Mrs. Houdini (20 page)

If she had thought London dazzling, then Budapest at the turn of the century was even more so. It was the era of the great Hungarian poets—Endre Ady and Mihály Babits, writers she had heard of—and the streets were lined with small coffeehouses with wood-paneled walls and firelit rooms where both men and women bent over books and porcelain cups of hot beverages. Bess wondered why Rabbi and Mrs. Weiss had ever left such a place. There had been some kind of celebration recently, and the buildings were still hung with colored banners.

They entered the city in the pink twilight, the streets echoing with hoofbeats on the hardwood blocks of the great avenues, which were lined with enormous green topiaries. In the carriage on the way to the boardinghouse, Bess looked over at Mrs. Weiss and saw that her eyes were filled with tears. She was gripping her son's hand, but the other hand, the one holding her handkerchief, was white as bone. Bess imagined she was remembering the last time she had been here, with Rabbi Weiss, so many years before, and how young they must have been then, their unlined faces shining on these very streets.

“Has it changed a great deal?” she asked Mrs. Weiss.

The old woman looked toward her, starry-eyed. “Oh, very much. It seems so much . . . more colorful than I remember. All my memories of it are black and gray.”

“I imagine my life would be very different if you had not chosen to leave. So I'm grateful that you did,” Bess told her.

They stopped at the entrance to a cramped alley, and Harry got out to check on the rooms. Across the street was a covered market, shuttered now with canvas for the evening. Mrs. Weiss shook her head. “Sometimes I wonder—if we had stayed in Pest, would things have been better than they ended up being in America? My husband might not have died so young, and Gladys wouldn't have been injured. And maybe Ehrich wouldn't have left home.”

Bess looked around at the paint peeling from the sides of the buildings. Surely this hadn't been what Harry had had in mind? He had planned this trip with such care. “No,” she said. “He would have left no matter where you lived. It's just the way he is.”

“Yes.” Mrs. Weiss nodded. “He is always looking for what is out there.”

The boardinghouse occupied a narrow space between a grocery and a butcher's shop; inside, the rooms were hardly six feet wide, each fitting only a small bed and a chair. The bathroom was cramped and dirty, at the end of a long hall, and the whole building smelled of cow meat.

The accommodations didn't startle Mrs. Weiss. “
És ist schon,
Harry,” she said, studying the view from the window. “It's lovely.”

But, as Bess had anticipated, Harry was crestfallen by all the dust. He and Bess usually stayed in lodgings like these, but he had spent more money than they usually did on his mother's room, which was still small and dirty.

Mrs. Weiss waved her hand. “You must leave me now,” she said. “I'm tired.” Bess imagined it must be difficult for her to have returned to the home she had left so many years ago; when she said good-bye, she must have assumed it would be forever. People who left during those years rarely made it home again. Now she was reunited with the old city, except it was larger and more glamorous than it had been thirty years earlier. There were green parks, and fountains, and stone music halls that had not been there before. Certainly, she could not help being saddened that the place she had loved had become better without her; that she had left for a better life that had disappointed her, and stood now in a past that had blossomed alone.

Through his mother's uncle Heller, whom Harry had contacted upon their arrival, Bess and Harry had planned the surprise party. Uncle Heller gathered everyone who still lived in the old neighborhood and had known the Weisses and took them across Liberty Square toward the Royal Hotel, which Harry had learned was the most luxurious hotel in the city. He and Bess escorted Mrs. Weiss privately into the courtyard of the massive building, where Harry presented her with the voluminous black gown he had purchased in London.

“This,” he said, smoothing the fabric, “was made for Queen Victoria.” He looked shyly at the ground. “Now it is yours.”

Mrs. Weiss cradled the dress in her arms like a fragile child. “What do you mean?” She looked up, confused, at the building with its wide windows and enormous gray cupolas. “This place is like a church,” she said. “It is like I am getting married. What are we doing here?”

Harry beamed. “Father never would have imagined I would one day bring you back here like this.” He had planned a reception in the palm garden salon, which had been a feat unto itself, as the salon was never used for hosting private parties. Bess, however, had stepped in and won over the management with Harry's story. She had explained how he wanted to crown his mother as a queen, for a few hours. The sentimentality of the plot appealed to the manager. “For so worthy a cause,” he told them, “you may have the room for nothing.”

When Mrs. Weiss had changed into the dress, Harry led her into the salon, where everyone she had known once who was able to come waited to surprise her. She had not seen any of them in decades; to only a few had she written letters. Uncle Heller, her mother's brother and the family patriarch, had disapproved of her marriage to Rabbi Weiss, and he had disapproved of her move to America. He had told her it would end in disaster. Now, here she was, an old woman standing in the finest hotel in Budapest, in Queen Victoria's gown, and her son was famous, and the walls were papered in gold leaf and she did not have that old life in the squalor of New York any longer, she had only this life, here.

The salon was decorated with black-and-white floor tiles, tapestries, palms, and gilded furniture. In the center of the room was a bubbling blue fountain, the water arcing over the head of a tiny cherub. Mrs. Weiss rested her hands on the edge of the fountain and bent her head.

Bess was alarmed. “Are you all right, Mother?”

“I was just thinking how two weeks ago I was looking at the Sears catalog, thinking that twenty cents for a bread toaster seemed so much. And now here I am standing on the other side of the world in Queen Victoria's dress.”

“Ehrich does love you very much. I can only hope I have a son one day who loves me just as much.”

