“Know what?”
“You knew we were in for a slide,” I say. “I was pretty sure.” He slips his hands into the pockets of his trousers. “But how?”
“There were crevices but no scrub. Crevices without enough soil for a bit of scrub are new and need to be watched. And the temperature dropped.”
“And water in cracks expands and contracts.”
Then he speaks almost shyly, as though he is not sure I want to hear: “There’s something more, too. There are moments, usually on the river. It’s nothing I know how to explain.”
I watch him, filling with wonder. I have heard Father argue that intuition is entirely rational. There is no mystery, no magic, nothing astonishing as far as he is concerned. A woman knows her child is ill, even before laying her palm on his forehead, only because he slept late and called out in the night and ate poorly the evening before. It does not matter one iota that she cannot articulate the clues. Father would say, “We do not always know what we know.”
But I am not so quick to rule out mystery and magic. I like the astonishing and do not doubt that it exists. What is God, after all, if not mystery and magic, and astonishing? I have little inclination to scoff at Tom’s bit of mystery. From my window seat at the academy, I saw prayers in the rising mist.
I want to hear more, but men are glancing over, waiting, uncertain what to do next. I nod so he will know I have understood.
“I should get to work,” he says.
As I make my way back to the trolley, I am determined to contribute in some small way. When I reach the woman with the sprain, I tear a strip of fabric from the hem of my underskirt and bind her swollen ankle with it. As I help her to her feet, she says, “You make a handsome pair,” and I smile.
Once the woman is hobbling about, her arm looped through that of a fellow in a uniform who seems to be her husband, I occupy several children with a game of I Spy, my attention often shifting to Tom. A girl of about twelve cups her hand around my ear and whispers, “Is he your beau?”
I cup my hand around her ear and whisper back, “Yes.”
I will feel Tom’s lips on mine today. I know it for sure. I know it because if he does not lean toward me, offering his mouth, I will lean toward him, offering mine, the Windsor Hotel pushed from my thoughts.
9
The legend of the Maid of the Mist
Ihave been made an offer of marriage. As the proposal was stammered out, I had the strangest sensation, as though I were watching one of those scenes in a play that causes the audience to snicker in their seats. A young actor announces he is heartbroken or, alternately, deeply in love. In either case, friends and relations of the lovesick fellow express condolences or congratulations, whichever is appropriate. All the while their minds are searching for some tidbit of missed information that will let them in on just who the coveted female is.
What a dreadful episode, Edward proposing to me.
Not five minutes ago, he went down on bended knee, and took my hand in his, at which point I became momentarily dumb, my tongue thick and dry. I was sitting on the chaise on the veranda, uncomfortable though I had forgone a corset. The dress was Mother’s, made acceptable enough by the addition of a ruffle of itchy tulle at the neckline. Isabel had been called inside, ostensibly to help prepare tea, but had been gone twenty minutes or more when Edward dropped to his knee.
I was half-listening to him ramble on about how well wicker furniture was selling in spite of the war when next thing I knew he was on his knee, his head bowed, unable to meet my eye. “Will you marry me?” he said.
Silence ensued while I tried to regain the use of my tongue. “Edward?”
He cleared his throat and, a little louder, said, “Will you marry me?”
“Are you serious?”
He looked at me. Seriously.
“But I’m only seventeen,” I said. Until I turned eighteen, marriage was impossible, unless my father gave his consent. “I’ve already asked and your father has agreed.”
“Oh.”
He looked up. “Kit said not to expect an answer right away.”
“I’m so surprised. And flattered, but, Edward, I …”
“I could help you, your family,” he said.
My hand flew to my hip. “Did Kit tell you that?”
“Are you angry?”
“Did she put you up to this?”
“No,” he said.
Suddenly Isabel and Mother were on the veranda with the tea.
Isabel’s eyes went to Edward, kneeling beside the chaise.
“A button fell off his shirt,” I said.
As she peered under the chaise, I said, “I think it rolled through a crack.”
