Mrs. Houdini(16)

But something was off, she realized. There was something wrong with the photograph.

“I did manage to get some dictation done earlier,” Gladys said—she wrote advertising copy, from home, for women’s products.

Bess tried to listen, but she was agitated. She couldn’t put her finger on why. “Let me get you another glass of water,” she said, standing up. She wanted to examine the photograph more closely. “Keep talking, I can hear you. I’ll just run into the kitchen.”

“I had a magazine page to do today—about soap. You can’t imagine how horribly boring it is to find something to say about soap.” Gladys had worked for the agency for so long that her blindness was hardly a disability any longer; her longtime employer, a gentleman in his early seventies, had given her the position at first as a favor to Harry. But she had shown such a knack for a quick turn of phrase that he kept her on.

Bess stared at the photograph. Had something changed? It didn’t appear so. It was still the same Harry, in the same necktie, with the same alluring expression. But something felt different.

It suddenly came to her. It wasn’t that the photograph had changed; it was the reflection. In the image she had seen in the tray earlier, Harry had been serious; in the photograph, he was smiling. She felt her whole body begin to tingle. It was a sensation she had experienced only a handful of times in her life, the same electricity she had felt when she’d had the vision of John Murphy so many years ago.

In the kitchen she found the serving tray she had been using earlier. Mamie had left everything in its proper place, washed and dried, and the silver was sparkling. Taking it back into the dining room, Bess couldn’t keep herself from trembling. She was glad Gladys couldn’t see her.

“Bess?” Gladys called. “Are you all right?”

“I’m . . . I was just looking at this photograph.” Bess tried to remember where she had been standing when she’d seen the reflection. She had just turned away from Table 8, where Lou had been sitting. She hadn’t taken more than a step toward the kitchen when she’d seen the image in the silver. Standing in front of Table 8 again now, exactly as she had been, with her back to Harry’s photograph, she held up the tray with shaking hands.

In the silver, she could see only the empty papered wall.

She turned around. Harry’s photograph was on the left. It hadn’t moved; but from where she’d been standing when she first saw his face, she saw now that it couldn’t have been a reflection from the photograph. The picture was simply hung too far over to catch the mirrored surface of the tray.

So what had she seen, exactly?

“Which photograph?”

Gladys’s question startled her back to clarity. But Bess could barely find the words to answer her. What could she say that wouldn’t sound cracked? “The portrait of Harry—I thought . . . I thought his expression was serious, but I’m looking at it now and he’s smiling.”

Gladys paused. “If there’s one thing I learned from Harry,” she said from across the room, “it’s that images aren’t always what they first appear to be. Neither was he, after all. As we both know.”





Chapter 3


THE BEER HALL


June 1894


The night they were married, he came to the window with her as the moon rose, flaming like a phoenix, over the steaming white heat of the afternoon. A few blocks away, they could see a crowd of Italians swarming a carriage that was making its way slowly down the street. Inside was a woman Bess’s age, in a white veil, next to a man in a black suit, and he was kissing her passionately. The members of the crowd were throwing flowers into the carriage, and the summer blazed.

“Do you wish that was you?” Harry frowned. “That you had a proper wedding?”

“I don’t need all that,” she reassured him, although there was a part of her that wondered whether she would ever be as happy as that bride, who had probably known her groom since grade school; that was the way the Italians did it. It was the same with the Germans, and if she had stayed at home she would doubtless have married one of the boys she had played with in the street as a child. But she had entered into a different life now, and she would never relinquish it for afternoons stitching clothes and cutting noodles, the tedium of the Brooklyn winters and the endless counting of rosary beads after dinner.

She turned to Harry, wondering how it was supposed to happen next, now that they were married. “I really don’t know what to call you,” she said. “And what will we call each other?”

Harry kissed her forehead. “We’ll call each other Mr. and Mrs. Houdini.”

“But those are just stage names. It seems odd to address you as Harry Houdini.”

“When I was twelve,” Harry said, “after my brother Herman died, and my father’s school failed and he moved us to Milwaukee, I made him a promise that I would take care of my mother, if anything should happen to him. But I couldn’t do that there. I ran away from home, to Missouri, and I began studying magic, and I gave up on Ehrich Weiss.” A dark cloud passed over his face. “Ehrich Weiss has nothing to offer me anymore.”

Bess felt her cheeks flush. She had never known a person to just decide he was going to be someone new, and commit to it so wholeheartedly. She felt she had entered into a world where anything could happen, where magic folded itself around them like a live thing. This was the kind of woman she wanted to be—not a timid, unripe girl, afraid of the dark, but the kind who left home and fell in love and married the man instead of waffling over him in confession for months on end. She wanted to live with Harry’s unapologetic certitude.