Mrs. Houdini (13 page)

Bess sat back, startled, before leaning in to look at the picture more closely. Was she really seeing what she thought she was seeing? There were the words from Harry's second code, in plain sight in front of her eyes.
I'll take you home again, Kathleen,
the song began. Their wedding night was the first and only time she'd sung it to him, but it had stayed with him, until his deathbed. And somehow she had stumbled across the photograph of this girl, Kathleen—who had not even won the pageant—the words “Home Again” clearly visible behind her.

Harry had always protested the idea that photographs could reveal spirits that could not be seen by the naked eye, at the same time conceding that there was something eerie and almost otherworldly about the idea of using light and darkness to capture a moment in time on paper. He had wondered, privately to Bess, whether some part of a person was left behind every time their photograph was taken. But the spiritualists' use of photography to show fake ghosts and spirits angered him; in one public demonstration, he showed how he could manipulate the development of film to portray Abraham Lincoln's “ghost” behind him. He always insisted that his own magic was different from the spiritualists' endeavors. His magic was an illusion—something clearly impossible becoming possible. But it didn't claim to be more than that—not divinely sanctioned or preordained. He and Bess had once flirted with that kind of deception, and they could never shake the feeling that there was a darkness behind their fraud.

Bess thought back to her vision of Harry in the silver tray. She had been fooled, she thought, by his photograph on the wall; but then she was not so certain. Was it possible that there was something about that photograph that tied in to the photograph of Kathleen O'Neill?

She thought back to the afternoon of his death. It was definitely possible that a nurse had overheard the first code; but Harry had only ever referred to the second code as “the song you sang for me on our wedding night.” They had never spoken the lyrics out loud. No one knew the details of that night.

She shook her head. She had to get some air and think of something else. “I'm going to get you some water,” she told Gladys.

Gladys shook her head. “Please, I'm fine.”

“It's no trouble.” Bess stood up and bumped into a man she didn't recognize, slightly younger and shorter than herself. The underarms of his shirt were damp with sweat.

“Hey, you're Bess Houdini,” he said, grabbing her arm. “I've seen you before. Three times actually. When your husband performed here in New York. He was something else.”

She hated when conversations began like that. She never knew whether people were being polite or fishing for information about Harry. She looked around desperately for someone to pull her away. Another of Niall's friends, whose name she had forgotten, was walking past; she grabbed his hand and pulled herself toward him. “Oh, Burt! I've been looking for you.”

The man looked at her, surprised for a moment, and then put his arm around her jovially. “Well,” he said. “Here I am.”

“Come with me into the kitchen.” She took him by the hand and led him through the double doors. “Oh, thank you,” she breathed, collapsing into a chair. Her mind was still racing over what she'd seen in the magazine.

He laughed, bending to turn on a lamp. “You actually almost got my name right. It's Robert. Bobby.”

She looked up at him distractedly. “What's that? Oh. That is funny. I've never been very good with names, especially ones I've made up myself.”

“What's yours?”

“My what?”

He smiled. “Your name.”

Bess blinked at him. “You mean you don't know?”

“We've never met before, have we?”

“No.” She wondered if she should tell him. As soon as they left the kitchen it would become embarrassingly obvious. She stood up.

“Don't go yet,” he said. “I was beginning to enjoy myself.”

Bess looked at him skeptically. “I'm sure you know you're handsome, but I'm also almost twenty years older than you. If I had to guess.”

He shrugged. “I prefer older women.”

“Are you married?” she asked him.

“No. Are you?”

Bess hesitated. She touched her hand instinctively, for the wedding ring she'd left at home after the Ford disaster. “Not anymore.”

“Well, that's good. We must keep up the pretense of decency, mustn't we? We wouldn't want to do anything to get people talking.”

Bess was amused. She liked his humor; it took her out of her head. There had been a period after Harry's death, in the haze of grief and champagne, when she'd lost her way with a number of men, many of them younger than she. There was a certain thrill to an affair with a man who was young, especially one who didn't know who she was. But after a while it had only made her long for some kind of real love.

“I ought to go,” she said. “What I really need is to get some air. You are funny though.”

“Well, you shouldn't go alone.” He followed her out the door that led into the alley beside the building and then onto Forty-Ninth Street. Next to the tearoom, a little jewelry store had opened up a few days earlier, selling hammered gold bespoke pieces. It was dark out and there was a breeze going; she closed her eyes and leaned against the glass storefront.

“That's better,” she said. “It's so hot in there.”

Robert pulled her against him and pressed his mouth hard against hers. Bess opened her eyes, startled. For a moment she wasn't sure what to do. Finally she did nothing, and let him kiss her. It felt good to feel someone's lips against hers again, even if it didn't mean anything.

He took her tightly by the waist. “Really,” he said. “You can't possibly be twenty years older than me. You barely look forty.”

“I can assure you I'm not forty.”

Someone whistled from the sidewalk. “Yoo-hoo, Bess!” She looked over to see a girlfriend of hers grinning at her from across the street.

Robert's hands fell from her waist. “
You're
Bess Houdini?” He was aghast. “Good God! I didn't recognize you!”

“Yes, I know. It was nice.”

“I'm—sorry. I didn't mean—I really should go.” He stumbled onto the sidewalk. Bess stared after him. She wasn't surprised he'd run off. The scandal surrounding her was still fresh, after all. Besides, men didn't like women who were famous for being other men's wives. And they certainly didn't like women who famously held séances for their dead husbands. Now she was alone, and the piano music from next door was falling softly into the street.

She rested her face against the cool glass of the jewelry store. She was happy something so innocuous had opened in the space, and not another restaurant to compete with hers. In the window, the female mannequin was dressed in a white silk shirtwaist with a red necktie and a wrist wrapped in gold. She was standing in front of an enlarged black-and-white photograph of a yacht, tied in the harbor at dusk; in the background, a man was leaning over the edge of the boat, waving to someone off camera.

