Bess’s heart sank. She reached for Moira’s arm. “It’s not real.” It was bad enough fooling strangers, but the thought of fooling these people who had become her friends made her ill. She groped for an explanation and ended up quoting Harry’s mechanical voice: “We are only acting by physical, not psychical, means.”
Harry found her in their bedroom after. She had ripped off her dress and was clawing at her corset. “I can’t breathe,” she said. “God help me, I can’t breathe.” Harry put his arms around her and tried to calm her, but she couldn’t stop shaking. It had come upon her so suddenly, the sickening feeling of foreboding, the voice saying they would go straight to hell, and the quick footprints of the rain on the roof.
The room felt unbearably hot. She pushed her way out of the car and into the thrashing rain. Thank goodness, the grass was cold. “Bess!” Harry followed her outside. She could barely see him through the downpour. The doors of the car were flapping wildly, and everywhere around them in the darkening night the circus goers were running to take shelter.
“You’re half naked!” Harry shouted. “Get back inside, would you?”
Bess shook her head.
“I don’t know how to help you!” he said. “I don’t know what you want!”
“I know why I’m not getting pregnant,” she called back. “It’s a punishment. We’ve pulled each other into something sinister, Harry.”
Harry looked at her in awe, then burst out laughing. “Is that what you think?”
“Then why can’t I have children?”
“Come inside out of the rain,” he said. “This isn’t like you. It makes me feel—uncentered.”
He looked so helpless. She imagined what she must look like, her hair matted with rain and all the pins falling out, and she thought about those “delicate” girls she hated, the ones who needed smelling salts and daytime rest. Harry could never love a girl like that. Offstage, he needed her to be the engaging one, the sensible one. She followed him back to the cot.
He wrapped her in a blanket. “There,” he said. “That’s better now.”
“You don’t have to coddle me.” She wrung out her hair. “I’m better now. It was a momentary loss of sense.”
“Over what?”
“That we’ve done something unforgivable.” It seemed to her now, in the flickering candlelight, that this world they had created around themselves could collapse at any moment. Harry was afraid, too, she knew, but of different things—that they wouldn’t be able to make it last after all, this career of magicianship, and that he wouldn’t be able to support her and he would let her down, by forcing her to go to work in some factory sewing socks, or some boardinghouse kitchen. Harry’s fears were physical, Bess’s metaphysical. On this account they differed.
“I don’t know about the children,” he said, “but let me show you something.” He took a scrap of paper out of his pocket and held it beside the candle so it would dry enough for him to be able to write on it. “You never told me the first name of your father, did you?”
She thought about it. “I don’t think so.”
“Write it now on this paper, and then burn it. Don’t show it to me.”
Bess did, then crumpled the paper in her hand and held it over the flame.
Harry dropped it into a bowl and let it burn. When it had been reduced to ashes, he pulled up his shirtsleeve, revealing his muscled forearm. With his other hand he rubbed the black remnants onto his bare skin, and almost immediately Bess’s father’s name, Gebhardt, appeared on his arm in red lettering.
Bess’s hand flew to her mouth. “You are the devil,” she said.
“Silly kid.” Harry laughed. “Don’t you know me by now? It was only a trick!”
“How? How was it a trick?”
“You guess.”
She frowned at him. “Give me a pen.” Harry grinned and handed her one, and she wrote on her arm with the sharp end and, with her fingertip, rubbed the skin where the inkless nib had touched. She watched as the letters of her father’s name appeared.
“It’s a trick of the body,” Harry explained. “Do you remember what I told you the night we met? There is no such thing as magic.” He laughed. “Still, my greatest dream is to slip one by you at some point. You figure them all out too fast.”
“But how did you know my father’s name?”
“Stella mentioned it in one of her letters.”
Bess let out a short laugh. She felt ridiculous. “You scared me for a minute.”
Harry peeled the top of the corset off her and climbed into the bed beside her. “There’s an explanation for everything.”
Bess closed her eyes. “I’m sorry I doubted you,” she said. Outside, the wind had calmed to a whisper.
“Do you want to go back to the Metamorphosis?”
She shook her head.
“We can’t cut the séances just yet—we’ll be poor without them.” He traced her eyelids with his fingertips.
Their existence seemed suddenly cozy, not terrible at all. They were together; they knew things about each other no one else knew. The thrill and the fear were gone, and out there on the other side of the storm, the scattered gaslights of the little town flamed and fell, flamed and fell.
Chapter 6
ATLANTIC CITY
June 1929