Mrs. Houdini(41)
The bartender shrugged. “I don’t know. Ten minutes ago, maybe?”
If Charles had been gone that long, it was too late to catch him. She wondered if she should try that restaurant he had mentioned, but she didn’t want Stella to come out and find her missing. On top of the varnished wooden bar, the newspaper he had been reading was still there, folded in half. Bess sat down, spent. She had little interest in the news, but she wondered if the story about her séance was still lingering in the press.
Opening the paper, she breathed a sigh of relief. It appeared to be only local news, innocuous at that. The front page carried a dull story about the Atlantic City lighthouse being repaired in time for the regatta. Another photographer—not Charles—had taken the accompanying photograph. The caption beneath it read, “The Absecon Light has only been out once before in its seventy-two-year history, for eighty-five hours from April 1 to April 4, 1925.”
Bess recognized the black-and-white-striped structure. It was the same lighthouse that was in the background of the yacht photograph she had found in the jeweler’s window. So it was as she had suspected; that image had been taken by Charles in the Atlantic City Harbor.
But the date was familiar, too—April 1925. Bess reread the newspaper caption. “The Absecon Light has only been out once before . . .” She folded the paper quickly and put it on her lap. It was impossible. The article must be incorrect. In the photograph Charles had taken of the yacht—at dusk on April 2, 1925, according to the scribble underneath his signature—the light from the lighthouse had clearly been working. But the newspaper said the light had been out all day; so how had it been shining in the photograph?
Chapter 7
EUROPE
June 1900
The crowd blew kisses at the departing boat, and many of them cried. Some of the passengers, certainly, would not be back again—illness would strike them, or poverty, or love. Bess and Harry stood at the railing and waved their handkerchiefs to Mrs. Weiss and Gladys, who had come to New York Harbor to see them off to Europe. Tears were pouring down Mrs. Weiss’s face; Gladys, pretty at eighteen years old, clung to her mother’s arm. The passengers on the boat released colored paper streamers into the water, and somewhere close to the bow, outside the first-class dining room, an orchestra was playing “Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms.”
In a low moment, Bess and Harry had moved back into the cramped Weiss apartment in Manhattan. It was certainly better accommodations than their makeshift circus rooms had been, but still, it was difficult to be a wife without a home of their own to care for, and Harry carried the burden of that humiliation around with him daily. He could barely drag himself out of bed knowing that he had been unable to live up to his promises. Their time with the Welsh troupe hadn’t been a failure, exactly; but attendance at the shows had dwindled gradually, until there was barely enough to support the troupe’s travel, and eventually the circus had closed. There were larger acts springing up all over the country, mostly with animals—an elephant kneeling before a man was a sight to behold—but Mr. Welsh couldn’t afford to purchase any animals, and he couldn’t afford to continue without them. After their last night in Louisville, Bess found herself standing on the railway platform beside Harry, with their old black trunk between them, saying good-bye to the friends they had made. Many of them, like the Houdinis, were trying to continue on the vaudeville circuit; they boarded separate trains to places like New York, Chicago, or Atlanta. Others had purchased tickets to California, where they had heard there were industrial and farming jobs. Mrs. McCarthy handed her a pink shawl she had knitted herself.
“For that baby girl you’re gonna have someday,” she said. She herself was headed to Idaho, where her daughter and her daughter’s husband owned a small potato farm. “From the potato fields of Ireland to the potato fields of America,” she remarked sadly. “It’s not what I’d dreamed of.” Bess noticed, for the first time, the thin brown lines that marked her forehead.
Mr. Welsh hooked one hand in his suspenders and shook Harry’s hand with his other. “Good luck in Chicago, son. You’ll do fine there.” He couldn’t look Harry in the eye; Bess knew he’d bankrupted himself, and she wasn’t sure what he was going to do next. He wasn’t a young man anymore; thank God, she thought, she and Harry had their youth to fall back on. Harry had already been gaining notoriety in small towns by escaping from various jail cells, a trick that began when the whole troupe was arrested one afternoon in Georgia for performing on a Sunday. Charlotte, the Fat Woman and a new addition to the troupe, had bawled half the night, squeezed with the rest of the group into a concrete twelve-by-twelve cell. When the jailer fell asleep, Harry had picked the lock and let everyone out, and they had sneaked away to a new town before daylight. Now he had plans to bust out of a Chicago cell in front of a group of reporters, where it would be big news, and, he hoped, get himself known before they continued on with another poorly paid act.
Bess had grown to love life on the Welsh circuit. Harry was shy, often keeping to himself and practicing when he wasn’t performing, and in those lonely hours Bess had sought the company of the others in the local beer and pool halls. She never again flirted with any of the men she met there but usually cradled a ginger beer and chatted with the women. Harry spent a great deal of time training with an old Japanese man who could swallow oranges and then bring them up again, a practice that thoroughly horrified Bess. But Harry was as fascinated with swallowers as he was with snake charmers, and he spent hours stretching the muscles of his throat to the point of accommodating small potatoes.