Mrs. Houdini (12 page)

She turned to see a group of loud, smooth-faced men crowding the doorway. The “boys,” as she called them—the young, rowdy magician set—had arrived. They always came in for drinks after their Friday shows. At first she'd kept the place open mainly for them, but then word got around and soon there were just as many women, too, each hoping to end the night pie-eyed with a man on her arm. They came in their best rayon dresses, trimmed with velvet, their tiny beaded chain-strapped purses hanging from their elbows. Bess watched them with a kind of removed clarity, their bodies lit by the old familiar glamour of the city—all the beautiful, ordinary people milling about, bearing the heightened sense that they
mattered,
that they were living in an age that mattered.

Niall Robbins was her favorite of the boys. He was a strange character; three years earlier, he'd been a reckless, handsome playboy, the son of a wealthy stockbroker. Then, for a year or so, he'd become pious and, just as suddenly, went back to the parties and declared his ambition to become a magician. He could drink with the best of them, and he got crazy doing it—they'd once spent a half hour going round and round in the Commodore Hotel's revolving door.

Bess greeted Niall in the lounge. “Darling, how are you? I was hoping I'd see you.” She stepped back. “This is Harry's sister Gladys.”

“You don't say. It's a real pleasure.” Niall pumped Gladys's hand. “But I should be asking how
you
are,” he called to Bess over the noise. He beckoned a server with a tray of cocktails. There were more than two dozen people crammed into the lobby alone now, and more pouring through the door. Zingoni, one of New York's most popular magicians, had just come from a performance, and his crew was raucous. One of them was pounding out “Bambalina” on the piano.

Bess shrugged. “It'll be out of the news tomorrow.”

“Listen,” Niall said, “I've told you, it's not going to happen the way you're imagining it. There has never yet been a séance that has produced any actual results.”

Bess was beginning to agree with him. Surely all the hours she had sat in those large, smoky rooms with women spewing their disgusting ectoplasm and claiming they were holy had been a grave mistake. The hundreds of mediums she had encountered worked only in the dark and adopted false voices—just as she had done during her circus days, touting falsehoods to small-town folks. Harry would never come back to her in that way. It was degrading. But what if she herself really did possess the clarity of vision, the gift of sight that Harry had always believed in? She had tried to access it after his death, but perhaps she had been going about it all wrong.

She had always prided herself on understanding Harry when no one else could, on being able to solve the mysteries and riddles he presented her with during their marriage—just as she had seen through his Metamorphosis trick when she first saw him onstage. She needed to channel his spirit—not his ghost, but his being, wherever he was. Her search, she realized, should be guided not by the conventional methods of the time—the endless séances and prayer vigils—but by following Harry's
rejection
of convention. She only had to figure out what that meant.

A friend of Stella's came up behind Bess and grabbed her arm, swaying to the music. “Is it true Lou Gehrig was here the other day? I was hoping he would come in tonight! Do you think he might?”

“He only came for lunch.” Bess shrugged. “I don't think he stays out late.”

“Stella says you're friends with dozens of celebrities.”

Bess smiled. “A lady never tells.”

Niall rolled his eyes. “You're a right old pontificator.” He turned to the woman. “She knows them all, and they know her—Josephine Baker, Al Jolson, Jack Dempsey. They've all been in here at one time or another.”

The woman shrieked and wandered off in search of anyone famous who might be lingering among the crowd.

When she left, Bess shook her head. “I do know them, but it's not true they've all come in here. Josephine Baker and Al Jolson live in California.”

“Oops.” Niall threw up his hands. “So it'll bring a little more business your way. How else do you think places become popular? Rumors. That's how. I'll tell you, if this was my place, I'd do whatever I had to do to keep it strong. Did you ever consider dating someone else famous? At least for the papers? I heard that's how it's done in Hollywood. One person's fame boosts the fame of the other, and vice versa. You get a few photographs taken together, and you don't even have to go out on a real date. Of course, you can sleep with the good-looking ones.”

