Mrs. Houdini(7)

She thought of what her mother would say if she brought home a Jew. “I can’t believe you’re actually serious right now. I can’t marry you, Harry. You don’t know a thing about me, nor I you.”

He considered this. “Harry’s not my real name. My real name is Ehrich Weiss. And no one here knows that but Dash, and you, now.”

“So you see then? I don’t even know what to call you.”

“You can call me whatever you like.”

“Harry—” she began.

He pulled her to her feet. “Come with me.”

“No, I can’t.”

“I’ll carry you then.” He picked her up like a trinket, laughing, then hooked his arms around her shoulders and knees, like a groom carrying a bride. “You’re very light.”

“This is preposterous,” she cried, but he was already walking in long strides across the sand, toward the marsh. “Where are we going?”

The marsh, they discovered, was really a quick rush of water the ocean had made into a river, through the sand. It had dug itself deep over time, and someone had built a small bridge across it. He put her down in the middle of the bridge. “Can you stand?” he asked.

“I can, you brute. But you’re mad. What in the world makes you think we can get married when we’ve only just met?”

“Damn it, Bess! How can you not see it?” His outburst startled her, and she stepped back. “We’re the same, you and me.” He wrapped his hands around her waist and held her tightly. “We see things. Things other people don’t.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because you didn’t see me. When you were onstage you were looking right at me, and yet you didn’t see me. Because you were seeing something else. Am I right?”

Bess nodded. She’d learned that when she sang, the songs enveloped her. She saw sensations in front of her—colors, the heat of the afternoon like smoke rising, brightness like the sun on glass.

He went on, breathlessly, as if the realization had consumed him. “There’s something else out there, beyond what the mind can perceive. Maybe it’s religion, maybe it’s not. It’s not magic the way we think of it—that kind of magic is a game. It’s something else, something truer than that. Some people believe in it. A few can sense it. But me—I can see it. And then I met you. And I think—I think you can actually reach it.”

Bess was stricken. She could feel the pulse of his hands around her waist as if the blood was throbbing through his fingers. “Reach what, Harry?”

“What is out there. The other place.”

“Like heaven?”

“White gates and all that? No, no. I think there’s another plane of living right here where we’re standing. People who have been, people who have yet to be, what if they are right here with us? And yet most of us aren’t even aware of them.” His eyes danced. There was a madness to his passion, but he was not insane. There was something real and familiar about him. She felt he was putting words to something she had always known. And what if he was right? What if she possessed something extraordinary? No one, before Doll and Anna approached her and asked her to sing, had ever believed she was extraordinary.

“Speaking with the dead is sacrilege.”

“I don’t care if you speak with them or not. I was only trying to explain why I love you.” He seemed suddenly nervous, as if, in his arrogance, he had only just now realized that she could reject him. “I was trying to say that you’re perceptive. And I think you could make me better.”

He stepped back slightly, turning to face the lights of the Bowery in the distance. “I’ve never been one to take anything slow. I’ve got these great expectations, you know. I’m going to be famous, and very wealthy, and I’m going to take care of my mother so she never has to worry again, and I simply can’t do that living like everyone else. When you caught on to my tricks, I thought, This is it. This is the girl. And if I know you’re the girl, why should I wait to tell you?”

Bess blushed. “Surely you can’t tell that from one—”

“That song you sing in your act—what was it? O’er me you cast a spell, something-something-something.”

“Rosabel.”

He grinned. “Yes, that was it. Rosabel. I loved that song. How does it go?”

“Rosabel, sweet Rosabel,” she said hurriedly, speaking instead of singing, “I love her more than I can tell, over me she casts a spell, my charming black-eyed Rosabel—” She broke off. “I thought you said it was silly.”

“No, I said the songs were silly.” He shook his head; he had been listening, rapt. “But that one’s beautiful. I started to love you then—your face lit up when you sang it. I thought, This is a girl who hopes for things. She probably doesn’t know a thing about love yet, but once she has it, she’s never giving it up. And then, after you sang the last verse, it was as if you realized you’d revealed too much. So you laughed and did that little jig, kicking your feet up, and the audience was charmed. But I knew. Your face had given it all away.”

Bess stared at him. She felt herself being swept up by his certitude. There was a kind of grandeur about him, about the way he seemed to feel emotions so strongly, as if the rest of the world lay glazed with sleep while he danced furiously. “I feel like—you may know my thoughts better than I do.” She had always believed herself decisive, self-reliant, but now she felt flustered.