Mrs. Houdini(26)

Bess loved Stella’s briskness, and she embraced the chaos her sister brought. They were their best selves at parties. She thought about all the lonely Sunday hours she had spent meditating on Harry’s photograph, wishing he would appear. Sometimes she thought she heard voices, but they turned out to be only men shouting on the street below. Once, when she was especially exhausted, she thought she had seen her name written in steam on the bathroom mirror. But when she woke up it was no longer there, and she couldn’t remember if she had dreamed it or imagined it, and it never appeared again. Something similar had happened to her years before, when she and Harry had been trying to contact Mrs. Weiss’s spirit. She had stumbled, blurry-eyed, into the bathroom in the middle of the night to find a bloom of thin white lines feathered across the mirror. She wasn’t sure what it meant, and when she’d turned on the light they had gone.

“I have something to confess to you,” Stella said, pulling Bess away from Gladys and onto the couch with her. “But you can’t be cross with me. Do you promise?”

“What is it?”

Stella hesitated. “Please don’t be upset.”

“For God’s sake, I won’t—now tell me!”

She took a breath. “Fred and I—we’re having another baby.”

Bess looked at her, confused; Stella was four years older than she was. She had three children, already grown. “But—that’s impossible.”

Stella pressed her hands together in her lap. “Of course I’m not pregnant. But Abby—she’s gotten herself into a situation, you see. And she was supposed to go off to Europe in the fall. She doesn’t want the baby.”

Abby was Stella’s youngest daughter; she was seventeen, and unmarried. She’d thrown herself into the Broadway scene, recklessly, and gotten lost in the lights.

“Well that’s— I’m not sure what to say. It’s wonderful, in a way. Isn’t it?”

“Is it? I’m rather concerned I’m too old to be raising a baby.”

“Nonsense.”

“I didn’t want to tell you. I was worried it might upset you.”

Bess shook her head, reaching to adjust the garnet-studded brooch she had pinned into her hair. She was aware that Stella had always spoken of children cautiously around her. “I’m happy for you. Really. You’ll enjoy it.”

Stella smiled, relieved.

“How is Fred reacting?”

“He’s furious of course; you know Fred. He’s been storming all over the house day and night since Abby saw the doctor. But I think he’s excited about it, too. He always did love babies. But it’s still early yet, of course. And Abby might change her mind and decide she wants it after all. That does tend to happen.” Her eye caught one of the other magazines on the table. “Is this The Delineator? I haven’t read this in years; I thought it’d gone out of print.” She picked it up. “Where did you find this?”

Bess shrugged. “Gladys brought it over the other day. She said that girl who helps her—you know, Colleen—bought it uptown. There’s apparently an article in there about Harry.”

She turned to see a group of loud, smooth-faced men crowding the doorway. The “boys,” as she called them—the young, rowdy magician set—had arrived. They always came in for drinks after their Friday shows. At first she’d kept the place open mainly for them, but then word got around and soon there were just as many women, too, each hoping to end the night pie-eyed with a man on her arm. They came in their best rayon dresses, trimmed with velvet, their tiny beaded chain-strapped purses hanging from their elbows. Bess watched them with a kind of removed clarity, their bodies lit by the old familiar glamour of the city—all the beautiful, ordinary people milling about, bearing the heightened sense that they mattered, that they were living in an age that mattered.

Niall Robbins was her favorite of the boys. He was a strange character; three years earlier, he’d been a reckless, handsome playboy, the son of a wealthy stockbroker. Then, for a year or so, he’d become pious and, just as suddenly, went back to the parties and declared his ambition to become a magician. He could drink with the best of them, and he got crazy doing it—they’d once spent a half hour going round and round in the Commodore Hotel’s revolving door.

Bess greeted Niall in the lounge. “Darling, how are you? I was hoping I’d see you.” She stepped back. “This is Harry’s sister Gladys.”

“You don’t say. It’s a real pleasure.” Niall pumped Gladys’s hand. “But I should be asking how you are,” he called to Bess over the noise. He beckoned a server with a tray of cocktails. There were more than two dozen people crammed into the lobby alone now, and more pouring through the door. Zingoni, one of New York’s most popular magicians, had just come from a performance, and his crew was raucous. One of them was pounding out “Bambalina” on the piano.

Bess shrugged. “It’ll be out of the news tomorrow.”

“Listen,” Niall said, “I’ve told you, it’s not going to happen the way you’re imagining it. There has never yet been a séance that has produced any actual results.”

Bess was beginning to agree with him. Surely all the hours she had sat in those large, smoky rooms with women spewing their disgusting ectoplasm and claiming they were holy had been a grave mistake. The hundreds of mediums she had encountered worked only in the dark and adopted false voices—just as she had done during her circus days, touting falsehoods to small-town folks. Harry would never come back to her in that way. It was degrading. But what if she herself really did possess the clarity of vision, the gift of sight that Harry had always believed in? She had tried to access it after his death, but perhaps she had been going about it all wrong.