Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
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 8 W
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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.
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. . . wa k i n g t h at m o r n i n g 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
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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 10 W
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“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.
The 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.
Gilbert was susceptible to sore throats, respiratory infections, si-The Falls X 11
nus headaches, Mrs. Erskine informed Ariah. He had a “delicate stomach” that couldn’t tolerate spicy foods, or “agitation.”
Mrs. Erskine had hugged Ariah, who yielded stiffly in the older woman’s plump arms. Mrs. Erskine had begged Ariah to call her
“Mother”—as Gilbert did.
Ariah murmured yes. Yes, Mother Erskine.
Thinking
Mother! What does that make Gilbert and me, brother and
sister?
Ariah had tried. Ariah was determined to be an ideal bride, and an ideal daughter-in-law.
A clamor of church bells. Sunday morning!
In a strange bed, in a strange city, and lost.
A female voice chiding in her ear, and a smell of Mother Erskine’s talcumy bosom.
If you’ve never drunk anything stronger than sweet cider,
Ariah, do you think it’s wise to have a second glass of champagne—so soon after the first?
Possibly it hadn’t been Gilbert’s mother but Ariah’s own mother.
Or possibly it had been both mothers at separate times.
A giggly-shivery bride. In satin and Chantilly lace, fussy little mother-of-pearl buttons, a gossamer veil and lace gloves to the elbow that, peeled off after the luncheon, left small diamond-shaped indentations in her sensitive skin like an exotic rash. At the luncheon, held in the Littrells’ big, gloomy brick residence adjacent to the church, the bride was observed nervously lifting her champagne glass to her lips numerous times. She ate little, and her hand so trembled she dropped a forkful of wedding cake. Her rather small, almond-shaped pebbly-green eyes were continually misting over, as with an allergy.
She excused herself several times to visit a bathroom. She freshened her lipstick which was bright red as neon; she’d powdered her nose too frequently, and granules of powder were discernible from a short distance. Though she tried to be graceful she was in fact ungainly and gawky as a stork. Pointy elbows, beaky nose. You’d never have thought her an accomplished singer, her voice was scratchy and inaudible. Still, some pronounced Ariah “very charming”—“a beautiful bride.” And yet: those Dixie-cup breasts! She was well aware that 12 W
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everyone stared at her bosom in the exquisite Chantilly lace bodice, pitying her. She was well aware that everyone pitied Gilbert Erskine, to have married an old maid.
Another glass of champagne?
She’d graciously declined. Or, maybe, she’d taken it. For just a few sips.
Mrs. Littrell, mother-of-the-bride, relieved and anxious in about equal measure, had conceded to Ariah that, yes, it might seem strange to her, a full corset to contain the tiny 32-A breasts, the twenty-two-inch waist, and the thirty-two-inch hips, yes but
this is a
wedding, the most important day of your life
. And the corset provides a garter belt for your sheerest of sheer silk stockings.
Ariah laughed wildly. Ariah grabbed something, a swath of silk from the astonished seamstress, and blew her nose into it.
Though she’d obeyed of course. Never would Ariah have defied Mrs. Littrell in such matters of feminine protocol.
Later, on the morning of the ceremony, being dressed by Mrs.
Littrell and the seamstress, she’d prayed silently
Dear God, don’t let my
stockings be baggy at the ankles. Nowhere it can show.
And, as the ceremony began:
Dear God, don’t let me perspire. I know
I’m starting, I can feel it. Don’t let half-moons show at my underarms. In this
beautiful dress. I beg you, God!
These eager girlish prayers, so far as Ariah knew, had been answered.
She was feeling stronger by degrees. She forced herself to whisper,
“Gilbert?” As one might sleepily whisper to a spouse, waking in the morning. “Gilbert, w-where are you?”
No answer.
Gazing through half-shut eyes she saw: no one in the bed beside her.
A crooked pillow. Wrinkled linen pillowcase. A bedsheet turned partly back, as if with care. But no one.
Ariah forced her eyes open. Oh!
A German ceramic clock on a mantel across the room and shiny
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gilt numerals that meant, for several arduous seconds, nothing to Ariah’s squinting eyes. Then the clock’s face showed 7:10. The fog outside the hotel windows was fading, it appeared to be morning and not dusk.
Ariah hadn’t lost the day, then.
Hadn’t lost her husband. Not so quickly!
For probably if Gilbert wasn’t in the bathroom, Gilbert was elsewhere in the hotel. Gilbert had let it be known he was an early riser.
Ariah guessed he was downstairs in the lobby with its Victorian dark paneling, leather settees and gleaming marble floor; or possibly he was having coffee on the wide, regal veranda overlooking Prospect Park and, a short distance beyond, the Niagara River and Falls.
Frowning as he skimmed the
Niagara Gazette,
the
Buffalo Courier-Express.
Or, his monogrammed silver pen in hand, a birthday gift from Ariah herself, he might be making notations as he leafed through tourist brochures, maps and pamphlets with such titles as THE
GREAT FALLS AT NIAGARA: ONE OF THE SEVEN WON-
DERS OF THE WORLD.
Waiting for me to join him. Waiting for me to slip my hand into his.
Ariah could envision her young husband. He was quite attractive in his stern way. Those winking eyeglasses, and nostrils unnaturally wide and deep in his long nose. Ariah would smile gaily at him, greet him with a light kiss on the cheek. As if they’d been behaving like this, so casually, in such intimacy, for a long time. But Gilbert would dispel the mood by standing quickly, awkwardly, jarring the little rat-tan table and spilling coffee, for he’d been trained never to remain seated in the presence of a woman. “Ariah! Good morning, dear.”
“I’m sorry to be so late. I hope . . .”
“Waiter? Another coffee, please.”
In charming white wicker rocking chairs, side by side. The honeymoon couple. Among how many hundreds of honeymoon couples in June, at The Falls. The uniformed Negro waiter appears, smiling . . .
Ariah winced, climbing down from the bed. It was a Victorian four-poster with brass fixtures and a crocheted canopy like mosquito netting; the mattress was unnaturally high from the floor. Like a creature with a back broken in several places, she moved cautiously.
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Tugging at a strap of her silk nightgown where it had fallen, or had been yanked, over her shoulder. (And how sore, how discolored her shoulder was . . . A plum-colored bruise had formed in the night.) Her lashes had come unstuck, though barely. There were dried bits of mucus in her eyes like sand. And that ugly acid taste in her mouth.
“Oh. My God.”
Shaking her head to clear it, which was a mistake. Shattered glass!