When Harry died, he had left her greatly in debt. She hadn’t known the extent of it until his creditors came calling a few days after his funeral, demanding payment. When she totaled the figures, the amount was staggering—more than she could possibly hope to pay with what remained to her. Harry had made enormous sums of money onstage over the last ten years of his life, but he had spent it just as quickly—rare books worth tens of thousands of dollars, unreasonably large gifts to friends, vast investments lost in the moving picture business. Bess was left with state inheritance taxes, funeral costs, and debts on a variety of their purchases, and a life insurance policy that would barely cover those figures.
She had already sold a great deal of Harry’s collection of magic books, articles, and papers, but she hadn’t had the heart to sell it all, and despite what she had parted with, the house was still packed with his belongings. He had always liked to brag, in his later years, that he possessed the world’s largest magic collection and one of the world’s largest dramatic collections. There was not a single wall in the four-story home on which bookshelves had not been built, and filled to capacity. She herself opened very few of these books, and even Harry, once he had cataloged them, read only a few pages of interest, then shelved them. He had had very little time to read either, especially as he got older and more renowned. Before he died he wrote seven books on magic, and what little time he had went to writing and research. He had never been the kind of man to drink or eat to excess, but collecting had been an addiction for him: he was consumed by the thrill of acquisition, which Bess attributed to his poverty as a child. Still, she disapproved of his limitless spending, and after a while she caught on that Becks was having the books delivered through the side door to avoid her seeing them. Even after Harry’s death, the books he had ordered kept arriving, by post or courier, to the tune of a twenty-thousand-dollar debt.
Even the house she had lived in with him would be quietly put on the market within the year. She had narrowly avoided bankruptcy, and now she was wrapped up in a sordid affair, thanks to Ford. Outside, the sounds on the street were growing steadily louder. Pulling back one of the curtains, she saw a crowd of reporters gathered on the sidewalk. They were pounding on the walls and waving their notebooks in the air. One of them looked up and noticed her face in the window and gave a shout, and the others followed suit, crying to her to come down. “Mrs. Houdini!” they shouted. “Can you tell us why you did it?” Bess closed the curtains.
So Stella had been right; there would be a backlash against her. How anyone could imagine she would betray Harry’s memory in such a way, she did not know. But few people knew how much they had lived through together, how they had spent the first five years of their marriage sleeping on cots and in hallways and stealing potatoes to survive. There hadn’t been a day in twenty years that she and Harry had spent apart. After his mother died, especially, he clung to her. He couldn’t even choose his own clothes without her. Perhaps it was because he felt that Bess was the only one still living who really knew him; in public, he would always be the showman, but at home he was only Harry.
Stella alone knew the full extent of Bess’s financial struggles. After Harry’s death Stella had asked her, “How could you not hate him for leaving you poor?” Bess had only shaken her head. How could she explain what no one would understand? Her loyalty to Harry, and her belief in his promises, was absolute.
“Harry wouldn’t leave me destitute,” she had told Stella.
Stella had looked at her pityingly. “But he did, darling. Look at all the bills.”
“No. There’s money somewhere. I’m sure of it.”
Stella had laughed. “Where? Hidden in the attic? In the soles of his shoes?”
“Perhaps. I don’t know.”
“Be realistic, Bess.”
Now Bess tried to push aside the memories and imagine what Harry would advise. She applied pink lipstick and changed into a new white dress and gloves. She would dress as the innocent, as she had early in her marriage, when she had played at being nothing more than an assistant unaware of the secrets behind the tricks. She would go to work as usual, and serve lunch, and avoid the crowds, and she would get by.
A year after Harry’s death, Bess had opened a speakeasy with Stella, which had quickly failed, largely due to bad investments—the same lack of business acumen that had always plagued Harry. But the thought of sitting alone in the house all day was abhorrent. After giving herself up to brandy and cigarettes and late nights on Broadway, she found herself dancing the Charleston on the edge of the Biltmore Hotel rooftop one Saturday night, kicking her feet out twenty-seven stories above Madison Avenue, and decided she ought to pursue a steadier occupation.