Mrs. Houdini(8)

“It’s the other way around. Tonight, you saw through me—you saw me . . . It was you who cast the spell.”

Bess thought about the morning of her thirteenth birthday, when her mother had first proposed the idea of her entering the nunnery. Her mother had taken her to a shabby brownstone in the middle of Manhattan where rows of old ladies in black robes were seated silently on benches, stringing rosaries. Outside, the city roared with life. She couldn’t imagine spending the rest of her life as one of those somber women, while just outside the door there was so much incandescence, so many elegant shops and sharply dressed men waiting to love her.

But her mother was a strict, unforgiving German woman, whose body had borne ten children, and whose second husband was in and out of the house, most of the time stinking of beer, a poor replacement for Bess’s gentle father, who had died years earlier. That afternoon, Bess had vowed to accept the first opportunity that would take her away from home. The opportunity came four years later, in the form of two nineteen-year-old girls named Nora Koch and Anna Kappel, who had been slightly ahead of her in high school but had left when they were fifteen, with dreams of being in vaudeville. She ran into them on the street outside the grocer’s; they had had some minor success as a singing duo, but they were looking for a third, and invited her to go with them to Coney Island, where they had booked an act for the summer, and longer, if they succeeded. But recently the thought had occurred to her that if they reached September without a larger booking, they could not continue, and what would she do then?

The act was barely making them enough money to afford their room in the boardinghouse, and she couldn’t imagine going back to Brooklyn, even to Stella’s, and having Sunday lunch with her family once again and hearing her stepfather crashing through the door, slurring those terrible old German songs, and seeing all her brothers and sisters crammed into two bedrooms. If she were married, she would have a home of her own. She wasn’t quite sure what love felt like, but she liked the way she felt when Harry touched her. And he said he wanted her. No one in her life had seemed to want to love her so much as he did.

“All right,” she said softly. “I’ll marry you.”

“You see? That’s part of what I love about you. You always do the unexpected.”

Then he resumed his strange seriousness. From the other side of Coney Island came the echo of church bells chiming the hour. They seemed an anomaly against the faint cacophony of voices drifting from the Bowery. “There’s something you need to promise me first,” he said. “Before we get married.”

“What is it?”

Harry took her hands and lifted them straight up, clasping his palms against hers. They were rough as sandpaper. “Beatrice,” he said. “Raise your hands to heaven and swear that you will be true to me. Never betray me in any way, so help you God.”

There was not an animal in the water beneath them, not a single creature shuffling through the sand. Everything was stillness.

“I will never betray you,” Bess murmured. She could not take her eyes off him. His intensity was hypnotic.

“What I do—I have many secrets. When you’re my wife, you’ll know all of them. You’ll know everything about me. You’ll know more than Dash, even. And if you agree to marry me, it must be forever. You can never go back home again.”

There was something about the lateness of the hour, the bridge in the marshland, and the dramatic vow he’d made her take that gave her pause. She wondered if she was standing face-to-face with a madman. But there was something thrilling about what had just transpired. Harry was promising her a life of possibility, of magic, and it was unlike anything she had ever imagined for herself. And she could not help but envision, now, what it would be like to be his wife, to wake up beside him, to watch him stand in front of her, silhouetted against the window, the muscles in his back sharp as lines of charcoal. She wanted him to kiss her. She thought of that black-haired waiter in Brooklyn and the taste of blood on her lip where he’d bitten her; she had been frightened then, but she wanted Harry to put his mouth on her now. She wanted him to say he would never love anyone but her. She thought of the sheer strength he must have to pull off that escape trick onstage, and she wondered what it would feel like to know that strength.

She thought about what her friends would say when she told them she had fallen in love with him. Doll would be both thrilled and heartbroken. Anna would despise her for leaving the group, certainly.

“Don’t be nervous.” Harry put his arm around her shoulder. “I will take care of you.”

“Harry,” she whispered. “When we are old, I want you to think of me as I am on our wedding night.” She didn’t know where the words came from. “I want to please you. I want you to remember me.” It seemed a more binding vow than the one he had asked her to swear.

He pulled her to him then, for the first time, so their bodies were against each other, their arms intertwined. She could feel his stomach harden. He pressed his mouth against hers and kissed her. Gently, he lowered her onto the wood of the bridge so they were kneeling face-to-face.

She heard Dash and Doll coming up the beach toward them, breaking their solitude. They stood up quickly, wiping the mud off their clothes. Doll was waving. “Yoo-hoo!” she called.

“You devil, Harry!” Dash shouted. “We knew you two were up to something!”