Ragtime: A Novel

by E. L. Doctorow

  Mother and Father waited outside the room. When they looked in again Coalhouse was on his knees beside the bed. His head was bowed and with his two hands he held the hand of Sarah. They retreated. Afterward they heard the sepulchral sounds of a grown man’s grief. Mother went home. She held the baby constantly. The family was devastated. They could not seem to keep warm. Everyone wore sweaters. Younger Brother fired the furnace. Toward the end of the week Sarah died.

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  The funeral was made in Harlem. It was lavish. Sarah’s coffin was bronze. The hearse was a custom Pierce Arrow Opera Coach with an elongated passenger compartment and a driver’s cab open to the weather. The top was railed with brass and banked with masses of flowers. Black ribbon flew from the four corners of the roof. The car was so highly polished the boy could see in its rear doors a reflection of the entire street. Everything was black including the sky. The street curved to a precipitous horizon. There were several town cars for carrying the mourners to the cemetery. The mourners were mostly musicians, associates of Coalhouse in the Clef Club Orchestra. They were Negro men with closely cropped hair, tightly buttoned dark suits, rounded collars and black ties. The women with them wore dresses that brushed the tops of their shoes, wide-brimmed hats, and small furs around their shoulders. When the mourners were in the cars and the doors were shut and the chauffeurs had got in behind their wheels, everyone heard a fanfare and there came up the street to take its place in the procession an open omnibus with a five-piece brass band in tuxedos. Coalhouse Walker paid for the funeral with the money he had saved for his wedding. He had secured a plot for Sarah through his membership in the Negro Musicians’ Benevolent Association. The cemetery was in Brooklyn. The band played dirges through the quiet streets of Harlem and all the way downtown. The cortege moved slowly. Children ran behind it and people on the sidewalks stopped to stare. The band played as the cars slowly crossed the Brooklyn Bridge high over the East River. Passengers on the trolley cars along the outer lanes of the bridge stood up in their seats to see the grand parade. The sun shone. Gulls rose from the water. They flew between the suspension cables and settled along the railing as the last of the cars went by.

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  Spring, spring! Like a mad magician flinging silks and colored rags from his trunk the earth produced the yellow and white crocus, then the fox grape, the forsythia flowering on its stalks, the blades of iris, the apple tree blossoms of pink and white and green, the heavy lilac and the daffodil. Grandfather stood in the yard and gave a standing ovation. A breeze came up and blew from the maples a shower of spermatozoic soft-headed green buds. They caught in his sparse gray hair. He shook his head with delight, feeling a wreath had been bestowed. A joyful spasm took hold of him and he stuck his leg out in an old man’s jig, lost his balance, and slid on the heel of his shoe into a sitting position. In this manner he cracked his pelvis and entered a period of declining health from which he would not recover. But the spring was joyful and even in pain he wore a smile. Everywhere the sap rose and the birds sang. Upstate, at Matteawan State Prison Farm, Harry K. Thaw nimbly jumped over a ditch in a road and stepped on the running board of a waiting Locomobile. He hooked his elbow about the roof post, gave an exultant cry, and the car drove off. Thaw escaped to Canada, leaving a trail of outraged waitresses and stunned hôteliers. He abducted and whipped a teenage boy—he was beginning to work out his problems. Eventually he came back across the border. He was discovered on a train near Buffalo and ran through the cars giggling and panting as police detectives set up pursuit. In the dining car he turned and threw heavy silvered individual coffeepots he plucked from the tables of astonished diners. He climbed up between the cars and ran along the top of the train in a kind of simian lope, leaping down upon the observation platform and standing with his arms outstretched to the sun as the police burst through the door and grabbed him.

  Thaw would not divulge the name of the person who helped him escape. Just call me Houdini, he said. An enterprising reporter decided to find the great magician and solicit a comment. He was that kind of reporter expert in the stupid and inconsequential news story so loved by the papers of the time. Houdini was found in a cemetery in Queens where he was observing the spring on his knees beside his mother’s grave. He looked up with the swollen and laughable face of grief. The reporter stole away. All around the graveyard the dogwood was in flower and the fallen magnolia petals lay in circles under the trees.

