He also has his wife.
Just as occurred in Detroit, she is not on the bridge for her husband’s jump in chains. She is in a city hotel room once again – not bed-bound with a fever, as in the ice story – but bored, weary of travel and far from home.
4
WILHELMINA Beatrice Houdini, known as Bess, is thirty-three; two years younger than her husband. Harry is not a tall man, around five-feet eight inches with the elevator inserts in his shoes. But he still stands a head taller than his wife, whom he often addresses as Mrs Houdini or, in one of his regular notes to her, with childish endearments like ‘Flopsy Wopsy’ or ‘My Precious Lump of Sweetness’. Bess regularly appears in photographs of the pair of them wearing extravagant hats. These add several inches to her height but also seem to weigh her down. She tends to smile with her lips together, as though she were self-conscious about her teeth. This makes her expression seem quizzical, as in a 1907 picture taken in New York with her husband and his mother, Cecilia Weiss, who stares straight at the camera. Bess, by contrast, is gazing up to the right of Harry’s head – as if she has a premonition that he will later caption the picture in this spot: ‘My two sweethearts.’
Two.
Although not conventionally beautiful, hers is a fascinating face, framed – when not hidden under a hat – by curled hair parted in the middle, like Harry’s. Her most striking feature are large eyes under strong dark brows. These eyes are now squinting slightly. She is trying to decipher the latest note her husband has left for her while she slept.
Bess finds the note with a yellow rose placed on top beside her head on the pillow when she wakes. She smiles on seeing the paper, marked with a pair of small damp patches from the flower, but doesn’t read it straight away, putting it aside on the bureau next to a reclining doll. It is the size of a young child, dressed in a blue and white sailor’s suit. The doll’s unblinking porcelain eyes stare at her as she selects her clothes for the day. She takes her time. She has a lot of time. Many garments are withdrawn from the oak cupboard, assessed, and replaced before she settles on a full-length crimson dress, not too heavy, with a ruffled bow at the back and matching button-up boots, size two. When she has put on these boots she turns to the doll.
‘Well, my boy,’ she asks. ‘Your mama is beautiful now?’
Only then does she give the note her full attention. She sits on the side of her unmade bed, feet not reaching the floor, and scans the latest letter from the man she married sixteen years earlier, when she was young Bessie Rahner.
My Angel! –
I pen these unadequate words knowing they may be the last I write to you. Because, My One True Love, I go now to prepare for my leap. The Grim Fiend is following me up and may catch me some day. When he does, be sure my thoughts at The End will be of you.
I am, even until the crack of Doom, Your Own Houdini.
PS – Have had word from Brassac. My aeroplane is near uncrated. I will be aloft before long. Bisy days ahead!
She reads the note slowly, letting the fingers of her right hand follow the childlike, sloping characters. The paper has an embossed heading: ‘Hotel Metropole, Melbourne’. There is more of the same stationery on a desk in the corner. Her husband must have written it there before he left – two, perhaps even three hours ago. They sleep in separate beds so that his perennial restlessness, the late nights and early rising, does not disturb her. She heard nothing this morning and is accustomed to starting her days with her husband gone and only the doll she calls Mayer Samuel for company. He is the child they never had. In Germany in 1901, Harry captions another photograph of himself with his wife: ‘We are 7 years married and this is alas all of our family.’
Nine years on, they no longer expect any different.
The doll they bought in a Dresden toy store – the doll Harry named after his late father, Rabbi Mayer Samuel Weiss – is lavished with the love and attention they would have afforded any infant. They talk to him. They talk about him. Harry describes him as a future president of the United States. He travels with them. He is taken to see the sights. After so many years, neither regards any of this to be unusual. He is their child. They believe this to be true.
Rising from her bed, Bess folds the letter so she can fit it in the shallow wooden box with the decoupage lid that she keeps inside the top drawer of her trunk. The box has a heart-shaped padlock, the tiny key to which she keeps inside a brooch on a gold chain. Her husband gave her the box and its fastening on her last birthday, swearing it was the one lock he would never try to crack. The box is almost full of his notes. Often she can guess their contents before she reads them, but occasionally – as has happened this morning – she finds something surprising. Has this Grim Fiend been mentioned before? Perhaps he is part of this place, so far from anywhere else. Since they arrived in Australia a fortnight earlier she has sensed in his letters a hint of foreboding to which he doesn’t otherwise allude. He is tired, she thinks. They are both tired. He has so much happening here.
Eight performances each week at Harry Rickards’ Opera House in Bourke Street. Also grand plans for his French flying machine, which made the twenty-nine-day voyage with them from Marseilles on the SS Malwa accompanied by Brassac the mechanic. And, as always, there are his publicity stunts, chief among them the manacled leap into a local river.
The leap …
She has missed it.
She realises this when she hears the Town Hall clock strike two. By now, she guesses, he will have towelled himself dry and distributed some signed photographs to spectators. Franz Kukol, his loyal assistant, will have packed away the chains and cuffs. Between handshakes and backslaps her husband is probably scanning the surrounding faces, looking for her, puzzled by her absence. She told him she would try to attend. Now she feels a fleeting pang of guilt. For she could have gone, even though she likes to lie in late. She could have dressed with more urgency and asked Mr Audran, the hotel manager, to organise transportation to the bridge. She cannot remember its name, but Mr Audran would have known where to go, having assured them that her husband’s advertised ‘Leap For Life’ was quite the talk of the town. Yes, she thinks, there had been time enough for her to attend. But she has seen so many of his jumps before – in Berlin and Paris, San Francisco and Chicago and Boston and all the rest. Variations on a single theme in different cities. Every time she must wait for him. And every time it is much the same.
