Mrs. Houdini

by Victoria Kelly

  Bess thought he had put his hope to the test so often that it was remarkable that any remained.

  “The spiritualists—they are going to kill me, you know. Every night they are praying for my death, because I dare to speak out against them.”

  Bess shuddered. “Don’t say those things, Harry.” She couldn’t bear the idea that he would ever willingly give up on life, when he had spent night after night of his career fighting for it onstage.

  Harry shrugged. “But you know it’s true. They despise me. Why try to pretend otherwise?”

  Chapter 16

  THE MESSAGE

  June 1929

  Bess drove recklessly through the streets of Atlantic City, swerving to avoid the clusters of women in their bathing outfits and straw hats on their way from the beach, laughing down the sidewalks, past the rows of white frame houses with silver chimes. The sky was purpling, and she felt a sense of urgency as she had never felt before. I am waiting for you at Young’s Pier. This had to be the message Harry had hidden for her in the photographs. She felt, in her heart, that, by some means, he had done it. Harry had called to her, and she would go. She did not know what she would say when she met him. What do you say to someone after such long years apart? Where does one begin?

  It was the great irony of Harry’s life that he had desired, beyond all measure, to access the realm of the spirits and had been unable to do so, even while the entire public was convinced he had achieved it. By his death Harry had become the nation’s foremost expert on spiritualism. He had advertised a money prize to whoever could show him a supernatural act he could not disprove. His book A Magician Among the Spirits was published to great fanfare. But after the Doyle séance, he had come close to believing in another’s power only one more time, and that was in Margery Crandon, an attractive blue-eyed Canadian woman whom the American Journal of Psychology had called “the most brilliant star in physical mediumship.” In her presence, golden lights had danced, clocks had stopped, and a white, grotesque substance she called ectoplasm had spewed from her mouth. By the time Harry and Bess met her, the nation and its scientists were already thoroughly under her spell.

  Bess recalled the scene of the séance, which had occurred in complete darkness. Harry had begun it with high hopes; men whom he respected greatly had vowed Margery was authentic. It had been a windy autumn evening, the stuff of horror novels, and there were a number of witnesses—scientists and physicians—who’d sat beside her in the Houdinis’ parlor in Harlem. Harry had been seated on one side of Mrs. Crandon, and another man was on her right, holding on to her hands and feet to ensure she did not move them to produce any effects. Mrs. Crandon had worn a light kimono with nothing underneath and breathed heavily throughout; she was a woman of overt sexuality, with bulging breasts, and Bess had immediately disliked her, though she imagined the men who were present felt her allure, even from across the room. During the séance, Margery had managed to ring a bell and throw a megaphone without the use of her hands or feet. Bess had been alarmed by the experience; she had felt frigid during the entire evening, even though the room was hot with so many bodies breathing inside.

  But afterward, Harry had taken Bess aside and told her he was going to denounce the woman, claiming he could prove that she had rung the bells with her legs, and that the megaphone had been thrown from atop her head. Still, something about her seemed to have unsettled Harry, and afterward he was not the same. He would not set foot in their parlor unless Bess was beside him. He was often fidgety, and he would spend hours at the YMCA, throwing the medicine ball and running the track, as if to invigorate himself out of a deep trance. At the time, she had thought it was a crisis of age, but looking back on it now, Bess thought it was possible Harry had seen some kind of vision of his own death during that séance. Something about it had disturbed him deeply.

  Bess’s hesitation about Harry’s message ran deeper than nervousness. It occurred to her, to her horror, as the car rattled through the Atlantic City streets, that Young’s Pier as she and Harry had known it no longer existed. In 1912 a massive fire had destroyed most of the structure. Pictures of the devastation had been in all the New York papers. Young had tried to recoup some of his losses by charging ten cents each to those wanting to see the debris being hauled away. But, ultimately, his efforts had failed. The pier lay in ruins until 1922, when it was finally rebuilt and renamed Central Pier. It would never again eclipse the grandeur of its older competitor, Steel Pier, where earlier in the summer, thousands had watched as swim-capped women on white horses dove into the ocean to the music of John Philip Sousa.

