Mrs. Houdini (16 page)

“Tell us their names!” Harry said. Bess didn't answer. “What are their names?”

Bess's movements grew increasingly violent. She began to bang her head against the back of the chair.

“Their names!” Harry demanded.

“Bill Doakes and Jim Saunders!” she said. “Benny is here. He won't—he won't let me go. Harry, tell him to let me go! He warns them, ‘You boys better put those razors away, or yous goin' to be where I is now.”

Then she collapsed onto the ground and lay still. From behind her blindfold she heard the commotion and the sound of a chair scraping the makeshift wooden floorboards. She knew one of the men she had just accused had been present and fled the room. She fought a smile. Harry had learned about the murder in a De Land barroom. It was not a sad one. Carter, Doakes, and Saunders were three local criminals who had gone about town together. Consensus was that Carter had stolen from the others and paid the price.

“My God!” someone shouted. “You know things that only the Almighty knows!”

Bess knew she had been right; give them a taste of danger, and talk about death, and they would be hooked.

For more in-depth communications, they used an elaborate code system Harry had devised. It involved signals that relied on the positions of the hands and feet, as well as facial expressions and spoken words. Each word corresponded with a number, so that
pray,
for example, meant 1 and
tell
meant 5. During the act, Harry, ever the showman, blindfolded Bess as she pretended to go into a trance. Harry was passed a coin by a member of the audience, and through their system of communication, he would speak to the spirits inside Bess, asking them “pray tell” when the coin was minted. The words he used in his question gave Bess the answer she was supposed to supply. Other questions and answers they would discuss ahead of time; Bess had the idea to disguise themselves and go door to door selling Bibles, which would give them access to the homes of the townspeople, allowing them to reveal information about those people during the séance.

It was a game she enjoyed, fooling such large groups. No one suspected them of fakery, especially not with Bess's childlike appearance. But one night after a show in southern Missouri, after a particularly thorny revelation about one woman's dead son, she removed her blindfold to see tears streaming down the face of a frail, bonneted old lady. She swelled with regret; the thrill of the deceit was gone. What had she been doing? She had betrayed every moral code she believed in; she had spit in the face of the God she'd been taught to worship. She wondered if the girl she'd been a year ago would ever have imagined she would stoop so low.

Her mother clung to her Catholic faith because she had to; she'd lost a husband, only to gain a derelict one, and she struggled to care for an enormous family. Bess thought Harry's situation had been similar. His father—an immigrant and floundering rabbi—clutched at his own Jewish faith because without it, he was just a failed man preaching about fairies. He had forced his faith on the family with what Harry saw as simpleminded naïveté. Harry didn't see his father's God saving his family; instead, he saw the slow deaths of a brother and his father, the silent desperation of his mother, her defeated shoulders. And so he turned to magic—tricks that played on people's credulity—and it was magic that saved them, the money he earned from traveling the show circuit on his own as a boy. He made no apologies for his agnosticism, but Bess knew there was a part of him that was always wondering whether there was a being out there whose magic was greater than his own.

Bess still believed in God. She believed in the serenity of a quiet church, in the rituals of beads and prayer. In the tumult of her childhood she had seen compassion from neighbors who brought meals, from strangers who led her home when she was lost, and there was something godlike in that. But she also loved Harry, and she loved his practical magic.

She glanced at Harry. He was still immersed in the trick, pacing the stage. She saw the other performers, her friends, huddled in the back of the room, awed. Afterward, Moira came up to her privately.

“I know you've got a trick up your sleeve. How are you knowing those things about people?”

Bess shook her head. “I can't say.”

“But it's not real, is it?” Moira asked, a lilt of hope in her voice.

Bess's heart sank. She reached for Moira's arm. “It's not real.” It was bad enough fooling strangers, but the thought of fooling these people who had become her friends made her ill. She groped for an explanation and ended up quoting Harry's mechanical voice: “We are only acting by physical, not psychical, means.”

