Bess had grown to love life on the Welsh circuit. Harry was shy, often keeping to himself and practicing when he wasn’t performing, and in those lonely hours Bess had sought the company of the others in the local beer and pool halls. She never again flirted with any of the men she met there but usually cradled a ginger beer and chatted with the women. Harry spent a great deal of time training with an old Japanese man who could swallow oranges and then bring them up again, a practice that thoroughly horrified Bess. But Harry was as fascinated with swallowers as he was with snake charmers, and he spent hours stretching the muscles of his throat to the point of accommodating small potatoes.
But it was in Chicago where Harry found his headlines. He had walked brazenly into the detective headquarters on the afternoon of their arrival and said to the sergeant on duty, “I would like to be locked up, please.” The sergeant had laughed out loud and had Harry escorted from the premises. He’d had to return on three consecutive days before anyone would take him seriously, but when they did, and he was handcuffed and locked inside a cell, he’d escaped easily enough. Then he had performed the feat in the city’s larger prison, and the following morning his picture was in the paper, next to the headline KING OF HANDCUFFS. He’d woken Bess up waving a stack of newspapers in his hand.
“I’m famous! My picture’s in the papers!” He had purchased over a hundred of them, along with envelopes and stamps, and they’d spent all afternoon mailing the clippings to anyone they could think of who might help them get a job.
It had worked. The clippings got the attention of a manager by the name of Martin Beck, the booker for the Orpheum Circuit. He installed Harry and Bess in his popular theater chain, where they gained a temporary notoriety. In The Omaha Daily News, Harry was described as “a young lion, with muscles like steel, roaming about the theater like a restless tiger.” Bess had never read anything more exquisite. Sometimes, when they were alone at night together, it seemed he thrust his whole being into his dreams. He would wake up heaving, dripping with sweat as if he had just exited some great performance.
They had celebrated that night, but they couldn’t maintain their publicity. As the months progressed they booked fewer and fewer acts, and were offered smaller and smaller salaries, until they were forced to move back to New York, where Bess got a sales position in a hat shop. She spent the hours when the shop was empty sewing ribbons onto felt in a cramped back room; Harry went to the offices of the city papers and offered to sell his magic secrets to them for ten dollars. There were no bidders.
Still, through the dark moments, he loved her. He left her notes every morning in the kitchen before going out to search for a booking: Sunshine of my life, I have had my coffee, have washed out my glass, and am on my way to business. Sometimes the notes included frivolous poetry: What is there in the vale of life / half as delightful as a wife?
After two months, Beck had called with a last-chance offer. If Harry wanted to go to London, he said, he had a contact for him at Scotland Yard. If he could break out of a prison like that, Beck told him, then he would be made.
Bess had never traveled abroad. She was desperate to see the elaborate palaces of Europe, the shining taffeta dresses of the British ladies. The boat was grand, with mahogany banisters and porcelain china. They were staying in the second-class cabin, which had none of those luxuries, but at night she sat on the stairs and listened to the music of the violins from the dining room. She missed her friends from the circus, but not enough to despair; the circus had been one adventure, but Europe was something else entirely. She thought back on her musings that first night on the bridge, that their lives could be glazed with greatness, that intimacy would somehow cascade into remarkable love. The night they married, she had removed her hairpins and her hair had fallen onto her shoulders and she had stood before Harry in the burning lamplight like a spectator of her own performance.
Harry, for his part, was green with seasickness and couldn’t keep anything down but ice and lemon juice. By the third evening he was delirious with fever. The pressure of the sorely needed success in Europe, combined with illness, almost broke him. He began talking in his sleep. “They think I break my knuckles to get the cuffs off,” he murmured one night, to no one. “They think they know how I does it.”
Bess leaned over him and stroked his burning forehead. His eyes were still closed. “It’s okay, Harry. You’re just dreaming.” She looked around. They shared a large dormitory lined with identical cots, but it didn’t appear he had woken anyone else.
“But it’s not talent,” he said. “It’s just practicing with every lock till I know how they all work.”
Was he conducting an imaginary interview in his sleep? Bess laughed. “I know, Harry.”
“I love you, Beth,” he muttered, slurring her name. “What would I do without you?”