“I've been on dates. Just not ones I flaunt in the papers.” Bess turned to survey the antics in the dining room. A small cigarette fire had started on one of the tables but appeared to have been extinguished.

“Why not? Do you really think Harry would blame you? What was it you said to that reporter last month? ‘I'll practice temperance when I'm old'?”

“Oh, come on. That was just publicity for the tearoom. I've got to make this place seem like someplace where anything could happen.”

Niall followed Bess's gaze to a young redhead who had stripped down to her pink checkered stockings and wrapped herself in a tablecloth. “Well, it certainly is that.”

The woman saw them and stumbled over. Niall held out his hand to help her stand.

“This is Marlene,” he told Bess and Gladys. “I brought her with me.” She was beautiful, and very young—only twenty or so—with coiffed auburn hair and black eyelashes. “Marlene's husband went away to prison, you see. But he managed to hide away enough of their money to get her a little apartment near the park.”

Marlene noted Gladys's surprise and added, “It's all right. Everyone knows about my husband. We used to give fabulous dinners.”

Niall nodded. “They did, that's true.”

Bess turned to the bar, where bowls of oranges and lemons were set out beside blue glass bottles. It looked like a painting; she had stayed late after the lunch hour to set up for tonight. “Let's have a drink.” She poured two gin rickeys and handed one to Gladys, who took a tentative sip.

“We're talking about finding ourselves some men,” Bess said. Marlene clapped her hands. “Oh!” she cried. “I have the perfect men for you. They're brothers. I just met them a few moments ago.” She looked around. “I think they were brothers.” She wandered off, still holding the tablecloth around her shoulders.

Bess raised her eyebrows at Niall. “Why, she's as beautiful as a peacock and stupid as a goose.”

“Don't be cruel,” he said, throwing up his hands. “She lives in the apartment next to mine, and she caught me on my way out.”

Gladys reached for Bess's elbow. “Would you sit with me for a moment?” she asked. “I'm feeling a little light-headed.”

“Oh no.” Bess led her over to the lounge and settled her onto the couch. “I shouldn't have given you that stuff. It's practically poison.”

“I'm just overwhelmed is all.”

Bess fumbled around in her purse for a cigarette. “Sometimes, I feel this city is so large that it makes me feel small.” She reached for the issue of
The Delineator
buried among the magazines on the coffee table. “I haven't had a chance to read that article you told me about yet.”

“Colleen read it to me. It's in the back somewhere, I think. It's very sweet.”

Bess flipped through the pages. The artistic renderings of the women were always like her—small and boyish, with thin hips and breasts flattened by side-laced bras. Years ago she had been ridiculed for her shape, and called a child. How ironic that it was only when she was a woman of middle age did she finally possess an enviable form. Still, she knew she was getting older. An advertisement for Palmolive facial cream asked, “The kindly candles of last night, the telltale revealments of noon! Do you fear the contrast they may offer?” And she did, she did fear it.

Toward the back of the issue she found the article, a short piece championing successful Hollywood marriages. It briefly mentioned her and Harry, with an accompanying photograph of them at a medical charity auction five years earlier, along with others like Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. She recalled Harry's nerves that night, how he had clung to her, how he stood in a room full of great doctors and philanthropists and wondered if he would ever stop feeling like the lesser, less refined man.

Those rare moments of vulnerability had always devastated her. Now, she knew he was out there in some unfamiliar place looking for her, just as she was looking for him. When he died she had seen how afraid he was, how uncertain, and the thought of him alone, lonely, trying to find her, was almost too much to bear. She looked at Gladys and lowered her voice. “Do you think . . . he'll ever come back?”

Gladys reached for her hand and peered at her with empty blue eyes. “He's not coming back,” she said gently. “He's not, Bess.”

“But he is
somewhere
.”

It was the one thing on which the two women fiercely disagreed. If there was anyone who could find a way to cross between the two worlds, it would be Harry. But Gladys, perhaps because of her own tragedy, had never subscribed to any romantic notions. Sometimes Bess wondered what it was Gladys saw in the blackness of the world around her. If she didn't see another, spiritual world, what did she see?

