Mrs. Houdini(45)

Arriving in Budapest was not without its difficulties. As had happened passing through Germany, the police trailed Bess and Harry at all hours of the day and night; they had heard about his feats in Scotland Yard and were convinced he was some kind of undercover agent, spying for Britain. He spent much of the day walking about the cities, thinking about his magic, leaving her to do her stitching, or sketching, or small errands. She knew his work thrived on loneliness. But when he was required to attend any kind of dinner or formal function, he clung to Bess. She pinned up her hair and sat by his side the entire evening, prodding him to speak when she thought he might need to impress someone.

His performance in Hamburg had been a smashing hit, and thirty marks had been charged for admission. This was more than Harry had ever commanded for his act. In America only the poor and the middle class had come to see him perform, but in Hamburg, for the first time, wealthy patrons filled the seats. Men and women wearing furs and polished shoes and carrying crystal spectacles filed into the theater, the room buzzing with anticipation. Martin Beck had been right—the doors were opening for him after all. Bess, concerned that her stage attire was too tawdry for their new audiences, purchased a long dress made of purple taffeta, as they had ceased doing many of the tricks that involved her being bent and locked away, and Harry had taken on the active physical work instead. Her position now was mainly to add an air of femininity to the stage. Harry explained to her that Europeans were much less accepting of women onstage, but Bess understood he was being kind. The audiences responded to him, not to her, and both of them knew it.

Mrs. Weiss traveled across the Atlantic alone, leaving Gladys with Dash, who was selling insurance in Harrison, New Jersey, now and performing small acts of magic at parties on the weekends. She met them at the port in Hamburg, fragile and feverish from the long ocean journey, and they traveled together by train to Budapest, in a second-class coach. Harry had spent most of their savings on the dress, and he was disappointed, Bess knew, to have to take his mother across Europe in such deplorable conditions. He did not tell her what he had in store for her, only kept repeating, to Mrs. Weiss’s dismay, that her trip would be unlike anything she had ever experienced. Bess spent much of the train ride with her embroidery on her lap, trying not to interrupt the conversation that flowed back and forth in German between mother and son.

Mrs. Weiss occupied a position in Harry’s heart that no one, not even she as his wife, could supplant. She could not help but think of her own mother, and the lack of tenderness they had shared, and how Mrs. Rahner had kept her word and refused to speak to her since her marriage to Harry. The fact was that Harry had both her and Mrs. Weiss, but she had only Harry, and unless she found herself with child soon, this would likely always be so.



If she had thought London dazzling, then Budapest at the turn of the century was even more so. It was the era of the great Hungarian poets—Endre Ady and Mihály Babits, writers she had heard of—and the streets were lined with small coffeehouses with wood-paneled walls and firelit rooms where both men and women bent over books and porcelain cups of hot beverages. Bess wondered why Rabbi and Mrs. Weiss had ever left such a place. There had been some kind of celebration recently, and the buildings were still hung with colored banners.

They entered the city in the pink twilight, the streets echoing with hoofbeats on the hardwood blocks of the great avenues, which were lined with enormous green topiaries. In the carriage on the way to the boardinghouse, Bess looked over at Mrs. Weiss and saw that her eyes were filled with tears. She was gripping her son’s hand, but the other hand, the one holding her handkerchief, was white as bone. Bess imagined she was remembering the last time she had been here, with Rabbi Weiss, so many years before, and how young they must have been then, their unlined faces shining on these very streets.

“Has it changed a great deal?” she asked Mrs. Weiss.

The old woman looked toward her, starry-eyed. “Oh, very much. It seems so much . . . more colorful than I remember. All my memories of it are black and gray.”

“I imagine my life would be very different if you had not chosen to leave. So I’m grateful that you did,” Bess told her.

They stopped at the entrance to a cramped alley, and Harry got out to check on the rooms. Across the street was a covered market, shuttered now with canvas for the evening. Mrs. Weiss shook her head. “Sometimes I wonder—if we had stayed in Pest, would things have been better than they ended up being in America? My husband might not have died so young, and Gladys wouldn’t have been injured. And maybe Ehrich wouldn’t have left home.”

Bess looked around at the paint peeling from the sides of the buildings. Surely this hadn’t been what Harry had had in mind? He had planned this trip with such care. “No,” she said. “He would have left no matter where you lived. It’s just the way he is.”

“Yes.” Mrs. Weiss nodded. “He is always looking for what is out there.”



The boardinghouse occupied a narrow space between a grocery and a butcher’s shop; inside, the rooms were hardly six feet wide, each fitting only a small bed and a chair. The bathroom was cramped and dirty, at the end of a long hall, and the whole building smelled of cow meat.

The accommodations didn’t startle Mrs. Weiss. “és ist schon, Harry,” she said, studying the view from the window. “It’s lovely.”

But, as Bess had anticipated, Harry was crestfallen by all the dust. He and Bess usually stayed in lodgings like these, but he had spent more money than they usually did on his mother’s room, which was still small and dirty.