Mrs. Houdini

by Victoria Kelly

  Niall nodded. “They did, that’s true.”

  Bess turned to the bar, where bowls of oranges and lemons were set out beside blue glass bottles. It looked like a painting; she had stayed late after the lunch hour to set up for tonight. “Let’s have a drink.” She poured two gin rickeys and handed one to Gladys, who took a tentative sip.

  “We’re talking about finding ourselves some men,” Bess said. Marlene clapped her hands. “Oh!” she cried. “I have the perfect men for you. They’re brothers. I just met them a few moments ago.” She looked around. “I think they were brothers.” She wandered off, still holding the tablecloth around her shoulders.

  Bess raised her eyebrows at Niall. “Why, she’s as beautiful as a peacock and stupid as a goose.”

  “Don’t be cruel,” he said, throwing up his hands. “She lives in the apartment next to mine, and she caught me on my way out.”

  Gladys reached for Bess’s elbow. “Would you sit with me for a moment?” she asked. “I’m feeling a little light-headed.”

  “Oh no.” Bess led her over to the lounge and settled her onto the couch. “I shouldn’t have given you that stuff. It’s practically poison.”

  “I’m just overwhelmed is all.”

  Bess fumbled around in her purse for a cigarette. “Sometimes, I feel this city is so large that it makes me feel small.” She reached for the issue of The Delineator buried among the magazines on the coffee table. “I haven’t had a chance to read that article you told me about yet.”

  “Colleen read it to me. It’s in the back somewhere, I think. It’s very sweet.”

  Bess flipped through the pages. The artistic renderings of the women were always like her—small and boyish, with thin hips and breasts flattened by side-laced bras. Years ago she had been ridiculed for her shape, and called a child. How ironic that it was only when she was a woman of middle age did she finally possess an enviable form. Still, she knew she was getting older. An advertisement for Palmolive facial cream asked, “The kindly candles of last night, the telltale revealments of noon! Do you fear the contrast they may offer?” And she did, she did fear it.

  Toward the back of the issue she found the article, a short piece championing successful Hollywood marriages. It briefly mentioned her and Harry, with an accompanying photograph of them at a medical charity auction five years earlier, along with others like Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. She recalled Harry’s nerves that night, how he had clung to her, how he stood in a room full of great doctors and philanthropists and wondered if he would ever stop feeling like the lesser, less refined man.

  Those rare moments of vulnerability had always devastated her. Now, she knew he was out there in some unfamiliar place looking for her, just as she was looking for him. When he died she had seen how afraid he was, how uncertain, and the thought of him alone, lonely, trying to find her, was almost too much to bear. She looked at Gladys and lowered her voice. “Do you think . . . he’ll ever come back?”

  Gladys reached for her hand and peered at her with empty blue eyes. “He’s not coming back,” she said gently. “He’s not, Bess.”

  “But he is somewhere.”

  It was the one thing on which the two women fiercely disagreed. If there was anyone who could find a way to cross between the two worlds, it would be Harry. But Gladys, perhaps because of her own tragedy, had never subscribed to any romantic notions. Sometimes Bess wondered what it was Gladys saw in the blackness of the world around her. If she didn’t see another, spiritual world, what did she see?

  Bess studied the yellow liquid sparkling at the bottom of her glass. “But, you see, he promised he’d come back. In all his life, he never broke a promise to me.”

  “Maybe he can’t come back,” Gladys said.

  Bess shook her head. There was something she’d kept from Gladys. “He promised something else, too. A few years before he died, I came in to find him in the library one night, hunched over some paperwork on his desk. I said, ‘Harry, what are you still doing in here? It’s late.’ And he turned to me, smiling, and said, ‘It’s all right, Bess. I’m making sure you’ll be taken care of if something happens to me.’ I said, ‘Nothing’s going to happen to you,’ and he said, ‘Don’t worry. I’m arranging everything.’”

  “What did he mean?” Gladys asked. “Life insurance?”

