Harry nodded. “That’s a good suggestion.”
“Of course it is,” Welsh snapped. “And another thing. Have someone in the audience inspect the cuffs. People will think they’re trick cuffs if you don’t.” He cleared his throat. “They aren’t trick cuffs, are they?”
“No, sir.”
“Good. Now, we need you in Tent Five. They’re demanding a Wild Man, but we ain’t got one. So you’re it.”
Bess looked at Harry in his slacks and shirt. “How are we going to do that?”
“Rumple his hair a bit, tear up some sacks for clothes, and make him wild with some raw meat. He’s supposed to be a native of the jungle, but who really cares?”
When Welsh left Harry said, “What do you think he meant when he said we should drag the act out? I thought we already were.”
Bess thought about it. “Maybe we should give them a hint of danger. Make them think your life is really at stake. People want drama.”
Harry kissed her. “My little ingenue.”
Harry embraced the challenges. The Wild Man drew a crowd of fifty to his first show. The ringmaster claimed Harry was living on a diet of meat and tobacco, so at the end of the show the men threw cigarettes and cigars at the cage. Between this act and the Metamorphosis, Harry gave away a stash of loot to the canvas men.
Of their twenty-five dollars a week, he insisted on saving half and sending the other half to his mother in New York. In return, Bess would receive the loveliest letters from Mrs. Weiss. The letters never mentioned Bess’s mother (although Bess was certain Harry had told her about being thrown out of the house) but Bess understood that Mrs. Weiss was offering herself up as a mothering figure, advising her on how to do laundry on the road, and how to evade the drunk circus goers.
Most of the performers, Bess learned, were related to each other. Mrs. McCarthy was married to the ringmaster, and her brother was the fire-eater, and her husband’s cousin was one of the canvas men. The other woman, Moira, did the costumes, and made Bess a new dress she could wear in the show. In return, whenever they could find poultry, Bess cooked up platters of fried chicken on Friday nights.
She didn’t mind the lack of spending money as much as she minded the lack of privacy. She couldn’t think about doing anything intimate in their living space, which was nearly the same as doing it in public as far as she was concerned. But she began to be haunted by the faces of the babies she saw in the audience.
Harry was against the idea. “We can’t support a child right now,” he told her. “And you wouldn’t be able to perform for a year. Who would take your place?” She knew his ambitions were elsewhere. He was spending an hour every day on his exercises, doing push-ups and intricate stretches, and another hour with his cards, practicing his finger work. Sometimes he would revert to the old standby he had learned in his youth—hanging upside down from a suspended bar and picking up needles with his eyelids. A more complicated task was swallowing the needles, then regurgitating them.
Bess undid his collar. “Please, darling. Think how much fun we’ll have in trying. Just meet me here on Fridays during lunch so we’re alone. You can be tired. I’ll take care of you.” And he relented.
He made the most extraordinary discovery in the quaint, sweltering town of Birmingham, Alabama, which charmed Bess with its shop-lined streets and immaculately dressed southern women. After the show one night Harry met a doctor who mentioned that he worked at a nearby insane asylum, and asked him if he would like to visit. Bess was curious and insisted on accompanying him. Mrs. McCarthy thought she was out of her mind. “You don’t want to see what goes on in places like that,” she told her. “The rest of us are going swimming in the river. Come with us.”
But Harry’s excitement was infectious. Dr. Steeves had told him that he had a possible new idea for an escape trick, only he wouldn’t tell him what it was.
The institution was set back from the road, near a lake, on freshly manicured grounds. It seemed to Bess, from the outside, to be more of a hotel than a hospital, except for the bars on the windows. The sun was shining on the red bricks, and she slid her hand into Harry’s as they waited at the front entrance.
