Mrs. Houdini(88)

“He’s one of my fraternity brothers,” Sam explained. “He’s all right.” Harry ushered him inside.

He was, he said, a theology student, but he looked years older than Sam’s twenty, and far too old to be in a fraternity. Bess felt suddenly uneasy, the small sitting room now crowded with people—her nurse, Harry, Jack, Sam, and Gordon. She felt her muscles contract and realized she was clenching her fists. There was something wrong with this new guest, only she couldn’t put her finger on it.

Harry gestured for him to take the last open chair. Gordon sat down stiffly. His movements seemed almost manufactured; his eyes darted around the room. Pressing his palms together, he asked Harry to expand on his lecture on spiritualism. Harry told them, laughing, of the many séances to which he had assigned agents—Bess included, working under her maiden name, Wilhelmina Rahner—to sit in the audience and test the mediums’ claims. Harry turned to Bess. “Darling, do you remember when John Slater at Carnegie Hall told you, ‘You will be taking your first trip to California’—years after we had moved back from Hollywood?” He slapped his knee and turned to the boys. “He also told her, ‘My guide says that your sweetheart is not quite as much in love with you as you are with him,’ and we all got into an uproar over that. Of course, he didn’t have any idea who she really was.” He grinned. “The whole world knows I love her more than she loves me.”

Sam said, “I think you two may be the most envied couple of the decade, except for maybe Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.”

Bess tried to laugh, to shake off her growing anxiety, but Gordon’s face turned serious. “Mr. Houdini, what is your opinion of the miracles mentioned in the Bible?” He leaned forward eagerly.

Sam looked up, startled by the abruptness of the question, but Harry only shrugged. “I prefer not to comment on matters of miracles.” Discussions of religion made Harry uneasy. He always felt the ghost of his father, the Jewish scholar, looking over his shoulder. On more than one occasion he had confided to Bess that he thought his father might have disapproved of the career he had chosen. It was one of lonely glamour, and whether in Hollywood or New York, he could not avoid the gaudy, gilded lifestyle celebrity ensured. “I would make one observation, however,” Harry added. “What would succeeding generations have said of my feats had I performed them in biblical times? Would they have been referred to as miracles?”

Gordon appeared taken aback. He blinked rapidly and then cleared his throat. “Speaking of miracles,” he ventured, “I have heard that you can resist the hardest blows to the abdomen. Is it true?”

Harry, still reclining on the couch, laughed and lifted his shirt. “My forearm and back muscles are like iron! Go on, feel them!”

Bess gripped his wrist nervously. “Don’t be a show-off, Harry.”

“Would you mind if I delivered a few blows to your abdomen, Mr. Houdini?”

Gordon was staring at Harry intently. It occurred to her that he was serious.

“Why, this is getting out of hand!” she interrupted. Harry would let him, too, she thought; his greatest weakness had always been his pride. But she was the only one who knew of the lingering delicacy of his kidney, and she didn’t want to see his health in jeopardy.

But before she could stop him, Harry spoke. “Well, all right,” she heard him say, and Gordon, in a flash, bent over him and pounded him with five forceful blows to the stomach. Harry grunted in pain and doubled over on the couch.

Bess screamed. She felt herself falling into a momentary darkness, a kind of white blindness. When she regained her vision, Jack Price was grabbing Gordon by the shoulders and shaking him. “Are you mad?” he yelled.

“He said I could,” Gordon protested, pulling away angrily.

Bess rushed to Harry, but he sat up, with some difficulty, and held up his hand to stop her. “That will do,” he muttered. He turned to Sam, who was staring at him, stricken. “Would you sign and date your drawing for me before you go?”

Sam did and handed it to him. Harry studied it, keeping one hand on his stomach. “You make me look a little tired in this picture. The truth is, I don’t feel so well.”

“Get them out of here!” Bess cried. Jack escorted an indignant Gordon and a flabbergasted Sam to the door, then came back to the couch and put his hand on Harry’s shoulder. “Are you all right?”

Harry smiled wryly. “Fine, fine. Just wasn’t quite prepared for it, that’s all. It’s only a muscle.” He turned back to his pile of mail and began sorting through the letters.

Through the fog of illness, Bess saw Harry’s reflection in the mirror over the mantel, and it seemed to her, for the briefest moment, to flicker and disappear. She turned around, in alarm, but her husband was still sitting there, jaw set, slicing an envelope with the hotel’s silver letter opener. Still, she could not rid herself of the feeling that the black magic she had been fearing since their wedding day would befall them after all.



A few days earlier, driving past Central Park on their way to the train station, where they were to catch the 6:00 P.M. train to Montreal, Harry had done something unusual. Seven blocks from their home, he had tapped the shoulder of the taxicab driver and asked him to go back.

“Go back where?” the man had asked.

“Go back to the house.”