Ragtime: A Novel

by E. L. Doctorow

  13

  Tracks! Tracks! It seemed to the visionaries who wrote for the popular magazines that the future lay at the end of parallel rails. There were longdistance locomotive railroads and interurban electric railroads and street railways and elevated railroads, all laying their steel stripes on the land, crisscrossing like the texture of an indefatigable civilization. And in Boston and New York there were even railroads under the streets, new rapid-transit subway systems transporting thousands of people every day. In New York, in fact, the success of the Manhattan subway had created a demand for a line to Brooklyn. Accordingly an engineering miracle was taking place, the construction of a tunnel under the East River from Brooklyn to the Battery. Sandhogs working behind a hydraulic shield excavated riverbed silt inch by inch and installed linking sections of cast-iron tubes as they went. The digging chamber was filled with compressed air pumped in from the surface. The work was dangerous. The men who did the work, the sandhogs, were considered heroes. Working under the river they were subject to horrible destinies. One typical hazard was the blowout, a situation in which the compressed air found a weakness in the roof of the tunnel and escaped with a violent rush. One day there was a blowout so explosive that it sucked four workmen out of the tunnel and blew them through twenty feet of river silt and shot them up through the river itself forty feet into the air on the crest of a geyser. Only one of the men survived. The freak accident made headlines in all the papers, and when Harry Houdini read the accounts over his morning coffee he hurriedly dressed and rushed downtown to Bellevue Hospital where it was said the surviving worker had been taken. I’m Harry Houdini, he told the admissions desk, and I’ve got to see that sandhog. Two nurses conferred behind the desk and while they did he stole a glance at the charts and ran up the stairs. You can’t come up here, a flinty nurse told him as he strode down a ward filled with sick and dying men. Chutes of cheerful morning sun leaned like buttresses from the high dirty windows of the ward. Clustered about the bed of the heroic sandhog was his family—a wife, an old mother in a babushka, two strapping sons. A doctor was in attendance. The man in the bed was swathed in bandages from his head to his feet. His arms, in casts, were supported in traction as was one encased leg. Every few moments there would issue from his head bandages a weak or perhaps only decorous groan. Houdini cleared his throat. I’m Harry Houdini, he said to the family, I escape for a living, that’s my profession, I’m an escapologist. But let me tell you I’ve never done an escape that can touch this one. He pointed to the bed. The family looked at him without expression on their stolid Slavic faces. The grandmother without taking her eyes off Houdini said something in a foreign language—a question it was, because one of the sons answered in kind and said Houdini’s name. They continued to look at him. I came to offer my respects, Houdini said. They all had flat faces, broad brows, eyes set widely apart. They did not return his smile. How did you get in here, the doctor said. I’ll only be a minute, Houdini said, I just want to ask him something. I think you better leave, the doctor said. Houdini turned to the family. I want to know how it felt. I want to know what he did to get to the surface. He was the only one to make it. He must have done something. I would like to know, it means a lot to me to know. He took out his wallet, removed some bills. I think you could probably use this. Go ahead, take it, I would like to help. The family continued to gaze at him. A sound came from the figure on the bed. One of the sons leaned over and put his ear down. He listened a moment and nodded. He went to the other son and said something to him. They were big fellows, over six feet, with chests like barrels. No rough stuff, the doctor said. Houdini found himself lifted by the arms and walked down the aisle of the ward with his feet just failing to touch the floor. He made a decision not to resist. He knew the tricks of self-defense, there were ways he could best these oafs; but this was a hospital after all.

  Houdini walked through the streets. His ears burned with humiliation. He wore a hat with the brim turned down. He wore a tight-fitting double-breasted linen jacket and he kept his hands in the pockets of the jacket. He wore tan trousers and brown and white shoes with pointed toes. It was a chilly autumn afternoon and most people wore coats. He moved swiftly through the crowded New York streets. He was incredibly lithe. There was a kind of act that used the real world for its stage. He couldn’t touch it. For all his achievements he was a trickster, an illusionist, a mere magician. What was the sense of his life if people walked out of the theatre and forgot him? The headlines on the newsstand said Peary had reached the Pole. The real-world act was what got into the history books.