Bess studied the yellow liquid sparkling at the bottom of her glass. “But, you see, he promised he'd come back. In all his life, he never broke a promise to me.”

“Maybe he
can't
come back,” Gladys said.

Bess shook her head. There was something she'd kept from Gladys. “He promised something else, too. A few years before he died, I came in to find him in the library one night, hunched over some paperwork on his desk. I said, ‘Harry, what are you still doing in here? It's late.' And he turned to me, smiling, and said, ‘It's all right, Bess. I'm making sure you'll be taken care of if something happens to me.' I said, ‘Nothing's going to happen to you,' and he said, ‘Don't worry. I'm arranging everything.'”

“What did he mean?” Gladys asked. “Life insurance?”

“No. It wasn't that. He had a policy, of course, but he could never be certain they would pay out if something happened while he was performing. He'd arranged for something else.”

“Like what?”

“Money of some sort. Hidden, where no one else could find it. He was always so paranoid, especially after that night we were burgled. Before he died, he tried to tell me something. I think it may have been about that. But he couldn't get the words out.” On nights when she couldn't sleep, Bess searched the house. There were enough papers and hidden panels and loose floorboards to last her years. But so far, she had found nothing.

“Have you called the banks? The reasonable thing would have been for him to keep it in a safe-deposit box.”

Bess nodded. “I've checked every one in the city. I've even called banks in Wisconsin.”

“That would have been smart of him. Not many people would think to look where we grew up.”

Bess held up her hands. “But there was nothing. Under the names Houdini or Weiss or Rahner.”

Gladys pressed her lips together. “What will happen if you don't find it? Are things really that bad?”

“I'll have to sell what's left, I suppose. Harry's things. People want them. That's why I'm pinning my hopes on this business.” She couldn't bring herself to tell Gladys that the house would have to go, too; in another year the mortgage would bleed the remnants of her accounts dry. She had already spoken to a broker, who could not contain his eagerness to list the property. But what would she have left of Harry once the house was gone? And what if the money Harry had left her was hidden somewhere inside? She could not shake the feeling that the house held secrets she was meant to discover. She needed to hold on to it for as long as possible.

“Bess—” Gladys began.

“Don't say it. That's why I didn't tell you.”

“I shouldn't have taken what Harry left for me. That should have been your money.”

“Don't be ridiculous. Harry left that to
you
. How else were you supposed to afford an aide? I'm not having this conversation.” Bess turned back to the magazine on her lap as the music picked up and the noise of the party, of the sweating, concrete city, swelled louder around them. At the bottom of the page was an article calling for the return of the Miss America pageants, which had been cancelled a year prior. She and Harry had been in attendance for the first official pageant, in 1921, when the “Most Beautiful Bathing Girl in America” had been awarded the title of Golden Mermaid. A hundred thousand people had crowded the boardwalk that day to watch a little dark-haired Norma Shearer look-alike win the hundred-dollar prize. The winner, a pretty teenager named Margaret Gorman, had asked Harry for an autograph after the competition. Harry had been tickled by this. “I'll trade mine for yours,” he had told her. “You're famous too now, after all.”

The magazine had a photograph of Margaret, an American flag draped around her shoulders and a string of white beads hanging from her neck. She had embodied the youthful energy of the age; a city girl, from Washington, she had later married and entered society as a minor celebrity. Below her was the caption “I am afraid I am going to wake up and find this has all been a dream.”

There were photographs of the subsequent competitions, too, as they had gained notoriety, even amid the harsh protestations of women's groups. In one of the photographs, a full-figured blond girl smiled in a black bathing suit, her hands on her hips. “Kathleen O'Neill of Philadelphia,” the caption read, “competing in the 1924 pageant.” Behind her, a poster advertising the film
Walkin' Home, Again
was plastered on the side of a bathhouse, the word
Walkin'
cut off by the girl's elbow.