Mrs. Houdini Read online

  “Speaking with the dead is sacrilege.”

  “I don’t care if you speak with them or not. I was only trying to explain why I love you.” He seemed suddenly nervous, as if, in his arrogance, he had only just now realized that she could reject him. “I was trying to say that you’re perceptive. And I think you could make me better.”

  He stepped back slightly, turning to face the lights of the Bowery in the distance. “I’ve never been one to take anything slow. I’ve got these great expectations, you know. I’m going to be famous, and very wealthy, and I’m going to take care of my mother so she never has to worry again, and I simply can’t do that living like everyone else. When you caught on to my tricks, I thought, This is it. This is the girl. And if I know you’re the girl, why should I wait to tell you?”

  Bess blushed. “Surely you can’t tell that from one—”

  “That song you sing in your act—what was it? O’er me you cast a spell, something-something-something.”

  “Rosabel.”

  He grinned. “Yes, that was it. Rosabel. I loved that song. How does it go?”

  “Rosabel, sweet Rosabel,” she said hurriedly, speaking instead of singing, “I love her more than I can tell, over me she casts a spell, my charming black-eyed Rosabel—” She broke off. “I thought you said it was silly.”

  “No, I said the songs were silly.” He shook his head; he had been listening, rapt. “But that one’s beautiful. I started to love you then—your face lit up when you sang it. I thought, This is a girl who hopes for things. She probably doesn’t know a thing about love yet, but once she has it, she’s never giving it up. And then, after you sang the last verse, it was as if you realized you’d revealed too much. So you laughed and did that little jig, kicking your feet up, and the audience was charmed. But I knew. Your face had given it all away.”

  Bess stared at him. She felt herself being swept up by his certitude. There was a kind of grandeur about him, about the way he seemed to feel emotions so strongly, as if the rest of the world lay glazed with sleep while he danced furiously. “I feel like—you may know my thoughts better than I do.” She had always believed herself decisive, self-reliant, but now she felt flustered.

  “It’s the other way around. Tonight, you saw through me—you saw me . . . It was you who cast the spell.”

  Bess thought about the morning of her thirteenth birthday, when her mother had first proposed the idea of her entering the nunnery. Her mother had taken her to a shabby brownstone in the middle of Manhattan where rows of old ladies in black robes were seated silently on benches, stringing rosaries. Outside, the city roared with life. She couldn’t imagine spending the rest of her life as one of those somber women, while just outside the door there was so much incandescence, so many elegant shops and sharply dressed men waiting to love her.

  But her mother was a strict, unforgiving German woman, whose body had borne ten children, and whose second husband was in and out of the house, most of the time stinking of beer, a poor replacement for Bess’s gentle father, who had died years earlier. That afternoon, Bess had vowed to accept the first opportunity that would take her away from home. The opportunity came four years later, in the form of two nineteen-year-old girls named Nora Koch and Anna Kappel, who had been slightly ahead of her in high school but had left when they were fifteen, with dreams of being in vaudeville. She ran into them on the street outside the grocer’s; they had had some minor success as a singing duo, but they were looking for a third, and invited her to go with them to Coney Island, where they had booked an act for the summer, and longer, if they succeeded. But recently the thought had occurred to her that if they reached September without a larger booking, they could not continue, and what would she do then?

  The act was barely making them enough money to afford their room in the boardinghouse, and she couldn’t imagine going back to Brooklyn, even to Stella’s, and having Sunday lunch with her family once again and hearing her stepfather crashing through the door, slurring those terrible old German songs, and seeing all her brothers and sisters crammed into two bedrooms. If she were married, she would have a home of her own. She wasn’t quite sure what love felt like, but she liked the way she felt when Harry touched her. And he said he wanted her. No one in her life had seemed to want to love her so much as he did.

  “All right,” she said softly. “I’ll marry you.”

  “You see? That’s part of what I love about you. You always do the unexpected.”

