by Ed Ifkovic
Quietly, I gathered my jacket and held my father’s elbow as we went downstairs and out the front door. I was pleased. So many nights, especially after the cutthroat skirmishes I had with Fannie, he chose me to walk with, the two of us strolling downtown. Tonight I’d expected him, actually, because supper had been stilted, heavy with frost. Fannie talked about the dress she was making, but my mother seemed distracted. No one mentioned Frana or the questioning of Kathe’s father. We avoided the story that so riveted Appleton. That angered me, though I chose not to bring it up. When I said Sam Ryan praised my Houdini interview again—he’d heard from subscribers—my mother said, sotto voce, “The praise of lesser men.”
I had no idea what that meant but felt, again, that it was part of my mother’s dislike of my being a reporter, as well as her familiar championing of Fannie’s side when we argued. I kept my mouth shut.
Slowly strolling with my father, holding his elbow, rarely speaking, we moved off North Street, down Morrison, onto College. I sensed my father had something to say because the gentle man, his body so loose-limbed and free, the Hungarian wanderer, tensed up, a tightness in the elbow. I waited.
We strolled past the Lyceum. A poster in the glass-fronted display window advertised tomorrow night’s show. Houdini’s benefit. “The Master Escape Artist. See the Handcuff King in a Show to Benefit the Children’s Home. The Greatest Mystery Novelty Act in the World. Known in Every Country on the Globe.” I thought of the genial, humorous man I’d interviewed, and chuckled.
“What?” my father asked.
I recited the braggadocio of the poster and described the fuzzy picture of Houdini bound in chains, hunched forward, showing the camera a hard glassy stare. My interview, published, had been the talk of the visitors to the Ferber household. All the Ferbers, including my father, planned to attend the show. That had surprised me, this change of heart. He would see nothing of Houdini’s antics, but he said he wanted to experience Houdini. “This is an event.” Houdini’s show, of course, was a visual extravaganza, a magician’s sleight of hand punctuated by a rattling of chains and the whoop and holler of a frenzied audience. I dreaded it because I feared I’d be constantly leaning in, explaining, describing.
The Lyceum was dark now, but on the second floor, off to the left, was a hazy light.
“Maybe Houdini is rehearsing.”
“Maybe he was rehearsing and they turned off the lights downstairs. Now he can’t find his way out.” He was grinning.
I felt hollowness in my chest. Was my father talking about himself? This man condemned to grasping at fleeting shadows, condemned to awful blackness and pain. I thought of Milton: “When I consider how my light is spent.” Or was it: “When I consider how my life is spent.” Suddenly I couldn’t remember the line. It didn’t matter because they both said the same thing.
He touched my shoulder. “I don’t like it when you and Fannie do battle.”
“I know.”
“But it won’t change.” He gripped my shoulder. “You are two different people. Fannie wants life to be a calm lake, a boat ride with parasols and moonlight. And that’s good. You want life to be a storm-tossed clipper on the high seas, perilous and thrilling. You two will never agree.”
I liked the image he created of my life. “I’m the girl reporter.”
“You know, your mother hates that phrase. Your mother also knows that she’s like you, or you’re like her, rather—look how she runs My Store, better than I ever did. She likes being out of the home. She won’t admit it—she can’t—but she loves that store.” He could be talking to himself. “She’s not happy when she’s home. She gets quieter and quieter as the days go on. I sometimes don’t know she’s in the house.” He swallowed. “Edna, you are like your mother. You like to be out of the house.”
No, I wanted to cry, I’m like you. But I knew I wasn’t. I didn’t know how to dream, I told myself. I only knew how to act…to move…to question…to probe…
“I like my job…”
“I know you do.” An awful pause as he stopped walking. “You are determined to be a part of this murder investigation.”
“What?”
“I heard you talking with Kathe…all of it.”
“I’m sorry.”
He touched my hand. “No, no. Edna, I’m not unsympathetic. You’re a bright girl. There’s a fierceness in you”—that smile again—“and a sassiness, a penchant for hurling barbs at hypocrites.” He laughed. “You’ll spend your life scaring people, Edna.”
“Father!”
