“I’ve never invoked the spirits before so many. Eight years ago, I conducted a séance in the town meeting hall of North Conway, New Hampshire. The cabinet my father built for that event is here tonight. I will be restrained within it. And with my deep appreciation, I would now like to greet the distinguished committee verifying my confinement.”
A gilt-edged group filed onstage to a patter of polite clapping: two Whitneys, the wife of a Whitney and the cousin of William K. Vanderbilt, along with Reverend and Mrs. Nathaniel Porteous, he the rector of the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. The men moved the wooden crate downstage as the lights came up.
It was built along the lines of a steam cabinet, with folding doors on the slanted front and a single aperture on top to permit the medium’s head to emerge. An ordinary wooden chair sat inside. Leather straps dangled from the arms and legs. “These were made from horse hobbles on my parents’ farm,” Opal said, as two committeemen fastened the buckles, securing her. The others thoroughly searched the cabinet. They announced it to be empty, closing and padlocking the doors.
The committee placed a battery-powered bell box, a tambourine, and a trumpet on the stage and retired to their seats. The house went dark. Candlelight revealed the cabinet’s shadowy bulk and Opal’s head showing above it, her eyes closed.
A restless hush gripped the auditorium. The cello fell silent. The candle flame wavered in the sepulchral silence, as if disturbed by wind or the unseen passage of invisible visitors. One by one, the candles mysteriously went out. Blackness enclosed the hall like a coffin lid.
Brrring! The bell box rang.
A woman in the balcony screamed.
The bell box rang a second time and a stern voice cried out: “Fraud!”
This caused a general stirring as the shadow of a man was seen to rise from the darker mass surrounding him. “This is fraud!” he declaimed, pushing his way toward the side aisle. “Turn on the lights!” He hurried toward the stage. “I demand the lights be turned on immediately!”
The authority of the voice and the implicit danger of the situation compelled the light man to bring the dimmers up, showcasing the energetic man bounding onto the stage. “It’s Houdini,” someone whispered. A general commotion ensued, though a far cry from his usual reception. This was not his audience. Most of this crowd never attended vaudeville. They considered it something vulgar to amuse the servants.
“I am Houdini.” The magician faced the audience with fire in his eyes. “What you have just seen was accomplished by trickery. Would the committee please come back on stage.”
Opal said nothing as her high-society committee filed up the side stairs. From the moment the first disturbance snapped her out of her trance, she stared directly at Houdini, eyes burning into him.
The padlocks were unfastened. “Examine every inch of the cabinet,” Houdini exhorted the committee members unfolding the doors. Opal remained strapped to her chair. While the buckles at her wrists and ankles were unfastened, she at last made eye contact with the magician. He felt her intensity glowing with electric energy, like Tesla’s arcing artificial lightning. In the end, it was Houdini who looked away first.
Opal stepped from the cabinet. Committee members examined the interior walls and corners. “Nothing has been altered,” announced one of the Whitneys.
“Call that a search…?” Houdini stepped forward and removed the chair, which had sat upon a colorful square of Moroccan carpet. Picking it up, he pointed to a folded carpenter’s rule on the cabinet floor. “Here is your fraud!”
The immediate outcry swept the hall like a tropical storm. “An eight-foot rule,” Houdini called out, gaining some measure of quiet. “Unfolded, and gripped in the teeth, it easily reaches the bell box from the cabinet.”
Several in the audience hissed and booed. Opal stepped forward to silence this disturbance. “Dear friends,” she said, “I deeply regret what has happened here tonight and the debate I know will follow. I am confident of the gift I was born with and trust you will give me another opportunity to share it with you. For the moment, I beg you to understand the impossibility of any contact in an atmosphere so charged with hostility.”
A wan smile softened her features. For a moment that touched their hearts she was a little girl again, standing before them in all innocence and simplicity. Then, with a graceful swirl, she was gone, gliding into the wings.