  Then he resumed his strange seriousness. From the other side of Coney Island came the echo of church bells chiming the hour. They seemed an anomaly against the faint cacophony of voices drifting from the Bowery. “There’s something you need to promise me first,” he said. “Before we get married.”

  “What is it?”

  Harry took her hands and lifted them straight up, clasping his palms against hers. They were rough as sandpaper. “Beatrice,” he said. “Raise your hands to heaven and swear that you will be true to me. Never betray me in any way, so help you God.”

  There was not an animal in the water beneath them, not a single creature shuffling through the sand. Everything was stillness.

  “I will never betray you,” Bess murmured. She could not take her eyes off him. His intensity was hypnotic.

  “What I do—I have many secrets. When you’re my wife, you’ll know all of them. You’ll know everything about me. You’ll know more than Dash, even. And if you agree to marry me, it must be forever. You can never go back home again.”

  There was something about the lateness of the hour, the bridge in the marshland, and the dramatic vow he’d made her take that gave her pause. She wondered if she was standing face-to-face with a madman. But there was something thrilling about what had just transpired. Harry was promising her a life of possibility, of magic, and it was unlike anything she had ever imagined for herself. And she could not help but envision, now, what it would be like to be his wife, to wake up beside him, to watch him stand in front of her, silhouetted against the window, the muscles in his back sharp as lines of charcoal. She wanted him to kiss her. She thought of that black-haired waiter in Brooklyn and the taste of blood on her lip where he’d bitten her; she had been frightened then, but she wanted Harry to put his mouth on her now. She wanted him to say he would never love anyone but her. She thought of the sheer strength he must have to pull off that escape trick onstage, and she wondered what it would feel like to know that strength.

  She thought about what her friends would say when she told them she had fallen in love with him. Doll would be both thrilled and heartbroken. Anna would despise her for leaving the group, certainly.

  “Don’t be nervous.” Harry put his arm around her shoulder. “I will take care of you.”

  “Harry,” she whispered. “When we are old, I want you to think of me as I am on our wedding night.” She didn’t know where the words came from. “I want to please you. I want you to remember me.” It seemed a more binding vow than the one he had asked her to swear.

  He pulled her to him then, for the first time, so their bodies were against each other, their arms intertwined. She could feel his stomach harden. He pressed his mouth against hers and kissed her. Gently, he lowered her onto the wood of the bridge so they were kneeling face-to-face.

  She heard Dash and Doll coming up the beach toward them, breaking their solitude. They stood up quickly, wiping the mud off their clothes. Doll was waving. “Yoo-hoo!” she called.

  “You devil, Harry!” Dash shouted. “We knew you two were up to something!”

  “Do you think Dash will be cross when you tell him?” Bess whispered.

  “No.” Harry shrugged. “And it doesn’t matter now. We’ve made our vows.”

  “But—we’ll have a ceremony?”

  “Of course.” Harry took her chin in his hand and kissed her again.

  They bought her ring in the morning, at a secondhand jewelry store, pooling what little money they had. When it was polished it looked almost
new, and Harry had the gold engraved inside with the word Rosabel, which would come to symbolize a time in their lives when everything was simplest, when a man could declare his love on a bridge in the middle of a humid night and everything usual or proper could be disregarded. In the afternoon they were married by the local ward boss, with his secretary as witness, and by the evening Bess had packed a suitcase with her few sets of clothes and photographs and moved into Harry’s room in the hotel across the street. He told her they would be leaving in a week, because Vacca’s was stiffing him and he’d heard of some opportunities in the South. She tried to imagine what her mother was doing at the very moment—some kind of embroidery, probably, or washing the pots, and she wondered what she herself would be doing thirty years later, when she was her mother’s age, and whether there would be anything left of the girl Harry fell in love with. She looked out at the roller coaster across the street, and the young girls in their white summer dresses and the boys staring after them, and the memories, beating with life, like tiny birds, before her eyes.

  Chapter 2

  THE TEAROOM

  May 1929

  “He’s here, Bess. Can’t you hear him? He’s with us now.”

