Nevermore

by William Hjortsberg

  “What’s so unfortunate, dear?” Bess appeared unexpectedly out of the shadows in the narrow corridor.

  Houdini’s lunar grin froze, a startled grimace advertising unspecified guilt. “Oh, Bess … here you are. I … I was just explaining to Mrs. Fletcher that we were unavailable tonight.”

  “Unavailable for what?”

  “To attend a séance.” The magician looked clearly uncomfortable. “I know you haven’t met. Mrs. Houdini, allow me to introduce Mrs. Opal Crosby Fletcher.”

  “My friends call me Isis.” The delicate oval face remained serene and composed, radiant in its unearthly beauty.

  Bess ignored the slender outstretched hand. “A distinct pleasure, Mrs. Fletcher,” she said, each word crisp and clear, as if individually carved from ice.

  “Yes. I’m sure.” Isis looked straight past Bess, focusing her intense attention on the magician. “I’ll expect your call,” she said softly, gliding off down the hall, her midnight dress melting into the shadows.

  Houdini stared after her. “Consorting with the enemy?” Bess jibed.

  “She asked me to act as an impartial psychic investigator at one of her séances.”

  “My knight in shining armor.” Bess gave him a big hug. “Be careful of that one, Harry. She’s dangerous.”

  Twenty minutes later, the press of true believers diminished sufficiently to allow the Houdinis to join Sir Arthur and Lady Conan Doyle for their planned evening of dining and dancing at the Central Park Casino. They stepped out of the stage entrance onto Seventh Avenue, confronting a crowd of reporters between them and the hired horse-drawn hansom cab waiting at the curb. Sir Arthur bristled at the sight of the gathered newsmen. “Damned jackals,” he muttered to Houdini, half under his breath.

  The reporters immediately recognized the two couples and closed in, all shouting questions at once. Conan Doyle remained polite, replying to the predictable queries with appropriately monosyllabic answers. How much did he enjoy America? Did he feel tonight’s lecture had gone well?

  “What progress has been made in the Scientific American competition?” asked a whippet-faced journalist.

  Sir Arthur seemed pleased with the question. He answered with a smile. “Well, as you all must know, a twenty-five-hundred-dollar prize has been offered to the first person producing a genuine psychic manifestation. Malcolm Bird, the magazine’s associate editor, came over to London at the beginning of the year, and together we attended several séances. We had sittings with Evan Powell and with another medium named John Sloan.

  “Unfortunately, in both instances the results were inconclusive, but I expect to continue these investigations with Bird while on tour in the States and have every expectation that we shall be awarding the prize before long.”

  A woman from the Herald, whose long neck, pallid face, and taupe cloche hat made her head appear to be a monstrous mushroom, tried to interject a literary note into the proceedings. “Are you influenced by Edgar Allan Poe?” she asked in a reedy, strident voice.

  Conan Doyle hesitated. Those of the press familiar with the author knew firsthand his aversion to questions of this sort and grinned in anticipation of his sardonic rejoinder. In fact, Sir Arthur was jolted into a startling recollection of the morning’s apparition. Had he really seen the specter? Did his profound belief in spiritism cloud his reason? The circle of waiting, expectant faces brought him back to the moment. “Poe…?” He blinked, seemingly bewildered. “Oh, immensely. His detective is the best in literature.”

  The woman from the Herald scribbled furiously in an F. W. Woolworth notebook. “You mean, except for Sherlock Holmes?”

  Conan Doyle stiffened, his face registering subtle degrees of displeasure. “I make no exception!” he bellowed.

  The knight’s brusque bark had those in the know grinning. No one much cared for the gangly woman from the Herald, and her blunder provided general amusement. Still, the reporters found it hard to fault her motives. Sherlock Holmes remained a subject of interest to most readers, whereas all this spiritualism business seemed a touch loony.

  A young reporter wearing eyeglasses as thick as the bottoms of beer mugs unfurled a copy of the late edition of the American. A bold Hearst headline blared: Poe Murders Grip City. “Seeing how much you like Poe,” he said, “what do you think of Runyon’s notion that we’ve got some kind of well-read maniac running around town?”

  Sir Arthur grinned. “As you all know, I am a devotee of homicide, but alas, I’ve been much too busy lately preparing for my lecture tour to pay close attention to any recent local-bloodletting.”

