“I’d like to buy it, then,” Harry said.
The shop owner raised his eyebrows. “One does not sell Her Majesty’s relics, sir.”
“How much would it cost if it did not belong to the Queen?”
He thought about it. “Probably fifty pounds. But it’s not for sale.”
Bess pulled Harry aside. “You most certainly cannot buy me that dress,” she whispered. “You’re getting carried away. We’re not royalty, and we don’t have the money.”
Harry pressed his hands into hers. “Bess, look at it. It’s just my mother’s size, don’t you think? I’m going to buy it for her.”
Bess stepped backward. “Oh,” she stammered.
“It’s too large for you,” he said. “You’re such a tiny thing.”
She nodded mutely. Harry pulled away and turned to the shopkeeper.
“I’d like to purchase this for my mother,” he explained. “She grew up very poor, and I’d like her to have a dress made for a queen. I’ll pay you fifty pounds for it.”
The shopkeeper shook his head. “I told you, the dress is not for sale.”
Harry pulled a bill out of his wallet and waved it at the man. “You’re telling me I am standing here as a paying customer and you are refusing to take my money?”
“I am sorry, sir.”
Bess put her hand on Harry’s arm. “Darling—”
Harry began to shout. “Well why the hell did you put it in your window then?”
The man remained calm. “You Americans are all the same. You come here and think you deserve the world because you have money. But we Britons have something better than money. We have tradition.”
“You’re a damn fool.”
Bess stepped in front of Harry. “Excuse me,” she said, assuming as gentle and feminine an air as she could muster, “but I have a proposal for you. What if we promise that this dress will never be worn in Great Britain? We’re only passing through. And this would mean the world to my mother-in-law. This way you can earn money on this dress, and you don’t have to feel you are betraying your queen.”
The shopkeeper’s face softened. “It’s a matter of respect, you see,” he grumbled.
“Of course it is,” Bess said. “I would do the same in your shoes.”
He considered it. “All right,” he agreed. “Provided the dress is never worn here.”
They left the store with the dress packaged in pink tissue and tied inside an enormous white box. Harry was pleased but still fuming.
“You’ll catch more flies with honey,” Bess told him. “You need to work on your temper. You’re going to be a public figure.”
This brightened his mood. “I am, aren’t I?” He smiled. “But that’s what I have you for. To be nice for me.”
When they got back to the boardinghouse she closed her eyes on the bed to rest and, when she woke, realized it was already the middle of the night. Harry was asleep beside her. He looked so vulnerable in his sleep. She got out of bed for a drink of water, and on the table next to the bed she noticed a box sticking out from underneath the clothes Harry had piled on the surface. Inside was a tiny gold ladybug charm, nestled in velvet.
“Harry.” She nudged him awake. “Where did you get this?”
Harry smiled sleepily. “It’s for you,” he said and closed his eyes again. “He said it’s a symbol of love.”
“Who said?”
“The jeweler.”
She examined the charm. It was intricately made. “When did you do this? I’ve been with you all day!”
“After my first performance,” he murmured. “I wanted the first paycheck to go to you.”
Harry wrote to Mrs. Weiss immediately, urging her to meet them in Budapest, where her old home was, and where many of her family members still lived. He had a surprise, he told her, although he would not tell her anything more than that.
Arriving in Budapest was not without its difficulties. As had happened passing through Germany, the police trailed Bess and Harry at all hours of the day and night; they had heard about his feats in Scotland Yard and were convinced he was some kind of undercover agent, spying for Britain. He spent much of the day walking about the cities, thinking about his magic, leaving her to do her stitching, or sketching, or small errands. She knew his work thrived on loneliness. But when he was required to attend any kind of dinner or formal function, he clung to Bess. She pinned up her hair and sat by his side the entire evening, prodding him to speak when she thought he might need to impress someone.
