Mrs. Houdini (15 page)

Bess pulled the large cloth bag over Harry's head and secured it at the top, so he was completely unseen. Then she guided him into the trunk, which she locked and strapped with a long belt. She looked out into the faces of the crowd; their chewing had stopped. She had their attention now. She stood on top of the trunk and drew a curtain in front of herself so that only her head was visible, then announced, “When I clap my hands three times, I will have disappeared. You will all be witness to a marvelous mystery, performed with the greatest speed and dexterity.” Then she drew the curtain completely above her head and clapped three times. With the third clap, the curtain dropped, and Harry was standing on the trunk in Bess's place.

His hands were uncuffed and resting on his hips. The crowd murmured.

“Where's your pretty assistant?” one of the men called.

“She probably just ran offstage,” someone else said.

“Offstage?” Harry feigned confusion. “Oh, no.” He stepped off the trunk and began to undo the belts. “You see, she's inside this trunk.”

The crowd burst into applause.

Backstage, on the lawn behind the tent, Bess wiped the sweat from her forehead. “How many of these do we have to do today?”

“Ten,” Harry said. “Give or take.”

“I'm exhausted already. I don't know how you do it.”

Harry tapped his foot in the grass. He was as spirited as a caged animal. He beamed at her. “Didn't you see? They loved us.”

Welsh came striding toward them from inside the tent, frowning.

“Uh-oh,” Bess said. “We made a mess of his Punch and Judy.”

Welsh stuck out his hand. “Helluva magic act, Houdini,” he said. “But you ain't no comedian. Scratch the Punch and Judy from now on. Have Bess start with a song instead.”

“I can do that,” she said, relieved.

“You two got a good thing going. Needs some polish though. Don't rush through it as much. You need to drag it out more.”

Harry nodded. “That's a good suggestion.”

“Of course it is,” Welsh snapped. “And another thing. Have someone in the audience inspect the cuffs. People will think they're trick cuffs if you don't.” He cleared his throat. “They aren't trick cuffs, are they?”

“No, sir.”

“Good. Now, we need you in Tent Five. They're demanding a Wild Man, but we ain't got one. So you're it.”

Bess looked at Harry in his slacks and shirt. “How are we going to do that?”

“Rumple his hair a bit, tear up some sacks for clothes, and make him wild with some raw meat. He's supposed to be a native of the jungle, but who really cares?”

When Welsh left Harry said, “What do you think he meant when he said we should drag the act out? I thought we already were.”

Bess thought about it. “Maybe we should give them a hint of danger. Make them think your life is really at stake. People want drama.”

Harry kissed her. “My little ingenue.”

Harry embraced the challenges. The Wild Man drew a crowd of fifty to his first show. The ringmaster claimed Harry was living on a diet of meat and tobacco, so at the end of the show the men threw cigarettes and cigars at the cage. Between this act and the Metamorphosis, Harry gave away a stash of loot to the canvas men.

Of their twenty-five dollars a week, he insisted on saving half and sending the other half to his mother in New York. In return, Bess would receive the loveliest letters from Mrs. Weiss. The letters never mentioned Bess's mother (although Bess was certain Harry had told her about being thrown out of the house) but Bess understood that Mrs. Weiss was offering herself up as a mothering figure, advising her on how to do laundry on the road, and how to evade the drunk circus goers.

Most of the performers, Bess learned, were related to each other. Mrs. McCarthy was married to the ringmaster, and her brother was the fire-eater, and her husband's cousin was one of the canvas men. The other woman, Moira, did the costumes, and made Bess a new dress she could wear in the show. In return, whenever they could find poultry, Bess cooked up platters of fried chicken on Friday nights.

She didn't mind the lack of spending money as much as she minded the lack of privacy. She couldn't think about doing anything intimate in their living space, which was nearly the same as doing it in public as far as she was concerned. But she began to be haunted by the faces of the babies she saw in the audience.

Harry was against the idea. “We can't support a child right now,” he told her. “And you wouldn't be able to perform for a year. Who would take your place?” She knew his ambitions were elsewhere. He was spending an hour every day on his exercises, doing push-ups and intricate stretches, and another hour with his cards, practicing his finger work. Sometimes he would revert to the old standby he had learned in his youth—hanging upside down from a suspended bar and picking up needles with his eyelids. A more complicated task was swallowing the needles, then regurgitating them.

Bess undid his collar. “Please, darling. Think how much fun we'll have in trying. Just meet me here on Fridays during lunch so we're alone. You can be tired. I'll take care of you.” And he relented.

He made the most extraordinary discovery in the quaint, sweltering town of Birmingham, Alabama, which charmed Bess with its shop-lined streets and immaculately dressed southern women. After the show one night Harry met a doctor who mentioned that he worked at a nearby insane asylum, and asked him if he would like to visit. Bess was curious and insisted on accompanying him. Mrs. McCarthy thought she was out of her mind. “You don't want to see what goes on in places like that,” she told her. “The rest of us are going swimming in the river. Come with us.”

