Mrs. Houdini

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  For my dad

  The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.

  —W. B. YEATS

  Prologue

  GALENA, KANSAS

  January 9, 1898

  “Where is my brother, John Murphy?” Harry held the card to the light. “I have not heard from him in nineteen years.” He returned the note to its envelope and surveyed the audience. Outside the hall, the winter roared over the cracked-earth streets, the horses stamping at their posts.

  “It’s my question.” A woman’s small voice rose from the back of the theater.

  Bess was seated in a wooden chair in the middle of the stage, a black lace veil draped over her head. She glanced at Harry, then peered into the darkness. This was not routine.

  “The cards are meant to remain anonymous,” Harry said. “It is what the spirits prefer.”

  The woman stood up, her face in the shadows. “But how are you supposed to answer without knowing me?”

  Bess began to cough. The hall was filthy, the clay floor kicked up by hundreds of feet, and the dust hung like an iron around her neck. The words wouldn’t come. For these types of questions the answer was always evasive, he is on the way to you, he is coming; for others, the answers apprehended ahead of time—recent deaths, small-town gossip—she could be more specific.

  “Mrs. Houdini.” Harry rushed to her side. “Are you all right? What is coming to you?”

  “It’s—John Murphy,” she stammered, abandoning her heavy, affected stage voice. “I think you will find him at East Seventy-Second Street in New York.”

  “New York?” the woman said. “Why would he be there?”

  Bess broke protocol again and looked directly at Harry. Another fit of coughing overtook her. The veil slipped to the floor.

  Harry stood up. “My wife is ill. The spirits are accosting her. We shall have to conclude here.” He ushered Bess backstage and placed his hand against the back of her neck. “My God, are you all right?” He searched her face. “What’s the matter?”

  Bess shook her head. “It was the dust. I couldn’t breathe.”

  “The dust?” He pulled away, irritated. “You shouldn’t have done that. We go by the plan, Bess. You know that.”

  “I don’t know where it came from. I kept thinking of John Murphy who owns the ice cream parlor near your mother’s apartment, and the words just came out.” She wiped her face. “I’m sorry.”

  “And what happens when the real Murphy turns out to be dead, or in jail?”

  “What does it matter? By then we’ll be halfway to Milwaukee.”

  Harry frowned. “I suppose. If the storm lets up.”

  She took his hand. “It’s all a trick one way or another, whatever we say.”

  In the frigid gray of morning, the trunks packed and the bill settled, Bess was stopped outside the hotel by a small, agitated woman, wrapped from ears to feet in a heavy wool coat.

  “Mrs. Houdini,” she said, her breath white as smoke. “It’s Mary Murphy.”

  “Mary Murphy?”

  “You told me about my brother.”

  Bess feigned innocence. “I’m afraid I don’t remember.”

  Harry came up behind them. “If it’s about last night, Mrs. Houdini isn’t entirely conscious during the readings,” he explained. “It’s not really her who’s speaking. She can’t be held accountable.”

  The woman pressed her hand against Harry’s arm, urgently. “Your wife was right. My brother works on Seventy-Second Street in New York.”

  Bess froze. “Pardon?”

  “I wired a friend of mine last night and asked her to investigate. She found him. He’s alive and well.”

  Bess saw Harry’s jaw go tight. “I’m so glad,” he said coolly, wrapping his arm around her waist and pulling her toward the hotel. “But I’m afraid we’re very late.”

  Mary Murphy stood in the snow, startled, and watched them leave.

  In the crowded lobby, Bess pulled free of Harry’s grip. “My God,” she said, trembling. “What have we done?”

  Harry ran his hand through his hair. “Clearly it’s a matter of coincidence.”

  “Harry—have we sold our souls for a little applause?”

  “It was an innocent enough answer.”

  Bess took a ragged breath. “This is what we’ve been looking for, though, isn’t it? This is real magic.”

  “What does that even mean?” He bent over to pick up their bags, but she could tell he was frightened. “You know I don’t put stock in religion.”

