Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
In 1902 Father built a house at the crest of the Broadview
Avenue hill in New Rochelle, New York. It
was a three-story brown shingle with dormers, bay
windows and a screened porch. Striped awnings
shaded the windows. The family took possession of
this stout manse on a sunny day in June and it seemed
for some years thereafter that all their days would be
warm and fair. The best part of Father's income was
derived from the manufacture of flags and buntings
and other accoutrements of patriotism, including fireworks.
Patriotism was a reliable sentiment in the early
1900's. Teddy Roosevelt was President. The population
customarily gathered in great numbers either out of
doors for parades, public concerts, fish fries, political
picnics, social outings, or indoors in meeting halls,
vaudeville theatres, operas, ballrooms. There seemed
to be no entertainment that did not involve great
swarms of people. Trains and steamers and trolleys
moved them from one place to another. That was the
style, that was the way people lived. Women were
stouter then. They visited the fleet carrying white parasols.
Everyone wore white in summer. Tennis racquets
were hefty and the racquet faces elliptical. There was a
lot of sexual fainting. There were no Negroes. There
were no immigrants. On Sunday afternoon, after dinner,
Father and Mother went upstairs and closed the
bedroom door. Grandfather fell asleep on the divan in
the parlor. The Little Boy in the sailor blouse sat on the
screened porch and waved away the flies. Down at the
bottom of the hill Mother's Younger Brother boarded
the streetcar and rode to the end of the line. He was a
lonely, withdrawn young man with blond moustaches,
and was thought to be having difficulty finding himself.
The end of the line was an empty field of tall
marsh grasses. The air was salt. Mother's Younger
Brother in his white linen suit and boater rolled his
trousers and walked barefoot in the salt marshes. Sea
birds started and flew up. This was the time in our history
when Winslow Homer was doing his painting. A
certain light was still available along the Eastern
seaboard. Homer painted the light. It gave the sea a
heavy dull menace and shone coldly on the rocks and
shoals of the New England coast. There were unexplained
shipwrecks and brave towline rescues. Odd
things went on in lighthouses and in shacks nestled in
the wild beach plum. Across America sex and death
were barely distinguishable. Runaway women died in
the rigors of ecstasy. Stories were hushed up and
reporters paid off by rich families. One read between
the lines of the journals and gazettes. In New York City
the papers were full of the shooting of the famous
architect Stanford White by Harry K. Thaw, eccentric
scion of a coke and railroad fortune. Harry K. Thaw
was the husband of Evelyn Nesbit, the celebrated
beauty who had once been Stanford White's mistress.
The shooting took place in the roof garden of the Madison
Square Garden on 26th Street, a spectacular block-long
building of yellow brick and terra cotta that White
himself had designed in the Sevillian style. It was the
opening night of a revue entitled Mamzelle Champagne,
and as the chorus sang and danced the eccentric scion
wearing on this summer night a straw boater and
heavy black coat pulled out a pistol and shot the
famous architect three times in the head. On the roof.
There were screams. Evelyn fainted. She had been a
well-known artist's model at the age of fifteen. Her
underclothes were white. Her husband habitually
whipped her. She happened once to meet Emma Goldman,
the revolutionary. Goldman lashed her with her
tongue. Apparently there were Negroes. There were
immigrants. And though the newspapers called the
shooting the Crime of the Century, Goldman knew it
was only 1906 and there were ninety-four years to go.
Mother's Younger Brother was in love with Evelyn
Nesbit. He had closely followed the scandal surrounding
her name and had begun to reason that the death of
her lover Stanford White and the imprisonment of her
husband Harry K. Thaw left her in need of the attentions
of a genteel middle-class young man with no
money. He thought about her all the time. He was desperate
to have her. In his room pinned on the wall was
a newspaper drawing by Charles Dana Gibson entitled
"The Eternal Question." It showed Evelyn in profile,
with a profusion of hair, one thick strand undone and
fallen in the configuration of a question mark. Her
downcast eye was embellished with a fallen ringlet
that threw her brow in shadow. Her nose was delicately
upturned. Her mouth was slightly pouted. Her
long neck curved like a bird taking wing. Evelyn Nesbit
had caused the death of one man and wrecked the
life of another and from that he deduced that there was
nothing in life worth having, worth wanting, but the
embrace of her thin arms.
The afternoon was a blue haze. Tidewater seeped
into his footprints. He bent down and found a perfect
shell specimen, a variety not common to western Long
Island Sound. It was a voluted pink and amber shell
the shape of a thimble, and what he did in the hazy sun
with the salt drying on his ankles was to throw his
head back and drink the minute amount of sea water in
the shell. Gulls wheeled overhead, crying like oboes,
and behind him at the land end of the marsh, out of
sight behind the tall grasses, the distant bell of the
North Avenue streetcar tolled its warning.
Across town the little boy in the sailor suit was suddenly
restless and began to measure the length of the
porch. He trod with his toe upon the runner of the
cane-backed rocking chair. He had reached that age of
knowledge and wisdom in a child when it is not
expected by the adults around him and consequently
goes unrecognized. He read the newspaper daily and
was currently following the dispute between the professional
baseballers and a scientist who claimed that
the curve ball was an optical illusion. He felt that the
circumstances of his family's life operated against his
need to see things and to go places. For instance he had
conceived an enormous interest in the works and
career of Harry Houdini, the escape artist. But he had
not been taken to a performance. Houdini was a headliner
in the top vaudeville circuits. His audiences were
poor people--carriers, peddlers, policemen, children.
