Houdini wore a black wool suit and the sleeve of the jacket was torn near the shoulder. His mother had been dead for some months but every morning he awoke with his wound as fresh and painful as if she had died the night before. He had canceled several bookings. He shaved only when he remembered to, which was not often, and with his reddened eyes and stubble and baggy suit he looked like anything but the snappy magician of international fame.
It is a Jewish custom to leave small stones at the gravesite to show that a visit has been made. Mrs. Cecelia Weiss’s burial mound was covered with pebbles and small stones, one upon another, so that a kind of pyramid was forming. He thought of her at rest in the coffin under the earth. He wept bitterly. He wanted to be next to her. He remembered his attempt to escape from a coffin, the terror when he realized he could not. The coffin had a trick lid but he had not anticipated the weight of the earth. He had clawed at the earth, feeling his monumental weight. He had screamed into its impenetrable silence. He knew what it was to be sealed in the earth but he felt now it was the only place for him. What good was life without his beloved little mother?
He hated the spring. The air filled his nose and mouth like clotted soil.
In his brownstone on 113th Street near Riverside Drive, Houdini arranged framed photographs of his mother to suggest her continuing presence. One close-up he laid on the pillow of her bed. He placed an enlarged photo of her seated in a chair and smiling in the very chair in which she had posed. There was a picture of her in a hat and coat walking up the stairs from the street to the front door. He hung this on the inside of the door. One of her prized possessions had been an oak music box with a glass window in its lid so that one could see the large tined disc in rotation. There were several discs to choose from, but her favorite had been the one that played “Gaudeamus Igitur” on one side and “Columbia the Gem of the Ocean” on the other. Houdini cranked up the music box and played these tunes every evening. He dreamed they were he voice. He had saved the letters she had written to him over the years and now had them translated into English and typed so that he could read them easily and relive them without fear of their turning to dust from overuse. He stood in the door of her closet and breathed the redolence of her wardrobe.
The old woman had taken ill while Houdini was in Europe. He had looked forward to describing to her his meeting with the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but before he could write her she had died. He secured a release from his performing contracts and sailed home as quickly as he could. He remembered nothing of the voyage. He was out of his mind with grief. The burial had been delayed until his return. He learned that she had called for him moments before her death. She had suffered a paralytic stroke. Erich, she had moaned. Erich, Erich. He was tormented with gilt. He was obsessed with the idea that she had wanted to tell him something, that she had something to tell him that she could reveal only then, at the moment of her death.
He had always been skeptical of occultists and the spiritual claims of clairvoyants and mediums. In his early days with the Welsh Brothers Circus in Pennsylvania he had himself exploited the gullibility of rubes by claiming transcendental powers for his tricks. Blindfolded he would tell a confederate what item had been held for identification by someone in the audience. What is this, Mr. Houdini, the confederate would say, and he’d know. It was all done by code. Sometimes he would claim to speak with the dead and give some poor sucker whose name and circumstances they had managed to figure out a message from a loved one who had passed on. So he knew what spiritual fraud was. He could recognize it. Spiritual fraud had been rampant in the United States since 1848 when two sisters, Margaretta and Kate Fox, invited neighbors to hear the mysterious rappings in their house in Hydesville, New York. But it was the very fact of his expertise that persuaded him now to consider the possibility of finding someone who had genuine gifts as a medium. If it was possible to communicate with the dead he would find out. He could recognize and unmask any fake act in the world. Therefore if he found the real thing he would know it. He wanted to see is his mother Cecelia’s tiny figure and feel her hands touch his face. But since that could not be, he decided to see if it was really possible to speak with her.
And at this time in our history communication with the dead was not as far-fetched an idea as it had once been. America was in the dawn of the Twentieth Century, a nation of steam shovels, locomotives, airships, combustion engines, telephones and twenty-five-story buildings. But there was an interesting susceptibility to occult ideas of the most famous pragmatists in the land. Of course it was all very hush-hush. A rumor in certain circles had it that Pierpont Morgan and Henry Ford had formed a secret society. And he knew that the horticultural wizard Luther Burbank, who crossbred and developed hybrids with increased crop yields, talked secretly to plants and believed they could understand him. The great Edison himself, the man who invented the Twenty Century, had theorized that irreducible particles of life-charged matter, which he called swarms, subsisted after death and could never be destroyed. Houdini tried to get in touch with Edison. He asked for an interview. But the great man was too busy. He was working on an invention so secret that there was frequent speculation in the press as to what it might be. One news story came out claiming the new invention was something called a vacuum tube by which Edison hoped to receive messages from dead people. Houdini desperately sent off telegrams begging and pleading for an interview. He was rebuffed. He offered money to help fund the work. He was rebuffed. He swore to himself that he would invent his own instrument, just as he had learned to fly his own aeroplane. Whatever Edison began with came from the storehouse of technology available to everyone. Houdini bought books and began a study of mechanical physics and the principles of the storage battery. He vowed that by whatever medium, mechanical or human, if there was life after death he would discover it.
His passion in no time at all came to the attention of various people who kept abreast of such things. He met a man from Buffalo, New York, who claimed to have worked at one time with Steinmetz, the dwarf immigrant genius of the General Electric Company. Physicists all over the world were discovering waves, the man told him. There was a tremendously important theory from abroad in which it was supposed matter and energy were but two aspects of the same primal force. That is my idea too, the man told Houdini. He was a physicist with a university degree from Transylvania. All he needed was to devise the properly sensitive instrument, and primal waves could be detected and decoded that nobody as yet knew anything about. Houdini signed an agreement with him giving him two thousand dollars for the exclusive rights to his research. Another man, a chemist, he established in the basement of his own home. Letters came to him from people claiming to have mediumistic gifts and asking for any item of his mother’s — a brooch or a lock of hair — to work with. He employed a detective agency to look into the most reasonable-sounding of these. He told the agents how to recognize spirit fraud. He told them about trumpets, and trick photography, hidden recording megaphones, levitation of tables by means of pulleys. Why should a medium need the room dark, he told them. When he turns out the lights it’s to hide something.
Soon Houdini had generated enough activity of this kind to make him think about working again. I’m feeling stronger, he told his manager. I’m beginning to feel like my old self. The bookings were soon arranged. Those who saw Houdini’s performances in this period of his career say they surpassed anything he had ever done. He brought masons onstage who built a brick wall ten feet high which he then walked through. He made a full-seized elephant disappear with a clap of his hands. Coins poured from his fingers. Doves flew from his ears. He stepped into a packing case previously examined by the audience. It was shut and tied with a stout rope. No drape was set up in front of the packing case. It was pried open. It was empty. A collective gasp went up from the audience as Houdini was seen running into the theatre from the lobby. He leaped onstage. His eyes seemed to gleam the color of blue diamonds. Slowly he lifted his arms. His feet rose from the floor. He stood six inches above the floor. Women panted. Suddenly he collapsed in a heap. There were exclamations of disbelief followed by prolonged applause. His assistants helped him to a chair. Houdini asked for a glass of wine to restore his strength. He held the wine up in the spotlight. It turned colorless. He drank it. The wineglass disappeared from his hand.