Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
And so when Gilbert saw Ariah again, in a floral-print shirtwaist, a white cardigan over her shoulders, her hair in the chic French twist and a demure lipstick on her thin, curving lips, he’d admire her again.
He’d be in awe of her again. (Hadn’t he been in awe of her once? For a while? The “musically-inclined” daughter of Reverend Thaddeus Littrell, with her small-town patrician aura?) He would smile shyly at her, adjusting his glasses. He’d blink at her as if a bright light were shining in his eyes.
I forgive you Ariah. However you disgusted me last night, and I disgusted you.
I can’t love you. But I can forgive you.
Ariah let her ivory-silk nightgown with the wide lace straps and
The Falls
X 21
lacy bodice fall in a snaky heap on the tile floor. There were dried mucous stains on it. And darkish stains . . . She wasn’t going to look.
She was grateful for the billowing steam, that obscured her vision.
Carefully she climbed into the claw-footed tub, that was still only partially filled. “Oh!”—the water was scalding. But she would endure it. The tub was larger, more ungainly than the Littrells’ old tub at home. A drinking trough for elephants. And not so sparkling clean as she’d believed: narrow rings of rust around the brass fixtures, bits of fluff and tiny kinky hairs floating in the sudsy water.
Ariah settled gingerly into the tub. She was so slender-boned, she seemed almost to be floating.
Don’t look. There’s no need.
Her sallow bruised body. Small breasts hard as green pears. Tight little nipples on these breasts like rubber caps. She had to wonder if Gilbert had been disappointed . . . Her collarbone pushed against her pale, nearly translucent skin, that was sprinkled with pale freckles. As a girl Ariah had dared to poke her tight little belly button with a finger, wondering if this was an act considered “dirty.” Like so many acts associated with the female body.
At the fork of her legs, a rusty swath of that hair called
pubic
.
Embarrassing! A few years ago, introducing students at a music school recital, Ariah had stumbled over the word
public
and had seemed to say
pubic
. Quickly she’d corrected herself—“
Pub
lic.” She’d been addressing an audience of mostly parents, relatives, neighbors of her students, and her face flamed: each freckle in the constellation of freckles in her face was a miniature fiery star.
Fortunately, Gilbert Erskine hadn’t been in the audience. She could imagine him wincing, his eyes pinching at the corners.
Out of kindness, no one had ever mentioned Ariah’s slip of the tongue.
(Though people must have laughed, in private. As Ariah might herself have laughed if another had made such a blunder.) In Troy, New York, it seemed much was left unsaid. Out of tact, kindness. Out of pity.
Ariah was examining a broken fingernail. It was cutting into the tender quick of her finger.
A scratch on Gilbert’s shoulder? On his back, or . . .
22 W
Joyce Carol Oates
Isn’t Gilbert Erskine too young for you, Ariah?
—so Ariah’s girl cousins and friends never once inquired, during the eight months of their engagement. Even in playful innocence, no one inquired.
She would wonder if anyone inquired of Gilbert
Isn’t Ariah Littrell
too old for you?
Well, they were a match! They’d seemed the same age, much of the time. They were of the same intelligent, bookish, high-strung, perhaps somewhat egotistic temperament, inclined to impatience, exasperation. Inclined to think well of themselves and less well of most others. (Though Ariah knew to hide these traits, as a dutiful daughter.)
Two sets of parents had heartily approved of the match.
Difficult to gauge who of the four elders was most relieved: Mrs.
Littrell, or Mrs. Erskine; Reverend Littrell, or Reverend Erskine.
In any case, Ariah had become engaged in the nick of time.
Twenty-nine was nearing the precipice, the edge of oblivion: thirty.
Ariah scorned such conventional thinking and yet the nether years of her twenties, past the median twenty-five, when everyone she knew or knew of was getting engaged, getting married, having babies, had been dismaying, nightmarish.
Dear God send someone to me
.
Let my life begin. I beg you!
There were times, shameful to admit, when Ariah Littrell, an accomplished pianist, singer, music teacher, would have gladly exchanged her soul for an engagement ring, it was that simple.
The man himself was a secondary matter.
And then the miracle happened: the engagement.
