Mrs. Houdini (34 page)

“But the only letters visible in the photograph are the last three,” Bess said.
“I-A-M.”

“Do you think there's something to it?”

“I'm not sure.”

In the pageant article, there were a number of other words. A scripted sign on the boardwalk advertised the Velvet Soap Company in tall white letters. Another spelled out “Wrigley's Juicy Fruit chewing gum,” and “Frostilla fragrant lotion.” And then there was the caption: “Kathleen O'Neill of Philadelphia, waiting for the pageant results.” And Charles's own name in the corner.

Bess rubbed her eyes. “What do you see?” she demanded. “Damn it, it's all a blur to me.”

Gladys leaned in. “What is it?”

Charles shook his head. “I'm not sure. Let me see the others.” He peered down at the postcard.
Come enjoy the beauty of the ocean, wild and wide,
the card read. “I have to admit, it's such a singular phrase, it does seem like more than a coincidence.” He flipped the card over. “The caption on the back says, ‘Young's Pier, Atlantic City.'” He ran his finger over the card. “It's not possible,” he said quietly.

Bess took the postcard, startled. “What is it? What did you find?” She pored over it again, uselessly. She couldn't imagine what she had missed.

“Look—look here. The
ng
of
Young's
has been smudged. Some kind of error in the printing I suppose.”

“Yes?”

“If you look at the photographs from latest to earliest”—he handed her the magnifying glass and pointed to the yacht,
The William,
and the visible letters—”
IAM.
I am.” He unfolded the magazine article again. “Kathleen O'Neill, waiting for pageant results.” He studied the words as if he couldn't quite believe it. “Waiting for . . .”

Bess leaned toward him. “Yes . . .”

“And this one.” Charles pointed to the back of the postcard, where the
ng
was rubbed out. “The letters that are left spell
you
.”

“I am waiting for you . . .” Bess couldn't believe it either. Surely it wasn't a coincidence?

“Where?” she demanded. “Waiting for me where?” Was it possible, if she deciphered it, she could reach Harry this very night? She grabbed Charles's cardboard portrait. There were no words at all in the photograph. “Where was this taken, Charles? Please. You must remember.”

Charles turned the card over. It was stamped with the studio name and the location: Young's Pier. “I remember, there was an exhibition of dancing horses. I asked my mother if we could see them, but by the time we left the studio, there were no more tickets. I was so angry at her.”

“Young's Pier again.” It seemed they kept coming back to that place. Bess could feel her heart pulsing wildly. For a moment, she could not move. It did not seem real. Had he really done it, she wondered. Had Harry managed to come back after all? She could not bring herself to stand up and go to him. Because what would she find if she went now, to Young's Pier? Would it be Harry himself, back from the dead? She shuddered, remembering what she had done there with Young himself. How could he want to meet her in the one place where she had nearly betrayed him?

One thing was certain; somehow, from wherever he was at the moment, he was playing with time to reach her. But she didn't know whether his present time coordinated with hers. If it didn't, would they be endlessly chasing each other?

“I have to go there,” she said.

She looked at Gladys, whose eyes were wide, her dark hair cascading down her shoulders, then at Charles. “May I borrow your car?”

“Do you think he will be there?” Gladys whispered, incredulous. There were tears on her eyelashes.

“I don't know.”

Charles pressed his lips together. “If he is . . . do you think it means . . . he will take you back with him?”

Bess understood what he was asking. What if going to Harry now meant leaving this world to join another? Would it happen suddenly, she wondered, like a heart attack? Would she feel anything? Or would it be simply like stepping through a fog, from one light into another?

Strangely, she was not afraid. But she looked at Charles, sitting cross-legged beside her, his expression grief-stricken, and she realized she could not leave him. She wanted to stay for him. Her life was valuable to someone else. And she had fallen into a kind of love with this lanky, beautiful, vulnerable man.

Bess took his hand. “I'll come back,” she promised. And the look of relief on his face broke over her like glass.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle pulled down the shades, casting the room in shadow. “I always like to begin with a prayer,” he said solemnly, “to help us find our way into the Great Beyond.”

Bess and Harry sat side by side in the Doyles' parlor in Crowborough, at the edge of Ashdown Forest in England. The Great War in Europe had blazed and dimmed and was over now, and England had already begun to pretend it had moved on, despite the staggering number of crippled soldiers in every town. Harry himself had taken on the preservation of Allied soldiers' lives as his mission, raising millions of dollars in war bonds through his performances and teaching young men how to escape from German handcuffs. But the young and dead who haunted him seemed only to strengthen his desire to contact his mother, whom he believed was somewhere out there, trying to reach him, to reassure him that she still existed, that someone was waiting for him.

Doyle reached for Bess's hand and closed his eyes. Across the circle from Bess, his wife—a pale, pretty thing who had been trained as a mezzo soprano in her younger days—seemed already to be in a meditative state.

“Almighty, we are grateful to you for this breaking down of the walls between two worlds.” Sir Arthur's long mustache muffled the words but also, somehow, gave them more weight. “We thirst for another undeniable message from beyond, another call of hope and guidance to the human race at this, the time of its greatest affliction. Can we receive another sign from our friends from beyond?”

Harry, holding Bess's other hand, squeezed her fingers with his; she could sense his nerves. She tried to stifle her own judgments of the process. She wasn't quite sure yet whether to think of it as hocus-pocus or true communication with the other side. Harry himself was fascinated by Doyle's beliefs, and during their time in England he took Bess to the moving pictures but went alone to the graveyards. He said he found peace there, but Bess wasn't entirely sure. He seemed to come home from them paler and grimmer than before. She didn't understand the comfort he claimed he received in such places; she did not think the dead resided there. She had the sense that they preferred to be present among the living.