  What if Harry couldn’t come through after all because the Young’s Pier they had known was gone? Charles hadn’t tried to stop her, only showed her how to start his automobile and watched from the sidewalk as she drove away. She’d had little experience driving in New York, but Harry had been excited to show her how when he purchased a Model T, and the night felt too urgent to waste any time letting her nerves about the road get to her. But she’d forgotten to ask Charles how to turn on the headlamps, and as the sun descended behind the buildings she raced to the oceanfront so she would not have to get out and walk in the darkness.

  The parking attendant at the Royal Hotel recognized her; she left the car at the entrance to the car elevator with him, hastily calling out an invented room number behind her as she ran off. She felt as if she were coming apart at the seams as she ran toward the boardwalk. The lamps were shining already, and the night was almost excruciatingly humid. Bess unpinned her hat and let the breeze cool her head. At the entrance to Central Pier, a carousel was spinning, the painted horses waltzing. Harry would be, she imagined, at the far end of the pier, near the deepest part of the ocean. He would be standing there with his back to her, looking out at the water into which he had jumped so many years before. And then he would turn around and smile at her, and take her hand, and he would tell her what it was like where he had come from, how full of color it was, how many stars there were.

  The pier was crowded with people. She could not remember such throngs before. Vaguely, she remembered that the Television exhibit was making its debut. They were calling it the greatest wonder of the electrical world, and there was tremendous ballyhoo over it; everyone was eager to see the new phenomenon. Bess pushed her way through the lines and down the narrow alley of boards on the outside, toward the end of the pier. She could hear the splash of yachts floating in the water. What if Harry wasn’t there? What if she didn’t recognize him? She chastised herself. Of course he would be there. There was no sense in doubting him; he had never failed to do a single thing he had set his mind to.

  It was far different than she remembered. The new pier was smaller than the old one had been, and more modern. The Chamber of Commerce offices occupied most of the interior space. But it hadn’t lost any of the vibrant energy it had had that afternoon when Harry performed his escape, and almost died doing it.

  This city came alive at night like noplace she had seen, short of New York. The electric lights blazed and the synthetic liquor flowed; women in coral chiffon dresses brushed past her, all the flaming youth of the era congregating in this carnival of color. But something about the scene bothered Bess; she wondered why Harry had lured her here, of all places, especially when he had always loved the quiet more than the crowds. As the Jazz Age swelled around him he had eschewed it, telling Bess he thought New York could sometimes be the loneliest city in the world. After he died, she had cloistered herself inside her huge city home, certain that if Harry were to appear to her it would be there. So why had he chosen this city of sin as their final meeting place?

  Rushing down the pier, she could make out a few dim figures by the railing. Most were couples, their hands and arms intertwined, and a few were too young to be Harry, no older than teenagers. But she could see one man, standing alone under the lamppost, hatless, with his elbows on the rail, leaning out over the ocean. Bess caught her breath and froze. She recognized Harry’s rumpled hai
r, the wrinkled black pants he loved. She stopped a few feet from him.

  “Ehrich?” she breathed. “Is it really you?” Her hands were trembling violently. She reached to touch his shoulder.

  The man turned around and looked at her. He was old—much older than Harry had been when he died—and his eyes were egg blue. There were none of Harry’s dark European features in him. “Sorry,” he said, shrugging. “I think you meant someone else.”

  Bess looked past him, as if the real Harry might be hiding on the other side of the rail. It couldn’t be . . . She searched the rest of the pier, but she couldn’t find him anywhere. The place was loud with laughter and voices and the muffled sounds of orchestra music. She blinked back tears. Certainly, she had interpreted the message correctly . . . hadn’t she?

  Perhaps Charles had been right. Perhaps Harry’s message was Charles all along; maybe Harry had merely meant to come back to her through his son, and she was on a fool’s errand now, reading silly messages in photographs that were not intended to be messages at all. And she should be happy with this, she knew, with this man who was the closest thing to the family she always wanted. But still, she felt a sadness she could not shake. She sat down on a bench and put her head in her hands.

