The next evening the Ferber family trooped to the Lyceum for Houdini’s benefit demonstration. No one was happy. I’d been late to supper, staying too long at the city room and neglecting to telephone home. Fannie, still roiling and fussing from the altercation the previous evening, served an undercooked spring chicken, lumpy mashed potatoes, and a sauerkraut cauliflower so vinegary my father gagged. I apologized, but Fannie would have none of it. Convinced my dawdling had been purposeful and malicious, she blamed the failed supper on her nerves. Kathe, scheduled to help that evening with supper, hadn’t shown up, and Fannie insisted that “Edna as Appleton’s Spanish Inquisition” had badgered the girl to a point where she probably would never set foot again in the Ferber household.
“And just how am I supposed to manage all these rooms?” She flung her arms out melodramatically and let her hand hang in the air like an emphatic punctuation mark.
“Perhaps if you weren’t so imperious with the help…” A rumbling from my father stopped me.
“Edna,” my mother wondered, “why were you late?”
“A witness has come forward.”
“To the murder?”
“No, but a farmer from Neenah, visiting his daughter on Friday, was taking a stroll in Lovers Lane, headed to the river sometime after two o’clock in the afternoon, and swears he saw a girl who looked a lot like Frana Lempke-he saw her picture in the paper-running off into a cove of bushes, running ahead of the man she was with.”
“Older?” From my father.
“He couldn’t tell except that the man seemed to be stumbling, losing his balance as he ran.”
“And he’s sure it was Frana?”
“He claims, yes. He said he noticed her because she was so pretty-and he said she drew his attention because she was laughing loudly.” I pushed away the sauerkraut. “He insists others can back him up. Because, minutes later, headed back to town, he saw a man and a woman nearby, the man leaning against a tree, the woman pulling at his sleeve. Lovers, teasing each other, playing games. Then the woman laughed out loud, and the two scampered out of sight. He said they would have crossed paths with the girl and her friend.”
“Good Lord,” my mother said.
I took a deep breath. “Chief Stone is trying to locate this couple, but the witness simply described them as ‘fancy dressed.’ Whatever that means. If true, then Frana somehow got out of the building by her own free will and met some man, happily so, and she was running-that was his word-running in the woods. It means she did not hide in that storeroom for hours-she left at two. More importantly it means that Mr. Schmidt didn’t grab her, pull her into that room, strangle her, then carry out her body after dark, as Amos Moss suggests.”
“Now what?” my father asked.
“Chief Stone doesn’t know if he believes the man.”
“Why?”
“I gather he…well, rambled, got confused. And I guess the chief would rather believe Frana was in that storeroom. She was in there that afternoon. So how could she have been outside at two?”
“So maybe the farmer is wrong.” My father rested his fork beside his plate.
“But if he’s not, something is really strange here. She hid in that room and then, well, I don’t know…”
“I bet that dullard Amos Moss has some ideas.” My mother, I knew, had little respect for the deputy.
“He’s probably arresting the farmer now for lying to the police.”
My mother frowned at the sauerkraut. “Well, it does seem to suggest that August Schmidt is innocent. I can’t imagine that poor man romping in the woods with Frana.”
“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 future brother-in-law and sister-in-law disliked each other. A trio of unhappy players.
I knew Homer had moved into Mrs. Zeller’s rooming house years back after his wife took sick and the children went back East to the grandparents. Gustave, the newcomer, rented the small cheap bungalow on South Street, just up from the boat dock near the mill district. The brothers didn’t share lodging. Well, I thought, grimly, I understood that perfectly because I anticipated the day when Fannie and I would be miles apart, independent of each other’s lives, my older sister married and probably stopping by on the High Holy Days or, more likely, Christmas. It would be nice if she lived in California, where I had no intention of ever going.
“Houdini wants to say hello to you,” Homer said. “He sent me to ask you because he can’t escape the sycophants.” A strange run of words, mechanical and flat, said while looking over my shoulder and seemingly addressed to the wall behind me. I caught Houdini’s eye. He was being monopolized by the overbearing Helena Poindexter, Appleton’s quintessential clubwoman, all bosom and bamboozle. He couldn’t escape. Her dress had a sweetheart decollete neckline, and under the overhead lights her wrinkled neck sported an ostentatious rope of pearls, a look that didn’t serve her well. Homer Timm slipped back to his necessary wall next to the frowning Mildred, while I made my way to Houdini, who looked relieved.
