The audience never knows whether the stunt is easy or hard, Harry had once confided to Bess. Sometimes a stunt that looks easy is in fact exceedingly difficult. The wet sheet escape he had been performing in Pittsburgh for the past week was a perfect example. For the escape, he had recruited hospital attendants to bind him with sheets and bandages—mummify him, he said—and then pour buckets of water over the bindings. Escaping from these soaking cloths was one of the most physically taxing feats he had ever accomplished, although no one knew this but Bess. The stunt had not been nearly as well received as the time he transported a handkerchief to the top of the Statue of Liberty, or the time he escaped, hanging upside down, from a giant milk jug filled with water.
He was not yet forty, but his body was revealing signs of strain; Bess had started plucking white hairs from his head with tweezers. He could not bear to show any weakness at all. He began spending more time meditating at the cemetery but refused to buy a plot for himself or for Bess. He behaved erratically sometimes, playing silly tricks on Bess at home and concocting various entertaining schemes. Before the Pittsburgh engagement, he had taken Bess, Gladys, and Mrs. Weiss on a vacation to a resort in the Catskills and, in the middle of the first night, had woken his mother by pouring a chest full of gold coins—his salary from a previous engagement—around her sleeping form.
Mrs. Weiss had sat up in bed, terrified, thinking she was drowning. Harry had been giddy as a schoolboy. “Look, Mother! It’s all yours!” He’d run his fingers through the gold. “Look what I brought you!”
Mrs. Weiss had looked around her in amazement. She had never possessed so much wealth in her life and had never—especially not during those early, harsh Wisconsin winters—imagined so much existed.
Gladys, who was sleeping in the other bed, had woken next. Harry had pressed a piece of the heavy gold into his sister’s hand. “See what I’ve done,” he’d told her. “This is yours.”
“What is this?” Gladys had rubbed the coin with her thumb.
“It’s gold. And it’s real.”
Bess had watched the festivities from the doorway, smiling a small, tight smile. She had tried to reconcile with her own mother, only to find the old neighborhood changed, Mrs. Rahner’s mind nearly gone. “How can I forgive you?” the withered woman had asked, staring up at her, confused. “I don’t even know you.”
But it was her sister Ada whose aging haunted Bess. The toothless baby was now a girl of eighteen; she looked startlingly like Bess had at that age. For years Stella had passed along news of the family, as their siblings moved out of New York one by one, leaving only Ada at home—but the others had wanted nothing to do with Bess, and she was almost always traveling.
“I read about you in the papers,” Ada had said shyly. “You’re very rich.”
“Not very. Only a little rich. Have you gotten the money I’ve sent?”
She’d nodded. “Mother said it was the devil’s money, but she kept it anyway.” Ada had stepped toward her. “Are you staying tonight?” Her voice rose a little in desperation.
“I can’t stay,” Bess had said softly. “I’m married now. I live with my husband.”
“Harry Houdini.”
“Yes.”
“You’re lucky,” Ada had said. “You got out.” The wistfulness in her voice had shattered Bess.
Now she could see Harry becoming more and more enamored with this wealth—even if only to give it away—and this worried her. The irony of his situation was not lost on her; he flaunted his gold while obsessing over death—that vast, black arena where one’s treasures could not go. Then, in the pink hours of the Catskills morning, as if in response to her fears, Harry had woken her with a small shake.
“Bess,” he’d whispered, terrified. “I’ve just been to the toilet. I’ve passed some blood.”
Bess had called Dr. Stone to Pittsburgh as soon as they arrived. Harry had refused to cancel his show and go back to New York, and so the medical tests were performed in the early hours of the morning, before the day’s work began. Dr. Stone slept in the room adjacent to theirs in the hotel; more than once Bess hurried him into their bedroom in the middle of the night, where Harry was writhing in pain, grasping a pillow and shimmering with sweat.
