Mrs. Houdini Page 5

  She could hear the clatter of teacups, in the dining room, and the delighted claps from the customers as Billy went table to table doing his card tricks. He was one of the best in the world at cards, she told everyone. She had discovered him when he was a boy and convinced Harry to mentor him. She hated wasting too much time in the back. She had built this business as a way to get herself out of the house, a way to get back into society after a period of reclusion, and she liked being actively involved in its running. “I wouldn’t recommend it as a rest cure,” she had once joked to a reporter during an interview. “But it does keep a woman busy.”

  “What do you say,” the man had asked her, “to the claim that you’re a regular Rosalind? A symbol of the age?”

  Bess was charmed. “I would say,” she had replied, “that I wish I were as young as Rosalind.”

  From the dining room, she heard a rush of commotion. “Oh, Jesus, are those reporters? They can’t come in here! Would you call the police, Dolores, please?”

  Dolores stuck her head out the door, then closed it quickly. “It’s not reporters, Mrs. Houdini. It’s Lou Gehrig! He’s in the dining room!”

  Bess jumped to her feet. “Lou’s here?”

  “He had a helluva night last night,” she said. “He hit three consecutive home runs against the Tigers. The Yankees won eleven to nine. Everyone’s talking about it.”

  Bess hurried into the dining room to find the baseball star dressed inconspicuously in summer-white slacks, signing autographs in the foyer. “Lou!” she called from the back of the crowd. She reached for his arm and led him away from the chaos, toward a corner table. “Is it just you today?”

  He nodded. “I’m hungry for a cold sandwich. I was hoping not to attract any attention.” He held up a copy of Dodsworth. “Just planning to read.”

  Bess laughed. “I heard you’re the talk of the town today. It’s going to be hard to read.”

  “I heard we’re both the talk of the town.” He smiled grimly. “Don’t let those saps get you down, Bess.”

  “I’ll try not to.”

  “You haven’t been to any games lately. You know I’ve got a seat for you whenever you want it.”

  “Thank you. You know . . . it’s not that I don’t want to come.” Bess lowered her eyes. He was such a good kid. She and Harry had first met Lou when he was just a nineteen-year-old college student with a strong arm, who loved magic. She’d known him for years, but she’d seen him only a handful of times, about town or in the tearoom, since Harry’s funeral. The truth was, after Harry died, she couldn’t bear going to games alone, and Lou’s new fame had put demands on him, a burden she understood too well.

  “You and Harry were always kind to me,” Lou said, taking a sip of water. “There were times I thought, Well, this man’s advice is just as swell as my father’s. He always knew what to say about handling the press, good or bad. And I think he would tell you to ignore what’s going on now.”

  Bess nodded. “I know you want some quiet. But it was good of you to come,” she said. “Really. I’ll send Billy over with a menu.” She caught sight of the young magician hovering eagerly in the kitchen doorway. She leaned toward him. “He idolizes you.”

  Standing, Bess picked up an empty tray from the sideboard. She wrapped her hands around the cool metal and breathed a private sigh of relief. Word of Lou’s appearance today would certainly get around town; it would drum up some more business, for a time. She also hoped it would help keep the papers from condemning her.

  She turned toward the kitchen to go back to the tomatoes, but not before she was blinded by a momentary flash of light. When the whiteness receded it seemed everything in front of her was magnified, the colors scattering like shards of glass. And behind her, a reflection glimmering in the silver of the serving tray, she could see Harry’s ghostly face, as if it had been flung across the room. He appeared like a haunting, his face veiled in shadows, his features misshapen. But then his eyes came into view, and everything else followed, and it was unmistakably him.

  She turned around, dropping the tray. The metal clattered as it hit the floor and the colors righted themselves and the light and shadows were gone.

  Billy rushed to her side. “Mrs. Houdini?”

  “It was Harry!” she cried, incredulous.

  He squinted at her. “What was Harry?”

