Mrs. Houdini(2)

“I think,” Harry said slowly, “you want to know more than you think you do. And I think ‘our magic’—if we can call it that—is something that happens when we’re together. It’s not evil.” The daylight rippled like water across his face. Outside the window, Mary Murphy had disappeared.

It was true. Since she had married Harry, Bess felt as if her senses had been illuminated. Colors were brighter; lights flamed in the dark. But she was afraid. “Let’s put a stop to the séances. You won’t find it, Harry—whatever it is you’re hoping to uncover.” She looked out toward the snow-covered plains, the white, blinding landscape where the street met the grass.

Harry looked, too, searching the emptiness as if waiting for a parade of spirits to march into view, dissolving like icicles into the frozen earth.





Chapter 1


CONEY ISLAND


June 1894


Besides the beach, there was no better place to spend a humid Saturday afternoon on Coney Island than inside Vacca’s Theater, where it was cool and dark. There were enough seats to make the place seem popular, but few enough that the stage always looked close, as if it were just on the other side of your living room. Bess had performed there three weeks earlier, right after she’d turned eighteen and joined the Floral Sisters, and the audience had been kind, throwing pink roses onto the stage. She and the girls knew better than to give their real names, which were dull, German names, and there would always be a crowd of eager men waiting by the theater doors afterward, wanting to know if they were really sisters, and was their last name really Floral?

This morning one of the girls had persuaded Bess to come with her. Her real name was Nora but everyone called her Doll, because she had tiny, rose-pink fingernails and eyes like moons. It was going to be a real riot, she said; a magician named Dash had saved her two seats and promised her a good show.

“You know, the other magician’s his brother,” Doll told her as they crossed the street from their boardinghouse onto the fairground. “And he’s unattached as well.”

“Of course he is,” Bess said. “And they’re always brothers.”

Doll rolled her eyes. “No, his real brother.”

“That’s what he told you, at least.” Doll was always giddy with the anticipation of love, always bringing Bess along on dates, and the worst were the dates with other performers. They all made their livings pretending to be something they were not—Bess and Doll included—but it was difficult for the men especially to be both charming and sincere at the same time, when in show business you could really only be one or the other.

Their seats were in the third row, left, and they had a good view of the stage when the two magicians stepped out and announced themselves to the crowd. They spoke loudly, and with authority, but the reception from the audience was merely polite. They were not transported yet; everyone could still hear the bells and laughter of the carnival outside, not quite muffled by the humidity of the afternoon. The women fanned their faces lazily, and no one was quite sure exactly who the Brothers Houdini were, although they billed themselves as “escape artists.”

“Which one’s Dash?” Bess asked, and Doll pointed to the taller of the two, who was tying the other inside a black cloth sack.

She wasn’t sure whether to be disappointed, because the one Doll called Harry wasn’t as tall as Dash, or pleased, because Harry was clearly the more athletic of the two, with darker hair and a rounder jaw. She had always liked dark-haired men. In high school, she had come close to losing her way with a waiter who’d kissed her so hard he’d bitten her. Still, she had been charmed by his coal-black hair and the swagger of a hot summer.

Still inside the sack, Harry knelt down in a steamer trunk, which Dash then locked and wrapped with a heavy braided rope. There was no sound or movement from inside the trunk. Dash pulled a curtain around the trunk and himself so that both men were completely obscured from view.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he declared from behind the curtain, raising his voice to drown out the sounds of the music outside. Doll pressed her palms together in anticipation. “Behold”—he clapped three times—“a miracle!”

The curtain was opened by unseen hands, and there, on the other side, stood Harry, completely free, arms raised triumphantly in the air. The audience murmured and then broke into loud applause.

Bess leaned toward Doll. “That was slick.”

“Wait,” Doll said, grabbing her arm. “I don’t think it’s over yet.”

Harry, his white shirt miraculously undirtied, proceeded to unwind the rope from around the trunk and open the latch. Inside, emerging somehow from the cloth sack, also unrumpled, was Dash.

The audience cheered. “Bravo!” Doll called, getting to her feet. From the stage, Dash noticed them and smiled. Bess was impressed and curious. It had been a matter of only a few minutes since Harry himself had been tied up in that sack. How could he have managed to get himself out, and Dash in, so quickly?

Then, from the back of the theater, a voice broke out. “Youse a bunch of fakers!” someone cried. The crowd parted to reveal a scowling, gray-haired man with his fists in the air. “I know fakers when I sees them, and youse two are some fakers!”

Onstage, Dash and Harry looked at each other. “I beg to differ with you, sir,” Harry said, and the audience laughed.