“No, no. There’s nothing wrong with that.” He turned toward me. “Edna, you’ll have to do what you have to do.”
“I always do.”
He smiled in the darkness and started walking. “The girl who got the interview with Houdini! Nineteen years old and so determined.”
“I have to be.”
His hand brushed my shoulder, affectionately. “I’ll never understand you, Edna.” He must have sensed me tense up. “I don’t really have to.”
Chapter Eleven
The next evening the Ferber family trooped to the Lyceum for Houdini’s benefit demonstration. No one was happy. I’d been late to supper, staying too long at the city room and neglecting to telephone home. Fannie, still roiling and fussing from the altercation the previous evening, served an undercooked spring chicken, lumpy mashed potatoes, and a sauerkraut cauliflower so vinegary my father gagged. I apologized, but Fannie would have none of it. Convinced my dawdling had been purposeful and malicious, she blamed the failed supper on her nerves. Kathe, scheduled to help that evening with supper, hadn’t shown up, and Fannie insisted that “Edna as Appleton’s Spanish Inquisition” had badgered the girl to a point where she probably would never set foot again in the Ferber household.
“And just how am I supposed to manage all these rooms?” She flung her arms out melodramatically and let her hand hang in the air like an emphatic punctuation mark.
“Perhaps if you weren’t so imperious with the help…” A rumbling from my father stopped me.
“Edna,” my mother wondered, “why were you late?”
“A witness has come forward.”
“To the murder?”
“No, but a farmer from Neenah, visiting his daughter on Friday, was taking a stroll in Lovers Lane, headed to the river sometime after two o’clock in the afternoon, and swears he saw a girl who looked a lot like Frana Lempke—he saw her picture in the paper—running off into a cove of bushes, running ahead of the man she was with.”
“Older?” From my father.
“He couldn’t tell except that the man seemed to be stumbling, losing his balance as he ran.”
“And he’s sure it was Frana?”
“He claims, yes. He said he noticed her because she was so pretty—and he said she drew his attention because she was laughing loudly.” I pushed away the sauerkraut. “He insists others can back him up. Because, minutes later, headed back to town, he saw a man and a woman nearby, the man leaning against a tree, the woman pulling at his sleeve. Lovers, teasing each other, playing games. Then the woman laughed out loud, and the two scampered out of sight. He said they would have crossed paths with the girl and her friend.”
“Good Lord,” my mother said.
I took a deep breath. “Chief Stone is trying to locate this couple, but the witness simply described them as ‘fancy dressed.’ Whatever that means. If true, then Frana somehow got out of the building by her own free will and met some man, happily so, and she was running—that was his word—running in the woods. It means she did not hide in that storeroom for hours—she left at two. More importantly it means that Mr. Schmidt didn’t grab her, pull her into that room, strangle her, then carry out her body after dark, as Amos Moss suggests.”
“Now what?” my father asked.
“Chief Stone doesn’t know if he believes the man.”
“Why?”
“I gather he…well, rambled, got confused. And I guess the chief would rather b
elieve Frana was in that storeroom. She was in there that afternoon. So how could she have been outside at two?”
“So maybe the farmer is wrong.” My father rested his fork beside his plate.
“But if he’s not, something is really strange here. She hid in that room and then, well, I don’t know…”
“I bet that dullard Amos Moss has some ideas.” My mother, I knew, had little respect for the deputy.
“He’s probably arresting the farmer now for lying to the police.”
My mother frowned at the sauerkraut. “Well, it does seem to suggest that August Schmidt is innocent. I can’t imagine that poor man romping in the woods with Frana.”
“Of course, he’s innocent,” I said.
Fannie eyed the chicken that had been scarcely touched. “Do we have to talk about murder at suppertime?”
“You prefer your unpleasantness served with dessert? Lemon pie?”
“Edna!” From my father.
