Mrs. Houdini (32 page)

Bess drew in a breath. “What?”

“Charmian's in love with her husband, not with me. She asked me to dinner to talk about Jack. Apparently you got loose-lipped with her about my own kidney injuries. She wanted to know if I could help her find him a doctor.”

“And . . . could you?”

Harry shook his head. “He's been to everyone I would have seen.”

“Oh, God,” Bess said. “Is he really—?”

Harry nodded.

My little lump of sugar down in Dixie, mine all mine,
Jolson sang. The room seemed to still around her. The doors to the patio were open and the room was cool with the breeze and the women's long dresses rustled as they danced.

Suddenly none of it seemed to matter any longer—the celebrity, the ocean, the lemon trees in the yard—and the sense that she had her own work, her own value, in Hollywood. She would, Bess realized, leave it all behind for Harry. For perhaps the first time in his career, it wasn't about the money for him. He was asking her to leave California because the place had broken him. People didn't understand that the tricks he did on screen were authentic, that they nearly cost him his life every time. Another actor could replicate them any day with a few well-placed camera angles. His talent was in live performance, where audiences could believe that his magic was real. In Hollywood everything—romances, magic—was manufactured. Harry could never be the Great Houdini in Hollywood. And he couldn't live without being the Great Houdini.

“I bet we're the only people in here who've actually been to Dixie,” Bess said quietly. “Remember the tiny trailer we used to live in?”

Harry smiled. “I had to cut holes in the walls of our bedroom, just to try to get some relief from the hot nights.”

“Those were some crazy years.”

Harry's face crumpled. “Don't you see, Bess? I'm yours till the end. In this life, and after.”

The house was not at all what she expected. It stood, a monument of gray stone, four blocks from the ocean, the porch white as washed linen. The grass was cut to an inch in height, and, inside, the rooms were shining. There were no dishes in the sink, and no shoes in the hall. A single black hat hung on a rack by the door. She would never have guessed that a single man lived there.

“Do you own this?” she asked, running her hands along the wooden banister. She turned to Gladys to describe it. “It's nearly perfect.”

Charles shrugged. “I purchased it a few years ago. Thinking, perhaps, I would have a family one day.”

“You still can,” she said. “You don't have to be a priest, you know. It's not too late to choose a different path.”

He continued to surprise her. She had not expected him to forgive her so quickly at the train station, nor had she expected that he would have agreed to let her go back to New Jersey with him. But she was certain now that Harry had brought them together, for some greater purpose.

It made sense, now, why Harry had refused to adopt a child all those years. All along, he had been looking for his own son. Adopting someone else's son while his own was out in the world without him must have seemed unbearable.

Bess looked through the window onto the green, square yard. The house, on the eastern side of Ventnor, was far from the chaos of the Atlantic City tourist area. The lawns of the neighboring houses were cluttered with children's bicycles.

“It's a very pretty neighborhood.”

“Yes, I feel sometimes I don't quite fit in here.”

The walls, she noticed, were peculiarly bare. In the hallway he had framed three photographs of the boardwalk, which, she assumed, he had taken for the newspaper. Besides these, there was no other artwork in the house. There were no photographs of family or friends, no stacks of books lying about, no indication of what kind of man lived there at all. It was a beautiful, empty house, and he seemed to her suddenly a very lonely boy who was pretending to be grown up. She saw now that he hadn't really come to a decision about his future at all.

She wandered into the parlor, where a tiny upholstered sofa stood, alone, in the center of the room. Charles leaned against the doorway, his hands in his pockets, enjoying the look of surprise on her face as she explored the house.

“You know, Charles, I was wrong about you. I accused you of deception and selfishness—all the bad sides of Harry, perhaps. But the truth is you have many of his good qualities. I don't think you've let the boy grow out of you yet. That was one thing about Harry. He was always young. Even as I got older, he was always young.”

Charles's smirk disappeared. “I know you're certain he was trying to find me all those years. But what if you're wrong? What if he knew where I was all along? I'm not sure I want to be his son.” On the train, Bess and Gladys had shown him the letters they'd found in Harry's desk. Charles had confirmed that his name had indeed once been Romario Tardo.

“He didn't know,” Gladys said. “Truly he didn't.” She lowered herself onto the sofa, and Bess sat next to her.

“What I am certain of,” Bess said, “is that there is some sort of message he's trying to send, and you're the only one who can help decipher it.” She reached up and clasped his hand. “You're the key to all of this.” Her fingers trembled as she took the postcard from her purse. “You read the newspapers when Arthur Ford revealed the code Harry left for me. I suppose . . . I could have loved Arthur, given enough time. But more than that, he almost shattered my hope of ever seeing Harry again.” She removed her gloves. She had looked at these hands every day of her life; Harry had touched these hands. But now they were worn. “I told you I thought there was a message from Harry embedded in your photographs. But what I didn't have a chance to tell you before—before our argument—was what that message was. It was a second code.”

Charles was stunned. “A second code? Do you know what this means, how many people would be dying to get their hands on that information?”

Bess nodded. “It was to be, Harry said, a safeguard of sorts. No one knew of its existence but us.” She handed him the postcard. “In the past week alone, I have found parts of this code in three photographs. All of which were taken by you.”

Charles looked at the card and nodded. “So where is the code in this one?”

Bess hesitated. Once she said it out loud, there would be no going back. There was no third code. If Charles broke her trust and sold her secret, Harry might never be able to come back to her. She would never know what had happened to him.

“There was a song I sang,” she said, running her hands over her wedding ring, “when I first met him. Not ‘Rosabel'—another song. He was barely Harry Houdini then. His name was Ehrich Weiss.” She hummed the tune for Charles.

