The Falls (9 page)

“ ‘The spirit of the place.’ Yes.”

It would seem to them afterward that in some way the red-haired woman
knew
. What had become of her husband.

They were finding nothing of significance in the parlor. Several annotated tourist brochures and maps. A flier for the popular
Maid of
the Mist
cruise past the base of the American and Horseshoe Falls. It was touching to think of the young honeymoon couple planning to take that cruise, back in Troy. “You say you found no note, Mrs.

Erskine?” the concierge asked a final time. “Nothing that might be
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construed as—a farewell note?” He found himself staring into a wastebasket shoved beneath a Victorian ladies’ writing desk, where some papers had been crumpled and dropped.

The red-haired woman seemed to waken, not quite fully, from a trance. “What? No. No farewell. I’m sorry.”

Flush-faced, the concierge stooped to retrieve whatever it was in the wastebasket—two crumpled paper napkins, of which one had lipstick smears on it. But that was all.

3

“A g u e s t at
my hotel
? Tell me
no
.”

Seeing in the eyes of his staff, before anyone dared speak, that there was bad news.

At least, the hotel wasn’t on fire: he’d have known that by now.

At least, no one had been murdered on the premises: the police would be here, the front drive filled with squad cars and emergency vehicles.

By two-twenty of the afternoon of June 12, 1950, just in time to escort Ariah Erskine to Niagara Falls police headquarters, Clyde Colborne had arrived at the Rainbow Grand at last.

He was a big-boned busy man in his mid-thirties. Aggressively friendly, with a prematurely bald, opaquely gleaming head like Roman statuary. His small shrewd restless eyes were deep set in a face lined from years of boating, waterskiing, golfing in the sun. His hands and feet were large, busy, agitated. He exuded an air, pungent as af-tershave, of frantic and well-intentioned inaction. He spoke and laughed loudly, with an excess of energy. Today he was dressed as if he’d been to church that morning, in a seersucker suit, white dress shirt open at the throat, and straw fedora; as often he did on such occasions, dropping by the hotel on Sunday, he allowed his employees to think, not altogether accurately, that he’d been to church services with his family on the Island (as l’Isle Grand was called), and hadn’t simply stopped back home while his family was at church to quickly shower, shave, and change clothes before driving out again after a marathon Saturday night of poker and drinking on a friend’s yacht 56 W
Joyce Carol Oates

anchored off Buckhorn Island, in the Tonawanda Channel of the Niagara River.

Colborne wasn’t separated from his wife, at the present time. He was living at home, though often he spent the night in his suite at the Rainbow Grand. The previous night, after the marathon game had ended around 5 a.m., he’d slept five or six dazed, stuporous hours on the yacht, where he was always welcome. He’d lost money at poker and was feeling guilty, dissolute, and resentful that he, Clyde Colborne, a man worth millions of dollars, at least in properties and investments, a man liked and admired by other men if disapproved of by his prudish wife and in-laws, should be made to feel such things.

Married too young! Married too long.
His friend from boyhood Dirk Burnaby who’d never married at all, who’d hosted the poker game on his yacht and won $1,400 from Colborne over the course of the night, said that the domestication of the male of the species
Homo sapiens
was “the great unsolved riddle” of evolution.

Not just the women have domesticated us for their own purposes, they make
us feel guilty as hell when the domestication doesn’t take.

Before he’d arrived at the Rainbow Grand, Colborne had heard the rumor of a suicide at The Falls. By this time it was likely a news bulletin. Burnaby had a police radio (unofficial, unauthorized) on the yacht to which he sometimes listened, especially in the late hours of the night when he couldn’t sleep, out of “congenital curiosity” as he called it. (Burnaby was a lawyer as well as a yachtsman, gambler, sports fan and sporadic “civic leader.” ) So they’d been hearing the unwelcome news that a man, at the time unidentified, had been seen by a gatekeeper at the Goat Island Bridge to have “thrown himself ”

over the Horseshoe Falls early that morning. Another suicide! At the giddy height of the honeymoon tourist season, when visitors to The Falls came from all over the world. God damn suicides, Colborne thought, disgusted. This would be—how many in the past year alone? Three, four? That authorities knew of. No doubt there’d been more, and the broken bodies never discovered.