  “His face—in the tray.” She stopped. In the mirror across the room, she saw it again—the same face she had just seen in the tray. She spun around to see a photograph of Harry, gazing at her, on the wall. It was a photograph she had hung there herself, when the tearoom first opened. His appearance in the tray had been nothing but a reflection of a photograph—something Harry himself would have laughed at her for mistaking. Not a visitation at all.

  She had to step outside. She was embarrassing herself. She told Billy that she was going over to Thirty-Fifth Street to sort out the vendor problems. “You look out for Lou and Gladys while I’m gone.”

  Apparently Billy had heard the commotion in the kitchen. “If you’re gonna fire the produce people, you could just call ’em. It’d be easier.”

  “No, no. I like to do things in person. It’s the honorable way.” She turned toward the street, still shaken. She had never admitted to anyone her hope that Harry’s return would be more than the code revealed, more even than a message that followed—that when he came to her, he would appear physically somehow. She would see him, perhaps be able to touch him. She knew she was expecting more than death allowed; even the idea that he could reach far enough across the divide to communicate the code to her was preposterous. But she hoped. Harry had always managed to achieve the impossible.

  It was already after four when she arrived back at the tearoom. The walk had served her well. After Harry’s death, she began to love the city. Its daily pandemonium was a relief from the chaos of her own mind. She loved the cathedral bells and the cramped alleys, the gold-tipped tops of the skyscrapers at dawn, the buildings lined up like army troops as far as she could see. And she loved the stone statues in the parks and the beaded dresses in the department store windows and the gnarled faces of the old men who sat on their stoops in the afternoons. She rarely went back to Brooklyn now, and only to visit Stella; she preferred Manhattan, its parade of colored taxicabs and wild energy.

  The streets were crowded with gray-suited men and women walking briskly home from their offices. She could not imagine having lived a life that stuck her to a desk for eight or ten hours a day. Stella’s husband, Fred, had worked at a bank for many years, and she knew he came home every night stooped by the tedium of the business. Really, it was the business side of running the tearoom that was the most taxing. Her argument with the produce vendors had lasted half an hour. It had ended badly; they claimed the tomatoes had been perfect when they were delivered, and Bess had had no choice but to end their contract.

  In the dining room, the remaining staff was clearing the tables and turning out the lamps. Gladys was sitting patiently by the window, her cane propped against the wall. Bess pressed her hand to her sister-in-law’s shoulder and sat down across from her, out of breath. “It’s me. I’m so sorry I’m late.”

  Gladys shrugged. “It’s very peaceful here when it empties out.” She looked, as usual, calm and well; she had worn only black since her mother’s death seventeen years prior, but she cut a trim, stylish figure, and black seemed more fashionable than miserable on her. At forty-four, she looked ten years younger, and had a childlike innocence about her. But she carried herself with a Victorian composure that defied the flapper irreverence of the era. She wound her dark hair into a tight bun at the nape of her neck and sat straight, always, two inches from the back of the chair, her ears studded with tiny pearls and her vacant blue eyes staring.

  Bess stretched her legs in front of her and reached for Gladys’s drink. “Is this gin?” She took a sip. It was water; Gladys, like Harry, almost always drank water.

  “It was a terrible thing that they
put in the papers this morning.”

  Bess pressed her hand into Gladys’s. “But you know I didn’t engineer that séance.”

  Gladys nodded reasonably. “Of course, you were tricked.”

  Bess felt her face flush. She didn’t want to be the object of anyone else’s pity, especially not Gladys’s. They had always enjoyed a cool, levelheaded friendship. And for all her life’s difficulties, Gladys had never felt sorry for herself, and Bess would be damned if she would let some gossip get to her.

  Gladys was the one person, besides Harry’s mother, who could do no wrong in his eyes. She had been almost completely blinded as a child in a gas lamp explosion, and when he died Harry had left her with a sum of money large enough for her to purchase her own small apartment and hire a sight companion, full-time. Bess had offered her a room in the town house, but Gladys had wanted to live on her own. The two women weren’t close during Harry’s lifetime, but in the years following his death their friendship had blossomed. Now they met every afternoon for cake and walked back to Gladys’s apartment together after four o’clock closing. It was the twilight hour—the tinkling spoons quieting as the room emptied out, the light settling into evening, the spring air cooling.