  Houdini wore a black wool suit and the sleeve of the jacket was torn near the shoulder. His mother had been dead for some months but every morning he awoke with his wound as fresh and painful as if she had died the night before. He had canceled several bookings. He shaved only when he remembered to, which was not often, and with his reddened eyes and stubble and baggy suit he looked like anything but the snappy magician of international fame.

  It is a Jewish custom to leave small stones at the gravesite to show that a visit has been made. Mrs. Cecelia Weiss’s burial mound was covered with pebbles and small stones, one upon another, so that a kind of pyramid was forming. He thought of her at rest in the coffin under the earth. He wept bitterly. He wanted to be next to her. He remembered his attempt to escape from a coffin, the terror when he realized he could not. The coffin had a trick lid but he had not anticipated the weight of the earth. He had clawed at the earth, feeling its monumental weight. He had screamed into its impenetrable silence. He knew what it was to be sealed in the earth but he felt now it was the only place for him. What good was life without his beloved little mother?

  He hated the spring. The air filled his nose and mouth like clotted soil.

  In his brownstone on 113th Street near Riverside Drive, Houdini arranged framed photographs of his mother to suggest her continuing presence. One close-up he laid on the pillow of her bed. He placed an enlarged photo of her seated in a chair and smiling in the very chair in which she had posed. There was a picture of her in a hat and coat walking up the stairs from the street to the front door. He hung this on the inside of the door. One of her prized possessions had been an oak music box with a glass window in its lid so that one could see the large tined disc in rotation. There were several discs to choose from, but her favorite had been the one that played “Gaudeamus Igitur” on one side and “Columbia the Gem of the Ocean” on the other. Houdini cranked up the music box and played these tunes every evening. He dreamed they were her voice. He had saved the letters she had written to him over the years and now had them translated into English and typed so that he could read them easily and relive them without fear of their turning to dust from overuse. He stood in the door of her closet and breathed the redolence of her wardrobe.

  The old woman had taken ill while Houdini was in Europe. He had looked forward to describing to her his meeting with the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but before he could write her she had died. He secured a release from his performing contracts and sailed home as quickly as he could. He remembered nothing of the voyage. He was out of his mind with grief. The burial had been delayed until his return. He learned that she had called for him moments before her death. She had suffered a paralytic stroke. Erich, she had moaned. Erich, Erich. He was tormented with guilt. He was obsessed with the idea that she had wanted to tell him something, that she had something to tell him that she could reveal only then, at the moment of her death.

  He had always been skeptical of occultists and the spiritual claims of clairvoyants and mediums. In his early days with the Welsh Brothers Circus in Pennsylvania he had himself exploited the gullibility of rubes by claiming transcendental powers for his tricks. Blindfolded he would tell a confederate what item had been held for identification by someone in the audience. What is this, Mr. Houdini, the confederate would say, and he’d know. It was all done by code. Sometimes he would claim to speak with the dead and give some poor sucker whose name and circumstances they had managed to figure out a message from a loved one who had passed on. So he knew what spiritual fraud was. He c
ould recognize it. Spiritual fraud had been rampant in the United States since 1848 when two sisters, Margaretta and Kate Fox, invited neighbors to hear the mysterious rappings in their house in Hydesville, New York. But it was the very fact of his expertise that persuaded him now to consider the possibility of finding someone who had genuine gifts as a medium. If it was possible to communicate with the dead he would find out. He could recognize and unmask any fake act in the world. Therefore if he found the real thing he would know it. He wanted to see his mother Cecelia’s tiny figure and feel her hands touch his face. But since that could not be, he decided to see if it was really possible to speak with her.

