Mrs. Houdini(60)

He should have let her go. He should have let her remarry, become a mother to some other man’s children, or a grandmother, and live out her days in some two-bedroom house by the ocean, where she could have spent her afternoons watching the ripples of waves, like tiny dunes, rolling across the water. All the men who had pursued her, whom she had turned away, the kind ones, the widowers, with soft eyes and hands, men who had loved fishing and listening to the radio on weekday nights—what had become of them? And what would have become of her, if she had chosen that kind of life instead?

Charles looked frightened. He was staring at her, mute. She realized she must seem crazed.

“Do you really have no idea?” she demanded. She wondered if Harry had been hiding Charles’s photograph all along in the house they shared together, as man and wife, and gazing upon it when she had gone to bed. It was unbearable, to imagine this kind of deception.

Charles shook his head. “No idea about what?”

No; it wasn’t possible. Harry would not have betrayed her in such a way. Her mind was racing; there had to be another explanation.

What if Charles was not Harry’s son? What if Harry had not orchestrated their meeting at all? What if her “discoveries” were merely coincidences that had led her to Charles, and he had taken advantage of this by leading her to believe he was Harry’s son? It would not have been impossible for him, working for a newspaper, to do a little digging after they’d met, and manage to contact some of their old Coney Island friends. Someone else besides her surely remembered that night, their sudden departure from their own party and Harry’s flirtations with Evatima.

“You want me to think you are his son.”

Charles stared at her. “Whose son?”

“Harry’s.”

Charles took a step backward, alarmed, and then laughed. “You’ve got to be joking. Are you telling me this photograph is in your house because . . . I’m Harry Houdini’s son?”

“Please leave,” she said quietly. “I’m sorry I invited you here.”

Charles stood there, frozen. “I didn’t deceive you. I don’t know why you would think that. But I’m not going to stay where I’m not welcome.”

He seemed—was it possible?—hurt. His eyes were wide, and he looked suddenly much like the boy in the photograph, young and open—the boy who might have been hers. He put the photograph in his pocket and turned to the door. And then he had gone, and the dog had run upstairs to hide, and the streetlights glowed in the empty dark, and Bess had never felt so utterly, completely alone.





Chapter 11


THE ATLANTIC OCEAN


October 1912


“It is my duty to inform you that by continuing your present regimen you would be committing suicide.” Dr. Stone tapped Harry’s test results with his forefinger. “You must reconcile yourself, Harry, to the fact that your strenuous days are over.”

Bess’s jaw dropped, but Harry put his arm around her shoulders and laughed loudly. “How long do you give me?”

Dr. Stone did not look amused. “If you continue as at present, you will be dead within a year.”

“Harry!” Bess said.

Harry shook his head and smiled wryly. “Impossible.”

“I assure you, it is quite possible. I see patients die every day from lesser conditions. But yours—this ruptured blood vessel in your kidney—it is quite dangerous.” Dr. Stone sighed. “Don’t be a fool, Harry. Take some time off. No more of these straitjacket escapes. No more stunts. You have other tricks to rely on.”

The audience never knows whether the stunt is easy or hard, Harry had once confided to Bess. Sometimes a stunt that looks easy is in fact exceedingly difficult. The wet sheet escape he had been performing in Pittsburgh for the past week was a perfect example. For the escape, he had recruited hospital attendants to bind him with sheets and bandages—mummify him, he said—and then pour buckets of water over the bindings. Escaping from these soaking cloths was one of the most physically taxing feats he had ever accomplished, although no one knew this but Bess. The stunt had not been nearly as well received as the time he transported a handkerchief to the top of the Statue of Liberty, or the time he escaped, hanging upside down, from a giant milk jug filled with water.

He was not yet forty, but his body was revealing signs of strain; Bess had started plucking white hairs from his head with tweezers. He could not bear to show any weakness at all. He began spending more time meditating at the cemetery but refused to buy a plot for himself or for Bess. He behaved erratically sometimes, playing silly tricks on Bess at home and concocting various entertaining schemes. Before the Pittsburgh engagement, he had taken Bess, Gladys, and Mrs. Weiss on a vacation to a resort in the Catskills and, in the middle of the first night, had woken his mother by pouring a chest full of gold coins—his salary from a previous engagement—around her sleeping form.

Mrs. Weiss had sat up in bed, terrified, thinking she was drowning. Harry had been giddy as a schoolboy. “Look, Mother! It’s all yours!” He’d run his fingers through the gold. “Look what I brought you!”

Mrs. Weiss had looked around her in amazement. She had never possessed so much wealth in her life and had never—especially not during those early, harsh Wisconsin winters—imagined so much existed.