A while later Houdini was led, stark naked, up the six flights of stairs to Murderer’s Row on the top tier of the jail. There were fewer inhabitants on this tier and the cells were believed to be escape-proof. The guards locked Houdini in an empty cell. They placed his clothing in a neat pile on the promenade, beyond his reach. Then the guards and the accompanying reporters withdrew and, as they had agreed, went back to the Warden’s office. Houdini carried in various places on his person small steel wires and bits of spring steel. This time he ran his palm along the sole of his foot and extracted from a slot in the callus of his left heel a strip of metal about a quarter-inch wide and one and a half inches long. From his thick hair he withdrew a piece of stiff wire which he fitted around the strip metal as a handle. He stuck his hand through the bars, inserted the makeshift key in the lock and twisted it slowly clockwise. The cell door swung open. At that moment Houdini realized that across the vault of gloom the cell directly opposite was lighted and occupied. A prisoner sat there staring at him. The prisoner had a broad flat face with a porcine nose, a wide mouth, and eyes that seemed unnaturally bright and large. He had coarse hair combed back from an oddly crescent hairline. Houdini, a vaudevillian, thought of the face of a ventriloquist’s dummy. The prisoner was sitting at a table laid with linen and service. On the table were the remains of a large meal. An empty bottle of champagne was stuck upside down in a cooler. The iron cot was covered with a quilted spread and throw pillows. A Regency armoire stood against the stone wall. The ceiling fixture had been ornamented with a Tiffany lampshade. Houdini could not help staring. The prisoner’s cell glowed like a stage in the perpetual dusk of the cavernous prison. The prisoner stood up and waved, a stately gesture, and his wide mouth offered the trace of a smile. Quickly Houdini began to dress. He put on his briefs, his trousers, his socks and garters and shoes. Across the well the prisoner began to undress. Houdini put on his undershirt, his shirt, his collar. He tied his tie and set the stock pin. He snapped his suspenders in place and pulled on his jacket. The prisoner was now as naked as Houdini had been. The prisoner came up to the front of his cell and raising his arms in a shockingly obscene manner he thrust his hips forward and flapped his penis between the bars. Houdini rushed down the promenade, fumblingly unlocked the cellblock door and closed it behind him.
Houdini was to tell no one of this strange confrontation. He went through the celebrations of his jailhouse feat in an uncharacteristically quiet, even subdued manner. Not even the lines at the box office following the stories in the evening papers could cheer him up. Escaping from the leg irons in two minutes gave him no pleasure at all. Days passed before he realized that the grotesque mimic on Murderer’s Row had to have been the killer Harry K. Thaw. People who did not respond to his art profoundly distressed Houdini. He had come to realize they were invariably of the upper classes. Always they broke through the pretense of his life and made him feel foolish. Houdini had high inchoate ambition and every development in technology made him restless. On the shabby confines of a stage he could create wonder and awe. Meanwhile men were beginning to take planes into the air, or race automobiles that went sixty miles an hour. A man like Roosevelt had run at the Spanish on San Juan Hill and now sent a fleet of white battleships steaming around the world, battleships as white as his teeth. The wealthy knew what was important. They looked on him as a child or a fool. Yet his self-imposed training, his dedication to the perfection of what he did, reflected an American ideal. He kept himself as trim as an athlete. He did not smoke or drink. Pound for pound he was as strong as any man he had ever run up against. He could tighten his stomach muscles and with a smile invite anyone at all to punch him there as hard as they liked. He was immensely muscular and agile and professionally courageous. Yet to the wealthy all this was nothing.
New in Houdini’s act was an escape in which he released himself from an office safe and then opened the safe to reveal, handcuffed, the assistant who had been onstage a moment before. It was a great success. One evening after the performance Houdini’s manager told him of being called by Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish of 78th Street, who wanted to book Houdini for a private party. Mrs. Fish was one of the Four Hundred. She was famous for her wit. Once she had given a ball at which everyone had to talk baby talk. Mrs. Fish was throwing a commemorative ball in honor of her friend the late Stanford White, the architect of her home. He had designed her home in the style of a doge palace. A doge was the chief magistrate in the republic of Genoa or Venice. I won’t have nothing to do with those people, Houdini told his manager. Dutifully the manager reported to Mrs. Fish that Houdini was not available. She doubled the fee. The ball was held on a Monday evening. It was the first big event of the new season. At about nine o’clock Houdini drove up in a hired Pierce Arrow. He was accompanied by his manager and his assistant. Behind the car was a truck carrying his equipment. The entourage was shown to the trade entrance.