I'll take you home again, Kathleen

across the ocean wild and wide

to where your heart has ever been

since first you were my bonnie bride.

She gestured toward the door. “In the front pocket of my case, there, are the other two photographs.”

Charles rummaged through the case and retrieved the photographs. Bess motioned for him to sit beside her. “This one—this was the first I found.” She unfolded the magazine article about the Miss America pageant. “See here, how the billboard and the caption together read ‘Home Again Kathleen'? And this one. Your photograph of the yacht—I only had the billboard, so I had a smaller copy photographed to take with me—‘Home Again.' And the postcard.” She pointed to the flowery script at the top of the card.
“The ocean, wild and wide.”

Charles studied the pictures carefully. “I see the phrases from the song, yes. But—”

Gladys finished his question. “But don't you think there's still a chance this could be a coincidence? That you wanted to find evidence of the code so badly that you found a connection where there was none?”

Bess laughed. “A coincidence? That all these photographs were taken by a son I never knew existed?”

“True,” Gladys said. “But what do you hope to gain from this, in the end? Let's say Harry is trying to communicate with you—”

“Which he is.”

“Yes. What do these photographs tell us, other than that he made it to the other side? Maybe the purpose was simply to bring you and Charles together. Maybe there's nothing more to it than what you've already discovered—each other.”

“No. There's more to it than we've seen so far. There's a message hidden here.” Bess looked at Charles. “When he died, I think Harry intended to come back for me. Physically, I mean. If he could find a way.”

Charles ran his hands over the photographs. “So you're saying that . . . what you hope to gain from all this—is that you think you will actually
see
him?”

Bess nodded. “Yes. Somehow, I will.”

“As in, he is reborn somehow?”

“No, no, nothing like that. But his whole body of work was so
visual,
you know? He built his life on the seen and unseen. And if he promised he would come back to me—well, I just don't think he would be satisfied with ambiguity.”

“But then why hasn't he just appeared to you, say, as a ghost?” Gladys persisted. “Or through a medium? Why all these clues?”

“Because Harry loved tricks. His whole life was an illusion. He
lived
his magic. Nothing was ever what it seemed.” Even their marriage, she couldn't help thinking, was an illusion. He had kept secrets even from her.

Charles sat down beside her. “What's next?”

“We have to look at your other photographs.”

He ran his fingers through his hair and sighed. “It's a big task,” he said, standing up. “Come into the study.”

Even though he said he hadn't, Charles, it seemed, had saved a copy of every photograph he'd ever taken, from the time he was seven years old. There were thousands of pictures, haphazardly tossed in boxes stacked end to end across the study floor. The room was overwhelming. Gladys could not contribute; she sat, agitated, on the desk chair and asked one question after another about the progress they were making. Two hours later, they had come up with nothing. The daylight was dimming, and Charles stood to turn on the electric lights. Bess remained on the floor in the pool of photographs, forlorn.

In the fading sunlight she felt suddenly sentimental. She looked at the disorder around her, Charles eagerly sorting through every picture he had ever taken, because, as she did, he believed in the reality, or the myth, of Harry Houdini's spirit.

“I treated you poorly, Charles,” she said, looking up at him. He stood above her and pushed his shirtsleeves up his forearms, as Harry used to do. It occurred to her for the first time that she could love this boy—not just in theory, but really, truly, love him. “I'm sorry I lost my temper with you before.”

Charles said, “If I ask you something, will you answer me honestly?”

“Of course.”

“If your husband had told you about me, would you have taken me in? Another woman's child?”

“You would have been—” Bess stopped. Her voice broke. “You would have been my son. I would have loved you all along.”

Charles's hands were white. “I needed a mother and you needed a son. But we didn't find each other until it was too late.”

“It's not too late.”

“Isn't it? I'm not a little boy anymore.”

“Harry loved his mother till the day he died. I used to wonder why we never did adopt any children. We kept saying, later, later. And later never came. And of course, now I realize why he kept putting off the decision; he was hoping he would find you. But I think now, looking back, that Harry was also very much like a boy himself, a kind of Peter Pan, if you will, who never grew up.” She paused. “You would have loved him.” She cleared her throat and swept her hands through the piles of photographs covering the floor. “We can't possibly have looked at everything, can we? I feel like we are missing something.”

Charles ran his hands through his hair again. “I don't know, but I'm exhausted.”

Bess tried not to panic. She did not want him to dismiss them to their hotel without finding anything, because she might never get another chance.

Gladys crept over to her side and knelt down beside her. “Perhaps there is another way.”

“No, no. There can't be.” Bess looked about the room, but there were only those three newspaper photographs on the wall. She'd looked at them a hundred times in desperation, and none of them had any words on them she could decipher from the code.

Then something occurred to her. “What's the biggest bank around here?”

Charles thought about it. “The Boardwalk National Bank, I suppose. Why?”

Gladys's eyes widened. “Of course. It would have to be one he knew would still be around, years later.”

“What do you mean?” Charles asked.

“Years before he died,” Bess explained, “Harry told me he had arranged some kind of financial security, in case anything ever happened to him. He didn't mean an insurance policy—he never trusted those. I always believed he had hidden money somewhere else. We were never exactly rich; I was always hounding him about spending more than we took in. And he knew there was a debt on the house. So he knew I would have difficulty if he died.”

“And you think this money is in a bank here?” Charles asked.

“It makes sense,” Gladys said. “Bess inquired at banks in New York. But Harry knew you had lived here at one point. It would have been a safer place to hide it.” And Atlantic City had held special meaning for Bess and Harry, too; it had been the place where she had almost lost him once, but had not, in more ways than one.

“But how would he have known you would find it?”