Burnaby said cryptically he never learned of a jumper at The Falls but he didn’t feel a tug somewhere in his soul. “There, but for the grace of God, and plain good luck, go you.” But Colborne didn’t feel
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that way. He was a businessman, he was selling The Falls. He was selling the idea of The Falls. He wasn’t selling the idea of some twisted neurotic nut jumping into The Falls.

Still, it was mostly male suicides that aroused his fury. Colborne conceded that females who jumped were desperate for reasons of being female. It was like a birth defect: female. Female suicides were more to be pitied than condemned, as the church condemned them.

The majority were young, distraught girls, pregnant and abandoned by their lovers. They were wives mistreated or abandoned by their husbands. Their babies had died. Maybe, somehow, they’d killed their babies. They were mentally ill, deranged. They were
only just
females.
At the height of romantic female suicides at The Falls, in the mid-nineteenth century, all the female suicides had been young, beautiful, “tragic”—at least, as they were represented in newspaper sketches. In the mid-twentieth century, things had changed. A lot.

Suicides now were likely to be pathetic girls and women, not heiresses or the spurned mistresses of wealthy men, and their deaths were not romanticized by the media.

But the men! Selfish sons of bitches. They had to be moral cowards, taking the easy way out. Sullying the reputation of The Falls.

Exhibitionists.
Look, look at me! Here I am.

Except: Colborne knew what a body can look like after it has gone over The Falls. After it rises to the river’s surface, sometimes days or even weeks later. Miles downriver, at the lake.

Yet The Falls exerted its malevolent spell, that never weakened. If you grew up in the Niagara region, you knew. Adolescence was the dangerous time. Most Niagara natives kept their distance from The Falls, so they were immune. But if you drifted too near, even out of intellectual curiosity, you were in danger: beginning to think thoughts unnatural to your personality as if the thunderous waters were thinking for you, depriving you of your will.

Clyde Colborne liked to think he was spared from such thoughts.

As Dirk Burnaby once said, you had to have a deep, mysterious soul to want to destroy yourself. The shallower you are, the safer.

Colborne had said, laughing, “I’ll drink to that.”

The Falls was good for one thing: money.

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Joyce Carol Oates

So this was bad news, anyway not good news, what his employees were telling him. Everyone on the staff was abuzz with it. A certain Reverend Erskine had disappeared, and from all reports it sounded as if he was the man who’d jumped that morning; his bride of hardly more than one day, the red-haired woman with the pale freckled face and distracted manner, had been looking for him in the hotel, and had finally reported him “missing.” The couple was from Troy, on the far side of the state; they’d booked the Rosebud Honeymoon Suite for five days.

“They were married just
yesterday
? Jesus.”

Colborne was incredulous, incensed. He had a twelve-year-old daughter. He had a mother who adored him, forgave him his faults.

He was sentimental about women. It infuriated him that any man, let alone a minister, could behave so selfishly on his honeymoon.

“At least he could’ve waited till he was married a while. Give it a chance. A few weeks. Months. Like the rest of us did.
Jesus
.”

Introduced to the widowed bride, Colberne thrust out his hand to take hers. He was wound tight as a spring. He was yearning for a quick drink. The young woman’s fingers were icy in his, and without strength; he had a sudden impulse to warm them energetically in both his hands. “Hello! Hel
lo
. Mrs. Erskine, I’m Clyde Colborne, proprietor of the Rainbow Grand. I’ve heard of your situation and I’ll be taking you to police headquarters. You’ve called your family, I assume? And Reverend Erskine’s family? And please understand, Mrs.

Erskine, under these difficult circumstances you’re welcome to stay on at the Rainbow Grand, compliments of the management, as long as—” Colborne paused, blushing. He meant to say until the body is found, identified, shipped home. But Mrs. Erskine hadn’t yet been told about the man over The Falls. “—as long as required.”

The red-haired woman lifted her strange glassy-green eyes to his.

Though she’d surely been told by his employees who Clyde Colborne was, and where he was now taking her, she seemed to have forgotten.

In a scratchy wondering voice she repeated “ ‘As long as required.’ ”

As if the words were foreign, or a riddle.

