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By Root 5067 0

losing his audience, his suspicions that his life was unimportant and his achievements laughable—all the weight of daily concern seemed easier to bear. He attributed this to his new pursuit, the unmasking of spirit fraud wherever he found it. Driven by his feeling for his sainted mother, he had broken up seances, revealed the shoddy practices of mediums and held up to public scorn the trappings and devices that charlatans used to gull the innocent. At every performance he offered ten thousand dollars to the medium who would produce a manifestation he, Houdini, could not duplicate using mechanical means. The press and the public loved this new element in his work, but that was incidental. It was as if, now that his mother was dead, heaven had to be defended. Embattled, he felt he would soon begin to distinguish the borders of the region where she dwelled. His private detectives visited occult parlors in every city in which he played. He himself went to seances disguised as a gray-haired widow in a veil. He would shine a portable electric torch on the thin wire that caused the table to levitate. He tore the covering from the hidden Victrola. He plucked trumpets out of the air and grabbed by the scruff of the neck confederates hidden behind drapes. Then he stood up and dramatically cast off his wig of waved gray hair and announced who he was. He accrued lawsuits by the dozens.

Houdini realized he was now raised to his assigned height. The breeze up here was somewhat stronger. He felt himself revolving. He faced the windows of the Times Tower, then the open spaces over Broadway and Seventh Avenue. Hey, Houdini, a voice called. The wind turned Houdini toward the building. A man was grinning at him, upside down, from a twelfth-floor window. Hey, Houdini, the man said, fuck you. Up yours, Jack, the magician replied. He could actually release himself from a strait jacket in less than a minute. But if he did it too quickly people would not believe he was legitimate. So he took longer. He appeared to struggle. He could hear the oohs and aahs rising from the street as he made the cable jerk and spin. Soon his entire upper half, including his head, was entangled in the restraint. Inside the thick duck of the strait jacket there was no light. He rested for a moment. He was upside down over Broadway, the year was 1914, and the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was reported to have been assassinated. It was at this moment that an image composed itself in Houdini’s mind. The image was of a small boy looking at himself in the shiny brass headlamp of an automobile.

We have the account of this odd event from the magician’s private, unpublished papers. Harry Houdini’s career in show business gave him to overstatement, so we must not relinquish our own judgment in considering his claim that it was the one genuine mystical experience of his life. Be that as it may, the family archives show a calling card from Mr. Houdini dated just a week later. Nobody was home to receive him. The family had by this time entered its period of dissolution. Mother, son and the brown child, who had been christened Coalhouse Walker III, were motoring upstate in a Packard touring car, Mother at the wheel. They were seeing the Howe Caverns, and their ultimate destination for the summer was the Maine shore at Prout’s Neck, where the painter Winslow Homer had lived his last years. Mother and Father were now on the most correct and abbreviated speaking terms, the death of Younger Brother in Mexico having provided final impetus for their almost continuous separation. Grandfather had not survived the winter and resided now in the cemetery behind the First Congregational Church on North Avenue in New Rochelle. Father was in Washington, D.C. He had found upon his return to the flag and fireworks plant a drawerful of blueprints that was the repayment of his debt to which Younger Brother had referred, cryptically, in their last conversation at the Morgan Library. In the year and a half of his life before his emigration, Younger Brother invented seventeen ordnance devices, some of