Mrs. Houdini

by Victoria Kelly

  The bartender shrugged. “I don’t know. Ten minutes ago, maybe?”

  If Charles had been gone that long, it was too late to catch him. She wondered if she should try that restaurant he had mentioned, but she didn’t want Stella to come out and find her missing. On top of the varnished wooden bar, the newspaper he had been reading was still there, folded in half. Bess sat down, spent. She had little interest in the news, but she wondered if the story about her séance was still lingering in the press.

  Opening the paper, she breathed a sigh of relief. It appeared to be only local news, innocuous at that. The front page carried a dull story about the Atlantic City lighthouse being repaired in time for the regatta. Another photographer—not Charles—had taken the accompanying photograph. The caption beneath it read, “The Absecon Light has only been out once before in its seventy-two-year history, for eighty-five hours from April 1 to April 4, 1925.”

  Bess recognized the black-and-white-striped structure. It was the same lighthouse that was in the background of the yacht photograph she had found in the jeweler’s window. So it was as she had suspected; that image had been taken by Charles in the Atlantic City Harbor.

  But the date was familiar, too—April 1925. Bess reread the newspaper caption. “The Absecon Light has only been out once before . . .” She folded the paper quickly and put it on her lap. It was impossible. The article must be incorrect. In the photograph Charles had taken of the yacht—at dusk on April 2, 1925, according to the scribble underneath his signature—the light from the lighthouse had clearly been working. But the newspaper said the light had been out all day; so how had it been shining in the photograph?

  Chapter 7

  EUROPE

  June 1900

  The crowd blew kisses at the departing boat, and many of them cried. Some of the passengers, certainly, would not be back again—illness would strike them, or poverty, or love. Bess and Harry stood at the railing and waved their handkerchiefs to Mrs. Weiss and Gladys, who had come to New York Harbor to see them off to Europe. Tears were pouring down Mrs. Weiss’s face; Gladys, pretty at eighteen years old, clung to her mother’s arm. The passengers on the boat released colored paper streamers into the water, and somewhere close to the bow, outside the first-class dining room, an orchestra was playing “Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms.”

  In a low moment, Bess and Harry had moved back into the cramped Weiss apartment in Manhattan. It was certainly better accommodations than their makeshift circus rooms had been, but still, it was difficult to be a wife without a home of their own to care for, and Harry carried the burden of that humiliation around with him daily. He could barely drag himself out of bed knowing that he had been unable to live up to his promises. Their time with the Welsh troupe hadn’t been a failure, exactly; but attendance at the shows had dwindled gradually, until there was barely enough to support the troupe’s travel, and eventually the circus had closed. There were larger acts springing up all over the country, mostly with animals—an elephant kneeling before a man was a sight to behold—but Mr. Welsh couldn’t afford to purchase any animals, and he couldn’t afford to continue without them. After their last night in Louisville, Bess found herself standing on the railway platform beside Harry, with their old black trunk between them, saying good-bye to the friends they had made. Many of them, like the Houdinis, were trying to continue on the vaudeville circuit; they boarded separate trains to places like New York, Chicago, or Atlanta. Others had purchased tickets to California, where they had heard there were industrial and farming jobs. Mrs. McCarthy handed her a pink shawl she had knitted herself.

  “For that baby girl you’re gonna have someday,” she said. She herself was headed to Idaho, where her daughter and her daughter’s husband owned a small potato farm. “From the potato fields of Ireland to the potato fields of America,” she remarked sadly. “It’s not what I’d dreamed of.” Bess noticed, for the first time, the thin brown lines that marked her forehead.