And now in June 1950, the wedding. Like Christ with the fishes and loaves, better yet like Christ raising Lazarus from the dead, the event had seemed to Ariah a miracle. She wouldn’t have to be Ariah Littrell the minister’s daughter any longer; the “girl” everyone in Troy professed to admire. Now she could bask in the innocent pride of being the wife of an ambitious young Presbyterian minister with, at only twenty-seven, his own church in Palmyra, New York, pop. 2,100.
Ariah had wanted to laugh at her friends’ faces when they first saw the engagement ring. “You never thought I’d get engaged, admit it!”
she’d wanted to tease, or accuse. But she’d said nothing, of course.
Her friends would only have denied it.
The Falls
X 23
The wedding ceremony itself had passed in a dream. Certainly Ariah had had no champagne before the church service yet her walk was unsteady, she’d leaned against her father’s strong arm as he escorted his tall pale red-haired daughter up the aisle and a blaze of light blinded her, pulsing lights like manic stars.
Do you Ariah Littrell
solemnly swear. Love honor obey. Till death do you
. . . No champagne of course but she’d taken several aspirins with Coke, a frequent home remedy. It caused her heart to jump and her mouth to dehydrate.
Gilbert would probably disapprove. Beside her at the altar he stood taller than she, still and wary, trying not to sniffle and reciting his part of the ceremony in a grave voice.
I take thee, Ariah
.
My lawfully
wedded wife.
Two trembling young people at the altar being blessed like cattle about to be slaughtered by a common butcher. Bonded by terror yet strangely oblivious of each other.
What awaited Ariah, what “physical” ordeal on her wedding night, and on the nights to follow, she shrank from contemplating.
She’d never been a girl whom forbidden thoughts much tempted, no more than forbidden actions. Though observed to be surprisingly passionate while thundering her way through the stormy movements of Beethoven’s great piano sonatas, or singing certain Schubert lieder, Ariah was a stiff, shy girl in most gatherings. She blushed easily, she shrank from being touched. Her pebbly-green eyes glinted with intelligence and not warmth. If she’d had occasional boyfriends they’d been boys like herself. Boys like Gilbert Erskine who were young-old and inclined to be round-shouldered in their teens. Of course Ariah was routinely examined by the Littrells’ family doctor, but the elderly physician could be relied upon not to use gynecologic instruments in any extreme manner, and always desisted when Ariah whimpered in pain and discomfort, or kicked at him in panic. Out of feminine delicacy and embarrassment Mrs. Littrell skirted the marital subject, and of course Reverend Littrell would rather have died than speak to his tense, virginal daughter of “intimate” matters. He left this awkward task to his wife, and thought no more of it.
The hot bath was making Ariah light-headed. Or such thoughts were making her light-headed. She saw that her left breast floated in the water, partly ochre-colored as if in shadow. He’d squeezed, 24 W
Joyce Carol Oates
pinched. She supposed there were bruises on her lower belly and thighs. Between her chafed legs there was less sensation, as if that part of her body had gone to sleep.
That bat-cry of his! His flushed shiny boy’s face contorted like Boris Karloff ’s face in
Frankenstein
.
He had not said
I love you, Ariah.
He had not lied.
Nor had she whispered
I love you Gilbert
as she’d rehearsed, lying in his arms. For she knew the words would offend him, at such a time.
Lying in the bath, as the water lost its steamy heat and began to scum over with soap, Ariah began silently to cry. Tears stung her eyes, that were already sore, and ran down her cheeks into the bathwater. She’d imagined how, while she was bathing, she would hear the outer door open and close, and Gilbert’s uplifted voice—“Ariah?
Good morning!” But she hadn’t heard any door open and close. She hadn’t heard Gilbert’s uplifted voice.
She was thinking how, long before she’d met Gilbert Erskine, while still in high school she’d locked herself in the bathroom at home and “examined” herself after a bath with a small mirror. Oh, she’d nearly fainted! It was bad as giving blood. She’d seen, between her slender thighs, inside the damp, curly swath of pubic hair, a curious little raised tissue like a tongue, or one of those slithery organs you take care to remove from a chicken before roasting it; and, as she stared in appalled fascination, a small, pinched hole at the base of this tissue, smaller than her belly button. How on earth could a man’s
“thing” be fitted into such a tiny space?
