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.
“Jews can breathe in America.” My father stressed the 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, you want to solve it, Miss Ferber.”
“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 you. You, Jacob’s pioneering daughter. You walk alone…” He glanced nervously at my father. “All of my life I’ve always sensed trouble…danger…and, well, I 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. Edna and Fan crying. Fan smashes vase.’ Thursday: ‘Bad headache. Pain in side. Jacob groaning in his sleep. Edna and Fan tore at each other’s hearts. Fire and pain.’” She’d paused. “What shall I write tonight?”
It had done no good: Fan was jealous of me, and I was of her; and each of us watched for a signal to rush to battle.
When my father attempted a few words about Houdini’s surprise visit, my mother snapped, “And didn’t you ask him to supper, Jacob? Did you leave your manners behind?” Fannie and I muttered at each other. My mother, alarmed by the loss of Kathe Schmidt, blamed me. “Perhaps if you apologize to her, Edna.”
“For what?”
“Ed, you were always a bit cruel to her.”
“I talk to her.”
My mother’s voice was matter-of-fact. “Sometimes you don’t hear the acid in your tongue.”
“You talk like I’m a witch.” I placed a piece of dark rye bread I’d just buttered onto a dish and announced, “Kathe wouldn’t accept an apology from me because I don’t believe she can recognize decency if she toppled onto it.”
Fannie grumbled, “See, Mother, she…”
“Ed.” My mother cleared her throat. “Today I learned a disturbing bit of news.” She glanced at Fannie, who nodded. “Some townspeople mentioned that you actually paid a visit to Jake Smuddie’s home to see him. His father told people.”
“I’m a reporter.”
“A young lady does not make such a visit, unannounced, unescorted. Or, I suppose, even invited. Ed, think of your reputation in this town. People talk. Yes, you have a job to do, but this murder seems to have pushed you beyond the line of respectable behavior and conduct and…”
“He wasn’t home.”
“And had he been?”
“I knew he wasn’t home.”
“Then why did you go there?”
“I’m a reporter.”
Fannie was frustrated. “If you use that sentence one more time…”
My mother pushed some dishes around, bit her lip. “You were also seen talking with him at the gazebo in the park, the two of you, at twilight, talking, alone.”
I waited. “Yes?”
Fannie raised her voice. “She doesn’t understand, Mother.”
“Oh, I understand. Of course I do. You’re assuming my conduct is…improper.”
“Well, it is,” Fannie insisted.
“And yours isn’t?” I shot back.
Fannie mock laughed. “Mine? How is that possible?”
“I’m talking about your baseless accusations-that’s the real questionable conduct here.”
“Your name keeps coming up,” my mother said. “I don’t know what to say to folks anymore. I’m out of excuses.” Again the deadpan voice, weary, broken.
“You don’t realize, Edna, how people are gossiping about you,” Fannie added.
My mother sighed. “You’re my daughter and…”
A fist crashed down on the table. Dishes shook. A plate slid to the floor, smashed. Water sloshed out of a glass onto the crisp white linen cloth. My father half-rose from his chair. “Have you all lost your minds?” He sat down, folded his arms, and looked as though he were in prayer.
Silence in the room, but not peace: the Ferber women glowered like tempestuous Macbeth witches on an Appleton heath.
My mother turned on him, her eyes cold. “Jacob, I’m trying to guard the reputation of our daughter. People are talking. What they’re saying is not nice. So, yes, maybe I have lost my mind. Someone in this family has to. You sit all day and…” She stopped, breathed in. “I slave all day in that hell hole of a store, making a penny here, a nickel there, pleading the change from dull farmers’ wives who look at me as though I’m gypping them of their first born. And I come home to this…and now this…” She raised a hand, palm up. “The doctor’s visits, the medicines, the…the silences, the dead air of this place.”
My father spoke in a reedy voice. “I understand.”
“Do you? Do you really? What do you understand? A silence so loud I can’t hear myself think.”
“I don’t bother anyone.”
“And yet you bother everyone. This is a house without walls. Tissue paper. The sound of the bank at our backs, hands out. The empty change purse.”
“I worked…”
She shook her head, bitterness lacing her words. “You worked at failing a family. And it wasn’t the blindness”- holding onto the word as if it held an awful power-“it’s the death of something inside.”
“Julia, not now. Don’t accuse…”
“Yes, I accuse you.”
“Julia, stop.”
