Prince of Air

by Ann Hood

  Great-Uncle Thorne’s eyes glistened.

  “Tonight,” he said. “At Tony Pastor’s.”

  The crowd at Tony Pastor’s was enormous. Even with three pairs of eyes searching for Great-Aunt Maisie among all the people, it was impossible to find her.

  “She could be anywhere,” Felix said, exhausted from being pushed and pulled.

  “We can’t give up now!” Great-Uncle Thorne said. “The consequences are too great.”

  “We’ve come this far,” Maisie said. “We’ll find her.”

  Maisie’s eyes never left the faces around her, searching intently for that girl who stared out at them from the photograph back at Elm Medona.

  An excited buzz moved through the crowd as the doors opened and people could finally take their seats.

  Great-Uncle Thorne had procured seats in the front row, even though Felix had argued that it would be better to sit in the back so they could more easily look for Great-Aunt Maisie.

  “Pickworths do not sit in the back,” Great-Uncle Thorne had said, insulted.

  Now they moved down the red-carpeted aisle toward their seats. The theater was enormous, with a high ceiling painted with Greek gods and goddesses in puffy clouds, plush, dark-red seats, and a giant chandelier that glowed with hundreds of tiny bulbs.

  Apparently the real star of the show was someone named Maggie Cline, a singer who sang what Great-Uncle Thorne called ridiculous tearjerkers. Great-Uncle Thorne told them her signature song, “Throw Him Down, McClosky,” had a raucous, ridiculous refrain that sent everyone backstage into a frenzy whereby they threw everything and anything onto the stage, which sent the audience into a wild state.

  Felix wondered if they would stay long enough to hear Maggie Cline sing “Throw Him Down, McClosky” or if they would already be back in Newport by the time she took the stage. He didn’t like the next thing he thought: Will Great-Aunt Maisie be with us when we get home?

  He didn’t have time to think anything further.

  Tony Pastor, a fat man with a waxed mustache and big, clunky rings on every one of his fingers, took the stage and introduced the first act. In fact, Tony Pastor introduced every act. Jugglers, dancing dogs, acrobats. Felix tried not to get distracted by what was happening on the stage and kept his eyes out for Great-Aunt Maisie.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Tony Pastor announced, “you will not believe your eyes when you watch the magic of the Prince of Air—”

  At this Maisie and Felix sat at attention.

  “—the European Illusionist—”

  “Oh please,” Great-Uncle Thorne said in disgust.

  “—the remarkable, the extraordinary, the one and only Ha-arry Hou-dini!”

  The red velvet curtain slowly opened.

  Harry stood center stage in a yellow silk jacket and black trousers.

  And there beside him, dressed in a white leotard bedazzled with sequins, stood Great-Aunt Maisie, the beautiful young assistant to Harry Houdini.

  Maisie, Felix, and Great-Uncle Thorne sat, unable to move, as Great-Aunt Maisie assisted Harry with his act. They watched as she showed the audience the cards for his card tricks and tapped on the box to demonstrate that it was empty before he pulled an ocean of silk scarves from it. She smiled and moved gracefully across the stage, taking each of his commands. But if Great-Aunt Maisie saw them, she didn’t let on.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Harry announced, “my beautiful assistant will now place not one . . . not two . . . but three sets of handcuffs on my wrists!”

  Sixteen-year-old Great-Aunt Maisie was indeed beautiful, Felix thought as he watched her display the three sets of handcuffs to the audience, holding each one up high in front of her face and tugging hard to prove they were real. Her blue eyes were large and round and framed by long, thick lashes. She had pale skin with just the right amount of peek on her cheeks, and her blond hair bounced at her shoulders in fat curls. Felix couldn’t help thinking of the Great-Aunt Maisie he knew, with a face etched with lines and creases, her eyes filmy rather than sparkling, and her hair silver.

  Now she clamped each set of handcuffs on Harry’s wrists, grinning wickedly as she did.

  Great-Uncle Thorne turned to Felix and whispered, “Let’s get out of here.”

  “What?” Felix whispered back. If they left, weren’t they leaving Great-Aunt Maisie to a terrible fate?