  The bespectacled man handed him the paper. “Here. Read all about it.”

  “I certainly shall, and with great interest.”

  “Any advice to give the boys in blue?” asked another reporter.

  “Boys in blue…? I don’t follow.”

  “You know, the cops. New York’s finest. The police. Any inside tips on how to go about finding a literary killer?”

  Sir Arthur glanced down at the headline on the newspaper he held. “I daresay it would be best to be apprised of the facts in the case before endeavoring to give advice.”

  “Boys … boys …” Houdini strutted before them on the sidewalk. “Let me tell you something. If anyone’s gonna get to the bottom of this mystery, it’ll be Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. And you can take that one to the bank.”

  “Is that right, Sir Arthur?” a reporter shouted. “You gonna crack the Poe case?”

  The noble knight looked a bit bewildered. “I wouldn’t say that… . I don’t have any of the facts at my disposal.”

  “He’s being too modest, fellas.” Houdini gestured like an energetic carnival pitchman. “This is the mind that gave the world Sherlock Holmes. Here is a master of deduction! This man is, in fact, Sherlock Holmes personified. Who else better suited to solving crime than the greatest detective on earth?”

  Like scraps tossed to mongrels, the magician’s remarks unleashed a frenzy of questioning among the rabid reporters. They danced about the two couples, an agitated wolf pack with the scent of blood in their nostrils.

  Conan Doyle flushed pink with embarrassment. “Gentlemen, please,” he pleaded. “I am not a detective. I am an author. Let us not confuse fiction with reality.”

  “What about the Oscar Slater case?” a reporter yelled.

  “What about the George Edalji mystery?” another joined in. “The business with the mutilated cattle?”

  “I’m afraid you must excuse us now.” Sir Arthur shouldered through the yammering reporters, clearing a path to the waiting cab for his wife and the Houdinis. “We really must be on our way. Thank you very much indeed.”

  Once the cab door closed, the driver flicked his buggy whip and the swaybacked mare pulled the hansom out into traffic, passing in front of a streetcar pausing to discharge passengers at the Fifty-seventh Street corner. Sir Arthur’s breath came in labored, choleric gasps. “How could you?” he said to Houdini, struggling for composure. “All that balderdash about the greatest detective on earth.”

  The magician smiled like a kid who’s just hit a home run. “Where’s the harm in a little ballyhoo?” “Harm? Why, it’s utter nonsense.” “No need to get upset. Just publicity.” “Bad publicity.” “No such thing … “

  9

  TRIPPING THE LIGHT FANTASTIC

  BITTER THOUGHTS CROWDED MARY Rogers’s head as she struggled to stay awake. After more than thirty-six hours on the dance floor she felt giddy with exhaustion. Her hard, brassy, marceled hair hung lank and disordered about her aching neck. Sweat wilted the pleated green silk Charmeuse frock she’d paid nearly eight dollars for at an after Christmas sale. It was her favorite outfit and had been marked down from $ 11.98. She had worn it not for comfort but because of how good she imagined she would look for the publicity pictures following her triumphant victory.

  Mary Rogers exemplified the epitome of a modern flapper, a sheba who might have stepped straight from one of John Held, Jr.’s ra
cy cartoons. Her hair was bobbed and peroxided, she smoked in public and rolled her hose below the knee and, while still in high school in Teaneck, New Jersey, flopped about wearing unbuckled galoshes and rode with her date to the prom in an open flivver painted with catchy slogans: “99 44/100% Pure,” “Lizzie of the Valley,” “Mrs. Often,” “Four Wheels, No Brakes.”

  College was never an option for a girl from a working-class family, so after graduation, armed with her stenography certificate, Mary headed straight for Manhattan, found a two-room Greenwich Village apartment, and secured employment at the Consolidated Life Insurance Company. To her Irish immigrant family, none of whom had gone beyond grade school, this seemed a remarkable achievement. Although she felt proud landing a job usually reserved for men, Mary wanted something more out of life than just taking dictation.

  She spent her free time in movie palaces and vaudeville theaters, fueling her dreams of glamour and fame. One Saturday afternoon, coming out of a matinee at Loew’s New York on Times Square, a man stopped her on the street, gave her his card, and inquired if she’d be interested in working in pictures. Her life changed forever on that day.

