Mrs. Houdini (37 page)

Bess bent over and rubbed her eyes.

“Do you see it?” Charles pressed. “Bess, do you see?”

Through the glass, clear as day, she could make him out. The man looking at the camera—staring right at her, now, as she sat there beside Charles—was, unmistakably, Harry.

Bess let out a small cry. Her eyes went back and forth between the two men in the picture. They were different, but they were the same man. There was a young, dark-haired Harry, dangling perilously from the pier. And there was an older, gray-haired Harry, standing in the crowd.

“Charles,” she said softly, “how is it possible?”

Charles pointed to the image. “This is my theory: I think he's living still—in another place, another plane—and he's coming back from the other side, through my photographs.”

Gladys sat on the bench beside Bess and took her hands. “Don't you see, Bess? Don't you see what he's done? He's found a way to come back to you!”

Bess started to cry. “I don't understand. How does this keep his promise? What is he playing at here?”

Charles, pacing in front of them, was almost electric with excitement. “You were right about the message!” he pressed. “I think Harry
is
waiting for you—just not in the way you thought.” He swept his hand in front of him and gestured toward the crowded pier. “You came out here thinking you would find him here, in the present. But he can't get to you that way. He can only come back through the past. And he's using my photographs to do it.”

“So you think . . . he is going back
in time
?”

Charles nodded. “To when these pictures were taken. We didn't think about this, but all of those photographs were taken
before
he died. He's been able to alter the landscape, just slightly, enough for the coded words to come through. You were right about the message—you just didn't interpret it correctly.”

Suddenly, it became clear to her what Harry had meant, what Charles had discovered.
I am waiting for you at Young's Pier.
Harry had used the song they'd chosen to relay this message. But the problem was, he couldn't reach her in her own, current, time. Perhaps, in the limbo one entered after death, one could only cross back to the years one had lived, and could go no further. And so Harry was prevented from coming back in all the ways she had been anticipating—through a medium, say, or as a ghost, because he couldn't move beyond 1926. And he wasn't trying to tell her where he would be waiting for her, now,
on this side;
he was trying to tell her where he would be waiting
on the other side
. He was telling her that, when she died, he would be waiting for her here, on Young's Pier, in 1905. And they would go on, together, to what was beckoning.

Bess recalled the agony of that afternoon, the interminable minutes as she'd watched the seething, throbbing blue ocean that had swallowed Harry whole. Afterward she could not get the sound of the crowd out of her head, the small cries of the women as he failed to appear in the water, the shrill voice of the newsboy as he called out the news: “Extree! Houdini dead!”

“I thought I'd lost you,” she'd murmured, over and over that night.

“Oh, no,” Harry had assured her. “You didn't lose me. I was right there all along.”

I was right there all along . . .

It made even more sense now, why Harry had chosen this place to come back to her.

Gladys felt Bess's face. “You're crying,” she said softly. “Are you sad because you wish he was here with you now?”

“No.” Bess wiped her face. “I'm crying because I don't have to be afraid anymore. Because now I know he's there, and I'll be there with him, too.”

Somewhere far away, in a time she'd already lived, the rest of the song was playing:

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.

The roses all have left your cheek.

I've watched them fade away and die

Your voice is sad when e'er you speak

And tears bedim your loving eyes.

Oh! I will take you back, Kathleen

To where your heart will feel no pain

And when the fields are fresh and green

I'll take you to your home again!

To that dear home beyond the sea

My Kathleen shall again return.

And when thy old friends welcome thee

Thy loving heart will cease to yearn.

Where laughs the little silver stream

Beside your mother's humble cot

And brightest rays of sunshine gleam

There all your grief will be forgot.

She saw now that the song itself was a love letter from Harry—a promise to take her home again. In his death, he had performed the greatest escape of all. And he had freed her, too, from the glittering loneliness, just as he had freed Charles.

In death he had corrected the two biggest regrets of his life—leaving his son fatherless and leaving his wife childless. He had performed one last remarkable feat, by bringing them together.

“You really love him still, don't you?” Charles marveled. “In spite of finding out about me, and all that.”

“No,” she said. “Not in spite of.”

The motley colors of the summer roared around them, in that iridescent city on the sea, and all the delirious energy of the age was hurtling its way ahead, pulsing with life, into the unknown.

The room in the Château Laurier in Montreal was a fine place for the pair of them to be laid up. The dean of McGill University had arranged for a top-floor suite, with cream curtains, heavy walnut furniture, and a reading library, in English and French, larger than Harry had ever seen in a hotel. Since arriving, however, Bess had been diagnosed with ptomaine poisoning and had been vomiting the contents of her stomach for almost two days. Harry, too, was exhausted, having stayed up all night with her, her fever running so high he was afraid to let her fall asleep. Then, during a lecture and performance at McGill, he had snapped his left ankle and only barely managed to hobble through the rest of the performance. Bess had been able, even through her delirious state, to convince him to see a surgeon, who had set his ankle and declared the rest of him “in the most perfect physical condition.”

“You see, Bess?” Harry had boasted. “Other than this ankle, perfect physical condition. I am in the peak of my athleticism.” Still, the two of them had spent the afternoon lying on the couch and reading Harry's mail, Harry with his leg propped up on a pillow and Bess with her face still flushed by the remnants of fever. Nevertheless, she took great joy in poking fun at him for the letters he received from young women, then destroying them so he could not respond.

