Mrs. Houdini(13)

The tearoom brought back her verve. She was capitalizing on Harry’s fame, yes, but it was the first thing she could call her own. Her identity had always been so dependent on Harry’s, her name so inextricably linked with his; even after his death she could not escape him. Both before and after he died so unexpectedly, she was completely consumed by his notoriety. But in her younger days, when they had started out, performing as a pair, they had been the Great Houdinis; she had considered herself his equal. When they were doing the dime museums, they had resorted to the pretense of clairvoyants in order to make enough money to live on. Harry would put her into a trance and she would deliver messages, which were carefully orchestrated between them, through an elaborate code of seemingly harmless blinks, hand and feet motions, and conversational words. So much of their marriage, it seemed to her now, had been defined by the codes they created.

Sneaking out the back of the house into the alley and hailing a cab two blocks down, she managed to avoid the crowd of reporters on the street. And when she stepped out of the car on Forty-Ninth Street, she felt a renewed sense of strength; she felt, for the first time, like it would be possible to start her life over the way she had started over at eighteen, or at twenty-three, when she and Harry had become famous. If she could get over this new obstacle, and focus again on reaching Harry, she would be all right. She didn’t need much; she only needed to make a living, and to have a reason to get up in the morning. And she needed to prove there was something more beyond this life—that Harry, who had once blazed with an indomitable spirit, had not vanished into some eternal darkness.

When she stepped into the tearoom at half past two, she was greeted by the clatter of plates and the muffled calls of the kitchen staff. How beautiful that these sounds belonged to her. Along the far wall, the pastries, iced in pastel, were on display in pristine glass cases; behind them, the soda fountain had just been installed. The green and pink glasses with their tiny curved rims were lined neatly on mahogany shelves behind the bar.

At a table across the room, one of the other magicians was entertaining a woman and a little girl with a needle-swallowing trick. The girl was enthralled. She pulled on the magician’s sleeve. “Tell me how you did it!” she begged in a tiny voice.

When they were younger Bess and Harry used to talk about adopting children. “We’ll take in dozens of them, when we settle down,” Harry used to say. “We’ll have a bigger family than yours even.” But the time to settle down never came.

They never did figure out what problems prevented them from having children. She never became pregnant. Harry seemed to think he had been sterilized as a result of X-ray exposure. When he was younger, he had befriended a radiologist and used to X-ray himself out of fascination with his insides.

Years ago, Harry had created an imaginary child named Mayer Samuel, whose life story he told to Bess in notes delivered from the fourth floor of their New York house to the third—his admission to Harvard, his marriage to a Boston heiress named Norma, his terms in the Senate. The story culminated in Mayer Samuel’s election as president of the United States, and then the fun seemed to fizzle out, and Mayer Samuel disappeared from their lives. Then, instead of children, they adopted dogs.

Standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the tearoom, watching the woman and her daughter, Bess was overcome by a sense of loss. She was over fifty now, and her childbearing days were far behind her. But she had never thought, in the rush of life while Harry was alive, what she would do without him, if she didn’t have children or grandchildren. She’d always assumed they’d grow old together. He was so healthy, so strong and vital, she never imagined he’d die so young. After his death, she realized he had kept every scrap of paper she had ever written to him, dating from their very first week together. Some of the notes were trivial, written on napkins, with addresses or questions about dinner. But he had filed every one of them away, and she had never known. How much more, she wondered, had she not known about him?

Bess saw the girl’s mother turn and catch her eye. The woman looked away quickly. Bess hurried into the dining room to check on the orders.

One of the magicians—a tall kid who, in his youngest years, used to follow Houdini around to all his New York performances—rushed to her side, asking, “Mrs. Houdini? What are you doing here?” She tried to wave him away, but he ushered her into the kitchen and seated her in an empty chair in the corner.

“For goodness’ sakes, I’m not ill, Billy. Just disgraced.”

He stared at her with his mouth open.

“I’m joking.”

“Oh.” He let out a small, forced laugh and cleared his throat.

At the kitchen door, Dolores, whom she’d hired as a bookkeeper, was beckoning to her. Mamie, the cook, was sweating in front of the stove and assembling the cooked-meat sandwiches. Bess saw a glimmer of suspicion in her eyes. So everyone has read the papers, she thought. And they’ve got to decide now whether I’ve tried to trick them or not. The truth was that she had a great deal to gain from a successful séance. Not only would it legitimize Harry’s lifetime of work but the publicity would help ease her financial difficulties. It would mean the success of her tearoom, requests for interviews, value added to Harry’s collectibles . . . It was no wonder people suspected her of fakery.

She ought to be out in the dining room, she knew, going from table to table as she usually did. The functioning of the place depended on her; without her presence, it lost its charm. But today seemed a day to remain behind the scenes.