She wished Harry would reconcile himself to the fact that he would never be—as he hoped—invincible. A few months earlier, during a bridge jump into the dark, churning waters of New York Harbor, a corpse had floated to the surface as he sank to the bottom. Bess, along with a thousand spectators, had initially thought the corpse was Harry’s, until he appeared a few moments later, his head coming to the surface within a foot of the dead man’s arm. Looking over to find the grayed mass bobbing beside him, Harry could not breathe. Flailing in the water, tangled in a cluster of weeds, he’d had to be rescued and dragged to land. For days, neither Bess nor Harry could rid themselves of the image of the man’s dark open eyes.
But instead of succumbing to Dr. Stone’s diagnosis, Harry resisted it. He declared his new ambition to be buried alive. He had mastered the art of managing his breath, and dirt, he reasoned, would be little different from water. He had Jim Collins bury him, manacled, under one foot of earth, and then two, while he practiced his escapes. Each time it took only a few minutes for him to break free, pushing out of the dirt like a mole. But when Jim put him in a hole at six feet—the depth at which he was intending to perform—he did not emerge. Bess felt a crazed and paralyzing chill come over her, but Jim’s eyes were fixed on his watch. He had been instructed to go in after Harry at exactly four and a half minutes. After four excruciating minutes Harry burst into the daylight, choking for air, his face and eyelids black with dirt.
That night when they got home, Harry was very quiet. He lay on the bed with his eyes closed for a long time. Bess lay next to him, afraid to disturb him. When she thought he was asleep, she crept out of the bed and went over to the closet to change into her dressing gown.
She had removed her shirtwaist and drawers when she heard a noise behind her. She turned to see Harry standing there in the dark, watching her. “I thought you were asleep,” she said, startled. “Did I wake you?”
He didn’t answer. He pushed her against the bedroom wall and pulled her stockings off. “What are you doing, Harry?” she asked. “Are you all right?”
“Are you afraid?” His voice was very quiet.
“No,” she said, honestly.
When she was undressed, he turned her around, so that her back was against the blue flowered wallpaper.
She didn’t make a sound. Instead she found herself moving as if she were detached from herself, as if she were watching another woman from above. He wrapped his arms around her waist. It felt like she was being filled when she had been empty. She and Harry had not made love this way since they were first married, not with this kind of passion. She turned, lifted her legs, and wrapped them around his waist, and when it was over, she did not feel lonely anymore.
“You can’t do the burial stunt again,” she said.
“I know.” Harry avoided her eyes. “I feel like a failure.”
“One failed trick doesn’t make you a failure.”
“Everyone wonders where people go when they leave this place. I want to perform a trick that makes it seem as if I have gone there, too. To wherever it is people go when they are invisible. But then I will come back again.”
Bess wondered if he was purposely avoiding speaking explicitly of death. Instead she said, “I don’t want you to go,” and he laughed.
“Of course I’m not really going anywhere.”
“But if you could, hypothetically—if you could really see the other side, I mean—you would.”
Harry thought about it. “Yes,” he said. “I would go there. If I could come back.”
She thought she had a sense of what he was intending to do. He had focused his whole career on pretending to escape death, and now he set his sights on walking into it.
Harry rented workshop space in Midt
own, and began working with Jim Collins on constructing a new trick. He had hired other assistants as well, including Jim Vickery, a tall, muscled cabinetmaker who rarely spoke but was, from the beginning, fiercely loyal to Harry. For the first time, Harry refused to tell Bess what the trick entailed. He unveiled it at Hammerstein’s Theatre on a damp Friday night in October, the sidewalks silvered with puddles. The stage on which the new trick was performed was covered in deep red carpet. While Harry performed other tricks, a team of bricklayers quickly constructed a brick wall, over ten feet tall, on the stage. After the wall had been built, two black screens were brought out and positioned on either side of it.
Harry stood at the front of the stage now in the suit Bess had ironed for him that morning. It was her small contribution. Harry had a dozen men in his employ now, working as bookers or secretaries or scouts or on construction. He had the young and eager Jim Collins, of course, and Jim Vickery, and his loyal, dignified secretary, John Sargent, with his crop of white hair.
