The Falls by Joyce Carol Oates

domestication doesn’t take.
    Before he’d arrived at the Rainbow Grand, Colborne had heard the rumor of a suicide at The Falls. By this time it was likely a news bulletin. Burnaby had a police radio (unofficial, unauthorized) on the yacht to which he sometimes listened, especially in the late hours of the night when he couldn’t sleep, out of “congenital curiosity” as he called it. (Burnaby was a lawyer as well as a yachtsman, gambler, sports fan and sporadic “civic leader.” ) So they’d been hearing the unwelcome news that a man, at the time unidentified, had been seen by a gatekeeper at the Goat Island Bridge to have “thrown himself ”
    over the Horseshoe Falls early that morning. Another suicide! At the giddy height of the honeymoon tourist season, when visitors to The Falls came from all over the world. God damn suicides, Colborne thought, disgusted. This would be—how many in the past year alone? Three, four? That authorities knew of. No doubt there’d been more, and the broken bodies never discovered.
    Burnaby said cryptically he never learned of a jumper at The Falls but he didn’t feel a tug somewhere in his soul. “There, but for the grace of God, and plain good luck, go you.” But Colborne didn’t feel The Falls X 57
    that way. He was a businessman, he was selling The Falls. He was selling the idea of The Falls. He wasn’t selling the idea of some twisted neurotic nut jumping into The Falls.
    Still, it was mostly male suicides that aroused his fury. Colborne conceded that females who jumped were desperate for reasons of being female. It was like a birth defect: female. Female suicides were more to be pitied than condemned, as the church condemned them.
    The majority were young, distraught girls, pregnant and abandoned by their lovers. They were wives mistreated or abandoned by their husbands. Their babies had died. Maybe, somehow, they’d killed their babies. They were mentally ill, deranged. They were only just females. At the height of romantic female suicides at The Falls, in the mid-nineteenth century, all the female suicides had been young, beautiful, “tragic”—at least, as they were represented in newspaper sketches. In the mid-twentieth century, things had changed. A lot.
    Suicides now were likely to be pathetic girls and women, not heiresses or the spurned mistresses of wealthy men, and their deaths were not romanticized by the media.
    But the men! Selfish sons of bitches. They had to be moral cowards, taking the easy way out. Sullying the reputation of The Falls.
    Exhibitionists. Look, look at me! Here I am.
    Except: Colborne knew what a body can look like after it has gone over The Falls. After it rises to the river’s surface, sometimes days or even weeks later. Miles downriver, at the lake.
    Yet The Falls exerted its malevolent spell, that never weakened. If you grew up in the Niagara region, you knew. Adolescence was the dangerous time. Most Niagara natives kept their distance from The Falls, so they were immune. But if you drifted too near, even out of intellectual curiosity, you were in danger: beginning to think thoughts unnatural to your personality as if the thunderous waters were thinking for you, depriving you of your will.
    Clyde Colborne liked to think he was spared from such thoughts.
    As Dirk Burnaby once said, you had to have a deep, mysterious soul to want to destroy yourself. The shallower you are, the safer.
    Colborne had said, laughing, “I’ll drink to that.”
    The Falls was good for one thing: money.
    58 W Joyce Carol Oates
    So this was bad news, anyway not good news, what his employees were telling him. Everyone on the staff was abuzz with it. A certain Reverend Erskine had disappeared, and from all reports it sounded as if he was the man who’d jumped that morning; his bride of hardly more than one day, the red-haired woman with the pale freckled face and distracted manner, had been looking for him in the hotel, and had finally reported him