“I have a box of spare buttons upstairs,” Mother said, although she could see just as well as Isabel that no button was missing from his shirt.
He stood up from kneeling, and I waited for him to say, “Button? What button? Did a button fall off my shirt?” But for once his eyes glinted comprehension. “There are plenty of buttons at home,” he said. He tipped his Panama hat to Mother and Isabel, and then to me. “I’ll be off.” Rude or not, he meant to escape before tea was served.
I stood up from the chaise and stepped toward him, already heading for the Runabout. Isabel and Mother remained on the veranda, Mother’s arm firmly looped through Isabel’s. When we were midway to the automobile, Mother and Isabel called out their good-byes and disappeared into the house, likely to tend to some newly urgent housekeeping task.
At the Runabout, he said, “I’ll be in touch.” He leaned toward me and delivered a dry, papery kiss to my cheek.
Isit on the chaise, forehead in my hands, elbows on my knees. Edward has never kissed me before, and I wonder what, if anything, invited the kiss. Was it because I did not reject his proposal flat out? Or because we conspired about the lost button? Was it that he had read too much into my tidy hair and itchy dress? While logic says the kiss would have come, invited or not, I am riddled with guilt.
As a first kiss, Edward’s effort would have been a great disappointment, a kick in the teeth really, given the imaginings of my girlhood and the secrets whispered in the Loretto corridors. But because it was not the first, it merely provided proof that nothing more than friendship exists between Edward and me.
When Tom kissed me at the close of our afternoon circuiting the gorge, I did not purse my lips. They fell slightly open, entirely receptive to the warm breath and wet of his mouth. The kiss lasted only seconds; we were barely hidden in the shadows of the Lower Steel Arch Bridge. Still, I have imagined that kiss a thousand times since. I have imagined his tongue against mine. Afterward, when we stood looking at each other, my flesh was taut, my skin goose-pimpled, my breath noticeably short, at least until the Coulsons passed by in their Oldsmobile, came to a halt, and insisted I climb into the backseat.
Before I even had the door pulled shut, Mrs. Coulson twisted around to face me. “Good gracious, Bess,” she said. “Who on earth was that?”
I was trembling under her piercing gaze, hardly able to breathe. “He used to bring us fish.”
“His hand was on your arm.”
I stared down at my knees, thanked God that, when we pulled into Glenview, Mother would not yet be back from Toronto or Father from the Windsor Hotel.
“What about your family?” she said, an angry knot of lines appearing on her brow. “A good connection is what you need.” Mr. Coulson patted her arm, as though to calm her, but she shrugged off his hand. Her voice grew louder. “People gossip, Bess. And there you are, fueling the flames. And that layabout. You were raised better than that.” She was silent as we turned onto Buttrey Street except for the occasional sigh.
At Glenview I said, “I wasn’t doing anything indecent at all,” and willed the tears not to come as I scrambled from the automobile.
Then, it was “You stay away from the likes of him,” quietly hurled from her lips.
The screen door claps the wood of the jamb, and I look at
Mother, standing there, watching, probably mulling over how best to approach me, particularly if Mrs. Coulson has called, which she very likely has. “Bess?” she says. “May I sit with you?”
I shift to the tall end of the chaise, and she sits at the foot.
“Well?” she says. “He proposed.”
“It’s wonderful,” she says. “He’s kind and generous. And most of all, he adores you.”
I throw my palms open. “I’m only seventeen.”
She lays a hand on my thigh. “You’re a woman. You’ve shown all of us that this summer,” she says.
“Then I should decide whom I’ll marry.” I mean to thump the chaise with my fist but only let it flop down beside me.
“It is your decision, Bess.”
“But I don’t love him,” I say. I am absolutely sure of it, given Tom, given our kiss.
I am delivered a long, possibly rehearsed lecture, the net of which is that there are two kinds of love. One that is slow in coming and builds with shared kindnesses. And another that is all-consuming, blind, little more than lust. “The first can last a lifetime,” she says. “The second is founded on nothing and cannot.”
