She had removed her shirtwaist and drawers when she heard a noise behind her. She turned to see Harry standing there in the dark, watching her. “I thought you were asleep,” she said, startled. “Did I wake you?”
He didn’t answer. He pushed her against the bedroom wall and pulled her stockings off. “What are you doing, Harry?” she asked. “Are you all right?”
“Are you afraid?” His voice was very quiet.
“No,” she said, honestly.
When she was undressed, he turned her around, so that her back was against the blue flowered wallpaper.
She didn’t make a sound. Instead she found herself moving as if she were detached from herself, as if she were watching another woman from above. He wrapped his arms around her waist. It felt like she was being filled when she had been empty. She and Harry had not made love this way since they were first married, not with this kind of passion. She turned, lifted her legs, and wrapped them around his waist, and when it was over, she did not feel lonely anymore.
“You can’t do the burial stunt again,” she said.
“I know.” Harry avoided her eyes. “I feel like a failure.”
“One failed trick doesn’t make you a failure.”
“Everyone wonders where people go when they leave this place. I want to perform a trick that makes it seem as if I have gone there, too. To wherever it is people go when they are invisible. But then I will come back again.”
Bess wondered if he was purposely avoiding speaking explicitly of death. Instead she said, “I don’t want you to go,” and he laughed.
“Of course I’m not really going anywhere.”
“But if you could, hypothetically—if you could really see the other side, I mean—you would.”
Harry thought about it. “Yes,” he said. “I would go there. If I could come back.”
She thought she had a sense of what he was intending to do. He had focused his whole career on pretending to escape death, and now he set his sights on walking into it.
Harry rented workshop space in Midtown, and began working with Jim Collins on constructing a new trick. He had hired other assistants as well, including Jim Vickery, a tall, muscled cabinetmaker who rarely spoke but was, from the beginning, fiercely loyal to Harry. For the first time, Harry refused to tell Bess what the trick entailed. He unveiled it at Hammerstein’s Theatre on a damp Friday night in October, the sidewalks silvered with puddles. The stage on which the new trick was performed was covered in deep red carpet. While Harry performed other tricks, a team of bricklayers quickly constructed a brick wall, over ten feet tall, on the stage. After the wall had been built, two black screens were brought out and positioned on either side of it.
Harry stood at the front of the stage now in the suit Bess had ironed for him that morning. It was her small contribution. Harry had a dozen men in his employ now, working as bookers or secretaries or scouts or on construction. He had the young and eager Jim Collins, of course, and Jim Vickery, and his loyal, dignified secretary, John Sargent, with his crop of white hair.
His hair, as usual, was uncombed. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he announced, in the booming stage voice that always gave her chills. “I have been preparing myself for years for a performance of this caliber. I have set out to prove to you that while you may think it impossible that one might stand in this very room and yet be somewhere else at the same time, it is quite possible. Indeed, there are realms we do not see, all around us. I have been there. Yet I cannot tell you, in good conscience, what I have witnessed. But when I walk through this wall in front of your eyes, you will know that I have been there, and come back, as the spirits do.”
Three audience members were selected to stand behind the brick wall to ensure that he could not sneak around it to the other side. Harry stood behind one of the black screens and waved his hands over the top. “I am here!” he shouted. “Now, ladies and gentlemen, I am going.” Only moments later, his hands appeared above the screen on the other side of the wall. “And now, by unknown means, I have crossed over to the other side!” his voice boomed. A stage assistant drew away the second screen, and there stood Harry, clothes and hair disheveled, panting, having crossed through solid brick.
The crowd sat in silence, dumbfounded. Harry bowed proudly.
“They’re going to say I am able to dematerialize,” he had hinted that morning before he went to prepare for the show. “And I won’t protest it. It is not enough to perform magic anymore. One must be magic as well.” He kissed her, but she turned her mouth away.