Mrs. Houdini (27 page)

Harry rented workshop space in Midtown, and began working with Jim Collins on constructing a new trick. He had hired other assistants as well, including Jim Vickery, a tall, muscled cabinetmaker who rarely spoke but was, from the beginning, fiercely loyal to Harry. For the first time, Harry refused to tell Bess what the trick entailed. He unveiled it at Hammerstein's Theatre on a damp Friday night in October, the sidewalks silvered with puddles. The stage on which the new trick was performed was covered in deep red carpet. While Harry performed other tricks, a team of bricklayers quickly constructed a brick wall, over ten feet tall, on the stage. After the wall had been built, two black screens were brought out and positioned on either side of it.

Harry stood at the front of the stage now in the suit Bess had ironed for him that morning. It was her small contribution. Harry had a dozen men in his employ now, working as bookers or secretaries or scouts or on construction. He had the young and eager Jim Collins, of course, and Jim Vickery, and his loyal, dignified secretary, John Sargent, with his crop of white hair.

His hair, as usual, was uncombed. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he announced, in the booming stage voice that always gave her chills. “I have been preparing myself for years for a performance of this caliber. I have set out to prove to you that while you may think it impossible that one might stand in this very room and yet be somewhere else at the same time, it is quite possible. Indeed, there are realms we do not see, all around us. I have been there. Yet I cannot tell you, in good conscience, what I have witnessed. But when I walk through this wall in front of your eyes, you will know that I have been there, and come back, as the spirits do.”

Three audience members were selected to stand behind the brick wall to ensure that he could not sneak around it to the other side. Harry stood behind one of the black screens and waved his hands over the top. “I am here!” he shouted. “Now, ladies and gentlemen, I am going.” Only moments later, his hands appeared above the screen on the other side of the wall. “And now, by unknown means, I have crossed over to the other side!” his voice boomed. A stage assistant drew away the second screen, and there stood Harry, clothes and hair disheveled, panting, having crossed through solid brick.

The crowd sat in silence, dumbfounded. Harry bowed proudly.

“They're going to say I am able to dematerialize,” he had hinted that morning before he went to prepare for the show. “And I won't protest it. It is not enough to perform magic anymore. One must
be
magic as well.” He kissed her, but she turned her mouth away.

“Harry,” she murmured, “we said we were never going to do that again.” She did not want him exploiting people's beliefs.

He had responded to Dr. Stone's warnings in some unconventional ways. He had purchased the original Martin Luther Bible, with Luther's own notes in the margins, and placed it upon Edgar Allan Poe's mahogany writing desk, in his study, as if to make some kind of point about dark and light. He had also had his father reburied in the family plot he had purchased in Machpelah Cemetery, insisting on viewing what was left of the body. “There was nothing but skull and bones,” he told Bess, rushing eagerly into the house after the process was complete. “Father's teeth were in surprisingly excellent condition.”

Now he frowned at her accusations. “This isn't the same as making up stories about people's dead cousins, Bess. This is different. It is the Great Mystery.”

“What is the Great Mystery?” she asked him.

He smiled his serene, magician's smile. “Where I go when I am gone.”

On April 14 the RMS
Titanic
collided with an iceberg during her maiden voyage. The
Carpathia,
which had rescued some of the survivors from the water, came into port in New York a few days later. Forty thousand people waited on the docks for their arrival, Bess and Harry among them. The mood was frenzied. Some of those waiting recognized Harry and asked if he could communicate with those lost. Harry looked stricken by the suggestion; on flyers thin as tissue paper, representatives of the Metropolitan Opera distributed advertisements for a benefit concert in which the opera star Mary Garden would perform “Nearer My God to Thee.”

The solemnity of the tragedy bled into the summer, and even the fall. One could not travel without fear anymore. Bess and Harry said good-bye to Mrs. Weiss in New York the week following Harry's diagnosis. He had been invited to Copenhagen to perform for the Danish royal family. It was a pearl-gray morning in October, and a large crowd had gathered at the dock. There were to be two celebrities on board the ship—Harry Houdini, famous magician, and Theodore Roosevelt, former president of the United States. Neither Bess nor Harry had ever met the president, but Harry was determined to make his acquaintance, and Bess had dressed herself carefully that morning in preparation. She looked about the dock for Mr. Roosevelt but did not see him.

Mrs. Weiss looked awfully small, Bess thought, against the massiveness of the ship floating at the pier. She was dressed in black silk, as she always was when seeing Harry off, as a way of mourning his departure. She clung to Harry's arm and shuffled beside him toward the gangplank.

Harry clasped his mother's hand. “It's only for a month,” he said. “John Sargent is going to look after you, and he can arrange for anything you need.”

“You know, I'm old,” she replied with a small smile. “Perhaps when you come back, I shall not be here.”

Harry laughed. “Nonsense. You only like to say those things so I will tell you I love you.”

Bess kissed Mrs. Weiss's cheek. “Good-bye, Mother.” She picked up her bag quickly, before Harry could do it. Neither of them had told his mother of his kidney, and Bess didn't want him to wince and give it away; it would only worry Mrs. Weiss. They had argued through the night after Dr. Stone left, and Harry had promised her they would take a three-week vacation after Copenhagen, and he would rest in Provence, on the condition that she keep the secret from his mother while he recovered.

