Mrs. Houdini (22 page)

At one she went to find Stella at the bathing house, but she wasn't there. Bess only then realized how long she'd talked with Charles. She was an hour late, and Stella had likely gotten hungry and gone off in search of lunch.

It was so hot that her dress stuck to her. She trudged up the sand back to the hotel and went to the room to change into her swimming costume. Even before she went inside she knew something was wrong. The door was ajar. When she pushed it open she saw clothes everywhere.

“Stella? Stella?”

Stella came out of the bedroom, her hair wet and pulled back into a bun. Her suitcase was in her hand.

“I thought something happened! I thought someone had broken in!” Only then did Bess realize Stella was crying. She stepped back. “What is it? What's wrong?”

“It's Abby,” Stella sobbed. “She's in the hospital. Something's wrong with the baby.”

“Oh, God.”

“I have to go back tonight. But I can't find my train ticket. I've been looking everywhere.”

“Don't worry about that. Buy a new one.”

“You can stay. I don't want you to cut your weekend short.”

Bess thought of Charles. She would have to wire him immediately. She pulled Stella into a hug. “Of course I'll go back with you.”

Inside the federal prison in the district of Washington, Bess awaited the outcome of Harry's latest stunt. The warden's tiny office was crammed with a dozen deputies, police officials, and reporters.

Warden Harris had been skeptical of Bess's presence. “This prison is no place for a lady,” he had explained to Harry, and it had taken some convincing to allow her inside.

It amused Bess that in the course of only a year she had become “a lady.” It had not been very long ago that they had happily slept in hotel rooms crawling with bedbugs and washed in basins stained red with rust. But Harry's notoriety in Europe and Russia had found its way back to America, and after fifteen months overseas, far longer than they had anticipated, he was invited to open in New York's Colonial Theatre. Bess assisted him during his act, which began with a new stunt he had perfected, in which he swallowed a packet of needles followed by a few yards of string, then proceeded to remove the items from his mouth, with the needles threaded onto the string. It was a trick he had come across, like many, in an old book of magic in a Paris antiques store.

She dressed like a lady now, too. She shopped the fur and fine dress floors at Macy's and had the boxes delivered directly to their new home on West 113th Street. She purchased haute couture from Paris and wore it to the racetrack in Saratoga, where American designers often hired models to show off their latest designs. In their new home, Harry installed a massive eight-foot mirror in his bathroom, where he practiced his sleight-of-hand tricks, and an even larger tub to practice his underwater breathing techniques.

The United States Jail in Washington was an enormous stone fortress. Getting inside the gates alone had taken twenty minutes. Now Bess, Harry, and ten reporters filed down the hallway and stood with the warden before Cell No. 2 on Murderers' Row. There were seventeen cells in the wing, all of them occupied, and the cheers and shouts of the inmates were deafening.

“This is the cell that held Charles Guiteau after he assassinated President Garfield,” the warden explained. He gestured toward a heavily reinforced square room with brick walls and a thick combination lock securing the iron door. “The door has been dug three feet into the earth to fortify it.”

“But—it's occupied!” Bess said. Shaking in the corner of the cell was a large black man with his knees drawn to his chest. He looked terrified.

“Mr. Houdini will be safe, won't he?” Harry's press agent, Whitman Osgood, asked the warden. Per the agreement, Harry would be left alone, except for the prisoners, to attempt his escape. Harry laughed. “Whit, I'm the one who asked to do this trick.”

“In an
empty
cell,” his agent argued.

“We never specified that.”

“Harry, it was
assumed
.”

Every prisoner housed in this wing was surely a murderer, but Bess felt a wave of compassion for the man in the cell. Everyone was staring at him. “It's all right,” she told him. “It's just Harry Houdini. You've heard of him, haven't you?”

“Houdini!” a man called from down the row. “Let us out!”

“We'll have to search you, of course,” the warden told Harry. “If you choose to go forward, that is?”

“I would expect no less,” Harry replied. He began taking off his shoes and socks. “And yes, I'm going to go on as planned.”

The warden cleared his throat and looked at Harry's press agent. “Mr. Osgood. I believe it would be prudent for Mrs. Houdini to retreat to the office at this time?”

Bess burst out laughing. “Trust me, Mr. Harris. I've seen my husband naked many times before.”

Harry smiled, embarrassed. “Of course you have, dear, but it's probably best to wait for me there. Or should they handcuff you and lead you off?”

“It's all right, I'll go willingly,” she said. She felt the color rush to her cheeks. She was proud of Harry, certainly, but since their trip to Europe it had become clear that he would have more success performing on his own, for exactly such a reason. Many of his escapes required him to expose himself completely to assert the authenticity of the trick. A fully dressed lady beside him, concealing whatever tools a dress might hide, would only discredit her husband.

Bess was escorted to the office and took a seat by the window, where she sipped her tea and listened to the skeptical chatter of the prison guards.

“Do you really think he'll pull it off today?” one of them asked her.

“Of course.”

The guard shook his head. He was a heavyset man with a thick head of hair. “I've been working here for fifteen years. It's impossible. I'm telling you—”

“But he did escape from Scotland Yard,” one of them interrupted.

“Those good-for-nothin' Brits.” The heavy guard shook his head. “They don't know what they're doing.”

“Guiteau was hanged here, wasn't he?” Bess asked. “Do things like that ever make you think the place is haunted?”

“I've seen all kinds of strange things here,” the guard said. “Things you wouldn't believe.”

