Mrs. Houdini (6 page)

Even the house she had lived in with him would be quietly put on the market within the year. She had narrowly avoided bankruptcy, and now she was wrapped up in a sordid affair, thanks to Ford. Outside, the sounds on the street were growing steadily louder. Pulling back one of the curtains, she saw a crowd of reporters gathered on the sidewalk. They were pounding on the walls and waving their notebooks in the air. One of them looked up and noticed her face in the window and gave a shout, and the others followed suit, crying to her to come down. “Mrs. Houdini!” they shouted. “Can you tell us why you did it?” Bess closed the curtains.

So Stella had been right; there would be a backlash against her. How anyone could imagine she would betray Harry's memory in such a way, she did not know. But few people knew how much they had lived through together, how they had spent the first five years of their marriage sleeping on cots and in hallways and stealing potatoes to survive. There hadn't been a day in twenty years that she and Harry had spent apart. After his mother died, especially, he clung to her. He couldn't even choose his own clothes without her. Perhaps it was because he felt that Bess was the only one still living who really knew him; in public, he would always be the showman, but at home he was only Harry.

Stella alone knew the full extent of Bess's financial struggles. After Harry's death Stella had asked her, “How could you not hate him for leaving you poor?” Bess had only shaken her head. How could she explain what no one would understand? Her loyalty to Harry, and her belief in his promises, was absolute.

“Harry wouldn't leave me destitute,” she had told Stella.

Stella had looked at her pityingly. “But he did, darling. Look at all the bills.”

“No. There's money somewhere. I'm sure of it.”

Stella had laughed. “Where? Hidden in the attic? In the soles of his shoes?”

“Perhaps. I don't know.”

“Be realistic, Bess.”

Now Bess tried to push aside the memories and imagine what Harry would advise. She applied pink lipstick and changed into a new white dress and gloves. She would dress as the innocent, as she had early in her marriage, when she had played at being nothing more than an assistant unaware of the secrets behind the tricks. She would go to work as usual, and serve lunch, and avoid the crowds, and she would get by.

A year after Harry's death, Bess had opened a speakeasy with Stella, which had quickly failed, largely due to bad investments—the same lack of business acumen that had always plagued Harry. But the thought of sitting alone in the house all day was abhorrent. After giving herself up to brandy and cigarettes and late nights on Broadway, she found herself dancing the Charleston on the edge of the Biltmore Hotel rooftop one Saturday night, kicking her feet out twenty-seven stories above Madison Avenue, and decided she ought to pursue a steadier occupation.

Finally, six months ago, she went into business on her own, in a more civilized operation, and opened a tearoom on West Forty-Ninth called Mrs. Harry Houdini's Rendezvous, where struggling magicians could find work, and wealthy women could eat and be entertained. She hired a Negro woman to do the cooking, rented a vacant space, and decorated it simply with candles, some toy rabbits, white-clothed tables, and framed portraits of herself and Harry. At the entrance she posted a red-winged parrot named Oscar, who called, “Welcome, welcome!” when customers came through the door. The back of the restaurant opened onto a garden patio, the tables shaded in the summertime with lace-trimmed red and black umbrellas.

The tearoom brought back her verve. She was capitalizing on Harry's fame, yes, but it was the first thing she could call her own. Her identity had always been so dependent on Harry's, her name so inextricably linked with his; even after his death she could not escape him. Both before and after he died so unexpectedly, she was completely consumed by his notoriety. But in her younger days, when they had started out, performing as a pair, they had been the Great Houdinis; she had considered herself his equal. When they were doing the dime museums, they had resorted to the pretense of clairvoyants in order to make enough money to live on. Harry would put her into a trance and she would deliver messages, which were carefully orchestrated between them, through an elaborate code of seemingly harmless blinks, hand and feet motions, and conversational words. So much of their marriage, it seemed to her now, had been defined by the codes they created.

Sneaking out the back of the house into the alley and hailing a cab two blocks down, she managed to avoid the crowd of reporters on the street. And when she stepped out of the car on Forty-Ninth Street, she felt a renewed sense of strength; she felt, for the first time, like it would be possible to start her life over the way she had started over at eighteen, or at twenty-three, when she and Harry had become famous. If she could get over this new obstacle, and focus again on reaching Harry, she would be all right. She didn't need much; she only needed to make a living, and to have a reason to get up in the morning. And she needed to prove there was something more beyond this life—that Harry, who had once blazed with an indomitable spirit, had not vanished into some eternal darkness.

When she stepped into the tearoom at half past two, she was greeted by the clatter of plates and the muffled calls of the kitchen staff. How beautiful that these sounds belonged to her. Along the far wall, the pastries, iced in pastel, were on display in pristine glass cases; behind them, the soda fountain had just been installed. The green and pink glasses with their tiny curved rims were lined neatly on mahogany shelves behind the bar.

At a table across the room, one of the other magicians was entertaining a woman and a little girl with a needle-swallowing trick. The girl was enthralled. She pulled on the magician's sleeve. “Tell me how you did it!” she begged in a tiny voice.

When they were younger Bess and Harry used to talk about adopting children. “We'll take in dozens of them, when we settle down,” Harry used to say. “We'll have a bigger family than yours even.” But the time to settle down never came.

They never did figure out what problems prevented them from having children. She never became pregnant. Harry seemed to think he had been sterilized as a result of X-ray exposure. When he was younger, he had befriended a radiologist and used to X-ray himself out of fascination with his insides.

