Mrs. Houdini (26 page)

She realized that in the hours after Harry had taken her to the train station, he had gone back to the beer hall, back to the beautiful, exotic Evatima Tardo, and he had made love to her. He had laid his naked body across hers, and put his mouth against hers, and he had given her himself. And a child. The child he could never give to Bess.

She could not think clearly. She stood up and went over to the fireplace. Charles followed her. He put his hand on her shoulder. “What's wrong?” he asked. “Are you all right?”

“This can't be,” she whispered.

“What can't be?” Charles frowned.

Harry had sent her to Atlantic City, of course. He had sent her those messages, through the photographs, and led her to Charles. But why would he do such a thing? To hurt her? She had expected his message from the grave to be a profession of love, of reassurance, and instead he had brought her to the doorstep of this man—this boy, really—to confess to her that their marriage had been nothing but a lie.

Perhaps, if she had been able to have children of her own, the blow would not have been so fierce. She had never forgiven herself for those moments with John Young. But—she hadn't gone through with it, in the end. She had been faithful to Harry. And for what? For her whole life to culminate in his indiscretion?

She wondered how long he would have known. Evatima must have sent him that photograph of Charles as a boy. So why had Harry never acknowledged him? Why had he never told Bess, especially after Evatima died, when he knew how desperately she wanted a child? It was cruel, and so unlike the Harry she knew. But then again, it was possible she hadn't really known him at all.

She looked at Charles. She could not help seeing the betrayal in him, Harry's hypocrisy when he had demanded her own loyalty with such forcefulness. She thought back on all the moments of tenderness they had shared and wondered if he had ever really loved her. Or had he simply been trying to assuage his own guilt with gestures of affection? And why had he made her promise to keep looking for him after he died? She had given up three years waiting for him to reach her, only to have dredged up a secret she wished had remained buried.

He should have let her go. He should have let her remarry, become a mother to some other man's children, or a grandmother, and live out her days in some two-bedroom house by the ocean, where she could have spent her afternoons watching the ripples of waves, like tiny dunes, rolling across the water. All the men who had pursued her, whom she had turned away, the kind ones, the widowers, with soft eyes and hands, men who had loved fishing and listening to the radio on weekday nights—what had become of them? And what would have become of her, if she had chosen that kind of life instead?

Charles looked frightened. He was staring at her, mute. She realized she must seem crazed.

“Do you really have no idea?” she demanded. She wondered if Harry had been hiding Charles's photograph all along in the house they shared together, as man and wife, and gazing upon it when she had gone to bed. It was unbearable, to imagine this kind of deception.

Charles shook his head. “No idea about what?”

No; it wasn't possible. Harry would not have betrayed her in such a way. Her mind was racing; there had to be another explanation.

What if Charles was
not
Harry's son? What if Harry had not orchestrated their meeting at all? What if her “discoveries” were merely coincidences that had led her to Charles, and he had taken advantage of this by leading her to believe he was Harry's son? It would not have been impossible for him, working for a newspaper, to do a little digging after they'd met, and manage to contact some of their old Coney Island friends. Someone else besides her surely remembered that night, their sudden departure from their own party and Harry's flirtations with Evatima.

“You want me to think you are his son.”

Charles stared at her. “Whose son?”

“Harry's.”

Charles took a step backward, alarmed, and then laughed. “You've got to be joking. Are you telling me this photograph is in your house because . . . I'm Harry Houdini's son?”

“Please leave,” she said quietly. “I'm sorry I invited you here.”

Charles stood there, frozen. “I didn't deceive you. I don't know why you would think that. But I'm not going to stay where I'm not welcome.”

He seemed—was it possible?—hurt. His eyes were wide, and he looked suddenly much like the boy in the photograph, young and open—the boy who might have been hers. He put the photograph in his pocket and turned to the door. And then he had gone, and the dog had run upstairs to hide, and the streetlights glowed in the empty dark, and Bess had never felt so utterly, completely alone.

