Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow [68]
Thaw would not divulge the name of the person who helped him escape. Just call me Houdini, he said. An enterprising reporter decided to find the great magician and solicit a comment. He was that kind of reporter expert in the stupid and inconsequential news story so loved by the papers of the time. Houdini was found in a cemetery in Queens where he was observing the spring on his knees beside his mother’s grave. He looked up with the swollen and laughable face of grief. The reporter stole away. All around the graveyard the dogwood was in flower and the fallen magnolia petals lay in circles under the trees.
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 its 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 her 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 guilt. 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