little insane.
I started to say something about elocution lessons and what he could do, how they’d given me confidence to speak before audiences, but he spoke over me. I got quiet and listened.
Gustave Timm seemed confused by Houdini. When he turned off at Edwards Street, heading home, he waved goodbye and shook his head, amused. Houdini talked on about his wife Bess and her attempt to correct his grammatical lapses, his egregious blunders; and of his brother’s mockery; and of the Russian and Germans and Hungarians and…and…
“Thank you for listening to me,” he said. “You’ve answered my question.”
“But…” I started to protest as we turned onto North Street. “Sir, I haven’t.”
“Oh, but you have.” He tipped his hat and bowed. He left me.
I continued on alone, smiling to myself. The international celebrity had walked me home, had asked me for advice. He filled me with wonder, this special soul, and for a moment I felt as if I owned the universe. When I reached my front steps, I turned to look after the departing handcuff king, a very strange man, indeed-but a kind man, a gentleman.
Houdini was no longer in sight.
Down at the intersection of North and Morrison a farm wagon passed, a horse neighed and stomped. A woman called out; a child yelled back. I saw a shadow by a grove of elm trees. I froze. I saw the quick movement of a man. Maybe. But there was no one there. Yet I felt a spasm of terror. In that moment I panicked. I was being followed. I
Chapter Seventeen
When I walked home from the city room the next evening, I spotted Houdini deep in conversation with my father. I stopped, amazed. The two men, these two vagabond Hungarian souls, looked like old, old friends, both dressed in similar at-home suits, Houdini in a gray flannel jacket, my father in black. Twins, brothers out of a grubby shtetl from an unforgiving land. They could be sipping coffee as the sun set on the Danube. I waved but Houdini didn’t even notice me until I stepped into the yard.
“Pete, a surprise for you!”
“Well, I guess so. Hello, Mr. Houdini.”
“I’m catching a train tomorrow for New York. I wanted to say goodbye.”
I pulled up a chair on the porch. Houdini was watching me, eyes narrowed. He fiddled with the sailor’s cap in his lap.
“Is everything all right?”
Houdini chuckled. “Ah, a reporter’s response. I’ve come to recognize it-me being interviewed over and over.” He acted as though he just thought of something. “I think I left you with a strange impression of me yesterday, walking you back from the theater, my dear Miss Ferber. I always get a little, well, energetic, especially when I’m working on a new stunt, my mind darting all over the place, and that new routine made me nervous. Things always do until I get them right.” He sighed. “So I talk too much and I bounce around-I can’t sit still. I walk for hours. In Appleton if you walk for hours, you end up in the Fox River or in Little Chute. One place leaves you soaking wet, the other leaves you lost in farm fields.” A moment’s silence. “I guess I’m doing it again.”
I felt there was something he was not saying.
In my brief encounters with him, I’d been struck by his larger-than-life presence, a kind of bluster and electricity that the famous seem to project…a little man who filled up all the space around him. Perversely, now on that porch, he seemed my father’s cherished chum, an immigrant stepping out of steerage with a tattered cardboard suitcase under his arm.
My father was talking. “We’ve been talking about Europe. Mr. Houdini has just visited Budapest. He mentioned a pastry shop on the Vaci Utca where I went with my mother as a young boy.”
“Your father and I are taking a sentimental journey.” He twisted his body in the chair.
“But I remember so little,” my father said.
“There are things you can’t forget about that beautiful city. You remember the smells in the air, the light in the sky, the way the moon rises over the Buda hills…”
“Sometimes I think I’m making it up.”
“It’s stamped onto your soul.”
Both men lapsed into silence, a sliver of a smile on my father’s lips. He was enjoying himself.
Houdini turned to me. “So how was your day of reporting?” An innocent question, tossed out carelessly, but I detected wariness, tension in the throwaway line. I stared out at the catalpa tree, the heavy green boughs dipping to the earth. In the flower boxes on the porch Fannie had planted mignonette and marigolds. For a second the aroma covered me. A wash of images flooded me: the aromas of a city old before the Romans arrived, the stench of the Danube in summer, the eye-watery hint of sulfur, the butter-heavy pastry…
I rattled on about the nonsense I’d written that day-an ambitious account of the popular Fox River Baseball League, with snippets of information on competing teams from Fond du Lac, Green Bay, Oshkosh. The Appleton Badgers. But I stopped. Houdini was not really listening, though he was staring at me. “I feel there is something you want to tell me, Mr. Houdini.”
He shook his head. “Oh no, I just came to say goodbye.”
Still, his forehead was creased with worry. What was going on here? I talked about some riverboat excursion on the Fox, all the time watching Houdini’s face, but I detected nothing. Houdini asked my father about My Store, which he’d passed in his wanderings down College Avenue; and he said the mishmash of sidewalk display-lamps, stacked tin ware, toys, porcelain figurines, gadgets, spilling boxes-reminded him of the Lower East Side in New York. My father laughed and said, “My wife knows how to sell. I never did.” He drew his lips into a line. “America has gone on behind my back.”
“Everyone comes to America hungry, Jacob. You got to learn to feed yourself right away.”
“But America is hard work, Harry.”
“Everybody can breathe here.” Houdini stretched out the last word.
“
“You know, my father was lost in America, a wanderer until he died.” Houdini was still staring at me and not at my father. “A man who simply gave up.”
Silence on the porch.
Houdini added, “He never understood America. You gotta know how to invent yourself with all this freedom.”
Then Houdini spoke in starts and stops of gossip he’d gleaned from David Baum, from others. Twice he mentioned watching Caleb Stone hauling drunks to the city jail. “The big crime of Appleton,” he declared.
All the time he was watching me.
Suddenly I understood. He’d come to talk about Frana’s murder. He was here for a reason. I interrupted, “Of course, the city room is still talking of Frana’s murder. The police are stymied. Our city editor Matthias Boon has made it his mission to uncover the truth.”
Houdini breathed in. “No,
“What?”
“You are so much involved with the mystery.”
“True but…”
My father stared into space. “Edna?”
“Of course not, Mr. Houdini. But I’m curious. That’s natural…I’m a reporter.”
Houdini leaned forward and brought his face close to mine. “I’m worried about you.” A sidelong glance at my father. His tone became confidential, serious. “I talk a lot but I also listen. David and Theo and I sat up late last night talking of the murder. We are afraid for
