Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow [61]
27
Spring, spring! Like a mad magician flinging silks and colored rags from his trunk the earth produced the yellow and white crocus, then the fox grape, the forsythia flowering on its stalks, the blades of iris, the apple tree blossoms of pink and white and green, the heavy lilac and the daffodil. Grandfather stood in the yard and gave a standing ovation. A breeze came up and blew from the maples a shower of spermatozoic soft-headed green buds. They caught in his sparse gray hair. He shook his head with delight, feeling a wreath had been bestowed. A joyful spasm took hold of him and he stuck his leg out in an old man’s jig, lost his balance, and slid on the heel of his shoe into a sitting position. In this manner he cracked his pelvis and entered a period of declining health from which he would not recover. But the spring was joyful and even in pain he wore a smile. Everywhere the sap rose and the birds sang. Upstate, at Matteawan State Prison Farm, Harry K. Thaw nimbly jumped over a ditch in a road and stepped on the running board of a waiting Locomobile. He hooked his elbow about the roof post, gave an exultant cry, and the car drove off. Thaw escaped to Canada, leaving a trail of outraged waitresses and stunned hôteliers. He abducted and whipped a teenage boy—he was beginning to work out his problems. Eventually he came back across the border. He was discovered on a train near Buffalo and ran through the cars giggling and panting as police detectives set up pursuit. In the dining car he turned and threw heavy silvered individual coffeepots he plucked from the tables of astonished diners. He climbed up between the cars and ran along the top of the train in a kind of simian lope, leaping down upon the observation platform and standing with his arms outstretched to the sun as the police burst through the door and grabbed him.
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