Mrs. Houdini(93)

Underneath the solution, in the red light of the darkroom bulb, he could see the image emerging in front of his eyes. There was young Harry, standing over the water, and there was the woman in the large hat who was always standing behind him. He watched, trembling, as the right edge of the photograph came into focus. He could see the tiny figures in the crowd, and then—he was so grateful he almost cried—he saw him. The gray-haired Harry Houdini, smiling up at a little boy’s perch.

“Oh, thank God.” Charles moved the paper carefully into the stop bath and the fixing solution, and then into a shallow tray of water. Finally, he turned on the lights and clipped the paper on the line to dry, staring at the image as the water dripped off.

He was so fixated on Harry’s face that he almost didn’t see it, until he leaned in to adjust the clip. Something else was in the photograph that hadn’t been there before.

There, with her arm fastened around Harry’s waist, was Bess Houdini, smiling up at him from the center of the crowd.





Author’s Note


Years ago, on Halloween—the anniversary of Harry Houdini’s death—I came across an article about Bess Houdini’s extensive and failed attempts to contact her deceased husband’s spirit. The 1920s represented the height of the spiritualist movement, when much of the public believed (with less skepticism than they do today) that the barrier between life and death was permeable. I imagined that Bess’s inability to reach Harry, who had been the love of her life, was, for her, the most heartbreaking tragedy. I wanted to create a different ending for her—what if, I wondered, she really had managed to contact Harry? What might have led her to keep such a discovery secret, when she had been so public about her search?

Many of the details in this novel are based on extensive research into the lives of the Houdinis and the period in which they lived. In the years after Harry’s death, in an attempt to forge an identity as an entrepreneur in her own right, Bess Houdini opened a tearoom called Mrs. Harry Houdini’s Rendezvous on West Forty-Ninth Street in New York City, which was featured in The Lewiston Daily Sun. In 1928 she made the unexpected decision to participate in Harold Kellock’s biography entitled Houdini: His Life Story, granting Kellock extensive interviews about Harry and her relationship with him. Now out of print, this volume was invaluable in helping me construct an honest portrayal of their lives together from Mrs. Houdini’s perspective. To achieve as much authenticity as possible, some of the dialogue in the novel has been replicated as she remembered it. I have, however, slightly altered the chronology of certain events and have taken other novelistic liberties throughout.

William Kalush and Larry Sloman’s The Secret Life of Houdini and Frederick Lewis Allen’s Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s also helped in my research, as did many of Houdini’s own writings about his magic. Houdini historian John Cox’s blog, Wild About Harry, provided a wealth of resources. For my descriptions of Atlantic City, I relied heavily on the recollections of my father, whose family lived and worked there for generations. Still, I was surprised by how little information about Bess’s personal life exists. Many accounts of the Houdinis’ lives are conflicting, and most sources primarily address Harry’s identity as a magician, not as a husband. Given Bess’s limited footprint, I was shocked when I purchased a battered secondhand copy of Kellock’s book for ten dollars, only to find, opening the book days later, Bess Houdini’s signature inside the cover. If there ever was a sign that perhaps her story should be told, I believe that was it.

While I have used research to capture the voices of the characters and the period details in the novel, the intimacies of the Houdinis’ relationship are born mainly from my imagination. I can only hope the work lives up to the legacy they left behind.




Acknowledgments


I am tremendously grateful to my agent, Trena Keating, who believed in me long before there was even a book to believe in, and who possesses the uncanny ability to be right about pretty much everything; and to Sarah Cantin, my editor, who is the kind of editor writers talk about, wistfully, as “surely existing somewhere out there.” Thank you to Judith Curr and the entire team at Atria, without whom this dream of mine would never have come true.

I am also indebted to these many friends and mentors for their support of my writing and for extraordinary kindnesses done over the years: Dick Allen; Todd Boss and the Motionpoems team; Kevin Brockmeier; Geraldine Brooks and Tony Horwitz; Connie Brothers, Deb West, Jan Zenisek, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop staff; Ethan Canin; Edward Carey; Sam Chang; Leo Damrosch; Gerald Dawe, Deirdre Madden, Lilian Foley, Jonathan Williams, the late E. A. Markham, and the Trinity College Dublin Creative Writing Program; Noah Dorsey; Jennifer duBois; Jehanne Dubrow; Denise Duhamel; Jose Falconi; Jerry Hendrix; Luisa Igloria; Joan Jakobson; Michael Khandelwal, Lisa Hartz, and the Muse Writers Center; David Lehman; Erin McKnight, and Queen’s Ferry Press; Jim McPherson; Keija Parssinen; Marilynne Robinson; Tim Seibles; Michael Shinagel; Michael Simms, Guiliana Certo, and Autumn House Press; John Stauffer; Tony Swofford; Gary Thompson and the Naval Institute Press; everyone at Union Literary; Trina Vargo, Mary Lou Hartman, and the U.S.-Ireland Alliance; Katherine Vaz. Thanks also to Gavitt, Kate, Kelly, Laura, Liz, Lizz, Lyndsey, Mallory, Stacey, Eric, Jessica, Lea, Rob, Austin, Josh, Loren, Jason, Alyssa, Dee, Erin, and Isaac, for over a decade of friendship; and to the many cherished friends of the Navy, Virginia Beach, and Galilee I’ve made over the past several years.