Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [231]
“Did Houdini do that?”
“Yes, this Houdini defied all forms of restraint and confinement, including the grave. He broke out of everything. They buried him and he escaped. They sank him in boxes and he escaped. They put him in a strait jacket and manacles and hung him upside-down by one ankle from the flagpole of the Flatiron Building in New York. Sarah Bernhardt came to watch this and sat in her limousine on Fifth Avenue looking on while he freed himself and climbed to safety. A friend of mine, a poet, wrote a ballad about this called ‘Harlequin Harry.’ Bernhardt was already very old and her leg had been amputated. She sobbed and hung on Houdini’s neck as they were driven away in the car and begged him to give back her leg. He could do anything! In czarist Russia the Okhrana stripped him naked and locked him in the steel van it used for Siberian deportations. He freed himself from that too. He escaped from the most secure prisons in the world. And whenever he came home from a triumphal tour he went straight to the cemetery. He lay down on his mother’s grave and on his belly through the grass he told her in whispers about his trips, where he had been, and what he had done. Later he spent years debunking spiritualists. He exposed all the tricks of the medium-racket. In an article I once speculated whether he hadn’t had an intimation of the holocaust and was working out ways to escape from the death camps. Ah! If only European Jewry had learned what he knew. But then Houdini was punched experimentally in the belly by a medical student and died of peritonitis. So you see, nobody can overcome the final fact of the material world. Dazzling rationality, blazing of consciousness, the most ingenious skill—nothing can be done about death. Houdini worked out one line of inquiry completely. Have you looked into an open grave lately, Miss Volsted?”
“At this point in your life, such a morbid obsession is understandable,” she said. She looked up, her face burning white. “There’s only one thing to do. It’s obvious.”
“Obvious?”
“Don’t play dumb,” she said. “You know the answer. You and I could do very well together. With me you’d stay free—no strings attached. Come and go as you like. We are not in America. But what do you do in your room? Who’s Who says you’ve won prizes in biography and history.”
“I’m preparing to write about the Spanish-American War,” I said. “And I’m catching up on my correspondence. Actually, I have this letter to post. . . .”
I had written to Kathleen in Belgrade. I didn’t mention money but I hoped she wasn’t going to forget my share of the option payment on Humboldt’s scenario. The sum she had mentioned was fifteen hundred dollars and I was going to need it soon. I was being dunned in Chicago—Szathmar was forwarding my mail. It turned out that the Señora had flown to Madrid First Class. The travel bureau was asking me to remit, promptly I had written to George Swiebel to ask whether the money for my Kirman rugs had been paid yet, but George was not a prompt correspondent. I knew that Tomchek and Srole would send in a staggering bill for losing my case and that Judge Urbanovich would let Cannibal Pinsker help himself from the impounded funds.
“You seem to be muttering to yourself in your room,” said Rebecca Volsted.
“I’m sure you haven’t been listening at the door,” I said.
She flushed—that is, she turned even paler—and answered, “Pilar tells me that you’re talking to yourself in there.”
“I read fairy tales