Mrs. Houdini(37)

Bess shook her head.

“I don’t know how to help you!” he said. “I don’t know what you want!”

“I know why I’m not getting pregnant,” she called back. “It’s a punishment. We’ve pulled each other into something sinister, Harry.”

Harry looked at her in awe, then burst out laughing. “Is that what you think?”

“Then why can’t I have children?”

“Come inside out of the rain,” he said. “This isn’t like you. It makes me feel—uncentered.”

He looked so helpless. She imagined what she must look like, her hair matted with rain and all the pins falling out, and she thought about those “delicate” girls she hated, the ones who needed smelling salts and daytime rest. Harry could never love a girl like that. Offstage, he needed her to be the engaging one, the sensible one. She followed him back to the cot.

He wrapped her in a blanket. “There,” he said. “That’s better now.”

“You don’t have to coddle me.” She wrung out her hair. “I’m better now. It was a momentary loss of sense.”

“Over what?”

“That we’ve done something unforgivable.” It seemed to her now, in the flickering candlelight, that this world they had created around themselves could collapse at any moment. Harry was afraid, too, she knew, but of different things—that they wouldn’t be able to make it last after all, this career of magicianship, and that he wouldn’t be able to support her and he would let her down, by forcing her to go to work in some factory sewing socks, or some boardinghouse kitchen. Harry’s fears were physical, Bess’s metaphysical. On this account they differed.

“I don’t know about the children,” he said, “but let me show you something.” He took a scrap of paper out of his pocket and held it beside the candle so it would dry enough for him to be able to write on it. “You never told me the first name of your father, did you?”

She thought about it. “I don’t think so.”

“Write it now on this paper, and then burn it. Don’t show it to me.”

Bess did, then crumpled the paper in her hand and held it over the flame.

Harry dropped it into a bowl and let it burn. When it had been reduced to ashes, he pulled up his shirtsleeve, revealing his muscled forearm. With his other hand he rubbed the black remnants onto his bare skin, and almost immediately Bess’s father’s name, Gebhardt, appeared on his arm in red lettering.

Bess’s hand flew to her mouth. “You are the devil,” she said.

“Silly kid.” Harry laughed. “Don’t you know me by now? It was only a trick!”

“How? How was it a trick?”

“You guess.”

She frowned at him. “Give me a pen.” Harry grinned and handed her one, and she wrote on her arm with the sharp end and, with her fingertip, rubbed the skin where the inkless nib had touched. She watched as the letters of her father’s name appeared.

“It’s a trick of the body,” Harry explained. “Do you remember what I told you the night we met? There is no such thing as magic.” He laughed. “Still, my greatest dream is to slip one by you at some point. You figure them all out too fast.”

“But how did you know my father’s name?”

“Stella mentioned it in one of her letters.”

Bess let out a short laugh. She felt ridiculous. “You scared me for a minute.”

Harry peeled the top of the corset off her and climbed into the bed beside her. “There’s an explanation for everything.”

Bess closed her eyes. “I’m sorry I doubted you,” she said. Outside, the wind had calmed to a whisper.

“Do you want to go back to the Metamorphosis?”

She shook her head.

“We can’t cut the séances just yet—we’ll be poor without them.” He traced her eyelids with his fingertips.

Their existence seemed suddenly cozy, not terrible at all. They were together; they knew things about each other no one else knew. The thrill and the fear were gone, and out there on the other side of the storm, the scattered gaslights of the little town flamed and fell, flamed and fell.





Chapter 6


ATLANTIC CITY


June 1929


Mid-June in Atlantic City was crowded, and the heat was scalding. Even in the early evening, the beaches were a patchwork of colored blankets, on top of which parents had placed picnic baskets and sleeping babies in white Moses baskets. Young women lounged in kelly green bathing costumes and stockings rolled down to the knees. The crash of the surf reached all the way to the boardwalk, where Bess stood scanning the row of hotels that stretched for miles.

Locating the photographer Charles Radley had not been difficult. Harry’s old secretary had found him easily enough, in under two weeks, through a few letters of inquiry to friends in Atlantic City. Bess felt certain this man was safeguarding some secret of Harry’s; perhaps Harry had even left with him the message he intended for Bess. But Charles Radley, it turned out, was no more than a newspaperman, a photographer for The Atlantic City Daily Press who also did some freelance work on his own time. She had never heard of him. She herself had only been to Atlantic City a handful of times with Harry, when he had performed his bridge-jumping stunts during the busy summer months.