  She could hear the voice beside her clearly, but it sounded nothing like Harry’s. The man at her bedside, grasping her palm, was not her husband but the reverend and medium Arthur Ford—a handsome, dark-eyed man in his early forties who had proclaimed he could entice Harry to speak to him. Ford had, over the past several months, become a fixture in Bess’s social circle. A few nights before, dizzy with champagne, she had taken a fall as she danced and banged her head against a railing, and Ford had taken her home and wrapped her head in white cloth. Now, he put his other hand on her cheek and brushed a strand of hair out of her eyes so she could see his face.

  “Mrs. Houdini, he says that when this message comes through there will be a veritable storm, that many will seek to destroy you. You must be prepared for this.”

  They were not alone. Seated in a semicircle around Bess’s chaise were Bess’s press agent, two reporters, an editor at Scientific American and his wife, and a wealthy friend of Ford’s who’d come for the spectacle of the séance. The blinds had been drawn, but the city still burned behind them. On the street, the taxicabs were crowded with kissing couples and red-lipped, white-toothed women who went on laughing under the streetlamps, and how divine it would have been to be young with Harry on a night like this, to be on his arm on the way to a party. But Harry was gone, wasn’t he? She had been left behind, and it was the end of a dream.

  Ford strengthened his grip on her hand. “He’s coming through clearly now,” he insisted, closing his eyes and hunching his shoulders, as if with the weight of some invisible force. “A man who says he is Harry Houdini, but whose real name is Ehrich Weiss, is here. He tells me to say, ‘Hello, Bess, sweetheart,’ and he wants me to convey his message.”

  “Yes.” The words emerged like small breaths in the cold. “Go on,” she said. “Tell me what it is.”

  Arthur Ford fixed his eyes on Bess. “The code, he says, is the one you used to use in one of your secret mind-reading acts, to communicate information to each other.” His voice was chillingly quiet.

  Bess used her elbow to push herself into a sitting position. Her head was still pounding from her injury. In the three years since Harry’s death, she had become unmoored, searching for the sparks of her own identity while continuing to cling to Harry’s. She did not want to forget him, and she did not want him to be forgotten. He had made it publicly clear before his death that when he was gone, he was going to try to come back, through the communication of a private code he and Bess had established.

  Then, in 1926, he had died suddenly, and young, at fifty-two; and the world had grieved with her. But what had surprised Bess was how desperately the public clung to Harry’s vow that he would return to speak to her. In these wild and unanchored years, people needed something to believe in; religious or not, they needed to know if there was some kind of life after death. They believed Bess’s retrieval of the code would provide the assurances they were looking for.

  And so, while she had spent the recent, grieving years sorting through Harry’s estate, and fielding interviews, and attempting two failed businesses of her own, she had also been participating in dozens of unsuccessful séances a month. At first she had believed she could channel Harry herself; every Sunday she set aside two still, private hours waiting for him to reach her. But nothing came of those hours. Whatever powers she, or Harry, had once believed she possessed, failed her. Finally she opened herself up to the idea that he might use someone else to speak to her. Harry had followed this same logic after his mother died, at first reaching out to her spirit himself, in the privacy of their home, then asking Bess to participate, unsuccessfully. Increasingly desperate, he had ventured into the parlors of the spiritualists.

  In the three years since Harry’s death, the public’s fascination with Houdini’s legacy hadn’t waned; she still received thousands of letters from mediums claiming to know the message Harry had left her before he died—the message that would prove, once and for all, that it was possible for the dead to come back and speak to the living. But all of these claims had been false.

  Only Bess knew how desperately Harry himself had wished to be certain of such a possibility. But none of the séances he had attended had ever convinced him. And she could never speak to anyone, not even his siblings, the truth that the great Houdini had died afraid of what was to come.

