Mrs. Houdini Read online

  “Everyone get out!” Bess cried. She looked at her agent. “Vernon, get them out! Get them out! I want everyone out!” She threw the covers off the couch and stood up, the neckline of her robe slipping down her shoulder. Ford reached toward her to pull the edge back up, but Bess pushed him away.

  “Darling—” he protested. “You need to lie down. You’re not well.”

  Bess’s voice was frigid. “Don’t call me darling; I’m not your darling. I never should have believed you—Harry never would have believed you! You’re nothing but a fraud!”

  The room was in an uproar. Bess’s agent pushed everyone toward the door, and in the chaos somebody knocked over a vase, which shattered on the floor, sending shards of clay skittering across the tile mosaic B that Harry had had installed. Her agent stooped to pick up the pieces.

  Bess waved him away. “Please, just leave me with Stella.”

  He looked at her. “Will you be all right?”

  “Yes, yes, I’ll be fine.”

  When everyone had gone, Stella sat down on the couch beside her. “I never slept with Harry,” she said. “That would have been—practically incestuous. And he never told me about the message.”

  “Of course not. It’s preposterous.”

  “They’re going to slander us both in the papers. It’s going to be horrible.” She picked at a run in her green silk stockings.

  “Yes, I know.” Bess’s whole body ached. It seemed as if everything she had tried to accomplish over the past three years had crumbled. She hated looking like a fool, but she hated even more having Harry’s legacy slandered. Would she be able to continue with the séances after this? Or would she and Harry be the laughingstocks of the press? She needed to reach him, notoriety or not. The public wanted Harry’s code revealed because it would be proof that one could live beyond death. But to Bess, the code was only a stepping-stone. Before Harry died he had told her that there was some kind of essential message, some private knowledge, that he could communicate to her only after he had gone; now, she needed to hear the code first, so that she knew it was truly Harry coming through.

  She hoped they wouldn’t go after Harry’s sister, Gladys, as well. She must telephone her immediately in the morning.

  “Will you be all right?” Stella asked. “It’s going to be a madhouse around here for a while.”

  “I’ll be fine. Maybe the scandal will rustle up some more business for the tearoom.”

  Stella laughed. “Always the silver lining.”

  Bess stopped herself from saying more. Even in the aftermath of another disastrous evening, she still had one last secret to propel her onward. Not a soul on earth—not Arthur Ford, not even Stella or Gladys—knew that Harry, who had always been one for contingencies, had left her with two codes before he died. Yes, there was Rosabel, believe, and soon the whole world would know about that. But there was a second code, too, which went back to one of their very first nights together. And when she heard those words—which she surely would, she had to—she would know, with certainty, that Harry had found her. Because it was impossible that anyone could have heard the second code; it had not been spoken out loud in decades.

  “I’m sorry about Arthur, though,” Stella said, mixing two glasses of ice and gin. “I know how much he meant to you.”

  Ford had meant something to her, briefly. He had a rare combination of confidence and schoolboyish sincerity that reminded her of Harry, and she had met him during a vulnerable evening, when she had discovered another of Harry’s old love letters hidden in the bookshelf. He had assuaged her loneliness, for a while. But she would recover.

  “It is a shame, isn’t it?” Bess sighed. “Of course, he was no Harry. But he was such a handsome man.”

  She woke in the morning with a splitting headache, curled in the chair in her living room. It appeared to be late morning, and the white city light was bleeding through the curtains. The house was unbearably quiet, except for some voices on the street. The housekeeper didn’t usually come until noon, and she wasn’t sure what had happened to the butler; she imagined he had taken the dog for a walk. It was such a large house for her to be living in, essentially alone—three stories of heavy brownstone, two balconies, and a dozen rooms, the tall windows framed by intricate woodwork and mirroring marble-slabbed fireplaces. Most of the rooms were unused now. When Harry had been alive there was always noise, always a parade of friends and strangers coming in and out, always Alfred Becks, Harry’s librarian, with another delivery of books and John Sargent, his secretary, with a pile of letters. Harry had adored fame; he had liked to be admired, hated to be alone.