“You like my show?”
“Of course.”
“I knew you would. I’m the Handcuff King. The world flocks to my shows.” He actually puffed his chest out, a bantam on home ground.
And I’m the Queen of Sheba. Immediately I feared he could also read minds. “Very impressive.”
“I read your interview in the Crescent.”
“You did?” I was pleased.
“Wonderful. I love what you said about my devotion to my mother. And the money I make. I am a success story for Appleton.”
“You are, indeed.”
“I cut it out, two copies, pasted one in my scrapbook I carry.”
I thanked him, pleased. “I’m just…”
He cut me off. “You are going to say you’re just a small-town reporter.” I shuddered. My God, he did read minds. “You remember my advice to you?”
He waited for me to answer. “Concentration and imagination.”
He chuckled. “A good student.”
I caught my mother’s eye. Let’s go home, her glance indicated. But when I looked back at Houdini, suddenly I didn’t want to abandon the conversation because I had an idea. I leaned into him. “Mr. Houdini, perhaps you’ve read of the murder of Frana Lempke?”
He seemed startled by the quick shift in subject. “Yes, David Baum and I discussed it. It’s a sad story, no?”
“It’s baffling.” I tried not to raise my voice.
“Baffling?”
“The way it happened. We…I mean the police can’t make any sense out of the way it happened. It’s a mystery.”
“What are you telling me?” His head was bobbing, his face close to mine.
“Well, watching you tonight on stage…”
“You liked it?”
“Of course, but watching your show, I thought…” I stopped. What did I want from him?
Houdini watched me closely, his face now soft and his eyes unblinking. “And you think all mysteries can be answered? Like in my show?”
I was surprised. “I hope so. I’ve always believed there’s an answer to everything.”
“That may not be true.”
“But there is a murderer…”
“You know, my dear Miss Ferber, murders are like escape from handcuffs-there’s always gotta be an answer, even though it looks impossible. Concentration and imagination. Logic and romance, the two together, you know. Any crime has to have an answer. It’s just a question of how to locate the answer.”
“But that’s what’s baffling.”
He whispered. “Before I let anyone tie me up or handcuff me, I already know beforehand-always-how I will be free. Otherwise I’d panic. It would be chaos, disaster.” He paused. “Even death. You gotta know how to escape.” While he was talking, a young man was dragging at his sleeve, thrusting a paper and pen for an autograph. Houdini tried to ignore him but hurriedly scratched his name on the sheet. He turned to me, “A minute of conversation in my dressing room, perhaps. Is all right?”
I agreed. Hurriedly, I told my family to leave without me, though my mother didn’t look happy. I wove my way through the still-milling crowd to a side door where Houdini waited. Gustave Timm was standing outside his office, his hands holding a stack of papers, and he looked surprised.
Houdini winked at Gustave. “I have a reporter guest for a second.”
Gustave nodded.
As we walked by the open door to Gustave’s office, I spotted the imperious Cyrus P. Powell seated at Gustave’s desk. Oddly, Homer Timm was standing behind him, unmoving, his eyes focused on the money. Powell was counting the money with undue concentration, but he glanced up at Houdini and me, and his look was sour, disapproving. He looked ready to say something, but the stack of dollar bills he gripped seemed more appealing.
Gustave was stranded outside his own office, one he dared not enter.
I followed Houdini into a narrow hallway and trailed him up a small flight of stairs into a shabby square dressing room. I had expected something more glamorous than the threadbare chairs, the dirty chintz draperies, and the faded Currier and Ives prints hanging lopsidedly on the wall. It looked like a room nobody came to…or at least stayed in very long. A musty smell, years of unwashed bodies, too much stage makeup, forgotten clothes left piled in corners. Houdini sat opposite me, poured himself a glass of tonic water, and sipped it. He offered me some, but I refused.
“I don’t drink spirits. It harms my body, saps my energy. I don’t smoke either. Cigars, never.” He made a face. “The body must be kept pure. Remember that.” He smiled as he sat up straight, his eyes fixed on me. “Now tell me the facts. The story of the murder.”
For the next few minutes, a little in awe of the man who drew close to me, blue-gray eyes shiny in the flickering gas light, I narrated the saga of Frana sneaking out of the high school, the phony note, the rumors of assignation with an older man-he frowned at that-the finding of the body in Lovers Lane.
“But why do you think of me?”