  Houdini decided to concentrate on his outdoor exploits. Going on tour he escaped from a packing case nailed shut and tied with ropes that had been lowered into the freezing Detroit River. He had himself lowered into rivers in Boston and Philadelphia. Ice floated in the rivers. He practiced for the freezing river escapes by sitting in his bathtub at home with blocks of ice dropped in there by the iceman. But nothing was changed. He decided to do a European tour. He had gotten his start in Europe when he had been unable to crack the big-time vaudeville circuits in the States. In some peculiar way, he still felt, the people in Europe understood him better than his own countrymen. A few days before his departure he agreed to do a benefit for old magicians and retired theatre folk. He wanted to surprise them with a new escape. He hired a team of orderlies from Bellevue to come up on the stage and wrap him from head to foot in bandages. This was done. Then they wound him in numbers of sheets and then they strapped him to a hospital bed. Then they poured water over him to weigh down the wrappings. Houdini escaped. The old theatre people went wild. He was unsatisfied.

  Houdini was to sail for Europe on the Imperator, an immense German vessel with a figurehead—an odd thing for a modern three-stack passenger liner. The figurehead was a crowned eagle with its claws embedded in the world. Houdini’s ancient mother, Mrs. Weiss, came down to the pier to see him off. She was a neat little woman in black. He kissed her and hugged her and kissed her hands and went up the gangplank. He ran back down the gangplank and kissed her again, holding her face in his hands and kissing her eyes. She nodded and patted him. He ran up the gangplank and waved. He wasn’t sure she could see him. As the great liner backed into the river he stood at the rail and waved. He waved his cap to attract her attention. It was obvious she could not see him. He shouted, ridiculously, because the ship’s engines were churning up the river water. He continued to watch her small black figure and ran around to the port deck when tugs faced the ship downriver. She stood on the pier, a frail sweet old lady, and watched the ship drift out of her vision. She enjoyed her son’s devotions. Once he had come to her and had her hold out her apron. Into the apron he poured fifty shiny gold dollars. He was a good boy. She returned by cab to their home on 113th Street to wait for him.