  “No. It wasn’t that. He had a policy, of course, but he could never be certain they would pay out if something happened while he was performing. He’d arranged for something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “Money of some sort. Hidden, where no one else could find it. He was always so paranoid, especially after that night we were burgled. Before he died, he tried to tell me something. I think it may have been about that. But he couldn’t get the words out.” On nights when she couldn’t sleep, Bess searched the house. There were enough papers and hidden panels and loose floorboards to last her years. But so far, she had found nothing.

  “Have you called the banks? The reasonable thing would have been for him to keep it in a safe-deposit box.”

  Bess nodded. “I’ve checked every one in the city. I’ve even called banks in Wisconsin.”

  “That would have been smart of him. Not many people would think to look where we grew up.”

  Bess held up her hands. “But there was nothing. Under the names Houdini or Weiss or Rahner.”

  Gladys pressed her lips together. “What will happen if you don’t find it? Are things really that bad?”

  “I’ll have to sell what’s left, I suppose. Harry’s things. People want them. That’s why I’m pinning my hopes on this business.” She couldn’t bring herself to tell Gladys that the house would have to go, too; in another year the mortgage would bleed the remnants of her accounts dry. She had already spoken to a broker, who could not contain his eagerness to list the property. But what would she have left of Harry once the house was gone? And what if the money Harry had left her was hidden somewhere inside? She could not shake the feeling that the house held secrets she was meant to discover. She needed to hold on to it for as long as possible.

  “Bess—” Gladys began.

  “Don’t say it. That’s why I didn’t tell you.”

  “I shouldn’t have taken what Harry left for me. That should have been your money.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Harry left that to you. How else were you supposed to afford an aide? I’m not having this conversation.” Bess turned back to the magazine on her lap as the music picked up and the noise of the party, of the sweating, concrete city, swelled louder around them. At the bottom of the page was an article calling for the return of the Miss America pageants, which had been cancelled a year prior. She and Harry had been in attendance for the first official pageant, in 1921, when the “Most Beautiful Bathing Girl in America” had been awarded the title of Golden Mermaid. A hundred thousand people had crowded the boardwalk that day to watch a little dark-haired Norma Shearer look-alike win the hundred-dollar prize. The winner, a pretty teenager named Margaret Gorman, had asked Harry for an autograph after the competition. Harry had been tickled by this. “I’ll trade mine for yours,” he had told her. “You’re famous too now, after all.”

  The magazine had a photograph of Margaret, an American flag draped around her shoulders and a string of white beads hanging from her neck. She had embodied the youthful energy of the age; a city girl, from Washington, she had later married and entered society as a minor celebrity. Below her was the caption “I am afraid I am going to wake up and find this has all been a dream.”

  There were photographs of the subsequent competitions, too, as they had gained notoriety, even amid the harsh protestations of women’s groups. In one of the photographs, a full-figured blond girl smiled in a black bathing suit, her hands on her hips. “Kathleen O’Neill of Philadelphia,” the caption read, “competing in the 1924 pageant.” Behind her, a poster advertising the film Walkin’ Home, Again was plastered on the side of a bathhouse, the word Walkin’ cut off by t
he girl’s elbow.

  Bess sat back, startled, before leaning in to look at the picture more closely. Was she really seeing what she thought she was seeing? There were the words from Harry’s second code, in plain sight in front of her eyes. I’ll take you home again, Kathleen, the song began. Their wedding night was the first and only time she’d sung it to him, but it had stayed with him, until his deathbed. And somehow she had stumbled across the photograph of this girl, Kathleen—who had not even won the pageant—the words “Home Again” clearly visible behind her.

