by Ed Ifkovic
Theo hurriedly glanced at his watch, mumbled something to his brother, and told us all goodbye. “I’m off to meet a friend.” He walked off the stage.
Gustave Timm was sputtering some gibberish about my talent as a writer.
Hmm. The homely girl as wordsmith; the drudge as hawker for his melodramas. Cinderella’s stepsister turning pieces of coal into words of diamonds.
Houdini obviously enjoyed the flash fire exchange, which bothered me. Was I overreacting? I was hurt, not only by Theo’s insensitive dismissal of me as a future actress but by Gustave Timm’s ready agreement with him, though perhaps he was just making idle chatter. A word came to mind, one to be added to my list of deadly sins: shallow. A cousin to boring and annoying. Pride and greed and lust and the other deadly sins were the stuff of literature-and classical theater. The niggling little petty vices were the ones that rankled and were thus especially unpardonable.
Gustave hurriedly changed the subject. “Miss Ferber, I saw you talking to that strange man who lives in my brother’s rooming house.”
“Mac?”
“I hadn’t realized you knew him-worked with him. He’s quite the oddity. He talks to no one in the house, even stares down the formidable Mrs. Zeller.” He mock shivered. “Everyone is quite scared of him.”
Well, so was I, but I declared, “He’s a highly accomplished printer.”
Gustave squinted. “Really?”
“We all have our idiosyncrasies, sir.” I waited a second. “Unfortunately, Mr. Timm, I overheard you squabbling with your brother while I was in Mrs. Zeller’s parlor. The walls are thin…”
He turned red in the face. “What?”
“I was surprised to learn that he’s planning on leaving the high school.” I spoke rapidly, purposely defiant, violating whatever tacit laws of privacy I believed in. I wanted to annoy now, to goad. Prick my vanity and I’m hell bent on revenge.
Good for me.
Gustave Timm looked lost for a minute. “That’s not definite, Miss Ferber…and not for publication. I’m hoping you’ll honor that.” He sighed. “What you heard was brotherly rivalry. My brother has been shattered by his wife’s illness and…and estrangement…and has been paralyzed. I actually took this job at the Lyceum to be near him.” His voice rose. “I’ve come to love Appleton. I have a life with Mildred now. And to spite me-it has nothing to do with his failed marriage-he says he wants to leave. He’s playing a game and…” He held up both hands. “Enough. What you heard was private. I don’t know why you have to bring it up now.”
Because I want to irritate you. “Well, you seem to want to provide a detailed explanation.”
He shook his head. “Touche, Miss Ferber. It’s a failure I have. My brother Homer is the taciturn one, the tombstone in the graveyard. I’m the chattering magpie, running on and on…”
“I was just curious.” I shrugged. “I’m a reporter.”
“Surely…”
“This is not news…Yet.”
“Homer is not leaving Appleton.”
“All right, then. But this is what the citizens of Appleton will want to know.”
“Please.”
For some reason Gustave glanced at Houdini. “I’ve said too much. I’m protective of my brother, even as we do battle.”
Houdini looked into the wings. “My brother Theo and I have our problems, I’ll be the first to tell you. He’s my shadow, you know. He even does his own show under the stage name Hardeen, but it’s a pale reflection of mine, and so…well…he runs off to talk about me with his friends…” He frowned. “While I yammer about him to you.”
I thought of Fannie. She was my sister and I would defend her, even though we argued. I did love her. She was my blood. I supposed someday, should we cross paths one time too many, especially with her frilly Cinderella posturings, I’d have to kill her. Deputy Moss would fumble with the leg irons…and wither under my tongue-lashing.
“We have to go,” I said. Esther had been frowning at my sniping at Theo and Gustave Timm. “I’m headed home. I promised my father a walk.”
“I’ll walk you both home.” Houdini moved toward me.
“Of course not. I’ve told you before…”
“There’s a murderer afoot in Appleton,” Houdini said, his tone a little too flippant. Esther and I gasped. Gustave Timm looked at him, befuddled. He sucked in his cheeks. “Oh, Lord, I’m sorry, that was careless of me. I choose the wrong words. My English is poor…Sometimes I speak…”
“No,” I agreed, “you’re right. But I walk the streets of Appleton all the time. People know me.”