“It is my duty to inform you that by continuing your present regimen you would be committing suicide.” Dr. Stone tapped Harry's test results with his forefinger. “You must reconcile yourself, Harry, to the fact that your strenuous days are over.”

Bess's jaw dropped, but Harry put his arm around her shoulders and laughed loudly. “How long do you give me?”

Dr. Stone did not look amused. “If you continue as at present, you will be dead within a year.”

“Harry!” Bess said.

Harry shook his head and smiled wryly. “Impossible.”

“I assure you, it is quite possible. I see patients die every day from lesser conditions. But yours—this ruptured blood vessel in your kidney—it is quite dangerous.” Dr. Stone sighed. “Don't be a fool, Harry. Take some time off. No more of these straitjacket escapes. No more stunts. You have other tricks to rely on.”

The audience never knows whether the stunt is easy or hard,
Harry had once confided to Bess.
Sometimes a stunt that looks easy is in fact exceedingly difficult.
The wet sheet escape he had been performing in Pittsburgh for the past week was a perfect example. For the escape, he had recruited hospital attendants to bind him with sheets and bandages—mummify him, he said—and then pour buckets of water over the bindings. Escaping from these soaking cloths was one of the most physically taxing feats he had ever accomplished, although no one knew this but Bess. The stunt had not been nearly as well received as the time he transported a handkerchief to the top of the Statue of Liberty, or the time he escaped, hanging upside down, from a giant milk jug filled with water.

He was not yet forty, but his body was revealing signs of strain; Bess had started plucking white hairs from his head with tweezers. He could not bear to show any weakness at all. He began spending more time meditating at the cemetery but refused to buy a plot for himself or for Bess. He behaved erratically sometimes, playing silly tricks on Bess at home and concocting various entertaining schemes. Before the Pittsburgh engagement, he had taken Bess, Gladys, and Mrs. Weiss on a vacation to a resort in the Catskills and, in the middle of the first night, had woken his mother by pouring a chest full of gold coins—his salary from a previous engagement—around her sleeping form.

Mrs. Weiss had sat up in bed, terrified, thinking she was drowning. Harry had been giddy as a schoolboy. “Look, Mother! It's all yours!” He'd run his fingers through the gold. “Look what I brought you!”

Mrs. Weiss had looked around her in amazement. She had never possessed so much wealth in her life and had never—especially not during those early, harsh Wisconsin winters—imagined so much existed.

Gladys, who was sleeping in the other bed, had woken next. Harry had pressed a piece of the heavy gold into his sister's hand. “See what I've done,” he'd told her. “This is yours.”

“What is this?” Gladys had rubbed the coin with her thumb.

“It's gold. And it's real.”

Bess had watched the festivities from the doorway, smiling a small, tight smile. She had tried to reconcile with her own mother, only to find the old neighborhood changed, Mrs. Rahner's mind nearly gone. “How can I forgive you?” the withered woman had asked, staring up at her, confused. “I don't even know you.”

But it was her sister Ada whose aging haunted Bess. The toothless baby was now a girl of eighteen; she looked startlingly like Bess had at that age. For years Stella had passed along news of the family, as their siblings moved out of New York one by one, leaving only Ada at home—but the others had wanted nothing to do with Bess, and she was almost always traveling.

“I read about you in the papers,” Ada had said shyly. “You're very rich.”

“Not very. Only a little rich. Have you gotten the money I've sent?”

She'd nodded. “Mother said it was the devil's money, but she kept it anyway.” Ada had stepped toward her. “Are you staying tonight?” Her voice rose a little in desperation.

“I can't stay,” Bess had said softly. “I'm married now. I live with my husband.”

“Harry Houdini.”

“Yes.”

“You're lucky,” Ada had said. “You got out.” The wistfulness in her voice had shattered Bess.

