Mrs. Houdini(53)

Harry followed them inside, but Bess could tell he was barely listening. His eyes were darting across the room, examining the structure from every angle. It was early springtime, but the ocean was cold and rough, and the sea spray came up to the windows, the salt caking the glass. She wondered if he was concerned. He rarely told her about any hesitations. “My chief task,” he liked to say, “is to conquer my own fear. If I can do that, I can do anything.”

The inside of the pier was like a glamorous hotel. There was music playing softly from a piano across the room, and shining white floors. Young led them toward the center of the building, which opened onto a vast lawn, cluttered with sculptures and small potted trees. “This is my home,” he boasted. “When the post office delivers my mail, they deliver it to Number One Atlantic Ocean.”

Bess was awed. She and Harry had seen a great many spectacles in Europe, but a house in the ocean was not one of them. Across the lawn, the gray stone of Young’s residence glistened like glass.

“I had no idea this was here,” she said. “From the outside, you can’t even tell.” A cold burst of air rushed over the lawn. Bess wrapped her mink stole more tightly around herself. “It is cold, isn’t it, Harry? Perhaps we’d better go inside so you can warm up before you perform.” She could tell he was distracted. He did not like being in the company of others, besides her, for very long.

Harry nodded. “Yes, that’s a good idea.”

Young led them inside the house, and Bess let out of a cry of amazement. The foyer walls were made entirely of colored seashells.

“It’s marvelous.”

“My wife designed the inside,” he explained. “She apologizes that she cannot be here. She has an engagement in New York and won’t be back until tomorrow.”

Young had invited them to stay with him. He showed them to their room so that they could rest before Harry’s stunt, which had been billed for four o’clock that afternoon. Over three thousand people were expected to attend.

The room was more traditionally decorated than the foyer, with silk wallpaper and thick Persian carpets. Bess unlaced her shoes and lay down on the bed.

“The water’s cold today,” Harry said, looking out the window. The room, on the fourth floor of the house, was two stories higher than the pier and looked out over the writhing ocean. “If this were a river, it would be frozen.”

Bess tried to sit up but was suddenly overcome by wooziness. She lay down again and put her hand to her forehead. “Maybe you should postpone the stunt if it’s too cold.”

Harry pressed his hands against the glass. “No. I can survive in cold water.”

“Come here and feel my head. I think it’s very warm.”

Harry sat down next to her and put his palm against her cheeks and forehead. “You are warm. Maybe you shouldn’t be outside today.”

Bess looked at him. “I have to be there!”

“But you really don’t look well,” he assured her. “And you know how you can be with these jumps.”

He was right about that. Of all his tricks, the bridge and pier jumps were the ones she feared the most. He trained for them, submerging himself in ice baths, gradually lowering the temperature to under thirty degrees to ensure that he could still hold his breath in temperatures so low. “Complete mental serenity” he called his experience in the baths. But Bess had her doubts. She suspected the baths were extremely painful, even for him. She tried to disguise her concern, but the danger in bridge and pier jumping was very real. What the audience never knew was that Harry always had with him a rope man, who was instructed to go down and retrieve him if he did not appear after two minutes. This had not happened yet, but certainly one’s luck could not last forever. Harry was often careless with his life. For his Detroit bridge jump, the river had frozen over the night before, and he had had to cut a hole into the ice so he could continue with the performance.

She was feeling poorly, it was true, but she was still saddened by their argument the night before. She hated the coldness that came over Harry whenever he was immersed in his work. While her ability to see through his new tricks had once enthralled him, recently it seemed to frustrate, and even insult, him. When he was attentive to her, he was the most loving man. But now he seemed to be more attentive to his work than to her, on an endless quest to earn larger audiences, greater fame. She suspected it was a result of his having achieved a little fame, but not enough to secure their future. She knew he worried over how to keep himself relevant in an increasingly competitive field. Whenever word reached him that another magician had stolen one of his tricks or claimed he could outdo him, Harry would rush off to the magician’s next performance to challenge the man and reclaim his title. She felt so much less a part of his world than she had when they had shared the stage. The more success he achieved on his own, the more Bess’s value seemed to lie in assuring his emotional well-being, boosting the confidence that waxed and waned according to his publicity.

Finally she agreed to stay inside and rest for the afternoon. Harry kissed her forehead distractedly and went out to meet his rope man and the rest of the crew, who had just arrived on the train, and to examine the site of the jump more closely. Bess changed into a silk robe, lay on her side, and tried to sleep. Outside she could hear the wind rattling the windows. The sky was growing gray, and the clouds were coming in.