Mrs. Houdini(67)

Gladys shook her head in disbelief. “It can’t be . . .”

“I told you all along.” Bess stopped pacing. “I knew Harry was trying to come through to me. What I can’t figure out is why the one message he would want to send would be the one that would hurt me the most.”

“Maybe he was trying to be honest with you at last,” Gladys ventured.

“I would have preferred dishonesty, I think.”

“Would you, though? Maybe there is a reason Harry wanted you two to meet. Maybe you just haven’t figured it out yet.”

In a chest next to Harry’s desk—the Poe desk—were albums of letters Bess had compiled when she was still a relatively young wife and had tried to bring some organization to their home. Eventually, she gave up the task, but not before she had filled over four dozen books with all the correspondence she and Harry had written to each other, and some of the photographs they’d collected together. Now, in a moment of clarity, she lifted the heavy lid of the trunk. She’d flipped through them before, many times, but she hadn’t known what she was looking for then. Inside, the books were just as she’d left them, stacked neatly in three piles, the covers now black with mold.

Gladys heard the shuffling of papers. “What are you doing?”

“I’m looking for something Harry may have left behind. There must be something in here that mentions Charles.”

She began pulling out the books in stacks, rifling through the pages and tossing the albums onto the floor in desperation. Surely, if Harry had been aware of a son, there would be some sign of it in these books, something she would have missed when she put them together. Certainly there would be another photograph, which she herself might even have pasted inside unknowingly, assuming, perhaps, it was of one of Harry’s distant cousins.

But she had not prepared herself for the sight of Harry’s handwriting. She was beaten back by it as if by a wave. There were all the letters he had written her, all the love professed, the ink still dark as if the words had just been written, as if Harry was only upstairs, having sent the letter down with the butler. My darling, would you run out for a new silk scarf for my act tonight? My other scarf is frayed. But my love for you is not.

There had been thousands of these notes over the years. But after Mrs. Weiss’s death, the playfulness that had once characterized their marriage had disappeared. Harry had stopped writing letters to Bess and had become consumed with writing long, elaborate sermons to no one. Bess remembered how, during their last encounter, Mrs. Weiss had asked Harry to bring her back a pair of slippers from Denmark; at her funeral, Harry had stooped over the casket and placed two new pink slippers into the grave, as tenderly as if they were babies. He had become melancholy; he’d spoken often of what he called “the mortal valley of death.” He would not accept bookings for performances if they meant leaving New York, because for months he visited her grave every afternoon. His relationship with Dash, which had been tenuous over the years, had become fraught with rivalry; Harry never forgave him for being the only son present for their mother’s death.

Would he, Bess had often wondered, have grieved for her the same way, if she had passed first? Looking through the early pages of their letters and all their professions toward her, she liked to believe he would have. But the truth was, she wasn’t sure now. There was a part of her that feared that he was happier on the other side of death than he had been with her.

The albums brought back a rush of memories, but there was no mention in any of them of Charles, no indication even that there might have been something Harry was hiding. As she flipped through the pages, she became more and more distraught, more confused and angry, and as she sobbed she began tearing the pages out of the books. She was tired of distrust, tired of searching for things that were not there.

Then she saw it—the postcard from Atlantic City. It was a photograph of the beach outside the Royal Hotel, touched up in color with paint, as postcards from those years often were. She and Harry had returned to the city again several times after Harry’s disastrous performance, when he had almost drowned. During one of their return trips he had mailed her this card so she would find it when they arrived home. It was postmarked August 1912, two months before they sailed to Europe. You are trying to look at what I’m writing as I write this, the back of the card said, but I’m not going to let you see, because I am the master of surprises. She remembered the scene vividly—Harry purchasing the card from a kiosk outside the hotel, leaning on the rail of the boardwalk as he wrote it, his back to her, laughing, Bess trying to peer over his shoulder. He had given another performance at Young’s Pier, but Young himself was not present for it, having been in Europe at the time on business. After a while, she had almost forgotten him. When she tried to recall his face now she could not.

After the show, she and Harry had sat together on the sand, watching the boardwalk lights, like tiny moons, turn on one by one.

Come enjoy the beauty of the ocean, wild and wide, the front of the postcard said, in flowery black script across the top.

Bess caught her breath. Wild and wide . . . They were words from the code. The tune rang in her ears: I’ll take you home again, Kathleen, across the ocean wild and wide . . . She held the card flat in her palm, like a relic, and read it again. The ocean wild and wide. The words had not changed; they were still there, engraved into the face of the card. She flipped the postcard over and searched the back for some other clue—anything that would give her an indication of what kind of message was being communicated—but there was nothing but the brief, casual note Harry had jotted to her, which really said nothing at all.