  Then, two months ago, Arthur Ford had come into her tearoom. He was a man of God. She had sensed that there was something different about him. He had kissed her, and promised her honesty, and Bess was convinced that he, of all people, could contact Harry. In the end, it was she who had asked him for a séance.

  Ford continued. “This is the code. It is ten words.” Bess nodded; that was correct. She pulled her white silk robe closer around her shoulders. “And it is: Rosabel. Answer. Tell. Pray. Answer. Look. Tell. Answer. Answer. Tell.” The room was completely silent, the eyes of all the witnesses focused on Bess. “He wants you to tell him whether they are right or not.”

  Bess was still. “Yes,” she said at last. “Yes, they are.” There was a murmur of amazement from the witnesses.

  Ford opened his eyes. “Harry smiles and says thank you. Now I can go on. He tells you to take off your wedding ring and tell them what Rosabel means.”

  She had lost so much weight in her widowed years that the ring slid easily off her finger. She traced the letters engraved on the inside. She held it out, trembling, for Ford to inspect, and she heard, from somewhere long ago, the words of the song: Rosabel, sweet Rosabel, I love her more than I can tell, over me she casts a spell, my charming black-eyed Rosabel . . .

  I’ll come back for you, Harry had promised. On his deathbed, he had struggled to convey a message he was unable to finish.

  “And now, the words we just established—answer, tell, pray, and so on—signify another word in your code, which used common phrases or groups of phrases to indicate certain letters,” Ford’s voice went on. “And that word after Rosabel is believe. The message Harry wants to send back to you is ‘Rosabel, believe.’ Is that right?”

  Bess looked at him, stunned. “Is it possible?” she whispered. “Is he really—is he really here?” The sounds of the city seemed to rush in upon her like a great wind. She could hear rain outside, sheets of it pounding on the sidewalk. “Someone close the windows, please!” she cried.

  “But—they are closed,” she heard the editor’s wife say.

  “Mrs. Houdini? Are you all right?” another voice asked. There was commotion in the room; chairs scraped against the floor. Someone leaned over her.

  Then she heard Ford’s voice, louder than before. “He says, ‘Tell the whole world that Harry still lives!’”

  Across the room, the door burst open. “What is this intrusion?” she heard Ford cry out. “What is going on?”
/>   Bess’s eyes focused again. Her sister Stella was pushing her way through the semicircle of chairs, her hair matted with rain under a black cloche hat. She stood dripping beside Bess’s couch.

  “Bess, don’t believe it!” she cried. “It’s all a hoax. This woman”—she pointed to one of the journalists—“has already sent a story to the Graphic that accuses you of faking this séance! It’s going to be the biggest scandal since the Ponzi scheme.”

  Ford stood up. “What do you think you are doing?”

  “Bess,” Stella urged, wringing the bottom of her dress, “Ford’s known the code all along. He didn’t get it through Harry just now. The message has already been printed in Rea Jaure’s story. And the story’s going to say that Harry and I were sleeping together, and that he told me the message, and I gave it to Ford, and you knew all along, and we’re all a bunch of fakes.”

  Bess shook her head. She swung her body around to look at Ford and then back at Stella. “But—that’s impossible. That was—our private message. No one knew it but Harry and me.”

  “No.” Stella shook her head. “Someone else knew. One of the nurses heard him say it in the hospital, and she sold the information to Ford.” She glared at him from across the room. “Rosabel, believe. That’s it, isn’t it?”

  The editor’s wife gasped. “How could you know that? We’ve only all just heard it for the first time.”

  Bess looked at Ford, her eyes steely with anger. “Is this true, Arthur? Were you just manipulating me this whole time?” She felt like a fool. How could she have been so naïve?

  Ford learned toward her and reached for her elbow. A combed-back strand of hair fell over his forehead. His eyes were wide with disbelief. And yet there was a glimmer in his voice of something she hadn’t recognized before—the overenunciated diction of a lie. “Darling, no. It’s real, I promise. Harry was here.”

  “It’s all going to come out tomorrow, Bess,” Stella said.