The audience made no general rush for the exit; most people stayed put, engaging in vigorous conversation. In any event the and up the aisle, leaving William K. Vanderbilt’s cousin puzzling over the folding rule. Bunch of stuffed shirts and swells. He’d performed for heads of state, for Teddy Roosevelt himself. Real royalty, not this pack of parvenus and robber barons.
In the lobby, departing members of the press surrounded Houdini standing in line at the coat check counter. More his kind of crowd. He liked newspapermen and they liked him, knowing he was always good for some copy.
“What made you spot her as a phony?” asked a reporter sporting a pearl gray derby.
“Boys, take it from me, there’s not one of ‘em that’s on the level.” Houdini tugged on his topcoat. “I used to do a spook show myself back in the old days, so I know all the angles. Over the years, I never saw a medium I thought was on the up and up.”
Outside, a light rain glazed the pavement. Waiting under the marquee, besieged by autograph-seekers, the magician missed the first few taxis. These folks had earlier picked up free tickets at the box office. After satisfying a dozen fans, Houdini waved his arm at an approaching Yellow cab. Just as the magician opened the door, a jasmine-scented figure swathed in black Alaskan seal swept past and stepped inside. It was Opal Crosby Fletcher. Her eyes bored into his. “Get in,” she said. “I’ll give you a lift.”
He wondered afterward what made him hesitate. “Come on,” she said. “I won’t hurt you.”
Houdini climbed in beside her. He smelled the rain glistening on the rich ebony fur. “Are you headed uptown?” he asked stiffly.
“I want to talk with you.” Opal pulled her coat closed around her. “Let’s go someplace quiet and have a drink.”
“I don’t drink,” he said, regretting the unintended hint of sanctimony.
“Coffee, then. We’ll have a bite to eat. Driver! Fifth Avenue and Forty-fourth Street.”
Like many of its new neighbors—the speakeasies and blind pigs operating out of brownstones and basement apartments since the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment—no name or electric sign identified the establishment occupying the distinguished turn-of-the-century building on the northeast corner of Fifth and Forty-fourth. After one hundred years of doing business at nine different locations in Manhattan, none was needed. This was Delmonico’s.
A row of bronze lamps budded from the narrow stone balcony surrounding the tobacco-yellow building. The cabby signaled for a turn well ahead of the brightly lit corner. He pulled to a stop on Forty-fourth in front of the ornate wrought-iron entrance. A doorman rushed out with an umbrella. The lady paid.
Houdini never felt comfortable in places like this. The headwaiter deferred to Mrs. Fletcher as to visiting royalty as he led them into her favorite dining room. Although fame ensured him first-class treatment everywhere, the magician knew a Jew was not truly welcome in this bastion of wealth and privilege. Once, back in ‘04, he had brought Bess and his mother here to celebrate the conclusion of their first successful European tour. The chill formality and polite disdain left a bad taste in his mouth in spite of the exquisite food. Fortunately, Mama didn’t speak English and had a wonderful time, always enjoying any display of her son’s phenomenal success.
“My late husband and I ate here at least once each week,” Opal said, setting aside her bill of fare. “Either here, or at Sherry’s …” She glanced about her. “Such a wonderful place. A pity it’s also going out of business.”
Houdini followed her gaze around the elegant room. More than half the tables stood empty. It didn’t take a mind reader t
o figure out that Prohibition meant the end for most of the plush old establishments like Sherry’s and Delmonico’s. “It belongs in another time,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “And, so do you. And so do I.”
She stared at him again with her burning intensity. He thought of all the cheap sideshow hypnotists, crystal readers, carny mitt-camp operators, and gypsy fortune-tellers he’d encountered in the course of a long career. He and Bess had even had an early success working a mentalist turn, wowing the rubes with their “telepathic” powers. What had once aided them did the same trick for Opal. She looked so fresh and guileless, the dew not yet dry on her petals.
At the same time, Houdini felt something unsettling about her. She possessed a certain power. He thought of Mesmer, then reminded himself she was half his age and might easily have been the daughter he never had.
