Mrs. Houdini

by Victoria Kelly

  But he was already striding over to the window and undoing the ties. “It’s all right. It hasn’t been very successful at drawing customers. I was going to replace it with something else. I thought it was elegant, but I think I need something flashier.”

  Bess kissed him on the cheek. “Oh, you’re a doll!” she cried. “And don’t worry about your business. I’ll make sure all my friends come in and buy something expensive from you.”

  She hauled the cardboard through the alley and left it against the outside wall of the tearoom. Then she went back inside in search of Gladys. Niall was blotto, leaning against the doorway, a dreamy look in his eyes. “I love this place, Bess,” he murmured. “It feels like home.”

  “You looking for your friend?” She turned to see the man with the sweaty underarms, holding a cigarette in each hand. “The blind one?”

  “Yes. Where did she go?”

  “She left with some fella. Said to tell you he would get her home.”

  “She did?” Bess was alarmed for a moment, then laughed to herself. “Well, that’s something.”

  She brought the picture of the yacht inside and leaned it against the wall in front of her. There were other white boats in the background, their names obscured, and in the distance, a striped lighthouse, a thin beam of light stretched across the water. It must have been some kind of yachting club.

  But she noticed something new. The photographer’s name, Charles Radley—scrawled in black ink in the corner—had been obscured in the window by the mannequin. Bess had never heard of him. Beneath his name, the photograph was dated April 2, 1925.

  The issue of The Delineator was still on the coffee table. She sat down on the sofa and turned the pages with trembling hands. There she was, that girl Kathleen still staring out at her, the look in her eyes penetrating—as if, all those years ago, she’d known—and the words “Home Again” blurred behind her.

  Bess tore out the photograph of Kathleen. On the bottom edge of the magazine page, there was also a photographer’s name, printed in italic letters so small she had to squint to decipher it, the words barely visible as they ran against the corner of the bathhouse.

  “Charles Radley,” it read.

  Chapter 5

  THE CIRCUS

  July 1894

  They joined the Welsh Brothers circus in the green, sleepy town of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, arriving at the train station in the thrashing nighttime rain. No one was waiting to greet them, and as the platform cleared they managed to find the stationmaster and asked him where the circus tents were. He directed them to a field three miles away, toward the center of town, but they had no money to spare and walked the distance in the mud and darkness. Each of them hauled a heavy trunk, one almost half filled with playing cards. Bess had come up with the idea to make up special packs of cards and sell them between their acts, along with the secret to a sleight-of-hand trick.

  They arrived at the field drenched and exhausted. They had eaten the last of their food—bread and cheese—on the train, and hadn’t had a meal for hours. Around them half a dozen tattered tents had been erected, and a dozen trucks parked, but there were no people. Everyone, it appeared, was inside taking shelter from the rain. They stopped in a little alley between two of the tents, panting.

  “Hey, you!” a voice called to them in the darkness. Bess looked around and saw a light burning in the distance. A figure was standing in a doorway that had been cut into the back of one of the trucks. “You the Houdinis?”

  “Oh, thank God,” she said to Harry. “We’ve been found.”

  The figure waved them toward the truck, and they discovered that the inside had been cleared out and done over as makeshift living quarters, with a few cots and a table and chair. A gas lamp was burning on the table, and Bess could make out the rounded, sweating face of the figure who had called them over, a heavyset man in greased black pants and loose suspenders.

  “I’m Welsh,” he said. “You’re the Houdinis, right?”

  Harry nodded. “Harry and Bess.” His uneasiness was noticeable immediately to Bess. She had known him only a short time, but she already felt she could read his slightest expressions. Welsh was intimidating, and much larger than Harry.

  Welsh sat down at the table and thumbed through a notebook. He didn’t motion for them to sit, but even if he had, there were no other seats besides the bed, and Bess certainly did not feel comfortable sitting on another man’s cot. “What do you do?” he asked, pulling out a pen.

  Harry shrugged. “Anything.”