  Even when it was just the two of them he had taken the rooms on the fourth floor for his study area, and she had taken the rooms on the third, where she would hear his voice call down three or four times before noon: “Mrs. Houdini, is my lunch ready?” While he wrote his books, he would send her letters, too, via the maid, who carried them down from the fourth floor on a silver tray. It was his little game. They were always elegantly packaged, even though the content was sometimes frivolous—lines from a poem, perhaps, or comments about the weather. Even when he was far, he always felt near. How ironic that during the fever of their marriage, the frenzied traveling schedule and public appearances, she had sometimes wished for time to herself. Now, it was she who hated to be alone. For the first time in her life since that one young month in Coney Island, she had independence, and was living off her own merit. And she still felt, and needed, Harry’s presence. His death, as had his life, consumed her, and until she reached him she did not feel that she could be in possession of herself entirely.

  Perhaps that was why she had trusted Ford. His easy arrogance, the enormity of his charisma, had filled a void. And she had hoped, for the first time after so many failed occasions, that someone had gotten through.

  Bess rubbed her face and looked at the clock, then jumped out of the chair. She fumbled for her robe. It wasn’t morning at all; it was already midafternoon. Could it possibly be two o’clock already? She couldn’t remember having slept so late since her circus days with Harry. She had to get to the tearoom. The vegetable orders were being delivered, and she couldn’t rely on anyone else to stand up to the deliveryman; bruised produce meant lost profit.

  When Harry died, he had left her greatly in debt. She hadn’t known the extent of it until his creditors came calling a few days after his funeral, demanding payment. When she totaled the figures, the amount was staggering—more than she could possibly hope to pay with what remained to her. Harry had made enormous sums of money onstage over the last ten years of his life, but he had spent it just as quickly—rare books worth tens of thousands of dollars, unreasonably large gifts to friends, vast investments lost in the moving picture business. Bess was left with state inheritance taxes, funeral costs, and debts on a variety of their purchases, and a life insurance policy that would barely cover those figures.

  She had already sold a great deal of Harry’s collection of magic books, articles, and papers, but she hadn’t had the heart to sell it all, and despite what she had parted with, the house was still packed with his belongings. He had always liked to brag, in his later years, that he possessed the world’s largest magic collection and one of the world’s largest dramatic collections. There was not a single wall in the four-story home on which bookshelves had not been built, and filled to capacity. She herself opened very few of these books, and even Harry, once he had cataloged them, read only a few pages of interest, then shelved them. He had had very little time to read either, especially as he got older and more renowned. Before he died he wrote seven books on magic, and what little time he had went to writing and research. He had never been the kind of man to drink or eat to excess, but collecting had been an addiction for him: he was consumed by the thrill of acquisition, which Bess attributed to his poverty as a child. Still, she disapproved of his limitless spending, and after a while she caught on that Becks was having the books delivered through the side door to
avoid her seeing them. Even after Harry’s death, the books he had ordered kept arriving, by post or courier, to the tune of a twenty-thousand-dollar debt.

  Even the house she had lived in with him would be quietly put on the market within the year. She had narrowly avoided bankruptcy, and now she was wrapped up in a sordid affair, thanks to Ford. Outside, the sounds on the street were growing steadily louder. Pulling back one of the curtains, she saw a crowd of reporters gathered on the sidewalk. They were pounding on the walls and waving their notebooks in the air. One of them looked up and noticed her face in the window and gave a shout, and the others followed suit, crying to her to come down. “Mrs. Houdini!” they shouted. “Can you tell us why you did it?” Bess closed the curtains.