  Houdini opened his European tour at the Hansa Theatre in Hamburg. The audiences were enthusiastic. The papers give lots of space. He had never known such feelings of dissatisfaction. He wondered why he had devoted his life to mindless entertainment. The audiences cheered. After every show there was always a small crowd at the stage entrance. He was short with them. Then one day he attended the public demonstration of a French-made flying machine, a Voisin, a beautiful biplane with boxed wings, a box rudder and three delicately strutted bicycle wheels. The aviator flew it over a race track and landed on the infield, and the next day his feat was described in the newspapers. Houdini moved decisively. Within a week he was the owner of a new Voisin biplane. It had cost him five thousand dollars. It came complete with a French mechanic who gave instruction in the art of flying. He secured the use of an army parade grounds outside of Hamburg. In all the countries in which he played he always got on well with the military. Soldiers everywhere were fans of his. Each morning at dawn he would drive to the parade grounds and sit at the controls of the Voisin while the French mechanic lectured him on the function and purpose of the levers and pedals within reach of the pilot. The plane was directed by means of a
large steering wheel mounted in the vertical position and attached by a shaft to the front rudder. The pilot sat behind the front rudder on a little seat between the two wings. Behind him was the engine, and behind the engine was the propeller. The Voisin was made of wood. The wings were covered in fabric stretched taut and sized with varnish. The struts connecting the double wings were paneled with the same material. The Voisin looked like a box kite. Houdini had his name painted in block letters on the outside panels of the wings and on the rear elevators. He could hardly wait for his first flight. The patient mechanic drilled him in the various operations required to get the machine aloft, maintain it in flight and land it. Every night Houdini did his act and every morning at dawn he went out for his lessons. Finally one morning when the red sky was clear and the mechanic judged the wind conditions to be right, they pushed the machine out of its shed and faced it into the breeze. Houdini climbed into the pilot’s seat, turned his cap backwards and pulled it down tight. He clutched the wheel. His eyes narrowed in concentration, he set his jaw firmly and he turned his head and nodded to the mechanic, who spun the wood propeller. The engine fired. It was an Enfield 80-horsepower job, supposedly better than the one the Wrights themselves were using. Hardly daring to breathe, Houdini throttled the engine, idled it, throttled it again. Finally he held up his thumb. The mechanic ducked under the wings and pulled the wheel chocks. The craft slowly moved forward. Houdini breathed faster and faster as the Voisin picked up speed. Soon it was bumping along the ground and he could feel the sensitive wings take on an intelligence of their own, as if a disembodied presence had joined the enterprise. The machine lifted off the ground. He thought he was dreaming. He had to willfully restrain his emotions, commanding himself sternly to keep the wings level, to keep the throttle continuously in touch with the speed of the flight. He was flying! His feet worked the pedals, he clasped the control wheel and gently the rudder in front of him tilted down and the machine climbed the sky. He dared to look down: the earth was fifty feet below him. He no longer heard the ratcheting engine behind his ear. He felt the wind in his face and discovered he was shouting. The guy wires seemed to sing, the great wings above and below him nodded and dipped and played in the air with their incredibly gentle intelligence. The bicycle wheels spun slowly, idly in the breeze. He was flying over a stand of trees. Gaining confidence he put the craft into a difficult maneuver, a bank. The Voisin described a wide circle around the parade grounds. Then he could see the mechanic standing in the distance, by the shed, raising both arms in salute. Coolly, Houdini leveled the wings, slipped under his breeze and began his descent. The moment the wheels touched down, the crudeness of the impact offended him. And when the machine rolled to a stop he wanted only to be airborne again.

  On subsequent flights Houdini stayed in the air as much as ten or twelve minutes. That was virtually to challenge the fuel capacity of the plane. He seemed at times to drift as if suspended from the clouds over his head. He was able to see whole villages nestled below in the German countryside, and to follow his own shadow down incredibly straight roads lined with hedgerows. Once he flew high enough to be able to see in the distance the medieval skyline of Hamburg with flashes of the Elbe River. He was tremendously proud of his aeroplane. He wanted to make flying history. Young officers from the local casern began to come to the parade grounds to watch Houdini fly. He got to know some of them by name. And then the Commandant, whose permission had been required for the use of the parade grounds, asked Houdini if he would be interested in giving a few lectures to these young officers on the art of flying. The magician readily agreed. He arranged his schedule accordingly and began a series of informal sessions. He liked the young officers. They were highly intelligent and very respectful. They laughed at his jokes. His German was faulty and Yiddish-inflected but they seemed not to notice.

  One morning after a flight Houdini taxied his plane to the shed and noticed waiting there a Mercedes staff car carrying general officers of the Imperial German Army. Before he could disembark his friend the Commandant stood up from the jump seat of the car, saluted him and asked him in a most formal manner if he would mind taking the Voisin up again for a demonstration flight. Houdini looked at the two elderly men, heavily medaled, sitting in the rear of the car. They nodded at him. Sitting at attention in the front seat next to the driver was an enlisted man who wore the spiked helmet and held a carbine across his lap. At this moment a white Daimler landau with an enclosed carriage for the passengers slowly pulled up behind the staff car. Its brass fittings were polished to a brilliance and even its white wooden wheel spokes were clean. A gold-fringed flag of rank flew from the right front fender. Houdini could not see into the passenger cab. Of course, he said. He ordered his mechanic to refuel and in a few minutes was aloft once more, making wide stately banks around the field. He tried to imagine how he must look from the ground. He felt the thrill of performance. He whirred over the cars at a height of a hundred feet and came around again at fifty feet waggling his wings and waving. He flew for whoever it was in that white car.

