Too Close to the Falls (9 page)

Needless to say I was very quiet for the next few days and finally my mother asked if I was on a private retreat. I told her what happened, and she said Miss Stayner was jealous of our “carefree lifestyle.” Since I never saw our life as having any particular style at all, I looked a bit dubious. Picking up on my scepticism she asked me if I'd rather be a frowzy old woman washing out my white stockings at night, making a dinner from a greasy fry pan, going to a church where they didn't even have an altar; or would I like to be a young girl dining out from a full-page menu. As for the “comedienne” part, my mother said it was not uncommon for Protestants to lack a funnybone and if Head Nurse could appreciate humour she wouldn't be a Unitarian who wore her uniform on the weekend. My mother said we were all God's children; however, some come into the world more able to appreciate life's beauty than others. She assured me I had more humour
in my big toe than Nurse Stayner had in her whole ramrod body. She convinced me Head Nurse Stayner needed more than our prayers. She explained that some people don't appreciate art, to them it's just paint, some think history is only facts, and some think humour is only words. My mother concluded by saying that if we listened to the Head Nurse Stayners of this world no one would do anything more important or fun than eat a balanced diet. The most consoling part of my mother's speech was that we both agreed that she was the type who probably found Topo Gigio funny, especially when he kissed Ed Sullivan good night.

In those days, in Lewiston, at any rate, people didn't seem to make formal arrangements to visit one another; they simply dropped in unannounced. My mother had a system for such spontaneous occurrences. Whenever headlights hit the curtains of the picture window, we all had to drop to the floor in hopes that they hadn't already seen our shadows. When the company rang the doorbell, the dog would bark furiously, growling and biting the throw rug in the hall, shaking it mercilessly as though to warn the visitor what might happen to him. When Mother yelled, “Hit the floor!” we'd all lie prostrate until the caller gave up and left. Sometimes the more tenacious visitors would go around to the back door and we'd hear them say in a bewildered tone, “All the lights are on,” or “The car's in the driveway.” When they left, my mother would say, “Thank God,” and my father and I shared her relief.

A number of years later, the day after he died of a brain tumour, some robbers read about my father in the obituary section of the paper and broke into the house to steal things. The police who came to our house explained that this is a common
scam because valuables are unattended and everyone is supposed to be at the funeral home at the times announced in the paper. My mother, who had returned home for her headache pills minutes before the robbers arrived, was, of course, well-hidden behind the couch by the time the robbers got in and she was never detected. She wrote down what each of them said, got their car licence number through a slit in the curtain, and was later able to identify all of them. The police were amazed she could have hidden so quickly and that she was so self-possessed. Little did they know she found them no more frightening than anyone else who may have dropped in.

Once in a while on the way home after Sunday mass and brunch, my father, the gregarious type, would suggest dropping in on some acquaintance, since we were already dressed in our Sunday best, but Mother would remind him that if we dropped in on them, then they would drop in on us, and it would be never-ending, and we'd have no one to blame but ourselves. She explained that one had to have refreshments for people when they dropped in, and we couldn't provide any. Seeing the wisdom of this, we drove home to pursue our individual interests. When my father, on rare occasions, suggested calling people and then going over to visit them, Mother said she'd like to go except that Willie, our dog, always chewed my father's electric blanket if we left him for more than an hour.

My mother and father invariably treated each other with politeness. They never contradicted each other and their mutual agreement never seemed strained or an uneasy compromise. (When my friends' parents disagreed mildly about when they should leave for their cottage, I was sure they were headed for a
divorce.) I had never met anyone who was divorced; nuclear-family meltdown was still two decades away. The only people who got a divorce in the 1950s that I had even heard of were Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher. Even that wasn't a real divorce; it was Hollywood filtered through
Silver Screen
. Liz Taylor stole Eddie while she was crazy with grief because her own husband, Mike Todd, died tragically in a plane crash. Poor Debbie was left to climb the walls with Donald O'Connor.

Father called Mother at three-thirty to see if she was enjoying her day and if I had gotten home from school safely. She routinely put on lipstick and changed her dress before my father came home and insisted that I put on a clean T-shirt. Every time he walked in the door she acted relieved, as though he had returned from a dangerous journey.

My mother would spend a great deal of time planning trips. They were more than daydreams but less than reality. She would go to the automobile association and get “Trip Tiks” to all over the country and even to places in Europe. She wrote to hundreds of Chambers of Commerce and got all kinds of brochures. She would figure out the projected daily mileage and what historical spots we could see along the way. She even planned a quick trip to Susan B. Anthony's shrine in Rochester and then to her home in Massachusetts before it got too crowded. Although my father always acted interested in her travel plans, he made it clear that it was far more sensible to read
National Geographic
from the comfort of our own home and without the hassle of eating foreign food. He told us about all the prescriptions for killing parasites he had to fill for people who travelled even out-of-state. Mother agreed, showing no disappointment, and said the most fun was in
the planning anyway. She continued planning expeditions, yet we never travelled more than sixty miles from home.

When I was eight years old, mother-daughter matching dresses were the rage and one Easter I suggested we make some. Mother said that would be wonderful but she had no idea how to sew. I bought the Simplicity patterns and fixed up the old treadle machine left by my grandmother and made the dresses, carefully following the instructions. (I had always had a compulsive streak, which is essential for any successful seamstress.) Mother said that seeing the dresses in parts made her too nervous to watch, so I stayed down in my playroom until they were completed. When they were finished she raved about her yellow linen shift and we both wore our matching dresses to church as I'd planned. I was bursting with pride when my father said we looked like two buttercups going to communion. Mrs. Bradshaw, the luncheonette owner who always had her hair in pincurls (believing they might conduct lightning, she took them out for rain and thunder), had us both walk the full length of her place when we arrived for brunch. She took our pictures as we posed in front of a chafing dish of scrambled eggs that matched our dresses.

