She began pulling out the books in stacks, rifling through the pages and tossing the albums onto the floor in desperation. Surely, if Harry had been aware of a son, there would be some sign of it in these books, something she would have missed when she put them together. Certainly there would be another photograph, which she herself might even have pasted inside unknowingly, assuming, perhaps, it was of one of Harry’s distant cousins.
But she had not prepared herself for the sight of Harry’s handwriting. She was beaten back by it as if by a wave. There were all the letters he had written her, all the love professed, the ink still dark as if the words had just been written, as if Harry was only upstairs, having sent the letter down with the butler. My darling, would you run out for a new silk scarf for my act tonight? My other scarf is frayed. But my love for you is not.
There had been thousands of these notes over the years. But after Mrs. Weiss’s death, the playfulness that had once characterized their marriage had disappeared. Harry had stopped writing letters to Bess and had become consumed with writing long, elaborate sermons to no one. Bess remembered how, during their last encounter, Mrs. Weiss had asked Harry to bring her back a pair of slippers from Denmark; at her funeral, Harry had stooped over the casket and placed two new pink slippers into the grave, as tenderly as if they were babies. He had become melancholy; he’d spoken often of what he called “the mortal valley of death.” He would not accept bookings for performances if they meant leaving New York, because for months he visited her grave every afternoon. His relationship with Dash, which had been tenuous over the years, had become fraught with rivalry; Harry never forgave him for being the only son present for their mother’s death.
Would he, Bess had often wondered, have grieved for her the same way, if she had passed first? Looking through the early pages of their letters and all their professions toward her, she liked to believe he would have. But the truth was, she wasn’t sure now. There was a part of her that feared that he was happier on the other side of death than he had been with her.
The albums brought back a rush of memories, but there was no mention in any of them of Charles, no indication even that there might have been something Harry was hiding. As she flipped through the pages, she became more and more distraught, more confused and angry, and as she sobbed she began tearing the pages out of the books. She was tired of distrust, tired of searching for things that were not there.
Then she saw it—the postcard from Atlantic City. It was a photograph of the beach outside the Royal Hotel, touched up in color with paint, as postcards from those years often were. She and Harry had returned to the city again several times after Harry’s disastrous performance, when he had almost drowned. During one of their return trips he had mailed her this card so she would find it when they arrived home. It was postmarked August 1912, two months before they sailed to Europe. You are trying to look at what I’m writing as I write this, the back of the card said, but I’m not going to let you see, because I am the master of surprises. She remembered the scene vividly—Harry purchasing the card from a kiosk outside the hotel, leaning on the rail of the boardwalk as he wrote it, his back to her, laughing, Bess trying to peer over his shoulder. He had given another performance at Young’s Pier, but Young himself was not present for it, having been in Europe at the time on business. After a while, she had almost forgotten him. When she tried to recall his face now she could not.
After the show, she and Harry had sat together on the sand, watching the boardwalk lights, like tiny moons, turn on one by one.
Come enjoy the beauty of the ocean, wild and wide, the front of the postcard said, in flowery black script across the top.
Bess caught her breath. Wild and wide . . . They were words from the code. The tune rang in her ears: I’ll take you home again, Kathleen, across the ocean wild and wide . . . She held the card flat in her palm, like a relic, and read it again. The ocean wild and wide. The words had not changed; they were still there, engraved into the face of the card. She flipped the postcard over and searched the back for some other clue—anything that would give her an indication of what kind of message was being communicated—but there was nothing but the brief, casual note Harry had jotted to her, which really said nothing at all.
The postcard was written in 1912, before their trip to Europe. She had stood with Harry as he wrote it and placed it in the postbox. She had pasted it in the album herself, years later. It was impossible that Charles, or anyone, could have manufactured its presence.
Gladys felt her way over to where Bess was seated. “What did you find?”
Bess pressed the postcard into her hand. “Another piece of the code. But this postcard was mailed fourteen years before Harry died. All the other clues were in photographs I just discovered. But I’ve had this for over a decade, and it’s unchanged.” She touched her hair distractedly. “I’m not sure what this means about how Harry is communicating with me . . . how he’s managed to use something that’s been in my possession for years.”
Gladys ran her fingers along the cardboard. “This code you think you’ve found—are you sure about it?”
“I think I am.”
“I never thought . . .” Gladys began, but her voice trailed off. “I never believed you, Bess.”
Bess’s mind was racing now; it was as if Harry had somehow plunged into her psyche and was pushing her thoughts forward. His desk . . . Why hadn’t she thought of it before? It was Edgar Allan Poe’s desk . . . Poe, who had written many times in his stories of secret compartments. Of course his own desk must have had one, or more. But she had never bothered to check. How could she have overlooked something so obvious? She ran her hands along the underside of the desk. She felt a ridge where the wood split in two. As she pressed her fingers along it, the wood slid back, revealing a space beneath the bottom drawer.
“Gladys,” she breathed. “I just found a hidden compartment in Harry’s desk. There are papers in here.” The possibility of finding some kind of hidden money seemed unimportant now; she would give it all up if what she found led her to Harry himself instead.