“I was raised on a farm, Mr. Houdini,” she said, a disclosure utterly at odds with her beaded black Patou evening dress. “My folks didn’t talk much, but when they did, they got straight to the point.” She fitted a black cigarette into a long, gold-tipped ivory holder. “You put that ruler-thing in my cabinet.”
She waited, leaning slightly forward, her carved ivory holder extended, ignoring the long silence, until at last a waiter stepped up and lighted her cigarette. Suddenly realizing his bad manners, Houdini made a hapless gesture of patting his pockets and stammered, “I … er, don’t smoke …”
This produced a sly smile from Isis as she exhaled. The smoke smelled of cloves and spices. Definitely not tobacco.
“I know you did this, not because I am psychic,” she continued. “I know it because I know nothing else. If I am innocent, then you must be guilty.” She paused to inhale. “You … or someone else wishing to discredit me.”
“Those who prey on the tender emotions of the bereaved deserve no less.” He saw no hypocrisy in this statement, nor any humor in his lofty, second-bill comic father tone of moral indignation.
“You condemn me without a trial.” Her eyes, shining with unwavering truth, never left his.
“All right. I admit I made the plant. It was a cheap trick.” The magician cringed inwardly at this confession. Any violation of his strict Boy Scout sense of fair play brought on tidal waves of guilt, but he quickly took refuge in the iron-clad sanctuary of a puritan morality. “I know you use a gag. They all do. The Davenports did. The Fox Sisters… . All of them.”
“I invite you to a private séance at my home. You may set whatever controls you wish, provided you forsake any further …” She smiled at him through a drifting garland of smoke. “Sleight-of-hand.”
“Agreed!” Houdini slapped the tabletop for emphasis, causing polite heads to turn a few tables away. He pretended not to notice, but lowered his voice all the same. “Here is my card.”
She set it beside her bread plate, tracing her fingertips over the embossed lettering. “I’ll have my secretary make the necessary arrangements.”
He found himself lost in her eyes again and attempted awkward small talk, groping for a way out. “Isis in Search… . Catchy name for a church.” Was there no escape from those eyes? “What’re you searching for?”
“You … ,” she said.
5
MEOW!
SHOW PEOPLE WERE A clannish lot. The vagabond nature of their profession, together with a caste system based on talent and luck, set them apart from the daily grind. Most were further isolated by lifelong poverty and, in spite of a faddish era’s un-ending appetite for “stars,” by the general disapproval of polite society, who still smugly remembered a not-so-distant time when actors were expected to use the trade entrance.
Entertainers remained a separate class, speaking a backstage lingo as obscure with slang as the argot of the underworld. Like criminals, they lived life on the lam, holing up in show business ghettos such as flourished in a number of rooming houses and cheap hotels along the side streets intersecting Times Square.
For every headliner lodging at the Astor, there were a hundred second bananas, chorus-line hoofers, and small-time ventriloquists crammed into drab run-down rabbit warrens like the Hotel Stanley, at 124 West Forty-seventh Street, just off Sixth Avenue. Rooms here could be rented daily, but most tenants paid by the month. Cheaper that way, and if an act got lucky and went on the jump for ten weeks in the sticks, the management could always be counted on to credit them with time already paid.
Located one crosstown block from the “Great White Way,” the Stanley was a short walk to the shoebox offices of third-rate booking agents and song publishers. Local coffee shops and cafeterias catered to show people, especially during the off-hours when the legitimate world toiled. In fair weather, old-timers living in the neighborhood gathered along “Panic Beach,” a strip of sidewalk fronting the Palace Theater, trading jokes and gossip, reminiscing about back when they “wowed `em in Trenton” or “brought down the house in Philly.”
Maude and Chester Marchington had lived off and on at the Stanley since before the war. Their two-room suite wasn’t much improvement over the room they’d had on Thirty-second Street more than twenty years ago when they were newlyweds. In 1900, Herald Square was the heart of the theater district and Maude worked as a showgirl in the Floradora Company, dancing alongside fifteen-year-old Evelyn Nesbit, who later gained notoriety as “the girl in the red velvet swing.”