But Harry's excitement was infectious. Dr. Steeves had told him that he had a possible new idea for an escape trick, only he wouldn't tell him what it was.

The institution was set back from the road, near a lake, on freshly manicured grounds. It seemed to Bess, from the outside, to be more of a hotel than a hospital, except for the bars on the windows. The sun was shining on the red bricks, and she slid her hand into Harry's as they waited at the front entrance.

They were greeted by Dr. Steeves, who was flushed with eagerness. He ushered them past the nurses' station and the recreation room, and through a long corridor of patient rooms. Some of the doors were partially ajar, and Bess could see the shadows of the patients moving about inside the rooms. Finally, she caught a glimpse of one of the patients in the flesh; it was a woman about her age, her dark hair pulled loosely from her face, sitting still by the window, staring out at the lawn. A vision of the woman as a child, playing with a doll in a railway car, flashed before her eyes. She wasn't sure whether it was based in any truth, but it made Bess alarmingly sad. She was not quite sure what separated a woman like that from one like her; did one see madness coming, she wondered, or did it come quietly, like a thief at night? She shivered. She would rather die than lose her mind.

At the end of the corridor was one final door, which looked to Bess just like all the others. But when Dr. Steeves unlocked it, he stepped in front of them and held up his hand. “Stay back,” he warned. “This patient is quite dangerous.”

Inside, the room was completely padded in cream-colored canvas. There were no windows, and it was stiflingly quiet, except for the panting of a man rolling about on the floor.

“My God!” Harry cried, horrified. “What is that?”

The man was wearing what appeared to be a normal jacket, except the sleeves were exceptionally long, and they were wrapped once around the man's torso and tied behind his back. Bess had never seen anything like it. She grabbed Harry's arm. He had used restraint muffs in his act before, but never anything like this. The man on the ground was straining every muscle in his body, but he could not get loose. His legs were jerking wildly, desperately, underneath him, and his forehead was dripping with sweat.

“It's called a straitjacket,” Dr. Steeves remarked proudly. “It's impossible to get free of it.”

Bess could see the flicker of eagerness in Harry's eyes at the word
impossible
.

“Can I borrow one?” he asked the doctor.

By the end of the week he had perfected the new trick, and the cigarettes were pouring onto the stage. Harry played up his experience in the asylum, making the patients out to be criminally inclined, dangerous men, and the feat he was accomplishing onstage seemed all the more daring because of it. But Bess could not forget how that young girl sat stick-still in her chair by the window, looking out onto the Alabama fields and thinking of God knows what life she'd had, or who had loved her once.

“We have just recently become aware of a tragic situation in this good town of De Land, Illinois,” Harry began. Bess, in a dress of cream-colored lace, sat blindfolded in a chair beside him. “A man who walked in these very streets beside you has only recently been found murdered.”

After a few months on the circuit, Harry had tired of the Metamorphosis. Bess, longing for a break from the physical exertion, came up with a new angle. She began to notice how many people lingered after the show, wondering if Harry was somehow working actual magic. They were longing, she saw, for something real. Possessing true knowledge made them more than players on the stage; it made them powerful. She asked Welsh to begin billing them as “Celebrated Clairvoyants” and saying they could communicate freely with the dead.

They worked on the trick together. Whenever they stopped in a new town, Harry paid a visit to the local cemetery, asking about recent deaths, while Bess disguised herself and gossiped with women at church teas. In the small towns where the circus pitched its tents, it was easy to learn the local rumors. Everyone knew everyone's business, a phenomenon that astounded Bess and Harry, having come from a place as large as New York City.

By now, the Houdinis' audiences had swelled to the hundreds. Word of their coming seemed to reach the small towns before the circus wagons arrived. “My wife, beside me, has the ability to speak with those we have lost,” Harry declared. Bess suddenly slumped over in her chair. “She is in a trance state,” Harry said. He rubbed his chin and feigned nervous energy. “My darling, what messages have you to give us today?”

Bess spoke in a high, unfamiliar voice. “I am looking for the killers of Benny Carter.”

“Killers?” Harry asked, alarmed. “Were there more than one?”

“Yes.”

“Were these killers known to Mr. Carter?”

“Yes.”

Harry began to pace back and forth. “Could you tell us, my dear, how this murder was accomplished?”

“With a razor.”

The audience was enthralled. Bess could hear their heavy silence, waiting for what she might say next.

“I see the blood,” she said, her voice trembling. “Oh, God!” Harry ran to her side and gripped her shoulders. Bess began throwing her body back and forth. “I can't hold on!” she cried. “God help me, I can't hold on!”