Escape Artist

candy machines. Gone-all of that. Where I’d mentioned the London Times, he’d added a phrase: “the most conservative paper in the world.” Why? Where I’d said how successful Houdini was, he’d added to my “poor fatherless boy” the phrase “wealth and ease.” He’d brutalized my work, but I said nothing.

“Quite the coup, Miss Ferber.” Sam saluted me.

When I looked at Matthias Boon, his expression could only be called hatred. “I guess it helps to be Jewish.”

“No,” I cut the silence, “it helps to be a reporter on the prowl.”

Houdini’s praise-his celebration of my spirit-flooded me, lifting me beyond the cramped city room. Something of Houdini’s energy or golden dust covered me, even as I realized that Matthias Boon would punish me for what I’d just done.

The stump-like city editor sat with his pipe in hand, his feet up, munching on the hardtack biscuits he kept in a brown bag in his drawer. The muscles in his neck looked like taut rope.

Well, one more nail to my own coffin. Which, I knew, I couldn’t escape as seamlessly as did Houdini.

Chapter Three

Daylight was fading as I finally turned onto North Street, four blocks north of the Crescent office. There was my home, the white clapboard house with the gingerbread lattice, the floor-to-ceiling casement windows, and the generous wraparound porch on three sides of the house. Flower boxes, planted with Sweet William and marjoram, lined the porch, along with wicker baskets filled with cascading ferns. I loved the house, considered it modern and grand.

But I dreaded what I’d find there.

I dawdled, my long dress sweeping the dirt lane, dust swirling. From a distance in the faltering twilight, I could see my father behind the floral boxes and baskets tucked into the Adirondack chair he lived in these days. Sitting there, impeccably dressed in his black suit with knitted tie. Waiting for me. My heart raced.

Distracted, I nearly crossed into the path of Mr. Cyrus P. Powell passing by in his plum-colored Victoria. He ignored my raised hand of greeting as he maneuvered his horses into a brisk clip. There was always something about the severe man that made me shiver. I’d never seen the prosperous Mr. Powell smile at anyone. In seconds he disappeared around a corner.

All was quiet. Staring down the street, across that expanse of neat and mannerly homes, I was gripped by a wave of panic; my throat tightened. My father was bent over, his head nodding. Flickering gaslights started popping on, a syncopated rhythm that turned the street into a fuzzy, drifting landscape, a dark-laced panorama that made me think of Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” all that heavy gloom, that slate-gray mist, that…that sense of ending.

For a moment I closed my eyes. Stop this. No! But I couldn’t shake the gnawing fear. I knew in that awful moment, paralyzed in the street, that my father would soon die-that this shadowy tableau of a slender man huddled outside his home would be something I’d have to flee.

I swallowed, roused myself, kept walking up the pathway, past the untrimmed lilacs already finishing their shrill springtime bloom.

“Is that you, Pete?” He leaned forward, expectant, a little irritation in his voice.

“Yes, Bill. Appleton’s Nelly Bly reporting home.”

It was our private joke. For years he’d affectionately called me Pete, though he couldn’t remember why. Then a few years back the Elks Convention met in Appleton, and the noisy, rollicking lodge members, bustling with cheer (and beer), hailed one another as “Bill” as they crossed paths downtown. So my father became Bill to me. Pete and Bill cemented a union that excluded my mother Julia and my older sister Fannie, sensible women who had little time for silly nicknames. Edna and Jacob Ferber, daughter and father, I’d long told myself, were the poets in the household, though I kept that news from the others.

Sitting with my father, I talked excitedly of my interview with Houdini, regaling him with anecdotes, imitating Houdini’s voice.

When I finished, he clapped his hands. “Sam Ryan will give you a raise. I’m sure of it.”

I got quiet. Not only were my days at the Crescent numbered, but, worse, I didn’t know what to do with my life. I liked being on the Appleton streets, ferreting out news. I liked being away from the house. I liked being away from, well…my father’s awful pain. For he was nearly totally blind now, only able to distinguish shadows, a hint of brilliant color or sunlight, maybe a dash of flashing movement as a horse trotted by. That was all. Save for the long harsh Wisconsin winter, he sat on the front porch day after day, losing interest in life, sometimes docile, other times irritable, and waited for me to return home-to take him for an afternoon walk or, at the end of my work day, to sit with him. At times a horrible debilitating pain would seize him, and though numb with fatigue, I would stand behind him, my fingers pushing into his tender temples, the nape of the neck, the center of his forehead, until, sighing, his skin grayish, clammy and wet, he closed his eyes, at peace.

I watched him staring straight into the darkening street. A handsome man with a high, intelligent brow shielding dreamy, half-closed hickory-colored eyes; a man always dressed in his immaculate black broadloom suit with a gold watch fob, and the silk cravat one of the women in the household expertly tied each morning. To me, he looked East European sitting there; old world, son of a shopkeeper from Eperye, a village outside Budapest, a market town; a man now without a country, or, more horribly, in a country of no light, no hope. His dark complexion, a gypsy’s pallor as soft as vellum, suggested a man who hid from day-to-day rigor, but that was only now when blindness had marched its cancerous way into our home. The long slender fingers, a musician’s hands, had been intended for violins or lyric poetry, not the housewares he tried to peddle in the emporium downtown-My Store. The name always made me wince. My Store. Of course, now it wasn’t-my mother ran it. Her store.

All he did was sit-the porch, the parlor, waiting for supper. Or summer. Or winter. Or the end of day. For me. He used to smoke pungent cigars but that had stopped. “I need to see the trail of smoke. Smell means nothing by itself.”

I understood.

In the long hot days of July and August, while the rest of Appleton sailed up and down the Fox River or strolled through Lovers Lane or picnicked at Brighton Beach on Lake Winnebago, I sat reading the Appleton Crescent to him. “The Lawrence Varsity Football team anticipates a successful fall program with the addition of Josiah Hunter, transferred from…” He’d yawn.

“Tired, Bill?”

“No. Keep reading, Pete.”

“The Congregational Church will hold its missionary food drive on…”

I wanted to talk that evening about Matthias Boon, about the silences in the city room, but I couldn’t. Houdini’s splendid shadow covered me, though Matthias Boon’s shadow kept intruding. I choked back a sob. In the gathering dark I reached out and touched my father’s wrist. It was cold and clammy, dead. I tightened my hold, but said nothing.

Suddenly the silence was shattered by my mother’s booming voice from an upstairs window. “Ed, are you just going to sit there? The kitchen is in chaos. When did you get home?”

“In a minute, Mother.”

The window slammed down. I didn’t move.

“You better go in, Pete.”

“In a minute.” I didn’t want to move.

“Your mother’s been in a mood since getting back from the store. And Fannie’s giving her trouble.”

I sighed. “Now what?” My mother and Fannie, two strong, fierce souls; demonstrative, hard-nosed. Stubborn, I fought them daily. Julia Ferber, wiry and severe, moved in short, halting steps, tackling a world she thought cruel and random. And Fannie, the homebody, pretty and lithe, belle of the ball, dizzy with boyfriends-and the modish clothing she spent hours whipping up. And the apricot and plum preserves she conjured up in the kitchen. And there I was, the third woman of the household: also strong, but tiny; the ugly duckling in a house where Cinderella made her own Parisian finery and banquet delicacies and danced the night away. The plain sister sat by firelight reading