“I only meant…” Houdini’s craggy face got soft. “I think of that poor girl. A girl just like you two. Young.”
No one knew where to look. Gustave Timm cleared his throat and checked his watch.
“Thank you.” I broke the awful silence. “But I can find my way home.”
Quietly, tension still in the air, we walked off the stage.
While Gustave locked up the theater, we lingered in front of the marquee that still bore Houdini’s name. A life-sized poster of Houdini filled the display case by the entrance, and I noticed Houdini checking his image. At that moment a plum-colored Victoria paused in front of the theater, the two majestic horses neighing noisily, and we turned to see Cyrus P. Powell, reins in hand, staring at us.
Gustave, flummoxed, dropped his keys, but Houdini half-bowed, European-style, ready to speak. Mr. Powell’s censorious eyes swept from me to Esther, then to Houdini, and he said through clenched teeth, “A private show at my theater?”
The rich man’s voice had a metallic, whistling timbre, so much like nails pulled across a school slate.
But in the next instant, he turned to his horses, and the Victoria moved away.
“He’s not happy with me,” Gustave mumbled.
“I doubt whether he’s happy with himself,” I chimed in, and I caught Houdini grinning at me.
Houdini said he was ready for a nap and planned to head back to David Baum’s house. Esther was meeting her mother at a friend’s two streets over, and began her generous goodbyes, which rivaled the farewell scene from some Italian opera. Houdini kissed her hand. I walked with Houdini and Gustave, but Houdini turned off at Oneida Street. Gustave and I continued on, and I purposely made peace with him, the two of us talking animatedly about Mabel Hite’s recent performance in A Knight for a Day. I thought her acting strained, the famous actress “underplaying the needed comedy.”
Gustave’s face brightened. “God, yes. You know, I thought the same thing.” I smiled at him; we were friends again. He added quickly, “I do think you should convince Sam Ryan to let you do theater reviews. I’ve read your news pieces. I’m not just saying that.”
“I’m lucky if I have a job next week.”
He seemed surprised and concerned. “Tell me.”
But suddenly Houdini was calling from behind us, returning. “Miss Ferber, let me walk you home.”
“I told you, sir, I’m safe in Appleton. This isn’t New York’s tenderloin district.”
“I need to ask you something.”
“What?”
“Let’s walk. It’s beautiful out.”
As the three of us walked along, Houdini wove an elaborate question about the differences between European and American audiences, and whether I thought-as someone who went to the theater regularly-he came off as a bumpkin with his rough accent, his boasting, and his faulty grammar. “You write for a living. Bess tells me to watch my speech. I just don’t know.” He looked me in the eye. “When you get famous, sometimes it’s hard to step backward to learn what you should have learned…” He faltered. “Sometimes I say ain’t and sometimes I say youse, and I know the audience thinks I’m a fool. In Europe it don’t matter. To them I’m a crazy American with my tenement-house gab. But here I notice people laughing. The other night, in my hometown, I said youse guys, and I saw some folks shake their heads.”
He didn’t wait for me to answer nor di
d he seem to care. His monologue was spirited and amiable…and a little insane.
I started to say something about elocution lessons and what he could do, how they’d given me confidence to speak before audiences, but he spoke over me. I got quiet and listened.
Gustave Timm seemed confused by Houdini. When he turned off at Edwards Street, heading home, he waved goodbye and shook his head, amused. Houdini talked on about his wife Bess and her attempt to correct his grammatical lapses, his egregious blunders; and of his brother’s mockery; and of the Russian and Germans and Hungarians and…and…
“Thank you for listening to me,” he said. “You’ve answered my question.”
“But…” I started to protest as we turned onto North Street. “Sir, I haven’t.”
“Oh, but you have.” He tipped his hat and bowed. He left me.
I continued on alone, smiling to myself. The international celebrity had walked me home, had asked me for advice. He filled me with wonder, this special soul, and for a moment I felt as if I owned the universe. When I reached my front steps, I turned to look after the departing handcuff king, a very strange man, indeed-but a kind man, a gentleman.
