The bag launched over the screen, empty, weightless and with the sudden slack, the sailors tumbled to the floorboards. There was a short burst of laughter from the audience. Evelyn looked at the bag in amazement. Carter looked at the bag in astonishment. The trick had worked!
Then Evelyn remembered to have the sailors inspect the knots. When they had dusted themselves off, with some grumbling about not getting warned that they’d fall on their cans, the sailors admitted their knots were still good. Evelyn collapsed the screen. Karl was gone.
“Where is Karl?” she asked the sailors. “Does anyone in the house know where Karl is?”
Carter sensed confusion in the audience—Evelyn was so concerned-looking that no one could tell if Karl going missing was part of the act. Then Karl walked onto stage from the wings. He waved at everyone. No one in the audience applauded.
“Thank you,” Evelyn said, bowing. “That was our trick.”
Carter scanned the crowd, seeing them fanning out their programs, trying to decide whether to stay for the soft-shoe number or to get a taffy apple now and come back later. But gradually, something happened that Carter had never heard before in vaudeville: from the wings, from the flies, starting slowly, but building, genuine applause as fellow performers gave The Funny Farm the ovation it deserved.
A few minutes later, Carter was backstage, and there was Chase the dramatic monologist, and Reilly and Schultz, the singers, and Minnie, with Julius and Adolph, two of her sons, and the wan-looking girl who danced in the Chinese number, and band conductor Laszlo with most of his brass section. They clapped Evelyn on the back. Evelyn was showing off the black bags to everyone, and explaining how the trick worked, “. . . see, so simple.” Carter, pushing through the crowd, wanted both to congratulate her and keep her from revealing more. She hugged Karl, who shut his bloodshot eyes when someone yelled encouragement into his ear. Evelyn saw Carter and extended her arms to hug him.
Mysterioso, who had never come so early before, was drifting like a black cloud near the exit doors. Carter saw him approach the stage manager, a man with a mustache and thin toupee. While Carter was being hugged by Evelyn, he watched Mysterioso pointedly take out a legal-sized document and direct the manager’s attention to it.
A moment later, the manager approached the troupe. He jerked his chin to Karl and Evelyn. “Yer shut,” he said.
The crowd, as one, gasped, for no one could believe what the manager had said.
“Can’t have three magic acts on the same bill. It’s in the contract, I seen it. Getcher stuff, scram!”
The buzz began: what had he said? They were shut? That was awful! But as Minnie first comforted Evelyn, then ran after the manager to give him a piece of her mind, the other acts began to disperse, the flats pushed toward the stage for the comedy number, and everyone withdrew back to their own lives. Another act shut—best keep your distance.
Carter didn’t leave. He stood perfectly still, close to the darkest corner of the backstage area. When the final person was gone, he concentrated, knowing he wasn’t really alone. Almost completely concealed by a papier-mâché shield and sword used in the tableaux vivants act, Mysterioso stood still, holding his little dog. The moment Carter perceived him, the other magician gave a slight bow, turned on his heel, and left.
That evening, Carter performed his act with particular skill and grace. He was furious. Whenever he glanced to the wings, in either direction, there was Mysterioso again. This was the first time he was aware of Mysterioso watching his act, but the timing of his appearances in the wings suggested he knew exactly when Carter would be facing stage left or stage right. Mysterioso wore a faint smile and, as Carter went through the tricks he’d been performing for years, he gave nods and shakes of his head, as if impressed. Carter was adding up numbers while he was waterfalling decks of cards: they had been on tour five weeks. In twenty-two weeks, in San Francisco, at the Orpheum, he would need to perform spectacularly. Twenty-two weeks was a great deal of time, enough to perfect a new illusion or two.
There was a problem. According to Minnie, Sarah had returned home to Bristol Bay, Alaska. The tour would not pass near her hometown, and it was unlikely any professional engagement would ever pass within eight hundred snowbound miles of her. Furthermore, she had left because she was returning to her first great love, the church. She was joining a convent. She had quit when Mysterioso would not let her perform a dance solo based on Lamentations.
