel and I were always a little awestruck when she came to the house, and then delighted to be sent upstairs with one of her coats. Though she never hesitated to scold children who were not her own, we would bury our faces and fingers in plush velvet, shearling trim, rosewater-scented mink, and then, once we had worked up the nerve, slip the garment over our own paltry frames and admire the transformation in the wardrobe mirror. “She’s the last woman on earth to need another dress,” I say.

“Mr. Coulson was appointed company director after your father was let go, and I suppose they think it’s the least they can do.”

“We’re taking charity, then?”

Mother’s lips become a thin line, her gaze lingering until my hand flits to a stray lock of hair. “I’ve been busy and Isabel’s been alone too much,” she says, “but that’s where you come in.”

“Should I go up now?”

“After breakfast you can take her a tray, just a biscuit and some tea.” She glances at the clock. “What on earth is keeping your father?”

From the lower landing she calls up the stairs, and a few minutes later Father comes into the kitchen in the frock coat and starched collar of a working gentleman. “Bess,” he says, clapping me on the back. “At last, you return.”

The frock coat and cheerful greeting give me hope that some good news has come his way. But the business day began at least an hour ago, and he moves through the kitchen as though he has all the time in the world. “Yes,” I say. “I’m finally home.”

“And the festivities last night, how’d it all turn out?”

“The dining hall was beautiful, knee deep in roses and peonies,” Mother says.

“If I’m not mistaken, you were in a play?” Father says.

I pause a moment, thinking of the picture Mother has set. “It went really well,” I say.

“Jolly good.” He lifts the cloth from the basket.

Before heading upstairs, Mother pours his tea and sets the pot on the table so I can help myself. She no longer has the time to ask about my plans for the day and then sit listening as though foraging for wild rhubarb were the most interesting activity in the world, to cram a year’s worth of mothering into a few short months as Isabel and I used to tease.

Father is a small man, with large ears, a slender face, and a narrow chin. His eyebrows are bushy and separated by a crevice that deepens when he shifts his attention to some unshared thought. It can happen during a meal, a game of crokinole, or even midsentence as he speaks. Today, as he spreads butter on biscuits and stirs sugar into tea, his focus stays with me, but the crevice remains.

I bite into a biscuit, and while it is edible, I am struck by its heaviness and again bemoan that Bride has been let go.

“Your mother’s victory biscuits,” Father says. “She’s saving the white flour for the boys overseas.” Then he moves on to inquiring about my grades, about my progress in geometry and algebra and my lack of the same in harp, which I took up to escape sitting alongside Sister Louisa at the piano explaining, yet again, my failure to master Bach’s “Minuet in G.” Unruffled, he asks about the daughters of several of his former business associates. I nod and smile and say, “She’ll win the prize for elocution next year” or “She’s off to Boston for a holiday,” as Mother would expect me to. He even brings up the tea dress I made for Isabel’s trousseau.

“The dress turned out wonderfully,” I say, even though it is balled in a corner of my trunk, wrinkled and out of sight.

“Jolly good.”

I am at a loss for words. I cannot mention the power company, a topic once guaranteed to trigger a lengthy response. And his colleagues and associates might be precarious terrain. And though it is what I most want to know, I am afraid to ask where he is headed, dressed as he is.

He picks up yesterday’s
Evening Review
from beside his plate and flips it open. “That Beck,” he says. “He’s at it again.”

Most of Father’s colleagues in the hydroelectric industry have nothing but loathing for Sir Adam Beck, and it is easy to understand why. He had given up politics and become the chairman of the Hydro Electric Power Commission, set up by the premier to build the transmission lines that would carry Niagara’s power all over Ontario but also to keep a watchful eye on the power companies, like Father’s onetime employer.

Even so, Father admires him. We have had a Conservative government in Ontario for the last ten years, and Father insists it was Beck’s campaign—that Niagara’s water power should belong to the people of Canada—that got them in. Before Beck, nearly every bit of the electricity made by the powerhouses on the Canadian side of the river was shipped off to the United States. More than once I had watched as Father lifted whatever tumbler was nearby and said, “Here’s to Beck. Without him, there’d be no Hydro-Electric Power Commission, no transmission lines, not much in the way of industry in Ontario.”

“What’s he up to?” I say, hopeful that, as in the old days, Father will have plenty to impart.

“He hasn’t given up on building a powerhouse at Queenston.” He swallows the last of his tea and wipes his mustache free of biscuit crumbs. “He’ll get his way. And you know what else? Any powerhouse he builds will dwarf the rest of them.”

“But isn’t he supposed to stick with transmission lines?” I say, certain I had once heard Father thank his lucky stars Beck’s mandate had not included the generation of electricity.

Father lifts an open palm in my direction, halting me. “Beck made sure all the newspapers covered it when word got out our powerhouses were charging more in Canada than in the U.S. And then he kicked up a fuss about the powerhouses siphoning off more water from the river than their charters set out.”