Her laugh was sardonic. “I sit here and listen to Ed and Fan ripping their love to pieces, night after night, and I hear you say ‘Stop!’ And then again, ‘Stop!’ As though you can use that word as a hammer. Or ‘Peace’-that utterly unreal word.” She started to shake. “I have no peace in my life.”
Silence. The ticking of the hall clock.
“I’ve failed you,” he said, quietly.
I waited for my mother to soften her words, to soothe, as she often-usually-did when they had their altercations, my mother relaxing, apologetic. Her hand would reach out to touch her husband’s hand or face. Instead, she said something I’d never heard her say before.
“Yes, I’m afraid you have.”
Later, everyone hiding in the far corners of the house, I approached my father’s chair. “It’s chilly out here.”
“It’s warmer than inside.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry. You and Fan should not be here to witness one more sad skirmish of a marriage.”
“It’s all right, Father.”
“Well”-a pause-“no, it isn’t.”
“But…”
“Pete, let’s take a walk.”
Finally, something to enjoy. I wrapped a woolen scarf around his neck. “Night chills,” I warned, “and wind from the river.”
We left the yard. I glanced back at the upstairs window to see my mother there, a shadow looking down on us. While I watched, she disappeared into the room. We strolled on North, down Morrison, over to College, past the Masonic Temple, one of our familiar rambles. On summer nights we’d walk as far as the river and sit on a bench under the leafy sycamores; in winter, we ambled on ice-slicked roads through the Lawrence University grounds. Tonight we turned at the Crescent office, headed down the largely deserted street toward the Lyceum. For the longest time we walked in silence, my arm holding my father’s elbow, my body leaning against his. A leisurely walk, a meditation. An exquisite treasure, I always thought. Even tonight, when the air in the Ferber household was poisonous and heavy.
My father broke the silence. “Don’t judge your mother by her anger.”
I was anxious to talk. “She accuses you of…of letting down the family.”
“Well, I have.”
I wanted to cry out, You’re ill. You’re blind. You’re…you’re a poet, a gentle man in a lion’s den of fiercely demanding women, myself included. But I didn’t. Instead, I snuggled closer to him, reassuring. I could smell the sweet talcum of the soap he bathed in daily, an aroma I recalled from childhood. For a moment I shut my eyes, dizzy.
“And you and Fannie will always be devoted to each other, bound by love, but each of you is cut from steel. You need to be apart from each other.”
“Since I joined the Crescent…”
“It’s what you have to do. You know, Edna, when you took the job last year, something shifted in the house. I noticed it. Fan can’t understand you. She looks at the four walls of the house and says to herself: ‘This is where a girl belongs.’”
“And I look at the four walls of the house and say, ‘What’s on the other side?’”
“Exactly.” A quick laugh. “You got the same fever Houdini has, you know.”
“What?”
“You want to move through walls.”
“Father, I don’t like to see you hurt or caught in the middle of these shouting matches.”
Again, a ripple of laughter. “You two have the same fight over and over, and it’s always as though it’s brand new.”
I peered into the subterranean windows of the Crescent office. A light gleamed. Someone was working. Perhaps Mac? I shuddered and surveyed the street, expecting to see the mysterious man watching me. But my father and I were alone.
He read my mind. “You’re determined to find Frana Lempke’s killer, Ed.” A declarative statement, headlined.
“What?”
“I do listen. And the talk with Mr. Houdini was telling.”
There was so much I wanted to tell him now, but I had trouble sifting through the whirl of thoughts. Images of Matthias Boon at the office-his criticism, his coldness, his diminution of my assignment sheet. I had no future at the newspaper. Even Sam Ryan, a kindly old man, found my writing overly effusive, flowery. He was losing faith in me. I wanted to be an actress. I wanted to leave Appleton and study elocution. I felt I was being followed. Houdini made me feel special. Houdini was not telling me something…
I was haunted by Frana’s death. “The investigation drags on. The police do nothing.”
“How do you know that?”
“Well, I don’t. But it’s been a week.”
“They wouldn’t tell you, Pete.”
“Bill, I’m just asking questions.”
“I repeat-we do have a police force.”
“Yes, we do.”
“But you feel you can help.” Was that wonder in his voice?
“I’m a reporter.” God, how often and cavalierly I hurl that sentence around. Surely, should I die now, it would be etched on my gravestone and some merry prankster would pass by and draw a question mark in chalk over the period.
“But you’re not happy being a reporter.” My father spoke into the darkness.
“What?” Now I stopped.
