Mrs. Houdini(3)
“What you have here is a fake box, and I’m gonna show this thing up,” the man cried.
“Do it!” someone else called. “Go up there and do it!”
Bess felt sorry for the Houdinis. She wished she could save them. She saw Dash wince, and she looked at Doll. “Those poor boys. He’s ruining their act.” But neither brother seemed the least bit flustered.
The man made his way up to the stage, cheered by the audience, and when he arrived he stood face-to-face with Harry and Dash, his cheeks flaming red.
“I can get myself outta that cheap box,” he announced. “I been doin’ acts for thirty years, and you’re dirtyin’ the stage with your fake tricks.”
“Please,” Harry said, motioning toward the trunk still sitting in the middle of the stage. The audience laughed again, nervously this time.
The man climbed inside the sack and pulled it up to his shoulders and then over his head, still muttering to himself. When he was completely enclosed, Harry tied the sack and helped him kneel down inside the trunk. Dash closed the latch and locked it, then pulled the curtain around the trunk, and Harry and Dash sat down on the edge of the stage to wait, their legs dangling just above the floor.
For the first few minutes everyone was quiet; Bess was not quite sure whether they were rooting for the old man or for the Houdinis; it would make for an unexpected show either way. By the start of the third minute, the crowd began to murmur.
Doll looked at Bess and beamed. “Dash promised a riot, didn’t he? I’ll tell you what, this is wonderful fun. I wonder how long he’ll stay in there.”
Bess wasn’t so sure. By the fifth minute it was becoming apparent that something was wrong. The crowd was restless, and some people were beginning to boo. Harry stood up from his seat at the corner of the stage and held up his hand.
As the voices died down, the muffled cries behind the curtain became louder. Someone on the other side was calling for help. Dash jumped to his feet, and he and Harry yanked the curtain aside to reveal the trunk, still roped shut. Dash sliced the ropes, and together the brothers helped pull the man, still inside the sack, from the confinement of the trunk. He was writhing inside the cloth, and when they untied it and the fabric fell to his feet, he stood for a moment in the middle of the stage, his body damp with perspiration, and then collapsed on the floor.
The crowd cheered.
The brothers had promised to meet them at the stage door a half hour after the show. Doll begged Bess to go back to their room so she could change. “I hate this skirt.” She tugged at the coarse blue fabric. “I should have worn the red.”
“Won’t Anna be mad when she sees you brought me instead of her?”
“Nah.” Doll shrugged. “She’s got a beau of her own tonight anyway.”
Bess smiled, but she knew why Doll had asked her instead of Anna. Of the three of them, Bess was the plainest; she had the smallest bust and the cruelest shape. Anna, on the other hand, with her corn-blond hair and pillowed cheeks, was the principal among them, and always took the middle spot when they sang.
They lived, with most of the other performers, in West Brighton, in a neighborhood nicknamed the Gut. The rough half a dozen blocks were crammed with shanties, beer halls, and cabarets. The three of them lived in a cheap hotel alongside chorus girls who danced in the bars and hustled customers by slipping hydrate of chloral into their drinks and stealing their wallets. It was Bess’s dream to one day earn enough to stay in the Brighton Beach Hotel, with its white veranda and geranium-lined walkways.
In their room, in the tiny aisle between the bunk and the single bed, each with its own tiny brass lamp, Doll leaned into a hand mirror and examined her eyelashes. “I hate it in here,” she said. “It’s so crammed, and there’s hardly any light.”
Bess nodded but couldn’t complain. It was the most independence she’d had, having grown up under first her mother’s constant religious admonitions, then the protective watchfulness of her older sister. And she did not regret leaving her sister’s tiny apartment on Grand Street, where the wealthier townhomes of Bedford were always just within view, their elaborate stonework and silk-draped windows a reminder of what she could never have. When Doll and Anna had asked her to join the singing troupe, she’d had nothing to lose. She had only a year of high school left, and the careers ahead of her were wife, nun, or shopgirl.
Most of the Gut had burned down a decade earlier, but it was still a wicked place to live, and no girl walked alone there at night. They practiced their act instead in the afternoons, in the park adjacent to the Manhattan Beach Hotel. The performance consisted mainly of love ballads for soprano and alto, accompanied by swaying hips and flickering eyelashes. Onstage, they wore feathers in their hair, black ankle boots, and skirts hemmed to their shins. After a half hour of rehearsal, sprawled on the cool hotel grass, they listened to the guests splashing in the saltwater bathhouses next door and plotted how to win a spot in Henderson’s Music Hall, with its polished wood stage, red velvet seats, and gilded balconies. Bess had been in Coney Island for only three weeks, but already she was lulled by the routine of their lazy afternoons, their evenings at the clam bars or the racetrack, the easy and unpoliced flirtation between men and women. None of it seemed scandalous to her. It did not seem like Gomorrah but rather like Eden, the carousels and the ivory sand and the hotels with their burning lights and pastel awnings, the thick, syrupy smell of the confectioners in the lobbies. She could almost forget the hot, baked sidewalks of Grand Street, the raging nightly altercations of the couple who lived on the other side of the apartment wall. When she was onstage with the girls, the evening air drifting through open windows and the piano music echoing behind her, she could imagine herself living this life forever, accountable to no one, her dark hair braided with pink feathers and the sound of her voice carrying, After the ball is over, after the break of morn, after the dancers’ leaving, after the stars are gone.