  “We’ll wait for them outside their dressing room,” Great-Uncle Thorne whispered. “Corner them.”

  “But we’ll draw attention to ourselves if we leave right now,” Felix hissed.

  Onstage, Harry had just escaped from all three sets of locked handcuffs, and the audience was applauding madly.

  “And now,” Harry announced, articulating each word with great care, “I will perform my most famous trick, The Metamorphosis.”

  Great-Uncle Thorne pressed his mouth to Felix’s ear. “If they get away from us, we might get stuck here.”

  That was enough to get Felix up and out of his seat, pulling his sister along with him.

  As Harry explained how he would lock his assistant in the trunk, Felix, Great-Uncle Thorne, and Maisie slipped up the long aisle and out into the lobby.

  “In just three seconds, right before your eyes,” Harry’s voice echoed from behind them, “you will see a complete . . . metamorphosis!”

  “Where are we going?” Maisie demanded.

  Great-Uncle Thorne motioned for them to follow him out the door and then down the side alley that bordered the building. He stopped in front of a door that said STAGE DOOR on it.

  “We’ve got to get Great-Aunt Maisie,” Felix explained to his sister.

  Maisie’s head was spinning from trying to sort out what to do. Harry had those handcuffs, and all he had to do was give them some life lesson and they would go home, wouldn’t they? And wouldn’t Great-Aunt Maisie go with them, no matter what they did?

  Great-Uncle Thorne held the stage door open for them, and Felix and Maisie found themselves in a labyrinth of corridors and rooms with closed doors. From one came the sounds of someone doing vocal warm-ups. A juggler practiced in one corridor, keeping five balls in the air while he balanced on a unicycle.

  “Explain your plan,” Maisie told Great-Uncle Thorne.

  His eyes darted down the corridors as he tried to second-guess where his sister and Harry might emerge.

  “We grab Maisie,” he said, “and we take her back with us.”

  “But how?” Maisie demanded. “We need Harry, too, don’t we?”

  Great-Uncle Thorne sighed. “I’m hoping that the things he told Felix are enough to get us back. Most importantly, we need Maisie.”

  The sounds of the audience gasping could be heard even back here. There was a pause, and then wild applause and whistles and the stomping of feet.

  “The Metamorphosis,” Great-Uncle Thorne muttered as if the trick were his enemy.

  To their surprise, Harry and Great-Aunt Maisie appeared, oblivious to the trap awaiting them. Hand in hand and smiling at each other, they walked toward their potential captors.

  Great-Aunt Maisie saw them first.

  Her blue eyes grew wide, and she stopped in her tracks.

  Puzzled, Harry looked down the corridor, too.

  “You again?” he said.

  Maisie glanced from her great-aunt, to Harry, and then at Great-Uncle Thorne, who appeared ready to leap at his sister.

  It was all too much. The hope that if they could hold on to Great-Aunt Maisie they could get home, the four of them. The consequences if they failed. Overwhelmed, Maisie turned and ran back from where they’d come, out the stage door, and onto Fourteenth Street.

  She heard Felix calling for her to stop. But she didn’t.

  Footsteps pounded behind her. Maisie didn’t bother to look over h
er shoulder. No doubt Great-Uncle Thorne was after her followed by Felix. She ran faster, weaving through the crowded street. Fourteenth Street was filled with theaters, almost like Times Square was now. Theatergoers stepped outside for intermission. Carriages waited along the curb. At the corner of Fourteenth and Broadway, Maisie paused to figure out where she should go.

  But a strong hand gripped her shoulder.

  Maisie spun around expecting to see Great-Uncle Thorne.

  Instead she found herself eye to eye with Harry Houdini.

  “Why are you running?” he asked her, his voice gentle.

  Maisie struggled to find a way to explain.

  “It’s too complicated,” she said finally.

  Harry’s piercing eyes studied her face.

  She squirmed under his grip, but he held on to her.

  “Your assistant,” she began.

  “Also a Maisie,” he said, smiling. “An angel,” he added.

  “She has to come back to Newport with us,” Maisie said. “It’s really important.”

  “I can’t let her go. Not now that we’ve found each other,” Harry said.