Now she could see Harry becoming more and more enamored with this wealth—even if only to give it away—and this worried her. The irony of his situation was not lost on her; he flaunted his gold while obsessing over death—that vast, black arena where one's treasures could not go. Then, in the pink hours of the Catskills morning, as if in response to her fears, Harry had woken her with a small shake.

“Bess,” he'd whispered, terrified. “I've just been to the toilet. I've passed some blood.”

Bess had called Dr. Stone to Pittsburgh as soon as they arrived. Harry had refused to cancel his show and go back to New York, and so the medical tests were performed in the early hours of the morning, before the day's work began. Dr. Stone slept in the room adjacent to theirs in the hotel; more than once Bess hurried him into their bedroom in the middle of the night, where Harry was writhing in pain, grasping a pillow and shimmering with sweat.

She wished Harry would reconcile himself to the fact that he would never be—as he hoped—invincible. A few months earlier, during a bridge jump into the dark, churning waters of New York Harbor, a corpse had floated to the surface as he sank to the bottom. Bess, along with a thousand spectators, had initially thought the corpse was Harry's, until he appeared a few moments later, his head coming to the surface within a foot of the dead man's arm. Looking over to find the grayed mass bobbing beside him, Harry could not breathe. Flailing in the water, tangled in a cluster of weeds, he'd had to be rescued and dragged to land. For days, neither Bess nor Harry could rid themselves of the image of the man's dark open eyes.

But instead of succumbing to Dr. Stone's diagnosis, Harry resisted it. He declared his new ambition to be buried alive. He had mastered the art of managing his breath, and dirt, he reasoned, would be little different from water. He had Jim Collins bury him, manacled, under one foot of earth, and then two, while he practiced his escapes. Each time it took only a few minutes for him to break free, pushing out of the dirt like a mole. But when Jim put him in a hole at six feet—the depth at which he was intending to perform—he did not emerge. Bess felt a crazed and paralyzing chill come over her, but Jim's eyes were fixed on his watch. He had been instructed to go in after Harry at exactly four and a half minutes. After four excruciating minutes Harry burst into the daylight, choking for air, his face and eyelids black with dirt.

That night when they got home, Harry was very quiet. He lay on the bed with his eyes closed for a long time. Bess lay next to him, afraid to disturb him. When she thought he was asleep, she crept out of the bed and went over to the closet to change into her dressing gown.

She had removed her shirtwaist and drawers when she heard a noise behind her. She turned to see Harry standing there in the dark, watching her. “I thought you were asleep,” she said, startled. “Did I wake you?”

He didn't answer. He pushed her against the bedroom wall and pulled her stockings off. “What are you doing, Harry?” she asked. “Are you all right?”

“Are you afraid?” His voice was very quiet.

“No,” she said, honestly.

When she was undressed, he turned her around, so that her back was against the blue flowered wallpaper.

She didn't make a sound. Instead she found herself moving as if she were detached from herself, as if she were watching another woman from above. He wrapped his arms around her waist. It felt like she was being filled when she had been empty. She and Harry had not made love this way since they were first married, not with this kind of passion. She turned, lifted her legs, and wrapped them around his waist, and when it was over, she did not feel lonely anymore.

“You can't do the burial stunt again,” she said.

“I know.” Harry avoided her eyes. “I feel like a failure.”

“One failed trick doesn't make you a failure.”

“Everyone wonders where people go when they leave this place. I want to perform a trick that makes it seem as if I have gone there, too. To wherever it is people go when they are invisible. But then I will come back again.”

Bess wondered if he was purposely avoiding speaking explicitly of death. Instead she said, “I don't want you to go,” and he laughed.

“Of course I'm not really
going
anywhere.”

“But if you could, hypothetically—if you could really see the other side, I mean—you would.”

Harry thought about it. “Yes,” he said. “I would go there. If I could come back.”

She thought she had a sense of what he was intending to do. He had focused his whole career on pretending to escape death, and now he set his sights on walking into it.