  Although the promised work turned out to be three days as an extra in a production starring Babe Ruth across the Hudson in Fort Lee, Mary promptly quit her steno’s job to pursue a career in show business. A total lack of talent hindered her in this occupation. She didn’t sing, dance, or act, and soon discovered a pretty face only landed her a regular spot on the casting couch.

  To make ends meet, she took a position as a cigarette girl at Barney Gallant’s ultrafancy Washington Square speakeasy, where they served the hooch in ginger ale bottles and printed a set of mock rules on the menus admonishing patrons to “make no requests of the leader of the orchestra for the songs of the vintage of 1890. Crooning ‘Sweet Adeline’ was all right for your granddad, but times, alas, have changed.”

  Mary’s salary seemed little better than a joke, but she picked up good tips and figured the convenience made it worthwhile. The Club Gallant was close to her apartment on Bleecker Street and working nights allowed her to tramp from audition to audition during the day. She studied the daily Variety religiously, attending every advertised open casting call. She became the uncrowned queen of “cattle calls.” Herded onto a bare stage under a single, dangling incandescent bulb among dozens of other aspiring chorus girls, and given less than a minute to strut her stuff, Mary felt a bovine weariness settle into her bones.

  And what had she to show for all the worn shoe leather and broken dreams? A few days’ work here and there for Selznick and Biograph and other local film production companies. Two weeks dressed as Little Bo Peep, handing out free scented Lady Janis Complexion Soap samples at Macy’s department store. A session with a photographer, modeling corsets for the B. Altman catalog. And, although she fantasized about becoming a Ziegfeld girl in the “Follies,” the closest she ever came to realizing that aspiration remained a two-week engagement in the company of a vaudeville magician.

  It would take a bit of her own magic to make the leap to stardom. At a time when entire careers centered on such dubious accomplishments as flagpole sitting and winning crossword puzzle tournaments, anyone with ambition might pluck fame from obscurity, like a rabbit from a silk top hat, by some single act of notoriety.

  When Mary Rogers read the newspaper accounts of the first dance marathon contest held in the United States on March 31, she hardly gave the article a second thought. The novelty had originated in England and didn’t seem likely to appeal to American tastes. She’d been dead wrong on that score. By the middle of April, more than a dozen competitions had been staged coast-to-coast, with a current endurance record of over ninety hours. Another fad off and running. On the day Roseland Ballroom advertised a May marathon featuring a grand prize of $500, Mary headed the line forming on Fifty-second Street, among the first five contestants to pay the required two-dollar entry fee.

  Her partner was a waiter from the club, an affable young man named George Paterson Dobbs, who everyone called “Pumpkin” or “Pummie” for reasons completely unknown to Mary. An aspiring poet, he had lived in the Village for several years before the war, returning to a garret on Carmine Street after being demobbed. Pummie knew Max Eastman and all that gang at The Masses, and had published some slight undistinguished work in The Quill and The Dial. Mary asked him to dance with her in the marathon contest mainly because no romantic attachment connected them. This was strictly business.

  Halfway through the second day, Mary Rogers felt sure she hated Pummie. His head rested heavily on her shoulder and the sickly-sweet odor of the Glostora he used to groom his hair made her stomach queasy. His face turned away and at least she didn’t suffer the rasp of his beard or smell his sour, tobacco-stale breath. She wondered if he was sleeping. His feet dragged mechanically across the polished hardwood floor, but that didn’t prove anything. She’d fallen asleep herself on several occasions and danced on like a zombie, never missing a step.

  Every hour, the contestants enjoyed a fifteen-minute recess, barely enough time for a cup of coffee, a bite of a sandwich, and a couple of puffs on a cigarette before the most recent orchestra struck up another fox-trot. Mary no longer distinguished one tune from the next. To her weary ears, “I Ain’t Got Nobody” might just as well have been “Ain’t We Got Fun.”

  Of over one hundred couples starting the marathon, fewer than thirty-odd remained on the dance floor. Even the musicians looked rumpled and fatigued, “The Sheik of Araby” sounding like a dirge. Mary cursed her fashionable high-heeled pumps. Why hadn’t she had the foresight to wear something more sensible? Her feet were killing her. Not even a massage from one of the attending nurses during the last break had been much help. When she saw two young women in ballet slippers and another wearing rubber-soled gymnasium shoes, she lost hope entirely. There was no way she could go the distance.