His life was absurd. He went all over the world accepting
all kinds of bondage and escaping. He was roped to
a chair. He escaped. He was chained to a ladder. He
escaped. He was handcuffed, his legs were put in irons,
he was tied up in a strait jacket and put in a locked cabinet.
He escaped. He escaped from bank vaults, nailed-up
barrels, sewn mailbags; he escaped from a zinc-lined
Knabe piano case, a giant football, a galvanized iron
boiler, a rolltop desk, a sausage skin. His escapes were
mystifying because he never damaged or appeared to
unlock what he escaped from. The screen was pulled
away and there he stood disheveled but triumphant
beside the inviolate container that was supposed to
have contained him. He waved to the crowd. He
escaped from a sealed milk can filled with water. He
escaped from a Siberian exile van. From a Chinese torture
crucifix. From a Hamburg penitentiary. From an
English prison ship. From a Boston jail. He was
chained to automobile tires, water wheels, cannon, and
he escaped. He dove manacled from a bridge into the
Mississippi, the Seine, the Mersey, and came up waving.
He hung upside down and strait-jacketed from
cranes, biplanes and the tops of buildings. He was
dropped into the ocean padlocked in a diving suit fully
weighted and not connected to an air supply, and he
escaped. He was buried alive in a grave and could not
escape, and had to be rescued. Hurriedly, they dug him
out. The earth is too heavy, he said gasping. His nails
bled. Soil fell from his eyes. He was drained of color
and couldn't stand. His assistant threw up. Houdini
wheezed and sputtered. He coughed blood. They
cleaned him off and took him back to the hotel. Today,
nearly fifty years since his death, the audience for
escapes is even larger.
The little boy stood at the end of the porch and fixed
his gaze on a bluebottle fly traversing the screen in a
way that made it appear to be coming up the hill from
North Avenue. The fly flew off. An automobile was
coming up the hill from North Avenue. As it drew
closer he saw it was a black 45-horsepower Pope-Toledo
Runabout. He ran along the porch and stood at
the top of the steps. The car came past his house, made
a loud noise and swerved into the telephone pole. The
little boy ran inside and called upstairs to his mother
and father. Grandfather woke with a start. The boy ran
back to the porch. The driver and the passenger were
standing in the street looking at the car: it had big
wheels with pneumatic tires and wooden spokes
painted in black enamel. It had brass headlamps in
front of the radiator and brass sidelamps over the fenders.
It had tufted upholstery and double side entrances.
It did not appear to be damaged. The driver was in livery.
He folded back the hood and a geyser of white
steam shot up with a hiss.
A number of people looked on from their front
yards. But Father, adjusting the chain on his vest, went
down to the sidewalk to see if there was something he
could do. The car's owner was Harry Houdini, the
famous escape artist. He was spending the day driving
through Westchester. He was thinking of buying some
property. He was invited into the house while the radiator
cooled. He surprised them with his modest,
almost colorless demeanor He seemed depressed. His
success had brought into vaudeville a host of competitors.
Consequently he had to think of more and more
dangerous escapes. He was a short, powerfully built
man, an athlete obviously, with strong hands and with
back and arm muscles that suggested themselves
through the cut of his rumpled tweed suit which,
though well tailored, was worn this day inappropriately.
The thermometer read in the high eighties. Houdini
had unruly stiff hair parted in the middle and clear
blue eyes, which did not stop moving. He was very
respectful to Mother and Father and spoke of his profession
with diffidence. This struck them as appropriate.
The little boy stared at him. Mother had ordered
lemonade. It was brought into the parlor and Houdini
drank it gratefully. The room was kept cool by the
awnings on the windows. The windows themselves
were shut to keep out the heat. Houdini wanted to
undo his collar. He felt trapped by the heavy square
furnishings, the drapes and dark rugs, the Oriental silk
cushions, the green glass lampshades. There was a
chaise with a zebra rug. Noticing Houdini's gaze
Father mentioned that he had shot that zebra on a
hunting trip in Africa. Father was an amateur explorer
of considerable reputation. He was past president of
the New York Explorers Club to which he made an
annual disbursement. In fact in just a few days he
would be leaving to carry the Club's standard on the
third Peary expedition to the Arctic. You mean, Houdini
said, you're going with Peary to the Pole? God
willing, Father replied. He sat back in his chair and lit a
cigar. Houdini became voluble. He paced back and
forth. He spoke of his own travels, his tours of Europe.
But the Pole! he said. Now that's something. You must
be pretty good to get picked for that. He turned his
blue eyes on Mother. And keeping the home fires burning
ain't so easy either, he said. He was not without
charm. He smiled and Mother, a large blond woman,
lowered her eyes. Houdini then spent a few minutes
doing small deft tricks with objects at hand for the little
boy. When he took his leave the entire family saw him
to the door. Father and Grandfather shook his hand.
Houdini walked down the path that ran under the big
maple tree and then descended the stone steps that led
to the street. The chauffeur was waiting, the car was
parked correctly. Houdini climbed in the seat next to
the driver and waved. People stood looking on from
their yards. The little boy had followed the magician
to the street and now stood at the front of the Pope-Toledo
gazing at the distorted macrocephalic image of
himself in the shiny brass fitting of the headlight. Houdini
thought the boy comely, fair like his mother, and
tow-headed, but a little soft-looking. He leaned over
the side door. Goodbye, Sonny, he said holding out his
hand. Warn the Duke, the little boy said. Then he ran
off.