Unknown to Houdini, Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish had also engaged for the evening the entire sideshow of the Barnum and Bailey circus. She liked to shock fuddy-duddies. Houdini was led into some sort of waiting room where he found himself encircled by a mob of freaks all of whom had heard of him and wanted to touch him. Creatures with scaled iridescent skins and hands attached to their shoulders, midgets with the voices of telephones, Siamese twin sisters who leaned in opposite directions, a man who lifted weights from iron rings permanently attached to his breasts. Houdini removed his cape and his top hat and his white gloves and handed them to his assistant. He slumped in a chair. His grips were waiting for instructions. The freaks yattered at him.
But the room itself was very beautiful, with carved wood ceilings and Flemish tapestries of Actaeon being torn apart by dogs.
Early in his career Houdini had worked in a small circus in western Pennsylvania. He recalled his loyalties now in order to regain his composure. One of the midgets, a woman, separated herself from the rest and got everyone to step back a few paces. She turned out to be the eminent Lavinia Warren, the widow of General Tom Thumb, the most famous midget of all. Lavinia Warren Thumb was dressed in a magnificent gown supplied by Mrs. Fish: it was supposed to be a joke on Mrs. Fish’s nemesis, Mrs. William Astor, who had worn the identical design the previous spring. Lavinia Thumb was coiffed in the Astor manner and wore glittering copies of the Astor jewels. She was nearly seventy years old and carried herself with dignity. Upon her wedding fifty years before she and Colonel Thumb had been received in the White House by the Lincolns. Houdini wanted to cry. Lavinia was no longer working in the circus but she had come down to New York from her home in Bridgeport, a clapboard house with escalloped bargeboards and a widow’s walk, which cost something to maintain. That was why she had taken this evening’s job. She lived in Bridgeport to be near the grave of her husband, who had died many years before and was commemorated in stone atop a monumental column in Mountain Grove Cemetery. Lavinia was two feet tall. She came to Houdini’s knees. Her voice had deepened with age and she now spoke in the tones of a normal twenty-year-old girl. She had sparkling blue eyes, silver-white hair and the finest of wrinkles on her clear white skin. Houdini was reminded of his mother. Come on, kid, do a coupla numbers for us, Lavinia said.
Houdini entertained the circus folk with sleight of hand and some simple tricks. He put a billiard ball in his mouth, closed his mouth, opened it, and the billiard ball was gone. He closed his mouth and opened it again and removed the billiard ball. He stuck an ordinary sewing needle into his cheek and pulled it through the inner side. He opened his hand and produced a live chick. He withdrew from his ear a stream of colored silk. The freaks were delighted. They applauded and laughed. When he felt he had discharged his responsibilities, Houdini rose and told his manager he would not perform for Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish. There were remonstrations. Houdini stormed out the door. Crystal light dazzled his eyes. He was in the grand ballroom of the doge palace. A string orchestra played from a balcony. Great pale red drapes framed the clerestory windows and four hundred people were wa
ltzing on a marble floor. Shading his eyes he saw bearing down on him Mrs. Fish herself, a clutch of jeweled feathers rising from her piled hair, ropes of pearls swinging pendulously from her neck, a witticism forming on her lips like the bubbles of an epileptic.
Despite such experiences Houdini never developed what we think of as a political consciousness. He could not reason from his own hurt feelings. To the end he would be almost totally unaware of the design of his career, the great map of revolution laid out by his life. He was a Jew. His real name was Erich Weiss. He was passionately in love with his ancient mother whom he had installed in his brownstone home on West 113th Street. In fact Sigmund Freud had just arrived in America to give a series of lectures at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, and so Houdini was destined to be, with Al Jolson, the last of the great shameless mother lovers, a nineteenth-century movement that included such men as Poe, John Brown, Lincoln and James McNeill Whistler. Of course Freud’s immediate reception in America was not auspicious. A few professional alienists understood his importance, but to most of the public he appeared as some kind of German sexologist, an exponent of free love who used big words to talk about dirty things. At least a decade would have to pass before Freud would have his revenge and see his ideas begin to destroy sex in America forever.
6
Freud arrived in New York on the Lloyd liner George Washington. He was accompanied by his disciples Jung and Ferenczi, both some years his junior. They were met at the dock by two more younger Freudians, Drs. Ernest Jones and A. A. Brill. The entire party dined at Hammerstein’s Roof Garden. There were potted palms. A piano violin duo played Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody. Everyone talked around Freud, glancing at him continuously to gauge his mood. He ate cup custard. Brill and Jones undertook to play host for the visit. In the days following they showed Freud Central Park, the Metropolitan Museum and Chinatown. Catlike Chinamen gazed at them out of dark shops. There were glass cabinets filled with litchi nuts. The party went to one of the silent films so popular in stores and nickelodeons around the city. White smoke rose from the barrels of rifles and men wearing lipstick and rouge fell backwards clutching their chests. At least, Freud thought, it is silent. What oppressed him about the New World was its noise. The terrible clatter of horses and wagons, the clanking and screeching of streetcars, the horns of automobiles. At the wheel of an open Marmon, Brill drove the Freudians around Manhattan. At one point, on Fifth Avenue, Freud felt as if he was being observed; raising his eyes he found some children staring down at him from the top of a double-decker bus.
