Mrs. Houdini (30 page)

In 1918 there was more news to report: Fletcher had located Romario in an archived newspaper photograph taken when the train arrived. He had included a copy of the picture in his letter. Bess held it up to the light. She recognized him from the photograph Charles had shown her; he was standing among a group of children, a cap pulled over his head, looking at something out of view of the camera. Bess stared at the picture for a long time. How might their lives have changed, she thought, if they had found him?

Harry must have kept his discovery a secret, Bess realized, not only because he didn't want to risk damaging their marriage but because he knew how much she had wanted a child. Maybe he couldn't bring himself to tell her that the fault lay in her own body, not his; all those years, he could have left her for someone else, had more children with another woman, but he chose not to. And he couldn't bear to tell her that there was an orphan out there who could be theirs, if she wanted him, only to have her hopes dashed when the boy was never found.

But he had never given up hope; he had looked for Charles for the rest of his life. In the 1926 letter—the last from Fletcher, as Harry had died that year—the trail had grown completely cold. Romario would have been thirty years old by then, and he could have been anywhere. Fletcher suggested dropping the investigation. Harry's response was tortured.
How can I continue my life, surrounded by wealth and fame, knowing somewhere out there this boy is alone? To me, he is not thirty; he will always be a little boy. I will find him, even if it's not in this life.

His prediction was eerily accurate; it was only in death that Harry had located Charles after all.

Bess clutched the letters to her chest as the clock struck nine. She looked at it, panic setting in. The first trains out of New York began running at five in the morning. Charles could very well be in New Jersey already.

“Gladys,” she breathed urgently. “We have to go after him.” She scribbled a note for George asking him to call Niall about the tearoom; then she grabbed her fringed wrap from the hall closet and flung open the front door.

“What are you going to tell him?”

“Everything. And we're going to finish piecing together Harry's message.”

The one thing Bess couldn't understand, still, as she and Gladys climbed into a taxicab, was why, if Harry was indeed able to communicate with her, as it seemed he was, he would have chosen a method so vague. Why wasn't he simply able to appear to her in a mirror, say, or a dream? Or through a medium? Why all these preposterous clues?

Fifteen minutes later, they emerged from the taxi onto the street corner in front of the terminal. The building was a shining architectural gem, which stood imposingly, its domed windows like the eyes of a giant stone monster. The sunlight gave the rooms inside a dusty, pearl-like glimmer. Bess's hands trembled. She had to find Charles. She felt as if she were on the edge of a precipice.

The massive vestibule was scattered with tired passengers sitting on their luggage, waiting for the trains. Many were sleeping on the benches that ran along the walls. Bess searched the room. Maybe Charles had been bluffing about leaving town. It was possible he was still sleeping at this very moment in some cheap hotel.

But he was there. He stood, his back to her, on the marble staircase, looking at the clock. His coat was hanging over his elbow, and he had one foot on the next step above, looking like a man she had seen before, a man who had waited for her on staircases all over the world. As she approached him, he turned. And for a shimmering moment, he could almost have been young Ehrich Weiss, coming to take her back to Coney Island, to have dinner at the Brighton Beach Hotel.

“Why don't you sing anymore?” Harry had asked her. “I miss your singing.” It was a Sunday in Atlantic City; they were waiting for a ride on the carousel, which had been dubbed the Palace of Flying Animals. Hymnals were being passed out for riders to sing along to organ music as they rode.

The funny thing was, she didn't know why she had stopped singing. She could not even remember the words to most of her old songs. She had had a good voice, once.

Harry had handed their tokens to the operator. “You'll go on the Flip-Flap Railroad with me after this, won't you?” His eyes had gleamed.

“Certainly not.” The railroad went upside down, in a loop, next to the pier. Many riders had said it had damaged their backs. “You know your body can't handle that kind of stress.”

He had laughed and raised his eyebrows suggestively. “My dear, my body can handle anything.”

She'd swatted at him. “You shouldn't be vulgar, Harry. You're a public figure now.”

