Mrs. Houdini(92)

As she stood there on the rooftop of the hotel, the hush almost sacred in its weight, all the old memories came back: of sitting in church with her mother and her brothers and sisters on either side, and the priest speaking in Latin and waving the incense, and the light burning through the stained glass and if she moved her hand in a certain way it would change color, too. In churches she used to feel as if, perhaps, Harry was just on the other side of the nave, hiding behind some curtain perhaps, waiting to step out to her and say, “Bess, darling, I never really died; it’s all been nothing but a trick.” Now she knew it was true, only not in the way she had imagined.

She stepped away from the shrine with the sting of tears in her eyes and made her way toward the stairs. A minute after the door closed behind her, the skies opened up with rain. The drops flared around the little table like broken glass. The guests rushed inside, pressing against one another to fit through the small door.

In the lobby of the hotel, the crowd of reporters caught up with her. “Mrs. Houdini! Why do you think your husband didn’t come through tonight?” one of them asked.

Bess smoothed her white skirt and looked at the men. “Harry was too grand a magician to come back only to shake little bells or write his name on a piece of slate,” she told a reporter named Charles Radley. “He lived in the great moments, and now he is gone.”

“Do you think, if he can see us, he’s laughing at the attempt?” he asked.

Bess shrugged. “I suppose I’ll ask him when I see him.”





Epilogue


ANTELOPE VALLEY


February 1944


Charles set down the newspaper and closed his eyes, breathing in the perfume of the house—the comforting smells of toast and clean sheets and shampoo. It was his one afternoon off, and he relished the quiet moments in the middle of the day when the sun was flaring through the windows and he had the house to himself. It was funny how he worked for a newspaper but never had time to actually read one except on his days off.

A year ago, on this day, Bess Houdini had died suddenly of a heart attack at age sixty-seven. Charles had not been there, and he had not been able to argue on her behalf when she was refused burial in her husband’s cemetery because she was a Catholic. Instead, he had mourned anonymously, and he had not tried to contact her spirit. She would not have wanted him, he knew, embroiled in the obsessions that had haunted her for so many years.

It was one o’clock now and the children were at school. Margaret was at a Red Cross meeting, folding bandages. The war had been going on for over two years, and the dead kept coming home—they were people he knew, neighbors and the sons of friends—but it was Bess Houdini he was thinking about now.

Every once in a while he took out the photograph of Harry at Young’s Pier, as if to reassure himself that it had really happened, that he had not imagined it after all. But Harry was always there, gray-haired and smiling up at the camera in the midst of the crowd. It was the one thing he had kept from Margaret during the seven happy years of their marriage. On their wedding night he had told her his secret—that he was Harry Houdini’s son, and that one day, when their children were grown, he and Margaret would tell them together. He had told her the story of meeting Bess and their decision to keep the information private, to avoid slandering Harry’s legacy and to keep himself out of the limelight. And when the children were born, he and Bess had created a trust account for them. But he had never told Margaret about the messages in the photographs. By the time he met her, it had seemed almost preposterous that anyone else would believe them. And he couldn’t bear the thought of ever speaking the words out loud. He felt it was something private—the one communion that he clung to—that he and his father shared.

He sat at the kitchen table looking again at the photograph. He had seen it so many times that the image was burned into his memory, but it still gave him chills every time he looked at it. Where was Harry now, he wondered. What was he doing?

He thought he heard a car in the driveway, and he hastily slid the photograph back into its envelope. But as he swept his hand across the table, he brushed his cup of coffee, and the black liquid spilled over everything. He let out a small, aching cry; he pulled out the photograph, and it was sopping wet, damaged almost beyond recognition. And the tiny image of Harry was gone, hidden under the black stain.

He almost couldn’t believe it. He felt as if his father had died in front of his very eyes. In his despair he glanced over at the window; the car he had heard was in his neighbor’s driveway, not his own.

He rushed into his office; he had the negative somewhere, he knew. Bess had made him catalog all his photographs after they moved to California, and they were ordered by date now in neat white boxes. He prayed the negative was inside; he had never looked at it, he realized now, but he knew it must still exist. He threw the boxes on the floor and dumped out the contents, searching like a madman through the strips of miniature images. Finally, he found it, just where it was supposed to be. He held it up to the light and peered at the picture. He could make out some of the scene, even though the image itself was no bigger than a few inches across.

In his darkroom, Charles set up the enlarger head and the easel, turning on the bulb and exposing the image from the negative onto the paper. He worked carefully, dropping the paper into the developing solution, praying that Harry would still be there when he finished. What would he do if the image could never be duplicated again? He wasn’t quite sure how the magic worked. What if the tiny, eerie smiling face of his father existed only on the single copy of the photograph he had just ruined?