  Welsh nodded. “You two do Punch and Judy. And mind reading. Houdini, you do the magic, the wife singing and dancing, and of course your trunk trick, and the handcuff act. Twenty-five a week and cakes.”

  Bess glanced at Harry to see if he knew what cakes were, but she couldn’t catch his eye. Harry didn’t seem concerned. He pushed his hand forward and grasped Welsh’s. “That’s fine.”

  Welsh led them to another car, where their own living space had been partitioned off from another, larger space, which appeared to house a group of men. The men were playing cards and nodded to them as they passed through but didn’t look up. There was nothing in the room they had been assigned but a narrow cot—no space even for a table. The division between their space and the men’s was nothing but a thin piece of wood. She could hear every word they were saying. They seemed to be the rougher ones that Harry had called canvas men.

  Harry was horrified. “This is worse than Coney Island,” he said. “I thought we were here for something better.”

  Bess took his hand and led him over to the bed. “This is fine,” she said, pulling off his soaking shirt and handing him a dry one. “This is all we need.” She smoothed his hair and kissed him. “We’re living simply, remember? We’re on the road life.” She tried to disguise her own nervousness—especially about the men living right on the other side of the thin wall—but she couldn’t bear to see Harry so hopeless, sitting beside her with his head in his hands.

  “It will get better,” she added, although she couldn’t stop shivering in her wet dress. “Once we do the act and people start noticing us, there’ll be more and more money coming our way.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  Bess wasn’t sure she did. But she nodded anyway.

  “I’m afraid—” He lowered his voice. “I’m afraid I may have failed you already. And we haven’t even begun.”

  “We have to start somewhere.” She nodded toward the wall. “And you better start by making friends with some of those men. They’ll tell you how things are run around here.”

  Harry bit his lip. “How do I do that?”

  Bess stared at him. “Haven’t you made a friend before?”

  He shrugged. “Dash was always the social one, not me.”

  Back in Coney Island, she had seen how his stage charm wore to awkwardness offstage. But she hadn’t realized the extent of Harry’s shyness until now. “When I met you, you were so confident. You have to be like that.”

  “I’m always like that after a show. It’s the act—it stays with me for a little while.”

  “Pretend you just got offstage,” she said.

  But Harry only shook his head. “It’s not like that.”

  “Well, I can’t make friends for you—” she began, then stopped herself. Or could she? She poked her head around the partition. The men were deeply engaged in their game. “Hello, gentlemen,” she called over the pounding of the rain outside. “Does anyone know where I could find an oven around here? I was going to make an almond cake in the morning if anybody wants some.”

  The men put down their cards and looked up. One of them eyed her suspiciously. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Bess.” She pulled Harry out behind her. She realized she must look a mess with her hair matted to her head and her dress dripping, but she forged ahead. “This is my husband, Harry. We’re the Houdinis.”

  The heavy, bearded man at the head of the table pushed back his chair. “
You’re the Houdinis?” He stood up and went to shake Harry’s hand. “I’m Eddie Saint. I heard you do some damn fine performing.”

  Harry seemed to find his footing. “Well, it’s my wife, really, who’s the star.”

  “He’s being modest,” Bess said. “He’s head billing.”

  Harry shook his head. “Oh, no. You see, we have to tell everyone it’s me because Bess looks so young, Welsh would try to pay her as a child, and we couldn’t live off that.”

  The men laughed and clapped him on the back. “I’ll take some of that cake,” one of them said.

  Saint looked at Bess. “Don’t you have a towel?” He turned to one of the younger players. “Lenny, get ’em a towel, would you? Don’t you have any manners?”

  Bess looked over at Harry and smiled.

  Bess didn’t notice until the morning that there was a tiny window cut into the side of the truck. When she woke up Harry was gone, and the day was bright and warm; there was no trace in the sky of the storm of the night before. She hurried to get dressed, then wandered around the grounds until she found the breakfast area. Half a dozen long pine tables had been set up under one of the open tents, and there was a sour-faced woman cooking eggs and toast on the far side of the dining area, in the shade. Another woman, wearing a warm, crooked smile, came up to her as she stood hesitantly at the entrance to the tent.