Harry found her in their bedroom after. She had ripped off her dress and was clawing at her corset. “I can't breathe,” she said. “God help me, I can't breathe.” Harry put his arms around her and tried to calm her, but she couldn't stop shaking. It had come upon her so suddenly, the sickening feeling of foreboding, the voice saying they would go straight to hell, and the quick footprints of the rain on the roof.

The room felt unbearably hot. She pushed her way out of the car and into the thrashing rain. Thank goodness, the grass was cold. “Bess!” Harry followed her outside. She could barely see him through the downpour. The doors of the car were flapping wildly, and everywhere around them in the darkening night the circus goers were running to take shelter.

“You're half naked!” Harry shouted. “Get back inside, would you?”

Bess shook her head.

“I don't know how to help you!” he said. “I don't know what you want!”

“I know why I'm not getting pregnant,” she called back. “It's a punishment. We've pulled each other into something sinister, Harry.”

Harry looked at her in awe, then burst out laughing. “Is that what you think?”

“Then why can't I have children?”

“Come inside out of the rain,” he said. “This isn't like you. It makes me feel—uncentered.”

He looked so helpless. She imagined what she must look like, her hair matted with rain and all the pins falling out, and she thought about those “delicate” girls she hated, the ones who needed smelling salts and daytime rest. Harry could never love a girl like that. Offstage, he needed her to be the engaging one, the sensible one. She followed him back to the cot.

He wrapped her in a blanket. “There,” he said. “That's better now.”

“You don't have to coddle me.” She wrung out her hair. “I'm better now. It was a momentary loss of sense.”

“Over what?”

“That we've done something unforgivable.” It seemed to her now, in the flickering candlelight, that this world they had created around themselves could collapse at any moment. Harry was afraid, too, she knew, but of different things—that they wouldn't be able to make it last after all, this career of magicianship, and that he wouldn't be able to support her and he would let her down, by forcing her to go to work in some factory sewing socks, or some boardinghouse kitchen. Harry's fears were physical, Bess's metaphysical. On this account they differed.

“I don't know about the children,” he said, “but let me show you something.” He took a scrap of paper out of his pocket and held it beside the candle so it would dry enough for him to be able to write on it. “You never told me the first name of your father, did you?”

She thought about it. “I don't think so.”

“Write it now on this paper, and then burn it. Don't show it to me.”

Bess did, then crumpled the paper in her hand and held it over the flame.

Harry dropped it into a bowl and let it burn. When it had been reduced to ashes, he pulled up his shirtsleeve, revealing his muscled forearm. With his other hand he rubbed the black remnants onto his bare skin, and almost immediately Bess's father's name, Gebhardt, appeared on his arm in red lettering.

Bess's hand flew to her mouth. “You
are
the devil,” she said.

“Silly kid.” Harry laughed. “Don't you know me by now? It was only a trick!”

“How? How was it a trick?”

“You guess.”

She frowned at him. “Give me a pen.” Harry grinned and handed her one, and she wrote on her arm with the sharp end and, with her fingertip, rubbed the skin where the inkless nib had touched. She watched as the letters of her father's name appeared.

“It's a trick of the body,” Harry explained. “Do you remember what I told you the night we met? There is no such thing as magic.” He laughed. “Still, my greatest dream is to slip one by you at some point. You figure them all out too fast.”

“But how did you know my father's name?”

“Stella mentioned it in one of her letters.”

Bess let out a short laugh. She felt ridiculous. “You scared me for a minute.”

Harry peeled the top of the corset off her and climbed into the bed beside her. “There's an explanation for everything.”

Bess closed her eyes. “I'm sorry I doubted you,” she said. Outside, the wind had calmed to a whisper.

“Do you want to go back to the Metamorphosis?”

She shook her head.

“We can't cut the séances just yet—we'll be poor without them.” He traced her eyelids with his fingertips.

