Bess sat on the roof of the Knickerbocker Hotel in Hollywood in a small semicircle of friends and magicians. Harry’s brother Dash was there, and Gladys, with her husband, Lloyd, and other friends of Harry’s, including a California judge, several Hollywood actors, and the president of the American Society of Psychical Research. Across from this inner circle, three hundred witnesses waited tensely on a set of wooden bleachers that had been erected for the occasion. Members of the press and various circles of magic had been summoned, by engraved invitation, to observe the tenth anniversary of Harry’s death. It was an important night; Bess had made it clear all along that she would discontinue her attempts to contact Harry after a decade had passed. “The whole world is waiting on you tonight,” Gladys had told her.
It was unexpectedly cold for October, and the lights of the city glittered, below them, like shards of crystal. On a table in front of Bess was a small altar bearing a picture of Harry Houdini. Above the picture, a tiny red light burned, and beside it, a stand had been set with a locked pair of handcuffs, a pistol, a tambourine, a piece of slate, a bell, and a trumpet.
Hundreds of well-wishers had been waiting for her at Penn Station ten years earlier, when she returned on a train bearing Harry’s body; three thousand mourners had gathered outside the Elks Club to witness the funeral procession over the Queensboro Bridge to Machpelah Cemetery. Strangers had wept in each other’s arms as Chopin’s Funeral March played in the streets, but none of it had brought Harry back.
Bess remembered the weeks that followed as one remembers a storm passing during sleep. Jack Price had cried murder to the press, and demanded to know whether the medium Margery Crandon had orchestrated Gordon Whitehead’s violence in retaliation for Harry’s humiliating her. But Harry’s condition was inconsistent with the blows he had received. Dr. Stone had tried to come up with an explanation as to how Harry could have died of appendicitis when the punches he received had been on the other side of his body; at last he’d concluded that the pain from the blows must have masked the symptoms of Harry’s true illness, preventing him from realizing the seriousness of his condition earlier. But Gordon Whitehead had disappeared; no one could locate him again. In her grief, Bess had confronted Mrs. Crandon, who was doing the traveling circuit in New York. Waiting outside her hotel, Bess had taken Margery by the shoulders and shaken her. “If I find out you had anything to do with Harry’s death,” she’d threatened, her voice quaking, “God help you.”
Margery had stared at her vacantly. “Grief does strange things to us, Mrs. Houdini,” she’d said. Then she had stepped into a waiting car and turned away from the window.
For so many years Bess had stood on the stage in Harry’s shadow; now, it was her performance alone. On the roof of the Knickerbocker, she faced the crowd in a pristine white dress and cape, her lips dabbed with red lipstick, her hair perfectly waved. Promptly at eight o’clock, the orchestra began playing “Pomp and Circumstance.” Bess had asked her old carny friend Edward Saint to officiate the séance. When the music was over, he stepped forward to address the gatherers.
“In this cathedral-like atmosphere,” he began, placing his hat over his chest, “I wish to remind you that this is a solemn occasion, and that the results of tonight are of a private nature. This is a personal gathering aiding Mrs. Houdini in completing her ten-year vigil. We wish it distinctly understood that in this last and final attempt we are interested in Houdini coming to us, instead of to a stranger.”