Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [38]
In the mid 1890s, Fay’s family left Nebraska and moved to the East. Fay put Frank in an Eastern boarding school and joined her sisters onstage again for a while. They played around Boston and New York, but eventually the act split up, and Fay followed a bad love affair to the West Coast. She settled in Sacramento in the 1920s, she said, because the city had been a haven for the Spiritualist and Theosophy movements, which Fay became active in. Then she married a man named William Ingram, one of the city’s prominent psychologists, and worked for him as his aide. After Ingram died a few years back, Fay continued to see some of his patients. In time, she found herself drifting back into Spiritualism. She believed that what really troubled many people was lack of a connection with the other side—that is, with those who had gone on to the spirit world, by way of death. It could bring great healing to both the living and the departed if they could establish communication through a medium such as Fay. “For example,” said Fay, “I can see that there is a gentle spirit who is around you at all times. She is here even as we speak. I sense that she works to protect you from a darker spirit that also lurks nearby, and often tries to get closer to you.”
“That,” said Bessie, “is enough of that. I don’t care what you do for a living, Fay, but if you want me to stay here with you, don’t bring any spirits knocking against my walls in the dark. I will leave faster than you can believe. When it comes to these matters, I have decided to stay a coward for the rest of my life.”
Fay agreed not to meddle between Bessie and her attendant spirits.
ALL THE BUSINESS ABOUT FRANK’S FAMOUS FATHER had left Bessie intensely curious, and something in Fay’s mess of hints and detail had clicked for my mother. She knew this much: Frank’s real surname, according to Fay, was Weiss, and his father had been killed by a stomach injury. Armed with this information, and her suspicions, Bessie visited the Sacramento Public Library one afternoon and did a little reading. It didn’t take much to give her what she wanted. In 1874, the celebrated magician Harry Houdini—the man so despised by Frank and his mother—had been born as Ehrich Weiss. He later changed his name to Houdini as a tribute to the famed French magician Robert Houdin. In 1926, during a tour, Houdini—who was then forty-eight—allowed an overzealous fan to deliver some hard blows to his midsection as a proof of the magician’s undiminished stamina and strength. The blows did severe damage that could not be repaired, and on October 31, 1926, Houdini died of an advanced form of peritonitis.
According to this information, Bessie surmised, Harry Houdini had been Frank Gilmore’s real father.
When Bessie told Fay what she had learned, Fay confirmed her suspicions. Years before, Fay said, after Houdini’s rise to fame, she had contacted the magician and tried to establish Frank’s claims to paternity. But Houdini, who was bitterly disappointed that his own wife could not have children—and in no mood for a scandal—refused Fay’s request. Still, she had let her son know who his father was; she thought it only fair. “That,” said Fay, “is the great tragedy of Frank’s life. The anger of the man is that he can never claim who he truly is.”
It was this bitter knowledge that his own father had refused him, said Fay, that had turned Frank into a restless man, bound for trouble, and unable to stay true to his own children. “If you have children with him, Bessie, make him stay true to them. That’s the only thing that will ever bring him peace. It’s too late for him to be Houdini’s son. The only thing he can do now is to be a father to his own sons.”
FOR YEARS, FAY HAS FASCINATED AND PERPLEXED me as much as anybody in my family’s history. Clearly, she was a woman who knew the effective force of mystery. The mystery of a powerful past that owns your destiny without giving up its own secrets. The mystery of the world of death.
Fay sowed her