Some people, Carter mused as he flicked a scarf in the air, turning it into the American flag, would be embarrassed to have fallen in love from afar without getting to know the girl first. But he had no time for that; Mysterioso had shut down The Funny Farm. Ever since the days of Jenks, Carter had felt a sour kind of hatred for triumphant bullies.
Now was the time in his act when he brought in a volunteer for his big finish. Robert-Houdin had written, “It is easier to dupe a clever man than an ignorant one” and Carter had taken that to heart.
“Will the smartest man in the house please come onstage?”
The line always got a laugh; and this time, accompanied by hoots and applause, a prosperous-looking man ambled up the aisle. He wore a European black wool suit with two side vents, and he was one of those types not willing to be fooled.
“What is your profession, sir?” Carter asked.
“I am an investment banker, sir.”
An investment banker. Perhaps someone who admired the Carter family name, as it was known to the legitimate, nonmagical world. Carter’s sangfroid voice chilled another five degrees. “I imagine you know how to judge a man’s worth by looking at him.”
“I do.”
“And character counts as much as anything, doesn’t it?”
“So Morgan says.”
Knowing the answer, Carter asked, “If I walked into your bank, would you give me credit?”
“No, sir, I wouldn’t.”
There was a little laughter from the audience, and, from the corner of his left eye, Carter sensed Mysterioso having a chuckle. “Perhaps we can change that situation.” Carter had him unseal a deck, shuffle it, and pick a card, placing it in an envelope. “Now, sir, would you please sign the card, then seal the envelope and sign your name across it?” As the man wrote his name, Carter said, “Is that the signature you’ll use when I come into your bank tomorrow morning?”
“It’s the signature I use when signing all documents.”
Carter put the envelope into the man’s jacket pocket. All he had to do was toss a deck of cards into the air and catch the right card. But Carter had reached a point he’d never reached before: he opened the deck distractedly.
A four of spades.
“Is this your card?”
“No, it is not.”
Carter looked at the four of spades. “Really?”
“Really.”
In the wings, Mysterioso approached the very edge of the stage. He leaned, arms crossed, against the back of some scenery painted with devils and wizards.
For a horrible moment, audience member turned to audience member, the whispers just beginning. Carter felt time slowing down for him. But thinking onstage was becoming second nature: unseen, he located the correct card and an idea for a good finish sprang as full-blown as Athena.
He shook a throwing knife down his sleeve, drew his arm back, and threw it directly at the flat his rival was leaning against. The blade cracked the wood three inches from Mysterioso’s head.
Returning his attention to his volunteer, Carter heard the offstage sound of Mysterioso stumbling over his boots and falling to the floor.
“Now then,” Carter said calmly, “is that your card?”
The investment banker frowned. “Is what my card?”
Carter tilted his head toward the flat. The six of hearts—signed by the banker—was impaled there. The knife blade had skewered it neatly. The banker looked disappointed. “Why—yes. That is my signature.”
“Thank you.” Carter showed him offstage. He too
k a bow and approached the footlights. “Ladies and Gentlemen, let us all learn how to give credit where credit is due.”
Carter then left the stage, repacking his kit and locking it away in the train’s cargo hold. He hurried to Karl’s and Evelyn’s rooms, but they’d already been vacated. No chance to say good-bye.
That night he ate the landlady’s salt horse stew, and later he lay in bed, staring upward at the peeling paint on yet another dirty ceiling, while cats howled outside his window. He tried to think of respectable illusions, ways to stand out from the ranks. Something involving fire, perhaps, or a new twist on spirit mediums. His thoughts kept drifting to Karl and Evelyn, to them sitting on a train, them not waving good-bye, for there was no one to see them off. And Sarah, gone, too. And Mysterioso, the headliner. Outside, two tomcats cried out, their voices raising like sirens.
Suddenly, Carter threw the covers off, opened the window, and howled back at them.
They fell silent. He imagined them stunned. He closed the window and went back to bed, but did not sleep.
