Escape Artist

fear there is something in this town…”

“I don’t understand.”

He waved his hand in the air. “You are a young girl…”

Next to him my father was getting agitated, a whistling sound invading his breathing. Houdini pulled back and managed a polite smile. “Enough. I’m a foolish man. I take emotions as fact, and I believe darkness has more power than daylight.”

I caught my breath. “I’m…I’m…”

“I’m sorry.”

My father’s voice was raspy. “Pete, is there something you’re not telling us?”

I made a joke of it. “Bill, I’m spending my days advising young women to use chiffon velvet instead of panne velvet in the making of a shirtwaist.”

Houdini shifted, uncomfortable. “I must go.” He watched me, though he shot a concerned look at my father.

Again, silence, Houdini fidgety, my father wrapping his arms around his thin chest. I felt my heart in my mouth, my throat dry, my temples pounding. Houdini had touched a wellspring within me, ill defined and elusive though it was; and I’d been tossed, pell mell, into a vortex of grown-up trouble. Houdini was telling me something. The man with the tremendous heart had delivered a message. But what? I felt overwhelmed, smothered. Insanely, I wanted to be a little girl again, sitting with Esther at the Volker’s Drug Store, nursing a lemon phosphate. Like Kathe, I wanted the old Appleton back.

Houdini checked his gold watch and stood. “I’m sorry. Sometimes I’m a foolish man who speaks unwisely. I must be off.”

“Stay for supper.” My father reached out, seeking his sleeve. “My wife will insist.” But Houdini said he had obligations.

I rose, agitated. A world I didn’t understand was spinning around me. What had just happened here?

I sat with my father and tried to think of what to say. Cozy platitudes sprang to mind: Houdini is a wonderful man, no? An interesting man; quite the character, no? An eccentric man. A wildly egoistical man. I tried to encapsulate the jaunty Jewish vaudeville performer, but no words came. Something was gnawing at me. My father was rubbing his neck, so I moved behind his chair and began slowly and methodically massaging his head in the practiced manner I knew so well. Deftly, I pushed my fingers hard into his neck and scalp, rubbing the fragile temples, my father’s clammy flesh yielding to my kneading touch, until, at last, I could sense his body relax. His head dipped into his chest, and I knew, for now, the cruel and raw agony had passed. He reached up and touched my hands, his long, slender fingers resting on my wrists, a touch so protective and sure that it always made me want to weep.

When I closed my eyes, I imagined a photograph of Houdini and my father as they huddled together. Fragments of their talk came to me…The old country, the wandering Jews, America, a country in which the landscape went on forever. As I opened my eyes, I was suddenly thrilled that my father had given me a life that was American, that was Jewish, that was mine to do with as I pleased. My father never left the porch and Houdini never stopped moving; but both men were at heart rag-tag yeshiva boys running toward the horizon.

My mother and Fannie turned in from the sidewalk, their arms loaded with packages. At the bottom of the steps they took in the silent tableau of father and daughter, me leaning against him, one hand on his shoulder. My mother hurried past us, shifting the packages in her arms, and said, “Fannie, Ed, we need to get to supper.”

“You missed Houdini,” my father told her. “He stopped here to say goodbye.” But my mother was already walking into the house. I’d caught her eye and I understood how much she resented what I had with my father. At that moment I realized what she’d lost…she didn’t know how to handle the space left by an empty marriage. Watching her stiff back, I knew that she struggled in the same darkness that engulfed my father.

“Fannie, dear,” my father began.

She spoke over his words. “Something horrible has happened.”

I tensed. “Tell me.”

Fannie’s voice was cutting. “Well, you’ve managed to make Kathe Schmidt abandon us. For good. She showed up after school this afternoon and said she’ll no longer work for us. Never again. I just came from her house, pleading.”

“Because of me?”

“Of course.”

“Well, that makes no sense.”

Fannie drummed her fingers on the porch railing. “After those assaults on her, right in the house. I don’t know what you thought you were doing.”

“It seems to me that she was having her say, too.”

“Her poor father accused of murder, and what do you do? You attack her.”

“I didn’t…”

“Edna, I heard you. More than once. I even heard you say, ‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?’ Because she was laughing with her friends in the library that afternoon-at Frana’s expense. You came at her like-like I don’t know what. Edna, aren’t you ashamed of yourself? You practically called her stupid…”

“Well, she is stupid.”

“I know that, but to say it…”

“She seems to think I’m to blame for Jake Smuddie’s leaving her.”

“Edna, I heard you.” A deep sigh. “We all did.”

“Fannie, I’m not to blame here.”

A flash of anger as she spun around. “And who is? She says you intimidate her with your questions and all- out assault. Here she is, the help. Helping me cut dress patterns or…or…we were going to have Wiener schnitzel tonight, but we’re not now. She’s here as a worker, not a suspect.”

My father broke into our spat, his voice weary. “Must we entertain the neighborhood?”

Exasperated, I cried out, “Fan, why must you take her side?”

She adjusted the bow on her blouse. “Edna, you always believe you’re right.”

“This time I am.”

“For God’s sake, Ed.”

“Fannie, it’s not my fault…”

My father, into the squabble. “Could we stop this now?” He half-rose from his seat.

But Fannie was not done. “You don’t know what it takes to run this household. You’re off-you go out there”-she pointed to the street-“and I have to do everything. Do you realize how long it took me to train Kathe?”

“Fan, she’s not a circus animal.”

Fannie snarled, “Flippancy-that’s what you give me.”

“You talk like she’s a dumb ox who is…”

My father stomped his foot on the floor, and we stopped. He stumbled past Fannie and disappeared into the back of the house.

Fannie spoke through clenched teeth. “See what you do, Edna. You drive him to anger.”

I brushed past her into the house, headed to the stairs to my room. “And you drive him to sadness.” I looked back at Fannie. “And that’s the bigger crime here.”

The war among the Ferbers escalated through supper. Which was, of course, not Wiener schnitzel but a dreary liver and onion dish Fannie half-heartedly threw together. Sometimes the aftermath of our battles was a dark curtain that covered the house for days. The walls bled with recrimination and anger and weeping. One time last year it had gone on, irrationally, for weeks-this was just after I took the job at the Crescent. No one was happy with that move…even me. One night, distraught over the screaming match of the two volatile sisters, my mother carried her diary from her bedroom and in a clipped, deadened voice said, “Let me read you everything I’ve written in my day book for the past three days. Tuesday: ‘Stomachache all day, shipping delayed at store. At night Ed and Fan at war.’ Wednesday: ‘Jacob to doctor at noon.