“The newspapers had a heyday,” I say, remembering.

“He’s been at it for a while, making sure everyone thinks the private power companies are as unscrupulous as they come. He’ll get his mandate changed. Clever old Beck, he’ll have it put to a vote. People love him. He’s taken on the stuffed shirts and brought them cheap electricity, and you’re too young to remember the coal famine, but plenty of voters do and plenty of them think it’s Beck who’ll keep them from ever again shivering in the dark.” With that he gathers his top hat and portfolio from the bench in the entrance hall, says, “I’m off,” and disappears out the front door.

F
rom the upstairs hallway, I call past Isabel’s partially open door, “I’ve brought biscuits and tea.”

“Bess!” she says, and I push the door fully open with my hip.

Isabel was flirtatious and charming in the way only the prettiest girls dared to be, the sort of girl it would be easy to dislike. But she was one of the most popular to have graduated from the academy, maybe the only girl ever to have simultaneously held the office of president for both the Athletic Association and the Gamma Kappa fraternity. Her marks were short of excellent, only because she could too often be found in the cozy little clubroom of the Gamma Kappa, chattering over a game of mahjongg or sneaking off to short-sheet the bed of an unsuspecting dorm mate.

But as I look at her now, she seems an altogether different person from the sister I know. Her complexion, once as smooth and pale as fresh cream, has lost the hint of ginger that keeps pallor in check. And her hair lies uncombed on her pillow, without the luster that comes with proper care. Worst of all, the bones of her cheeks and shoulders jut at sharp angles from beneath her scant flesh.

She pushes herself to sitting, struggling with the pillow behind her back. “Thank God you’re home,” she says. “I’ve missed you so much.”

I set the tray on the foot of her bed and straighten the pillow myself. “You’re so thin.”

“Never mind about that,” she says.

“You have to eat.” I hand her the plate with the biscuit on it.

“Please, Bess. Don’t make a fuss.” She sets the plate on a small table beside her bed. “Mother’s nagging is enough.”

My fingers bristle, momentarily poised to return the plate to her lap, but I only say, “I’ve missed you, too. No one ever tells me anything except you.”

“Oh, Bess,” she says, “I wish I had better news.”

“What’s going on?”

She unclasps her bracelet, a series of ten linked oval plaques, each delicately embossed with tiny stars and edged with gilded cord, then re-clasps it around her thin wrist. Father had given it to her as a graduation gift two years ago. We were in the academy parlor, waiting for a slice of cake, when he pulled a small felt pouch from his pocket and showed the bracelet to Mother, Isabel, and me. He made much of the fact that it was hammered and chipped from a sheet of aluminum a half century ago, back when aluminum was as valuable as gold. As he handed her the bracelet, he said it was only recently that the scientists had figured out how to use electricity to make large quantities of aluminum from bauxite, a plentiful ore remarkably like dirt. It did little to convince the three of us of the bracelet’s worth. His excitement waned momentarily, as he seemed to consider for the first time that Isabel might associate aluminum with the inner workings of an automobile. “Keep it in your jewelry box,” he said, patting her hand, but she fastened the bracelet around her wrist and said, “I’ll wear it every day.”

The bracelet clatters dully as Isabel’s hand flops onto the bed. “There isn’t going to be an aluminum smelter in Niagara Falls,” she says.

I had often heard father rhapsodizing in the academy parlor on Sunday afternoons about incomparable aluminum—beautiful to the eye, whiter than silver, indestructible by contact with air, strong, elastic, and so light that the imagination almost refuses to think of it as a metal. He said aluminum would turn Niagara Falls, with its never-ending stream of hydroelectricity, into an industrial power.

“Father and Mr. O’Reilly and Mr. Woodruff and God only knows who else bet their fortunes on the smelter,” she says. “Everyone says Father prompted all the fuss.”

“Their fortunes?”

“A couple of them had been promised orders from the Ministry of Militia and Defense if they sank a bit of cash into retooling their factories. But Father insisted the war wouldn’t last. He made promises, said the smelter was a done deal, a sure bet.”

I sit down on the edge of the bed. “But he wouldn’t have said it if it wasn’t true.”

“He thought it was. A bunch of bigwigs from Toronto wanted the smelter, and Father was in on the discussions because his powerhouse was supposed to supply the electricity.”

“They backed out?”

She nods, lets out a huff. “Yep, once all but the final documents were signed. And by then Father and his so-called pals had paid top dollar for land around the site and dumped loads of cash into everything from machinery for aluminum cookware to mail-order homes for the workers.”

“Why’d the financiers back out?” My shoulders inch up.

“They said they couldn’t make aluminum as cheaply as it’s made at Shawinigan Falls. It’s rubbish, though. With the war, it’s easier to make money churning out explosives and artillery shells.”