His performance in Hamburg had been a smashing hit, and thirty marks had been charged for admission. This was more than Harry had ever commanded for his act. In America only the poor and the middle class had come to see him perform, but in Hamburg, for the first time, wealthy patrons filled the seats. Men and women wearing furs and polished shoes and carrying crystal spectacles filed into the theater, the room buzzing with anticipation. Martin Beck had been right—the doors were opening for him after all. Bess, concerned that her stage attire was too tawdry for their new audiences, purchased a long dress made of purple taffeta, as they had ceased doing many of the tricks that involved her being bent and locked away, and Harry had taken on the active physical work instead. Her position now was mainly to add an air of femininity to the stage. Harry explained to her that Europeans were much less accepting of women onstage, but Bess understood he was being kind. The audiences responded to him, not to her, and both of them knew it.
Mrs. Weiss traveled across the Atlantic alone, leaving Gladys with Dash, who was selling insurance in Harrison, New Jersey, now and performing small acts of magic at parties on the weekends. She met them at the port in Hamburg, fragile and feverish from the long ocean journey, and they traveled together by train to Budapest, in a second-class coach. Harry had spent most of their savings on the dress, and he was disappointed, Bess knew, to have to take his mother across Europe in such deplorable conditions. He did not tell her what he had in store for her, only kept repeating, to Mrs. Weiss’s dismay, that her trip would be unlike anything she had ever experienced. Bess spent much of the train ride with her embroidery on her lap, trying not to interrupt the conversation that flowed back and forth in German between mother and son.
Mrs. Weiss occupied a position in Harry’s heart that no one, not even she as his wife, could supplant. She could not help but think of her own mother, and the lack of tenderness they had shared, and how Mrs. Rahner had kept her word and refused to speak to her since her marriage to Harry. The fact was that Harry had both her and Mrs. Weiss, but she had only Harry, and unless she found herself with child soon, this would likely always be so.
If she had thought London dazzling, then Budapest at the turn of the century was even more so. It was the era of the great Hungarian poets—Endre Ady and Mihály Babits, writers she had heard of—and the streets were lined with small coffeehouses with wood-paneled walls and firelit rooms where both men and women bent over books and porcelain cups of hot beverages. Bess wondered why Rabbi and Mrs. Weiss had ever left such a place. There had been some kind of celebration recently, and the buildings were still hung with colored banners.
They entered the city in the pink twilight, the streets echoing with hoofbeats on the hardwood blocks of the great avenues, which were lined with enormous green topiaries. In the carriage on the way to the boardinghouse, Bess looked over at Mrs. Weiss and saw that her eyes were filled with tears. She was gripping her son’s hand, but the other hand, the one holding her handkerchief, was white as bone. Bess imagined she was remembering the last time she had been here, with Rabbi Weiss, so many years before, and how young they must have been then, their unlined faces shining on these very streets.
“Has it changed a great deal?” she asked Mrs. Weiss.
The old woman looked toward her, starry-eyed. “Oh, very much. It seems so much . . . more colorful than I remember. All my memories of it are black and gray.”
“I imagine my life would be very different if you had not chosen to le
ave. So I’m grateful that you did,” Bess told her.
They stopped at the entrance to a cramped alley, and Harry got out to check on the rooms. Across the street was a covered market, shuttered now with canvas for the evening. Mrs. Weiss shook her head. “Sometimes I wonder—if we had stayed in Pest, would things have been better than they ended up being in America? My husband might not have died so young, and Gladys wouldn’t have been injured. And maybe Ehrich wouldn’t have left home.”
Bess looked around at the paint peeling from the sides of the buildings. Surely this hadn’t been what Harry had had in mind? He had planned this trip with such care. “No,” she said. “He would have left no matter where you lived. It’s just the way he is.”
“Yes.” Mrs. Weiss nodded. “He is always looking for what is out there.”
The boardinghouse occupied a narrow space between a grocery and a butcher’s shop; inside, the rooms were hardly six feet wide, each fitting only a small bed and a chair. The bathroom was cramped and dirty, at the end of a long hall, and the whole building smelled of cow meat.