  And at this time in our history communication with the dead was not as far-fetched an idea as it had once been. America was in the dawn of the Twentieth Century, a nation of steam shovels, locomotives, airships, combustion engines, telephones and twenty-five-story buildings. But there was an interesting susceptibility to occult ideas of the most famous pragmatists in the land. Of course it was all very hush-hush. A rumor in certain circles had it that Pierpont Morgan and Henry Ford had formed a secret society. And he knew that the horticultural wizard Luther Burbank, who crossbred and developed hybrids with increased crop yields, talked secretly to plants and believed they could understand him. The great Edison himself, the man who invented the Twentieth Century, had theorized that irreducible particles of life-charged matter, which he called swarms, subsisted after death and could never be destroyed. Houdini tried to get in touch with Edison. He asked for an interview. But the great man was too busy. He was working on an invention so secret that there was frequent speculation in the press as to what it might be. One news story came out claiming the new invention was something called a vacuum tube by which Edison hoped to receive messages from dead people. Houdini desperately sent off telegrams begging and pleading for an interview. He was rebuffed. He offered money to help fund the work. He was rebuffed. He swore to himself that he would invent his own instrument, just as he had learned to fly his own aeroplane. Whatever Edison began with came from the storehouse of technology available to everyone. Houdini bought books and began a study of mechanical physics and the principles of the storage battery. He vowed that by whatever medium, mechanical or human, if there was life after death he would discover it.

  His passion in no time at all came to the attention of various people who kept abreast of such things. He met a man from Buffalo, New York, who claimed to have worked at one time with Steinmetz, the dwarf immigrant genius of the General Electric Company. Physicists all over the world were discovering waves, the man told him. There was a tremendously important theory from abroad in which it was supposed matter and energy were but two aspects of the same primal force. That is my idea too, the man told Houdini. He was a physicist with a university degree from Transylvania. All he needed was to devise the properly sensitive instrument, and primal waves could be detected and decoded that nobody as yet knew anything about. Houdini signed an agreement with him giving him two thousand dollars for the exclusive rights to his research. Another man, a chemist, he established in the basement of his own home. Letters came to him from people claiming to have mediumistic gifts and asking for any item of his mother’s—a brooch or a lock of hair—to work with. He employed a detective agency to look into the most reasonable-sounding of these. He told the agents how to recognize spirit fraud. He told them about trumpets, and trick photography, hidden recording megaphones, levitation of tables by means of pulleys. Why should a medium need the room dark, he told them. When he turns out the lights it’s to hide something.

  Soon Houdini had generated enough activity of this kind to make him think about working again. I’m feeling stronger, he told his manager. I’m beginning to feel like my old self. The bookings were soon arranged. Those who saw Houdini’s performances in this period of his career say they surpassed anything he had ever done. He brought masons onstage who built a brick wall ten feet high which he then walked through. He made a full-sized elephant disappear with a clap of his hands. Coins poured from his fingers. Doves flew from his ears. He stepped into a packing case previously examined by the audience. It was nailed shut and tied with a stout rope. No drape was set up in front of the packing case. It was pried open. It was empty. A collective gasp went up from the audience as Houdini was seen running into the theatre from the lobby. He leaped onstage. His eyes seemed to gleam the color of blue diamonds. Slowly he lifted his arms. His feet rose from the floor. He stood six inches above the floor. Women panted. Suddenly he collapsed in a heap. There were exclamations of disbelief followed by prolonged applause. His assistants helped him to a chair. Houdini asked for a glass of wine to restore his strength. He held the wine up in the spotlight. It turned colorless. He drank it. The wineglass disappeared from his hand.