  Mr. Welsh hooked one hand in his suspenders and shook Harry’s hand with his other. “Good luck in Chicago, son. You’ll do fine there.” He couldn’t look Harry in the eye; Bess knew he’d bankrupted himself, and she wasn’t sure what he was going to do next. He wasn’t a young man anymore; thank God, she thought, she and Harry had their youth to fall back on. Harry had already been gaining notoriety in small towns by escaping from various jail cells, a trick that began when the whole troupe was arrested one afternoon in Georgia for performing on a Sunday. Charlotte, the Fat Woman and a new addition to the troupe, had bawled half the night, squeezed with the rest of the group into a concrete twelve-by-twelve cell. When the jailer fell asleep, Harry had picked the lock and let everyone out, and they had sneaked away to a new town before daylight. Now he had plans to bust out of a Chicago cell in front of a group of reporters, where it would be big news, and, he hoped, get himself known before they continued on with another poorly paid act.

  Bess had grown to love life on the Welsh circuit. Harry was shy, often keeping to himself and practicing when he wasn’t performing, and in those lonely hours Bess had sought the company of the others in the local beer and pool halls. She never again flirted with any of the men she met there but usually cradled a ginger beer and chatted with the women. Harry spent a great deal of time training with an old Japanese man who could swallow oranges and then bring them up again, a practice that thoroughly horrified Bess. But Harry was as fascinated with swallowers as he was with snake charmers, and he spent hours stretching the muscles of his throat to the point of accommodating small potatoes.

  But it was in Chicago where Harry found his headlines. He had walked brazenly into the detective headquarters on the afternoon of their arrival and said to the sergeant on duty, “I would like to be locked up, please.” The sergeant had laughed out loud and had Harry escorted from the premises. He’d had to return on three consecutive days before anyone would take him seriously, but when they did, and he was handcuffed and locked inside a cell, he’d escaped easily enough. Then he had performed the feat in the city’s larger prison, and the following morning his picture was in the paper, next to the headline KING OF HANDCUFFS. He’d woken Bess up waving a stack of newspapers in his hand.

  “I’m famous! My picture’s in the papers!” He had purchased over a hundred of them, along with envelopes and stamps, and they’d spent all afternoon mailing the clippings to anyone they could think of who might help them get a job.

  It had worked. The clippings got the attention of a manager by the name of Martin Beck, the booker for the Orpheum Circuit. He installed Harry and Bess in his popular theater chain, where they gained a temporary notoriety. In The Omaha Daily News, Harry was described as “a young lion, with muscles like steel, roaming about the theater like a restless tiger.” Bess had never read anything more exquisite. Sometimes, when they were alone at night together, it seemed he thrust his whole being into his dreams. He would wake up heaving, dripping with sweat as if he had just exited some great performance.

  They had celebrated that night, but they couldn’t maintain their publicity. As the months progressed they booked fewer and fewer acts, and were offered smaller and smaller salaries, until they were forced to move back to New York, where Bess got a sales position in a hat shop. She spent the hours when the shop was empty sewing ribbons onto felt in a cramped back room; Harry went to the offices of the city papers and offered to sell his magic secrets to them for ten dollars. There were no bidders.

  Still, through the dark moments, he loved her. He left her notes every morning in the kitchen before going out to search for a booking: Sunshine of my life, I have had my coffee, have washed out my glass, and am on my way to business. Sometimes the notes included frivolous poetry: What is there in the vale of life / half as delightful as a wife?

  After two months, Beck had called with a last-chance offer. If Harry wanted to go to London, he said, he had a contact for him at Scotland Yard. If he could break out of a prison like that, Beck told him, th
en he would be made.

  Bess had never traveled abroad. She was desperate to see the elaborate palaces of Europe, the shining taffeta dresses of the British ladies. The boat was grand, with mahogany banisters and porcelain china. They were staying in the second-class cabin, which had none of those luxuries, but at night she sat on the stairs and listened to the music of the violins from the dining room. She missed her friends from the circus, but not enough to despair; the circus had been one adventure, but Europe was something else entirely. She thought back on her musings that first night on the bridge, that their lives could be glazed with greatness, that intimacy would somehow cascade into remarkable love. The night they married, she had removed her hairpins and her hair had fallen onto her shoulders and she had stood before Harry in the burning lamplight like a spectator of her own performance.

