It was June 1859. I had recently turned nineteen, and felt ready to take the entrance exams for three different female colleges—though I knew I must perform well enough to secure a scholarship as well as admittance. Thomas was home from Madison University for the summer. And Reverend Skelley, who knew I had never traveled by train, proposed an excursion: why should we three not go to Niagara Falls together and watch the Great Blondin walk across on his tightrope? We could leave early in the morning and return late the same night, so there would be no impropriety.
My father consented far more readily than I’d expected. I suppose he’d resigned himself to the idea that I would marry into a Universalist family and never again believe that anyone was damned to hell, offensive though he found that forgiving doctrine.
I suppose he was simply relieved by the prospect of anyone but Gus.
Before dawn on the thirtieth I was dressed and out the door. We took a coach to Batavia, and from there the train—the thunder and rush delighted me more even than the promised feat—then, far too soon, we disembarked into a jostling crowd all heading for the falls.
The falls. I had lived my whole life less than fifty miles distant from Niagara, but I had never seen them before. We were early enough to find a fair spot to spread our blanket on the American side, and I marveled at the water’s roar obliterating the noise of that vast assembly, at the mists so dense even history might be lost in them. The white walls of water growled over the festival air. We looked across at Canada, its shore crawling with the particolored dots of parasols and bright summer dresses; we bought sugared buns and hot chocolate from the ambling vendors.
At what point did I observe that Thomas, who usually kept his gaze lowered, was watching me sidelong with a look of bashful longing? At what point did I realize that his father, usually the more talkative of the two, was at pains to stare into the distance, as if we were not there? I hadn’t understood the point of this excursion before, but now I began to suspect, and my mind wheeled through frantic calculations.
Darius, like Gus, could not comprehend that anyone might sincerely reject magic. When he’d suppressed its flickering in me, I don’t doubt that Darius had thought I’d come to him soon enough and beg for his help in freeing my power once again. Now I reached into myself, and felt—nothing. No disease of the mind, no oozing menace to reality’s fragile configurations. Had Darius actually cured me, and thought of it as a curse?
(He had not. But how could I know?)
The crash of the falls made our silence less conspicuous. I was grateful for the reprieve.
Meanwhile the funambulist’s cable was tied to an oak tree on the American side, but there was some difficulty in getting it up the cliff in Canada. The crowd burst into cheers as Blondin rappelled down the gorge, then tied a rope to the hemp cable so it could be drawn up. Blondin climbed the cliff with what appeared to be airy unconcern, his lithe figure sometimes obscured by spray. How slippery, how treacherous those rocks must be!
If I was cured, if I was no longer obliged to reject Thomas for his own protection, that still left the question of what I wanted. Both Skelleys were warmly encouraging when it came to my hopes for college and even when I talked of perhaps becoming a journalist afterward. They were true Spiritualists, committed to an ideal of absolute human equality. I believed that neither of them would balk at seeing their ideals put into action.
Guy ropes were strung to constrain the cable’s swaying. A vast webwork grew in midair, a hundred lines of tension, all of them touching a single man’s life.
In the early afternoon Reverend Skelley unpacked our picnic basket. Sandwiches and lemonade, cold chicken and strawberries.
And of course a pie. It was too early for fresh blackberries, so Thomas must have used canned ones. As he lifted the pie from the basket he looked away, but I saw his brimming eyes.
We had far too much food, and shared with our neighbors. They had three little daughters with them, and for a while the children’s joyful hunger covered everything still unsaid between us.
There was one final consideration. Did I love Thomas Skelley, love him enough to justify marriage, of all preposterous things?
The sun began its decline, striking a furious dazzle from the rising mist. Reverend Skelley excused himself to stretch his legs; our neighbors’ littlest girl fell asleep with her head on my leg.
And Thomas took my hand. “My father told me long ago that you meant never to marry,” he said, so gently that his voice seemed one with the wind. “But if you ever change your mind, no matter how far in the future, then I can imagine nothing more beautiful than the life we could make together.”
“I must think,” I told him. “I must think.”
“I mean of course—after you finish college, and whatever else you want to do on your own—you could take all the time you needed—” A plangent note had entered his voice, and he broke off in shame at the sound of it.
“I’ll give you my answer soon, I promise! Only—”
He didn’t press me further, and I didn’t withdraw my hand.
Could I imagine anything more beautiful than such a life? I saw it then: children, pies, fireflies, books, the soft bellies of hens as I reached in for eggs. We would study together, quest for secrets in rainwater and bones; Thomas would work in the sciences, and I could add my efforts to the many movements for justice then current, perhaps by writing for one of the reform-minded newspapers. It would be a life without grandeur, without any grasping after superiority to the rest of humankind. A life of small things.
It would fall to us to make them immense through love.
Reverend Skelley came back to our blanket with a Spiritualist acquaintance he’d run into; the two of them seemed absorbed in conversation.
It was late afternoon when Blondin put his foot on the cable, on the American side again, and began to walk. There was no net, no line, no help for him if he slipped. Only blue space and thrashing winds all the way to another country. He carried a balancing pole several times his own height, and his sequined pink costume scattered feverish glints across the endless air. He walked, or more nearly strutted, into ravenous emptiness.
There was no magic in this marvel, please note. Instead there was a solitary person, in desperate peril, determined to reach the other side.
Around me thousands of people held their breath, peeked through their fingers, buried their faces in nearby shoulders. I think Thomas never noticed how hard he was squeezing my hand. But as Blondin went on, my own doubts lifted; I felt his confidence as if it were my own.
He sat down on his rope, and blithely hauled up a bottle of wine from the Maid of the Mist far below; he raised his glass in a toast, and drank.
The guy ropes could not reach all the way to the cable’s center. Blondin approached the sagging, wavering span at the midpoint, and the crowd’s anxiety ratcheted again. Fear breathed through me as his dwindling figure balanced on that wobbly line; for the first time I felt viscerally that we all might have come here only to watch a man die.
But he went on, and at last his feet curled on the steadier stretch leading to Canada. With the bursting energy of unexpected freedom, he began to run. Sunlight washed around him, and he looked as small as a spider on its thread.
No matter how the falls thundered, they could not drown out the cheers when he dismounted on the far side. The uproar came at us, a wind of human voices blown across the chasm; all around me people began to shout, to jump, to cry.
It was then that I knew.
“Thomas,” I said into the tumult. “Thomas!”
It was a wonder that he heard me at all; how his mind must have been attuned to the slightest note of my voice! He turned, shaking from head to toe, and looked at me.
“We’ve made it,” I said. “We’re across at last!”
It was a moment before he understood what I meant. But then his face broke open, and his arms flew out, and we took each other in. That embrace was a small thing, only two people clinging to each other in a vast and shrieking crowd.
But its warmth felt big enough to hold all the future.
Hush.