  “It’s not religion. It’s . . . knowing more than we should. Connecting with the other side. We’ve been pretending all this time to speak with the dead—what if we really can?” She lowered her voice. “How do we know what—or who—is really over there?”

  Harry’s eyes glistened. “Isn’t that what everyone wants—to know what is beyond?”

  “No. Not me.” She shivered, remembering her childhood fear of darkness, the shadows that assembled themselves into gruesome shapes on her bedroom ceiling at night, and the hours of prayer it took to dispel them.

  “I think,” Harry said slowly, “you want to know more than you think you do. And I think ‘our magic’—if we can call it that—is something that happens when we’re together. It’s not evil.” The daylight rippled like water across his face. Outside the window, Mary Murphy had disappeared.

  It was true. Since she had married Harry, Bess felt as if her senses had been illuminated. Colors were brighter; lights flamed in the dark. But she was afraid. “Let’s put a stop to the séances. You won’t find it, Harry—whatever it is you’re hoping to uncover.” She looked out toward the snow-covered plains, the white, blinding landscape where the street met the grass.

  Harry looked, too, searching the emptiness as if waiting for a parade of spirits to march into view, dissolving like icicles into the frozen earth.

  Chapter 1

  CONEY ISLAND

  June 1894

  Besides the beach, there was no better place to spend a humid Saturday afternoon on Coney Island than inside Vacca’s Theater, where it was cool and dark. There were enough seats to make the place seem popular, but few enough that the stage always looked close, as if it were just on the other side of your living room. Bess had performed there three weeks earlier, right after she’d turned eighteen and joined the Floral Sisters, and the audience had been kind, throwing pink roses onto the stage. She and the girls knew better than to give their real names, which were dull, German names, and there would always be a crowd of eager men waiting by the theater doors afterward, wanting to know if they were really sisters, and was their last name really Floral?

  This morning one of the girls had persuaded Bess to come with her. Her real name was Nora but everyone called her Doll, because she had tiny, rose-pink fingernails and eyes like moons. It was going to be a real riot, she said; a magician named Dash had saved her two seats and promised her a good show.

  “You know, the other magician’s his brother,” Doll told her as they crossed the street from their boardinghouse onto the fairground. “And he’s unattached as well.”

  “Of course he is,” Bess said. “And they’re always brothers.”

  Doll rolled her eyes. “No, his real brother.”

  “That’s what he told you, at least.” Doll was always giddy with the anticipation of love, always bringing Bess along on dates, and
the worst were the dates with other performers. They all made their livings pretending to be something they were not—Bess and Doll included—but it was difficult for the men especially to be both charming and sincere at the same time, when in show business you could really only be one or the other.

  Their seats were in the third row, left, and they had a good view of the stage when the two magicians stepped out and announced themselves to the crowd. They spoke loudly, and with authority, but the reception from the audience was merely polite. They were not transported yet; everyone could still hear the bells and laughter of the carnival outside, not quite muffled by the humidity of the afternoon. The women fanned their faces lazily, and no one was quite sure exactly who the Brothers Houdini were, although they billed themselves as “escape artists.”

  “Which one’s Dash?” Bess asked, and Doll pointed to the taller of the two, who was tying the other inside a black cloth sack.

  She wasn’t sure whether to be disappointed, because the one Doll called Harry wasn’t as tall as Dash, or pleased, because Harry was clearly the more athletic of the two, with darker hair and a rounder jaw. She had always liked dark-haired men. In high school, she had come close to losing her way with a waiter who’d kissed her so hard he’d bitten her. Still, she had been charmed by his coal-black hair and the swagger of a hot summer.

  Still inside the sack, Harry knelt down in a steamer trunk, which Dash then locked and wrapped with a heavy braided rope. There was no sound or movement from inside the trunk. Dash pulled a curtain around the trunk and himself so that both men were completely obscured from view.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he declared from behind the curtain, raising his voice to drown out the sounds of the music outside. Doll pressed her palms together in anticipation. “Behold”—he clapped three times—“a miracle!”