As she settles herself before the dressing-table mirror to attend to her hair, swept up into curls on either side of her pale face, she pictures how it will have gone here: the expectant crowd; the cheering as the renowned escape artist makes his appearance; the hush as chains are pulled tight; the fall, further in some places than others, invariably accompanied by screams of delight or fear at the sound of the splash; the silence after the ripples disappear; murmurs of disquiet as the wait drags on; then the applause and astonished expressions when her husband resurfaces, dripping wet, his hair slicked down, unshackled and triumphant.
Like his letters, it is only the differences that can engage her interest now. A logistical problem, as in Aberdeen. Unusual faces in the crowd. The time taken. Perhaps a new twist, such as bulkier handcuffs or an extra loop of chain. She will have to hear about it from him; try to appear especially eager to learn how it went this time. She will explain her absence by mentioning the enervating heat that has left her lethargic; suggest she didn’t want to expose Mayer Samuel to the sun. She will say she is still weary after all the travelling and the effort of becoming accustomed to this unfamiliar country, with its flies and dust and people with harsh accents. She finds it so warm here after the European winter they left behind a little over a month ago. In the gilt-framed mirror before her she can see dark smudges under her eyes.
Eyes like amethyst, Captain Dewhurst told her at the Malwa’s costume ball late in the wearisome voyage. She dressed as a fairy queen for the ball. Her husband, inspired by their brief stopover in Egypt, made his entrance as a Pharaoh, only to depart soon after. He was stricken with seasickness and spent most of another wretched night with his face buried in a pillow.
So Harry never saw his fairy queen dance with the captain, who towered over her in his smart nautical uniform with brass buttons. His fingertips pressed gently into her back. His lush brown beard tickled the top of her head. When he leaned in close she smelled cinnamon.
Sparks fizzed in her hair as they waltzed, as if his touch was electric.
She loves to dance. Now she is standing before the mirror, which she has tilted down so she can see more of herself. She watches the folds of the cotton crimson dress sway as she swings one way, then the other. She lets her feet slide on the carpet. One two three, one two three, slide, then dip. The hem of the garment crumples on the floor. She sighs. It is too grand, like a little girl’s dress-up costume. She moistens a forefinger to smooth the arching line of her eyebrows. She looks again and frowns: the dress has a high collar. It makes it look like she has no neck at all. But it will have to do for now. She turns away from the mirror and crosses to the window.
Peering outside, she sees a line of cabs, both horse-drawn and motorised, at a rank in the street. She sees a park with a fountain and, opposite, a grand building with stone steps and pillars and construction workers. This is an unfinished city. A place in flux. All the shadows are sharp. The sky is pale blue. There are no clouds. It will be hot again. Her clothes are unsuitable. She must do some shopping. Yes, that is something she can do. But where? Mr Audran will know. Her mood lightens as she thinks of slim cardboard boxes with new garments in crisp tissue-paper wrapping. She will buy a hat with a broad brim to protect her face from this relentless sun. Also something similar for Mayer Samuel. New outfits, too. He must be uncomfortable in his sailor suit with the long sleeves. She dances a few more steps, humming softly to herself a tune from a popular Italian opera. Then stops and stands quite still.
There … she is not imagining it.
She can hear it again – the same sound she thought she heard late the previous evening. She wondered then if she was dreaming. Bess unlatches the window, letting in a warm breeze, the noise of an engine and some male voices. No, it is not outside.
She walks to the door and turns the polished metal handle. Opens it just enough to put her head out, for she doesn’t wish to be noticed, then listens. Housemaids are chattering – down the stairs, it seems. Then, when they fall silent or move away, she hears it once more.
Music is playing somewhere much further along the corridor, out of sight. The same tune she hummed to herself just a few minutes earlier.
5
HARRY must force himself to face the water again on stage that night.
When he arrives at Rickards’ Opera House, a little later than usual, he has in mind a particular program: he will free his wrists from ropes tied by members of the audience as well as several different kinds of handcuffs; reappear, unruffled, after being secured in a black cloth bag locked within a cabinet; also extricate himself from a straightjacket. But he will not perform his celebrated milk-can escape – the routine that has been a remarkable success in Europe before this Australian tour and is normally the highlight of his show.
‘Not this time, Franz,’ Harry tells Kukol as he secures studs to his shirt.
Kukol says nothing. Just nods. He knows better than to disagree with his employer. But Harry notices his gaze straying to the large cast-iron container in the corridor near his dressing-room. Kukol himself, the Austrian who has been his assistant for half a dozen years, helped him design and build the container. It is just big enough for Harry to clamber inside, with his knees pressed up against his chest and his hands, which are cuffed, over his ankles. Water is poured into the container, the top is secured with six padlocks, and he must escape or die. ‘Failure To Release Himself Means Drowning’, the newspaper advertisements promise.
Harry believes the impact of the milk-can routine rests on its simplicity. Audience members see the container filled with water: twenty-two buckets, one after another, are poured while he changes off stage from evening-dress into a bathing-costume. They also see the custom-made clock face, five feet across, with a second hand visible from the back row of any theatre. While the buckets pass back and forth, spectators are invited to try holding their breath to the clock. Most will not last more than fifteen or twenty seconds before gasping. Still catching their breath, they see Harry climb into the can until only his head is exposed, hear him bid them farewell, then watch Kukol – his extravagant black moustache freshly waxed and gleaming – lower and lock the heavy top to the container after one last bucket is added to ensure complete immersion. Then the stage curtains are closed.