“At least not at the Crescent. I’ve sensed a change in you.”
“The atmosphere there is different now.”
“How?”
“You know, things change. The new editor, Matthias Boon…”
“You like to write?” he interrupted.
“Yes.”
“Then be a writer. A novelist. Books. Stories. You have it. I think of the times you’ve read to me from your reporter’s pad. The way you describe people you meet. Those snippets of overheard conversation. Write.”
“I can’t do that.”
I saw him smile in the darkness. “Ferber women don’t use that line.” He waited a bit. “Mr. Houdini likes you.”
“I know he does. I’m a curiosity to him.”
“Not true. You’re more than that.”
“I know.”
“He says you have ‘a lightning-flash imagination mixed with a wide-eyed wonder about the world around you.’”
“He said that?”
“But he’s worried about you.”
“I know. I don’t understand that.”
His voice rose. “I do. It’s because he knows you want to solve this murder.”
I blurted out, “It’ll prove something to me, Father.” A stupid line. With all the coolness and dismissal at the Crescent office, with all the battles raging in the house of Ferber, somehow I needed-what? I searched for a word. Definition. I needed to define myself. Frana’s murder had changed everything.
My father was talking. “The murderer is not a drummer staying for a few days at the Sherman House.”
“Why, Bill?”
“I’ve listened to the stories you and the others tell. Frana was an ambitious girl, pretty everyone says, a head filled with silly notions, a girl who wanted something to change in her life. There’s nothing wrong with that. She was like you in some ways. But she came from a strict home where the men are the taskmasters-her father, her uncle. Maybe her brothers. She didn’t know how to escape that world. It seems to me that Frana would only have listened-and planned that foolish escapade-with someone who represented similar authority.”
“An older man?”
She knows someone who lives across from a theater in New York.
“Yes, certainly not a footballer boy like Jake Smuddie. But someone she saw as stable, a community figure, someone people trusted.”
“Some man who lives in Appleton.” I got excited. Maybe someone with roots in Appleton.
“Yes.” A pause. “And that’s a scary thought. That’s why I worry about you.” Tension in his voice. “Like Houdini, I hear something in your voice. I heard it when you talked to Kathe. I’m afraid someone might hear you and think you know something.”
“That murderer is among us?”
“I can’t win, can I?” He smiled. “But, yes, I think so. You know, that flight through that unused storeroom at the high school-the idea of it-is telling, no? Someone, but not Frana, thought that up.”
“So the murderer…”
My father shuddered. “We all know him. And that terrifies me.”
That night I lay in my hot bed, unable to sleep. The talk with my father had unsettled me, and I wrestled with bits and pieces of it: my job, the murder, my sister-a trio of weights that pressed me to the ground. I was at a crossroads and that notion frightened me. Just that afternoon Matthias Boon, walking past me with an armload of copy, glanced down at me while I was idly typing my copy. A smug look, as though he had a secret he knew I’d not like. And Fannie, sleeping across the hallway, had glowered at me before bedtime, a look that suggested the war would continue on the morrow. And the murder: my father’s cryptic words. The passageway as a clue…to something. Trust. Authority. A stalwart citizen of the placid town.
Though I drifted off, I suffered a nightmarish rest, images of the Fox River overflowing its banks, floods washing over Appleton. And there, glistening and gigantic, stood Jake Smuddie in his football togs, a bulwark against the raging river. Herr Professor stood nearby wagging a finger at me. Miss Hepplewhyte and Mr. McCaslin and Principal Jones and Homer Timm surrounded me. I woke in a sweat and struggled to fall back to sleep.
I dreamed of the Deputy Sheriff Amos Moss sneaking back into the high school where he’d once been a student. Everyone had gone to Ryan High School. I dreamed I took refuge in my own house, but the house had been moved back to Ottumwa, Iowa, that hateful, coal-mining hamlet. Drunken revelers followed me home: “Oy yoy, sheeny. Run! Go on, run!” I couldn’t find a hiding place. “Christ killer.” Everywhere I ran in the hundreds of rooms-each one empty of furniture, each one a coffin-like box-there was no refuge. Finally I located my family, a frozen Sunday-best photograph of Jacob, Julia, and Fannie lined up and staring bleakly into the photographer’s lens. Where am I? I begged. I’m not in the picture. And no one answered. Why am I not in the picture? I woke again, gasping for air, and sat up. One thought knocked me back into my wet pillow. My home was behind enemy lines.
But what did that mean?