Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow [70]
Soon Houdini had generated enough activity of this kind to make him think about working again. I’m feeling stronger, he told his manager. I’m beginning to feel like my old self. The bookings were soon arranged. Those who saw Houdini’s performances in this period of his career say they surpassed anything he had ever done. He brought masons onstage who built a brick wall ten feet high which he then walked through. He made a full-sized elephant disappear with a clap of his hands. Coins poured from his fingers. Doves flew from his ears. He stepped into a packing case previously examined by the audience. It was nailed shut and tied with a stout rope. No drape was set up in front of the packing case. It was pried open. It was empty. A collective gasp went up from the audience as Houdini was seen running into the theatre from the lobby. He leaped onstage. His eyes seemed to gleam the color of blue diamonds. Slowly he lifted his arms. His feet rose from the floor. He stood six inches above the floor. Women panted. Suddenly he collapsed in a heap. There were exclamations of disbelief followed by prolonged applause. His assistants helped him to a chair. Houdini asked for a glass of wine to restore his strength. He held the wine up in the spotlight. It turned colorless. He drank it. The wineglass disappeared from his hand.
In fact his performances were now of such intensity and had so strange and disquieting an effect on his audiences, 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 their 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