My mother and I had one daily ritual that we shared while sitting together on the couch in our blue-and-white-striped seersucker outfits. She wore clam-diggers and a matching blouse and I wore an accordion-pleated skort and shell. We watched a TV show called
Queen for a Day
. I could imitate Jeanne Cagney, the hostess with the throaty voice who always chattered to Jack, the maniacally empathetic and appallingly cheerful MC, about the beautiful fashions donated by Lanvin. Jack asked each of four contestants to describe the horrors of their lives. The audience
then clapped for the most unfortunate person, and the one with the worst life was crowned Queen for a Day and walked down the aisle sobbing in a trailing robe. Jeanne then reappeared and the Queen got the one thing she needed to make her life perfect (for a day), such as a washer, dryer, or wheelchair. During the commercials I used to pretend I was the fifth unfortunate on the show and I would make my situation so impossible even Jack wouldn't be able to help me. I'd play all the parts — Jeanne, Jack, and the contestant. I would sob and say I was living in an abandoned school bus and all I wanted was a heater for the bus because I had lost fingers to frostbite. Jack would agree, the audience would clap, and then I would say, “Oh, Jack, I forgot, I'm in a wheelchair and can't get in and out of the bus.” Jack would be his accommodating old self and give me a wheelchair, and then I would say that the bus was at the top of a hill and I couldn't roll the wheelchair up because of my lost fingers. As this went on, Jack would become enraged and scream and finally throw me off the show. My mother, a great lover of black comedy, would at this point be curled up on the couch laughing hysterically and telling me I had to go on Jack Paar with my Queen for a Day act.

If I made comedy out of tragedy for her, she made historical intrigue out of everyday life for me. Once when we were having lemonade on the wraparound porch of the two-hundred-year-old Frontier House Inn, Mother told me how the word
cocktail
was invented, right in the spot where we were sitting. During the War of Independence the waitress of the inn worked undercover for the American Revolutionaries and she was assigned the task of rooting out the Loyalist infiltrators who had crossed the border from their haven in Canada only a few miles across the river. As
was true with most old inns, there were chickens and cocks strutting around on the dirt floor, future dinners for the guests. The waitress, Betsy Flanagan, a Revolutionary sympathizer, placed a feather from the rooster's tail in each of the Loyalists' drinks, assuring them it was a drink she'd invented called a “cocktail.” These cocktails told the Revolutionaries exactly who were their enemies and they acted accordingly, ambushing the Loyalists en route to their headquarters in Fort Erie. The story spread and cocktails were served there for the next hundred years at the Frontier House as the ultimate in patriotic drinks.

James Fenimore Cooper, then a midshipman, was staying for an extended period at the Frontier House and most probably witnessed Betsy's patriotic cocktail concoctions. While boarding there he wrote
The Spy
, in which one of the characters is actually named Betsy Flanagan. His appreciation for the allegiant heart under Betsy's rough exterior obviously made an impression on him for she appears again in
The Pioneer
. Washington Irving and Henry Clay also stayed for extended visits.

The local library was a place where Lafayette made a speech, and Charles Dickens stayed in town at the Frontier House on his stagecoach tour of the U.S. He even wrote sections of
Our Mutual Friend
in one of the guest rooms upstairs. Mother took me to the room marked “the Dickens” and read the sections that he had supposedly composed while looking out the window there. I assumed that he was moved to write because Lewiston was so marvellously inspiring in its frontier spirit and revolutionary history. I was surprised when he wrote about London, which as far as I could gather was simply a place overrun with Peter Rabbit and his boring, camomile-tea-drinking family. I was equally
shocked when the opening scene was not set in Niagara Falls, one of the seven wonders of the world, but on a river, the Thames! We did notice that the story opened with an inn on a river much like the Frontier House on the Niagara River. We marvelled at the coincidence, and as we sleuthed around town we tried to think of local spots which may have inspired him.

The Hooker family of Lewiston was famous for a number of reasons. First of all they were rich and technically our neighbours in that they lived on our street. However, they lived in a mansion compared to our simple home. It was along the Niagara River on top of a hill we used for sledding in the winter. The grounds were surrounded by an eight-foot wrought-iron fence with spears on top to impale the curious climber. The front of the white clapboard house with its six Greek columns and dozens of windows sat majestically on “Hooker's Hill” while the house itself backed on the dramatic shale cliffs of the Niagara River. Hooker fame later spilled over into infamy as the family business, Hooker Chemical, was ultimately responsible for dumping an unprecedented volume of chemicals in the Niagara River and also burying chemicals under what would eventually be known as the notorious Love Canal.

On Halloween I put black chalk on my face and masqueraded as a minstrel. My mother took me to the Hookers' house and, after getting my treat, we moved on to “Tryon's Folly.” In 1818 Amos Tryon built a home for his wife-to-be without consulting her and she refused to live in it or to ever even lay eyes on it, so it lay empty for years and acquired its name. In the 1820s, Amos's brother, Reverend Josiah Tryon, the local agent for the Underground Railroad, put the house to use by helping escaped slaves
across the Niagara River to Queenston, Ontario, and freedom. Mother asked the owner to show me the three basements that were part of the Underground Railroad. There was one basement and a trap door which led to another basement and then a trap door which led to a third watery hole that had a tiny door about big enough for one of the seven dwarves which opened to the shore and led to a rickety dock. Sometimes the slaves had to hide for days in the third sub-basement until they were ferried to freedom in Canada. Some died in the last basement, too tired for the final leg of their journey, and were thrown into a watery grave. Apparently the Tryons' house was searched many times by the authorities but the sub-basements where the slaves were hiding were never found.