  So Stella had been right; there would be a backlash against her. How anyone could imagine she would betray Harry’s memory in such a way, she did not know. But few people knew how much they had lived through together, how they had spent the first five years of their marriage sleeping on cots and in hallways and stealing potatoes to survive. There hadn’t been a day in twenty years that she and Harry had spent apart. After his mother died, especially, he clung to her. He couldn’t even choose his own clothes without her. Perhaps it was because he felt that Bess was the only one still living who really knew him; in public, he would always be the showman, but at home he was only Harry.

  Stella alone knew the full extent of Bess’s financial struggles. After Harry’s death Stella had asked her, “How could you not hate him for leaving you poor?” Bess had only shaken her head. How could she explain what no one would understand? Her loyalty to Harry, and her belief in his promises, was absolute.

  “Harry wouldn’t leave me destitute,” she had told Stella.

  Stella had looked at her pityingly. “But he did, darling. Look at all the bills.”

  “No. There’s money somewhere. I’m sure of it.”

  Stella had laughed. “Where? Hidden in the attic? In the soles of his shoes?”

  “Perhaps. I don’t know.”

  “Be realistic, Bess.”

  Now Bess tried to push aside the memories and imagine what Harry would advise. She applied pink lipstick and changed into a new white dress and gloves. She would dress as the innocent, as she had early in her marriage, when she had played at being nothing more than an assistant unaware of the secrets behind the tricks. She would go to work as usual, and serve lunch, and avoid the crowds, and she would get by.

  A year after Harry’s death, Bess had opened a speakeasy with Stella, which had quickly failed, largely due to bad investments—the same lack of business acumen that had always plagued Harry. But the thought of sitting alone in the house all day was abhorrent. After giving herself up to brandy and cigarettes and late nights on Broadway, she found herself dancing the Charleston on the edge of the Biltmore Hotel rooftop one Saturday night, kicking her feet out twenty-seven stories above Madison Avenue, and decided she ought to pursue a steadier occupation.

  Finally, six months ago, she went into business on her own, in a more civilized operation, and opened a tearoom on West Forty-Ninth called Mrs. Harry Houdini’s Rendezvous, where struggling magicians could find work, and wealthy women could eat and be entertained. She hired a Negro woman to do the cooking, rented a vacant space, and decorated it simply with candles, some toy rabbits, white-clothed tables, and framed portraits of herself and Harry. At the entrance she posted a red-winged parrot named Oscar, who called, “Welcome, welcome!” when customers came through the door. The back of the restaurant opened onto a garden patio, the tables shaded in the summertime with lace-trimmed red and black umbrellas.

  The tearoom brought back her verve. She was capitalizing on Harry’s fame, yes, but it was the first thing she could call her own. Her identity had always been so dependent on Harry’s, her name so inextricably linked with his; even after his death she could not escape him. Both before and after he died so unexpectedly, she was completely consumed by his notoriety. But in her younger days, when they had started out, performing as a pair, they had been the Great Houdinis; she had considered herself his equal. When they were doing the dime museums, they had resorted to the pretense of clairvoyants in order to make enough money to live on. Harry would put her into a trance and she would deliver messages, which were carefully orchestrated between them, through an elaborate code of seemingly harmless blinks, hand and feet motions, and conversational words. So much of their marriage, it seemed to her now, had been defined by the codes they created.

  Sneaking out the back of the house into the alley and hailing a cab two blocks down, she managed to avoid the crowd of reporters on the street. And when she stepped out of the car on Forty-Ninth Street, she felt a renewed sense of strength; she felt, for the first time, like it would be possible to start her life over the way she had started over at eighteen, or at twenty-three, when she and Harry had become famous. If she could get over this new obstacle, and focus again on reaching Harry, she would be all right. She didn’t need much; she only needed to make a living, and to have a reason to get up in the morning. And she needed to prove there was something more beyond this life—that Harry, who had once blazed with an indomitable spirit, had not vanished into some eternal darkness.

  When she stepped into the tearoom at half past two, she was greeted by the clatter of plates and the muffled calls of the kitchen staff. How beautiful that these sounds belonged to her. Along the far wall, the pastries, iced in pastel, were on display in pristine glass cases; behind them, the soda fountain had just been installed. The green and pink glasses with their tiny curved rims were lined neatly on mahogany shelves behind the bar.