  Maisie rolled her eyes at his sentimentality.

  “You don’t know what it’s like,” Harry told her. “To be different. To talk with an accent and to be poor. Without magic, I’d be . . .” He hesitated, then he said softly, “I’d be like one of the freaks.”

  “Ha!” Maisie said. “I am a freak. Not the kind who had some genetic accident, but a different kind.”

  She was aware of people standing closer to her, but she didn’t look at them. Her eyes stayed on Harry’s.

  “I don’t even have one friend except Felix. I invited someone over after school, and she turned out to be totally weird. Felicity LaSalle, who you call a freak—”

  “Well, she is an albino,” Harry said.

  “She was the first person who actually wanted to be my friend.” Maisie felt herself getting choked up. “So don’t tell me I don’t know what it’s like to be different.”

  Harry’s forehead creased with concentration.

  “You need to—” he began.

  “Stop!” Great-Uncle Thorne shouted, pushing through the crowd. “Don’t say another word!”

  Felix arrived, panting, at Maisie’s side.

  “Where’s Great-Aunt Maisie?” Maisie asked him.

  “She got away,” he said.

  “I believe you can find your magic,” Harry said to Maisie. “Self-confidence. Discipline. Passion.”

  Thorne yanked Maisie away from Harry, throwing his hands over her ears.

  “Look at how you improved my enunciation,” Harry continued. “I believe in you. Now you just have to believe in yourself.”

  “Oh no!” Felix cried.

  Great-Uncle Thorne’s face grew wild with panic as the three of them were lifted from the sidewalk.

  “Maisie!” Great-Uncle Thorne called. “Maisie!”

  They heard the midway sounds of Coney Island and cannon fire and bells tinkling. The air filled with the smells of cinnamon and Christmas trees and ocean as they tumbled through it.

  The last image Felix, Maisie, and Great-Uncle Thorne had was of Great-Aunt Maisie, sixteen years old and beautiful, happy and triumphant on the sidewalk across the street from where they’d stood.

  She lifted her hand and waved.

  They could read her lips as they traveled forward.

  “Adieu!” she said to them. “Adieu.”

  Maisie thought she would never forget the look on Great-Aunt Maisie’s face as she called Adieu to them. And it was that look that she kept in her mind as she returned to the stage door in the auditorium of Anne Hutchinson Elementary School and found Great-Aunt Maisie—the real one . . . or the old one . . . or the present-day one . . . stretched out on the scuffed wooden floor and Maisie’s mother yelling, “Is there a doctor in the house?”

  Lily Goldberg’s father came rushing up the aisle, his black doctor’s bag in his hand.

  “She was fine and then . . . ,” their mother said.

  She wrapped her arms around Maisie and Felix.

  “I’m sure she’ll be all right,” she said in her best comforting-mother voice.

  But Felix had already begun to cry.

  Great-Uncle Thorne sat on one of the folding chairs, his face buried in his hands.

  Lily Goldberg’s father was bent over Great-Aunt Maisie, his stethoscope in his ears. The crowd had gone eerily silent, and Felix was glad that Lily came to stand beside him.

  In the distance they heard the sound of a siren approaching.

  The doors to the auditorium burst open, and EMTs hurried in with a stretcher, the crowd parting to let them through.

  Felix couldn’t bear to watch as they lifted Great-Aunt Maisie’s old body onto it.

  “Think of her saying adieu,” Maisie told him.

  And he did. He pictured her pale, unlined face, her bright-blue eyes, her full lips parting to tell them good-bye.

  The EMTs placed an oxygen mask over Great-Aunt Maisie’s face and pulled a thin powder- blue blanket up to her chin. Lily Goldberg’s father patted their mother on the back.

  “There, there,” he said.

  Their mother looked up at him with frightened eyes.

  “Will she be okay?” she asked him.

  “I think it’s best if you go in the ambulance with her,” he said. “I can take Felix and Maisie home.”

  “Of course,” their mother said.

  She gathered Great-Aunt Maisie’s wrap and purse and scurried to catch up with the EMTs.

  “Do you want me to come home with you?” Lily asked Felix.

