Escape Artist

“Of course, he’s innocent,” I said.

Fannie eyed the chicken that had been scarcely touched. “Do we have to talk about murder at suppertime?”

“You prefer your unpleasantness served with dessert? Lemon pie?”

“Edna!” From my father.

So the Ferber family, walking to the theater, moved with frozen spaces between us, save for my father who leaned on my mother. At the Lyceum, I nodded to old friends and felt a little proprietary about Harry Houdini. The evening was sold out, and I felt responsible, though that made no sense. In the packed lobby under the blazing chandeliers, I spotted the brothers Timm standing by the ticket window. Homer Timm, dressed in his high-school face, smiled at me as I neared. He half-bowed to my mother. His brother Gustave was as frantic and harried as he always was on the nights of performance. Standing next to Homer, though not speaking to him, stood Mildred Dunne, her eyes on Gustave. Dressed in a purple velvet dress that must have cost a week’s wages, she wore an enigmatic yet oddly triumphant smile on her face, much as, I mused, Balboa had when he stood on that peak in Darien contemplating the vast Pacific. In that resplendent dress, Miss Dunne hardly looked the severe high-school librarian. Such elegant plumage and ostrich feathered hat would, I feared, alarm the quiet shelves of Dickens and Thackeray and Bulwer-Lytton.

Gustave moved through the lobby, nodded at Miss Dunne, disappeared behind his office door, circled back, bowed to folks. At one point he shook my father’s hand and spent a few minutes chatting about Houdini, who, he confided, was an old friend. I refused to believe him because Houdini was my friend. But I was happy to see him single out my father. So often Jacob Ferber, standing in a crowd, seemed lost and abandoned, a deserted island in a storm-tossed sea. Backslapper though he was, Gustave seemed genuinely interested in my father’s well being. Showmanship, I thought, but I appreciated the effect.

As we stood among friends, none of us in a hurry to find our seats, I confirmed that the brothers Timm did not like each other. Lately, given my plodding journalism up and down College Avenue, I prided myself on my powers of character observation, my delight in observing the foibles of the souls I encountered. The Timm brothers filled up pages of my reporter’s notebook. I didn’t care for Homer, put off by his rigid physiognomy; Gustave I tolerated because of his jovial demeanor. But they disliked each other, even though they were often seen together. Every time Gustave sauntered near Homer, I detected a slight frown on Homer’s face, a momentary flicker of disgust. Gustave either didn’t notice or he didn’t care. He’d smile foolishly at Mildred and move off, called away by a theater patron who wanted to shake his hand or to ask something. The minute Gustave’s back was turned, Homer’s eyes followed him, and, had I been a nineteenth-century writer of melodrama, I’d have described Homer’s glare as baleful. Hmm, the brothers Timm as Dickensian characters. Well, well.

Put that on your library shelf, Miss Dunne.

The observation thrilled me. In my reporter’s notebook I’d jotted down imaginary scenes with the two brothers, and now, to my satisfaction, they acted as I had drawn them.

Mr. McCaslin arrived, dressed in a theater cloak which he wore on nights when his high-school drama club performed for parents, and announced to someone behind me that the Lyceum stage should be reserved for classic drama. “Not vaudeville antics.”

A bell rang, and we all rushed to our seats.

Houdini strutted his stuff on the stage to the maddened delight of the audience. Expecting sensation and glorious exhibition, I found myself bored. Not that I didn’t marvel at the transformation of the short, unassuming man into a stage Goliath. Houdini appeared in a black frock coat, stiff collar and black tie. He cried, “Are youse ready to witness the marvelest escape of our time?” I cringed, though the rest of the audience waxed ecstatic. His voice managed to echo off the far balconies-thickly accented but peculiarly melodic and entrancing.

Accompanied by his brother Theo and his admittedly sheepish friend David Baum-who kept stumbling into the footlights and almost fell off the stage, to the delight of Houdini himself and the Appleton folks who knew Baum as the genial owner of Baum Hardware-Houdini moved slowly across the stage but created the illusion of rapid movement. Each calculated step was a masterpiece of planning. Every eye locked onto his every movement. He filled up the room, ruled the space. He was marvelous to watch because the stage show was a deliberate manipulation of the audience’s expectations.

