Ragtime (23 page)

Shortly after these adventures Pierpont Morgan suffered a sudden decline in health. He demanded to be taken back to Rome. But he was far from unhappy, having concluded that his physical deterioration was exactly the sign for which he had been waiting. He was so urgently needed again on earth that he was exempt from the usual entombment rituals. Members of his family met him in Rome. Don’t be sad, he told them. War speeds things up. They didn’t know what he was taking about. They were at his bedside when he died, not without anticipation, at the age of seventy-six.

Now, it was not long after Morgan’s death that the Archduke Franz Ferdinand rode into the city of Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, to inspect the troops there. With him was his wife the Countess Sophie. The Archduke held his plumed helmet in the crook of his arm. All at once there was a loud noise and a good deal of smoke and shouting. Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Countess Sophie found themselves covered with chalk dust. Dust coated their faces, it was in their mouths and eyes and all over their clothing. Someone had thrown a bomb. The Mayor was aghast. The Archduke was furious. The day is ruined, he said, and terminating the ceremonies he ordered his chauffeur to leave Sarajevo. They were in a Daimler touring car. The chauffeur drove through the streets and made a wrong turn. He stopped, put the gears into reverse and twisted around in his seat preparatory to backing up. As it happened the car had stopped beside a young Serbian patriot who was one of the same group who had tried to kill the Archduke by bomb but who had despaired of another opportunity. The patriot jumped on the running board of the touring car, aimed his pistol at the Duke and pulled the trigger. Shots rang out. The Countess Sophie fell over between the Archduke’s knees. Blood spurted from the Archduke’s throat. There were shouts. The green feathers of the plumed helmet turned black with blood. Soldiers grabbed the assassin. They wrestled him to the ground. They dragged him off to jail.

In New York the papers carried the news as one of these acts of violence peculiar to the Balkan states. Few Americans could have had any particular feeling of sympathy for the slain heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. But the magician Harry Houdini, reading his paper at breakfast, felt the shock of the death of an acquaintance. Imagine that, he said to himself. Imagine that. He saw the moody and phlegmatic Duke staring at him from under his coif of flattened brush-cut hair. It seemed to him awesome that someone embodying the power and panoply of an entire empire could be so easily brought down.

It so happened that Houdini, on this very day, was scheduled to perform one of his spectacular outdoor feats. He was therefore unable to reflect on the Archduke’s death to the extent he might have otherwise. He left his house, hailed a cab and rode downtown to Times Square. Here, an hour and a half later, with several thousand watching, he was put in a strait jacket and attached by the ankles to a steel cable and hauled feet first halfway up the side of the Times Tower. With each turn of the winch up on the roof he rose a few feet and swayed in the wind. The crowd cheered. It was a warm day and the sky was blue. The higher he rose the more distant the sounds of the street. He could see his own name upside down on the marquee of the Palace Theatre five blocks to the north. Automobiles honked and trolleys ganged together at Times Square as their drivers stopped to see the excitement. Police on horseback blew their whistles. Everything was upside down—the automobiles, the people, the sidewalks, the police on horseback, the buildings. The sky was at his feet. Houdini rose past the baseball scoreboard attached to the side of the building. He breathed deeply and found the calmness in danger that years of physical discipline had made possible. He had directed his assistants to hoist him approximately twelve stories above the street, truly well up in the air but not too high to be seen clearly. His plan was to wrestle himself out of the strait jacket, fling it away, jackknife his body upwards, like an aerialist, and grab the cable hooked to the chain around his ankles. He would then stand right side up, his feet planted in the curve of the great hook, and wave to the cheering crowd as he descended. Houdini had lately been feeling better about himself. His grief for his mother, his fears of losing his audience, his suspicions that his life was unimportant and his achievements laughable—all the weight of daily concern seemed easier to bear. He attributed this to his new pursuit, the unmasking of spirit fraud wherever he found it. Driven by his feeling for his sainted mother, he had broken up séances, revealed the shoddy practices of mediums and held up to public scorn the trappings and devices that charlatans used to gull the innocent. At every performance he offered ten thousand dollars to the medium who would produce a manifestation he, Houdini, could not duplicate using mechanical means. The press and the public loved this new element in his work, but that was incidental. It was as if, now that his mother was dead, heaven had to be defended. Embattled, he felt he would soon begin to distinguish the borders of the regions where she dwelled. His private detectives visit occult parlors in every city in which he played. He himself went to séances disguised as a gray-haired widow in a veil. He would shine a portable electric torch on the thin wire that caused the table to levitate. He tore the covering from the hidden Victrola. He plucked trumpets out of the air and grabbed by the scruff of the neck confederates hidden behind drapes. Then he stood up and dramatically cast off his wig of waved gray hair and announced who he was. he accrued lawsuits by the dozens.

Houdini realized he was now raised to his assigned height. The breeze up here was somewhat stronger. He felt himself revolving. He faced the windows of the Times Tower, then the open spaces over Broadway and Seventh Avenue. Hey, Houdini, a voice called. The wind turned Houdini toward the building. A man was ginning at him, upside down, from a twelfth-floor window. Hey, Houdini, the man said, fuck you. Up yours, Jack, the magician replied. He could actually release himself from a strait jacket in less than a minute. But if he did it too quickly people would not believe he was legitimate. So he took longer. He appeared to struggle. He could hear the oohs and aahs rising from the street as he made the cable jerk and spin. Soon his entire upper half, including his head, was entangled in the restraint. Inside the thick duck of the strait jacket there was no light. He rested for a moment. He was upside down over Broadway, the year was 1914, and the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was reported to have been assassinated. It was at this moment that an image composed itself in Houdini’s mind. The image was of a small boy looking at himself in the shiny brass headlamp of an automobile.