His hair, as usual, was uncombed. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he announced, in the booming stage voice that always gave her chills. “I have been preparing myself for years for a performance of this caliber. I have set out to prove to you that while you may think it impossible that one might stand in this very room and yet be somewhere else at the same time, it is quite possible. Indeed, there are realms we do not see, all around us. I have been there. Yet I cannot tell you, in good conscience, what I have witnessed. But when I walk through this wall in front of your eyes, you will know that I have been there, and come back, as the spirits do.”
Three audience members were selected to stand behind the brick wall to ensure that he could not sneak around it to the other side. Harry stood behind one of the black screens and waved his hands over the top. “I am here!” he shouted. “Now, ladies and gentlemen, I am going.” Only moments later, his hands appeared above the screen on the other side of the wall. “And now, by unknown means, I have crossed over to the other side!” his voice boomed. A stage assistant drew away the second screen, and there stood Harry, clothes and hair disheveled, panting, having crossed through solid brick.
The crowd sat in silence, dumbfounded. Harry bowed proudly.
“They’re going to say I am able to dematerialize,” he had hinted that morning before he went to prepare for the show. “And I won’t protest it. It is not enough to perform magic anymore. One must be magic as well.” He kissed her, but she turned her mouth away.
“Harry,” she murmured, “we said we were never going to do that again.” She did not want him exploiting people’s beliefs.
He had responded to Dr. Stone’s warnings in some unconventional ways. He had purchased the original Martin Luther Bible, with Luther’s own notes in the margins, and placed it upon Edgar Allan Poe’s mahogany writing desk, in his study, as if to make some kind of point about dark and light. He had also had his father reburied in the family plot he had purchased in Machpelah Cemetery, insisting on viewing what was left of the body. “There was nothing but skull and bones,” he told Bess, rushing eagerly into the house after the process was complete. “Father’s teeth were in surprisingly excellent condition.”
Now he frowned at her accusations. “This isn’t the same as making up stories about people’s dead cousins, Bess. This is different. It is the Great Mystery.”
“What is the Great Mystery?” she asked him.
He smiled his serene, magician’s smile. “Where I go when I am gone.”
On April 14 the RMS Titanic collided with an iceberg during her maiden voyage. The Carpathia, which had rescued some of the survivors from the water, came into port in New York a few days later. Forty thousand people waited on the docks for their arrival, Bess and Harry among them. The mood was frenzied. Some of those waiting recognized Harry and asked if he could communicate with those lost. Harry looked stricken by the suggestion; on flyers thin as tissue paper, representatives of the Metropolitan Opera distributed advertisements for a benefit concert in which the opera star Mary Garden would perform “Nearer My God to Thee.”
The solemnity of the tragedy bled into the summer, and even the fall. One could not travel without fear anymore. Bess and Harry said good-bye to Mrs. Weiss in New York the week following Harry’s diagnosis. He had been invited to Copenhagen to perform for the Danish royal family. It was a pearl-gray morning in October, and a large crowd had gathered at the dock. There were to be two celebrities on board the ship—Harry Houdini, famous magician, and Theodore Roosevelt, former president of the United States. Neither Bess nor Harry had ever met the president, but Harry was determined to make his acquaintance, and Bess had dressed herself carefully that morning in preparation. She looked about the dock for Mr. Roosevelt but did not see him.
Mrs. Weiss looked awfully small, Bess thought, against the massiveness of the ship floating at the pier. She was dressed in black silk, as she always was when seeing Harry off, as a way of mourning his departure. She clung to Harry’s arm and shuffled beside him toward the gangplank.
Harry clasped his mother’s hand. “It’s only for a month,” he said. “John Sargent is going to look after you, and he can arrange for anything you need.”
“You know, I’m old,” she replied with a small smile. “Perhaps when you come back, I shall not be here.”
Harry laughed. “Nonsense. You only like to say those things so I will tell you I love you.”