CHAPTER 9
Carter turned twenty-three in November in Wichita. Borax Smith sent him a fountain pen, along with an invitation to write him as often as he liked. He also received a package from his family—books, long underwear, a trick photograph taken at Woodward Gardens in which James seemed to be playing a hand of cards with himself. Besides these gifts, Carter’s celebration consisted of climbing to the roof of the boardinghouse, drinking a single shot of whiskey, and making a frame with his fingertips that he swept around the sky until he found a constellation he recognized, but could not name. He wondered if it were also visible from Alaska. He’d heard nothing from Sarah, but imagined her frozen in time there, waiting for him though she didn’t even know it.
The last two nights of week twenty-seven were a grand show at San Francisco, the Orpheum, the gem of the circuit. With a fifty-piece orchestra and velvet seats for two thousand patrons, the Orpheum was where the finest performers in the world—Houdini, Sarah Bernhardt, the Barrymores—played for five thousand dollars a week. The thirty-week players, who averaged perhaps $110 a month, were allowed two nights at the Orpheum so that management could watch their acts and renegotiate contracts for the following season. These were the shows where they were expected to add twists, nuances, and improvements.
Carter’s old ideas for illusions seemed vulgar, and lately, his imagination dwelt on tricks involving beheadings or electrocutions or the brank, and he did not trust his judgment. He wrote to the brothers Martinka, the great illusion builders, to inquire about the costs of fabricating a levitation effect. They wrote back with steep quotations for an aga levitation and steeper still for what he really wanted, an asrah, in which the subject not only floated but vanished. He could hardly afford even the former without touching his trust fund and alerting his father.
By the twelfth week, “purchased” word of mouth was in full swing. This meant that when the tour was about to hit a smaller town, just a single night on the schedule—Okmulgee, Oklahoma; Nacogdoches, Texas; Plaquemine, Louisiana—advance men went to taverns and churches, speaking to each other loudly about the many marvels the next Keith-Orpheum circuit show held. In church, they clucked their tongues when considering their poor wives, who had missed the show, and hadn’t seen handsome Chase Wiley, the poetic monologist. In the taverns, they laughed about the antics of Fun in Hi Skule and murmured to each other about the risqué dance set in the opium den. Why, they wondered, had so much of the girl’s flesh been allowed to show? The tactics worked—seats were filled close to capacity.
But as the tour progressed, a genuine swell of public opinion greeted them, based on a new member of Mysterioso’s act: Annabelle, the woman who replaced Sarah O’Leary after three other girls had filled in and were dismissed.
Carter had little interest in her. Before his attempt with Sarah, he had never been one to fling woo at girls. And in Sarah’s absence, he kept a noble sort of detachment from Annabelle for almost three days. Two days, nineteen hours after she joined the troupe, they were both backstage, Annabelle stretching in her black leotard, one leg propped up on a ballet bar. While he checked the band of his top hat for extra aces, he saw her to be awkward-looking and red-faced, with her brow wrinkled as if in complaint.
But as he popped his top hat on his head and swirled his cape in anticipation of his entrance, he glanced her way again, and saw that Annabelle had silky, fine hair, henna red, that fell in curls on either side of her heart-shaped face. How large her hands were, how chipped her nails. The blue ribbon in her red hair was sad and frayed. But, just as he started to feel sorry for her, he saw, in her shifting weight from foot to foot, the play of muscles in her back.
She caught his eye. He said nothing. Neither did she. They both turned away, successfully. He moved to the apron of the stage as the orchestra played “Pomp and Circumstance,” and he bowed to the audience. He performed perfectly well onstage, but while he was pulling hard-boiled eggs out of the ear of a small boy, he was recalling what terrible qualities he’d just seen in Annabelle’s eyes.
He would not talk to her. He was too afraid of the very quality he’d seen in her green and gold-flecked eyes, the quality that made her an asset to Mysterioso’s company. Her eyes reflected volcanic anger.
Her first night onstage, in Topeka, she had fought—truly fought—the men approaching her, throwing one aside and kicking another in the stomach and knocking the wind out of him. Then, as if it had been a passing summer cloudburst, she lost interest and let herself be kidnapped. The crowd had never seen a woman who could fight before. They went wild. At the closing curtain, unbidden by anyone, she took her own bow, getting a glare from her employer, and even more applause.