Their existence seemed suddenly cozy, not terrible at all. They were together; they knew things about each other no one else knew. The thrill and the fear were gone, and out there on the other side of the storm, the scattered gaslights of the little town flamed and fell, flamed and fell.

Mid-June in Atlantic City was crowded, and the heat was scalding. Even in the early evening, the beaches were a patchwork of colored blankets, on top of which parents had placed picnic baskets and sleeping babies in white Moses baskets. Young women lounged in kelly green bathing costumes and stockings rolled down to the knees. The crash of the surf reached all the way to the boardwalk, where Bess stood scanning the row of hotels that stretched for miles.

Locating the photographer Charles Radley had not been difficult. Harry's old secretary had found him easily enough, in under two weeks, through a few letters of inquiry to friends in Atlantic City. Bess felt certain this man was safeguarding some secret of Harry's; perhaps Harry had even left with him the message he intended for Bess. But Charles Radley, it turned out, was no more than a newspaperman, a photographer for
The Atlantic City Daily Press
who also did some freelance work on his own time. She had never heard of him. She herself had only been to Atlantic City a handful of times with Harry, when he had performed his bridge-jumping stunts during the busy summer months.

She had written to Mr. Radley under a pseudonym, asking him to meet her at the United States Hotel. She had heard he did freelance photography, she said, and she wanted to hire him for a job.

When Stella heard Bess was traveling to Atlantic City for the weekend, she jumped at the chance to accompany her. The baby was due in the fall, and she wanted to be home with Abby when she got bigger. And Fred was so busy at work. She desperately needed a vacation, she said.

Bess couldn't tell her that the trip was really about following the trail of the second code—she knew Stella would think she was imagining things—but still, she hated to travel alone. She told Stella she was going for some business meetings related to Harry's estate, but she would mostly be free. Niall had offered to look after the café while she was gone, and they traveled by train into New Jersey and arrived only an hour before Bess was scheduled to meet with Mr. Radley. She left Stella in the hotel room and made her way downstairs to the lobby.

She was uneasy about the meeting. So much of her marriage with Harry had been about the written word, the notes they left for each other in one room or another; and so much of Harry's career had involved using images to mislead, that it did seem plausible that he could be communicating his second code to her through the words inside photographs. But what if she was wrong? She wasn't sure she would be able to believe in much if she could not believe in this.

The United States Hotel was massive and garish; it spanned fourteen acres between Atlantic, Pacific, Delaware, and Maryland Avenues. It was the largest hotel in the nation, and a marvel of architecture. She and Harry had stayed there after it had first been built; the hotel was hosting Harry's performances for two weeks, and a suite of rooms was included in the contract, for the Houdinis as well as their employees. Bess had been delighted by the ghastly size of the property; she had found the place to be a playground. From the outside, the building was an identical series of brick stories with long white balconies; on the inside, the corridors were carpeted in the same red carpet throughout. While Harry buried himself in work, she went swimming and came back holding pink boxes of saltwater taffy and newspapers with his picture on the front page. Even after fame had found him, he never ceased being thrilled by his face on newsprint.

She didn't really have the money to be staying here now, but she thought it prudent to keep up pretenses, in case it proved necessary. Bess recalled the first time she and Harry had stayed in a real palace, during a trip to Russia. The Grand Duke Sergius, bored and hearing of Harry's escapes, had invited them to St. Petersburg, to give a special exhibition in his ballroom. The duke told them he had spent a month building a steel chest that could not be unlocked. Harry, slightly concerned but knowing how much Bess was longing to see the palace, accepted the challenge. Bess was invited to have tea with the duchess while Harry was performing. Afterward, he recounted to her how he was stripped to his underwear and searched, but managed to open the box nonetheless. She knew how it had been done, the picklock clasped underneath his left toes; he had tested it with her the night before. That night they slept in gray silk sheets in a room decorated with candlelight and heavy tapestries. Breakfast was brought in on a tray and eaten on the balcony, which overlooked the gardens.