  “Come on, you’ll sit with me, dear,” the woman said. “You don’t want nothin’ to do with those men over there. Are you a Houdini?”

  Bess nodded.

  “I’m Mrs. McCarthy. I’m a juggler. We’ve been waiting for you. Heard you got a good show going on. And you see we ain’t got nearly enough women here.”

  “Yes . . . I see that.” Bess looked around at the men who were shoveling food into their mouths, spilling much of it onto the tables.

  “Did Welsh really put you in the trailer with the canvas men? Does he want you to up and quit before you even start?” Mrs. McCarthy led her into a smaller tent adjacent to the breakfast tent. “Come on. The performers eat in here. Breakfast is almost over.”

  “They’re not so bad,” Bess said.

  Mrs. McCarthy appeared to be in her late thirties, and she was dressed decently enough, in a cream-and-purple-patterned day dress. The performers’ tent was much quieter than the other. The men and women—there was only Mrs. McCarthy and one other woman—sat together, and the younger one flirted with a blond-haired man in low whispers. There was a sense of familiarity to it, almost like home. Here, in this Pennsylvania field, the grass dusted with the dew of last night’s storm and the veil of light coming through the canvas, everything seemed still; Bess wanted to hold this gleaming moment before it slid away.

  She spotted Harry at one of the tables and took a seat next to him. He raised her hand to his lips and kissed it. “Good morning. I didn’t want to wake you. You’re not mad I left you, are you?”

  Bess shook her head. “Of course not.” She was stunned he had ventured off on his own.

  A waiter put a cup of black coffee in front of her. “Ham or—?” He stopped. Bess looked at Harry, confused.

  “One ham, one or, please,” Harry said, and everyone laughed.

  “Or means eggs,” Mrs. McCarthy told Bess from across the table. “You can only pick one.” But she was amused. Harry looked at Bess, pleased with himself.

  They both ordered eggs, and Bess turned back to Mrs. McCarthy. “Last night, Welsh said something about cakes. What are cakes?”

  Mrs. McCarthy laughed again; it came from deep in her stomach, a kind of bellow. “Cakes means meals. He means you get your meals included when you work here.”

  Bess nodded, relieved. At least they wouldn’t have to worry about food for the time being. She wondered what they would do with their salary if they didn’t have to pay for meals or lodging. She supposed Harry would want them to save it.

  “Does anyone ever take a room in town, away from the trucks?” she asked, out of curiosity. She worried how Harry would fare in their close quarters over time.

  Mrs. McCarthy shook her head. “I wouldn’t do that, hon. It’ll look bad for you. Everyone here does everything together. That’s the way it’s always been. There ain’t no privacy, but that’s the life.”

  Bess looked over at Harry, who was talking to two of the men animatedly about their acts. She turned back to Mrs. McCarthy. “I almost forgot. Do you know where I can find an oven?”

  “Bribed some of the men with food, did ya?” She nodded toward the back of the tent. “There’s no oven, but there’s a stove back there. I did the same thing when I first got here. It’s about the only way to get ’em to like ya if you can’t sleep with ’em.”

  “What a sweet creature—what a beautiful face my wife has!”

  Harry knelt beside Bess behind the curtained puppet theater, voicing the role of the male puppet, Punch. Beyond the stage, ten circus goers had gathered to watch their performance. Most seemed only minimally interested; the men were chewing tobacco and the children were looking around the tent. In the back corner, Welsh leaned against the pole, his face cool as stone.

  Bess slapped Harry’s puppet with hers and looked down at the script. “Keep quiet, dummy! You’re a terrible husband.”

  “Don’t be cross, my dear. Give me a kiss.”

  “Oh, all right.” Bess kissed his puppet with hers and leaned toward his lips behind the stage. Harry grinned and cupped her brassiere.

  “Stop!” Bess slapped his hand away. She whispered, “Do you want to get fired?”

  “I didn’t come all the way down here to do some dumb puppet show. Who wrote this script anyway?”