They were greeted by Dr. Steeves, who was flushed with eagerness. He ushered them past the nurses’ station and the recreation room, and through a long corridor of patient rooms. Some of the doors were partially ajar, and Bess could see the shadows of the patients moving about inside the rooms. Finally, she caught a glimpse of one of the patients in the flesh; it was a woman about her age, her dark hair pulled loosely from her face, sitting still by the window, staring out at the lawn. A vision of the woman as a child, playing with a doll in a railway car, flashed before her eyes. She wasn’t sure whether it was based in any truth, but it made Bess alarmingly sad. She was not quite sure what separated a woman like that from one like her; did one see madness coming, she wondered, or did it come quietly, like a thief at night? She shivered. She would rather die than lose her mind.
At the end of the corridor was one final door, which looked to Bess just like all the others. But when Dr. Steeves unlocked it, he stepped in front of them and held up his hand. “Stay back,” he warned. “This patient is quite dangerous.”
Inside, the room was completely padded in cream-colored canvas. There were no windows, and it was stiflingly quiet, except for the panting of a man rolling about on the floor.
“My God!” Harry cried, horrified. “What is that?”
The man was wearing what appeared to be a normal jacket, except the sleeves were exceptionally long, and they were wrapped once around the man’s torso and tied behind his back. Bess had never seen anything like it. She grabbed Harry’s arm. He had used restraint muffs in his act before, but never anything like this. The man on the ground was straining every muscle in his body, but he could not get loose. His legs were jerking wildly, desperately, underneath him, and his forehead was dripping with sweat.
“It’s called a straitjacket,” Dr. Steeves remarked proudly. “It’s impossible to get free of it.”
Bess could see the flicker of eagerness in Harry’s eyes at the word impossible.
“Can I borrow one?” he asked the doctor.
By the end of the week he had perfected the new trick, and the cigarettes were pouring onto the stage. Harry played up his experience in the asylum, making the patients out to be criminally inclined, dangerous men, and the feat he was accomplishing onstage seemed all the more daring because of it. But Bess could not forget how that young girl sat stick-still in her chair by the window, looking out onto the Alabama fields and thinking of God knows what life she’d had, or who had loved her once.
“We have just recently become aware of a tragic situation in this good town of De Land, Illinois,” Harry began. Bess, in a dress of cream-colored lace, sat blindfolded in a chair beside him. “A man who walked in these very streets beside you has only recently been found murdered.”
After a few months on the circuit, Harry had tired of the Metamorphosis. Bess, longing for a break from the physical exertion, came up with a new angle. She began to notice how many people lingered after the show, wondering if Harry was somehow working actual magic. They were longing, she saw, for something real. Possessing true knowledge made them more than players on the stage; it made them powerful. She asked Welsh to begin billing them as “Celebrated Clairvoyants” and saying they could communicate freely with the dead.
They worked on the trick together. Whenever they stopped in a new town, Harry paid a visit to the local cemetery, asking about recent deaths, while Bess disguised herself and gossiped with women at church teas. In the small towns where the circus pitched its tents, it was easy to learn the local rumors. Everyone knew everyone’s business, a phenomenon that astounded Bess and Harry, having come from a place as large as New York City.
By now, the Houdinis’ audiences had swelled to the hundreds. Word of their coming seemed to reach the small towns before the circus wagons arrived. “My wife, beside me, has the abili
ty to speak with those we have lost,” Harry declared. Bess suddenly slumped over in her chair. “She is in a trance state,” Harry said. He rubbed his chin and feigned nervous energy. “My darling, what messages have you to give us today?”
Bess spoke in a high, unfamiliar voice. “I am looking for the killers of Benny Carter.”
“Killers?” Harry asked, alarmed. “Were there more than one?”
“Yes.”
“Were these killers known to Mr. Carter?”
“Yes.”
Harry began to pace back and forth. “Could you tell us, my dear, how this murder was accomplished?”
“With a razor.”
The audience was enthralled. Bess could hear their heavy silence, waiting for what she might say next.
