“How could you?”
She put her hand on his shoulder. “Darling, please don’t be mad. It was just a kiss.”
“I need you to leave,” he said, lifting his head.
Bess looked at him, startled. “Leave? What do you mean?”
“I want you to go to your sister’s. I’ll take you to the train station.”
“That’s ridiculous. You were flirting, too, to make me jealous. What about your promises?”
“You betrayed me, Bess. You swore you never would, and you did.”
She felt as if she were on the edge of hysteria. “If I go to my sister’s, will you come find me?”
Harry stood up. “Come on. Let’s go.”
“We can’t leave—all those people inside are there for us.” She watched him walk away, his gait stiff and unnatural. She was terrified, but also inflamed by the alcohol, and by the memory of his flirtations with Evatima. She ran after him. “Fine,” she cried. “If this is what you want, I’ll go! You’ll regret it!”
They didn’t speak on the walk. The last train to Grand Street left at ten. Harry bought her ticket and stood with her on the platform until the train pulled in. “Good-bye, Mr. Houdini,” she said when the doors opened, trying to maintain her dignity.
Harry looked at her coldly. “Good-bye. I’ll wire your sister to tell her you’re coming.”
Bess’s knees trembled as she climbed the steps onto the train. She half expected Harry to come running after her, but when she looked out the window he was still standing there, his face unforgiving in the blue moonlight. She wondered what she would say to Stella, when just a week before she had so brazenly declared herself willing to give up everything for a man who was now abandoning her.
She sat shaken, as if in a dream, during the thirty-minute ride. How did one go about getting a divorce? she wondered. And how would she arrange one if Harry was leaving in two days for the circus? She felt herself choking back tears, imagining him doing the act without her. Just a short time ago he had proclaimed her extraordinary, and she had believed him. But then he had cast her off just as quickly, and she was a fool. By the time the train pulled into the station she was sobbing quietly, much to the horror of her seatmate, an elderly woman clasping a heavy brocade handbag.
Bess looked around for her own case and realized, alarmed, that she hadn’t brought one—all she had was her little purse with powder and a few coins. When she saw her sister’s tall figure standing on the platform, waiting for her, she knew it was true—Harry had wired her after all, and he wasn’t coming back for her. She took the steps two at a time and threw herself into Stella’s arms.
“I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,” she sobbed. “I was wrong about Harry.”
Stella stroked her hair. “He’s a brute. You’ve been badly abused, Bess.”
“But I loved him—I love him.”
“I know. But you can live with me now. And Fred will give him a good thrashing if he ever sees him again.”
Stella took her home and made her drink a glass of whiskey. Then she put her to sleep in the big bedroom, with its crisp embroidered sheets, and she and Fred took the little bed. Fred was livid about Harry; Bess could hear him storming around the kitchen.
At two in the morning, she awoke to the sound of someone knocking loudly on the front door. She could hear Fred stumbling out of bed, and then she heard voices in the foyer, and Stella whispering, and she knew Harry had come back for her. Bess flew to the door in her sister’s nightgown and threw her arms around his neck. Harry kissed the top of her head over and over.
“See, darling,” he said. “I told you I would send you away, but I didn’t say I wouldn’t fly after you and bring you back.”
Chapter 4
THE FRIDAY BOYS
May 1929
Bess stood in the hall outside Gladys’s apartment, holding a blue beaded dress wrapped in paper. Gladys answered the door herself; her Irish girl, Colleen, had the night off.
She reached out to touch the fabric of the dress and then felt Bess’s own apricot crepe dress. “I don’t know about this. It seems very flimsy. Can you see through it?”
“There was always a bit of the harem in that covering up your arms and legs business, don’t you think?”
Gladys was only one size larger than Bess, and the dress slipped on her easily, even though she still wore the thick ribbed corset of the old decade. Bess zipped the dress and then lifted her sister-in-law’s hair and dropped it back onto her shoulders. “You should cut this, you know. No one wears their hair long anymore.” She had bobbed her own hair years ago, bleaching it when it started to gray, to a hue so blond it appeared almost white. “I’m not saying Eton crop or anything dramatic like that. Just a little shorter.”