Houdini was no longer in sight.
Down at the intersection of North and Morrison a farm wagon passed, a horse neighed and stomped. A woman called out; a child yelled back. I saw a shadow by a grove of elm trees. I froze. I saw the quick movement of a man. Maybe. But there was no one there. Yet I felt a spasm of terror. In that moment I panicked. I was being followed. I knew it. Standing there, I watched the shadows. Nothing moved. No one moved. Nothing. Yet my spine tingled and my heart pounded. There was someone there. But where?
Chapter Seventeen
When I walked home from the city room the next evening, I spotted Houdini deep in conversation with my father. I stopped, amazed. The two men, these two vagabond Hungarian souls, looked like old, old friends, both dressed in similar at-home suits, Houdini in a gray flannel jacket, my father in black. Twins, brothers out of a grubby shtetl from an unforgiving land. They could be sipping coffee as the sun set on the Danube. I waved but Houdini didn’t even notice me until I stepped into the yard.
“Pete, a surprise for you!”
“Well, I guess so. Hello, Mr. Houdini.”
“I’m catching a train tomorrow for New York. I wanted to say goodbye.”
I pulled up a chair on the porch. Houdini was watching me, eyes narrowed. He fiddled with the sailor’s cap in his lap.
“Is everything all right?”
Houdini chuckled. “Ah, a reporter’s response. I’ve come to recognize it-me being interviewed over and over.” He acted as though he just thought of something. “I think I left you with a strange impression of me yesterday, walking you back from the theater, my dear Miss Ferber. I always get a little, well, energetic, especially when I’m working on a new stunt, my mind darting all over the place, and that new routine made me nervous. Things always do until I get them right.” He sighed. “So I talk too much and I bounce around-I can’t sit still. I walk for hours. In Appleton if you walk for hours, you end up in the Fox River or in Little Chute. One place leaves you soaking wet, the other leaves you lost in farm fields.” A moment’s silence. “I guess I’m doing it again.”
I felt there was something he was not saying.
In my brief encounters with him, I’d been struck by his larger-than-life presence, a kind of bluster and electricity that the famous seem to project…a little man who filled up all the space around him. Perversely, now on that porch, he seemed my father’s cherished chum, an immigrant stepping out of steerage with a tattered cardboard suitcase under his arm.
My father was talking. “We’ve been talking about Europe. Mr. Houdini has just visited Budapest. He mentioned a pastry shop on the Vaci Utca where I went with my mother as a young boy.”
“Your father and I are taking a sentimental journey.” He twisted his body in the chair.
“But I remember so little,” my father said.
“There are things you can’t forget about that beautiful city. You remember the smells in the air, the light in the sky, the way the moon rises over the Buda hills…”
“Sometimes I think I’m making it up.”
“It’s stamped onto your soul.”
Both men lapsed into silence, a sliver of a smile on my father’s lips. He was enjoying himself.
Houdini turned to me. “So how was your day of reporting?” An innocent question, tossed out carelessly, but I detected wariness, tension in the throwaway line. I stared out at the catalpa tree, the heavy green boughs dipping to the earth. In the flower boxes on the porch Fannie had planted mignonette and marigolds. For a second the aroma covered me. A wash of images flooded me: the aromas of a city old before the Romans arrived, the stench of the Danube in summer, the eye-watery hint of sulfur, the butter-heavy pastry…
I rattled on about the nonsense I’d written that day-an ambitious account of the popular Fox River Baseball League, with snippets of information on competing teams from Fond du Lac, Green Bay, Oshkosh. The Appleton Badgers. But I stopped. Houdini was not really listening, though he was staring at me. “I feel there is something you want to tell me, Mr. Houdini.”
He shook his head. “Oh no, I just came to say goodbye.”
Still, his forehead was creased with worry. What was going on here? I talked about some riverboat excursion on the Fox, all the time watching Houdini’s face, but I detected nothing. Houdini asked my father about My Store, which he’d passed in his wanderings down College Avenue; and he said the mishmash of sidewalk display-lamps, stacked tin ware, toys, porcelain figurines, gadgets, spilling boxes-reminded him of the Lower East Side in New York. My father laughed and said, “My wife knows how to sell. I never did.” He drew his lips into a line. “America has gone on behind my back.”
