Mrs. Houdini(80)

“I lost my mother, too, you know,” Bess had told him. Why couldn’t Harry see, she wondered, that she could grieve as well as he could? She simply managed to hide it better. Moreover, she felt she had, in many ways, lost her God by marrying Harry. She had once gone to church weekly, but now she rarely attended. Over the years she had turned to Harry for comfort, when she had once turned to religion. God had become secondary to her marriage. She wasn’t sure whether she could ever be forgiven for giving false séances—false hope to grieving widows and parents—during their earlier stage days. Sometimes, memories of her betrayals still rose up to greet her in the middle of the night, like gray ghosts.

When they gave up their California house they traveled to Europe, looking for a change in scenery. In the Suicides’ Graveyard in Monte Carlo—where those who had lost their fortunes and killed themselves were buried—Harry wept, and told Bess he loved her, and she forgave him. It didn’t seem worth it to be at odds any longer, in the face of all the devastation around them. An obsession with the dead had swept Europe and America, especially among those families mourning sons lost in the war. It seemed every household had purchased a Ouija board and everyone was conducting their own spiritualist experiments. People, it seemed, were possessed by the paranormal.

Harry had begun a correspondence with the noted writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who, like Harry, had started dabbling in spirit photography and embarked upon a quest to contact the dead. “Where are they?” he asked Harry in a letter. “What has become of all those splendid young lives? Are they anywhere?” He told Harry he had been able to reach his son Kingsley—lost to influenza—through a medium. “I am a true believer now,” he wrote to Harry, “and I also believe that you are harboring occult powers which you may not even realize.”

This, Harry laughed at, but he was impressed by Doyle’s steadfast belief that the other side existed. But Harry told Bess he himself was struggling between two opposing forces, that he was both a “skeptic” and “a seeker of the truth.” He detested fraud but desperately wanted to find an authentic medium who could prove him wrong.

Bess was frightened by Harry’s obsession. Along their European route she searched for Catholic churches on narrow side streets and attended masses in languages she didn’t understand. She wasn’t sure that the spirits he was attempting to contact were entirely good. Had he forgotten all the trickery they had performed during their early years onstage together, and the eerie power they had seemed to possess despite their fakery—their predictions that had come true? There seemed to be forces at work that they could not control, and Bess was hesitant to rouse them. She bent her head and prayed into the candle smoke and tried to find the faith she’d had as a little girl, but she felt like an impostor, like someone who did not quite belong anymore. She tried to pray, but the words sounded empty.

But Doyle promised he could contact the late Mrs. Weiss. His wife, he claimed, had “a gift.”

And so Bess and Harry sat in a small circle across from Sir Arthur and Lady Jean Doyle, who had begun to tap the table with her pencil. She did not look the part of the medium; she was wrapped in a cascade of white fur and filigreed jewelry. “This is the most energetic the forces have ever been,” she announced. She drew a cross at the top of the paper laid out in front of her, to ward off evil spirits.

“Who is it?” Doyle asked her eagerly. “Is it Houdini’s mother?”

Lady Doyle was furiously scribbling. Doyle jumped to his feet and stood over her shoulder, reading what she was writing. “Oh, my darling, thank God, at last I’m through!” he read. “My beloved boy, tell him not to grieve. Soon he’ll get all the evidence he’s looking for.”

Bess looked over at Harry. His eyes were squeezed tightly shut, and he was sweating profusely.

Doyle continued reading his wife’s scribbles. His voice was shrill with excitement. “Tell him I’ve been with him all the while, all the while. And I have prepared a home for him. It is so different over here, so much larger and bigger and more beautiful. I am so happy in this life.” Lady Doyle was convulsing, as if with the weight of the pencil. Even the air around them seemed heavy.

“Why don’t you ask her a question?” Bess urged Harry softly.

“I don’t know if the spirit will answer direct questions,” Doyle said. Lady Doyle shuddered, and her hand began scribbling again. Sir Arthur read, “If only the world knew the great truth, how different life would be . . . Bless my son, bless him, tell him the gulf will be bridged and his eyes will soon be opened—”

Lady Doyle dropped her pencil and fell back against her chair, weeping.

“I’m sorry, Harry,” she said. “She’s gone. I’m so sorry.” She turned to Sir Arthur. “Dear, raise the shades. I need the light.”

Harry was still gripping Bess’s hand. His face was white. “Darling, you must let go,” she murmured. “You’re hurting my hand.”

He seemed to rouse himself as if from a deep trance. “What’s that, Bess? Oh.” He released her hand from his grip.

Later that night, in the privacy of the Doyles’ guest room, the frigid English breeze blew through the cracks around the window, and Bess buried her head in Harry’s shoulder. “Do you think it was truly your mother coming through?” she asked him. It was difficult even for her to believe that the Doyles—the sincerest Catholics she knew—would resort to manipulation. But Harry had produced all kinds of spooky effects through his own “magic.” She had always relied upon him to decipher the real from the fraudulent, and it seemed now, for the first time, he could not. During his own “séances,” to prove that such things could be done, he had produced luminous figures that moved through the air. But this was different; this was a séance with a well-known public figure and his wife who insisted they had spoken with his own mother. It was hard for her to call them frauds outright.