Brill drove the party down to the Lower East Side with its Yiddish theatres and pushcarts and elevated trains. The fearsome elevated rumbled past the windows of tenements in which people were expected to live. The windows shook, the very buildings shook. Freud had to relieve himself and nobody seemed to be able to tell him where a public facility could be found. They all had to enter a dairy restaurant and order sour cream with vegetables so that Freud could go to the bathroom. Later, back in the car, they pulled up to a corner to watch a street artist at work, an old man who with nothing but a scissors and paper made miniature silhouette portraits for a few cents. Standing for her portrait was a beautiful well-dressed woman. The excitable Ferenczi, masking his admiration for the woman’s good looks, declared to his colleagues in the car his happiness at finding the ancient art of silhouette flourishing on the streets of the New World. Freud, clamping his teeth on his cigar, said nothing. The motor idled. Only Jung noticed the little girl in the pinafore standing slightly behind the young woman and holding her hand. The little girl peeked at Jung and the shaven-headed Jung, who was already disagreeing on certain crucial matters with his beloved mentor, looked through his thick steel-rimmed spectacles at the lovely child and experienced what he realized was a shock of recognition, although at the moment he could not have explained why. Brill pressed the gear pedal and the party continued on its tour. Their ultimate destination was Coney Island, a long way out of the city. They arrived in the late afternoon and immediately embarked on a tour of the three great amusement parks, beginning with Steeplechase and going on to Dreamland and finally late at night to the towers and domes, outlined in electric bulbs, of Luna Park. The dignified visitors rode the shoot-the-chutes and Freud and Jung took a boat together through the Tunnel of Love. The day came to a close only when Freud tired and had one of the fainting fits that had lately plagued him when in Jung’s presence. A few days later the entire party journeyed to Worcester for Freud’s lectures. When the lectures were completed Freud was persuaded to make an expedition to the great natural wonder of Niagara Falls. They arrived at the falls on an overcast day. Thousands of newly married couples stood, in pairs, watching the great cascades. Mist like an inverted rain rose from the falls. There was a high wire strung from one shore to the other and some maniac in ballet slippers and tights was walking the wire, keeping his balance with a parasol. Freud shook his head. Later the party went to the Cave of Winds. There, at an underground footbridge, a guide motioned the others back and took Freud’s elbow. Let the old fellow go first, the guide said. The great doctor, age fifty-three, decided at this moment that he had had enough of America. With his disciples he sailed back to Germany on the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse. He had not really gotten used to the food or the scarcity of American public facilities. He believed the trip had ruined both his stomach and his bladder. The entire population seemed to him over-powered, brash and rude. The vulgar wholesale appropriation of European art and architecture regardless of period or country he found appalling. He had seen in our careless commingling of great wealth and great poverty the chaos of an entropic European civilization. He sat in his quiet cozy study in Vienna, glad to be back. He said to Ernest Jones, America is a mistake, a gigantic mistake.
At the time of course not a few people on these shores were ready to agree with him. Millions of men were out of work. Those fortunate enough to have jobs were dared to form unions. Courts enjoined them, police busted their heads, their leaders were jailed and new men took their jobs. A union was an affront to God. The laboring man would be protected and cared for not by the labor agitators, said one wealthy man, but by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom had given the control of the property interests of this country. If all else failed the troops were called out. Armories rose in every city of the country. In the coal fields a miner made a dollar sixty a day if he could dig three tons. He lived in the company’s shacks and bought his food from the company stores. On the tobacco farms Negroes stripped tobacco leaves thirteen hours a day and earned six cents an hour, man, woman or child. Children suffered no discriminatory treatment. They were valued everywhere they were employed. They did not complain as adults tended to do. Employers liked to think of them as happy elves. If there was a problem about employing children it had to do only with their endurance. They were more agile than adults but they tended in the latter hours of the day to lose a degree of efficiency. In the canneries and mills these were the hours they were most likely to lose their fingers or have their hands mangled or their legs crushed; they had to be counseled to stay alert. In the mines they worked as sorters of coal and sometimes were smothered in the coal chutes; they were warned to keep their wits about them. One hundred Negroes a year were lynched. One hundred miners were burned alive. One hundred children were mutilated. There seemed to be quotas for these things. There seemed to be quotas for death by starvation. There were oil trusts and banking trusts and railroad trusts and beef trusts and steel trusts. It became fashionable to honor the poor. At palaces in New York and Chicago people gave poverty balls. Guests came dressed in rags and ate from tin plates and drank from chipped mugs. Ballrooms were decorated to look like mines with beams, iron tracks and miner’s lamps. Theatrical scenery firms were hired to make outdoor gardens look like dirt farms and dining rooms like cotton mills. Guests smoked cigar butts offered to them on silver trays. Minstrels performed in blackface. One hostess invited everyone to a stockyard ball. Gu
ests were wrapped in long aprons and their heads covered with white caps. They dined and danced while hanging carcasses of bloody beef trailed around the walls on moving pulleys. Entrails spilled on the floor. The proceeds were for charity.