  “Bess!”

  She looked up and saw Charles and Gladys standing in front of her. They were both panting, drenched with sweat. They must have taken a taxi after she left and run down the pier.

  “I didn’t find him,” she said, sobbing. “He’s not here.” Her naïveté became clear to her now; people didn’t come back from the dead. How could she have imagined that Harry would have proven himself the exception? And, moreover, that he would return to her at the scene of the most terrible day of her life—when she had kissed another man, and Harry had almost died?

  “We know you didn’t,” Charles said, trying to catch his breath. “He’s not here.”

  Bess frowned. “What do you mean?”

  Charles held out a tattered piece of paper. “I found something after you left. It’s— Well, look.” His eyes were shining. “Well, it’s remarkable.”

  Bess squinted down at the photograph. It was creased with age, and the figures on it were blurred. “There are no words anywhere on this.” It was a photograph of Harry’s jump, from 1905. In it, she could make out Harry’s tiny form hanging over the railing. “You were there,” she whispered, incredulous. “I had forgotten you said you were there.”

  “My mother took me. I begged her to let me go.” He wiped the sweat off his brow. “She had bought me a Brownie camera, and I remember I climbed one of the lampposts so I could get a good picture.”

  Bess could not believe Charles and Harry had come so close to each other. Suddenly it made sense to her why Harry had sent her to Young’s Pier; not only was it the day he thought his father had been with him in the water, but it was his singular lost moment, the one time in his life he had walked upon the same ground as his own son. It would have been the greatest regret of his life, looking back on it, that he had not recognized his own son in the crowd.

  She peered at the image, looking for a smudge of a young woman holding on to a white hat in the wind, before she remembered that she hadn’t come outside until after the jump. Then she sighed, holding out the photograph. “But I don’t see what this has to do with my coming here. Look around. Harry’s not here.”

  Charles pressed the paper back into her palm. “You didn’t look closely enough.” He reached into his pocket and drew out a small magnifying glass. He knelt down beside her and held the glass over the picture. “Look here.” He pointed to the crowd. “What do you see?”

  Bess followed his finger. The crowd was pressed together, everyone staring intently at Harry hanging over the water, about to jump. It was a moment in time captured by a boy’s cheap camera, unaware of what the magician’s wife had just done, or what would happen to the magician, or what would happen to the boy himself, only months later, when he would be orphaned. Only the backs of the people’s heads were visible to the camera. Except, there was something strange. One man was not looking at the ocean; he was facing the other direction, his face turned upward, staring straight past the heads of the crowd into the camera.

  Bess bent over and rubbed her eyes.

  “Do you see it?” Charles pressed. “Bess, do you see?”

  Through the glass, clear as day, she could make him out. The man looking at the camera—staring right at her, now, as she sat there beside Charles—was, unmistakably, Harry.

  Bess let out a small cry. Her eyes went back and forth between the two men in the picture. They were different, but they were the same man. There was a young, dark-haired Harry, dangling perilously from the pier. And there was an older, gray-haired Harry, standing in the crowd.

  “Charles,” she said softly, “how is it possible?”

  Charles pointed to the image. “This is my theory: I think he’s living still—in another place, another plane—and he’s coming back from the other side, through my photographs.”

  Gladys sat on the bench beside Bess and took her hands. “Don’t you see, Bess? Don’t you see what he’s done? He’s found a way to come back to you!”

  Bess started to cry. “I don’t understand. How does this keep his promise? What is he playing at here?”

  Charles, pacing in front of them, was almost electric with excitement. “You were right about the message!” he pressed. “I think Harry is waiting for you—just not in the way you thought.” He swept his hand in front of him and gestured toward the crowded pier. “You came out here thinking you would find him here, in the present. But he can’t get to you that way. He can only come back through the past. And he’s using my photographs to do it.”

  “So you think . . . he is going back in time?”

