The Falls (5 page)

haired woman, eager to establish himself with her influential father the Reverend Thaddeus Littrell of Troy, New York. Introduced to the red-haired woman whose thin lips wavered in a hesitant, hopeful smile even as her pebbly-green eyes stared at him lustrous and unyielding as glass. And he’d thought, in his folly, vanity, desperation
A
sister! One like myself
.

He was walking swiftly. Bare feet in leather dress shoes, and his heels chafed. A mistake not to pull on socks but he hadn’t time. He needed to get to the river, he needed to get
there.
As if, only
there,
he could breathe. The broad sidewalks of Prospect Street were puddled from a recent rain. The cobbled street glistened with wet. He stepped into the street and out of nowhere a rattling trolley rushed at him and a shrieking horn sounded and he hid his face so no one could recognize it afterward seeing its likeness in the local papers. For he knew the shame and desperation of his act would outlive him, and its courage would be obscured, but he did not care for it was time, God would never forgive him but God would grant him freedom. That was the promise of The Falls. Through the night he heard its murmurous roar and now in the open air he heard it more clearly, and could feel the very ground beneath his feet vibrating with its power.
Come! Here
alone is peace.

What pride, what a fervor of triumph. Ten months before.

On the telephone announcing in a tremulous voice
I am engaged,
Douglas
. And his friend spoke warmly, spontaneously.
Congratulations,
Gil!
And he’d said almost boastfully,
Will you come to my wedding?

They’re scheduling it for next June.
D. said,
Of course, Gil
.
Hey, this is great
news. I’m very happy for you
. G. said,
I’m happy, too. I’m
. . .
happy.
D. said,
Gil?
and G. said,
Yes, Douglas?
and D. asked,
Who is she?
and for a moment G. couldn’t think, and stammered,
Who?
and D. said, laughing,
Your fiancée, Gil
.
When will I meet her?

D. had been impressed (hadn’t he?) when he’d learned who his friend’s fiancée was. The daughter of. A music instructor, pianist and singer.

At the seminary they’d been such opposite types. Yet they’d
The Falls
X 29

talked passionately late into the night: of life and death, mortality and Life Everlasting. Never had they talked of suicide. Never of despair. For, young Christian men studying for the ministry, why should they despair? They were themselves the bearers of good news.

Instead, they talked with the fervor of late adolescence of love—

“mature love”—“love between a man and a woman”—“what a Christian marriage in the mid-twentieth century should be.” Of course they’d talked of having children.

They played chess, which was D.’s game. They went hiking, and sometimes searched for fossils in shale-rich ravines and creekbeds, which was G.’s game since boyhood.

D. hadn’t been able to attend G.’s wedding. G. wondered if he would attend his funeral. If there can be a funeral without a body? For maybe they’d never find his body. He smiled to think so. Sometimes, going over The Falls, a human being was lost forever. Even small boats had been known to disintegrate in such a way that their parts were never retrieved or identified.

The peace of oblivion.

G. had left no note for D. He’d left a scribbled note only for A., his wife. Out of a sense of obligation that suggested (he hoped, for he wasn’t cruel) none of the loathing he felt for the woman. But D.

would forgive him. He believed.

D., in the simplicity and goodness of his heart. A natural-born Christian. He would grieve for G., but forgive him.

D. had his own, separate life now. For years. He was assistant to the minister of a large, prosperous church in Springfield, Massa-chusetts. He was proud husband and father of two-year-old girl twins. To make of D. an accomplice of a kind if only at second- or third-hand would be a sinful act. To make of D. a sharer of so shameful a secret. Unless it was so beautiful a secret.
I can’t love any woman,
God help me I’ve tried. I can only love you.
D. had joined G. in his rambling walks in search of fossils. He’d begun as a boy collecting Indian arrowheads and artifacts but “fossils” came to fascinate him more.

