Mrs. Houdini(9)

“Do you think Dash will be cross when you tell him?” Bess whispered.

“No.” Harry shrugged. “And it doesn’t matter now. We’ve made our vows.”

“But—we’ll have a ceremony?”

“Of course.” Harry took her chin in his hand and kissed her again.



They bought her ring in the morning, at a secondhand jewelry store, pooling what little money they had. When it was polished it looked almost new, and Harry had the gold engraved inside with the word Rosabel, which would come to symbolize a time in their lives when everything was simplest, when a man could declare his love on a bridge in the middle of a humid night and everything usual or proper could be disregarded. In the afternoon they were married by the local ward boss, with his secretary as witness, and by the evening Bess had packed a suitcase with her few sets of clothes and photographs and moved into Harry’s room in the hotel across the street. He told her they would be leaving in a week, because Vacca’s was stiffing him and he’d heard of some opportunities in the South. She tried to imagine what her mother was doing at the very moment—some kind of embroidery, probably, or washing the pots, and she wondered what she herself would be doing thirty years later, when she was her mother’s age, and whether there would be anything left of the girl Harry fell in love with. She looked out at the roller coaster across the street, and the young girls in their white summer dresses and the boys staring after them, and the memories, beating with life, like tiny birds, before her eyes.





Chapter 2


THE TEAROOM


May 1929


“He’s here, Bess. Can’t you hear him? He’s with us now.”

She could hear the voice beside her clearly, but it sounded nothing like Harry’s. The man at her bedside, grasping her palm, was not her husband but the reverend and medium Arthur Ford—a handsome, dark-eyed man in his early forties who had proclaimed he could entice Harry to speak to him. Ford had, over the past several months, become a fixture in Bess’s social circle. A few nights before, dizzy with champagne, she had taken a fall as she danced and banged her head against a railing, and Ford had taken her home and wrapped her head in white cloth. Now, he put his other hand on her cheek and brushed a strand of hair out of her eyes so she could see his face.

“Mrs. Houdini, he says that when this message comes through there will be a veritable storm, that many will seek to destroy you. You must be prepared for this.”

They were not alone. Seated in a semicircle around Bess’s chaise were Bess’s press agent, two reporters, an editor at Scientific American and his wife, and a wealthy friend of Ford’s who’d come for the spectacle of the séance. The blinds had been drawn, but the city still burned behind them. On the street, the taxicabs were crowded with kissing couples and red-lipped, white-toothed women who went on laughing under the streetlamps, and how divine it would have been to be young with Harry on a night like this, to be on his arm on the way to a party. But Harry was gone, wasn’t he? She had been left behind, and it was the end of a dream.

Ford strengthened his grip on her hand. “He’s coming through clearly now,” he insisted, closing his eyes and hunching his shoulders, as if with the weight of some invisible force. “A man who says he is Harry Houdini, but whose real name is Ehrich Weiss, is here. He tells me to say, ‘Hello, Bess, sweetheart,’ and he wants me to convey his message.”

“Yes.” The words emerged like small breaths in the cold. “Go on,” she said. “Tell me what it is.”

Arthur Ford fixed his eyes on Bess. “The code, he says, is the one you used to use in one of your secret mind-reading acts, to communicate information to each other.” His voice was chillingly quiet.

Bess used her elbow to push herself into a sitting position. Her head was still pounding from her injury. In the three years since Harry’s death, she had become unmoored, searching for the sparks of her own identity while continuing to cling to Harry’s. She did not want to forget him, and she did not want him to be forgotten. He had made it publicly clear before his death that when he was gone, he was going to try to come back, through the communication of a private code he and Bess had established.

Then, in 1926, he had died suddenly, and young, at fifty-two; and the world had grieved with her. But what had surprised Bess was how desperately the public clung to Harry’s vow that he would return to speak to her. In these wild and unanchored years, people needed something to believe in; religious or not, they needed to know if there was some kind of life after death. They believed Bess’s retrieval of the code would provide the assurances they were looking for.

And so, while she had spent the recent, grieving years sorting through Harry’s estate, and fielding interviews, and attempting two failed businesses of her own, she had also been participating in dozens of unsuccessful séances a month. At first she had believed she could channel Harry herself; every Sunday she set aside two still, private hours waiting for him to reach her. But nothing came of those hours. Whatever powers she, or Harry, had once believed she possessed, failed her. Finally she opened herself up to the idea that he might use someone else to speak to her. Harry had followed this same logic after his mother died, at first reaching out to her spirit himself, in the privacy of their home, then asking Bess to participate, unsuccessfully. Increasingly desperate, he had ventured into the parlors of the spiritualists.