  The curtain was opened by unseen hands, and there, on the other side, stood Harry, completely free, arms raised triumphantly in the air. The audience murmured and then broke into loud applause.

  Bess leaned toward Doll. “That was slick.”

  “Wait,” Doll said, grabbing her arm. “I don’t think it’s over yet.”

  Harry, his white shirt miraculously undirtied, proceeded to unwind the rope from around the trunk and open the latch. Inside, emerging somehow from the cloth sack, also unrumpled, was Dash.

  The audience cheered. “Bravo!” Doll called, getting to her feet. From the stage, Dash noticed them and smiled. Bess was impressed and curious. It had been a matter of only a few minutes since Harry himself had been tied up in that sack. How could he have managed to get himself out, and Dash in, so quickly?

  Then, from the back of the theater, a voice broke out. “Youse a bunch of fakers!” someone cried. The crowd parted to reveal a scowling, gray-haired man with his fists in the air. “I know fakers when I sees them, and youse two are some fakers!”

  Onstage, Dash and Harry looked at each other. “I beg to differ with you, sir,” Harry said, and the audience laughed.

  “What you have here is a fake box, and I’m gonna show this thing up,” the man cried.

  “Do it!” someone else called. “Go up there and do it!”

  Bess felt sorry for the Houdinis. She wished she could save them. She saw Dash wince, and she looked at Doll. “Those poor boys. He’s ruining their act.” But neither brother seemed the least bit flustered.

  The man made his way up to the stage, cheered by the audience, and when he arrived he stood face-to-face with Harry and Dash, his cheeks flaming red.

  “I can get myself outta that cheap box,” he announced. “I been doin’ acts for thirty years, and you’re dirtyin’ the stage with your fake tricks.”

  “Please,” Harry said, motioning toward the trunk still sitting in the middle of the stage. The audience laughed again, nervously this time.

  The man climbed inside the sack and pulled it up to his shoulders and then over his head, still muttering to himself. When he was completely enclosed, Harry tied the sack and helped him kneel down inside the trunk. Dash closed the latch and locked it, then pulled the curtain around the trunk, and Harry and Dash sat down on the edge of the stage to wait, their legs dangling just above the floor.

  For the first few minutes everyone was quiet; Bess was not quite sure whether they were rooting for the old man or for the Houdinis; it would make for an unexpected show either way. By the start of the third minute, the crowd began to murmur.

  Doll looked at Bess and beamed. “Dash promised a riot, didn’t he? I’ll tell you what, this is wonderful fun. I wonder how long he’ll stay in there.”

  Bess wasn’t so sure. By the fifth minute it was becoming apparent that something was wrong. The crowd was restless, and some people were beginning to boo. Harry stood up from his seat at the corner of the stage and held up his hand.

  As the voices died down, the muffled cries behind the curtain became louder. Someone on the other side was calling for help. Dash jumped to his feet, and he and Harry yanked the curtain aside to reveal the trunk, still roped shut. Dash sliced the ropes, and together the brothers helped pull the man, still inside the sack, from the confinement of the trunk. He was writhing inside the cloth, and when they untied it and the fabric fell to his feet, he stood for a moment in the middle of the stage, his body damp with perspiration, and then collapsed on the floor.

  The crowd cheered.

  The brothers had promised to meet them at the stage door a half hour after the show. Doll begged Bess to go back to their room so she could change. “I hate this skirt.” She tugged at the coarse blue fabric. “I should have worn the red.”

  “Won’t Anna be mad when she sees you brought me instead of her?”

  “Nah.” Doll shrugged. “She’s got a beau of her own tonight anyway.”

  Bess smiled, but she knew why Doll had asked her instead of Anna. Of the three of them, Bess was the plainest; she had the smallest bust and the cruelest shape. Anna, on the other hand, with her corn-blond hair and pillowed cheeks, was the principal among them, and always took the middle spot when they sang.

