Mrs. Houdini(11)

“Darling—” he protested. “You need to lie down. You’re not well.”

Bess’s voice was frigid. “Don’t call me darling; I’m not your darling. I never should have believed you—Harry never would have believed you! You’re nothing but a fraud!”

The room was in an uproar. Bess’s agent pushed everyone toward the door, and in the chaos somebody knocked over a vase, which shattered on the floor, sending shards of clay skittering across the tile mosaic B that Harry had had installed. Her agent stooped to pick up the pieces.

Bess waved him away. “Please, just leave me with Stella.”

He looked at her. “Will you be all right?”

“Yes, yes, I’ll be fine.”

When everyone had gone, Stella sat down on the couch beside her. “I never slept with Harry,” she said. “That would have been—practically incestuous. And he never told me about the message.”

“Of course not. It’s preposterous.”

“They’re going to slander us both in the papers. It’s going to be horrible.” She picked at a run in her green silk stockings.

“Yes, I know.” Bess’s whole body ached. It seemed as if everything she had tried to accomplish over the past three years had crumbled. She hated looking like a fool, but she hated even more having Harry’s legacy slandered. Would she be able to continue with the séances after this? Or would she and Harry be the laughingstocks of the press? She needed to reach him, notoriety or not. The public wanted Harry’s code revealed because it would be proof that one could live beyond death. But to Bess, the code was only a stepping-stone. Before Harry died he had told her that there was some kind of essential message, some private knowledge, that he could communicate to her only after he had gone; now, she needed to hear the code first, so that she knew it was truly Harry coming through.

She hoped they wouldn’t go after Harry’s sister, Gladys, as well. She must telephone her immediately in the morning.

“Will you be all right?” Stella asked. “It’s going to be a madhouse around here for a while.”

“I’ll be fine. Maybe the scandal will rustle up some more business for the tearoom.”

Stella laughed. “Always the silver lining.”

Bess stopped herself from saying more. Even in the aftermath of another disastrous evening, she still had one last secret to propel her onward. Not a soul on earth—not Arthur Ford, not even Stella or Gladys—knew that Harry, who had always been one for contingencies, had left her with two codes before he died. Yes, there was Rosabel, believe, and soon the whole world would know about that. But there was a second code, too, which went back to one of their very first nights together. And when she heard those words—which she surely would, she had to—she would know, with certainty, that Harry had found her. Because it was impossible that anyone could have heard the second code; it had not been spoken out loud in decades.

“I’m sorry about Arthur, though,” Stella said, mixing two glasses of ice and gin. “I know how much he meant to you.”

Ford had meant something to her, briefly. He had a rare combination of confidence and schoolboyish sincerity that reminded her of Harry, and she had met him during a vulnerable evening, when she had discovered another of Harry’s old love letters hidden in the bookshelf. He had assuaged her loneliness, for a while. But she would recover.

“It is a shame, isn’t it?” Bess sighed. “Of course, he was no Harry. But he was such a handsome man.”



She woke in the morning with a splitting headache, curled in the chair in her living room. It appeared to be late morning, and the white city light was bleeding through the curtains. The house was unbearably quiet, except for some voices on the street. The housekeeper didn’t usually come until noon, and she wasn’t sure what had happened to the butler; she imagined he had taken the dog for a walk. It was such a large house for her to be living in, essentially alone—three stories of heavy brownstone, two balconies, and a dozen rooms, the tall windows framed by intricate woodwork and mirroring marble-slabbed fireplaces. Most of the rooms were unused now. When Harry had been alive there was always noise, always a parade of friends and strangers coming in and out, always Alfred Becks, Harry’s librarian, with another delivery of books and John Sargent, his secretary, with a pile of letters. Harry had adored fame; he had liked to be admired, hated to be alone.

Even when it was just the two of them he had taken the rooms on the fourth floor for his study area, and she had taken the rooms on the third, where she would hear his voice call down three or four times before noon: “Mrs. Houdini, is my lunch ready?” While he wrote his books, he would send her letters, too, via the maid, who carried them down from the fourth floor on a silver tray. It was his little game. They were always elegantly packaged, even though the content was sometimes frivolous—lines from a poem, perhaps, or comments about the weather. Even when he was far, he always felt near. How ironic that during the fever of their marriage, the frenzied traveling schedule and public appearances, she had sometimes wished for time to herself. Now, it was she who hated to be alone. For the first time in her life since that one young month in Coney Island, she had independence, and was living off her own merit. And she still felt, and needed, Harry’s presence. His death, as had his life, consumed her, and until she reached him she did not feel that she could be in possession of herself entirely.