Mrs. Houdini(5)

Harry’s smirk vanished. “You’re wrong.”

“I’m not saying it doesn’t take a great deal of skill and practice to do it so quickly. I do think you should bind your ankles as well though. It would make the escape seem even more miraculous.” She saw Harry’s face darken and realized she had gone too far.

“I’ll tell you my own secret,” she said, more kindly. “My real name’s much worse than Floral. It’s Wilhelmina Beatrice Rahner. The Bess comes from Beatrice.”

Harry’s anger seemed to soften. “That’s your secret? It’s not that bad.”

“Of course it is. It sounds like the name of some fat headmistress.”

“Beatrice was the name of Dante’s muse,” he argued. “He wrote her into Paradise.”

Bess glanced up at the dim figures of Dash and Doll, ahead of them, growing farther and farther away. “You’ve read Dante?”

“I’ve read everything there is to do with magic. Or at least I intend to, anyway.”

“But Dante’s books are about religion.” She recalled her teacher’s lecture on the Inferno in high school. She wouldn’t classify it as a study in magic—fantasy, maybe, if you took it lightly. But to Bess, the nine circles of hell were a Catholic warning against sin, about how carefully everyone treaded in this world, and how quickly fortune could be taken away. The Italian girls flaunted their untranslated copies of the book to show up the German girls, whom they considered bland and unsophisticated. Of course, on Sundays they all went to the same church, and outside their neighborhood, in the wealthier parts of the city, all of them tried equally hard not to give away any trace of their heritages, using American nicknames to disguise Old World names and American makeup to hide ethnic imperfections.

Harry snorted. “Magic and religion are the same thing.”

“You mean miracles?”

“Miracles don’t exist. I mean real magic.” He frowned. “Growing up, I watched my father pace uselessly around the room when the rent came due, saying, ‘The Lord will provide, the Lord will provide.’ But it wasn’t the Lord who found ways to pay our rent. It was me.”

Bess was taken aback. “I have to say I disagree with you. Miracles do exist.”

“Have you ever seen one?”

“No, but—”

“So how would you know?”

“It depends on how you look at it. A baby being born—that’s a miracle, don’t you think?” She felt her cheeks flush. It was becoming clear how young she was, how little experience she had outside the few blocks she grew up on. She knew the priests did not have all the answers; in fact, one of the ones she’d encountered in a church near the Gut had tried to run his hand along her leg. But it was difficult to admit that, to some extent, life was one great pool of floundering souls, everyone clutching for something to believe in. Church had always set her at ease—when her father died, when her mother remarried, and the house was full of screaming children—she could sit for an hour among the trembling brightness of the candles, the windows the colors of jewels, and all that breathless beauty, and be still.

“Listen,” Harry said. “The only miracle I’ve seen yet is the one that led me to meeting you tonight.”

Bess blinked at him. She wondered if he was making fun of her. She had insulted him, perhaps even humiliated him, and now he was proclaiming some kind of tenderness toward her? He hadn’t even touched her hand, but she felt as if he’d run his fingers down her back. She wrapped her arms instinctively around her waist. “You’re—you’re quite straightforward.”

Harry reached toward her. “Are you cold?”

She shook her head and changed the subject. “Are you saying you don’t believe in religion then?”

“Of course I do. My father was a Jewish scholar.”

“Oh,” she stammered, confused. “You’re . . . Jewish then?” She wasn’t quite sure which was worse—that he was Jewish, or that he seemed to have mocked her own beliefs. Or that neither of these changed the fact that she couldn’t quite bring herself to step away from him.

“I suppose.”

“Do you still practice it?”

“No.” He looked her up and down. “And you’re Catholic, then?”

“Why would you suppose that?”

He smiled. “You said Jewish with such forced politeness.”

She blushed. “I did not. And it’s not that. My mother’s very strict about her faith.”

“So you became a dancer. How very Catholic of you.” He frowned. “You seem to put a lot of stock in what you’ve learned from other people—teachers, parents, priests. But what about what you’ve learned for yourself?”

She felt, in a way, that, by standing here alone with Harry, she had made a decision without intending to. His breath was so warm she felt as if it might scald her. She realized now that she wouldn’t—couldn’t—go back. What she had once considered sinful did not seem wrong anymore. The routines of her new life—the wide-eyed stares of the men in the audience; the giggling late-night confessions of Anna and Doll in the bunk across from her—seemed not only harmless but honest and real. She had been looking for something during those hours she spent in the solitude of a church pew, but she had found it here instead, in Harry’s smooth, unblemished face, and in the way he seemed to want her not for being smooth or unblemished but for being wonderfully complicated, emerging from the banality of her past life to something enthralling.