Mrs. Houdini (38 page)

“Why, this is getting out of hand!” she interrupted. Harry would let him, too, she thought; his greatest weakness had always been his pride. But she was the only one who knew of the lingering delicacy of his kidney, and she didn't want to see his health in jeopardy.

But before she could stop him, Harry spoke. “Well, all right,” she heard him say, and Gordon, in a flash, bent over him and pounded him with five forceful blows to the stomach. Harry grunted in pain and doubled over on the couch.

Bess screamed. She felt herself falling into a momentary darkness, a kind of white blindness. When she regained her vision, Jack Price was grabbing Gordon by the shoulders and shaking him. “Are you mad?” he yelled.

“He said I could,” Gordon protested, pulling away angrily.

Bess rushed to Harry, but he sat up, with some difficulty, and held up his hand to stop her. “That will do,” he muttered. He turned to Sam, who was staring at him, stricken. “Would you sign and date your drawing for me before you go?”

Sam did and handed it to him. Harry studied it, keeping one hand on his stomach. “You make me look a little tired in this picture. The truth is, I don't feel so well.”

“Get them out of here!” Bess cried. Jack escorted an indignant Gordon and a flabbergasted Sam to the door, then came back to the couch and put his hand on Harry's shoulder. “Are you all right?”

Harry smiled wryly. “Fine, fine. Just wasn't quite prepared for it, that's all. It's only a muscle.” He turned back to his pile of mail and began sorting through the letters.

Through the fog of illness, Bess saw Harry's reflection in the mirror over the mantel, and it seemed to her, for the briefest moment, to flicker and disappear. She turned around, in alarm, but her husband was still sitting there, jaw set, slicing an envelope with the hotel's silver letter opener. Still, she could not rid herself of the feeling that the black magic she had been fearing since their wedding day would befall them after all.

A few days earlier, driving past Central Park on their way to the train station, where they were to catch the 6:00
P
.
M
. train to Montreal, Harry had done something unusual. Seven blocks from their home, he had tapped the shoulder of the taxicab driver and asked him to go back.

“Go back where?” the man had asked.

“Go back to the house.”

“Why?” Bess had asked, alarmed. “Did you forget something?”

“Please don't ask questions. Just turn around and go back.”

Rain was coming down in torrents by the time they reached 113th Street; Bess could barely make out the street signs. When the driver slowed, Harry jumped out of the car and stood under the open sky, looking up at the house, as if it was the last time he would see it.

“Harry, your coat!” Bess cried. “You'll get soaked!”

But he didn't seem to hear. He stood on the sidewalk for a moment and then slowly turned and got back in the car.

“You're sopping wet now!” Bess threw his coat over his shoulders and tried to pat him dry. “Why didn't you go inside?”

Harry shook his head. “I thought I forgot something, but I didn't after all.”

After the blow to Harry's stomach, they made their train to Detroit from Montreal, but by the time the curtain went up on Harry's next show, his temperature had soared to 102. During one phase of the first act, he was to pull a thousand yards of silk ribbon from a glass bowl on a table. But he was so weak that he could not finish. He beckoned to Jim Collins to come out and complete the trick. Standing by Jim's side on the open stage, he glanced over at Bess, sitting in the wings. Spread across his face was the saddest expression of humiliation she had ever seen. After the second act she heard him say to the stagehand, “Drop the curtains, I can't go any further.” When the curtain descended, he collapsed in her arms.

Harry was admitted into Grace Hospital that evening. Bess wired Dr. Stone about Harry's condition and asked what to do. He wired back and told her to agree to an operation, and asked if she wanted him to come from New York. She thought about it but declined; she didn't want Harry to think his condition was too serious.

As he was being wheeled into the operating room, Harry tried to stand up and walk. He was almost incoherent, and Bess had to coax him back onto the gurney. As he lay there, staring vacantly at the ceiling, Bess collapsed. Jim Collins, who had not left their side since the theater, rushed to her. “Get someone over here!” he cried. He put his hand on her forehead. “Jesus, she's got a fever of her own.”

Harry, in his own state of delirium, did not seem aware that she had fallen. “Say, I could still lick the two of you,” she heard him say to the orderlies.

When she awoke, Stella was by her bedside. “Are you really awake now?” she asked. “You've been waking up and going back under for days.”

“What day is it?” Bess asked groggily. She had a pounding headache. “How did you get here?”

Stella glanced at the clock. “Jim telephoned. He said you and Harry had both been admitted to the hospital, so I rushed out.”

Bess heard a sound from the hall. A man appeared in the doorway, his figure obscured by the sun streaming through the windows behind him. “Oh, Harry,” Bess said, relieved. “There you are.” The man took a step forward into the shadows of the room. It was not Harry; it was Dash Weiss.

“Oh, thank God, she's up,” she heard him say.

Stella shook her head. “Only just.”

Bess struggled to sit up. “Dash?”

“You have to come to Harry's room. He hasn't got much time.”

“Much time for what?” A nurse came in behind him and, seeing that Bess was awake, rushed over to her bedside.

“It's okay, I've got her,” Dash told her, helping Bess out of bed and into a wheelchair.

“Come on, we've got to go.”

“Time for what?” Bess demanded. No one answered. Stella laid a thin blanket over her lap.

Harry's room was three down from hers. Through the open door, she could see him lying in his hospital bed, unmoving. A tube had been inserted into the side of his mouth. One of the doctors was monitoring his heartbeat with a stethoscope. Nurses were standing along the walls, as if at attention. Bess screamed.

Stella touched her arm gently. “They say he had a gangrenous appendix. He's had two surgeries since he came in. You've been out for days.”

Harry's eyes flickered open, and he saw Bess. “Darling,” he mumbled. His lips were very dry; the skin was peeling off them. She stumbled out of her wheelchair and onto the edge of the bed. “Remember the code,” he whispered, gripping her hand. “Rosabelle, believe.”

“No, Harry,” Bess sobbed. “Don't say that.”

“I have been tired for a long time. Sometime or other we all grow tired.”

“Give them a goddamn moment, would you,” she heard Dash say, behind her. He ushered everyone out of the room. He himself was the last to go. He put his hand on Harry's shoulder. “I'm sorry, old boy,” he murmured. “About our quarreling.” They were two men who had lived a century between them, but in that moment they were merely boys again, shuffling cards together in Wisconsin, playing at fame. Bess reached for Dash's hand, the same hand that had shaken hers so many years before, outside Vacca's Theater. Whatever had become of Doll, she wondered. Pretty, petite Doll, with her ears like perfect shells? And Anna? It seemed like a lifetime ago. She wasn't quite sure what was happening. Just a few moments ago Harry had been going into surgery, and suddenly she was sitting beside him and he looked ten pounds lighter.

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.

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.