“Charles, thank God. I thought you'd be gone.” Bess stood at the base of the staircase looking up at the young man, her arm looped through Gladys's elbow. Her lower lip quivered. She reached into her purse and thrust the postcard toward him. “I have to know if you've seen this before.”

Charles looked at her with suspicion. “What are you doing here?” He stared at her outstretched hand and seemed to consider it for a moment disdainfully. Finally, he took the card and studied it. His expression changed. “This is my photograph,” he said. “It was one of the first photographs I ever sold. I was only seventeen.” He looked up at her, his expression still mistrustful. “Why did you come all the way here to show me this?”

Bess lowered her voice. “Harry's brought us together to tell us something, Charles. Please don't leave. I was wrong to accuse you of lying. You
are
his son. Certainly, deep down, you know this. Harry Houdini was your father.”

“Well, Mrs. Houdini.” Harry stood in the doorway to the back garden, grinning at her. “We've made it now.” He waved a heavy canvas-covered book in the air. “We're in the dictionary!”

Bess closed her novel and blinked at him through the sunlight. “What are you going on about?”

Harry opened the book and began to read. “ ‘To Houdinize: Verb. To release or extricate oneself, from confinement, bonds, and the like, as by wriggling out.' Ha!” He slammed the book shut again and scooped her off the bench and kissed her.

In a few hours they would be standing outside the Los Angeles premiere of his most recent motion picture,
Haldane of the Secret Service
. The theater was expecting crowds in the thousands.

“Tonight, darling, you should wear the white dress that I love so much.”

“But we're still going for a swim with the Londons first? It's so hot.”

Harry feigned insult. “You mean you'd rather a double date with those bores than a romantic afternoon with a motion picture star?”

“If it means cooling off a little, yes.” Bess stood on her toes and kissed the side of Harry's neck. He smelled different in California. The California air was nothing like New York air. It was cleaner here; they had lemon trees in their yard. And Harry was happier, too, doing his stunts for film as an established movie celebrity, although it had been difficult to get him to agree to leave New York. When he was first offered a leading role in a picture, he had been in a lengthy and dark depression, even though no one who'd seen him perform would have suspected. He had made a five-ton elephant vanish at the New York Hippodrome—the pinnacle of his career—and the papers had had a field day with the trick afterward, quoting Harry's quip, “Fellows, even the elephant does not know how it is done!” But afterward, instead of sleeping, he would retreat to the fireplace in the library and attempt another failed communication with his mother. The house where they had all lived together became a venue for these one-way communications—every mirror a place where she might appear, every Victrola record an opportunity for her voice to come through. But Mrs. Weiss never appeared, and she never spoke to him. Every morning Harry would stare at her photograph and say, “Well, Mama, I have not heard from you. I have not heard.” He knew she was his one avenue to prove that the afterlife existed, and he desperately wanted to know what was on the other side.

One evening he came rushing out of the bathroom, his face lathered in shaving cream. “Bess, come quick!” He was nearly delirious with excitement. “I think my mother is trying to reach me!” Bess tossed her needlework aside and ran into the bathroom.

“Listen,” he whispered. They stood silently side by side, until Bess began to hear a muted, erratic tapping noise. “It's some kind of code,” Harry said.

Bess followed the origin of the noise to the window, and pulled open the shade. Outside, the shutter was hanging loose from its hinges, and the wood was knocking against the house. It almost broke her heart to tell him; for a moment she considered letting him believe, but in the end, she could not.

Harry's face fell. He laughed a little. “How ridiculous of me,” he said at last and went back to shaving.

Then the offer from Ben Rolfe at Octagon Films came for Harry to film
The Master Mystery
. Bess begged Harry to do it. California, she knew, could be a new start for them. But it was only after she had convinced John Sargent, Jim Vickery, Jim Collins, and two more men from Harry's crew to come with them that Harry gave in. The men adored Harry, despite his fiery outbursts, the occasions on which he would fire them, then greet them the next morning as if nothing had happened. Periodically, they would raise their own salaries, as Harry always forgot to address such issues. When Bess looked at the books and questioned Harry about the raises, he defended them. “Of course it's okay!” he told her, indignant. “Think of the high cost of living!”