I find myself wondering into which camp she and Father fall. They married young and speak fondly of their early days, of the winter Mother’s shoe soles wore through and Father stuffed newspaper into the toes of his boots and gave them to her. But lately she has begun to sigh deeply when his back is turned. Does she regret marrying him? I will not ask. To do so might lend a bit of credence to her words.
“That fellow who brought the fish,” she says and waits, eyes narrowed, head cocked.
“I was out walking on River Road.”
“He has nothing to offer you.”
“I don’t want anything from him.” I smooth damp palms over my skirt, anxious that she somehow knows just how badly I want a second kiss.
“You’ll want a roof over your head, the odd pretty dress, sugar for your tea …”
“And Edward can give me all that so I should marry him?” I stand up from the chaise, walk to the far corner of the veranda, and stand with my back to her.
“He is a gentleman. He’ll devote himself to you.”
I turn toward her. “I know. I know he would, but still.”
“As for the fellow who brought the fish,” she says, and I shrink under her steady gaze. “He brought you to some dark corner of the Lower Steel Arch Bridge. Your reputation was the furthest thing from his mind. He isn’t a gentleman, not in the least.”
“Mrs. Coulson is a busybody.” Brave words from a girl of seventeen with a month’s worth of daydreams under scrutiny and withering.
“He behaved improperly.”
Not feeling altogether well, I sit back down on the chaise and say, “Edward should marry Isabel.”
“He wants to marry you.” She brushes my cheek with the back of her hand.
“What about love growing over time and all that?”
Her gaze leaves mine. “Edward has made up his mind.”
“And so have I,” I say, though my head is a muddled, murky pool. “And I won’t marry him.”
I begin to cry, and she takes me into her arms. My cheek against her breast, she rocks me back and forth, cooing, “You’ll decide for yourself” and “I only want what’s best,” though I have already said I will not marry Edward.
She rubs the place that aches between my shoulder blades and smoothes my hair. I sniffle and bawl, needing that embrace like a child, like a child taking those first few steps toward the safety net of outstretched arms.
If she insisted, or argued even a little bit, I think I might be able to stop the tears, the second guessing. But, wrapped in my mother’s love, I cannot. With each heave of my shoulders, with each gasp for breath, her words gain a smidgen of credibility.
Eventually, I am able to say, “Isabel would hate me if I married Edward.”
She is silent a moment, her hand motionless on my back. Then she gently guides me to sitting upright and tilts my chin so that she can see my face. “Take your time deciding,” she says and wipes my cheeks and nose with her handkerchief. “Isabel will see the upside in having Edward as a brother-in-law.”
She is beautiful just now, her forehead smooth, her eyes bright, brimming with hope.
10
The August night is sweltering and my four-poster bed seems entirely too small. Shift and turn as I might, every square inch of linen is wrinkled and damp, and I find no reprieve from the warmth my body has set down. Away from Mother and her comforting words, Edward’s proposal seems a warren of trapdoors, regardless of what I decide. I pray for guidance, but my mind only drifts from pleas for good judgment and clarity to Tom’s warm mouth on my own. And somehow I am depraved enough to wonder, Is it a sign? Surely God could nudge that kiss from my prayers.
By the time there is enough light to make out the straw-colored vines of the paper covering my walls, I am determined to find Tom, in the glen, at the whirlpool, or even at the Windsor Hotel. I am determined to keep my head clear, my mind sharp, much as Mother would, rather than a stew of bristle hair against skin and forearms rippling with strength each time the crowbar is passed. I will ask about ambition and schooling and intentions, and rye whiskey drunk at the Windsor Hotel or any other place, questions a father not as negligent as my own would surely ask. And if Tom minds? Well, then, mind he must. At least I will know. I dress quickly, straining to hear any stirrings in my parents’ bedroom, and tiptoe downstairs, careful to avoid the creaky third step.
I am on River Road before the birdsong has ended or the dew dried from the grass. Facing south and then north, I squint into the distance, but the road is empty.