  They lived, with most of the other performers, in West Brighton, in a neighborhood nicknamed the Gut. The rough half a dozen blocks were crammed with shanties, beer halls, and cabarets. The three of them lived in a cheap hotel alongside chorus girls who danced in the bars and hustled customers by slipping hydrate of chloral into their drinks and stealing their wallets. It was Bess’s dream to one day earn enough to stay in the Brighton Beach Hotel, with its white veranda and geranium-lined walkways.

  In their room, in the tiny aisle between the bunk and the single bed, each with its own tiny brass lamp, Doll leaned into a hand mirror and examined her eyelashes. “I hate it in here,” she said. “It’s so crammed, and there’s hardly any light.”

  Bess nodded but couldn’t complain. It was the most independence she’d had, having grown up under first her mother’s constant religious admonitions, then the protective watchfulness of her older sister. And she did not regret leaving her sister’s tiny apartment on Grand Street, where the wealthier townhomes of Bedford were always just within view, their elaborate stonework and silk-draped windows a reminder of what she could never have. When Doll and Anna had asked her to join the singing troupe, she’d had nothing to lose. She had only a year of high school left, and the careers ahead of her were wife, nun, or shopgirl.

  Most of the Gut had burned down a decade earlier, but it was still a wicked place to live, and no girl walked alone there at night. They practiced their act instead in the afternoons, in the park adjacent to the Manhattan Beach Hotel. The performance consisted mainly of love ballads for soprano and alto, accompanied by swaying hips and flickering eyelashes. Onstage, they wore feathers in their hair, black ankle boots, and skirts hemmed to their shins. After a half hour of rehearsal, sprawled on the cool hotel grass, they listened to the guests splashing in the saltwater bathhouses next door and plotted how to win a spot in Henderson’s Music Hall, with its polished wood stage, red velve
t seats, and gilded balconies. Bess had been in Coney Island for only three weeks, but already she was lulled by the routine of their lazy afternoons, their evenings at the clam bars or the racetrack, the easy and unpoliced flirtation between men and women. None of it seemed scandalous to her. It did not seem like Gomorrah but rather like Eden, the carousels and the ivory sand and the hotels with their burning lights and pastel awnings, the thick, syrupy smell of the confectioners in the lobbies. She could almost forget the hot, baked sidewalks of Grand Street, the raging nightly altercations of the couple who lived on the other side of the apartment wall. When she was onstage with the girls, the evening air drifting through open windows and the piano music echoing behind her, she could imagine herself living this life forever, accountable to no one, her dark hair braided with pink feathers and the sound of her voice carrying, After the ball is over, after the break of morn, after the dancers’ leaving, after the stars are gone.

  Dash met them first, swinging his stage jacket over his shoulder and cracking some joke about Harry primping like a girl. He picked Doll up by the waist and spun her in a quick circle, pressing his mouth against hers. “I was hoping you’d come,” he said.

  “Oh, the act was wonderful,” she breathed. “We wouldn’t have missed it for anything.”

  He turned to Bess. “I’m Dash,” he said, pumping her hand. “My brother and I saw you in your show last weekend.” He nodded at Doll. “I stopped this one on her way out.”

  Bess felt her cheeks burning. She hadn’t noticed them. “I usually don’t pay attention to faces,” she mumbled. “I’m sorry. I know that seems rude.”

  Dash shrugged. “Nah.”

  “Are you two really brothers?” she asked.

  “We are.”

  “You don’t look much alike.”

  “We’re Hungarian,” he said, as if it were an explanation. Bess didn’t press him further, because the one Doll had called Harry had come outside and was striding over to them. His hair was newly brushed and he’d changed his shoes, but while Dash had switched shirts, Harry wore the same clothing she’d seen onstage. She couldn’t see any stains of perspiration on his shirt. She wondered if that, too, was a trick, whether he’d simply changed into an identical shirt to make it seem as if it had all been easy. If so, it had worked; she was impressed.