  Harry, for his part, was green with seasickness and couldn’t keep anything down but ice and lemon juice. By the third evening he was delirious with fever. The pressure of the sorely needed success in Europe, combined with illness, almost broke him. He began talking in his sleep. “They think I break my knuckles to get the cuffs off,” he murmured one night, to no one. “They think they know how I does it.”

  Bess leaned over him and stroked his burning forehead. His eyes were still closed. “It’s okay, Harry. You’re just dreaming.” She looked around. They shared a large dormitory lined with identical cots, but it didn’t appear he had woken anyone else.

  “But it’s not talent,” he said. “It’s just practicing with every lock till I know how they all work.”

  Was he conducting an imaginary interview in his sleep? Bess laughed. “I know, Harry.”

  “I love you, Beth,” he muttered, slurring her name. “What would I do without you?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I suppose you’d be lost.”

  When he finally woke up, early the next morning, she was still awake, watching him. He looked at her intensely, with an expression of such tenderness it made her shiver. He had never looked at her like that before, not even on their wedding night. It was more than infatuation or desire. It was a look that came from years of real love, tested by hardship—the kind of bursting, painful emotion she herself sometimes felt when she cried over tiny babies she’d seen in prams, and he took her in his arms and held her without saying a word.

  He tried to stand but ended up knocking over their open vanity cases in the process.

  “I’ve got to get you some more ice,” she told him. “You be a good boy while I’m gone.” She tied his wrist to the bed, for fear he would somehow stumble out of the room and fall overboard.

  “I’ll get loose,” he said, falling back on the bed. “I’ve broken outta prisons, you know.”

  “Not in this condition you won’t.”

  They arrived in Southampton battered and bruised, Harry from his disastrous short trips around the deck for fresh air, and Bess from her many late-night struggles to get him to stay in bed. The port itself was far from glamorous—even more crowded than New York had been, and dirtier. They had to navigate their trunks through a maze of horse droppings to find the railway station. Beck had given them the address of a boardinghouse in London, and they had not even settled in before Harry had swallowed a half gallon of water, washed his face, and sat down at the table with a map of the city to plot out a route to Scotland Yard.

  Bess sat down beside him and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. “How do you know they’re expecting you?”

  “Beck said so.”

  “What’ll you do if they’ve never heard of you?”

  Harry shrugged.

  She turned his head toward hers and kissed him. “Don’t go just yet. We’ve only just gotten here. You’ve only just recovered.”

  “We’re out of money.” Harry pulled away. “I’ve got to go to work.”

  She knew he was right. “I want to go with you,” she said.

  Harry looked at her sadly. “My sweet, sweet girl. You know you can’t.”

  “I am your assistant, you know.”

  Harry thought about it. “I think I have to go in on my own here. Or else they’ll think you’re helping me somehow. That you sneaked in some kind of lock pick.”

  Bess surveyed his appearance. “At least change your clothes. You’ve been wearing those same pants for three days.”

  Harry looked down. “Have I? I can’t remember when I put them on.”

  After he had gone, in a clean shirt and pressed pants, she fell into a deep sleep. She dreamed of a man who’d grabbed her hand outside her school when she was twelve, a vagabond with swift eyes and tiny crystals of perspiration on his face, and the nun who’d come out of the school lobby and saved her, and the cool glass of water she’d given Bess in her office afterward, and her soft voice saying, “No one will ever hurt you.” Except when she looked up the nun wasn’t there anymore, and it was Harry standing over her, with his hand on her shoulder.

  She had forgotten where she was. She looked out the window and saw clothes flapping from lines in the alley, and two children kicking dust clouds out of the dirt, the shafts of light between the buildings like two wide-open eyes.

  “Here’s how we fasten the Yankee criminals who come over here and get into trouble,” Superintendent William Melville told Harry at the police headquarters. He wrapped Harry’s arms around a pillar in the middle of the station and handcuffed him. “Stage handcuffs, they’re one thing, but these are real.” Melville smiled. “Beck said you’d give me a real laugh. I might just leave you here to teach you a lesson.”