Years ago, Harry had created an imaginary child named Mayer Samuel, whose life story he told to Bess in notes delivered from the fourth floor of their New York house to the third—his admission to Harvard, his marriage to a Boston heiress named Norma, his terms in the Senate. The story culminated in Mayer Samuel's election as president of the United States, and then the fun seemed to fizzle out, and Mayer Samuel disappeared from their lives. Then, instead of children, they adopted dogs.

Standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the tearoom, watching the woman and her daughter, Bess was overcome by a sense of loss. She was over fifty now, and her childbearing days were far behind her. But she had never thought, in the rush of life while Harry was alive, what she would do without him, if she didn't have children or grandchildren. She'd always assumed they'd grow old together. He was so healthy, so strong and vital, she never imagined he'd die so young. After his death, she realized he had kept every scrap of paper she had ever written to him, dating from their very first week together. Some of the notes were trivial, written on napkins, with addresses or questions about dinner. But he had filed every one of them away, and she had never known. How much more, she wondered, had she not known about him?

Bess saw the girl's mother turn and catch her eye. The woman looked away quickly. Bess hurried into the dining room to check on the orders.

One of the magicians—a tall kid who, in his youngest years, used to follow Houdini around to all his New York performances—rushed to her side, asking, “Mrs. Houdini? What are you doing here?” She tried to wave him away, but he ushered her into the kitchen and seated her in an empty chair in the corner.

“For goodness' sakes, I'm not ill, Billy. Just disgraced.”

He stared at her with his mouth open.

“I'm joking.”

“Oh.” He let out a small, forced laugh and cleared his throat.

At the kitchen door, Dolores, whom she'd hired as a bookkeeper, was beckoning to her. Mamie, the cook, was sweating in front of the stove and assembling the cooked-meat sandwiches. Bess saw a glimmer of suspicion in her eyes. So everyone has read the papers, she thought. And they've got to decide now whether I've tried to trick them or not. The truth was that she had a great deal to gain from a successful séance. Not only would it legitimize Harry's lifetime of work but the publicity would help ease her financial difficulties. It would mean the success of her tearoom, requests for interviews, value added to Harry's collectibles . . . It was no wonder people suspected her of fakery.

She ought to be out in the dining room, she knew, going from table to table as she usually did. The functioning of the place depended on her; without her presence, it lost its charm. But today seemed a day to remain behind the scenes.

In the corner, she found Dolores standing over a cardboard box with her hands on her face. “Mrs. Houdini,” she said. “These are ruined. We can't serve them.”

Bess looked in the box at over a hundred tomatoes, half of them crushed.

“They were delivered to the back. There's half a dozen other boxes out there, too.”

“You mean the deliveryman just
left
them there? Without getting a signature?” She was fuming. “I won't pay for these!”

“You shouldn't, ma'am,” Mamie cut in. “They're tryin' to put one over on you. They probably thought you wouldn't come in today. Or wouldn't notice if you did.”

Bess sat down and tried to think. It was unacceptable. She'd have to find another vendor. But the other vendors charged more. Either way, she'd be losing money.

She could hear the clatter of teacups, in the dining room, and the delighted claps from the customers as Billy went table to table doing his card tricks. He was one of the best in the world at cards, she told everyone. She had discovered him when he was a boy and convinced Harry to mentor him. She hated wasting too much time in the back. She had built this business as a way to get herself out of the house, a way to get back into society after a period of reclusion, and she liked being actively involved in its running. “I wouldn't recommend it as a rest cure,” she had once joked to a reporter during an interview. “But it does keep a woman busy.”

“What do you say,” the man had asked her, “to the claim that you're a regular Rosalind? A symbol of the age?”

Bess was charmed. “I would say,” she had replied, “that I wish I were as young as Rosalind.”

From the dining room, she heard a rush of commotion. “Oh, Jesus, are those reporters? They can't come in here! Would you call the police, Dolores, please?”

Dolores stuck her head out the door, then closed it quickly. “It's not reporters, Mrs. Houdini. It's Lou Gehrig! He's in the dining room!”

Bess jumped to her feet. “Lou's here?”

“He had a helluva night last night,” she said. “He hit three consecutive home runs against the Tigers. The Yankees won eleven to nine. Everyone's talking about it.”

Bess hurried into the dining room to find the baseball star dressed inconspicuously in summer-white slacks, signing autographs in the foyer. “Lou!” she called from the back of the crowd. She reached for his arm and led him away from the chaos, toward a corner table. “Is it just you today?”

He nodded. “I'm hungry for a cold sandwich. I was hoping not to attract any attention.” He held up a copy of
Dodsworth
. “Just planning to read.”

Bess laughed. “I heard you're the talk of the town today. It's going to be hard to read.”

“I heard we're
both
the talk of the town.” He smiled grimly. “Don't let those saps get you down, Bess.”

“I'll try not to.”

“You haven't been to any games lately. You know I've got a seat for you whenever you want it.”

“Thank you. You know . . . it's not that I don't want to come.” Bess lowered her eyes. He was such a good kid. She and Harry had first met Lou when he was just a nineteen-year-old college student with a strong arm, who loved magic. She'd known him for years, but she'd seen him only a handful of times, about town or in the tearoom, since Harry's funeral. The truth was, after Harry died, she couldn't bear going to games alone, and Lou's new fame had put demands on him, a burden she understood too well.

“You and Harry were always kind to me,” Lou said, taking a sip of water. “There were times I thought, Well, this man's advice is just as swell as my father's. He always knew what to say about handling the press, good or bad. And I think he would tell you to ignore what's going on now.”