Mrs. Houdini (39 page)

Bess remembered the weeks that followed as one remembers a storm passing during sleep. Jack Price had cried murder to the press, and demanded to know whether the medium Margery Crandon had orchestrated Gordon Whitehead's violence in retaliation for Harry's humiliating her. But Harry's condition was inconsistent with the blows he had received. Dr. Stone had tried to come up with an explanation as to how Harry could have died of appendicitis when the punches he received had been on the other side of his body; at last he'd concluded that the pain from the blows must have masked the symptoms of Harry's true illness, preventing him from realizing the seriousness of his condition earlier. But Gordon Whitehead had disappeared; no one could locate him again. In her grief, Bess had confronted Mrs. Crandon, who was doing the traveling circuit in New York. Waiting outside her hotel, Bess had taken Margery by the shoulders and shaken her. “If I find out you had anything to do with Harry's death,” she'd threatened, her voice quaking, “God help you.”

Margery had stared at her vacantly. “Grief does strange things to us, Mrs. Houdini,” she'd said. Then she had stepped into a waiting car and turned away from the window.

For so many years Bess had stood on the stage in Harry's shadow; now, it was her performance alone. On the roof of the Knickerbocker, she faced the crowd in a pristine white dress and cape, her lips dabbed with red lipstick, her hair perfectly waved. Promptly at eight o'clock, the orchestra began playing “Pomp and Circumstance.” Bess had asked her old carny friend Edward Saint to officiate the séance. When the music was over, he stepped forward to address the gatherers.

“In this cathedral-like atmosphere,” he began, placing his hat over his chest, “I wish to remind you that this is a solemn occasion, and that the results of tonight are of a private nature. This is a personal gathering aiding Mrs. Houdini in completing her ten-year vigil. We wish it distinctly understood that in this last and final attempt we are interested in Houdini coming to us, instead of to a stranger.”

Bess lifted her head and scanned the crowd. It seemed that everyone she had ever loved, or would again, was there—Stella, a grandmother now, watching with sympathetic eyes; nearby, her sister Ada, alongside three other siblings. Jim Vickery had died, as had Alfred and Dr. Stone and John Sargent, but Jim Collins was there, in the second row next to Harry's old producer, Ben Rolfe, and beside him, Stella's husband, Fred, and the young magicians from her old tearoom. A month after her trip to Atlantic City, she had sold it to Niall for a song; she had discovered that the chaos of the place hadn't held her in its thrall as it once had. It needed someone young and vibrant at the helm—someone who needed something from it, as she had when she first opened it.

Saint continued, “The Houdinis always believed that if you remove the fraud, what is left must be the truth. Before Houdini's death, Mr. Houdini and his wife made a pact that the first to go would contact the survivor. The first year after Houdini's death found Mrs. Houdini every Sunday between the hours of twelve and two o'clock locked up in her own room, waiting for a sign. But at no time has Mrs. Houdini ever received a psychic communication from her husband. We believe that the great Houdini will, in this last authentic séance, come back to Mrs. Houdini, who, for thirty-three years, stood by the side of her beloved Harry, listening to the applause of kings and emperors and the world at large.” Saint's voice echoed across the blue night.

On the far end of the bleachers, in the last row, Charles sat quietly with the other members of the press. He wore a badge that identified him as a newspaperman from the
Los Angeles Examiner
. After the stock market crashed, with the East Coast in chaos, he had moved with Bess to California. He had bought a white bungalow, with lemon trees in the yard, across from her own in the Hollywood Hills, where they had pretended to meet as neighbors. He had not gone to seminary. He wanted a child, he told Bess. He wanted to pass along Harry's legacy. Bess, for her part, had begun her marriage to Harry with a trunk of clothes and five dollars to her name; she felt she needed to live once more as if she was only partway through a great adventure.

Gladys had almost gone with them, but then Lloyd had proposed in the garden of his crumbling Long Island estate, and she had accepted. The estate was being sold; he had lost most of his money in stocks but still had some family money remaining. They moved to a three-bedroom house in a quiet town outside the city.