At the Wintergreen Flats overlooking the glen, I stop for a moment and survey the woods far below, but the leafy canopy easily blocks any glimpse of him. I descend the stairway of some seventy steps, the only way to reach the winding pathways of the talus slope. Overhead the uppermost layers of the flats protrude beyond the cliff wall forming a natural amphitheater and, to the north, a spectacular promontory. I stand gazing upward at the river’s handiwork.
There are giant boulders strewn about the woods, some precariously poised, others with great basins or even curiously round hollows carved all the way through. Smaller fragments of sheared rock are only partially covered with earth, yet the scenery is sylvan, pretty, too, a paradise of wildflowers and ferns. Each time a pathway intersects mine, I select the route with the steepest descent, thinking it will lead me most quickly to the river and to Tom.
The thunder of the Niagara tells me the rapids are near long before I am able to glimpse the froth and spray through the woods. I can see only a few feet in any one direction, and my spirit wanes, my search seeming futile, even dangerous, the scheme of a naïve girl expecting providence to intervene. But I continue along the path, humming in an attempt to keep my imagination in check, until I come to a spot where a glut of boulders between the pathway and the riverbank has kept the vegetation down. I pick my way across the boulders, scaling their sides, descending their slopes, striding the crevices in between, until I come to a thin stream of river severed from the main flow by a boulder. The boulder would provide the perfect vantage point from which to view a good chunk of the shore, yet I once read in the newspaper about a group of tourists who were marooned on a boulder that became an island when the river unexpectedly rose. Also, at its farthest reach, the boulder is lashed by rushing water, much of it curling backward and forming an angry standing wave as it smashes headlong into the current surging downstream.
Regardless, I remove my stockings and shoes and hike up my skirts. The stream is deceptive, possibly because of its juxtaposition with the Niagara. Midway to the boulder, the current tugs my shins, threatening to sweep my feet from beneath me and deliver me to the river proper, from which even Captain Webb could not escape.
Once on the boulder, I need only a moment to scan the empty shoreline and then a further moment to take in the majesty
of the gorge wall. So as not to lose my nerve, I keep the river at my back.
My return to the pathway is without mishap, and, elated by my daring, I continue on, in a southern direction, toward the whirlpool, though the pathway narrows and then becomes altogether difficult to pick out. It is likely the route Tom follows as he makes his way between glen and whirlpool, also other fishermen and the most adventure-some of the tourists. There is evidence, too, of deer, tidy brown pellets that fortunately do not stick to my shoes.
Earlier I arranged my hair hastily, with little thought given to a scramble in the woods. Now slim branches pull long strands from their clips. My right forearm is scraped in two places, and a thin line of red appears on the back of my hand. My skirt is caked in dust, which will likely shake loose. But in several spots the dirt is ground in. I will have to tell Mother I went into the glen to walk and to think. I will say that I became lost, that I panicked and stumbled in my rush.
The stone beach of the whirlpool could not be a more welcome sight, except that the lone gentleman catching his breakfast on the far shore is not Tom. Disheartened, but anxious to take up the most efficient route to the Windsor Hotel, I make my way across the beach to what looks like a trailhead of sorts. Years ago the whirlpool was accessible from the rim of the gorge by means of an incline railway, and likely the break in the leafy canopy above the trailhead marks the remains of the tracks. With luck the old ties will serve as footholds while I climb the bank leading out of the gorge.
My hunch is correct, and soon enough I am clambering up a still solid set of tracks. I move quickly, not stopping to smooth my hair or skirt, or wipe the dirt from my hands. When a small fox rustles the underbrush, I am startled and my hands fly to my chest. My gaze settles on a rough path of trampled ferns leading away from the tracks. Twenty feet from where I stand, the path ends at a weather-beaten chest. I notice the set of initials carved into the lid: “T. C.” And it is of no surprise to me that Thomas Cole would not have a middle name, also that he would know about the old tracks and have a secret place to stash his gear.