Bess looked longingly at the mannequin's bracelets. No one had bought her jewelry since Harry died. She could buy herself dresses and hats and shoes, but jewelry was something else; it wasn't something one bought for oneself.

There was something familiar about the charm on the mannequin, she realized. It looked like one Harry had bought for her years before, on their first trip to London. She still had it in a wooden box on her dressing table. It was a tiny gold ladybug, the tips of its wings dotted with red paint. Hers was much smaller, of course; they had had very little money at the time, but it was the first piece of gold jewelry she'd ever owned, other than her wedding ring.

Below the man's hand in the photo, the name of the yacht was barely visible.
Home Again,
it said, the words painted in curled black letters.

Bess froze. It couldn't be. She pressed her palms against the glass and searched the image for something else she recognized, but there was nothing familiar at all about the scene.

At the back of the store, she saw a light burning under a closed door. Someone was in there. She pounded on the window glass. After a moment the door opened and a thin old man hobbled toward her, removing a head-strap magnifier.

“What do you want?” he called through the front door. “We're closed.”

“I own the tearoom next door!” she yelled back. “I need to talk to you!”

The jeweler unlocked the door and let her in. “Bess Houdini? Why didn't you say so? This damn magnifier does things to my vision.” He frowned. “What's the matter?”

Bess hesitated. “I'm sorry about the noise next door.”

He shrugged. “I like the noise. Makes it seem less lonely in here. To be honest I came into work so late because I knew it would be chaos in there.”

“The picture in your window,” she said. “I need to know where you got it.”

He blinked at her. “What do you mean?”

“That yacht. Did you take that photograph yourself?”

“No. My son made the display for me. That's him in the picture. But it was taken years ago.”

Bess examined it. It didn't look familiar. “Where was it taken?”

“I'm not sure. I just said I needed something for a display, and he pulled it out of his album and had it enlarged.”

“Do you have a copy of the photograph?” She wasn't sure what she was going to find, but she felt, if she could study it at home, something would come of it.

He looked confused. “What's this about?”

“I know it's an odd request. You see,” she lied, “it looks just like a boat my father used to own when I was a girl.”

He shook his head. “My son has the negatives. But he lives in Chicago now.”

She must have looked crestfallen, because she saw the glaze of pity in his eyes. He thought about it, then waved his hand. “You know what? You can have it—the one in the window.”

“Oh no, I couldn't take that. It's your display.” Bess turned around. The cardboard was over two feet tall.

But he was already striding over to the window and undoing the ties. “It's all right. It hasn't been very successful at drawing customers. I was going to replace it with something else. I thought it was elegant, but I think I need something flashier.”

Bess kissed him on the cheek. “Oh, you're a doll!” she cried. “And don't worry about your business. I'll make sure all my friends come in and buy something expensive from you.”

She hauled the cardboard through the alley and left it against the outside wall of the tearoom. Then she went back inside in search of Gladys. Niall was blotto, leaning against the doorway, a dreamy look in his eyes. “I love this place, Bess,” he murmured. “It feels like home.”

“You looking for your friend?” She turned to see the man with the sweaty underarms, holding a cigarette in each hand. “The blind one?”

“Yes. Where did she go?”

“She left with some fella. Said to tell you he would get her home.”

“She did?” Bess was alarmed for a moment, then laughed to herself. “Well, that's something.”

She brought the picture of the yacht inside and leaned it against the wall in front of her. There were other white boats in the background, their names obscured, and in the distance, a striped lighthouse, a thin beam of light stretched across the water. It must have been some kind of yachting club.

But she noticed something new. The photographer's name, Charles Radley—scrawled in black ink in the corner—had been obscured in the window by the mannequin. Bess had never heard of him. Beneath his name, the photograph was dated April 2, 1925.

The issue of
The Delineator
was still on the coffee table. She sat down on the sofa and turned the pages with trembling hands. There she was, that girl Kathleen still staring out at her, the look in her eyes penetrating—as if, all those years ago, she'd known—and the words “Home Again” blurred behind her.

Bess tore out the photograph of Kathleen. On the bottom edge of the magazine page, there was also a photographer's name, printed in italic letters so small she had to squint to decipher it, the words barely visible as they ran against the corner of the bathhouse.

“Charles Radley,” it read.

They joined the Welsh Brothers circus in the green, sleepy town of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, arriving at the train station in the thrashing nighttime rain. No one was waiting to greet them, and as the platform cleared they managed to find the stationmaster and asked him where the circus tents were. He directed them to a field three miles away, toward the center of town, but they had no money to spare and walked the distance in the mud and darkness. Each of them hauled a heavy trunk, one almost half filled with playing cards. Bess had come up with the idea to make up special packs of cards and sell them between their acts, along with the secret to a sleight-of-hand trick.

They arrived at the field drenched and exhausted. They had eaten the last of their food—bread and cheese—on the train, and hadn't had a meal for hours. Around them half a dozen tattered tents had been erected, and a dozen trucks parked, but there were no people. Everyone, it appeared, was inside taking shelter from the rain. They stopped in a little alley between two of the tents, panting.

“Hey, you!” a voice called to them in the darkness. Bess looked around and saw a light burning in the distance. A figure was standing in a doorway that had been cut into the back of one of the trucks. “You the Houdinis?”

“Oh, thank God,” she said to Harry. “We've been found.”

The figure waved them toward the truck, and they discovered that the inside had been cleared out and done over as makeshift living quarters, with a few cots and a table and chair. A gas lamp was burning on the table, and Bess could make out the rounded, sweating face of the figure who had called them over, a heavyset man in greased black pants and loose suspenders.