“But will you be all right there?” Bess had asked her. “You won't know anyone.”

Gladys had smiled. “Harry never really had any friends.”

Bess had laughed. “No, he didn't. He had hundreds of acquaintances. And very loyal employees. But that's not the same as having friends.”

“He had you.”

“Yes.” Bess had thought about it. “I was his best friend.”

Now, Saint clasped his hands together. “Let us meditate in prayer,” he moaned. “O, mastermind of the universe, please let the spirit of understanding be sent upon us who are gathered in this inner circle tonight. Please bring the light of truth to us tonight. Aid us, guide us, on this most important quest. O, thou disembodied spirits, those of you who have grown old in the mysterious laws of the spirit land, all is in readiness. Please now, the time is at hand. Make yourself known to us. Houdini, are you here?”

He paused; the air around him seemed fragile as lace.

Saint's voice rose to a shout. “Are you here, Houdini? Manifest yourself! Bess is here, your Bess is here, pleading in her heart for a sign. Please manifest yourself by speaking through the trumpet. Lift it, lift it! Levitate the table, move it! Spell out a code, Harry, please! Ring the bell, let it be heard round the world! Come through, Harry!”

In response, there was a deafening silence. The members of the semicircle sat with clasped hands, in meditation, while the crowd craned their heads to see the items laid out on the little black table, which sat, unmoving, where they had been placed at the beginning of the evening.

At last Saint, in a voice that broke, placed his hand over his heart. “Mrs. Houdini,” he said. “It seems the zero hour has passed. Have you reached a decision?”

Bess stood to face him on unsteady legs. What she could not tell him was that Harry had, in fact, come through years before. She was done with the humiliating circuses of the spiritualists; she was done with them all. Charles, plagued by the deep-seated fear of public scrutiny, on him and on Bess, had begged her to do the final séance everyone wanted and be done with it all. They had made a pact, together, never to reveal to anyone, with the exception of a future wife, in confidence, that he was Harry's son; Bess had arranged for his inheritance to be passed to him through Gladys, and did not mention him in her will. Nor would they ever reveal the message they had discovered in his photographs.

And so she stood in front of those she had loved dearly, in a recording that would be broadcast around the world, and publicly ended her search for Harry.

“Mrs. Houdini,” Saint repeated. “Have you come to a decision?”

Bess looked around her one last time. “Yes,” she said. “My husband did not come through. My last hope is gone. I do not believe that Houdini can come back to me, or to anyone. It is now my personal belief that spirit communication is impossible. I do not believe that ghosts or spirits exist.”

There was a low murmur from the crowd.

She bent over Harry's photograph on the table and reached for the red lamp. “I now, reverently, turn out the light.” She kissed her husband's lips. “Good night, Harry. It is finished.”

As she stood there on the rooftop of the hotel, the hush almost sacred in its weight, all the old memories came back: of sitting in church with her mother and her brothers and sisters on either side, and the priest speaking in Latin and waving the incense, and the light burning through the stained glass and if she moved her hand in a certain way it would change color, too. In churches she used to feel as if, perhaps, Harry was just on the other side of the nave, hiding behind some curtain perhaps, waiting to step out to her and say, “Bess, darling, I never really died; it's all been nothing but a trick.” Now she knew it was true, only not in the way she had imagined.

She stepped away from the shrine with the sting of tears in her eyes and made her way toward the stairs. A minute after the door closed behind her, the skies opened up with rain. The drops flared around the little table like broken glass. The guests rushed inside, pressing against one another to fit through the small door.

In the lobby of the hotel, the crowd of reporters caught up with her. “Mrs. Houdini! Why do you think your husband didn't come through tonight?” one of them asked.

Bess smoothed her white skirt and looked at the men. “Harry was too grand a magician to come back only to shake little bells or write his name on a piece of slate,” she told a reporter named Charles Radley. “He lived in the great moments, and now he is gone.”

“Do you think, if he can see us, he's laughing at the attempt?” he asked.