These delicate, leafy remnants of a lost and scarcely imaginable time before human history. Like mysterious artworks they were, skeletal impressions of once-living organisms from an era millions of years—

30 W
Joyce Carol Oates

an unfathomable sixty-five million years!—before Christ. A world of slow time in which one thousand years was but a moment and sixty thousand years was too brief a time to be measured by geological methods of fossil dating. As a boy of thirteen he’d fashioned a fine-meshed net attached to a wooden frame so that he could wade creekbeds and sift through soft black muck in search of fragments of fossil rocks and bone, the teeth of ancient sharks and skates; the outlines of ancient squids calcified to a kind of amber. So far inland as Troy, New York! G. couldn’t believe, as his own father did, that the Devil had planted so-called fossils in the earth to mislead mankind; to cast doubt on the account of creation in Genesis—that God had created the earth and the stars and all the creatures of the earth in seven days and nights, no more than six thousand years ago. (Six thousand!

G. smiled to think of it.) Yet he resisted the very premise of “evolution.” Blindness, accident. No! Not possible.

And yet: could it be true that ninety-nine percent of all species, flora and fauna, that have ever lived have become extinct, and that species are passing into extinction continuously? Daily? Why did God create so many creatures, only to let them fight frantically with one another for existence, and then to pass into oblivion? Would mankind disappear too, one day?
Was this God’s plan?
For surely there was a plan.

Christianity must try to comprehend, and to explain. G.’s father refused to discuss such issues with G. He’d long ago come to the conclusion that science was a false, shallow religion and that deep abiding faith was all that mattered, finally. “You’ll see, son. In time.” A few of G.’s younger instructors at the seminary were more open to discuss such questions but these men, too, were limited in their responses, and uninformed in science. To them, there was little difference between six thousand years, sixty-five million years and five hundred million years. Faith, faith! G. complained to D., “What good is ‘faith’

if it’s based upon ignorance? I want to
know
.” But D. said, “Look, Gil.

Faith is a day-to-day, practical matter. I can no more doubt the existence of God and Jesus than I can doubt the existence of my family, or you. What matters is how we relate to them, and to one another. And that’s all that matters.”

The Falls
X 31

G. was moved by this answer. Its simplicity, and the essential soundness of such an attitude. Yet he doubted he could be satisfied with it. Always he wanted more . . .

“Maybe that’s your special destiny, Gil. To make sense of these things. To bring together science and ‘faith.’ Ever think of that?”

D. seemed quite serious, saying this. He seemed to think that G., graduate of a provincial Protestant seminary in upstate New York, with virtually no science in his background, might be capable of such a task.

No one but D. had ever had such ambitions for G.

No one but D. had ever called him
Gil.

Well, that was finished now. G. would be leaving his fossil collection behind, in his parents’ house. In his boyhood room, in drawers and cartons. In junior high he’d begun bringing these to show his science teachers, who made a stab at identifying and dating them. Had his teachers known much more than G. himself, he wondered. He’d wanted to think so. They assured him that, at least, the fossils were millions of years old. Hundreds of millions? There was the Cambrian Era, and there was the Cretaceous Era. Fossils in this upstate New York region might belong to the Ice Age. The Age of Dinosaurs. The Age of Neanderthals. He’d been thrilled to think that these mysterious objects had ended up in his possession. There were no accidents in God’s plan, and he knew that God had intended him to be a minister; since God had allowed him to find these fossils, too, there was a reason. One day, he would know that reason. He intended to take courses in paleontology, paleozoology, at a distinguished university like Cornell . . . Somehow, he never had. He wondered if he’d been fearful of what he might learn.

That you have no special destiny. Not you, and not mankind
.

At this early hour of Sunday morning the city was nearly deserted.

Yet church bells seemed to be ringing continuously. A noisy clamor.

He wanted to clap his hands over his ears. Never had he noticed how intrusive his faith was. Here we are! Christians! Surrounding 32 W
Joyce Carol Oates

you! Bringing news of the Gospels! Good news! Come and be saved!

How much more seductive he found the monosyllabic roar of The Falls.

He forced himself, panting, to walk at a normal pace. For what if a police officer saw him, and guessed his intention. His face. His ravaged face. His boy’s face that had aged years in a single night. His eyes sunken in his face. He was afraid it shone unmistakably in his face, the release from misery he sought.

