Mrs. Houdini(28)

Toward the back of the issue she found the article, a short piece championing successful Hollywood marriages. It briefly mentioned her and Harry, with an accompanying photograph of them at a medical charity auction five years earlier, along with others like Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. She recalled Harry’s nerves that night, how he had clung to her, how he stood in a room full of great doctors and philanthropists and wondered if he would ever stop feeling like the lesser, less refined man.

Those rare moments of vulnerability had always devastated her. Now, she knew he was out there in some unfamiliar place looking for her, just as she was looking for him. When he died she had seen how afraid he was, how uncertain, and the thought of him alone, lonely, trying to find her, was almost too much to bear. She looked at Gladys and lowered her voice. “Do you think . . . he’ll ever come back?”

Gladys reached for her hand and peered at her with empty blue eyes. “He’s not coming back,” she said gently. “He’s not, Bess.”

“But he is somewhere.”

It was the one thing on which the two women fiercely disagreed. If there was anyone who could find a way to cross between the two worlds, it would be Harry. But Gladys, perhaps because of her own tragedy, had never subscribed to any romantic notions. Sometimes Bess wondered what it was Gladys saw in the blackness of the world around her. If she didn’t see another, spiritual world, what did she see?

Bess studied the yellow liquid sparkling at the bottom of her glass. “But, you see, he promised he’d come back. In all his life, he never broke a promise to me.”

“Maybe he can’t come back,” Gladys said.

Bess shook her head. There was something she’d kept from Gladys. “He promised something else, too. A few years before he died, I came in to find him in the library one night, hunched over some paperwork on his desk. I said, ‘Harry, what are you still doing in here? It’s late.’ And he turned to me, smiling, and said, ‘It’s all right, Bess. I’m making sure you’ll be taken care of if something happens to me.’ I said, ‘Nothing’s going to happen to you,’ and he said, ‘Don’t worry. I’m arranging everything.’”

“What did he mean?” Gladys asked. “Life insurance?”

“No. It wasn’t that. He had a policy, of course, but he could never be certain they would pay out if something happened while he was performing. He’d arranged for something else.”

“Like what?”

“Money of some sort. Hidden, where no one else could find it. He was always so paranoid, especially after that night we were burgled. Before he died, he tried to tell me something. I think it may have been about that. But he couldn’t get the words out.” On nights when she couldn’t sleep, Bess searched the house. There were enough papers and hidden panels and loose floorboards to last her years. But so far, she had found nothing.

“Have you called the banks? The reasonable thing would have been for him to keep it in a safe-deposit box.”

Bess nodded. “I’ve checked every one in the city. I’ve even called banks in Wisconsin.”

“That would have been smart of him. Not many people would think to look where we grew up.”

Bess held up her hands. “But there was nothing. Under the names Houdini or Weiss or Rahner.”

Gladys pressed her lips together. “What will happen if you don’t find it? Are things really that bad?”

“I’ll have to sell what’s left, I suppose. Harry’s things. People want them. That’s why I’m pinning my hopes on this business.” She couldn’t bring herself to tell Gladys that the house would have to go, too; in another year the mortgage would bleed the remnants of her accounts dry. She had already spoken to a broker, who could not contain his eagerness to list the property. But what would she have left of Harry once the house was gone? And what if the money Harry had left her was hidden somewhere inside? She could not shake the feeling that the house held secrets she was meant to discover. She needed to hold on to it for as long as possible.

“Bess—” Gladys began.

“Don’t say it. That’s why I didn’t tell you.”

“I shouldn’t have taken what Harry left for me. That should have been your money.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Harry left that to you. How else were you supposed to afford an aide? I’m not having this conversation.” Bess turned back to the magazine on her lap as the music picked up and the noise of the party, of the sweating, concrete city, swelled louder around them. At the bottom of the page was an article calling for the return of the Miss America pageants, which had been cancelled a year prior. She and Harry had been in attendance for the first official pageant, in 1921, when the “Most Beautiful Bathing Girl in America” had been awarded the title of Golden Mermaid. A hundred thousand people had crowded the boardwalk that day to watch a little dark-haired Norma Shearer look-alike win the hundred-dollar prize. The winner, a pretty teenager named Margaret Gorman, had asked Harry for an autograph after the competition. Harry had been tickled by this. “I’ll trade mine for yours,” he had told her. “You’re famous too now, after all.”

The magazine had a photograph of Margaret, an American flag draped around her shoulders and a string of white beads hanging from her neck. She had embodied the youthful energy of the age; a city girl, from Washington, she had later married and entered society as a minor celebrity. Below her was the caption “I am afraid I am going to wake up and find this has all been a dream.”