  In fact his performances were now of such intensity and had so strange and disquieting an effect on his audiences, that in some cases children were hurried out before the end of the show. Houdini never noticed. He drove himself beyond his own physical capacity and would do eight or a dozen of his major tricks in a show that was supposed to have three. He had always billed his tricks as death-defying and now reporters from the New York dailies, fully expecting him to overextend himself, followed him on his one-night stands from the Brooklyn Pantages, to Fox’s Union City, to the Main Street Theatre in New Rochelle. He did his famous milk-can escape in which he was padlocked in one of the ordinary forty-quart cans used to deliver milk to grocery stores. The can was filled with water. He had to escape or he would die. He lay in a glass tank shaped like a coffin, shown to be airtight, and in which a candle’s flame could not be sustained. He lay in there sometimes for as much as six minutes after the candle went out. People shouted from the audience. Women closed their eyes and put their hands over their ears. They begged his assistants to stop him. When the pleas were finally heeded the fitted top of the glass coffin made a popping sound as it came off. He was helped out shaking and covered with sweat. Every feat enacted Houdini’s desire for his dead mother. He was buried and reborn, buried and reborn. One night, at a single performance only in New Rochelle, his wish for his own death was so apparent that people began to scream and a local clergyman stood up and shouted Houdini, you are experimenting with damnation! Perhaps it is true that he could no longer distinguish his life from his tricks. He stood in his long belted robe, and glistening with sweat, his wet hair in spirals, he looked like a creature from another universe. Ladies and gentlemen, he said in an exhausted voice, please forgive me. He wanted to explain his mastery of an ancient Eastern breathing regimen that allowed him to suspend his animation. He wanted to explain that his feats looked far more dangerous than they really were. He raised his hands in appeal. But at that moment there was an explosion of such force that the theatre shook on its foundations and chunks of plaster fell from the proscenium arch; and the distracted and nerve-shattered audience, thinking it was another of his satanic tricks, retreated up the aisles in terror of him.

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  Actually the blast occurred two miles away at the borders of the city in its west end. The station house of the Emerald Isle Engine had exploded, firing the field across the street with burning timbers and lighting the sky over Westchester. Companies from every section of the city responded and from the adjoining communities of Pelham and Mount Vernon. Little could be done. Fortunately the clapboard structure on Firehouse Lane was no closer than a quarter-mile to the nearest residence. But two of the volunteers were in the hospital, one with burns so severe that he was not expected to live through the day. And at least five men were known to have been on duty at the time. It was the night of the week, Thursday, when the company gathered for its regular game of poker.

  By the following dawn the field was scorched and the building was a pile of charred ruins. The entire area had been roped off and police detectives now began to go through the debris recovering bodies and deducing from the evidence what it was that had caused the disaster. It soon became apparent that
homicide had been committed. Of the four bodies recovered two showed that not the fire or the explosion but buckshot had been the cause of death. The matching horses were in harness and attached to the pumper and they lay where they had fallen halfway into the street. The alarm signal machine was recovered from the ruins showing that an alarm had been given from a box at the north end of town, yet there had been no other fire anywhere in the city that night. From this and several other bits of evidence, some secured with the help of a doctor of forensic medicine from the New York City Police Department, the following reconstruction was made: At approximately 10:30 P.M. six members of the engine company had been gathered in their quarters playing cards when the alarm rang. The cardplayers scrambled into their boots and helmets. The horses were trotted out of their stalls and hitched to the steam engine. The harness was a special snap-on variety developed for firehorses by the P. A. Setzer Company of Hickory, North Carolina. Like all firemen the Emerald Isle were proud of the speed with which they answered alarms. There was always a small fire going under the boiler so that the steam could be raised to full pressure by the time the apparatus arrived at the site. If the company were normally efficient on this evening not one minute would have elapsed before the doors were swung open and the driver, hollahing his horses, would have whipped them into the road. Someone was standing in the street directly in the engine’s path. He or they were armed with shotguns which were fired directly in the faces of the oncoming horses. Two of the horses went down immediately, the third reared, wounded in the neck so that its blood sprayed over the street like a fine rain. The driver of the rig was fatally shot, and fell forward to the ground. Of the three firemen aboard, two incurred fatal wounds and a third was crushed to death as the engine, pulled awry by the panicked horses, toppled over on its side. When the steam boiler went over, it made a terrible clang that was heard by residents in the neighborhood already startled by the boom of guns. The firebox was scattered and flaming coals ignited the clapboard firehouse. The blaze quickly grew and the heat of the burning building exploded the boiler and sent burning timbers flying across the road into the field. That was the moment Houdini lost the affection of his audience.