“It doesn’t have to be like the French Follies,” I said hastily. “I don’t intend to cancan or striptease. I just have to give an impression of glamour onstage and to distract the audience from what the illusionist is doing.”
Daniel shook his head. “But glamour demands an hourglass figure.”
“You are the master,” Ryan said. “If anyone can create her an outfit, you can.”
“Flatterer,” Daniel responded. He gave a dramatic sigh. “Oh, well, I suppose I’ll see what I can do.”
“And I do need it in a hurry,” I pointed out.
Daniel rolled his eyes. “You don’t need me, you need a miracle-working saint. You Irish know your saints, don’t you? Who is the patron of producing instant glamorous outfits?”
I looked at Ryan and we laughed, thus breaking the tension.
“Don’t worry, he fusses a lot but he’ll do it, and you’ll look fabulous,” Ryan assured me as we came away. “He really is a genius. I absolutely insist that he makes all the costumes for my productions.”
So I had what was probably going to be a horribly expensive costume being made for me with a grudging promise that it would be ready for a fitting in the morning. Now all I had to do was learn how to be an illusionists’ assistant in one lesson. How did I get myself into these things? I wondered.
The day was not quite as stiflingly hot as the one before and I was altogether in a better mood when I alighted from the train at Ninety-ninth. That mood seemed to be radiated from the other people on the street. Old men were sitting on stoops, windows were open with bedding draped over sills to air. The girls were still playing jump rope games and women paused from their sweeping and polishing to look up with a smile, remembering the days when they had time for games.
Houdini’s brother opened the door to me at their house. “Oh, it’s you again,” he said. He didn’t look too thrilled to see me.
“Has Bess come home from the hospital?”
“Yes, but she’s really weak. My mother is making her some Hungarian beef soup.”
“And your brother is here?”
“Ehrie? Yes, he’s with her.”
I hadn’t heard him called that name before. “Ehrie?” I asked.
He nodded. “That’s his name—Ehrich. I guess that’s where he got the name Harry from for his act. Well, I suppose you’d better come in.”
He led me into a dark hallway and then opened the door to a front parlor. It was truly hideous—dark, overstuffed, and Victorian at its worst with velvet sofas, chairs with skirts to them to hide the offending legs, dried flowers and birds under glass domes, in fact not an inch of space that hadn’t been decorated with something. Then I remembered that this was a rented house and forgave the Houdinis for the awful taste. It was also clearly a traditional front parlor, the type that is never used, except for weddings and funerals. The pillows looked as if no back had ever leaned against them. I perched uneasily on the edge of the nearest chair and waited.
Soon brother Dash returned. “They want you to go up to the bedroom,” he said with a tinge of horror in his voice.
As I started up the stairs the mother’s face peered from the kitchen. She shot Dash a sharp question in whatever language they spoke—I wasn’t sure if it was Hungarian or Yiddish or a mixture of both. He answered and she gave me a look of pure venom. Clearly I wasn’t exactly welcome in the Weiss’s household. I wondered if they were Orthodox Jews and I was breaking some kind of taboo. I’d had a brief encounter with Orthodox Judaism early in my time in New York and had learned about all those rules and foods and different sinks. But then Harry and Bess had traveled all over Europe in their profession. They’d have learned to eat and sleep on the road in a variety of circumstances. And I also remembered that Bess wasn’t even Jewish. So that couldn’t be the reason that Harry’s mother resented my presence. I wondered what they’d told her.
Bess was lying propped among pillows. She still looked very pale, but her dark eyes lit up when she saw me. “Here she is, Harry. Here’s our girl,” she said. “Come on in, Molly.”
“Your mother and brother don’t seem to think I should be here,” I said, coming over to take her hand and nodding to Harry,