“I see the blood,” she said, her voice trembling. “Oh, God!” Harry ran to her side and gripped her shoulders. Bess began throwing her body back and forth. “I can’t hold on!” she cried. “God help me, I can’t hold on!”
“Tell us their names!” Harry said. Bess didn’t answer. “What are their names?”
Bess’s movements grew increasingly violent. She began to bang her head against the back of the chair.
“Their names!” Harry demanded.
“Bill Doakes and Jim Saunders!” she said. “Benny is here. He won’t—he won’t let me go. Harry, tell him to let me go! He warns them, ‘You boys better put those razors away, or yous goin’ to be where I is now.”
Then she collapsed onto the ground and lay still. From behind her blindfold she heard the commotion and the sound of a chair scraping the makeshift wooden floorboards. She knew one of the men she had just accused had been present and fled the room. She fought a smile. Harry had learned about the murder in a De Land barroom. It was not a sad one. Carter, Doakes, and Saunders were three local criminals who had gone about town together. Consensus was that Carter had stolen from the others and paid the price.
“My God!” someone shouted. “You know things that only the Almighty knows!”
Bess knew she had been right; give them a taste of danger, and talk about death, and they would be hooked.
For more in-depth communications, they used an elaborate code system Harry had devised. It involved signals that relied on the positions of the hands and feet, as well as facial expressions and spoken words. Each word corresponded with a number, so that pray, for example, meant 1 and tell meant 5. During the act, Harry, ever the showman, blindfolded Bess as she pretended to go into a trance. Harry was passed a coin by a member of the audience, and through their system of communication, he would speak to the spirits inside Bess, asking them “pray tell” when the coin was minted. The words he used in his question gave Bess the answer she was supposed to supply. Other questions and answers they would discuss ahead of time; Bess had the idea to disguise themselves and go door to door selling Bibles, which would give them access to the homes of the townspeople, allowing them to reveal information about those people during the séance.
It was a game she enjoyed, fooling such large groups. No one suspected them of fakery, especially not with Bess’s childlike appearance. But one night after a show in southern Missouri, after a particularly thorny revelation about one woman’s dead son, she removed her blindfold to see tears streaming down the face of a frail, bonneted old lady. She swelled with regret; the thrill of the deceit was gone. What had she been doing? She had betrayed every moral code she believed in; she had spit in the face of the God she’d been taught to worship. She wondered if the girl she’d been a year ago would ever have imagined she would stoop so low.
Her mother clung to her Catholic faith because she had to; she’d lost a husband, only to gain a derelict one, and she struggled to care for an enormous family. Bess thought Harry’s situation had been similar. His father—an immigrant and floundering rabbi—clutched at his own Jewish faith because without it, he was just a failed man preaching about fairies. He had forced his faith on the family with what Harry saw as simpleminded naïveté. Harry didn’t see his father’s God saving his family; instead, he saw the slow deaths of a brother and his father, the silent desperation of his mother, her defeated shoulders. And so he turned to magic—tricks that played on people’s credulity—and it was magic that saved them, the money he earned from traveling the show circuit on his own as a boy. He made no apologies for his agnosticism, but Bess knew there was a part of him that was always wondering whether there was a being out there whose magic was greater than his own.
Bess still believed in God. She believed in the serenity of a quiet church, in the rituals of beads and prayer. In the tumult of her childhood she had seen compassion from neighbors who brought meals, from strangers who led her home when she was lost, and there was something godlike in that. But she also loved Harry, and she loved his practical magic.
She glanced at Harry. He was still immersed in the trick, pacing the stage. She saw the other performers, her friends, huddled in the back of the room, awed. Afterward, Moira came up to her privately.
“I know you’ve got a trick up your sleeve. How are you knowing those things about people?”
Bess shook her head. “I can’t say.”
“But it’s not real, is it?” Moira asked, a lilt of hope in her voice.