  As Gladys and Harry’s mother had gotten older, Gladys and Mrs. Weiss had cared for each other; they had a symbiotic relationship that worked well, each doing the things the other could not—Mrs. Weiss still had her vision but was lacking strength, and Gladys had plenty of strength but no vision. But when Mrs. Weiss died it was like a light went off in Gladys. Only with their own growing friendship had Bess seen a change in her.

  “I had a little shock this afternoon. You’ll think I’m mad, but I thought I saw Harry—here in the dining room.” She saw Gladys’s frown and added quickly, “Of course, it wasn’t him. It was a trick of the mind.” She looked over at the photograph she had seen reflected in the tray. It was one of her favorites; Harry was facing the camera with his tight, pursed smile. He looked very mysterious, which made it perfect for the tearoom, and she felt silly recalling her earlier panic. “But never mind that. What did you do this morning?”

  But something was off, she realized. There was something wrong with the photograph.

  “I did manage to get some dictation done earlier,” Gladys said—she wrote advertising copy, from home, for women’s products.

  Bess tried to listen, but she was agitated. She couldn’t put her finger on why. “Let me get you another glass of water,” she said, standing up. She wanted to examine the photograph more closely. “Keep talking, I can hear you. I’ll just run into the kitchen.”

  “I had a magazine page to do today—about soap. You can’t imagine how horribly boring it is to find something to say about soap.” Gladys had worked for the agency for so long that her blindness was hardly a disability any longer; her longtime employer, a gentleman in his early seventies, had given her the position at first as a favor to Harry. But she had shown such a knack for a quick turn of phrase that he kept her on.

  Bess stared at the photograph. Had something changed? It didn’t appear so. It was still the same Harry, in the same necktie, with the same alluring expression. But something felt different.

  It suddenly came to her. It wasn’t that the photograph had changed; it was the reflection. In the image she had seen in the tray earlier, Harry had been serious; in the photograph, he was smiling. She felt her whole body begin to tingle. It was a sensation she had experienced only a handful of times in her life, the same electricity she had felt when she’d had the vision of John Murphy so many years ago.

  In the kitchen she found the serving tray she had been using earlier. Mamie had left everything in its proper place, washed and dried, and the silver was sparkling. Taking it back into the dining room, Bess couldn’t keep herself from trembling. She was glad Gladys couldn’t see her.

  “Bess?” Gladys called. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m . . . I was just looking at this photograph.” Bess tried to remember where she had been standing when she’d seen the reflection. She had just turned away from Table 8, where Lou had been sitting. She hadn’t taken more than a step toward the kitchen when she’d seen the image in the silver. Standing in front of Table 8 again now, exactly as she had been, with her back to Harry’s photograph, she held up the tray with shaking hands.

  In the silver, she could see only the empty papered wall.

  She turned around. Harry’s photograph was on the left. It hadn’t moved; but from where she’d been standing when she first saw his face, she saw now that it couldn’t have been a reflection from the photograph. The picture was simply hung too far over to catch the mirrored surface of the tray.

  So what had she seen, exactly?

  “Which photograph?”

  Gladys’s question startled her back to clarity. But Bess could barely find the words to answer her. What could she say that wouldn’t sound cracked? “The portrait of Harry—I thought . . . I thought his expression was serious, but I’m looking at it now and he’s smiling.”

  Gladys paused. “If there’s one thing I learned from Harry,” she said from across the room, “it’s that images aren’t always what they first appear to be. Neither was he, after all. As we both know.”

  Chapter 3

  THE BEER HALL

  June 1894

  The night they were married, he came to the window with her as the moon rose, flaming like a phoenix, over the steaming white heat of the afternoon. A few blocks away, they could see a crowd of Italians swarming a carriage that was making its way slowly down the street. Inside was a woman Bess’s age, in a white veil, next to a man in a black suit, and he was kissing her passionately. The members of the crowd were throwing flowers into the carriage, and the summer blazed.