She lifted the papers out gently; some of them felt very old and brittle. “They’re letters.” Inside the envelopes, the notes were all handwritten, and they were all from John Sargent, Harry’s late secretary, and mailed to the various parts of the country or the world where Bess and Harry had happened to be at the time.
“What do they say?” Gladys held her hand out tentatively to touch them.
The first, at the top of the pile, was dated January 1907.
Harry, you said this lost cousin of yours lives in Atlantic City. I can imagine the shock you must have had to receive the news that a child existed at all. But I searched for his mother and I’m sorry to tell you she has died. No word of the boy’s whereabouts. He seems to have disappeared. I’ll keep searching. He referred to the boy as Romario Tardo.
Gladys listened with her hand on her mouth. “So Harry knew,” she whispered. “He knew he had a son, but he never found out where he was.”
“He was clever,” Bess said. “He must have told John he was the son of his mother’s cousin and enlisted John to help find him.”
The next letter was dated a few months later: Inquired of some neighbors, Bess read, and discovered the fate of the boy—he was sent west, it seems, by rail, to be adopted. Have not been able to find him. The records are ill-kept. It seems many of the children are given new names upon arrival. So Harry had gone as far as to send John, in person, down to Atlantic City, to continue the search. Bess knew the import of this; Harry had relied on his secretary so heavily to manage his correspondence that he rarely liked for him to leave New York, even for business matters.
After that, the letters from John stopped. All future letters were signed by a man named Henry Fletcher, who appeared to be a private investigator of some sort.
“Harry must have worried that John would find out the truth,” Bess said. “There was only so far he could take the story of a lost
cousin with John.”
But with Fletcher, Harry had apparently continued the ruse. Fletcher continued to refer to Romario as Harry’s cousin. He had written Harry a letter on January 1 of every year from 1908 to 1926. Each letter detailed the progress, or lack of progress, of the previous year’s inquiries.
“Listen to this,” Bess said, holding up the letter from 1910. “It’s the first time he had a real lead. Mr. Houdini, I am writing to you with promising news. I have finally managed to trace Romario’s journey west, to Des Moines, Iowa.” But he hadn’t been able to locate any more information. The records from that period had been destroyed in a fire.
“So Harry found out about Charles in late 1906 or early 1907,” Gladys said thoughtfully. “When he was eleven years old. Clearly Evatima must have decided for some reason to send Harry the photograph and tell him the truth. For what? Money? Fame?”
“Maybe she had a foreboding about her death. She was involved with some dangerous people, it seems.”
“Well, she was right. She must have died shortly after she sent the photograph, because by the time Harry began his search, Charles was already on the orphan train.”
“And, of course, his new family changed his name. And he decided to keep it, even after he went back to New Jersey.”
“These explain part of the mystery, at least. Harry never revealed himself to Charles as his father because it seems he was never been able to find him.”
Bess continued reading the letters from Fletcher. By 1915 Harry began including carbon copies of his own replies. It seemed he was growing desperate. Fletcher had gone out to Des Moines to interview everyone he could find. There is a girl here who remembers Romario, he wrote to Harry. She says she was in the same train car. She remembers he went to a childless couple, but she never saw him after that. The next sentence was scribbled out, and then, it appeared, Fletcher changed his mind and decided to include it after all. She said he was a nice boy, and he did not seem too afraid.
Harry’s response was anguished. Damn it, man, he wrote. Go back out there if you’ve got a lead. The expense is no concern.
In 1918 there was more news to report: Fletcher had located Romario in an archived newspaper photograph taken when the train arrived. He had included a copy of the picture in his letter. Bess held it up to the light. She recognized him from the photograph Charles had shown her; he was standing among a group of children, a cap pulled over his head, looking at something out of view of the camera. Bess stared at the picture for a long time. How might their lives have changed, she thought, if they had found him?
Harry must have kept his discovery a secret, Bess realized, not only because he didn’t want to risk damaging their marriage but because he knew how much she had wanted a child. Maybe he couldn’t bring himself to tell her that the fault lay in her own body, not his; all those years, he could have left her for someone else, had more children with another woman, but he chose not to. And he couldn’t bear to tell her that there was an orphan out there who could be theirs, if she wanted him, only to have her hopes dashed when the boy was never found.
But he had never given up hope; he had looked for Charles for the rest of his life. In the 1926 letter—the last from Fletcher, as Harry had died that year—the trail had grown completely cold. Romario would have been thirty years old by then, and he could have been anywhere. Fletcher suggested dropping the investigation. Harry’s response was tortured. How can I continue my life, surrounded by wealth and fame, knowing somewhere out there this boy is alone? To me, he is not thirty; he will always be a little boy. I will find him, even if it’s not in this life.
His prediction was eerily accurate; it was only in death that Harry had located Charles after all.
Bess clutched the letters to her chest as the clock struck nine. She looked at it, panic setting in. The first trains out of New York began running at five in the morning. Charles could very well be in New Jersey already.
“Gladys,” she breathed urgently. “We have to go after him.” She scribbled a note for George asking him to call Niall about the tearoom; then she grabbed her fringed wrap from the hall closet and flung open the front door.
“What are you going to tell him?”