So they were swept into the chaos of Hollywoodland—the poolside parties, the champagne on silver trays, the catered lunches behind painted wooden sets. It was a different world of celebrity from the one they had enjoyed in New York. The enchanted city was, essentially, a desert town, dusty and mountainous, that had been transformed into a kind of fairy tale—a self-made utopia. Everyone was there. They went to places like the El Fay Club and lived large—visiting Rudolph Valentino at Falcon Lair and William Randolph Hearst at San Simeon, his estate enormous with Gothic fireplaces, sundecks, pipe organs, pagodas, and projection rooms.

A month before their departure westward, Harry had surprised Bess with a weekend in Coney Island at the Brighton Beach Hotel. It was as extravagant as she had remembered, gold-gilded and marbled and salt-aired. But it also felt worn-out. Oddly, she had left feeling not nostalgic but indifferent, as if that part of her life had belonged to someone she barely knew, someone she might pass on the street with only a flicker of recognition. California, on the other hand, seemed fraught with glitz and energy, the hotels even more opulent than the Brighton Beach.

The studios were just being built, and Bess marveled at this vast landscape dotted with massive, skylit buildings, the warehouses filled with costumes, the miniature cities built overnight. It all seemed like a grandiose version of the playacting she had done as a child, but these actors performed with more gravity than she had, much the way Harry performed his own art onstage. The streets where the more modest moviemakers lived were lined with orange flowers and white-fenced houses. After supper people sat on their porches until the sun went down, and there was a lazy, dreamy quality to those California evenings that reminded her of the ones she had spent as a little girl in the rowhouse in Brooklyn, when one could still be anything.

Renting the house down the street from them in Laurel Canyon was another well-known couple, Jack and Charmian London. They had come to Hollywood from Sonoma to sort out contracts for screenplays of Jack's work. Some years before, Jack had written a novel titled
The Call of the Wild,
which had garnered him instant fame. He'd led an adventurous life, which he liked to recount during late Friday night dinners. He had lived in Alaska during the Klondike Gold Rush, had spent time in a Japanese prison, and had tended grapes in a vineyard. He and Harry had an eerie number of things in common. Both had massive book collections; Jack's first wife had been named Bess; and his mother had been a spiritualist performer, back when the art had first become popular.

Bess, for her part, was enamored with Charmian, who embodied the freedom of spirit Bess was still trying to achieve. She was dark-haired and voluptuous and seemed, to Bess, to be a more exciting and beautiful version of herself. What distinguished her most of all in Bess's eyes was that Charmian was not simply her husband's companion. She had a career of her own; she was a writer, too, and had published short stories.

“Jack's having a bad day today,” Charmian told her, as they set up their sun umbrellas. The seagulls wheeled overhead. Bess looked at the water where the men were wading. Jack London had been sick for years with uremic poisoning, and was on and off morphine.

“Is there anything we can do?” Bess brushed the sand off her arms. “You shouldn't feel obligated to go with us tonight, you know.”

Charmian shaded her eyes. “Darling, we wouldn't miss it. We've seen those doorknob tags.”

Bess had come up with the idea to distribute thousands of tags promoting Harry's movie; they were printed with the words
This lock is not Houdini-proof
. “Yes,” Bess said, “Harry's particularly fond of those.”

Charmian laughed. “A picture that will thrill you to the marrows, I've read.”

“I certainly hope so.
The Man from Beyond
didn't fare so well. Harry put so much into that one, too.” Bess shielded her eyes from the sun. “I feel happy here—happier than I've ever been in New York. And I think Harry's found his first real friend in Jack. What Jack does, his writing, I mean—it's like Harry's art. His account of the San Francisco earthquake in
Collier's
—I'll never forget it.
And for three days and nights this lurid tower swayed in the sky, reddening the sun, darkening the day, and filling the land with smoke.
It was both beautiful and terrifying.”