  At a table across the room, one of the other magicians was entertaining a woman and a little girl with a needle-swallowing trick. The girl was enthralled. She pulled on the magician’s sleeve. “Tell me how you did it!” she begged in a tiny voice.

  When they were younger Bess and Harry used to talk about adopting children. “We’ll take in dozens of them, when we settle down,” Harry used to say. “We’ll have a bigger family than yours even.” But the time to settle down never came.

  They never did figure out what problems prevented them from having children. She never became pregnant. Harry seemed to think he had been sterilized as a result of X-ray exposure. When he was younger, he had befriended a radiologist and used to X-ray himself out of fascination with his insides.

  Years ago, Harry had created an imaginary child named Mayer Samuel, whose life story he told to Bess in notes delivered from the fourth floor of their New York house to the third—his admission to Harvard, his marriage to a Boston heiress named Norma, his terms in the Senate. The story culminated in Mayer Samuel’s election as president of the United States, and then the fun seemed to fizzle out, and Mayer Samuel disappeared from their lives. Then, instead of children, they adopted dogs.

  Standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the tearoom, watching the woman and her daughter, Bess was overcome by a sense of loss. She was over fifty now, and her childbearing days were far behind her. But she had never thought, in the rush of life while Harry was alive, what she would do without him, if she didn’t have children or grandchildren. She’d always assumed they’d grow old together. He was so healthy, so strong and vital, she never imagined he’d die so young. After his death, she realized he had kept every scrap of paper she had ever written to him, dating from their very first week together. Some of the notes were trivial, written on napkins, with addresses or questions about dinner. But he had filed every one of them away, and she had never known. How much more, she wondered, had she not known about him?

  Bess saw the girl’s mother turn and catch her eye. The woman looked away quickly. Bess hurried into the dining room to check on the orders.

  One of the magicians—a tall kid who, in his youngest years, used to follow Houdini around to all his New York performances—rushed to her side, asking, “Mrs. Houdini? What are you doing here?” She tried to wave him away, but he ushered her into th
e kitchen and seated her in an empty chair in the corner.

  “For goodness’ sakes, I’m not ill, Billy. Just disgraced.”

  He stared at her with his mouth open.

  “I’m joking.”

  “Oh.” He let out a small, forced laugh and cleared his throat.

  At the kitchen door, Dolores, whom she’d hired as a bookkeeper, was beckoning to her. Mamie, the cook, was sweating in front of the stove and assembling the cooked-meat sandwiches. Bess saw a glimmer of suspicion in her eyes. So everyone has read the papers, she thought. And they’ve got to decide now whether I’ve tried to trick them or not. The truth was that she had a great deal to gain from a successful séance. Not only would it legitimize Harry’s lifetime of work but the publicity would help ease her financial difficulties. It would mean the success of her tearoom, requests for interviews, value added to Harry’s collectibles . . . It was no wonder people suspected her of fakery.

  She ought to be out in the dining room, she knew, going from table to table as she usually did. The functioning of the place depended on her; without her presence, it lost its charm. But today seemed a day to remain behind the scenes.

  In the corner, she found Dolores standing over a cardboard box with her hands on her face. “Mrs. Houdini,” she said. “These are ruined. We can’t serve them.”

  Bess looked in the box at over a hundred tomatoes, half of them crushed.

  “They were delivered to the back. There’s half a dozen other boxes out there, too.”

  “You mean the deliveryman just left them there? Without getting a signature?” She was fuming. “I won’t pay for these!”

  “You shouldn’t, ma’am,” Mamie cut in. “They’re tryin’ to put one over on you. They probably thought you wouldn’t come in today. Or wouldn’t notice if you did.”

  Bess sat down and tried to think. It was unacceptable. She’d have to find another vendor. But the other vendors charged more. Either way, she’d be losing money.