Mrs. Houdini(90)

In the quiet of the room after everyone left, she could hear Harry’s labored breathing. “In almost every respect, I think I am a fake, Bess,” he said. He was still lying on his back; he didn’t seem to have the strength to turn himself on his side and look at her.

“What are you talking about? You’re no fake.”

“Remember the song you sang for me on our wedding night. Don’t forget.”

“How could I forget?”

He looked at something over her shoulder. “I’ll come back for you. Promise you’ll look for me. Don’t give up. I won’t be able to rest until I reach you.”

Bess’s hand trembled against his. “What do you think you’ll find when you arrive?”

“There’s something I need to tell you . . . but I don’t know it all yet myself. I can’t know the whole truth of it in this life. But it will change everything.”

“How? How will it change everything?”

“We have to look for each other, Bess. Don’t give up.” His voice broke. “I’m . . . afraid,” he whispered. “And I’m afraid to say I’m afraid.” Then his eyes seemed to focus on Bess again. “You were such a pretty girl. You said you were too young to marry me. But you were all in white.”

He began to cough. He seemed to be struggling to say something else.

“Harry? What is it? Tell me—what are you seeing?” Bess was seized with fear. He could not leave her, he could not go without her.

His eyes fluttered shut. Bess reached for his face, stunned. His cheeks, which had been pink a moment before, seemed to turn blue before her eyes. It occurred to her that she was still holding Harry’s hand, but she was alone. She looked frantically around the room. No one was there. Across the room, the clock did not stop. There were voices in the hall, laughter from other rooms. The automobiles coughed outside, four stories below. Smartly dressed women in gray and white stepped onto the sidewalks, carrying sandwiches in brown bags. But somewhere else Harry’s afternoon was luminous, luminous with color, and he could not see them.





Chapter 18


THE KNICKERBOCKER HOTEL


Halloween 1936


Bess sat on the roof of the Knickerbocker Hotel in Hollywood in a small semicircle of friends and magicians. Harry’s brother Dash was there, and Gladys, with her husband, Lloyd, and other friends of Harry’s, including a California judge, several Hollywood actors, and the president of the American Society of Psychical Research. Across from this inner circle, three hundred witnesses waited tensely on a set of wooden bleachers that had been erected for the occasion. Members of the press and various circles of magic had been summoned, by engraved invitation, to observe the tenth anniversary of Harry’s death. It was an important night; Bess had made it clear all along that she would discontinue her attempts to contact Harry after a decade had passed. “The whole world is waiting on you tonight,” Gladys had told her.

It was unexpectedly cold for October, and the lights of the city glittered, below them, like shards of crystal. On a table in front of Bess was a small altar bearing a picture of Harry Houdini. Above the picture, a tiny red light burned, and beside it, a stand had been set with a locked pair of handcuffs, a pistol, a tambourine, a piece of slate, a bell, and a trumpet.

Hundreds of well-wishers had been waiting for her at Penn Station ten years earlier, when she returned on a train bearing Harry’s body; three thousand mourners had gathered outside the Elks Club to witness the funeral procession over the Queensboro Bridge to Machpelah Cemetery. Strangers had wept in each other’s arms as Chopin’s Funeral March played in the streets, but none of it had brought Harry back.

Bess remembered the weeks that followed as one remembers a storm passing during sleep. Jack Price had cried murder to the press, and demanded to know whether the medium Margery Crandon had orchestrated Gordon Whitehead’s violence in retaliation for Harry’s humiliating her. But Harry’s condition was inconsistent with the blows he had received. Dr. Stone had tried to come up with an explanation as to how Harry could have died of appendicitis when the punches he received had been on the other side of his body; at last he’d concluded that the pain from the blows must have masked the symptoms of Harry’s true illness, preventing him from realizing the seriousness of his condition earlier. But Gordon Whitehead had disappeared; no one could locate him again. In her grief, Bess had confronted Mrs. Crandon, who was doing the traveling circuit in New York. Waiting outside her hotel, Bess had taken Margery by the shoulders and shaken her. “If I find out you had anything to do with Harry’s death,” she’d threatened, her voice quaking, “God help you.”

Margery had stared at her vacantly. “Grief does strange things to us, Mrs. Houdini,” she’d said. Then she had stepped into a waiting car and turned away from the window.

For so many years Bess had stood on the stage in Harry’s shadow; now, it was her performance alone. On the roof of the Knickerbocker, she faced the crowd in a pristine white dress and cape, her lips dabbed with red lipstick, her hair perfectly waved. Promptly at eight o’clock, the orchestra began playing “Pomp and Circumstance.” Bess had asked her old carny friend Edward Saint to officiate the séance. When the music was over, he stepped forward to address the gatherers.

“In this cathedral-like atmosphere,” he began, placing his hat over his chest, “I wish to remind you that this is a solemn occasion, and that the results of tonight are of a private nature. This is a personal gathering aiding Mrs. Houdini in completing her ten-year vigil. We wish it distinctly understood that in this last and final attempt we are interested in Houdini coming to us, instead of to a stranger.”