Mrs. Houdini(87)

The motley colors of the summer roared around them, in that iridescent city on the sea, and all the delirious energy of the age was hurtling its way ahead, pulsing with life, into the unknown.





Chapter 17


DETROIT


October 1926


The room in the Chateau Laurier in Montreal was a fine place for the pair of them to be laid up. The dean of McGill University had arranged for a top-floor suite, with cream curtains, heavy walnut furniture, and a reading library, in English and French, larger than Harry had ever seen in a hotel. Since arriving, however, Bess had been diagnosed with ptomaine poisoning and had been vomiting the contents of her stomach for almost two days. Harry, too, was exhausted, having stayed up all night with her, her fever running so high he was afraid to let her fall asleep. Then, during a lecture and performance at McGill, he had snapped his left ankle and only barely managed to hobble through the rest of the performance. Bess had been able, even through her delirious state, to convince him to see a surgeon, who had set his ankle and declared the rest of him “in the most perfect physical condition.”

“You see, Bess?” Harry had boasted. “Other than this ankle, perfect physical condition. I am in the peak of my athleticism.” Still, the two of them had spent the afternoon lying on the couch and reading Harry’s mail, Harry with his leg propped up on a pillow and Bess with her face still flushed by the remnants of fever. Nevertheless, she took great joy in poking fun at him for the letters he received from young women, then destroying them so he could not respond.

Despite his protestations, she was worried about his health. Lately he had taken on too much; the muscles around his eyes and mouth twitched constantly. He had decided to establish what he was calling a University of Magic and had been designing the curriculum: showmanship, ethics, philosophy. One morning he had come home from the theater to inform Bess that he had enrolled at Columbia University, in an English course. “If I’m going to become the president of my own university,” he told her sheepishly, “I need to know how to write better English.” Bess knew he had always been ashamed of his lack of education. He had essentially invented a new art form—the art of escape—and he had met a president of the United States and the greatest scholars of the world, but in his mind he had always been second-rate.

Physically, Harry’s escapes were becoming more demanding as he aged, not less. He had encased himself in a metal coffin that was then submerged in a hotel swimming pool, and had survived in it for an hour and thirty-one minutes, emerging with close to fatally low blood pressure and high body temperature. And, having accomplished this feat, he was constructing a new stunt in which he would escape from a block of ice.

“Stop thinking that at fifty years you are old,” Harry chastised her when she protested. “I’m not old, and I’m older than you. We’re not a couple of fiddle-dee-dees. We have our best years before us.”

Harry was dictating responses to his letters to a friend of his, Jack Price, who had come up from New York to see the show, when there was a loud knock on the hotel room door. Jack opened it to a large, rather awkward-looking boy of about twenty years, a sketch pad under his arm.

Harry got to his feet. “Sam! Come in, come in.” He pumped the boy’s hand and gestured toward an armchair. “We were just having a read of some letters.”

The boy sat down meekly on the edge of the chair and placed the sketch pad on his knees.

Harry introduced him to Bess. “This young man came to my dressing room after my lecture this afternoon and showed me a sketch he had done of me. It was really rather good. I asked him to come and make another.”

Bess smiled weakly, taking a long sip of her water. “How lovely. Are you a student at McGill?”

“Yes, ma’am.” He knocked over a vase of roses as he settled himself into the chair. He tried to catch the flowers but failed, letting out a guttural sound of embarrassment. Bess felt her heart go out to the boy, whose body seemed slightly too large for him to manage.

Harry rolled up his shirtsleeves and reclined on the couch, closing his eyes. “Don’t worry about it. You’ll have to excuse us,” he explained. “We’re in need of a bit of rest.”

The boy stood up again. “I can come back later.”

“Nonsense.” Harry gestured for him to sit down again.

As Sam sketched, Harry talked languidly about the craft of magic. Sam seemed enthralled by it. He asked Harry if he could explain some of his secrets. Harry smiled and waved his hand. “Aha!” he said. “I’ll have to ask my spirits to give me permission.”

“He’s kidding,” Bess interrupted, seeing the boy’s eyes widen. “He doesn’t have any spirits.”

“Would that were true,” Harry said solemnly. “Think of the trouble I might have caused if I had used my talents for ill.”

“Harry!” she chastised.

As Sam resumed sketching, there was a second knock on the door. Bess sat up. She felt suddenly nauseous. “Harry, don’t answer it. You’re injured.”

Harry waved his hand and stood up. “It’s fine. It could be a delivery.”

Standing at the door was a muscled, broad-faced man with his hands in his pockets. He was as tall as Sam but heavier, with puckered, sunburned skin and thinning hair. He introduced himself as Gordon Whitehead.