“I lost my mother, too, you know,” Bess had told him. Why couldn't Harry see, she wondered, that she could grieve as well as he could? She simply managed to hide it better. Moreover, she felt she had, in many ways, lost her God by marrying Harry. She had once gone to church weekly, but now she rarely attended. Over the years she had turned to Harry for comfort, when she had once turned to religion. God had become secondary to her marriage. She wasn't sure whether she could ever be forgiven for giving false séances—false hope to grieving widows and parents—during their earlier stage days. Sometimes, memories of her betrayals still rose up to greet her in the middle of the night, like gray ghosts.

When they gave up their California house they traveled to Europe, looking for a change in scenery. In the Suicides' Graveyard in Monte Carlo—where those who had lost their fortunes and killed themselves were buried—Harry wept, and told Bess he loved her, and she forgave him. It didn't seem worth it to be at odds any longer, in the face of all the devastation around them. An obsession with the dead had swept Europe and America, especially among those families mourning sons lost in the war. It seemed every household had purchased a Ouija board and everyone was conducting their own spiritualist experiments. People, it seemed, were possessed by the paranormal.

Harry had begun a correspondence with the noted writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who, like Harry, had started dabbling in spirit photography and embarked upon a quest to contact the dead. “Where are they?” he asked Harry in a letter. “What has become of all those splendid young lives? Are they anywhere?” He told Harry he had been able to reach his son Kingsley—lost to influenza—through a medium. “I am a true believer now,” he wrote to Harry, “and I also believe that you are harboring occult powers which you may not even realize.”

This, Harry laughed at, but he was impressed by Doyle's steadfast belief that the other side existed. But Harry told Bess he himself was struggling between two opposing forces, that he was both a “skeptic” and “a seeker of the truth.” He detested fraud but desperately wanted to find an authentic medium who could prove him wrong.

Bess was frightened by Harry's obsession. Along their European route she searched for Catholic churches on narrow side streets and attended masses in languages she didn't understand. She wasn't sure that the spirits he was attempting to contact were entirely good. Had he forgotten all the trickery they had performed during their early years onstage together, and the eerie power they had seemed to possess despite their fakery—their predictions that had come true? There seemed to be forces at work that they could not control, and Bess was hesitant to rouse them. She bent her head and prayed into the candle smoke and tried to find the faith she'd had as a little girl, but she felt like an impostor, like someone who did not quite belong anymore. She tried to pray, but the words sounded empty.

But Doyle promised he could contact the late Mrs. Weiss. His wife, he claimed, had “a gift.”

And so Bess and Harry sat in a small circle across from Sir Arthur and Lady Jean Doyle, who had begun to tap the table with her pencil. She did not look the part of the medium; she was wrapped in a cascade of white fur and filigreed jewelry. “This is the most energetic the forces have ever been,” she announced. She drew a cross at the top of the paper laid out in front of her, to ward off evil spirits.

“Who is it?” Doyle asked her eagerly. “Is it Houdini's mother?”

Lady Doyle was furiously scribbling. Doyle jumped to his feet and stood over her shoulder, reading what she was writing. “Oh, my darling, thank God, at last I'm through!” he read. “My beloved boy, tell him not to grieve. Soon he'll get all the evidence he's looking for.”

Bess looked over at Harry. His eyes were squeezed tightly shut, and he was sweating profusely.

Doyle continued reading his wife's scribbles. His voice was shrill with excitement. “Tell him I've been with him all the while, all the while. And I have prepared a home for him. It is so different over here, so much larger and bigger and more beautiful. I am so happy in this life.” Lady Doyle was convulsing, as if with the weight of the pencil. Even the air around them seemed heavy.

“Why don't you ask her a question?” Bess urged Harry softly.

“I don't know if the spirit will answer direct questions,” Doyle said. Lady Doyle shuddered, and her hand began scribbling again. Sir Arthur read, “If only the world knew the great truth, how different life would be . . . Bless my son, bless him, tell him the gulf will be bridged and his eyes will soon be opened—”

Lady Doyle dropped her pencil and fell back against her chair, weeping.

“I'm sorry, Harry,” she said. “She's gone. I'm so sorry.” She turned to Sir Arthur. “Dear, raise the shades. I need the light.”

Harry was still gripping Bess's hand. His face was white. “Darling, you must let go,” she murmured. “You're hurting my hand.”

He seemed to rouse himself as if from a deep trance. “What's that, Bess? Oh.” He released her hand from his grip.

Later that night, in the privacy of the Doyles' guest room, the frigid English breeze blew through the cracks around the window, and Bess buried her head in Harry's shoulder. “Do you think it was truly your mother coming through?” she asked him. It was difficult even for her to believe that the Doyles—the sincerest Catholics she knew—would resort to manipulation. But Harry had produced all kinds of spooky effects through his own “magic.” She had always relied upon him to decipher the real from the fraudulent, and it seemed now, for the first time, he could not. During his own “séances,” to prove that such things could be done, he had produced luminous figures that moved through the air. But this was different; this was a séance with a well-known public figure and his wife who insisted they had spoken with his own mother. It was hard for her to call them frauds outright.

Harry wrapped his arm around her and pulled the blanket up to his chin. “I am afraid that I cannot say. Her eyes—they looked at me, but they were not focused on me. It was . . . strange.”

It seemed to Bess that her husband was a magician who wanted, desperately, to believe that magic was real.