On subsequent flights Houdini stayed in the air as much as ten or twelve minutes. That was virtually to challenge the fuel capacity of the plane. He seemed at times to drift as if suspended from the clouds over his head. He was able to see whole villages nestled below in the German countryside, and to follow his own shadow down incredibly straight roads lined with hedgerows. Once he flew high enough to be able to see in the distance the medieval skyline of Hamburg with flashes of the Elbe River. He was tremendously proud of his aeroplane. He wanted to make flying history. Young officers from the local casern began to come to the parade grounds to watch Houdini fly. He got to know some of them by name. And then the Commandant, whose permission had been required for the use of the parade grounds, asked Houdini if he would be interested in giving a few lectures to these young officers on the art of flying. The magician rapidly agreed. He arranged his schedule accordingly and began a series of informal sessions. He liked the young officers. They were highly intelligent and very respectful. They laughed at his jokes. His German was faulty and Yiddish-inflected but they seemed not to notice.
One morning after a flight Houdini taxied his plane to the shed and noticed waiting there a Mercedes staff car carrying general officers of the Imperial German Army. Before he could disembark his friend the Commandant stood up from the jump seat of the car, saluted him and asked him in a most formal manner if he would mind taking the Voisin up again for a demonstration flight. Houdini looked at the two elderly men, heavily medaled, sitting in the rear of the car. They nodded at him. Sitting at attention in the front seat next to the driver was an enlisted man who wore the spiked helmet and held a carbine across his lap. At this moment a white Daimler landau with an enclosed carriage for the passengers slowly pulled up behind the staff car. Its brass fittings were polished to a brilliance and even its white wooden wheel spokes were clean. A gold-fringed flag of rank flew from the right front fender. Houdini could not see into the passenger cab. Of course, he said. He ordered his mechanic to refuel and in a few minutes was aloft once more, making wide stately banks around the field. He tried to imagine how he must look from the ground. He felt the thrill of performance. He whirred over the cars at a height of a hundred feet and came around again at fifty feet waggling his wings and waving. He flew for whoever it was in that white car.
When he landed he was escorted to the big Daimler. The chauffeur opened the door and stood at attention. Sitting in the car was the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. The Archduke was dressed in the uniform of a field marshal of the Austrian Army. He held in the crook of his palm a plumed helmet. His hair was cut very short and flat on top, like a brush. He had large waxed moustaches that curled upward and he gazed at Houdini with stupid heavy-lidded eyes. Sitting next to him was his wife, the Countess Sophie, a stately matron yawning delicately behind a gloved hand. The Archduke Franz Ferdinand didn’t seem to know who Houdini was. He congratulated him on the invention of the aeroplane.
II
14
hen Father returned to New Rochelle he walked up the front steps of his hoe, passed under the giant Norwegian maples and found his wife holding a brown baby in her arms. Upstairs the colored girl was withdrawn. Melancholy had taken the will out of her muscles. She did not have the strength to hold her baby. She sat all day in her attic room and watched the diamond windowpanes as they gathered the light, glowed with it and then gave it up. Father looked at her through the open door. She ignored him. He wondered through the house finding everywhere signs of his own exclusion. His son now had a desk, as befitted all young students. He thought he heard an Artic wind but it was the housemaid Brigit pushing an electric suction cleaner across the rug in the parlor. What was strangest of all was the mirror in his bath: it gave back the gaunt, bearded face of a derelict, a man who lacked a home. His shaving mirror on the Roosevelt had not revealed this. He removed his clothes. He was shocked by the outlines of his body, the ribs and clavicle, white-skinned and vulnerable, the bony pelvis, the organ hanging there redder than anything else. At night in bed Mother held him and tried to warm the small of his back, curled him into her as she lay against his back cradling his strange coldness. It was apparent to them both that this time he’d stayed away too long. Downstairs Brigit put a record on the Victrola, wound the crank and sat in the parlor smoking a cigarette and listening to John McCormack sing “I Hear You Calling Me.” She was doing what she could to lose her place. She was no longer efficient or respectful. Mother marked this change from the arrival of the colored girl. Father related it to the degrees of turn in the moral planet. He saw it everywhere, this new season, and it bewildered him. At his office he was told that the seamstresses in the flag department had joined a New York union. He put on clothes from his closet that ballooned from him as shapeless as the furs he had worn for a year. He had brought home gifts. He gave his son a pair of walrus tusks and a whale’s tooth with Esquimo carvings. e gave his wife the fur of a white polar bear. He pulled Artic treasures from his trunk — notebooks of his journals, their covers curling at the corners, their pages stiff as pages that have been wet; a signed photograph of Commander Peary; a bone harpoon tip; three or four tins of unused tea — incredible treasures in the North, but here in the parlor the embarrassing possessions of a savage. The family stood around and watched him on his knees. There was nothing he had to tell them. On the Northern arc of the world was a darkness and a coldness that had crept upon him and rounded his shoulders. Waiting for Peary to return to the Roosevelt he had heard the wind howl at night and had clasped with love and gratitude the foul body, like a stinking fish. The old Anglo-Saxon word he had hardly dared think of. That is what he had done. Now in New Rochelle he smelled on himself the oil of fish liver, fish on his breath, fish in his nostrils. He scrubbed himself red. He looked in Mother’s eyes to detect there his justice. He found instead a woman curious and alerted to his new being. He realized that every night since he’d returned they had slept in the same bed. She was in some way not as vigorously modest as she’d been. She took his gaze. She came to bed with her hair unbraided. Her hand one night brushed down his chest and came to rest below his nightshirt. He decided God had punishments in store so devious there was no sense trying to anticipate what they were. With a groan he turned to her and found her ready. Her hands pulling his face to hrs did not feel the tears.