Mrs. Weiss shook her hand free of Harry's. “Go.”

Harry turned to the crowd that was watching them. “Look, my mother drives me away from her!” They broke out in laughter. Bess flushed; Harry was always the performer, even at the most inconvenient moments.

Bess envied Mrs. Weiss that she had a son like Harry; but at the same time she felt sorry for the woman. Mrs. Weiss was seventy-one already and increasingly fragile each day, and she had spent the majority of her life saying good-bye to those she loved—her husband, her oldest son, and even Harry, for months at a time, when he traveled around the world doing his magic. Bess, at least, could say that she'd been by his side every night since they met.

“Just go quickly,” Mrs. Weiss said, patting his hand, “and come back safely.”

Harry pulled Bess up the stairs onto the ship's deck. The passengers were waving their hats and cream-colored gloves, shouting and crying. On the pier, the crowd of Harry's admirers cheered and called his name. The passengers on the boat threw out lines of red paper streamers toward those on the dock. Mrs. Weiss caught Harry's, and as the ship glided slowly away from the dock, Harry leaned farther and farther over the rail, the long wisp of paper dangling between him and his mother, until it snapped and the ends wafted into the murky water.

When the dock was out of sight he turned to Bess, his face already green with seasickness. “Strange how I am a grown man, and still it always feels the same to say good-bye to my mother.” He blushed.

“Let's go to the dining hall before you become too ill to eat,” she replied.

Harry bowed to her ceremoniously. “What would I do without you to keep track of my meals?”

Bess laughed. “You may be weak on ships, but you're quite strong in character.”

Harry smirked. “Now, we both know stubbornness is not the same as strength of character. It's true, though. I'm helpless as a child without you.”

She wrapped her arms around his waist and helped him across the deck. The other passengers watched them, some of the men stopping to clap Harry on the shoulder or shake his hand. Some were amazed that a man like him could be made ill so easily by the ocean. What they didn't understand was that, in all his feats, he was in control; but even his immense abilities were powerless compared to the mighty ocean, writhing like an animal beneath them. Yet this would be a different voyage from their first, years earlier; this time they had a spacious room with a large window, and a butler, and a bed layered in cream silk sheets. Never in her life had Bess imagined she would be quarantined on a ship with a former president of the United States. She imagined dining next to him at tables set with heavy silver.

“It's going to be a helluva trip,” Harry said.

But Bess didn't answer. She was staring into the water at the wake.

“Bess? Darling, are you all right? Don't tell me you're ill now, too.”

She turned to him with a look of horror on her face. “Look there,” she said, pointing. “Do you see it?”

He clutched his stomach and leaned over the railing, staring at the white crests of the waves. “Look at what?”

She leaned over again, this time her eyes scanning the water frantically. “It's gone.”

“What's gone?”

“I don't—I don't understand. I saw—”

He gripped her arm. “What is it? What did you see? Tell me.”

“It was strange. It was a vision of your mother, in the water. Like a reflection in a pool.” Bess craned her head so she could still see the dock full of waving onlookers, like toy soldiers saluting. “It's probably nothing,” she said, seeing Harry's terrified face. “Just my mind playing tricks on me.” She wondered if she was coming down with whatever malady Harry had and was hallucinating. Still, she couldn't help thinking that the souls of the
Titanic
passengers were trapped somewhere beneath the trembling waters. One could not travel now without imagining what it must have been like to cling to the rails of the ship in that black night.

“Let's go inside for lunch,” she said. “It's terribly chilly out here.”

On the second day of the voyage Harry reported to Bess that he had met the president on the deck, doing his morning exercises. The two had walked to breakfast together, and in the dining hall the ship's captain had approached and asked Harry if he would perform as a medium for the passengers.

“What did you say?” Bess asked. “Did you agree?” Recently Harry had begun introducing medium tricks into his act, although he was careful never to claim, as he had long ago, that he was possessed of supernatural powers.

Harry pursed his lips together. “I looked at Mr. Roosevelt, and he said, ‘Go on, Mr. Houdini. Give us a little séance.' So I had to agree. But it's all in fun.”

Bess frowned. “Be careful. This is the president you're performing for, after all. You don't want to frighten him.”

Harry smiled his small, confident smile. “Don't you worry, Mrs. Houdini. I've got a trick or two up my sleeve.”

“You mean you're not going to tell me what you're planning?”

“I think I'll make it a surprise.”

“You'll have to avoid eating beforehand, remember, so you don't get sick and vomit all over Mr. Roosevelt.” Bess kissed him. “What is he like? What kind of man is he?” A few years earlier, Roosevelt had refused to shoot a bear cub he'd been gifted by a group of hunters in Mississippi, and Bess had admired him since.

“He's quite a lively fellow.” Harry drew a deck of cards out of his pocket and began shuffling. “I rather like the man. You'll like him, too, I'm certain.”

The “reading” took place in the ship's first-class library that evening. It seemed to Bess that the entire roster of first-class passengers was in attendance; the room was filled to capacity, the crew having to bring chairs from the dining hall to accommodate them all.