Mrs. Houdini(49)

They had made it to the end of the wooden walkway, and the white-crusted ocean stretched out in front of them, the shoreline crowded with splashing bathers. It was difficult to disguise her nervousness. She felt as if she were courting someone. “You know, as everyone does, that I’ve been trying to reach Harry. And I think he might be trying to contact me—through you.” She looked at him. “Is that . . . strange?”

Charles gazed at her sharply, as if assessing her sincerity. When she didn’t crack a smile, his expression turned to one of bewilderment. “Why do you think that he would be using me?”

Her voice was shaking. “Can I trust you?” she asked. “I don’t even know you.”

“You can trust me.”

He seemed so sincere, so genuine. She knew she had no choice but to tell him the truth, crazy as she knew it would sound. “You see,” she began, “in the past several weeks, I’ve come across two photographs which seemed to have a message embedded in them. The strange thing was, when I found out who took them . . . they were both yours.” She turned away from him, toward the ocean. “And I’m not sure why that would be, if he didn’t have a connection to you. But I’m also afraid . . . I may have been searching for something that wasn’t there.”

“I believe you,” he said softly.

“You do?”

“Yes.”

Charles removed his glasses and began polishing them with his shirtsleeve. “You know I’m a photographer at the Press. What I didn’t tell you is that I’ve—” He hesitated, as if he were afraid she would laugh at him. “I’ve applied to the seminary.”

Bess blinked at him. “You’re going to be a priest?”

“I’m not sure yet.”

“But—I saw you flirting with that woman last night!”

Charles stuck his hands in his pockets and squinted at the horizon, where the sea receded into the curve of the earth. “I’m shy. I’ve never even had a real relationship with a woman.” The words came out painfully. “I’d like to try to see . . . if it’s possible. Before I make any decisions.”

“And the lie? About being a banker named Wallace?”

He blushed. “Sometimes it’s easier for me to speak to people I don’t know if I pretend to be someone else.”

Bess felt a twinge of sympathy for him. How many times had she, too, pretended? How many times had she wished no one would recognize her?

“Do you think I’m foolish?”

Bess shook her head. “People treat me differently,” she said, “when they know who I am. To the world, I am Harry Houdini’s widow. It is nice sometimes to be judged for myself, as my own person.”

“Do you think that, possibly, Harry led you to me because of my spiritual leanings? Because he knew I would believe you?”

She considered it. “I’ve never tried communicating through a priest before. Harry was Jewish, you know. And he wasn’t a good Jew. I certainly am not a good Catholic.”

“Perhaps it’s because I’m not a priest yet. I think people who are in between the secular world and the religious world have the most open minds of anyone. Perhaps he thought I could be a link between the two.”

Even in her white straw hat she could feel the sun burning on her cheeks. It was the kind of brilliant, steaming day when she wished that she was anywhere else—somewhere like California, in a bungalow by the studios, with a little greenhouse on the property, waiting for lunch to be served in the garden, and for Harry to step out of his office to join her.

“What I think,” Charles ventured, “is that you are afraid because you don’t know what happened to your husband after he died. You are afraid he had nowhere to go.” He looked down, at the sand. “I know because for a very long time I felt that way, after my mother died, when I was still a boy. And I couldn’t bear the thought of her becoming . . . nothing.”

Late in Harry’s career they had found themselves staying in the same hotel as Sarah Bernhardt, in downtown Boston. The great actress had had her right leg amputated a few months before and had sunk into a deep depression, and she came to watch Harry perform. Afterward, they’d shared an automobile back to the hotel. Bess recalled Sarah’s heavy black coat, long to her ankles to hide her wooden leg, and her bursting confection of a hat, red and feathered.

“Mr. Houdini,” she had said to Harry. “You must possess some extraordinary powers to perform such marvels.”

Harry had laughed. But Sarah had gripped his hand in hers. “Won’t you use it to restore my limb for me?”

Bess had realized, at the same time as Harry, that the question was not in jest. Sarah was looking at him eagerly, her eyes filling with tears.

“Good heavens,” Harry had said, aghast. “You are asking me to do the impossible.”

“But you do the impossible.”

“I’m afraid you exaggerate my abilities,” he’d said, and Sarah had studied him for a long moment, as if she were hoping he was testing her, before releasing her grip on his hand.

Bess recognized a glimpse of this desperation in herself now. She remembered Harry’s own tears as he got out of the car at the hotel, leaving Sarah inside. He had never meant to deceive anyone. But what if he was deceiving her now, without even realizing it?