Mrs. Houdini(36)

Bess’s movements grew increasingly violent. She began to bang her head against the back of the chair.

“Their names!” Harry demanded.

“Bill Doakes and Jim Saunders!” she said. “Benny is here. He won’t—he won’t let me go. Harry, tell him to let me go! He warns them, ‘You boys better put those razors away, or yous goin’ to be where I is now.”

Then she collapsed onto the ground and lay still. From behind her blindfold she heard the commotion and the sound of a chair scraping the makeshift wooden floorboards. She knew one of the men she had just accused had been present and fled the room. She fought a smile. Harry had learned about the murder in a De Land barroom. It was not a sad one. Carter, Doakes, and Saunders were three local criminals who had gone about town together. Consensus was that Carter had stolen from the others and paid the price.

“My God!” someone shouted. “You know things that only the Almighty knows!”

Bess knew she had been right; give them a taste of danger, and talk about death, and they would be hooked.

For more in-depth communications, they used an elaborate code system Harry had devised. It involved signals that relied on the positions of the hands and feet, as well as facial expressions and spoken words. Each word corresponded with a number, so that pray, for example, meant 1 and tell meant 5. During the act, Harry, ever the showman, blindfolded Bess as she pretended to go into a trance. Harry was passed a coin by a member of the audience, and through their system of communication, he would speak to the spirits inside Bess, asking them “pray tell” when the coin was minted. The words he used in his question gave Bess the answer she was supposed to supply. Other questions and answers they would discuss ahead of time; Bess had the idea to disguise themselves and go door to door selling Bibles, which would give them access to the homes of the townspeople, allowing them to reveal information about those people during the séance.

It was a game she enjoyed, fooling such large groups. No one suspected them of fakery, especially not with Bess’s childlike appearance. But one night after a show in southern Missouri, after a particularly thorny revelation about one woman’s dead son, she removed her blindfold to see tears streaming down the face of a frail, bonneted old lady. She swelled with regret; the thrill of the deceit was gone. What had she been doing? She had betrayed every moral code she believed in; she had spit in the face of the God she’d been taught to worship. She wondered if the girl she’d been a year ago would ever have imagined she would stoop so low.

Her mother clung to her Catholic faith because she had to; she’d lost a husband, only to gain a derelict one, and she struggled to care for an enormous family. Bess thought Harry’s situation had been similar. His father—an immigrant and floundering rabbi—clutched at his own Jewish faith because without it, he was just a failed man preaching about fairies. He had forced his faith on the family with what Harry saw as simpleminded na?veté. Harry didn’t see his father’s God saving his family; instead, he saw the slow deaths of a brother and his father, the silent desperation of his mother, her defeated shoulders. And so he turned to magic—tricks that played on people’s credulity—and it was magic that saved them, the money he earned from traveling the show circuit on his own as a boy. He made no apologies for his agnosticism, but Bess knew there was a part of him that was always wondering whether there was a being out there whose magic was greater than his own.

Bess still believed in God. She believed in the serenity of a quiet church, in the rituals of beads and prayer. In the tumult of her childhood she had seen compassion from neighbors who brought meals, from strangers who led her home when she was lost, and there was something godlike in that. But she also loved Harry, and she loved his practical magic.

She glanced at Harry. He was still immersed in the trick, pacing the stage. She saw the other performers, her friends, huddled in the back of the room, awed. Afterward, Moira came up to her privately.

“I know you’ve got a trick up your sleeve. How are you knowing those things about people?”

Bess shook her head. “I can’t say.”

“But it’s not real, is it?” Moira asked, a lilt of hope in her voice.

Bess’s heart sank. She reached for Moira’s arm. “It’s not real.” It was bad enough fooling strangers, but the thought of fooling these people who had become her friends made her ill. She groped for an explanation and ended up quoting Harry’s mechanical voice: “We are only acting by physical, not psychical, means.”

Harry found her in their bedroom after. She had ripped off her dress and was clawing at her corset. “I can’t breathe,” she said. “God help me, I can’t breathe.” Harry put his arms around her and tried to calm her, but she couldn’t stop shaking. It had come upon her so suddenly, the sickening feeling of foreboding, the voice saying they would go straight to hell, and the quick footprints of the rain on the roof.

The room felt unbearably hot. She pushed her way out of the car and into the thrashing rain. Thank goodness, the grass was cold. “Bess!” Harry followed her outside. She could barely see him through the downpour. The doors of the car were flapping wildly, and everywhere around them in the darkening night the circus goers were running to take shelter.

“You’re half naked!” Harry shouted. “Get back inside, would you?”