“Your father and I are taking a sentimental journey.” He twisted his body in the chair.
“But I remember so little,” my father said.
“There are things you can’t forget about that beautiful city. You remember the smells in the air, the light in the sky, the way the moon rises over the Buda hills…”
“Sometimes I think I’m making it up.”
“It’s stamped onto your soul.”
Both men lapsed into silence, a sliver of a smile on my father’s lips. He was enjoying himself.
Houdini turned to me. “So how was your day of reporting?” An innocent question, tossed out carelessly, but I detected wariness, tension in the throwaway line. I stared out at the catalpa tree, the heavy green boughs dipping to the earth. In the flower boxes on the porch Fannie had planted mignonette and marigolds. For a second the aroma covered me. A wash of images flooded me: the aromas of a city old before the Romans arrived, the stench of the Danube in summer, the eye-watery hint of sulfur, the butter-heavy pastry…
I rattled on about the nonsense I’d written that day-an ambitious account of the popular Fox River Baseball League, with snippets of information on competing teams from Fond du Lac, Green Bay, Oshkosh. The Appleton Badgers. But I stopped. Houdini was not really listening, though he was staring at me. “I feel there is something you want to tell me, Mr. Houdini.”
He shook his head. “Oh no, I just came to say goodbye.”
Still, his forehead was creased with worry. What was going on here? I talked about some riverboat excursion on the Fox, all the time watching Houdini’s face, but I detected nothing. Houdini asked my father about My Store, which he’d passed in his wanderings down College Avenue; and he said the mishmash of sidewalk display-lamps, stacked tin ware, toys, porcelain figurines, gadgets, spilling boxes-reminded him of the Lower East Side in New York. My father laughed and said, “My wife knows how to sell. I never did.” He drew his lips into a line. “America has gone on behind my back.”
“Everyone comes to America hungry, Jacob. You got to learn to feed yourself right away.”
“But America is hard work, Harry.”
“Everybody can breathe here.” Houdini stretched out the last word.
“Jews can breathe in America.” My father stressed the word.
“You know, my father was lost in America, a wanderer until he died.” Houdini was still staring at me and not at my father. “A man who simply gave up.”
Silence on the porch.
Houdini added, “He never understood America. You gotta know how to invent yourself with all this freedom.”
Then Houdini spoke in starts and stops of gossip he’d gleaned from David Baum, from others. Twice he mentioned watching Caleb Stone hauling drunks to the city jail. “The big crime of Appleton,” he declared.
All the time he was watching me.
Suddenly I understood. He’d come to talk about Frana’s murder. He was here for a reason. I interrupted, “Of course, the city room is still talking of Frana’s murder. The police are stymied. Our city editor Matthias Boon has made it his mission to uncover the truth.”
Houdini breathed in. “No, you want to solve it, Miss Ferber.”
“What?”
“You are so much involved with the mystery.”
“True but…”
My father stared into space. “Edna?”
“Of course not, Mr. Houdini. But I’m curious. That’s natural…I’m a reporter.”
Houdini leaned forward and brought his face close to mine. “I’m worried about you.” A sidelong glance at my father. His tone became confidential, serious. “I talk a lot but I also listen. David and Theo and I sat up late last night talking of the murder. We are afraid for you. You, Jacob’s pioneering daughter. You walk alone…” He glanced nervously at my father. “All of my life I’ve always sensed trouble…danger…and, well, I fear there is something in this town…”
“I don’t understand.”
He waved his hand in the air. “You are a young girl…”
Next to him my father was getting agitated, a whistling sound invading his breathing. Houdini pulled back and managed a polite smile. “Enough. I’m a foolish man. I take emotions as fact, and I believe darkness has more power than daylight.”
I caught my breath. “I’m…I’m…”
“I’m sorry.”
My father’s voice was raspy. “Pete, is there something you’re not telling us?”
I made a joke of it. “Bill, I’m spending my days advising young women to use chiffon velvet instead of panne velvet in the making of a shirtwaist.”
Houdini shifted, uncomfortable. “I must go.” He watched me, though he shot a concerned look at my father.
Again, silence, Houdini fidgety, my father wrapping his arms around his thin chest. I felt my heart in my mouth, my throat dry, my temples pounding. Houdini had touched a wellspring within me, ill defined and elusive though it was; and I’d been tossed, pell mell, into a vortex of grown-up trouble. Houdini was telling me something. The man with the tremendous heart had delivered a message. But what? I felt overwhelmed, smothered. Insanely, I wanted to be a little girl again, sitting with Esther at the Volker’s Drug Store, nursing a lemon phosphate. Like Kathe, I wanted the old Appleton back.
Houdini checked his gold watch and stood. “I’m sorry. Sometimes I’m a foolish man who speaks unwisely. I must be off.”
“Stay for supper.” My father reached out, seeking his sleeve. “My wife will insist.” But Houdini said he had obligations.
I rose, agitated. A world I didn’t understand was spinning around me. What had just happened here?
I sat with my father and tried to think of what to say. Cozy platitudes sprang to mind: Houdini is a wonderful man, no? An interesting man; quite the character, no? An eccentric man. A wildly egoistical man. I tried to encapsulate the jaunty Jewish vaudeville performer, but no words came. Something was gnawing at me. My father was rubbing his neck, so I moved behind his chair and began slowly and methodically massaging his head in the practiced manner I knew so well. Deftly, I pushed my fingers hard into his neck and scalp, rubbing the fragile temples, my father’s clammy flesh yielding to my kneading touch, until, at last, I could sense his body relax. His head dipped into his chest, and I knew, for now, the cruel and raw agony had passed. He reached up and touched my hands, his long, slender fingers resting on my wrists, a touch so protective and sure that it always made me want to weep.
When I closed my eyes, I imagined a photograph of Houdini and my father as they huddled together. Fragments of their talk came to me…The old country, the wandering Jews, America, a country in which the landscape went on forever. As I opened my eyes, I was suddenly thrilled that my father had given me a life that was American, that was Jewish, that was mine to do with as I pleased. My father never left the porch and Houdini never stopped moving; but both men were at heart rag-tag yeshiva boys running toward the horizon.
My mother and Fannie turned in from the sidewalk, their arms loaded with packages. At the bottom of the steps they took in the silent tableau of father and daughter, me leaning against him, one hand on his shoulder. My mother hurried past us, shifting the packages in her arms, and said, “Fannie, Ed, we need to get to supper.”
“You missed Houdini,” my father told her. “He stopped here to say goodbye.” But my mother was already walking into the house. I’d caught her eye and I understood how much she resented what I had with my father. At that moment I realized what she’d lost…she didn’t know how to handle the space left by an empty marriage. Watching her stiff back, I knew that she struggled in the same darkness that engulfed my father.
“Fannie, dear,” my father began.
She spoke over his words. “Something horrible has happened.”
I tensed. “Tell me.”
Fannie’s voice was cutting. “Well, you’ve managed to make Kathe Schmidt abandon us. For good. She showed up after school this afternoon and said she’ll no longer work for us. Never again. I just came from her house, pleading.”