The accommodations didn’t startle Mrs. Weiss. “És ist schon, Harry,” she said, studying the view from the window. “It’s lovely.”
But, as Bess had anticipated, Harry was crestfallen by all the dust. He and Bess usually stayed in lodgings like these, but he had spent more money than they usually did on his mother’s room, which was still small and dirty.
Mrs. Weiss waved her hand. “You must leave me now,” she said. “I’m tired.” Bess imagined it must be difficult for her to have returned to the home she had left so many years ago; when she said good-bye, she must have assumed it would be forever. People who left during those years rarely made it home again. Now she was reunited with the old city, except it was larger and more glamorous than it had been thirty years earlier. There were green parks, and fountains, and stone music halls that had not been there before. Certainly, she could not help being saddened that the place she had loved had become better without her; that she had left for a better life that had disappointed her, and stood now in a past that had blossomed alone.
Through his mother’s uncle Heller, whom Harry had contacted upon their arrival, Bess and Harry had planned the surprise party. Uncle Heller gathered everyone who still lived in the old neighborhood and had known the Weisses and took them across Liberty Square toward the Royal Hotel, which Harry had learned was the most luxurious hotel in the city. He and Bess escorted Mrs. Weiss privately into the courtyard of the massive building, where Harry presented her with the voluminous black gown he had purchased in London.
“This,” he said, smoothing the fabric, “was made for Queen Victoria.” He looked shyly at the ground. “Now it is yours.”
Mrs. Weiss cradled the dress in her arms like a fragile child. “What do you mean?” She looked up, confused, at the building with its wide windows and enormous gray cupolas. “This place is like a church,” she said. “It is like I am getting married. What are we doing here?”
Harry beamed. “Father never would have imagined I would one day bring you back here like this.” He had planned a reception in the palm garden salon, which had been a feat unto itself, as the salon was never used for hosting private parties. Bess, however, had stepped in and won over the management with Harry’s story. She had explained how he wanted to crown his mother as a queen, for a few hours. The sentimentality of the plot appealed to the manager. “For so worthy a cause,” he told them, “you may have the room for nothing.”
When Mrs. Weiss had changed into the dress, Harry led her into the salon, where everyone she had known once who was able to come waited to surprise her. She had not seen any of them in decades; to only a few had she written letters. Uncle Heller, her mother’s brother and the family patriarch, had disapproved of her marriage to Rabbi Weiss, and he had disapproved of her move to America. He had told her it would end in disaster. Now, here she was, an old woman standing in the finest hotel in Budapest, in Queen Victoria’s gown, and her son was famous, and the walls were papered in gold leaf and she did not have that old life in the squalor of New York any longer, she had only this life, here.
The salon was decorated with black-and-white floor tiles, tapestries, palms, and gilded furniture. In the center of the room was a bubbling blue fountain, the water arcing over the head of a tiny cherub. Mrs. Weiss rested her hands on the edge of the fountain and bent her head.
Bess was alarmed. “Are you all right, Mother?”
“I was just thinking how two weeks ago I was looking at the Sears catalog, thinking that twenty cents for a bread toaster seemed so much. And now here I am standing on the other side of the world in Queen Victoria’s dress.”
“Ehrich does love you very much. I can only hope I have a son one day who loves me just as much.”
The manager entered the room wearing an expensive suit of clothes, the kind that was reserved for royalty. He kissed Mrs. Weiss’s hand and knelt before her on one knee. One by one, the other guests, including Harry, knelt as well. The moment had been orchestrated to the last detail.
“Welcome to our establishment,” the manager said. “My mother passed away last year, but she would have been proud to see me open this room to you today.”
“You are like a fairy queen,” Bess whispered, placing a hand on her shoulder. “You are resplendent.”
Mrs. Weiss nodded mutely, staring around her in amazement. A line of waiters entered, bearing cups of black coffee and trays of small iced cakes.