  Harry smiled back at him, and Melville checked his watch and turned to the door. It was lunchtime.

  “Wait,” Harry said. “I’ll go with you.”

  When Melville turned around, he saw that Harry had freed himself and was leaning against the pillar, the cuffs dangling from his pinkie finger.

  “Here’s the way Yankees open handcuffs,” he said. Melville looked at him in astonishment, then burst into laughter.

  Harry recounted the story to Bess afterward, pacing the room with excitement. “And I convinced him,” he went on, “that I’m the real thing, and he put me in touch with an agent here, who booked me for two weeks at fifty dollars a week. He wants me to do the handcuff trick and the Metamorphosis trick.”

  “Us,” Bess corrected. “He wants us to do the tricks.”

  Harry nodded. “That’s what I meant.” He took her elbows in his hands. “You and me.”

  “I think you did it, Harry,” she said. “I think we’re gonna be something.”

  “This act isn’t going to separate us,” Harry said. “It’s going to bring us together.”

  Bess grinned. “Let’s go have some tea. Isn’t that what people do when they’re in London?”

  Harry’s two-week engagement at the Hippodrome turned into two months. He had thoroughly entertained Superintendent Melville with both his brazenness and his skill, and even though he would not reveal how his tricks were done, Melville had done him a favor and brought in the papers. A London Times reporter was present when Harry broke out of a concrete cell in Scotland Yard in under fifteen minutes, and the paper published the story as an advertisement for his nightly acts. People flooded the theater, bringing with them a dozen handcuffs and restraints, all of which Harry was able to extract himself from. Bess wore her usual white dress and black tights and retrieved the cuffs from the audience members, then brought them to Harry onstage. In the afternoons, while Harry was readying his new tricks to show her, she walked through the London streets, looking in shop windows. She purchased a fancy crimson-covered sketchbook in a department store, and then spent the hours on park benches, drawing. She wanted to remember these days, the small moments you see only when sitting still for a long time—the women in gossamer dresses floating like spirits over the grass, and the lonely carriage drivers who brushed their horses’ manes with the tenderness of parents. When she came home, Harry would be fast asleep on the bed. Only half awakening at t
he sound of the door opening, he would reach out his arms and pull her down with him, and they would nap together until it was time to get up and dress.

  A week before they were scheduled to perform in Budapest, Bess convinced Harry to walk with her after lunch. He was too pale, she said. It wasn’t healthy. It was cool out, and the sky was glass blue, and she simply had to leave the dark little room in the actors’ boardinghouse they had been sharing for weeks. They walked across the park and onto Regent Street, which had some of the most fashionable shopping. The windows were dressed with rope portieres and displayed everything from silver hatpins and porcelain jars of cold cream to glass table lamps.

  “The buildings are all so much older than in New York,” Bess said. But Harry didn’t answer. He was looking up at them with a furrowed brow, and she knew he was thinking of some kind of new trick. “Harry, no—”

  “What about bridge jumping?” he mused. “Do you think I could escape the cuffs underwater?”

  Bess looked at him, aghast. “Don’t you dare.”

  He shrugged. “I’ll think it over.”

  “Harry, don’t. I’m serious.” She tried to change the subject. “Look at that.” She pointed to a beaded black ball gown with an enormously ballooned bottom, dressing a mannequin in a store window. It was lined with white lace at the cuffs, and exposed the shoulders. “It’s exquisite.”

  Harry looked at her with a twinkle in his eye. “You should try it on.”

  “That’s ridiculous. We can’t afford to buy something like that. It wouldn’t be decent to go in there and pretend we can afford it.”

  But Harry was already striding ahead of her, into the shop. “We’re Americans,” he was saying. “I heard there are so many American heiresses here, looking to marry into titles, that everyone assumes all Americans are rich.”

  Inside, they learned that the dress was not available for sale. It had been designed for Queen Victoria, the shop owner explained, but her son had recently become ill, and she had cancelled the purchase.