  Charles nodded. “To when these pictures were taken. We didn’t think about this, but all of those photographs were taken before he died. He’s been able to alter the landscape, just slightly, enough for the coded words to come through. You were right about the message—you just didn’t interpret it correctly.”

  Suddenly, it became clear to her what Harry had meant, what Charles had discovered. I am waiting for you at Young’s Pier. Harry had used the song they’d chosen to relay this message. But the problem was, he couldn’t reach her in her own, current, time. Perhaps, in the limbo one entered after death, one could only cross back to the years one had lived, and could go no further. And so Harry was prevented from coming back in all the ways she had been anticipating—through a medium, say, or as a ghost, because he couldn’t move beyond 1926. And he wasn’t trying to tell her where he would be waiting for her, now, on this side; he was trying to tell her where he would be waiting on the other side. He was telling her that, when she died, he would be waiting for her here, on Young’s Pier, in 1905. And they would go on, together, to what was beckoning.

  Bess recalled the agony of that afternoon, the interminable minutes as she’d watched the seething, throbbing blue ocean that had swallowed Harry whole. Afterward she could not get the sound of the crowd out of her head, the small cries of the women as he failed to appear in the water, the shrill voice of the newsboy as he called out the news: “Extree! Houdini dead!”

  “I thought I’d lost you,” she’d murmured, over and over that night.

  “Oh, no,” Harry had assured her. “You didn’t lose me. I was right there all along.”

  I was right there all along . . .

  It made even more sense now, why Harry had chosen this place to come back to her.

  Gladys felt Bess’s face. “You’re crying,” she said softly. “Are you sad because you wish he was here with you now?”

  “No.” Bess wiped her face. “I’m crying because I don’t have to be afraid anymore. Because now I know he’s there, and I’ll be there with him, too.”

  Somewhere far away, in a time she’d already lived, the rest of the song was playing:

  I’ll take you home again, Kathleen

&nb
sp; Across the ocean wild and wide

  To where your heart has ever been

  Since first you were my bonnie bride.

  The roses all have left your cheek.

  I’ve watched them fade away and die

  Your voice is sad when e’er you speak

  And tears bedim your loving eyes.

  Oh! I will take you back, Kathleen

  To where your heart will feel no pain

  And when the fields are fresh and green

  I’ll take you to your home again!

  To that dear home beyond the sea

  My Kathleen shall again return.

  And when thy old friends welcome thee

  Thy loving heart will cease to yearn.

  Where laughs the little silver stream

  Beside your mother’s humble cot

  And brightest rays of sunshine gleam

  There all your grief will be forgot.

  She saw now that the song itself was a love letter from Harry—a promise to take her home again. In his death, he had performed the greatest escape of all. And he had freed her, too, from the glittering loneliness, just as he had freed Charles.

  In death he had corrected the two biggest regrets of his life—leaving his son fatherless and leaving his wife childless. He had performed one last remarkable feat, by bringing them together.

  “You really love him still, don’t you?” Charles marveled. “In spite of finding out about me, and all that.”

  “No,” she said. “Not in spite of.”

  The motley colors of the summer roared around them, in that iridescent city on the sea, and all the delirious energy of the age was hurtling its way ahead, pulsing with life, into the unknown.

  Chapter 17

  DETROIT

  October 1926

  The room in the Château Laurier in Montreal was a fine place for the pair of them to be laid up. The dean of McGill University had arranged for a top-floor suite, with cream curtains, heavy walnut furniture, and a reading library, in English and French, larger than Harry had ever seen in a hotel. Since arriving, however, Bess had been diagnosed with ptomaine poisoning and had been vomiting the contents of her stomach for almost two days. Harry, too, was exhausted, having stayed up all night with her, her fever running so high he was afraid to let her fall asleep. Then, during a lecture and performance at McGill, he had snapped his left ankle and only barely managed to hobble through the rest of the performance. Bess had been able, even through her delirious state, to convince him to see a surgeon, who had set his ankle and declared the rest of him “in the most perfect physical condition.”