“Everyone comes to America hungry, Jacob. You got to learn to feed yourself right away.”
“But America is hard work, Harry.”
“Everybody can breathe here.” Houdini stretched out the last word.
“Jews can breathe in America.” My father stressed the word.
“You know, my father was lost in America, a wanderer until he died.” Houdini was still staring at me and not at my father. “A man who simply gave up.”
Silence on the porch.
Houdini added, “He never understood America. You gotta know how to invent yourself with all this freedom.”
Then Houdini spoke in starts and stops of gossip he’d gleaned from David Baum, from others. Twice he mentioned watching Caleb Stone hauling drunks to the city jail. “The big crime of Appleton,” he declared.
All the time he was watching me.
Suddenly I understood. He’d come to talk about Frana’s murder. He was here for a reason. I interrupted, “Of course, the city room is still talking of Frana’s murder. The police are stymied. Our city editor Matthias Boon has made it his mission to uncover the truth.”
Houdini breathed in. “No, you want to solve it, Miss Ferber.”
“What?”
“You are so much involved with the mystery.”
“True but…”
My father stared into space. “Edna?”
“Of course not, Mr. Houdini. But I’m curious. That’s natural…I’m a reporter.”
Houdini leaned forward and brought his face close to mine. “I’m worried about you.” A sidelong glance at my father. His tone became confidential, serious. “I talk a lot but I also listen. David and Theo and I sat up late last night talking of the murder. We are afraid for you. You, Jacob’s pioneering daughter. You walk alone…” He glanced nervously at my father. “All of my life I’ve always sensed trouble…danger…and, well, I fear there is something in this town…”
“I don’t understand.”
He waved his hand in the air. “You are a young girl…”
Next to him my father was getting agitated, a whistling sound invading his breathing. Houdini pulled back and managed a poli
te smile. “Enough. I’m a foolish man. I take emotions as fact, and I believe darkness has more power than daylight.”
I caught my breath. “I’m…I’m…”
“I’m sorry.”
My father’s voice was raspy. “Pete, is there something you’re not telling us?”
I made a joke of it. “Bill, I’m spending my days advising young women to use chiffon velvet instead of panne velvet in the making of a shirtwaist.”
Houdini shifted, uncomfortable. “I must go.” He watched me, though he shot a concerned look at my father.
Again, silence, Houdini fidgety, my father wrapping his arms around his thin chest. I felt my heart in my mouth, my throat dry, my temples pounding. Houdini had touched a wellspring within me, ill defined and elusive though it was; and I’d been tossed, pell mell, into a vortex of grown-up trouble. Houdini was telling me something. The man with the tremendous heart had delivered a message. But what? I felt overwhelmed, smothered. Insanely, I wanted to be a little girl again, sitting with Esther at the Volker’s Drug Store, nursing a lemon phosphate. Like Kathe, I wanted the old Appleton back.
Houdini checked his gold watch and stood. “I’m sorry. Sometimes I’m a foolish man who speaks unwisely. I must be off.”
“Stay for supper.” My father reached out, seeking his sleeve. “My wife will insist.” But Houdini said he had obligations.
I rose, agitated. A world I didn’t understand was spinning around me. What had just happened here?
I sat with my father and tried to think of what to say. Cozy platitudes sprang to mind: Houdini is a wonderful man, no? An interesting man; quite the character, no? An eccentric man. A wildly egoistical man. I tried to encapsulate the jaunty Jewish vaudeville performer, but no words came. Something was gnawing at me. My father was rubbing his neck, so I moved behind his chair and began slowly and methodically massaging his head in the practiced manner I knew so well. Deftly, I pushed my fingers hard into his neck and scalp, rubbing the fragile temples, my father’s clammy flesh yielding to my kneading touch, until, at last, I could sense his body relax. His head dipped into his chest, and I knew, for now, the cruel and raw agony had passed. He reached up and touched my hands, his long, slender fingers resting on my wrists, a touch so protective and sure that it always made me want to weep.