  Harry had always protested the idea that photographs could reveal spirits that could not be seen by the naked eye, at the same time conceding that there was something eerie and almost otherworldly about the idea of using light and darkness to capture a moment in time on paper. He had wondered, privately to Bess, whether some part of a person was left behind every time their photograph was taken. But the spiritualists’ use of photography to show fake ghosts and spirits angered him; in one public demonstration, he showed how he could manipulate the development of film to portray Abraham Lincoln’s “ghost” behind him. He always insisted that his own magic was different from the spiritualists’ endeavors. His magic was an illusion—something clearly impossible becoming possible. But it didn’t claim to be more than that—not divinely sanctioned or preordained. He and Bess had once flirted with that kind of deception, and they could never shake the feeling that there was a darkness behind their fraud.

  Bess thought back to her vision of Harry in the silver tray. She had been fooled, she thought, by his photograph on the wall; but then she was not so certain. Was it possible that there was something about that photograph that tied in to the photograph of Kathleen O’Neill?

  She thought back to the afternoon of his death. It was definitely possible that a nurse had overheard the first code; but Harry had only ever referred to the second code as “the song you sang for me on our wedding night.” They had never spoken the lyrics out loud. No one knew the details of that night.

  She shook her head. She had to get some air and think of something else. “I’m going to get you some water,” she told Gladys.

  Gladys shook her head. “Please, I’m fine.”

  “It’s no trouble.” Bess stood up and bumped into a man she didn’t recognize, slightly younger and shorter than herself. The underarms of his shirt were damp with sweat.

  “Hey, you’re Bess Houdini,” he said, grabbing her arm. “I’ve seen you before. Three times actually. When your husband performed here in New York. He was something else.”

  She hated when conversations began like that. She never knew whether people were being polite or fishing for information about Harry. She looked around desperately for someone to pull her away. Another of Niall’s friends, whose name she had forgotten, was walking past; she grabbed his hand and pulled herself toward him. “Oh, Burt! I’ve been looking for you.”

  The man looked at her, surprised for a moment, and then put his arm around her jovially. “Well,” he said. “Here I am.”

  “Come with me into the kitchen.” She took him by the hand and led him through the double doors. “Oh, thank you,” she breathed, collapsing into a chair. Her mind was still racing over what she’d seen in the magazine.

  He laughed, bending to turn on a lamp. “You actually almost got my name right. It’s Robert. Bobby.”

  She looked up at him distractedly. “What’s that? Oh. That is funny. I’ve never been very good with names, especially ones I’ve made up myself.”

  “What’s yours?”

  “My what?”

  He smiled. “Your name.”

  Bess blinked at him. “You mean you don’t know?”

  “We’ve never met before, have we?”

  “No.” She wondered if she should tell him. As soon as they left the kitchen it would become embarrassingly obvious. She stood up.

  “Don’t go yet,” he said. “I was beginning to enjoy myself.”

  Bess looked at him skeptically. “I’m sure you know you’re handsome, but I’m also almost twenty years older than you. If I had to guess.”

  He shrugged. “I prefer older women.”

  “Are you married?” she asked him.

  “No. Are you?”

  Bess hesitated. She touched her hand instinctively, for the wedding ring she’d left at home after the Ford disaster. “Not anymore.”

  “Well, that’s good. We must keep up the pretense of decency, mustn’t we? We wouldn’t want to do anything to get people talking.”

  Bess was amused. She liked his humor; it took her out of her head. There had been a period after Harry’s death, in the haze of grief and champagne, when she’d lost her way with a number of men, many of them younger than she. There was a certain thrill to an affair with a man who was young, especially one who didn’t know who she was. But after a while it had only made her long for some kind of real love.

  “I ought to go,” she said. “What I really need is to get some air. You are funny though.”

  “Well, you shouldn’t go alone.” He followed her out the door that led into the alley beside the building and then onto Forty-Ninth Street. Next to the tearoom, a little jewelry store had opened up a few days earlier, selling hammered gold bespoke pieces. It was dark out and there was a breeze going; she closed her eyes and leaned against the glass storefront.

  “That’s better,” she said. “It’s so hot in there.”