  He shook his head. “We’ll be okay,” he said.

  Great-Uncle Thorne slowly looked up, his eyes wet with tears.

  “She got what she wanted,” he said. “I guess we can take some comfort in that.”

  Maisie took Felix’s hand. They had never known anyone who had died, and neither of them knew what to say or what to do.

  Slowly, Great-Uncle Thorne got to his feet. He put his arms around their shoulders, leaning on them a bit for support, his walking stick dangling from his hand. The three of them made their way across the auditorium and out into the spring night. The air had gone still, and the sky seemed to have filled with more stars than they had ever seen. They stood on the sidewalk, waiting for Dr. Goldberg to get his car and take them back to Elm Medona.

  A breeze cut through the still night air, growing in intensity, shaking the new leaves on the trees.

  Maisie and Felix inhaled. They could smell things blossoming, coming to life. Ever so faintly they caught a whiff of Chanel No. 5.

  Adieu!

  The breeze seemed to carry that word with it.

  Adieu!

  Great-Uncle Thorne, Maisie, and Felix each lifted their faces upward as if they could catch it.

  Adieu!

  Then the breeze was gone, and everything went still and silent again.

  For most of his life, Harry Houdini said that he was born in Appleton, Wisconsin. However, he was really born Ehrich Weisz in Budapest, Hungary. His father, a rabbi, immigrated to the United States when Harry was four. There, he changed the family’s last name from Weisz to Weiss. The congregation in Appleton found Harry’s father to be too old-fashioned, and he was fired. When Harry was eight, the family moved to Milwaukee. They were quite poor, and all the children had to work when they were young. Harry sold newspapers and worked shining shoes.

  Harry’s father took him to see a magician who called himself Dr. Lynn. Soon afterward, Harry began performing magic tricks in the backyard. Although he claimed to have performed a trapeze act in which he hung upside down and picked up pins with his eyelids, this is widely thought to b
e an exaggeration of a simple trick he did hanging from a tree in his family’s backyard wearing red socks his mother made for him. Still, he did call himself “Ehrich, Prince of the Air.”

  At the age of twelve, Harry ran away from home by hopping on a freight train to Kansas City. He stayed away for a year, during which his family moved to New York City in the hopes of finding work. Harry joined them there, taking jobs as a tie cutter, messenger, and photographer’s assistant to help the family survive. He became a prizewinning cross-country runner and swimmer, beginning the discipline of exercise that continued throughout his life.

  A friend gave Harry the book The Memoirs of Robert-Houdin: Ambassador, Author, and Conjuror, Written by Himself about the famous French magician who had lived in the mid-1800s and was considered the father of modern magic. The book changed Harry’s life. A friend told him, erroneously, that in French, adding an i to Houdin would mean “like Houdin,” the great magician. So Harry added an i to his idol’s name. He also thought it sounded more mysterious. The name Harry came from a mispronunciation or an Americanization of his Hungarian nickname, Ehrie. At any rate, Harry Houdini was born.

  After his father died, seventeen-year-old Harry and his brother Theo, called Dash, became The Brothers Houdini, performing their magic act at dime museums, civic groups, sideshows, and music halls around the city, including the famous amusement park Coney Island. There he met a young singer named Bess Rahner. They fell in love, and soon Bess replaced Dash, becoming Harry’s assistant. Bess and Harry got married and traveled with circuses performing his magic act, which included The Metamorphosis.

  But Harry wanted to become famous. He began to perfect becoming an escape artist. An expert at escaping from handcuffs, Houdini would arrive in a new town and claim the ability to escape from any handcuffs provided by the local police, offering $100 to anyone who provided handcuffs from which he could not escape. He never had to pay. Soon he was known as “The Handcuff King.”

  In London, he successfully broke free after being wrapped around a pillar and handcuffed at Scotland Yard. Word of this escape spread throughout Europe, and soon his act was sold out everywhere he went. Harry performed a stunt in which he was handcuffed and chained while nailed into a packing crate that was then thrown into a river. Realizing that the crowd loved the suspense and the danger, he would remain underwater long after many observers were certain he couldn’t survive. Then he would pop up, waving the chains over his head.