It was difficult for him to simulate calm, though. He felt like a wild beast on a leash. If anyone got in his way or tried to stop him, if the woman had tried to stop him, he’d have flung her aside in a rage.

It wasn’t despair he felt. Not at all. Despair suggested meekness, passivity, giving-up. But Gilbert Erskine wasn’t giving anything up.

Another man would return to the hotel suite, to the
lawfully wedded
wife
. The bed, the swath of rusted-red crotch. The moaning fish’s mouth and the eyes rolled back in the head and the eventual babies, a cozy stink of diapers. That was Gilbert Erskine’s true destiny. The tall gaunt house in Palmyra, New York, mud-colored brick and rotted shingleboards in the roof and a congregation of less than two hundred people, most of them middle-aged and older, to whom the young minister must “prove” himself. “Win” their confidence, their respect, eventually their love. Yes? But no.

Not for G. He was acting out of courage, conviction. God would not forgive him.
But God will know me as I am.

The roar of The Falls. Like the blood-roar in the ears. Penetrating his fevered brain as he’d lain sleepless in that bed. Recalling the vanity of their first meeting. He’d believed the woman a “sister”—what a cruel, crude joke. How they’d met. Now he knew. Their elders had shrewdly planned the meeting, he saw now. Her parents were desperate for the prim, plain spinster to be married, and his parents were desperate for the prim, plain bachelor to be married. (Possibly they worried about his manhood? Reverend Erskine at least.) And so

“Ariah” and “Gilbert” were but pawns on a chess board who’d imagined themselves players!

Last night. His life careening past as if already he were drowning in the river. Broken like a cheap plastic doll in The Falls. Beside him
The Falls
X 33

the stuporous snoring woman. Drunken woman. His wedding night, and a drunken woman. Run, run! He had to throw himself into the most monstrous of falls, the Horseshoe. Nothing less would suffice.

In his expansive sense of himself he dreaded surviving. He dreaded being pulled from the churning water below The Falls, broken and maimed. Would rescue crews be on duty, so early in the morning? He wished for total extinction, obliteration. To erase forever from his sight the smeared greedy face of the red-haired woman. Chaste and virginal and cool to the touch as an icicle she’d been for the long months of their engagement, and that thin-lipped smile and awkward manner . . . Well, he’d been deceived. Like a dupe of the Devil he’d been deceived. He, Gilbert Erskine! The most skeptical of the seminarians. The most “free thinking.” He who’d prided himself on eluding the wiles of featherbrained simpering-coy females for years.

Desperate to marry, they were. The pack of them desperate to be

“engaged”; shamelessly greedy for a ring to wear, to present boastfully to the world.
See? I’m loved. I’m saved.
But Ariah Litterell had seemed to him so different. Of another species. A young woman he might respect as a wife, a woman who was his equal socially and almost his equal intellectually.

He was bitter that D. had not asked
Do you love this woman, Gil?

He’d planned to say to D.
As much as you love yours.

The occasion had not arisen. In fact, no one asked G.
Do you love
this woman?

Possibly G. had murmured to her, yes he did. He loved her. Possibly, stricken with shyness. Embarrassment. And the woman in turn stiff, self-conscious, blinking rapidly and her green-glassy eyes wavering from his eyes. Possibly she’d murmured to him, in turn.
And I, I
love you.

So it was decided. He’d slid the ring on her thin finger.

Run, run!

Spray wetted his face like spit. The roar of The Falls had been steadily getting louder. His glasses were misted over, hardly could he see the pavement in front of him. That bridge. Goat Island Suspension Bridge.
Love me why can’t you love me for God’s sake can’t you. Do
it, DO IT!
It was Goat Island he wanted. He’d marked on the tourist 34 W
Joyce Carol Oates

map. With the little silver pen she’d given him, inscribed with his initials
G.S.
His pride in this artifact!
I’m loved, I’m saved.

Their shy groping dry-mouthed kisses. Her stiffening body, the tough little skeleton holding her erect when he touched her, put his arms around her.
Like they do in the movies. Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, let’s
dance! It’s so easy.