“Everything. And we’re going to finish piecing together Harry’s message.”
The one thing Bess couldn’t understand, still, as she and Gladys climbed into a taxicab, was why, if Harry was indeed able to communicate with her, as it seemed he was, he would have chosen a method so vague. Why wasn’t he simply able to appear to her in a mirror, say, or a dream? Or through a medium? Why all these preposterous clues?
Fifteen minutes later, they emerged from the taxi onto the street corner in front of the terminal. The building was a shining architectural gem, which stood imposingly, its domed windows like the eyes of a giant stone monster. The sunlight gave the rooms inside a dusty, pearl-like glimmer. Bess’s hands trembled. She had to find Charles. She felt as if she were on the edge of a precipice.
The massive vestibule was scattered with tired passengers sitting on their luggage, waiting for the trains. Many were sleeping on the benches that ran along the walls. Bess searched the room. Maybe Charles had been bluffing about leaving town. It was possible he was still sleeping at this very moment in some cheap hotel.
But he was there. He stood, his back to her, on the marble staircase, looking at the clock. His coat was hanging over his elbow, and he had one foot on the next step above, looking like a man she had seen before, a man who had waited for her on staircases all over the world. As she approached him, he turned. And for a shimmering moment, he could almost have been young Ehrich Weiss, coming to take her back to Coney Island, to have dinner at the Brighton Beach Hotel.
“Why don’t you sing anymore?” Harry had asked her. “I miss your singing.” It was a Sunday in Atlantic City; they were waiting for a ride on the carousel, which had been dubbed the Palace of Flying Animals. Hymnals were being passed out for riders to sing along to organ music as they rode.
The funny thing was, she didn’t know why she had stopped singing. She could not even remember the words to most of her old songs. She had had a good voice, once.
Harry had handed their tokens to the operator. “You’ll go on the Flip-Flap Railroad with me after this, won’t you?” His eyes had gleamed.
“Certainly not.” The railroad went upside down, in a loop, next to the pier. Many riders had said it had damaged their backs. “You know your body can’t handle that kind of stress.”
He had laughed and raised his eyebrows suggestively. “My dear, my body can handle anything.”
She’d swatted at him. “You shouldn’t be vulgar, Harry. You’re a public figure now.”
“Charles, thank God. I thought you’d be gone.” Bess stood at the base of the staircase looking up at the young man, her arm looped through Gladys’s elbow. Her lower lip quivered. She reached into her purse and thrust the postcard toward him. “I have to know if you’ve seen this before.”
Charles looked at her with suspicion. “What are you doing here?” He stared at her outstretched hand and seemed to consider it for a moment disdainfully. Finally, he took the card and studied it. His expression changed. “This is my photograph,” he said. “It was one of the first photographs I ever sold. I was only seventeen.” He looked up at her, his expression still mistrustful. “Why did you come all the way here to show me this?”
Bess lowered her voice. “Harry’s brought us together to tell us something, Charles. Please don’t leave. I was wrong to accuse you of lying. You are his son. Certainly, deep down, you know this. Harry Houdini was your father.”
Chapter 13
HOLLYWOOD
June 1923
“Well, Mrs. Houdini.” Harry stood in the doorway to the back garden, grinning at her. “We’ve made it now.” He waved a heavy canvas-covered book in the air. “We’re in the dictionary!”
Bess closed her novel and blinked at him through the sunlight. “What are you going on ab
out?”
Harry opened the book and began to read. “ ‘To Houdinize: Verb. To release or extricate oneself, from confinement, bonds, and the like, as by wriggling out.’ Ha!” He slammed the book shut again and scooped her off the bench and kissed her.
In a few hours they would be standing outside the Los Angeles premiere of his most recent motion picture, Haldane of the Secret Service. The theater was expecting crowds in the thousands.
“Tonight, darling, you should wear the white dress that I love so much.”
“But we’re still going for a swim with the Londons first? It’s so hot.”
Harry feigned insult. “You mean you’d rather a double date with those bores than a romantic afternoon with a motion picture star?”
“If it means cooling off a little, yes.” Bess stood on her toes and kissed the side of Harry’s neck. He smelled different in California. The California air was nothing like New York air. It was cleaner here; they had lemon trees in their yard. And Harry was happier, too, doing his stunts for film as an established movie celebrity, although it had been difficult to get him to agree to leave New York. When he was first offered a leading role in a picture, he had been in a lengthy and dark depression, even though no one who’d seen him perform would have suspected. He had made a five-ton elephant vanish at the New York Hippodrome—the pinnacle of his career—and the papers had had a field day with the trick afterward, quoting Harry’s quip, “Fellows, even the elephant does not know how it is done!” But afterward, instead of sleeping, he would retreat to the fireplace in the library and attempt another failed communication with his mother. The house where they had all lived together became a venue for these one-way communications—every mirror a place where she might appear, every Victrola record an opportunity for her voice to come through. But Mrs. Weiss never appeared, and she never spoke to him. Every morning Harry would stare at her photograph and say, “Well, Mama, I have not heard from you. I have not heard.” He knew she was his one avenue to prove that the afterlife existed, and he desperately wanted to know what was on the other side.
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