On the brief drive to Niagara Falls Police Headquarters on South Main, Clyde Colborne at the wheel of his flashy new car (a powder
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X 59

blue Buick with whitewall tires, automatic transmission, beige leather upholstery soft as the inside of a woman’s thigh) was uneasily aware of his passenger Ariah Erskine who sat stiffly, gloved hands clasped together on her lap. (Ariah had retrieved from her hotel room a fresh pair of white crocheted gloves.) Colborne wracked his brains to think of something to say to her. Silence between human beings scared him. He was rehearsing how he’d recount this miserable experience to his old friend Burnaby.
Jesus! I’d have been a helluva lot better off
going to church with my family.
Only when Colborne was parking his car did the woman say quietly, “I haven’t yet called my family. Or his. I have nothing to say to them. They will ask where Gilbert went, and why. And I have no answer.”

4

Foolish woman, who are you to be spared My justice?

God’s voice taunting her. Inside her skull. In this place of strangers staring at her. In pity, and suspicion.

“But how is it justice, God? Why do I deserve this?”

She waited. God declined to reply.

How long ago it now seemed, and how remote. She was standing with her thin arms lifted in a pose of crucifixion as the white satin gown with its myriad pearl buttons, tucks and pleats and ingenious lace trim, was fitted onto her like an exquisite straitjacket. Mrs.

Littrell had insisted upon the corset, Ariah could scarcely breathe.
I
take thee Gilbert
.
My lawfully wedded husband.
A sneeze would have shattered the corset, and the wedding.

At police headquarters, the bride of the “fallen” man was clearly to blame.

Ariah had washed her face. Rinsed her mouth where panic had left a taste as of copper pennies. How annoyed Gilbert would be to see how another time her damned “French twist” (as her mother called it) had come undone. Strands and wisps of hair made hopelessly frizzy by the humid Niagara atmosphere. Ariah saw with dismay she looked as if she’d only just wakened.

In that pigsty of a bed.

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Joyce Carol Oates

You disgust me. I tried to love you.

This frees both of us now.

In this new, impersonal place. Not the showy luxury of the honeymoon hotel but an ugly fluorescent-lit room where strangers addressed her urgently. “Mrs. Erskine?” And again, as if this was her name, “Mrs. Erskine? We have something to tell you, please prepare yourself.” The gentlemanly man from the hotel whose name she’d forgotten seemed to have disappeared and she was left now with these strangers, identified as police officers though they were not in uniform. One of them, unexpectedly, was a woman: a “matron.” You would need a female police officer to deal with female criminals, victims. This one was middle-aged, with a blunt ax of a face, a faint dark mustache on her upper lip, in a gray serge suit that fitted her bulk snugly. The woman was saying—what? Ariah tried to listen through the roaring in her ears.

Gilbert Erskine might have “fallen” into—what? Where?

“The Horseshoe Falls, a witness has reported. At about six-thirty this morning.”

Ariah heard these individual words but could make little sense of their significance. And the woman had, amazingly, the wallet photo of Gilbert, too. (How had she gotten her hands on that picture of Gilbert, exactly like one Ariah had in her possession?) Ariah said, slowly, “My husband wouldn’t have gone sightseeing without me. He might have left me, but he wouldn’t have gone sightseeing without me. For weeks we’d been planning this trip. He was planning it, mostly. He’d marked off the tourist sights and the ‘geological’ sights we were going to visit, he even numbered them in the order we’d be seeing them.” She said, stubbornly, “You’d have to know Gilbert Erskine, to know that he wouldn’t have done such a thing.”

The woman in the gray serge suit, busty and big-shouldered, was trying not to be argumentative, you could see. But there was an argument brewing here.

“Mrs. Erskine, we understand. But this photo of Mr. Erskine has been identified ‘almost certainly’ by the witness who saw the man at The Falls this morning. On Goat Island. Shortly after the time you’ve said Mr. Erskine disappeared from your hotel room.”

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“Did I say that? How could I say that?” Ariah asked excitedly. “I’m sure I said I didn’t know the time. I had no idea of the time. The time was not a concern of mine when I was asleep. Someone must be lying.”