So the Ferber family, walking to the theater, moved with frozen spaces between us, save for my father who leaned on my mother. At the Lyceum, I nodded to old friends and felt a little proprietary about Harry Houdini. The evening was sold out, and I felt responsible, though that made no sense. In the packed lobby under the blazing chandeliers, I spotted the brothers Timm standing by the ticket window. Homer Timm, dressed in his high-school face, smiled at me as I neared. He half-bowed to my mother. His brother Gustave was as frantic and harried as he always was on the nights of performance. Standing next to Homer, though not speaking to him, stood Mildred Dunne, her eyes on Gustave. Dressed in a purple velvet dress that must have cost a week’s wages, she wore an enigmatic yet oddly triumphant smile on her face, much as, I mused, Balboa had when he stood on that peak in Darien contemplating the vast Pacific. In that resplendent dress, Miss Dunne hardly looked the severe high-school librarian. Such elegant plumage and ostrich feathered hat would, I feared, alarm the quiet shelves of Dickens and Thackeray and Bulwer-Lytton.
Gustave moved through the lobby, nodded at Miss Dunne, disappeared behind his office door, circled back, bowed to folks. At one point he shook my father’s hand and spent a few minutes chatting about Houdini, who, he confided, was an old friend. I refused to believe him because Houdini was my friend. But I was happy to see him single out my father. So often Jacob Ferber, standing in a crowd, seemed lost and abandoned, a deserted island in a storm-tossed sea. Backslapper though he was, Gustave seemed genuinely interested in my father’s well being. Showmanship, I thought, but I appreciated the effect.
As we stood among friends, none of us in a hurry to find our seats, I confirmed that the brothers Timm did not like each other. Lately, given my plodding journalism up and down College Avenue, I prided myself on my powers of character observation, my delight in observing the foibles of the souls I encountered. The Timm brothers filled up pages of my reporter’s notebook. I didn’t care for Homer, put off by his rigid physiognomy; Gustave I tolerated because of his jovial demeanor. But they disliked each other, even though they were often seen together. Every time Gustave sauntered near Homer, I detected a slight frown on Homer’s face, a momentary flicker of disgust. Gustave either didn’t notice or he didn’t care. He’d smile foolishly at Mildred and move off, called away by a theater patron who wanted to shake his hand or to ask something. The minute Gustave’s back was turned, Homer’s eyes followed him, and, had I been a nineteenth-century writer of melodrama, I’d have described Homer’s glare as baleful. Hmm, the brothers Timm as Dickensian characters. Well, well.
Put that on your library shelf, Miss Dunne.
The observation thrilled me. In my reporter’s notebook I’d jotted down imaginary scenes with the two brothers, and now, to my satisfaction, they acted as I had drawn them.
Mr. McCaslin arrived, dressed in a theater cloak which he wore on nights when his high-school drama club performed for parents, and announced to someone behind me that the Lyceum stage should be reserved for classic drama. “Not vaudeville antics.”
A bell rang, and we all rushed to our seats.
Houdini strutted his stuff on the stage to the maddened delight of the audience. Expecting sensation and glorious exhibition, I found myself bored. Not that I didn’t marvel at the transformation of the short, unassuming man into a stage Goliath. Houdini appeared in a black frock coat, stiff collar and black tie. He cried, “Are youse ready to witness the marvelest escape of our time?” I cringed, though the rest of the audience waxed ecstatic. His voice managed to echo off the far balconies—thickly accented but peculiarly melodic and entrancing.
Accompanied by his brother Theo and his admittedly sheepish friend David Baum—who kept stumbling into the footlights and almost fell off the stage, to the delight of Houdini himself and the Appleton folks who knew Baum as the genial owner of Baum Hardware—Houdini moved slowly across the stage but created the illusion of rapid movement. Each calculated step was a masterpiece of planning. Every eye locked onto his every movement. He filled up the room, ruled the space. He was marvelous to watch because the stage show was a deliberate manipulation of the audience’s expectations.
For his first act, Houdini encouraged two strapping farm boys to tie him up with a cord and then handcuff his wrists behind him. He drew it out with much twisting and jumping and struggle, groaning, the footlights capturing the beads of sweat cascading off his brow. He cried to the crowd, “The path of a handcuff king is not all roses.” While the audience sat pensive and restless, he twisted, and suddenly he stood there, ropes collected about his feet, handcuffs snapped open and held out to view. The audience erupted. I knew he could have extracted himself within the first few minutes, but the man understood the psychology of anticipation. Ode, I thought, on a Grecian urn, as it were—vaudeville style. He understood the power of presentation, the need to interact with an audience, the swell and thrust of human drama. This was what Sam Ryan had also told me: You need to understand what your audience is hearing you say. Now, watching Houdini, I understood.
