The Falls Read Online Free PDF Page A

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