Mrs. Houdini(17)

Harry bent down to retrieve something from the cabinet behind him. When he turned around, he was holding a glistening bottle of champagne. Bess clapped her hands. “Where did you get that?” They’d barely had enough money to buy the rings.

“Don’t worry about that,” he said, and then, shrugging, “a gift from Dash.” He stuck a pocketknife into the cork, and the top popped off and shot across the room.

Bess shrieked. “Is it supposed to do that?” Harry filled a pewter cup with the shimmering liquid and handed it to her. “Aren’t you going to have any?” she asked him.

He shook his head. “I never drink alcohol. It slows my reflexes.”

Bess considered her own glass. She had never had champagne before, and she’d been drunk only once in her life. “Well, fine,” she said and poured the contents down her throat in one gulp.

Harry blinked at her, then burst out laughing. “You’ll feel that,” he said.

Her throat was already burning. She stepped toward him and, almost imperceptibly, brushed her hand against his. “But that’s what I want,” she said. “I want to feel everything.”

Harry stepped back and looked at her, then reached out a hand and placed it on her back, where the laces of her dress were tied. Even in the dark she could sense his uncertainty, the utter seriousness of the moment. She turned so he could untie her. He fumbled with the knots, but after some effort they came free, and the dress slid to her ankles. She stepped out of it and stood before him, shivering even in the heat. He took her hand. Her corset and drawers had yet to be removed, but she could feel the rise and fall of her chest, the white flesh visible. She lifted his hand to her and stepped against him so she could feel his breath, like a sacred thing.

“We’re married now,” she said quietly. “You can do what you like.”

His hand shook as he held it to her breast. “No one—no one’s ever said that to me before.”

“You’ve never been married before.”

“Will you sing something?” he asked her. “I like your voice.”

She looked at him. Was it possible that he was nervous? The same Harry Houdini who had held her gaze so intensely on the beach, who was so sure she would marry him? The lyrics of an Irish love song she learned as a girl in school came rushing back to her. She hadn’t heard it in a long time, but the words had etched themselves on her and she pulled them out like tiny, glimmering threads. “I’ll take you home again, Kathleen,” she began, her voice quiet, “across the ocean wild and wide, to where your heart has ever been, since first you were my bonnie bride.”

“Keep going,” he begged. There was a flicker of recognition in his eyes, perhaps a longing for the old world his parents had told him about when he was a child, before the cold Milwaukee winters and the tragedy of poverty had hardened him.

Bess’s voice shook. “To that dear home beyond the sea, my Kathleen shall again return, and when thy old friends welcome thee, thy loving heart will cease to yearn.”

Harry closed his eyes, and when he opened them again he said, “It’s sad.”

“Yes,” she said. “It is sad.”

He took her to the bed and undressed her completely, then himself, so that they were lying against each other. The humidity pressed down on them, heavy as stone, and Bess pushed the blanket to the side of the bed. “I don’t know what I’m doing, Harry,” she said softly. She had never seen a man’s naked body before, except her stepfather’s flaccid form when he was drunk and had fallen asleep, naked, on the kitchen floor. But there had been something pitiful and contemptible about him that was not present here, in Harry. She could see the dim form of every muscle on his chest, spangled with sweat, and he was beautiful, and she could feel him trembling, too. His breath was hot against her face.

“It will hurt,” he said.

“I know.” But she was brave. What powers she possessed beneath those clothes, she had never imagined. Her mother had never broached the subject with her, but her sister Stella, who was already married, had alluded to it. Tomorrow she would have to bring Harry home and tell them both, she realized, and she would not be a little girl in that house anymore.

“Do you think I look like a child?” she asked him. “Men have said I look like a child.”

Harry’s eyes widened. “A child? Far from that.” He laughed, holding her against him. Her concern seemed to ease his nerves somewhat. She waited for what came next, for the agony of the wait to be over, and the rush of pain, but also the way she knew it would change them both, how they would emerge, not unscathed but happier.

“You are my own,” he said.



As a performer, Harry had determined that true power belonged to those who knew how to create not merely illusions but transformations. It was a fact of human nature, he said, that people wished to become something else. They wanted to travel to that mysterious in-between place that lives only in magic, which ordinary men and women cannot reach. Characters in fairy tales were awakened from death as if they had only been asleep—they hovered, suspended, between two worlds—and Harry knew that people wanted this experience for themselves. If they could go to that place, and come back from it, they would somehow be different—they, too, would be anointed and saved.

This was the secret that drove the success of Harry’s Metamorphosis trick—when one person was locked inside the trunk, and disappeared, and then reemerged free and unbound; it was as if he had been able to pass through walls, to fade into the ether in which the secret, dreamed-about places lay, and come back from it changed.