Mrs. Houdini(62)
“I know.” Harry avoided her eyes. “I feel like a failure.”
“One failed trick doesn’t make you a failure.”
“Everyone wonders where people go when they leave this place. I want to perform a trick that makes it seem as if I have gone there, too. To wherever it is people go when they are invisible. But then I will come back again.”
Bess wondered if he was purposely avoiding speaking explicitly of death. Instead she said, “I don’t want you to go,” and he laughed.
“Of course I’m not really going anywhere.”
“But if you could, hypothetically—if you could really see the other side, I mean—you would.”
Harry thought about it. “Yes,” he said. “I would go there. If I could come back.”
She thought she had a sense of what he was intending to do. He had focused his whole career on pretending to escape death, and now he set his sights on walking into it.
Harry rented workshop space in Midtown, and began working with Jim Collins on constructing a new trick. He had hired other assistants as well, including Jim Vickery, a tall, muscled cabinetmaker who rarely spoke but was, from the beginning, fiercely loyal to Harry. For the first time, Harry refused to tell Bess what the trick entailed. He unveiled it at Hammerstein’s Theatre on a damp Friday night in October, the sidewalks silvered with puddles. The stage on which the new trick was performed was covered in deep red carpet. While Harry performed other tricks, a team of bricklayers quickly constructed a brick wall, over ten feet tall, on the stage. After the wall had been built, two black screens were brought out and positioned on either side of it.
Harry stood at the front of the stage now in the suit Bess had ironed for him that morning. It was her small contribution. Harry had a dozen men in his employ now, working as bookers or secretaries or scouts or on construction. He had the young and eager Jim Collins, of course, and Jim Vickery, and his loyal, dignified secretary, John Sargent, with his crop of white hair.
His hair, as usual, was uncombed. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he announced, in the booming stage voice that always gave her chills. “I have been preparing myself for years for a performance of this caliber. I have set out to prove to you that while you may think it impossible that one might stand in this very room and yet be somewhere else at the same time, it is quite possible. Indeed, there are realms we do not see, all around us. I have been there. Yet I cannot tell you, in good conscience, what I have witnessed. But when I walk through this wall in front of your eyes, you will know that I have been there, and come back, as the spirits do.”
Three audience members were selected to stand behind the brick wall to ensure that he could not sneak around it to the other side. Harry stood behind one of the black screens and waved his hands over the top. “I am here!” he shouted. “Now, ladies and gentlemen, I am going.” Only moments later, his hands appeared above the screen on the other side of the wall. “And now, by unknown means, I have crossed over to the other side!” his voice boomed. A stage assistant drew away the second screen, and there stood Harry, clothes and hair disheveled, panting, having crossed through solid brick.
The crowd sat in silence, dumbfounded. Harry bowed proudly.
“They’re going to say I am able to dematerialize,” he had hinted that morning before he went to prepare for the show. “And I won’t protest it. It is not enough to perform magic anymore. One must be magic as well.” He kissed her, but she turned her mouth away.
“Harry,” she murmured, “we said we were never going to do that again.” She did not want him exploiting people’s beliefs.
He had responded to Dr. Stone’s warnings in some unconventional ways. He had purchased the original Martin Luther Bible, with Luther’s own notes in the margins, and placed it upon Edgar Allan Poe’s mahogany writing desk, in his study, as if to make some kind of point about dark and light. He had also had his father reburied in the family plot he had purchased in Machpelah Cemetery, insisting on viewing what was left of the body. “There was nothing but skull and bones,” he told Bess, rushing eagerly into the house after the process was complete. “Father’s teeth were in surprisingly excellent condition.”
Now he frowned at her accusations. “This isn’t the same as making up stories about people’s dead cousins, Bess. This is different. It is the Great Mystery.”
“What is the Great Mystery?” she asked him.
He smiled his serene, magician’s smile. “Where I go when I am gone.”
On April 14 the RMS Titanic collided with an iceberg during her maiden voyage. The Carpathia, which had rescued some of the survivors from the water, came into port in New York a few days later. Forty thousand people waited on the docks for their arrival, Bess and Harry among them. The mood was frenzied. Some of those waiting recognized Harry and asked if he could communicate with those lost. Harry looked stricken by the suggestion; on flyers thin as tissue paper, representatives of the Metropolitan Opera distributed advertisements for a benefit concert in which the opera star Mary Garden would perform “Nearer My God to Thee.”
The solemnity of the tragedy bled into the summer, and even the fall. One could not travel without fear anymore. Bess and Harry said good-bye to Mrs. Weiss in New York the week following Harry’s diagnosis. He had been invited to Copenhagen to perform for the Danish royal family. It was a pearl-gray morning in October, and a large crowd had gathered at the dock. There were to be two celebrities on board the ship—Harry Houdini, famous magician, and Theodore Roosevelt, former president of the United States. Neither Bess nor Harry had ever met the president, but Harry was determined to make his acquaintance, and Bess had dressed herself carefully that morning in preparation. She looked about the dock for Mr. Roosevelt but did not see him.