7
One day after a visit to the Tombs Evelyn Nesbit happened to notice through the rear window of the electric hansom that for the first time in days none of the reporters were following. Usually Hearst and Pulitzer reporters dogged her in packs.
On an impulse she told the driver to turn and go east. A servant of Harry Thaw’s mother, the driver permitted himself a frown. Evelyn took no notice. The car moved through the city, its motor humming in the warm afternoon. It was a black Detroit Electric with hard rubber tires. After a while through the window Evelyn saw the peddlers and pushcarts of the Lower East Side.
Dark-eyed faces peered into the hansom. Men with big moustaches smiled through their gold teeth. Street workers sat on the curbs in the heat and fanned themselves with their derbies. Boys in knickers ran alongside the car with bulky loads of piecework on their shoulders. Evelyn saw stores with Hebrew signs in the windows, the Hebrew letters looking to her eyes like arrangements of bones. She saw the iron fire escapes on the tenements as tiers of cellblocks. Nags in their yokes lifted their bowed necks to gaze at her. Ragmen struggling with their great junk-loaded two-wheeled carts, women selling breads from baskets carried in their arms: they all looked. The driver was nervous. He wore gray livery with black leather jodhpurs. He nosed the shiny car through the narrow filthy streets. A girl in a pinafore and high-laced shoes sat playing in the muck along the curbstone. A little dirty-faced girl. Stop the car, Evelyn said. The driver ran around and opened her door. Evelyn stepped into the street. She knelt down. The girl had straight black hair that fitted her head like a helmet. She had olive skin and eyes so brown they were black. She gazed at Evelyn without curiosity. She was the most beautiful child Evelyn had ever seen. A piece of clothesline was tied around her wrist. Evelyn stood up, followed the clothesline, and found herself looking into the face of a mad old man with a closely cropped gray beard. The end of the line was tied around the old man’s waist. He wore a threadbare coat. One sleeve was torn. He wore a soft cap and a collar with a tie. He stood on the sidewalk in front of a display cart of framed silhouette portraits pinned to a black velvet curtain. He was a silhouette artist. With nothing but a small scissors and some glue he would make your image by cutting a piece of white paper and mounting it on a black background. The whole thing with the frame cost fifteen cents. Fifteen cents, lady, the old man said. Why do you have this child tied with a rope, Evelyn said. The old man gazed at her finery. He laughed and shook his head and talked to himself in Yiddish. He turned his back to her. A crowd had gathered when the car stopped. A tall workingman stepped forward and removed his hat with respect before translating for Evelyn what the old man had said. Please, missus, he said, so the little girl is not stolen from him. Evelyn had the feeling the translator was also something of a diplomat. The old artist was laughing bitterly and thrusting his chin in her direction, obviously commenting on her. He says the rich lady may not be aware that young girls in the slums are stolen every day from their parents and sold into slavery. Evelyn was shocked. This child can’t be more than ten, she said. The old man began to shout and pointed across the street at a tenement house, and turned and pointed toward the corner and turned and pointed to the other corner. Please, missus, the tall workingman said, married women, children, anyone they can get their hands on. They defile them and then in shame the female gives her life to vagrancy. Houses on this very street are used for this purpose. Where are the child’s parents, Evelyn demanded. The old man was now talking to the crowd, beating his breast and pointing his finger in the air. A woman in a black shawl shook her head and moaned in sympathy. The old man took off his hat and tugged at his hair. Even the tall workingman forgot to translate, so moved was he by the account. Please, missus, he finally said, this man himself is the child’s father. He pointed to the artist’s torn sleeve. His own wife, to feed them, offered herself and he has now driven her from his home and mourns her as we mourn the dead. His hair has turned white in the last month. He is thirty-two years old.
Ragtime: A Novel Page 3