For his first act, Houdini encouraged two strapping farm boys to tie him up with a cord and then handcuff his wrists behind him. He drew it out with much twisting and jumping and struggle, groaning, the footlights capturing the beads of sweat cascading off his brow. He cried to the crowd, “The path of a handcuff king is not all roses.” While the audience sat pensive and restless, he twisted, and suddenly he stood there, ropes collected about his feet, handcuffs snapped open and held out to view. The audience erupted. I knew he could have extracted himself within the first few minutes, but the man understood the psychology of anticipation. Ode, I thought, on a Grecian urn, as it were-vaudeville style. He understood the power of presentation, the need to interact with an audience, the swell and thrust of human drama. This was what Sam Ryan had also told me: You need to understand what your audience is hearing you say. Now, watching Houdini, I understood.

Some of his trickery I found tedious, yet I was more interested-though not that much more-by his climactic exhibition, his being bound again in ropes, then lowered into a coffin with the town’s master carpenter Hermann Grower noisily banging nails into the lid and, prompted by the audience, examining the box closely. Grower mumbled to the audience, “It’s real, let me tell you,” spoken with so much wonder and awe that he garnered a round of spontaneous applause. The coffin was lifted into the air and suspended above the stage as a curtain was drawn over it, leaving an open space below it. Silence…minutes passing…shuffling of feet and elbows in the audience…whispers…nervousness. Waiting…waiting.

I fought a vagrant mental image of laughing, happy Frana Lempke escaping into the woods on the arm of her murderous lover. Trapped, unable to free herself. What happened to them? What turned that joyous moment into such disaster? Again and again and again: How did Frana get out of the school? Where was the evil lover waiting? The lawn behind the high school led, a few hundred yards away, into the dense park of Lovers Lane. So many places to hide. The back door of the school opened onto that wooded expanse. I drifted off, an unwelcome reverie, imaging myself in Lovers Lane the moment Esther and I happened upon that body.

The curtain lifted. I jumped, emitted a little yelp, and my mother scowled at me. The box rested on the stage, and from the wings a triumphant Houdini appeared. He invited the carpenter to examine the box and beamed as Hermann Grover announced that not a nail had been removed, everything was just as he had hammered it minutes before. Removing the lid, a disheveled brother Theo popped out. He bowed. Hermann, excited, reached over to shake Houdini’s hand, and Houdini, winking at the audience, put something in Hermann’s hand. Baffled, Hermann opened his palm and grinned. He was holding, he announced, the watch fob that had been clipped to his vest.

“Genius,” he shouted, and the crowd roared.

Masterful. The pint-sized dynamo, all sinew and muscle, a Jewish boy from Appleton, the performer who once called himself the Prince of the Air, stealer of crabapples and peaches. The wonder of it all.

Afterwards in the lobby, that hum of wonder covered the room like a spray of warm river mist. I was standing near the front door, ready to leave, watching as Gustave Timm, preening like a barnyard cock at dawn, leaned into my father, but I had no idea what he was saying. Yet my father was pleased, even smiling a bit. So it was all right, then, this chat.

When I approached, I heard Gustave inviting him to join him and David Baum and some other men for a luncheon two days hence, the day before Houdini was scheduled to leave. That thrilled me, but my father said, “No, thank you.”

Gustave implored him, saying that Baum had requested my father be there. “Houdini wants to meet the father of the feisty girl who ambushed him on College Avenue.”

Baum, like Jacob Ferber, of course, and Houdini himself, had been born in small impoverished villages in Hungary. They had all fled to the golden land.

“No,” my father said, a little more empathically, “I would be uncomfortable.”

Gustave walked away. Listening to these few plaintive words, I wanted to go home.

Suddenly Houdini was there, a small, clean-shaven man now writ larger than life, his black curly hair messed up. He maneuvered his way through the packed crowd. Someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned, expecting to see Sam Ryan or Miss Ivy. It was Homer Timm. He looked none too happy away from the corner of the room where he’d been rooted. Mildred, nearby, watched him, a frown on her face. Another observation for my notebook: The