  Suddenly, Pummie screamed and fell to the floor clutching his right calf.

  “Get up!” she shrieked, tugging at him.

  “I’ve got a cramp.” His face contorted with pain. “Oh, my dear God!”

  “Get up, you bastard! We’ll be disqualified.”

  “I can’t move. Feels like it’s broken.”

  She kicked at him. “Get up! Get up! Get up! …”

  Whirling coin-sized spots of light reflecting from the rotating mirrored ball flickered across her furious, imploring features. “Please, Pummie,” she pleaded. “Please, please, please … get up and dance.”

  “I can’t, Mary. Honest.” George Paterson Dobbs stared at her with the pain-heightened innocence of a chromolith martyr. “I’m finished.”

  “Piss on you then!” Mary turned with a sneer and hobbled unsteadily off the dance floor, the sad complaint of the orchestra droning a mournful rendition of “Toot, Toot, Tootsie” behind her.

  Outside on the sidewalk, daylight took her by surprise. A flock of pigeons whirled into the angled sunlight, turning in a single motion like leaves caught in a whirlwind. Still early, and the shops, theaters, and restaurants had yet to open. Broadway was not an a.m. boulevard.

  Mary walked to Forty-seventh Street, then changed her mind and headed east. She didn’t feel like taking the subway downtown. A huge painted spectacular advertising Piedmont Cigarettes high above the intersection of Broadway and Seventh Avenue made her crave a smoke, but she’d done the last of her coffin nails almost an hour ago. “My lucky day,” she said out loud, her laugh a bitter echo of her emotional state.

  Every hotel, had a cigar stand, but Mary didn’t want to enter a lobby unescorted and reached Fifth Avenue without passing another establishment selling cigarettes. She caught a downtown number four bus, paid her ten-cent fare to the conductor, and climbed the curving rear stairs to the upper deck. Trolley cars and the subway cost only a nickel but, after thirty-six long hours at Roseland, Mary craved fresh air.

  It felt good to sit in the open with the sun on her face and a brisk wind tangling her bleach
ed blond hair. A man across the aisle lit up, the flat green metal tin still in his hand. Mary bummed a Lucky Strike, although she adroitly avoided being drawn into any sort of conversation.

  Exhaling, she felt her bad mood flowing away on the breeze along with curling wreaths of smoke. Before reaching the Waldorf-Astoria on Thirty-fourth Street, the bus passed a parade of great department stores: B. Altman’s, Lord & Taylor’s, Tiffany’s, Gorham, Best & Company. Mary indulged in a fantasy shopping spree. Something to wear while strutting along Peacock Alley.

  Dream-shopping was all Mary could afford these days. Things had seemed more promising a couple of months ago when she landed a job in Harry Houdini’s vaudeville company. The pay topped $35 a week and she was giddy in anticipation of buying a fabulous new wardrobe. Next thing you know, the stuck-up little runt docked her a fin because she forgot some dumb part of her costume and after they played the Palace she got notice she wouldn’t be needed for the short tour of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Still a chance she might be asked back for ten weeks on the western circuit later in the summer, but something told her not to hold her breath on that score.

  The boy sitting in front of her looked to be about eight. Mary wondered why he wasn’t in school. He kneeled on his seat, leaning over the rail and pointing out passing automobiles to the plump, dark-haired woman with him. Canvas-topped cars constituted the large majority, but many enclosed sedans and coupes joined their ranks. Most were Fords—high, black, boxlike Model Ts—the only vehicle Mary could identify by brand name.

  “There’s a Jordan Playboy, Blair,” the little boy cried, pointing to a rakish roadster. “Look, Blair. An Apperson Eight! And a Barney Oldsmobile! There’s a Franklin, it’s got an air-cooled engine… . And a Milburn Light Electric… . Hey! Hey! A Kenworthy! A Chandler! … An Auburn! … A Maxwell! … A Roamer! … A Peerless! … A Locomobile! … An Owen Magnetic! … A Grant Six! … A Jewett!

  … A Haynes! … A Cadillac! …” The automotive litany continued unabated until Blair and the little boy got off the bus at Fourteenth Street.