The second picture, also in heavy gilt-gold frame, was one I had purchased in an emporium in Chicago. I gazed on the glitzy chromolithograph each night before turning down the gaslight: a slender young girl with auburn hair stands alone on a cliff overlooking a vast periwinkle blue ocean, puffy white clouds in the sky. A breeze rustles her white dress. Her alabaster hand is reaching to the distant horizon, wanting to be somewhere else, out there, beyond the white-tinged horizon. The sentimental caption was a quote: Beyond the horizon is the world you dream of. Each night, glancing at the print, I asked myself: But is that true?
Contemplating the print, I wondered what Houdini had seen in my eyes. What hunger? Imagination and concentration-cornerstones of a lifetime. The whole world could not confine him, yet I was locked inside these four walls. Bound by the geography of Appleton. On my bureau was the clipped interview. I read it over and over, not out of vanity, but because I believed it held the clue to something I needed to know. Even as I became obsessed with Frana’s murder, I pictured Houdini on that street corner. Echoes of his voice stayed with me. And, I admitted to myself, thrilled me.
A gentle knock on the door. “Edna?” My father opened the door. “Edna, let’s take a walk.”
Quietly, I gathered my jacket and held my father’s elbow as we went downstairs and out the front door. I was pleased. So many nights, especially after the cutthroat skirmishes I had with Fannie, he chose me to walk with, the two of us strolling downtown. Tonight I’d expected him, actually, because supper had been stilted, heavy with frost. Fannie talked about the dress she was making, but my mother seemed distracted. No one mentioned Frana or the questioning of Kathe’s father. We avoided the story that so riveted Appleton. That angered me, though I chose not to bring it up. When I said Sam Ryan praised my Houdini interview again-he’d heard from subscribers-my mother said, sotto voce, “The praise of lesser men.”
I had no idea what that meant but felt, again, that it was part of my mother’s dislike of my being a reporter, as well as her familiar championing of Fannie’s side when we argued. I kept my mouth shut.
Slowly strolling with my father, holding his elbow, rarely speaking, we moved off North Street, down Morrison, onto College. I sensed my father had something to say because the gentle man, his body so loose-limbed and free, the Hungarian wanderer, tensed up, a tightness in the elbow. I waited.
We strolled past the Lyceum. A poster in the glass-fronted display window advertised tomorrow night’s show. Houdini’s benefit. “The Master Escape Artist. See the Handcuff King in a Show to Benefit the Children’s Home. The Greatest Mystery Novelty Act in the World. Known in Every Country on the Globe.” I thought of the genial, humorous man I’d interviewed, and chuckled.
“What?” my father asked.
I recited the braggadocio of the poster and described the fuzzy picture of Houdini bound in chains, hunched forward, showing the camera a hard glassy stare. My interview, published, had been the talk of the visitors to the Ferber household. All the Ferbers, including my father, planned to attend the show. That had surprised me, this change of heart. He would see nothing of Houdini’s antics, but he said he wanted to experience Houdini. “This is an event.” Houdini’s show, of course, was a visual extravaganza, a magician’s sleight of hand punctuated by a rattling of chains and the whoop and holler of a frenzied audience. I dreaded it because I feared I’d be constantly leaning in, explaining, describing.
The Lyceum was dark now, but on the second floor, off to the left, was a hazy light.
“Maybe Houdini is rehearsing.”
“Maybe he was rehearsing and they turned off the lights downstairs. Now he can’t find his way out.” He was grinning.
I felt hollowness in my chest. Was my father talking about himself? This man condemned to grasping at fleeting shadows, condemned to awful blackness and pain. I thought of Milton: “When I consider how my light is spent.” Or was it: “When I consider how my life is spent.” Suddenly I couldn’t remember the line. It didn’t matter because they both said the same thing.
He touched my shoulder. “I don’t like it when you and Fannie do battle.”
“I know.”
“But it won’t change.” He gripped my shoulder. “You are two different people. Fannie wants life to be a calm lake, a boat ride with parasols and moonlight. And that’s good. You want life to be a storm-tossed clipper on the high seas, perilous and thrilling. You two will never agree.”
I liked the image he created of my life. “I’m the girl reporter.”
“You know, your mother hates that phrase. Your mother also knows that she’s like you, or you’re like her, rather-look how she runs My Store, better than I ever did. She likes being out of the home. She won’t admit it-she can’t-but she loves that store.” He could be talking to himself. “She’s not happy when she’s home. She gets quieter and quieter as the days go on. I sometimes don’t know she’s in the house.” He swallowed. “Edna, you are like your mother. You like to be out of the house.”
No, I wanted to cry, I’m like you. But I knew I wasn’t. I didn’t know how to dream, I told myself. I only knew how to act…to move…to question…to probe…
“I like my job…”
“I know you do.” An awful pause as he stopped walking. “You are determined to be a part of this murder investigation.”
“What?”
“I heard you talking with Kathe…all of it.”
“I’m sorry.”
He touched my hand. “No, no. Edna, I’m not unsympathetic. You’re a bright girl. There’s a fierceness in you”-that smile again-“and a sassiness, a penchant for hurling barbs at hypocrites.” He laughed. “You’ll spend your life scaring people, Edna.”
“Father!”
“No, no. There’s nothing wrong with that.” He turned toward me. “Edna, you’ll have to do what you have to do.”
“I always do.”
He smiled in the darkness and started walking. “The girl who got the interview with Houdini! Nineteen years old and so determined.”
“I have to be.”
His hand brushed my shoulder, affectionately. “I’ll never understand you, Edna.” He must have sensed me tense up. “I don’t really have to.”
Chapter Eleven
The next evening the Ferber family trooped to the Lyceum for Houdini’s benefit demonstration. No one was happy. I’d been late to supper, staying too long at the city room and neglecting to telephone home. Fannie, still roiling and fussing from the altercation the previous evening, served an undercooked spring chicken, lumpy mashed potatoes, and a sauerkraut cauliflower so vinegary my father gagged. I apologized, but Fannie would have none of it. Convinced my dawdling had been purposeful and malicious, she blamed the failed supper on her nerves. Kathe, scheduled to help that evening with supper, hadn’t shown up, and Fannie insisted that “Edna as Appleton’s Spanish Inquisition” had badgered the girl to a point where she probably would never set foot again in the Ferber household.
“And just how am I supposed to manage all these rooms?” She flung her arms out melodramatically and let her hand hang in the air like an emphatic punctuation mark.
“Perhaps if you weren’t so imperious with the help…” A rumbling from my father stopped me.
“Edna,” my mother wondered, “why were you late?”
“A witness has come forward.”
“To the murder?”
“No, but a farmer from Neenah, visiting his daughter on Friday, was taking a stroll in Lovers Lane, headed to the river sometime after two o’clock in the afternoon, and swears he saw a girl who looked a lot like Frana Lempke-he saw her picture in the paper-running off into a cove of bushes, running ahead of the man she was with.”