The manager entered the room wearing an expensive suit of clothes, the kind that was reserved for royalty. He kissed Mrs. Weiss's hand and knelt before her on one knee. One by one, the other guests, including Harry, knelt as well. The moment had been orchestrated to the last detail.

“Welcome to our establishment,” the manager said. “My mother passed away last year, but she would have been proud to see me open this room to you today.”

“You are like a fairy queen,” Bess whispered, placing a hand on her shoulder. “You are resplendent.”

Mrs. Weiss nodded mutely, staring around her in amazement. A line of waiters entered, bearing cups of black coffee and trays of small iced cakes.

Bess stepped aside to allow them to wait on Mrs. Weiss first. “You are happy, though?”

“Oh, yes,” she said, taking a cake off the tray. “I keep thinking I'm going to do something wrong. Everyone's looking at me. And I don't know how to be wealthy.”

“No one really knows how to be wealthy,” Bess said. “Except maybe the king and queen.”

“No.” Mrs. Weiss shook her head. “You'll be a very good wealthy woman one day. You have vigor.”

Bess laughed.

“Did Harry ever tell you that I was a widow when I married the rabbi?”

“You were? I didn't know that.”

“Yes. I married my first husband when I was just seventeen. But we were only married for six months. He got involved with some bad men, and lost a great deal of money, and there was an argument over it. He died in a duel.”

Bess grabbed her sleeve. “That's terrible!”

She looked around the room. “It was a great scandal. Even my family was ashamed. These people I knew once, they came to this party, but that's still what they all see now, when they look at me.” She paused. “I met the rabbi a few years later, and he was much older than I was, but he loved me, and he didn't care that I was a widow. So I married him.”

“But did you love him?” Bess asked.

“In time, I did. But you see, when Harry brought you home, I could tell how much you already loved him back. That's why I liked you. Because I knew you'd give him what I never gave my husband.” She reached for Bess's hand. “Don't worry,” she said. “You'll have a child. God wouldn't make you only to leave you alone.”

Bess looked at the floor. “I'm not alone, though. I have Harry.”

“He's a good boy,” Mrs. Weiss said, patting Bess's hand. “But I can tell he still leaves you lonely sometimes.”

Bess glanced at Harry; he was standing in the corner of the room, quietly observing the proceedings. Bess felt a pang of despair. She did feel alone, the only stranger in this salon, among a roomful of people who had once shared a life together. She wondered if Harry felt toward her the same fierce love and sense of duty he felt toward his mother. His black eyes took in the room, proudly. He didn't stand with her, or look out for her. He seemed, in fact, to have forgotten her entirely.

Still, Mrs. Weiss was right. She loved him with a wonder that crushed the flesh against her chest.

“I will never betray you,” she had sworn to him, years ago on the golden beach of Coney Island. She had taken a vow, and meant it. And she could be angry with him, or hurt. But she could never un-love him.

In the crisp white sheets of her hotel room, Bess woke in a cold sweat. “Harry?” She reached for the pillow beside her. “Darling, I thought I heard something.”

He was not there. The room was dark except for the sliver of yellow light from the hallway under the door. The space beside her was cool, the sheets unwrinkled. With slow awareness, she put her hands to her face and felt the creped, tender skin under her eyes. She was not in her twenties anymore; she was much older, and Harry was gone. The sea air coming through the window covered her like a fine mist.

Charles had invited her to his offices, not far from her hotel. But there was still the problem of Stella. Bess longed to tell her what she was really doing here in New Jersey. Stella had never understood why Bess had continued to devote herself to Harry wholeheartedly after his death. It should have been a new beginning, she said; but to Bess, Harry's death had never been an end. Besides her financial burdens, she could not rid herself of the knowledge that Harry was desperate to reach her, and that the message he intended for her carried enormous weight. Yet she had, from the minute he closed his eyes for the last time, clung to the hope that it would not be just his words that would reach her but his voice, his whole form. Surely, such a course existed. She liked to think that the dead were separated from the living by a matter almost like cement—fluid, liquid for the first years after death, until it hardened and became impassable. She had to reach him while she still could.

Stella was sitting at the breakfast table in the sitting room, reading the morning papers in a white lace nightgown. She looked up when she saw Bess.

“Good morning,” she said, gesturing toward the window. “It's an absolutely divine day. We must get dressed and go to the beach.”

Bess leaned down and kissed her on the cheek. “Of course. I have to run out for an hour or so first to sign some paperwork.”

Stella sighed. “You work too hard, you know.” Bess raised her eyebrows, and Stella laughed. “I just wish you'd sell the tearoom and let Fred and me help you out with money, now that we finally have some. You always helped us and the kids out. Now it's our turn.”

Bess shook her head. “I
like
running the tearoom. You just want me to sell it because it has Harry's name on the door.”

“Even if it isn't making any profit?”

“It is making a profit!”

“You can't fool me.” Stella sighed. “Fred knows business. And he says you don't know a thing about running one. You shouldn't be giving away as much food and drink as you do.”

Bess winced. Fred was right; she didn't know anything about keeping books or calculating margins of profit. She knew how to throw a party, and she knew how to fit her body into a wooden trunk; that was all she knew, and little good either of them did her now.

“If you feel the need to criticize,” she said coldly, “you're welcome to stay at home the next time I have an event.”

Stella set down her teacup. “Oh, come on. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to make you angry. I just meant—at least let Fred give you some advice.”

“I'll think about it.” Bess had told Stella the extent of her debts, but she hadn't shared her belief that Harry had left her with a way to extricate herself from them. She hid her desperate, late-night searches of the house from her sister. Stella would call her a fool.