  “I don’t know. Welsh said do Punch and Judy before our magic. When we start getting known for our real act we can stop.” In front of the curtain, she maneuvered her puppet’s arms around Punch. “You have sweet lips,” she said in Judy’s high, shrewish voice. “Will you dance with me?”

  Punch hit Judy on the nose. “Get out of the way! You don’t dance well enough for me! Go and fetch the baby.”

  Bess raised her voice. “You get the baby, you lazy idiot. I’m making the dumplings.”

  Bess shoved the puppet baby toward Harry. For the next part of the act, Punch was supposed to get annoyed at its wailing and hit its head against the wall.

  “I can’t do it,” Harry whispered.

  The audience began to boo. “Git the hook!” one of them cried. “Git ’em outta here!”

  Harry stood up from behind the curtain. “Oh, all right!” he cried, throwing down his puppet. “I don’t like this damn doll show any more than you do. Let’s get on with the magic!”

  The audience hooted. Bess dropped her puppet, relieved, and stood up beside Harry.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Harry began with a flourish. “I am Harry Houdini, and this is my assistant, Madame Houdini. We are the Master Monarchs of Modern Mystery, and today, you will be the first to witness the greatest novelty mystery act in the world!”

  The audience cheered.

  Bess retrieved a pair of handcuffs from inside a black bag. “Now you can see,” Harry went on, “that I have nothing—no keys—up my sleeve. Any escapes will be completely unaided and authentic.” He held up his arm. “Now Madame Houdini is going to handcuff my hands behind my back.”

  Bess secured the handcuffs tightly. It was a new innovation to the Metamorphosis trick that Harry had devised on one of their afternoon walks through town, when they had passed a man with his hands behind his back being led into the local police station. “Now,” Harry said, “you may have seen ordinary escape tricks before. But I can assure you this is no ordinary escape. We are not using ropes. There has never before been an escape done while handcuffed.”

  Bess felt surprisingly at ease. Her new role in Harry’s magic was much more thrilling than her short-lived singing career. She hadn’t been able to draw men’s eyes the way Anna had, but her childlike size was perfectly suited to the manipulations Harry’s tricks required. Wha
t was more, Harry was more confident when she was beside him onstage. He seemed to her the best version of himself.

  Bess pulled the large cloth bag over Harry’s head and secured it at the top, so he was completely unseen. Then she guided him into the trunk, which she locked and strapped with a long belt. She looked out into the faces of the crowd; their chewing had stopped. She had their attention now. She stood on top of the trunk and drew a curtain in front of herself so that only her head was visible, then announced, “When I clap my hands three times, I will have disappeared. You will all be witness to a marvelous mystery, performed with the greatest speed and dexterity.” Then she drew the curtain completely above her head and clapped three times. With the third clap, the curtain dropped, and Harry was standing on the trunk in Bess’s place.

  His hands were uncuffed and resting on his hips. The crowd murmured.

  “Where’s your pretty assistant?” one of the men called.

  “She probably just ran offstage,” someone else said.

  “Offstage?” Harry feigned confusion. “Oh, no.” He stepped off the trunk and began to undo the belts. “You see, she’s inside this trunk.”

  The crowd burst into applause.

  Backstage, on the lawn behind the tent, Bess wiped the sweat from her forehead. “How many of these do we have to do today?”

  “Ten,” Harry said. “Give or take.”

  “I’m exhausted already. I don’t know how you do it.”

  Harry tapped his foot in the grass. He was as spirited as a caged animal. He beamed at her. “Didn’t you see? They loved us.”

  Welsh came striding toward them from inside the tent, frowning.

  “Uh-oh,” Bess said. “We made a mess of his Punch and Judy.”

  Welsh stuck out his hand. “Helluva magic act, Houdini,” he said. “But you ain’t no comedian. Scratch the Punch and Judy from now on. Have Bess start with a song instead.”

  “I can do that,” she said, relieved.

  “You two got a good thing going. Needs some polish though. Don’t rush through it as much. You need to drag it out more.”