We have the account of this odd event from the magician’s private, unpublished papers. Harry Houdini’s career in show business gave him to overstatement, so we must not relinquish our own judgment in considering his claim that it was the one genuine mystical experience of his life. Be that as it may, the family archives show a calling card from Mr. Houdini dated just a week later. Nobody was home to receive him. The family had by this time entered its period of dissolution. Mother, son and the brown child, who had been christened Coalhouse Walker III, were motoring in a Packard touring car, Mother at the wheel. They were seeing the Howe Caverns, and their ultimate destination for the summer was the Maine shore at Prout’s Neck, where the painter Winslow Homer had lived his last years. Mother and Father were now on the most correct and abbreviated speaking terms, the death of Younger Brother in Mexico having provided final impetus for their almost continuous separation. Grandfather had not survived the winter and resided now in the cemetery behind the First Congregational Church on North Avenue in New Rochelle. Father was in Washington, D.C. He had found upon his return to the flag and fireworks plant a drawerful of blueprints that was the repayment of his debt to which Younger Brother had referred, cryptically, in their last conversation at the Morgan Library. In the year and a half of his life before his emigration, Younger Brother invented seventeen ordnance devices, some of which were so advanced that they were not used by the United States until World War II. They included a recoilless rocket grenade launcher, a low-pressure land mine, sonar-directed depth charges, infrared illuminated rifle sights, tracer bullets, a repeater rifle, a lightweight machine gun, a shrapnel grenade, puttied nitroglycerine and a portable flame thrower. It was to arrange for adoption of certain of these weapons that Father had repaired to Washington and become a familiar of high-ranking officers of the United States Army and Navy. What with tests of prototype models, sales contract negotiations, conferences in the halls of the Congress and various expensive lobbying procedures, including lunches and dinners and weekend entertainments, Father had had to take an apartment at the Hay-Adams Hotel. His response to his personal unhappiness was to throw himself more avidly into his work than he had ever done. With the onset of the Great War in Europe he was one of those who feared Woodrow Wilson’s lack of fighting spirit and was openly for preparedness before it became the official view of the Administration. There was great interest expressed by other governments than our own in the malign works of Younger Brother’s genius, and under the advice of counselors in the State Department Father tended to recognize some of these at the expense of others. To the Germans he was quite rude, to the British friendly and conciliatory of terms. He was anticipating just the final alignment of American sympathies with the Allies that in fact took place in 1917, but which began to be inevitable as early as 1915 when the British passenger liner
Lusitania
was torpedoed by a U-boat off the southwest coast of Ireland. The
Lusitania
, registered as an armed merchant ship, was secretly carrying a manifest volatile war matérial in her holds. Twelve hundred men, women, and children, many of whom were American, lost their lived, among them, Father, who was going to London with the first shipments for the War Office and the Admiralty of the grenades, depth charges and puttied nitro that undoubtedly contributed to the monstrous detonations in the ship that preceded its abrupt sinking.

Poor Father, I see his final exploration. He arrives at the new place, his hair risen in astonishment, his mouth and eyes dumb. His toe scuffs a soft storm of sand, he kneels and his arms spread in pantomimic celebration, the immigrant, as in every moment of his life, arriving eternally on the shore of his Self.

Mother wore black for a year. At the end of this time Tateh, having ascertained that his wife had died, proposed marriage. He said I am not a baron, of course. I am a Jewish socialist from Latvia. Mother accepted him without hesitation. She adored him, she loved to be with him. They each relished the traits of character in the other. They were married in a civil ceremony in a judge’s chambers in New York City. They felt blessed. Their union was joyful though without issue. Tateh made a good deal of money producing preparedness serials—
Slade of the Secret Service
and
Shadows of the U-Boat.
But his great success was still to come. The family found tenants for the house in New Rochelle and moved out to California. They lived in a large white stucco house with arched windows and an orange tile roof. There were palm trees along the sidewalk and beds of bright red flowers in the front yard. One morning Tateh looked out the window of his study and saw the three children sitting on the lawn. Behind them on the sidewalk was a tricycle. They were talking and sunning themselves. His daughter, with dark hair, his tow-headed stepson and his legal responsibility, the schwartze child. He suddenly had an idea for a film. A bunch of children who were pals, white black, fat thin, rich poor, all kinds, mischievous little urchins who would have funny adventures in their own neighborhood, a society of ragamuffins, like all of us, a gang, getting into trouble and getting out again. Actually not one movie but several were made of this vision. And by that time the era of Ragtime had run out, with the heavy breath of the machine, as if history were no more than a tune on a player piano. We had fought and won the war. The anarchist Emma Goldman had been deported. The beautiful and passionate Evelyn Nesbit had lost her looks and fallen into obscurity. And Harry K. Thaw, having obtained his release from the insane asylum, marched annually at Newport in the Armistice Day parade.