Some of his trickery I found tedious, yet I was more interested—though not that much more—by his climactic exhibition, his being bound again in ropes, then lowered into a coffin with the town’s master carpenter Hermann Grower noisily banging nails into the lid and, prompted by the audience, examining the box closely. Grower mumbled to the audience, “It’s real, let me tell you,” spoken with so much wonder and awe that he garnered a round of spontaneous applause. The coffin was lifted into the air and suspended above the stage as a curtain was drawn over it, leaving an open space below it. Silence…minutes passing…shuffling of feet and elbows in the audience…whispers…nervousness. Waiting…waiting.
I fought a vagrant mental image of laughing, happy Frana Lempke escaping into the woods on the arm of her murderous lover. Trapped, unable to free herself. What happened to them? What turned that joyous moment into such disaster? Again and again and again: How did Frana get out of the school? Where was the evil lover waiting? The lawn behind the high school led, a few hundred yards away, into the dense park of Lovers Lane. So many places to hide. The back door of the school opened onto that wooded expanse. I drifted off, an unwelcome reverie, imaging myself in Lovers Lane the moment Esther and I happened upon that body.
The curtain lifted. I jumped, emitted a little yelp, and my mother scowled at me. The box rested on the stage, and from the wings a triumphant Houdini appeared. He invited the carpenter to examine the box and beamed as Hermann Grover announced that not a nail had been removed, everything was just as he had hammered it minutes before. Removing the lid, a disheveled brother Theo popped out. He bowed. Hermann, excited, reached over to shake Houdini’s hand, and Houdini, winking at the audience, put something in Hermann’s hand. Baffled, Hermann opened his palm and grinned. He was holding, he announced, the watch fob that had been clipped to his vest.
“Genius,” he shouted, and the crowd roared.
Masterful. The pint-sized dynamo, all sinew and muscle, a Jewish boy from Appleton, the perform
er who once called himself the Prince of the Air, stealer of crabapples and peaches. The wonder of it all.
Afterwards in the lobby, that hum of wonder covered the room like a spray of warm river mist. I was standing near the front door, ready to leave, watching as Gustave Timm, preening like a barnyard cock at dawn, leaned into my father, but I had no idea what he was saying. Yet my father was pleased, even smiling a bit. So it was all right, then, this chat.
When I approached, I heard Gustave inviting him to join him and David Baum and some other men for a luncheon two days hence, the day before Houdini was scheduled to leave. That thrilled me, but my father said, “No, thank you.”
Gustave implored him, saying that Baum had requested my father be there. “Houdini wants to meet the father of the feisty girl who ambushed him on College Avenue.”
Baum, like Jacob Ferber, of course, and Houdini himself, had been born in small impoverished villages in Hungary. They had all fled to the golden land.
“No,” my father said, a little more empathically, “I would be uncomfortable.”
Gustave walked away. Listening to these few plaintive words, I wanted to go home.
Suddenly Houdini was there, a small, clean-shaven man now writ larger than life, his black curly hair messed up. He maneuvered his way through the packed crowd. Someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned, expecting to see Sam Ryan or Miss Ivy. It was Homer Timm. He looked none too happy away from the corner of the room where he’d been rooted. Mildred, nearby, watched him, a frown on her face. Another observation for my notebook: The future brother-in-law and sister-in-law disliked each other. A trio of unhappy players.
I knew Homer had moved into Mrs. Zeller’s rooming house years back after his wife took sick and the children went back East to the grandparents. Gustave, the newcomer, rented the small cheap bungalow on South Street, just up from the boat dock near the mill district. The brothers didn’t share lodging. Well, I thought, grimly, I understood that perfectly because I anticipated the day when Fannie and I would be miles apart, independent of each other’s lives, my older sister married and probably stopping by on the High Holy Days or, more likely, Christmas. It would be nice if she lived in California, where I had no intention of ever going.