Bess kissed Mrs. Weiss’s cheek. “Good-bye, Mother.” She picked up her bag quickly, before Harry could do it. Neither of them had told his mother of his kidney, and Bess didn’t want him to wince and give it away; it would only worry Mrs. Weiss. They had argued through the night after Dr. Stone left, and Harry had promised her they would take a three-week vacation after Copenhagen, and he would rest in Provence, on the condition that she keep the secret from his mother while he recovered.
Mrs. Weiss shook her hand free of Harry’s. “Go.”
Harry turned to the crowd that was watching them. “Look, my mother drives me away from her!” They broke out in laughter. Bess flushed; Harry was always the performer, even at the most inconvenient moments.
Bess envied Mrs. Weiss that she had a son like Harry; but at the same time she felt sorry for the woman. Mrs. Weiss was seventy-one already and increasingly fragile each day, and she had spent the majority of her life saying good-bye to those she loved—her husband, her oldest son, and even Harry, for months at a time, when he traveled around the world doing his magic. Bess, at least, could say that she’d been by his side every night since they met.
“Just go quickly,” Mrs. Weiss said, patting his hand, “and come back safely.”
Harry pulled Bess up the stairs onto the ship’s deck. The passengers were waving their hats and cream-colored gloves, shouting and crying. On the pier, the crowd of Harry’s admirers cheered and called his name. The passengers on the boat threw out lines of red paper streamers toward those on the dock. Mrs. Weiss caught Harry’s, and as the ship glided slowly away from the dock, Harry leaned farther and farther over the rail, the long wisp of paper dangling between him and his mother, until it snapped and the ends wafted into the murky water.
When the dock was out of sight he turned to Bess, his face already green with seasickness. “Strange how I am a grown man, and still it always feels the same to say good-bye to my mother.” He blushed.
“Let’s go to the dining hall before you become too ill to eat,” she replied.
Harry bowed to her ceremoniously. “What would I do without you to keep track of my meals?”
Bess laughed. “You may be weak on ships, but you’re quite strong in character.”
Harry smirked. “Now, we both know stubbornness is not the same as strength of character. It’s true, though. I’m helpless as a child without you.”
She wrapped her arms around his waist and helped him across the deck. The other passengers watched them, some of the men stopping to clap Harry on the shoulder or shake his hand. Some were amazed that
a man like him could be made ill so easily by the ocean. What they didn’t understand was that, in all his feats, he was in control; but even his immense abilities were powerless compared to the mighty ocean, writhing like an animal beneath them. Yet this would be a different voyage from their first, years earlier; this time they had a spacious room with a large window, and a butler, and a bed layered in cream silk sheets. Never in her life had Bess imagined she would be quarantined on a ship with a former president of the United States. She imagined dining next to him at tables set with heavy silver.
“It’s going to be a helluva trip,” Harry said.
But Bess didn’t answer. She was staring into the water at the wake.
“Bess? Darling, are you all right? Don’t tell me you’re ill now, too.”
She turned to him with a look of horror on her face. “Look there,” she said, pointing. “Do you see it?”
He clutched his stomach and leaned over the railing, staring at the white crests of the waves. “Look at what?”
She leaned over again, this time her eyes scanning the water frantically. “It’s gone.”
“What’s gone?”
“I don’t—I don’t understand. I saw—”
He gripped her arm. “What is it? What did you see? Tell me.”
“It was strange. It was a vision of your mother, in the water. Like a reflection in a pool.” Bess craned her head so she could still see the dock full of waving onlookers, like toy soldiers saluting. “It’s probably nothing,” she said, seeing Harry’s terrified face. “Just my mind playing tricks on me.” She wondered if she was coming down with whatever malady Harry had and was hallucinating. Still, she couldn’t help thinking that the souls of the Titanic passengers were trapped somewhere beneath the trembling waters. One could not travel now without imagining what it must have been like to cling to the rails of the ship in that black night.
“Let’s go inside for lunch,” she said. “It’s terribly chilly out here.”
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