Mrs. Houdini (5 page)

Then, two months ago, Arthur Ford had come into her tearoom. He was a man of God. She had sensed that there was something different about him. He had kissed her, and promised her honesty, and Bess was convinced that he, of all people, could contact Harry. In the end, it was she who had asked him for a séance.

Ford continued. “This is the code. It is ten words.” Bess nodded; that was correct. She pulled her white silk robe closer around her shoulders. “And it is: Rosabel. Answer. Tell. Pray. Answer. Look. Tell. Answer. Answer. Tell.” The room was completely silent, the eyes of all the witnesses focused on Bess. “He wants you to tell him whether they are right or not.”

Bess was still. “Yes,” she said at last. “Yes, they are.” There was a murmur of amazement from the witnesses.

Ford opened his eyes. “Harry smiles and says thank you. Now I can go on. He tells you to take off your wedding ring and tell them what Rosabel means.”

She had lost so much weight in her widowed years that the ring slid easily off her finger. She traced the letters engraved on the inside. She held it out, trembling, for Ford to inspect, and she heard, from somewhere long ago, the words of the song:
Rosabel, sweet Rosabel, I love her more than I can tell, over me she casts a spell, my charming black-eyed Rosabel . . .

I'll come back for you,
Harry had promised. On his deathbed, he had struggled to convey a message he was unable to finish.

“And now, the words we just established—
answer, tell, pray,
and so on—signify another word in your code, which used common phrases or groups of phrases to indicate certain letters,” Ford's voice went on. “And that word after Rosabel is
believe
. The message Harry wants to send back to you is ‘Rosabel, believe.' Is that right?”

Bess looked at him, stunned. “Is it possible?” she whispered. “Is he really—is he really here?” The sounds of the city seemed to rush in upon her like a great wind. She could hear rain outside, sheets of it pounding on the sidewalk. “Someone close the windows, please!” she cried.

“But—they are closed,” she heard the editor's wife say.

“Mrs. Houdini? Are you all right?” another voice asked. There was commotion in the room; chairs scraped against the floor. Someone leaned over her.

Then she heard Ford's voice, louder than before. “He says, ‘Tell the whole world that Harry still lives!'”

Across the room, the door burst open. “What is this intrusion?” she heard Ford cry out. “What is going on?”

Bess's eyes focused again. Her sister Stella was pushing her way through the semicircle of chairs, her hair matted with rain under a black cloche hat. She stood dripping beside Bess's couch.

“Bess, don't believe it!” she cried. “It's all a hoax. This woman”—she pointed to one of the journalists—“has already sent a story to the
Graphic
that accuses you of faking this séance! It's going to be the biggest scandal since the Ponzi scheme.”

Ford stood up. “What do you think you are doing?”

“Bess,” Stella urged, wringing the bottom of her dress, “Ford's known the code all along. He didn't get it through Harry just now. The message has already been printed in Rea Jaure's story. And the story's going to say that Harry and I were sleeping together, and that he told
me
the message, and I gave it to Ford, and you knew all along, and we're all a bunch of fakes.”

Bess shook her head. She swung her body around to look at Ford and then back at Stella. “But—that's impossible. That was—our private message. No one knew it but Harry and me.”

“No.” Stella shook her head. “Someone else knew. One of the nurses heard him say it in the hospital, and she sold the information to Ford.” She glared at him from across the room. “
Rosabel, believe.
That's it, isn't it?”

The editor's wife gasped. “How could you know that? We've only all just heard it for the first time.”

Bess looked at Ford, her eyes steely with anger. “Is this true, Arthur? Were you just manipulating me this whole time?” She felt like a fool. How could she have been so naïve?

Ford learned toward her and reached for her elbow. A combed-back strand of hair fell over his forehead. His eyes were wide with disbelief. And yet there was a glimmer in his voice of something she hadn't recognized before—the overenunciated diction of a lie. “Darling, no. It's real, I promise. Harry was here.”

“It's all going to come out tomorrow, Bess,” Stella said.

“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.