Bess shrugged. “I suppose I'll ask him when I see him.”

Charles set down the newspaper and closed his eyes, breathing in the perfume of the house—the comforting smells of toast and clean sheets and shampoo. It was his one afternoon off, and he relished the quiet moments in the middle of the day when the sun was flaring through the windows and he had the house to himself. It was funny how he worked for a newspaper but never had time to actually read one except on his days off.

A year ago, on this day, Bess Houdini had died suddenly of a heart attack at age sixty-seven. Charles had not been there, and he had not been able to argue on her behalf when she was refused burial in her husband's cemetery because she was a Catholic. Instead, he had mourned anonymously, and he had not tried to contact her spirit. She would not have wanted him, he knew, embroiled in the obsessions that had haunted her for so many years.

It was one o'clock now and the children were at school. Margaret was at a Red Cross meeting, folding bandages. The war had been going on for over two years, and the dead kept coming home—they were people he knew, neighbors and the sons of friends—but it was Bess Houdini he was thinking about now.

Every once in a while he took out the photograph of Harry at Young's Pier, as if to reassure himself that it had really happened, that he had not imagined it after all. But Harry was always there, gray-haired and smiling up at the camera in the midst of the crowd. It was the one thing he had kept from Margaret during the seven happy years of their marriage. On their wedding night he had told her his secret—that he was Harry Houdini's son, and that one day, when their children were grown, he and Margaret would tell them together. He had told her the story of meeting Bess and their decision to keep the information private, to avoid slandering Harry's legacy and to keep himself out of the limelight. And when the children were born, he and Bess had created a trust account for them. But he had never told Margaret about the messages in the photographs. By the time he met her, it had seemed almost preposterous that anyone else would believe them. And he couldn't bear the thought of ever speaking the words out loud. He felt it was something private—the one communion that he clung to—that he and his father shared.

He sat at the kitchen table looking again at the photograph. He had seen it so many times that the image was burned into his memory, but it still gave him chills every time he looked at it. Where was Harry now, he wondered. What was he doing?

He thought he heard a car in the driveway, and he hastily slid the photograph back into its envelope. But as he swept his hand across the table, he brushed his cup of coffee, and the black liquid spilled over everything. He let out a small, aching cry; he pulled out the photograph, and it was sopping wet, damaged almost beyond recognition. And the tiny image of Harry was gone, hidden under the black stain.

He almost couldn't believe it. He felt as if his father had died in front of his very eyes. In his despair he glanced over at the window; the car he had heard was in his neighbor's driveway, not his own.

He rushed into his office; he had the negative somewhere, he knew. Bess had made him catalog all his photographs after they moved to California, and they were ordered by date now in neat white boxes. He prayed the negative was inside; he had never looked at it, he realized now, but he knew it must still exist. He threw the boxes on the floor and dumped out the contents, searching like a madman through the strips of miniature images. Finally, he found it, just where it was supposed to be. He held it up to the light and peered at the picture. He could make out some of the scene, even though the image itself was no bigger than a few inches across.

In his darkroom, Charles set up the enlarger head and the easel, turning on the bulb and exposing the image from the negative onto the paper. He worked carefully, dropping the paper into the developing solution, praying that Harry would still be there when he finished. What would he do if the image could never be duplicated again? He wasn't quite sure how the magic worked. What if the tiny, eerie smiling face of his father existed only on the single copy of the photograph he had just ruined?

Underneath the solution, in the red light of the darkroom bulb, he could see the image emerging in front of his eyes. There was young Harry, standing over the water, and there was the woman in the large hat who was always standing behind him. He watched, trembling, as the right edge of the photograph came into focus. He could see the tiny figures in the crowd, and then—he was so grateful he almost cried—he saw him. The gray-haired Harry Houdini, smiling up at a little boy's perch.

“Oh, thank God.” Charles moved the paper carefully into the stop bath and the fixing solution, and then into a shallow tray of water. Finally, he turned on the lights and clipped the paper on the line to dry, staring at the image as the water dripped off.