Despite his protestations, she was worried about his health. Lately he had taken on too much; the muscles around his eyes and mouth twitched constantly. He had decided to establish what he was calling a University of Magic and had been designing the curriculum: showmanship, ethics, philosophy. One morning he had come home from the theater to inform Bess that he had enrolled at Columbia University, in an English course. “If I'm going to become the president of my own university,” he told her sheepishly, “I need to know how to write better English.” Bess knew he had always been ashamed of his lack of education. He had essentially invented a new art form—the art of escape—and he had met a president of the United States and the greatest scholars of the world, but in his mind he had always been second-rate.

Physically, Harry's escapes were becoming more demanding as he aged, not less. He had encased himself in a metal coffin that was then submerged in a hotel swimming pool, and had survived in it for an hour and thirty-one minutes, emerging with close to fatally low blood pressure and high body temperature. And, having accomplished this feat, he was constructing a new stunt in which he would escape from a block of ice.

“Stop thinking that at fifty years you are old,” Harry chastised her when she protested. “I'm not old, and I'm older than you. We're not a couple of fiddle-dee-dees. We have our best years before us.”

Harry was dictating responses to his letters to a friend of his, Jack Price, who had come up from New York to see the show, when there was a loud knock on the hotel room door. Jack opened it to a large, rather awkward-looking boy of about twenty years, a sketch pad under his arm.

Harry got to his feet. “Sam! Come in, come in.” He pumped the boy's hand and gestured toward an armchair. “We were just having a read of some letters.”

The boy sat down meekly on the edge of the chair and placed the sketch pad on his knees.

Harry introduced him to Bess. “This young man came to my dressing room after my lecture this afternoon and showed me a sketch he had done of me. It was really rather good. I asked him to come and make another.”

Bess smiled weakly, taking a long sip of her water. “How lovely. Are you a student at McGill?”

“Yes, ma'am.” He knocked over a vase of roses as he settled himself into the chair. He tried to catch the flowers but failed, letting out a guttural sound of embarrassment. Bess felt her heart go out to the boy, whose body seemed slightly too large for him to manage.

Harry rolled up his shirtsleeves and reclined on the couch, closing his eyes. “Don't worry about it. You'll have to excuse us,” he explained. “We're in need of a bit of rest.”

The boy stood up again. “I can come back later.”

“Nonsense.” Harry gestured for him to sit down again.

As Sam sketched, Harry talked languidly about the craft of magic. Sam seemed enthralled by it. He asked Harry if he could explain some of his secrets. Harry smiled and waved his hand. “Aha!” he said. “I'll have to ask my spirits to give me permission.”

“He's kidding,” Bess interrupted, seeing the boy's eyes widen. “He doesn't have any spirits.”

“Would that were true,” Harry said solemnly. “Think of the trouble I might have caused if I had used my talents for ill.”

“Harry!” she chastised.

As Sam resumed sketching, there was a second knock on the door. Bess sat up. She felt suddenly nauseous. “Harry, don't answer it. You're injured.”

Harry waved his hand and stood up. “It's fine. It could be a delivery.”

Standing at the door was a muscled, broad-faced man with his hands in his pockets. He was as tall as Sam but heavier, with puckered, sunburned skin and thinning hair. He introduced himself as Gordon Whitehead.

“He's one of my fraternity brothers,” Sam explained. “He's all right.” Harry ushered him inside.

He was, he said, a theology student, but he looked years older than Sam's twenty, and far too old to be in a fraternity. Bess felt suddenly uneasy, the small sitting room now crowded with people—her nurse, Harry, Jack, Sam, and Gordon. She felt her muscles contract and realized she was clenching her fists. There was something wrong with this new guest, only she couldn't put her finger on it.

Harry gestured for him to take the last open chair. Gordon sat down stiffly. His movements seemed almost manufactured; his eyes darted around the room. Pressing his palms together, he asked Harry to expand on his lecture on spiritualism. Harry told them, laughing, of the many séances to which he had assigned agents—Bess included, working under her maiden name, Wilhelmina Rahner—to sit in the audience and test the mediums' claims. Harry turned to Bess. “Darling, do you remember when John Slater at Carnegie Hall told you, ‘You will be taking your first trip to California'—years after we had moved back from Hollywood?” He slapped his knee and turned to the boys. “He also told her, ‘My guide says that your sweetheart is not quite as much in love with you as you are with him,' and we all got into an uproar over that. Of course, he didn't have any idea who she really was.” He grinned. “The whole world knows I love her more than she loves me.”

Sam said, “I think you two may be the most envied couple of the decade, except for maybe Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.”

Bess tried to laugh, to shake off her growing anxiety, but Gordon's face turned serious. “Mr. Houdini, what is your opinion of the miracles mentioned in the Bible?” He leaned forward eagerly.

Sam looked up, startled by the abruptness of the question, but Harry only shrugged. “I prefer not to comment on matters of miracles.” Discussions of religion made Harry uneasy. He always felt the ghost of his father, the Jewish scholar, looking over his shoulder. On more than one occasion he had confided to Bess that he thought his father might have disapproved of the career he had chosen. It was one of lonely glamour, and whether in Hollywood or New York, he could not avoid the gaudy, gilded lifestyle celebrity ensured. “I would make one observation, however,” Harry added. “What would succeeding generations have said of my feats had I performed them in biblical times? Would they have been referred to as miracles?”

Gordon appeared taken aback. He blinked rapidly and then cleared his throat. “Speaking of miracles,” he ventured, “I have heard that you can resist the hardest blows to the abdomen. Is it true?”

Harry, still reclining on the couch, laughed and lifted his shirt. “My forearm and back muscles are like iron! Go on, feel them!”

Bess gripped his wrist nervously. “Don't be a show-off, Harry.”

“Would you mind if I delivered a few blows to your abdomen, Mr. Houdini?”

Gordon was staring at Harry intently. It occurred to her that he was serious.