“You'd be surprised how much I would believe.”

The warden and the reporters came into the office. Warden Harris checked his watch. “He's on the clock now. We'll see how he does.”

The reporters pulled their chairs around Bess. “Do you know how he does his escapes?” one of them asked her.

Bess always avoided this question; she knew everything, of course, but she liked to keep some mystery around Harry's acts.

“She's not gonna tell us that,” the heavy guard said. “Then no one would quit asking her how it's done.”

The reporter changed angles. “What would you do if Harry fails to escape today?”

Bess smiled. “Do? Why, I would do what I always do around this time of the afternoon. I would go back to the hotel and wash for dinner.”

They were not amused. “But wouldn't you be upset?”

Bess took a long sip of tea before responding. “My husband, you see, has escaped from far more terrible places than this. I imagine he could even find his way into and out of your homes at night without your ever knowing.”

The men sat back, startled. Before they could muster any response, there was a knock on the door. The warden opened it to find Harry, standing in the corridor with his clothes back on. Bess looked at her watch. It had been exactly twenty-one minutes.

“I let all of your prisoners out,” Harry said, wiping his brow. The guards jumped to their feet. “But then I locked them all in again.”

“What the devil are you talking about?” the warden demanded. The group rushed outside to find the eight other prisoners in the cellblock, including the black man from Guiteau's cell, locked in entirely different cells than they'd been in before.

Bess lingered in the back of the group with Harry. “You mustn't do things like that, Harry,” she whispered. “People don't understand your humor.”

Afterward they took the first train to New York, where Harry had scheduled a series of rehearsals that weekend for an upcoming act. The idleness of waiting for him was difficult. That evening Bess wandered around Macy's department store, looking for something to occupy her time. The building had opened only a few years before, and the floors and walls still glistened. When she had first become wealthy enough for shopping to be a pastime, the department store had enthralled her. It advertised itself as “a place where almost anything may be bought,” and she was a woman who could buy almost anything. And people had begun to recognize her; the store clerks whispered when she approached, and stepped up to help her before she had even approached the counters. They called her famous.

And she loved the crowds; she loved the soft smells of the perfumes and the long carpeted avenues between displays. But tonight they had been invited to Sherry's for a party given by the insurance magnate James Hazen Hyde, and she had convinced Harry to give up his work for a few hours. She heard the restaurant had been transformed into a royal French garden for the occasion, with real grass on the floor. And she wanted to surprise Harry with a new dress, one with the scandalously low Gibson girl neckline coming into style.

She found Harry at his desk at home after she had dressed for dinner; he was scribbling furiously in a notebook.

When he saw her in her diamond earrings, a glass of wine in her hand, he stopped writing. “Dear, I don't think I'm up for dinner tonight. I'm exhausted.”

Bess's heart sank; he didn't even mention the dress, how beautiful she looked in it. “That just means you want time to work on your tricks. Instead of spending time with me.” A wave of despair came over her. Didn't he see how integral she was to his success? She fielded the questions from reporters so he didn't have to. She sewed his clothes when he ripped them and ran him a bath when his muscles ached from so many rehearsals. His accomplishments in the prison were hers as well as his; she deserved to celebrate with him. And to cancel at the last minute when the hosts had gone to such lengths for the party would be insulting.

He snatched the wineglass from her. “I don't want you drinking this stuff anymore. You never know what you're saying when you drink.”

Bess grabbed the glass back, splashing some of the wine onto the carpet. “I know perfectly well what I'm saying. I've had one sip. You didn't even want to come back to New York today until I made you. You hardly even see your mother anymore.”

Harry's eyes narrowed. He stood up quickly, and Bess winced. She knew better than to imply any kind of disrespect toward his mother. But he only took a napkin from the table and knelt down on his knees to mop up the spill.

“I'm sorry,” she said softly. “I didn't mean that. I only meant that I'm lonely.”

“How can you be lonely?” Harry demanded, still blotting the stain. “You have everything you could have dreamed of. You're a society woman now. You can go anywhere you like.”

Bess was quiet. “You know why I'm lonely,” she said finally.

Harry stopped cleaning but did not look up. “I can't help you with that, Bess. We're just not meant to have children.”

“We could adopt a child.”

“You have a dog.”

Bess scoffed. “A dog's no substitute for a child.” Besides, even Carla, their Russian Pomeranian, was always left behind in New York under the care of the housekeeper when they traveled.

“Well, right now we can't adopt. In a few years, when I'm more secure in my career, then we can talk about it. But you can't drag a child around the world like this. It's not fair.” He stood up. “I'm just very, very tired. And we have to pack our cases again tonight. We have to leave earlier than we planned for Atlantic City.”

Bess watched him turn away. “Is it because you're afraid there's something wrong with you?” she said. “That maybe you aren't capable of making a child?” Harry stopped but didn't turn around. Bess's voice broke. “Or what if it's me? Did you ever think about that? Did you ever think about what it would feel like to be a woman who can't give her husband a baby? What use am I then? You have your work, but what do I have?”

Harry turned around. The hardness in his face had disappeared. He looked sad, and old for the first time in his life. “Bess,” he said. He took her in his arms and ran his fingers through the back of her hair. “You have me.”

“But I don't have you. We've been invited to the most beautiful evening of the season, and you won't go with me.”

Harry sighed. “You know how I feel about those parties. My head's just too full of work right now to carry on a conversation about business or politics.”