Bess’s heart sank. She reached for Moira’s arm. “It’s not real.” It was bad enough fooling strangers, but the thought of fooling these people who had become her friends made her ill. She groped for an explanation and ended up quoting Harry’s mechanical voice: “We are only acting by physical, not psychical, means.”
Harry found her in their bedroom after. She had ripped off her dress and was clawing at her corset. “I can’t breathe,” she said. “God help me, I can’t breathe.” Harry put his arms around her and tried to calm her, but she couldn’t stop shaking. It had come upon her so suddenly, the sickening feeling of foreboding, the voice saying they would go straight to hell, and the quick footprints of the rain on the roof.
The room felt unbearably hot. She pushed her way out of the car and into the thrashing rain. Thank goodness, the grass was cold. “Bess!” Harry followed her outside. She could barely see him through the downpour. The doors of the car were flapping wildly, and everywhere around them in the darkening night the circus goers were running to take shelter.
“You’re half naked!” Harry shouted. “Get back inside, would you?”
Bess shook her head.
“I don’t know how to help you!” he said. “I don’t know what you want!”
“I know why I’m not getting pregnant,” she called back. “It’s a punishment. We’ve pulled each other into something sinister, Harry.”
Harry looked at her in awe, then burst out laughing. “Is that what you think?”
“Then why can’t I have children?”
“Come inside out of the rain,” he said. “This isn’t like you. It makes me feel—uncentered.”
He looked so helpless. She imagined what she must look like, her hair matted with rain and all the pins falling out, and she thought about those “delicate” girls she hated, the ones who needed smelling salts and daytime rest. Harry could never love a girl like that. Offstage, he needed her to be the engaging one, the sensible one. She followed him back to the cot.
He wrapped her in a blanket. “There,” he said. “That’s better now.”
“You don’t have to coddle me.” She wrung out her hair. “I’m better now. It was a momentary loss of sense.”
“Over what?”
“That we’ve done something unforgivable.” It seemed to her now, in the flickering candlelight, that this world they had created around themselves could collapse at any moment. Harry was afraid, too, she knew, but of different things—that they wouldn’t be able to make it last after all, this career of magicianship, and that he wouldn’t be able to support her and he would let her down, by forcing her to go to work in some factory sewing socks, or some boardinghouse kitchen. Harry’s fears were physical, Bess’s metaphysical. On t
his account they differed.
“I don’t know about the children,” he said, “but let me show you something.” He took a scrap of paper out of his pocket and held it beside the candle so it would dry enough for him to be able to write on it. “You never told me the first name of your father, did you?”
She thought about it. “I don’t think so.”
“Write it now on this paper, and then burn it. Don’t show it to me.”
Bess did, then crumpled the paper in her hand and held it over the flame.
Harry dropped it into a bowl and let it burn. When it had been reduced to ashes, he pulled up his shirtsleeve, revealing his muscled forearm. With his other hand he rubbed the black remnants onto his bare skin, and almost immediately Bess’s father’s name, Gebhardt, appeared on his arm in red lettering.
Bess’s hand flew to her mouth. “You are the devil,” she said.
“Silly kid.” Harry laughed. “Don’t you know me by now? It was only a trick!”
“How? How was it a trick?”
“You guess.”
She frowned at him. “Give me a pen.” Harry grinned and handed her one, and she wrote on her arm with the sharp end and, with her fingertip, rubbed the skin where the inkless nib had touched. She watched as the letters of her father’s name appeared.
“It’s a trick of the body,” Harry explained. “Do you remember what I told you the night we met? There is no such thing as magic.” He laughed. “Still, my greatest dream is to slip one by you at some point. You figure them all out too fast.”
“But how did you know my father’s name?”
“Stella mentioned it in one of her letters.”
Bess let out a short laugh. She felt ridiculous. “You scared me for a minute.”
Harry peeled the top of the corset off her and climbed into the bed beside her. “There’s an explanation for everything.”
Bess closed her eyes. “I’m sorry I doubted you,” she said. Outside, the wind had calmed to a whisper.
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