Bess smiled weakly, taking a long sip of her water. “How lovely. Are you a student at McGill?”
“Yes, ma’am.” He knocked over a vase of roses as he settled himself into the chair. He tried to catch the flowers but failed, letting out a guttural sound of embarrassment. Bess felt her heart go out to the boy, whose body seemed slightly too large for him to manage.
Harry rolled up his shirtsleeves and reclined on the couch, closing his eyes. “Don’t worry about it. You’ll have to excuse us,” he explained. “We’re in need of a bit of rest.”
The boy stood up again. “I can come back later.”
“Nonsense.” Harry gestured for him to sit down again.
As Sam sketched, Harry talked languidly about the craft of magic. Sam seemed enthralled by it. He asked Harry if he could explain some of his secrets. Harry smiled and waved his hand. “Aha!” he said. “I’ll have to ask my spirits to give me permission.”
“He’s kidding,” Bess interrupted, seeing the boy’s eyes widen. “He doesn’t have any spirits.”
“Would that were true,” Harry said solemnly. “Think of the trouble I might have caused if I had used my talents for ill.”
“Harry!” she chastised.
As Sam resumed sketching, there was a second knock on the door. Bess sat up. She felt suddenly nauseous. “Harry, don’t answer it. You’re injured.”
Harry waved his hand and stood up. “It’s fine. It could be a delivery.”
Standing at the door was a muscled, broad-faced man with his hands in his pockets. He was as tall as Sam but heavier, with puckered, sunburned skin and thinning hair. He introduced himself as Gordon Whitehead.
“He’s one of my fraternity brothers,” Sam explained. “He’s all right.” Harry ushered him inside.
He was, he said, a theology student, but he looked years older than Sam’s twenty, and far too old to be in a fraternity. Bess felt suddenly uneasy, the small sitting room now crowded with people—her nurse, Harry, Jack, Sam, and Gordon. She felt her muscles contract and realized she was clenching her fists. There was something wrong with this new guest, only she couldn’t put her finger on it.
Harry gestured for him to take the last open chair. Gordon sat down stiffly. His movements seemed almost manufactured; his eyes darted around the room. Pressing his palms together, he asked Harry to expand on his lecture on spiritualism. Harry told them, laughing, of the many séances to which he had assigned agents—Bess included, working under her maiden name, Wilhelmina Rahner—to sit in the audience and test the mediums’ claims. Harry turned to Bess. “Darling, do you remember when John Slater at Carnegie Hall told you, ‘You will be taking your first trip to California’—years after we had moved back from Hollywood?” He slapped his knee and turned to the boys. “He also told her, ‘My guide says that your sweetheart is not quite as much in love with you as you are with him,’ and we all got into an uproar over that. Of course, he didn’t have any idea who she really was.” He grinned. “The whole world knows I love her more than she loves me.”
Sam said, “I think you two may be the most envied couple of the decade, except for maybe Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.”
Bess tried to laugh, to shake off her growing anxiety, but Gordon’s face turned serious. “Mr. Houdini, what is your opinion of the miracles mentioned in the Bible?” He leaned forward eagerly.
Sam looked up, startled by the abruptness of the question, but Harry only shrugged. “I prefer not to comment on matters of miracles.” Discussions of religion made Harry uneasy. He always felt the ghost of his father, the Jewish scholar, looking over his shoulder. On more than one occasion he had confided to Bess that he thought his father might have disapproved of the career he had chosen. It was one of lonely glamour, and whether in Hollywood or New York, he could not avoid the gaudy, gilded lifestyle celebrity ensured. “I would make one observation, however,” Harry added. “What would succeeding generations have said of my feats had I performed them in biblical times? Would they have been referred to as miracles?”
Gordon appeared taken aback. He blinked rapidly and then cleared his throat. “Speaking of miracles,” he ventured, “I have heard that you can resist the hardest blows to the abdomen. Is it true?”
Harry, still reclining on the couch, laughed and lifted his shirt. “My forearm and back muscles are like iron! Go on, feel them!”
Bess gripped his wrist nervously. “Don’t be a show-off, Harry.”
“Would you mind if I delivered a few blows to your abdomen, Mr. Houdini?”
Gordon was staring at Harry intently. It occurred to her that he was serious.