  “Do you wish that was you?” Harry frowned. “That you had a proper wedding?”

  “I don’t need all that,” she reassured him, although there was a part of her that wondered whether she would ever be as happy as that bride, who had probably known her groom since grade school; that was the way the Italians did it. It was the same with the Germans, and if she had stayed at home she would doubtless have married one of the boys she had played with in the street as a child. But she had entered into a different life now, and she would never relinquish it for afternoons stitching clothes and cutting noodles, the tedium of the Brooklyn winters and the endless counting of rosary beads after dinner.

  She turned to Harry, wondering how it was supposed to happen next, now that they were married. “I really don’t know what to call you,” she said. “And what will we call each other?”

  Harry kissed her forehead. “We’ll call each other Mr. and Mrs. Houdini.”

  “But those are just stage names. It seems odd to address you as Harry Houdini.”

  “When I was twelve,” Harry said, “after my brother Herman died, and my father’s school failed and he moved us to Milwaukee, I made him a promise that I would take care of my mother, if anything should happen to him. But I couldn’t do that there. I ran away from home, to Missouri, and I began studying magic, and I gave up on Ehrich Weiss.” A dark cloud passed over his face. “Ehrich Weiss has nothing to offer me anymore.”

  Bess felt her cheeks flush. She had never known a person to just decide he was going to be someone new, and commit to it so wholeheartedly. She felt she had entered into a world where anything could happen, where magic folded itself around them like a live thing. This was the kind of woman she wanted to be—not a timid, unripe girl, afraid of the dark, but the kind who left home and fell in love and married the man instead of waffling over him in confession for months on end. She wanted to live with Harry’s unapologetic certitude.

  Harry bent down to retrieve something from the cabinet behind him. When he turned around, he was holding a glistening bottle of champagne. Bess clapped her hands. “Where did you get that?” They’d barely had enough money to buy the rings.

  “Don’t worry about that,” he said, and then, shru
gging, “a gift from Dash.” He stuck a pocketknife into the cork, and the top popped off and shot across the room.

  Bess shrieked. “Is it supposed to do that?” Harry filled a pewter cup with the shimmering liquid and handed it to her. “Aren’t you going to have any?” she asked him.

  He shook his head. “I never drink alcohol. It slows my reflexes.”

  Bess considered her own glass. She had never had champagne before, and she’d been drunk only once in her life. “Well, fine,” she said and poured the contents down her throat in one gulp.

  Harry blinked at her, then burst out laughing. “You’ll feel that,” he said.

  Her throat was already burning. She stepped toward him and, almost imperceptibly, brushed her hand against his. “But that’s what I want,” she said. “I want to feel everything.”

  Harry stepped back and looked at her, then reached out a hand and placed it on her back, where the laces of her dress were tied. Even in the dark she could sense his uncertainty, the utter seriousness of the moment. She turned so he could untie her. He fumbled with the knots, but after some effort they came free, and the dress slid to her ankles. She stepped out of it and stood before him, shivering even in the heat. He took her hand. Her corset and drawers had yet to be removed, but she could feel the rise and fall of her chest, the white flesh visible. She lifted his hand to her and stepped against him so she could feel his breath, like a sacred thing.

  “We’re married now,” she said quietly. “You can do what you like.”

  His hand shook as he held it to her breast. “No one—no one’s ever said that to me before.”

  “You’ve never been married before.”

  “Will you sing something?” he asked her. “I like your voice.”

  She looked at him. Was it possible that he was nervous? The same Harry Houdini who had held her gaze so intensely on the beach, who was so sure she would marry him? The lyrics of an Irish love song she learned as a girl in school came rushing back to her. She hadn’t heard it in a long time, but the words had etched themselves on her and she pulled them out like tiny, glimmering threads. “I’ll take you home again, Kathleen,” she began, her voice quiet, “across the ocean wild and wide, to where your heart has ever been, since first you were my bonnie bride.”