  When he landed he was escorted to the big Daimler. The chauffeur opened the door and stood at attention. Sitting in the car was the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. The Archduke was dressed in the uniform of a field marshal of the Austrian Army. He held in the crook of his arm a plumed helmet. His hair was cut very short and flat on top, like a brush. He had large waxed moustaches that curled upward and he gazed at Houdini with stupid heavy-lidded eyes. Sitting next to him was his wife, the Countess Sophie, a stately matron yawning delicately behind a gloved hand. The Archduke Franz Ferdinand didn’t seem to know who Houdini was. He congratulated him on the invention of the aeroplane.

  II

  14

  When Father returned to New Rochelle he walked up the front steps of his home, passed under the giant Norwegian maples and found his wife holding a brown baby in her arms. Upstairs the colored girl was withdrawn. Melancholy had taken the will out of her muscles. She did not have the strength to hold her baby. She sat all day in her attic room and watched the diamond windowpanes as they gathered the light, glowed with it and then gave it up. Father looked at her through the open door. She ignored him. He wandered through the house finding everywhere signs of his own exclusion. His son now had a desk, as befitted all young students. He thought he heard an Arctic wind but it was the housemaid Brigit pushing an electric suction cleaner across the rug in the parlor. What was strangest of all was the mirror in his bath: it gave back the gaunt, bearded face of a derelict, a man who lacked a home. His shaving mirror on the Roosevelt had not revealed this. He removed his clothes. He was shocked by the outlines of his body, the ribs and clavicle, white-skinned and vulnerable, the bony pelvis, the organ hanging there redder than anything else. At night in bed Mother held him and tried to warm the small of his back, curled him into her as she lay against his back cradling his strange coldness. It was apparent to them both that this time he’d stayed away too long. Downstairs Brigit put a record on the Victrola, wound the crank and sat in the parlor smoking a cigarette and listening to John McCormack sing “I Hear You Calling Me.” She was doing what she could to lose her place. She was no longer efficient or respectful. Mother marked this change from the arrival of the colored girl. Father related it to the degrees of turn in the moral planet. He saw it everywhere, this new season, and it bewildered him. At his office he was told that the seamstresses in the flag department had joined a New York union. He put on clothes from his closet that ballooned from him as shapeless as the furs he had worn for a year. He had brought home gifts. He gave his son a pair of walrus tusks and a whale’s tooth with Esquimo carvings. He gave his wife the fur of a white polar bear. He pulled Arctic treasures from his trunk—notebooks of his journals, their covers curling at the corners, their pages stiff as pages that have been wet; a signed photograph of Commander Peary; a bone harpoon tip; three or four tins of unused tea—incredible treasures in the North, but here in the parlor the e
mbarrassing possessions of a savage. The family stood around and watched him on his knees. There was nothing he had to tell them. On the Northern arc of the world was a darkness and a coldness that had crept upon him and rounded his shoulders. Waiting for Peary to return to the Roosevelt he had heard the wind howl at night and had clasped with love and gratitude the foul body, like a stinking fish, of an Esquimo woman. He had put his body into the stinking fish. The old Anglo-Saxon word he had hardly dared think of. That is what he had done. Now in New Rochelle he smelled on himself the oil of fish liver, fish on his breath, fish in his nostrils. He scrubbed himself red. He looked in Mother’s eyes to detect there his justice. He found instead a woman curious and alerted to his new being. He realized that every night since he’d returned they had slept in the same bed. She was in some way not as vigorously modest as she’d been. She took his gaze. She came to bed with her hair unbraided. Her hand one night brushed down his chest and came to rest below his nightshirt. He decided God had punishments in store so devious there was no sense trying to anticipate what they were. With a groan he turned to her and found her ready. Her hands pulling his face to hers did not feel the tears.