“What was your most difficult feat, the most difficult escape you ever made?”
“I think my escape from the Siberian Transport. I was placed in the great vault intended for political prisoners, and when the massive door was shut, I had the hardest time of my life, perhaps, in releasing myself.” He confided, “Eighteen minutes it took me. But, after all, I am Houdini. In Germany they called me Konig der Handschellen. You speak German?”
“Of course. King of the Handcuffs.”
“Very good, young lady.”
I got him to talk about his life as little Ehrich Weiss, and he got teary-eyed talking about his mother. What was he doing in front of the drug store? Well, his father the rabbi rented rooms on College Avenue between Oneida and Morrison. He pointed to a building. “Right there. Over the Heckert Saloon. Where I used to get my spanking.”
“A sentimental journey?”
He ignored that. “But now I’m the master of chains and handcuffs, all made of the strongest iron.” He made a bicep and told me to feel his upper arm. I hesitated, but he insisted. “Go ahead.”
Feeling foolish, I let my fingers feel the hard muscle, which he flexed. Red faced, unsure, I dropped my hand back to my side. He was grinning, enjoying my discomfort.
Suddenly, as though slamming a book shut, he stopped talking. The interview was over. I backed away, thanking him, but he leaned forward. “Let me tell you a secret.”
“To what?” A child’s wide-eyed wonder.
“To your future. Because I sense you are like me-hungry to leave this small city, hungry for something out there. You have a heimweh for it. You know that word?”
“A talent, I suppose.”
“You are hungry…”
“Oh, no,” I protested, “I’m content…”
He hushed me. “No, you ain’t. Stop this…this talk. Otherwise you wouldn’t be assaulting strange men in front of drug stores. You’d be home, the dutiful Jewish daughter, serving your father and mother.”
I closed my eyes and thought of my blind father, lonely on the front porch of our home. “Mr. Houdini, I…”
He held up his hand. “I’m not saying this is a bad thing, young woman. But you must let me finish talking.”
“But…but…I’m content…”
“No, you’re not. Contentment is for the baby in a cradle. All over the world I spot it, identify it. You-I see it. Keep in mind that I come from these streets. There’s a hunger in some souls…”
I needed to get away, miserable now. How had this man, a stranger talking about himself, guessed my unhappiness?
“I’ll tell you something. Just two things. Two things that lead you to success in the world. In fact, why I am the world famous Houdini and not little Ehrich Weiss picnicking on the Fox River. Houdini, one of the great people of the earth right now. Why people all over know me.” He puffed up his chest, face flushed. I waited, breathless. “Can you tell me what they are?”
I panicked. What? What? Finally, I stabbed, “Imagination.”
He slapped one fist into the other. “Good for you, Miss Ferber. But that you knew all along. The other?”
I was at a loss.
“Let me tell you then. Concentration. Imagination ain’t nothing good without concentration. How do you think I get out of deadly bolts and chains? It takes imagination, true, the leap of fancy, maybe, but, you know, concentration shapes the edges of the fancy.” Then he closed up again. “I expect to read your interview in the Crescent. I’ll cut it out and paste it in my scrapbook.”
The interview was over. But my mind spun like a child’s top. My God, an interview with Harry Houdini! How would my revelations be greeted across the street, down in the office? I, the distaff interloper, the snooping girl, sashaying in with the scoop of the week. A bead of sweat formed on my brow. One more battle to wage.
Houdini kept talking. “You’re a delightful young woman, Miss Ferber. And, I think, a brave one. I hope our paths cross again before I leave Appleton.” That struck me as impossible. “Are you coming to my performance at the Lyceum?”
I hadn’t planned to. Beer hall pyrotechnics; vaudeville buffoonery. “Yes. Of course.”
“Would you like to have me tie you up and secret you in a box-and then change places with you?”
“No, sir. Coffins have no appeal for me.”
He laughed then, uproariously and full-throated. I turned to go. “Ah, Miss Ferber.” I swung back. He was handing me something. Two padlocks rested in his palm. In front of the drug store were two candy machines, glass-bowed containers of penny candy, set up against the white clapboards. Somehow, deftly, while we spoke, he’d undone the simple padlocks and now deposited them into my palm. “You’d better return these to the shopkeeper. Otherwise he’ll have no candy left for the youngsters of Appleton to buy.” He walked away.
I hadn’t seen him touch the two dispensers in all the time I’d spoken with him.
Back at the city room, reached in a fury, I pecked out a two-page interview on my Oliver. No one there paid me any mind nor wondered at my sudden return to the city room. Within the half hour I was through, a rambling but nonetheless faithful account of my conversation with Houdini. As I typed, I felt euphoric. Still, his advice locked itself neatly in my brain. “Concentration and imagination,” the secret code to something. There was a whiff of arrogance in his telling me how to succeed, which bothered me, a hint of his own self-congratulation. Frankly, I already possessed both qualities. I was a young woman of purpose, clearly. So be it. Ego is the province of an entertainer. Satisfied, I slipped the final page from the machine, read it over again, penciled in some changes, and sat back, triumphant.
Sam Ryan, nodding off in the late-afternoon warm room, roused himself. “You got the look of a fox raiding a hen house.”
I gleamed, handing him the two typed sheets. Silently, he reached for them, sat up, and read the headline I’d provided: “Houdini is Master of Locks and Bolts.” He shot me a look, shaking his head. “How?”
I shrugged.
He read on, a smile seeping into the creases of his mouth. “Good job.” Then, getting the attention of Matthias Boon who’d been ignoring our brief exchange, he waved the sheets. “Here, Mr. Boon. This will run tomorrow.”
Boon probably expected to read of some boating mishap on the Fox River or, maybe, the wife of the President of Lawrence University spilling tea on a visiting dignitary. He read the sheets rapidly, his small, stolid body hard, tense, the tendons in his neck purple and prominent. His stubby fingers drummed the pages, his nails so bitten to the quick that a line of dried blood seemed permanent scars. He eyed me. I expected censure or anger at my usurping his planned thunder. Instead, his voice was buttery. “A tad flowery and syrupy, no?”
I fumed.
He drew a red pencil across lines, editing, shifting, truncating my prose. He slid it back to me and half of my words had disappeared, blotted out, including my last mesmerizing paragraph about the trickery with the drug-store candy machines. Gone-all of that. Where I’d mentioned the London Times, he’d added a phrase: “the most conservative paper in the world.” Why? Where I’d said how successful Houdini was, he’d added to my “poor fatherless boy” the phrase “wealth and ease.” He’d brutalized my work, but I said nothing.
“Quite the coup, Miss Ferber.” Sam saluted me.
When I looked at Matthias Boon, his expression could only be called hatred. “I guess it helps to be Jewish.”
“No,” I cut the silence, “it helps to be a reporter on the prowl.”
Houdini’s praise-his celebration of my spirit-flooded me, lifting me beyond the cramped city room. Something of Houdini’s energy or golden dust covered me, even as I realized that Matthias Boon would punish me for what I’d just done.
The stump-like city editor sat with his pipe in hand, his feet up, munching on the hardtack biscuits he kept in a brown bag in his drawer. The muscles in his neck looked like taut rope.