That’s what the press called Evelyn at the trial of her millionaire husband, Harry K. Thaw. He murdered Stanford White, her former lover, in the rooftop garden restaurant at Madison Square Garden. The famous architect died on top of his favorite design. Back then, Chester sported handlebar mustaches. A job as a singing waiter at Rector’s was as close to show business as he would ever get on his own. Maude always said she was happy not to have married a jealous, sadistic millionaire, to have found instead a loving man with “a set of million-dollar pipes,” who didn’t go around bumping off everybody who’d ever gotten fresh with her.
Her appraisal of Chester’s talents proved somewhat inflated. The two-act they put together during the summer of the Thaw trial, the “Merry Musical Marchingtons,” never rated higher than fifth billing on the three-a-day. Now they took whatever bookings they could get, performing at weddings and bar mitzvahs; working summers in Coney Island and the occasional split week at small-time Loew Circuit theaters in the Bronx and Brooklyn. For the most part, they hung out on the pavement outside the Palace or lingered over coffee at the Somerset with friends from the old days, out-of-work jugglers and comedians.
“With those earphones stuck on his head, he don’t care what kind of howling goes on next door.” Maude addressed her remarks to the hotel’s daytime manager, a ginger-haired young man named Bloom, decked out in so many freckles he looked camouflaged. “It’s bad enough I got to listen to the El roaring by outside, all day long and half the night …”
Her angry stare focused not on Bloom, but Chester, slumped in his ratty armchair, fiddling with the dial of a little single-tube reflex circuit Crosley 50. Ever since he first bought an experimental crystal set five years ago, he’d been addicted to radio. Maude thought it just another fad. She still called it the “wireless,” wisecracking that it had less future than their act.
“I don’t hear anything,” Bloom said.
“Just wait.” Maude pointed at the wall. “It’s like someone is getting skinned alive in there.”
They waited. An uptown train rattled by on Sixth Avenue just as the howling started. Bloom couldn’t be sure. There was too much racket.
“Shhh!” Maude put her finger to her lips like a schoolteacher.
Bloom remained quiet. He kept glancing at the door, thinking this a waste of time. Suddenly, the most unearthly shriek came through the wall, a wail of torment echoing all the way from the depths of Perdition. Bloom jumped, giving a mouselike squeak of terror. “What’d I tell ya?” Maude’s knowing smirk once carried to the back row of Keith’s Union Square.
“My goodness! Whatever could that p
ossibly be?” Bloom did not look like a happy man.
“Ain’t it your job to find out?”
“Six-D is Mrs. Speers’s room. I believe she’s out on tour.”
“So, you gonna wait till she gets back? Me and Marconi here gotta put up with that caterwauling in the meantime?”
The tortured howl made Bloom’s flesh crawl. “I’ll get to the bottom of this,” he said.
Maude Marchington followed Mr. Bloom out into the hall and watched as he rapped his knuckles on the door to 6-D. No answer. He shrugged his shoulders and knocked again with somewhat less enthusiasm.
“Either you do something about it, or I’m calling the cops,” Maude said.
“The passkey’s in my office.”
Maude waited by the elevator until Bloom returned. Less than five minutes had elapsed. “It’s just as I thought,” he said, the scissor gate rattling shut behind him. “Mrs. Speers informed the front desk she was leaving Tuesday, to go out West for twenty-eight weeks on the Orpheum Circuit.”
Bloom was a catty sort and knew this last information would hit a nerve. He got to observe tenants twice in their careers: first on the way up, and later, on the way down. Mrs. Speers had played the Palace at the beginning of the month and was clearly ascending. The same could not be said for Mrs. Marchington.
His remark had its desired effect. Maude remained silent, following him down the dusty hall to 6-D. Bloom imperiously inserted the passkey. When the door swung open, the morbid wailing diminished. They both stood apprehensively on the sill, peering into an empty room.
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