  Robert pulled her against him and pressed his mouth hard against hers. Bess opened her eyes, startled. For a moment she wasn’t sure what to do. Finally she did nothing, and let him kiss her. It felt good to feel someone’s lips against hers again, even if it didn’t mean anything.

  He took her tightly by the waist. “Really,” he said. “You can’t possibly be twenty years older than me. You barely look forty.”

  “I can assure you I’m not forty.”

  Someone whistled from the sidewalk. “Yoo-hoo, Bess!” She looked over to see a girlfriend of hers grinning at her from across the street.

  Robert’s hands fell from her waist. “You’re Bess Houdini?” He was aghast. “Good God! I didn’t recognize you!”

  “Yes, I know. It was nice.”

  “I’m—sorry. I didn’t mean—I really should go.” He stumbled onto the sidewalk. Bess stared after him. She wasn’t surprised he’d run off. The scandal surrounding her was still fresh, after all. Besides, men didn’t like women who were famous for being other men’s wives. And they certainly didn’t like women who famously held séances for their dead husbands. Now she was alone, and the piano music from next door was falling softly into the street.

  She rested her face against the cool glass of the jewelry store. She was happy something so innocuous had opened in the space, and not another restaurant to compete with hers. In the window, the female mannequin was dressed in a white silk shirtwaist with a red necktie and a wrist wrapped in gold. She was standing in front of an enlarged black-and-white photograph of a yacht, tied in the harbor at dusk; in the background, a man was leaning over the edge of the boat, waving to someone off camera.

  Bess looked longingly at the mannequin’s bracelets. No one had bought her jewelry since Harry died. She could buy herself dresses and hats and shoes, but jewelry was something else; it wasn’t something one bought for oneself.

  There was something familiar about the charm on the mannequin, she realized. It looked like one Harry had bought for her years before, on their first trip to London. She still had it in a wooden box on her dressing table. It was a tiny gold ladybug, the tips of its wings dotted with red paint. Hers was much smaller, of course; they had had very little money at the time, but it was the first piece of gold jewelry she’d ever owned, other than her wedding ring.

  Below the man’s hand in the photo, the name of the yacht was barely visible. Home Again, it said, the words painted in curled black letters.

  Bess froze. It couldn’t be. She pressed her palms against the glass and searched the image for
something else she recognized, but there was nothing familiar at all about the scene.

  At the back of the store, she saw a light burning under a closed door. Someone was in there. She pounded on the window glass. After a moment the door opened and a thin old man hobbled toward her, removing a head-strap magnifier.

  “What do you want?” he called through the front door. “We’re closed.”

  “I own the tearoom next door!” she yelled back. “I need to talk to you!”

  The jeweler unlocked the door and let her in. “Bess Houdini? Why didn’t you say so? This damn magnifier does things to my vision.” He frowned. “What’s the matter?”

  Bess hesitated. “I’m sorry about the noise next door.”

  He shrugged. “I like the noise. Makes it seem less lonely in here. To be honest I came into work so late because I knew it would be chaos in there.”

  “The picture in your window,” she said. “I need to know where you got it.”

  He blinked at her. “What do you mean?”

  “That yacht. Did you take that photograph yourself?”

  “No. My son made the display for me. That’s him in the picture. But it was taken years ago.”

  Bess examined it. It didn’t look familiar. “Where was it taken?”

  “I’m not sure. I just said I needed something for a display, and he pulled it out of his album and had it enlarged.”

  “Do you have a copy of the photograph?” She wasn’t sure what she was going to find, but she felt, if she could study it at home, something would come of it.

  He looked confused. “What’s this about?”

  “I know it’s an odd request. You see,” she lied, “it looks just like a boat my father used to own when I was a girl.”

  He shook his head. “My son has the negatives. But he lives in Chicago now.”

  She must have looked crestfallen, because she saw the glaze of pity in his eyes. He thought about it, then waved his hand. “You know what? You can have it—the one in the window.”

  “Oh no, I couldn’t take that. It’s your display.” Bess turned around. The cardboard was over two feet tall.