In fact his performances were now of such intensity nd had so strange and disquieting an effect on his audience, that in some cases children were hurried out before the end of the show. Houdini never noticed. He drove himself beyond his own physical capacity and would do eight or a dozen of his major tricks in a show that was supposed to have three. He had always billed his tricks as death-defying and now reporters from the New York dailies, fully expecting him to overextend himself, followed him on his one-night stands from the Brooklyn Pantages, to Fox’s Union City, to the Main Street Theatre in New Rochelle. He did his famous milk-can escape in which he was padlocked in one of the ordinary forty-quart cans used to deliver milk to grocery stores. The can was filled with water. He had to escape or he would die. He lay in a glass tank shaped like a coffin, shown to be airtight, and in which a candle’s flame could not be sustained. He lay in there sometimes for as much as six minutes after the candle went out. People shouted from the audience. Women closed their eyes and put their hands over the ears. They begged his assistants to stop him. When the pleas were finally heeded the fitted top of the glass coffin made a popping sound as it came off. He was helped out shaking and covered with sweat. Every feat enacted Houdini’s desire for his dead mother. He was buried and reborn, buried and reborn. One night, at a single performance only in New Rochelle, his wish for his own death was so apparent that people began to scream and a local clergyman stood up and shouted Houdini, you are experimenting with damnation! Perhaps it is true that he could no longer distinguish his life from his tricks. He stood in his long belted robe, and glistening with sweat, his wet hair in spirals, he looked like a creature from another universe. Ladies and gentlemen, he said in an exhausted voice, please forgive me. He wanted to explain his mastery of an ancient Eastern breathing regimen that allowed him to suspend his animation. He wanted to explain that his feats looked far more dangerous than they really were. He raised his hands in appeal. But at that moment there was an explosion of such force that the theatre shook on its foundations and chunks of plaster fell from the proscenium arch; and the distracted and nerve-shattered audience, thinking it was another of his satanic tricks, retreated up the aisles in terror of him.
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ctually the blast occurred two miles away at the borders of the city in its west end. The station house of the Emerald Isle Engine had exploded, firing the field across the street with burning timbers and lighting the sky over Westchester. Companies from every section of the city responded and from the adjoining communities of Pelham and Mount Vernon. Little could be done. Fortunately the clapboard structure on Firehouse Lane was no closer than a quarter-mile to the nearest residence. But two of the volunteers were in the hospital, one with burns so severe that he was not expected to live through the day. And at least five men were known to have been on duty at the time. It was the night of the week, Thursday, when the company gathered for its regular game of poker.
By the following dawn the field was scorched and the building was a pile of charred ruins. The entire area had been roped off and police detectives now began to go through the debris recovering bodies and deducing from the evidence what it was that had caused the disaster. It soon became apparent that homicide had been committed. Of the four bodies recovered two show that not the fire or the explosion but buckshot had been the cause of death. The matching horses were in harness and attached to the pumper and they lay where they had fallen halfway into the street. The alarm signal machine was recovered from the ruins showing that an alarm had been given from a box at the north end of town, yet there had been no other fire anywhere in the city that nigh. From this and several other bits of evidence, some secured with the help of a doctor of forensic medicine from the New York City Police Department, the following reconstruction was made: At approximately 10:30 P.M. six members of the engine company had been gathered in their quarters playing cards when the alarm rang. The cardplayers scrambled into their boots and helmets. The horses were trotted out of their stalls and hitched to the steam engine. The harness was a special snap-on variety developed for firehorses by the P. A. Setzer Company of Hickory, North Carolina. Like all firemen the Emerald Isle were proud of the speed with which they answered alarms. There was always a small fire going under the boiler so that the steam could be raised to full pressure by the time the apparatus arrived at the site. If the company were normally efficient on this evening not one minute would elapse before the doors were swung open and the driver, hollahing his horses, would have whipped them into the road. Someone was standing in the street directly in the engine’s path. He or they were armed with shotguns which were fired directly in the faces of the oncoming horses. Two of the horses went down immediately, the third reared, wounded in the neck so that its blood sprayed over the street like a fine rain. The driver of the rig was fatally shot, and fell forward to the ground. Of the three firemen aboard, two incurred fatal wounds and a third was crushed to death as the engine, pulled awry by the panicked horses, toppled over on its side. When the steam boiler went over, it made a terrible clang that was heard by residents in the neighborhood already startled by the boom of guns. The firebox was scattered and flaming coals ignited the clapboard firehouse. The blaze quickly grew and the heat of the burning building exploded the boiler and sent burning timbers flying across the road into the field. That was the moment Houdini lost the affection of his audience.
As it happened the family had retired early that night. They had been sleeping poorly. The brown baby cried for his mother and did not take to the mild of a wet nurse. Father heard the distant explosion and looking out of his bedroom window saw the light sky. His first thought was that his plant with its store of fireworks had blown. But the glow was brightest in a different direction. It wasn’t until the next morning that he learned what it was that had burned. The fire seemed to be the only topic of conversation throughout the city. At the lunch hour Father went to the site. Crowds were standing at the police barriers. He circled the ropes and came to the pond at the bottom of the field across the road from the demolished firehouse: in the pond, the sunken structure of the Model T appeared and disappeared as the water, raised to a small chop by the prevailing breeze, erased and then re-formed its wavering outlines. Father went home for the day although the twelve-noon whistle had only just blown. Mother could not look at him. She was seated with the baby on her lap. Her head was bet in a meditative attitude unconsciously suggestive of the dead Sarah. Father wondered at this moment if their lives might no longer be under their control.