Word trickled down from Mysterioso’s camp that after the first performance he had actually fired her, but that a dozen women of Topeka had lined up at the stage door to bless Mysterioso for showing the world that they could fight Indians, too. The women said they were telling all of their neighbors to come to the next evening’s show, and they told him “God bless you” so many times he rehired Annabelle and made her performance part of the act. When his men complained, he chuckled, and said he was now doubly sure he was making the right decision. He told them to choreograph a mock fight.
Had Carter been interested in watching her (he wasn’t—his position on this was so strong he wrote it down), he could have stood in the vacant lots behind the theatres and seen Annabelle and the men rehearsing an increasingly athletic and complex battle. The men were reluctant, but as Annabelle bought drinks for any man she knocked unconscious, they became firm supporters of her place in the act.
. . .
Whenever the tour intersected with another vaudeville circuit’s show, Carter watched performances by other magicians, usually taking notes. He saw full-length shows at the legitimate theatre: the Great Raymond (in his journal, Carter wrote, “he was good”); Adelaide Herrmann, last of the great Herrmann family (“good”); Thurston, successor to Kellar, and named by his peers as the world’s greatest magician (“not bad,” Carter wrote); T. Nelson Downs, the King of Koins (Carter made no mention of Downs’s act, but wrote a page defending his own act, concluding, miserably, that he had to find a new effect).
The only performance that he considered at length was at the Boston Keith’s theatre. Houdini. “Last night,” Carter wrote James, “I saw the most famous man in the world give what I suppose is a typical performance. It is now three A.M. and I am still trying to comprehend what I saw: a short, muscular man with a precise way of speaking, like a Dutchman who speaks the Queen’s English, in a dirty tuxedo—I was in Row S, and I could see soot on him—botching ten minutes of card tricks before tossing the deck aside and getting to the real business: being Houdini. Have I mentioned that he is the most famous man in the world? He did, for ten minutes. ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, George Bernard Shaw said that the three most famous men in the history of the world are Jesus Christ, Sherlock Holmes, and Houdin
i. Only one of us could be here tonight. . . .’ He listed all of the things he has escaped from in the last twelvemonth: handcuffs, straitjacket, sea bag, jail cell, convict ship, crazy crib, coffin, glass box, padlocked case, giant football, witch’s chair, chains, ropes, etc. Then he explained, for another ten minutes, all the old stories of how many foolish imitators he has destroyed. ‘If you are a handcuff king, beware of me,’ he said, ‘for I am unveiling a new weapon.’ Then he showed a motion picture show of him jumping manacled into the Mississippi River and escaping and then construction crews roping him to a girder of the Heidelberg Tower in Manhattan; he escaped that, too.
“Then the lights went up and he proceeded to perform the most amazing stunt I have ever seen in my life.”
Two hot-water boilers were brought onstage, one empty and the other full of warm water. Men from the Albert Mann Boiler Works shackled Houdini with chains and handcuffs they’d brought themselves. Houdini walked up a platform and stepped into the empty boiler, which came up to his neck. Then the men began draining the warm water into the boiler Houdini stood in. This took quite a long time, an interim that Houdini filled with jokes: “It’s not even Saturday night,” and “If I escape, this will be a good trick. If not, buy an Albert Mann Boiler tomorrow—I vouch for its integrity.”
When the water was level with the top—spilling over, in fact—two men carried the boiler cap across the stage, and Houdini took a great gulp of breath and ducked under the surface as the cap was placed on top and the bolts tightened. Immediately, the orchestra struck up “Asleep in the Deep.”
Carter, who had been impressed with the beginning of this illusion, was suddenly let down: of course the cap could screw off. But then two more workmen came out of the wings holding menacing-looking rivet guns. With the snap and retort of metal piercing metal, the boiler cap was riveted shut in twenty places. The men walked off and the curtain swung shut on the sight of the boiler trembling slightly from whatever motion the entrapped Houdini was making inside.
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