Worse yet, how could a baby
emerge through such a tiny space?
The revelation had left Ariah weak with terror, dread, revulsion for hours afterward. Maybe she hadn’t recovered, yet.
4
T h e r e i t wa s. The note. So conspicuous. Like a shout. Propped up by the vanity mirror. Ariah would never comprehend how, or why, she hadn’t noticed it earlier.
On rose-colored hotel stationery, in a hastily scrawled handwrit-The Falls X 25
ing Ariah could not have easily identified as Gilbert’s, were these words:
Ariah sorry—I cant—
I tried to love you
I am going where my pride must take me
I know—you cant forgive
God will not forgive
By this I free us both of our vows
On the carpet below was a monogrammed silver pen. It must have been tossed carelessly down, and rolled onto the floor.
For a very long time (five minutes? ten?) Ariah stood frozen, the note in her trembling hand. Her mind was struck blank. At last she began to cry, hoarse ugly sobs wracking her body.
As if, after all, she’d loved him?
R
un, run! Run for your life.
At last it was dawn. All night the thunderous river had called to him. Through the night as he prayed to summon strength for what he must do, the river called to him.
Come! Here is peace.
River of Thunder the Tuscaroras named it centuries ago. Falls of Thunder.
The Ongiara Indians named it Hungry Water. Devouring the unwary, and the sacrifices. Those who threw themselves into its seething waters to be carried off to oblivion, and peace. How many tortured souls repudiated by God had found peace in those waters, how many had been obliterated and returned to God, he could not guess. Surely there had been hundreds like himself, perhaps thousands. From the start of recorded history in this part of North America, in the 1500’s.
Many of these were pagans, but Jesus would pity them. Jesus would pity him. Jesus would grant him oblivion, as He on His cross would have been granted oblivion if He had wished it. But He had not required such solace for He was the son of God and born without sin or the very capacity or yearning for sin. Never had He touched a
The Falls
X 27
woman, never had He shrieked in ecstatic surrender to the woman’s crude touch.
It was dawn, it was time. He’d lived too long. Twenty-seven years, three months! They called him young, fussed over him as a prodigy, but he knew better. He’d lived a day and a night too long.
Do you take
this woman as your lawfully wedded wife. Till death do you part
and so he could not bear another hour. Slipping from the bed. Slipping from the bedclothes that smelled of their bodies. As the woman who was Mrs.
Erksine
the lawfully wedded wife
slept heavily, on her back as if she’d fallen from a great height, unconscious, brainless, her hands flung upward in an expression of astonishment, mouth open like a fish’s and her breath catching at the back of her mouth in a wet rasping idiotic way that maddened him, made him want to shut his fingers around her throat and squeeze. Run, run! Don’t look back. Gathering his clothes, his shoes, tiptoeing into the parlor where a chill pale light at the windows exposed the fussily decorated plush-pink room.
Honeymoon suite, paradise for two. Luxury and privacy. An idyll you will never
forget!
Fumbling with buttons, muttering to himself as he dressed hurriedly, pushed his bare feet by force into part-laced shoes, and fled.
Run, run! For your life.
Too restless to wait for an elevator, taking the fire stairs instead.
Five flights down. By the Bulova watch (a gift from his proud parents when he’d graduated top of his class at the Albany Theological Seminary) he had not failed to strap to his wrist, for G. was one to observe certain routine rituals of his life even in the final exalted hour of his life, it was just past 6 a.m. The hotel lobby was nearly deserted.
A few uniformed hotel staff, taking not much notice of him. Outside, the air was cold and very damp. June, the month of brides. June, the season of young love. June, a mockery. If by G.’s watch it should have been dawn, by the actual sky above the Niagara Gorge it was an hour without time, mist-shrouded, sullenly glaring like the bottom of a scrubbed pot and smelling mostly of something sulfurous, metallic.
Niagara! Honeymoon Capital of the World.
He’d known from the start, maybe. Never had he truly deceived himself. Introduced to the red-28 W
Joyce Carol Oates