Bess stepped aside to allow them to wait on Mrs. Weiss first. “You are happy, though?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, taking a cake off the tray. “I keep thinking I’m going to do something wrong. Everyone’s looking at me. And I don’t know how to be wealthy.”
“No one really knows how to be wealthy,” Bess said. “Except maybe the king and queen.”
“No.” Mrs. Weiss shook her head. “You’ll be a very good wealthy woman one day. You have vigor.”
Bess laughed.
“Did Harry ever tell you that I was a widow when I married the rabbi?”
“You were? I didn’t know that.”
“Yes. I married my first husband when I was just seventeen. But we were only married for six months. He got involved with some bad men, and lost a great deal of money, and there was an argument over it. He died in a duel.”
Bess grabbed her sleeve. “That’s terrible!”
She looked around the room. “It was a great scandal. Even my family was ashamed. These people I knew once, they came to this party, but that’s still what they all see now, when they look at me.” She paused. “I met the rabbi a few years later, and he was much older than I was, but he loved me, and he didn’t care that I was a widow. So I married him.”
“But did you love him?” Bess asked.
“In time, I did. But you see, when Harry brought you home, I could tell how much you already loved him back. That’s why I liked you. Because I knew you’d give him what I never gave my husband.” She reached for Bess’s hand. “Don’t worry,” she said. “You’ll have a child. God wouldn’t make you only to leave you alone.”
Bess looked at the floor. “I’m not alone, though. I have Harry.”
“He’s a good boy,” Mrs. Weiss said, patting Bess’s hand. “But I can tell he still leaves you lonely sometimes.”
Bess glanced at Harry; he was standing in the corner of the room, quietly observing the proceedings. Bess felt a pang of despair. She did feel alone, the only stranger in this salon, among a roomful of people who had once shared a life together. She wondered if Harry felt toward her the same fierce love and sense of duty he felt toward his mother. His black eyes took in the room, proudly. He didn’t stand with her, or look out for her. He seemed, in fact, to have forgotten her entirely.
Still, Mrs. Weiss was right. She loved him with a wonder that crushed the flesh against her chest.
“I will never betray you,” she had sworn to him, years ago on the golden beach of Coney Is
land. She had taken a vow, and meant it. And she could be angry with him, or hurt. But she could never un-love him.
Chapter 8
THE PRESS
June 1929
In the crisp white sheets of her hotel room, Bess woke in a cold sweat. “Harry?” She reached for the pillow beside her. “Darling, I thought I heard something.”
He was not there. The room was dark except for the sliver of yellow light from the hallway under the door. The space beside her was cool, the sheets unwrinkled. With slow awareness, she put her hands to her face and felt the creped, tender skin under her eyes. She was not in her twenties anymore; she was much older, and Harry was gone. The sea air coming through the window covered her like a fine mist.
Charles had invited her to his offices, not far from her hotel. But there was still the problem of Stella. Bess longed to tell her what she was really doing here in New Jersey. Stella had never understood why Bess had continued to devote herself to Harry wholeheartedly after his death. It should have been a new beginning, she said; but to Bess, Harry’s death had never been an end. Besides her financial burdens, she could not rid herself of the knowledge that Harry was desperate to reach her, and that the message he intended for her carried enormous weight. Yet she had, from the minute he closed his eyes for the last time, clung to the hope that it would not be just his words that would reach her but his voice, his whole form. Surely, such a course existed. She liked to think that the dead were separated from the living by a matter almost like cement—fluid, liquid for the first years after death, until it hardened and became impassable. She had to reach him while she still could.
Stella was sitting at the breakfast table in the sitting room, reading the morning papers in a white lace nightgown. She looked up when she saw Bess.
“Good morning,” she said, gesturing toward the window. “It’s an absolutely divine day. We must get dressed and go to the beach.”
Mrs. Houdini Page 14