I breathed in. “When I saw you get out of that box…” I told him of the locked storeroom, the dusty space with the smudged footprints…and Frana’s bit of ribbon.
“So?”
“So she got into that storeroom and we thought she hid there-or was held there against her wishes, perhaps strangled there-but a witness now claims he saw her running in Lovers Lane a few minutes later. It’s impossible.”
“It doesn’t sound too complicated.”
“Well, it’s baffled us all.” I waited a second. “It doesn’t seem possible.”
“She could have walked out. People miss what’s in front of their eyes, you know. Illusion.”
“You haven’t met Miss Hepplewhyte.”
He tilted his head to the side. “So it’s a box of illusion, that room.”
“Perhaps you can help.”
“Maybe yes, maybe no.”
This was not what I wanted to hear. “I’m bothered, Mr. Houdini, I must tell you, because the school janitor is considered the murderer, so far at least. He’s a gentle man, harmless, a German immigrant who doesn’t understand what’s happening to him. A witness claims he saw Frana and her friend frolicking”-I paused, hesitant with the word-“in Lovers Lane. Well, sir, Mr. Schmidt is not one to frolic. Believe me.” I was going on and on, becoming impassioned, and I realized that Houdini was smiling at me. No, he was grinning widely.
“What?” A little peeved.
“I enjoy your spirit.”
“Well…”
“It’s good, really. You write with flavor, and you speak with a passion. And you are how old?”
“Nineteen.”
“A child.”
“Hardly.”
“Are you married?”
“Of course not.” What was wrong with this man?
“I married my Bess young, knew her a matter of days. A slip of a girl, though the love of my life, this wonderful woman. She is better than my career, of course. In a few years I’ll stop this nonsense and have children. Lots of them.”
“I have no intention of getting married,” I announced, surprising myself.
“Then you better get famous fast.”
“Why?”
“We all got to have someone to applaud for us.”
That made no sense. I wanted to get back to the story of Frana. “Mr. Houdini, people can’t walk through walls…”
“Of course they can.”
“No, no, realistically.” I was getting frustrated. “I know you do an act on stage, but you can’t just walk through a wall.” I pointed to an outside wall, bright under blazing gaslight.
“You just have to know how to do it.”
He was toying with me, as he’d done before, and, again, I realized I took myself too seriously. All right. But this pleasant banter was getting us nowhere. Frankly, it was time for bed. Eight hours of blissful sleep each night, my practical regimen, my requirement, no less.
“All along,” I emphasized, “I was thinking Frana was hiding in that locked, unused storeroom, but maybe she was running through the woods, happy as can be.” I made eye contact. “That means she got out.”
“Happy, until someone snapped her neck.” Houdini dramatically twisted his wrists.
I trembled. “It seems impossible.”
“Mysteries are like handcuffs…”
I interrupted. “I know, I know. They always have an answer.”
“Let me think on this. I’m here for three more days.” He stood. “Now I’ll walk you home.”
“Oh, no. That’s not necessary. Appleton is a safe town. It’s not that far.”
His face set, firm. “I am a gentleman. I can do no less.”
I acquiesced reluctantly, though flattered. As we walked out, Gustave Timm was turning off the gaslights and locking the doors behind us. Mildred Dunne had left. Cinderella back at the hearth, dreaming of September and her honeymoon at Niagara Falls. Outside, waiting for his brother, Homer Timm stood with his arms folded over his chest. He seemed startled to see Houdini and me together, Houdini cradling my elbow. We turned down the sidewalk, crossing the street. When I glanced back both brothers were still outside the Lyceum, two shadows against the dark facade, unmoving.
Under a moonlit sky, we walked to my home in comfortable silence. The only thing Houdini said was that the night reminded him of a recent stroll on the Nevsky Prospekt in Moscow.
“The sky was the same pale blue with a hint of sulfur in the air. Like here in Appleton from the paper mills out at the Flats. I never forget the odor of sulfur in the air. In Moscow I feel like I’m in prison. The Czar’s police follow you everywhere. It ain’t America, Miss Ferber.” He grew quiet, neither of us talking until I pointed out my house, dark now, on North Street. He bowed and I thanked him.
“I have an answer for you,” he said, suddenly. “There is only one possible answer.”
I turned back. “What is it?”
“Not yet.”
“When?”
He chuckled in the darkness. “The impatience of young people. I will sleep on it.”
He disappeared into the dark night.