The Ripper's Wife

34

I returned to America on the same ship that brought me to England, Jim, and my destiny, twenty-four years ago, the SS Baltic, only it was a brand, spanking new Baltic; they’d retired the old one years ago but kept the name. It seemed somehow strangely fitting that I’d been with both Baltics when they were maidens, only I wasn’t a young girl anymore, a hopeful bride-to-be of eighteen, though there were moments when I stood at the rail that I sensed her ghost standing beside me. My reflection reminded me every chance it got that I was a worn and weary middle-aged woman whose future remained uncertain. But I was still hoping for a new and better life; that hadn’t changed. I was alive, and life and hope are bound together like Siamese twins; you can’t have one without the other.

When our ship glided gracefully into New York Harbor and I saw the Statue of Liberty I fell on my knees, the most grateful tears I had ever shed streaming down my face. Let the others stare; I didn’t care. I more than any one of them understood what liberty truly meant. I’d lost it, I thought forever, and now it was mine again, and I would never be such a fool as to take my freedom for granted.

The moment my foot, shod in a dainty new boot of black patent leather and gray suede, to match my new striped traveling dress and silver fox stole and muff, touched the gangplank a band began to play “Home, Sweet Home.” I was so overcome that Mama had to hold me up. The press of the crowd, though they were a kindly bunch, all calling out good wishes and God bless, frightened me, as did the numerous journalists, crying out questions and aiming cameras at me, making me feel petrified with terror, like I was facing a firing squad, and I clung to Mama all the more and tried, with trembling hands, to pull my veil down.

“Please! I am too overwhelmed to speak!” I kept crying as I slumped against Mama.

The next thing I knew I was seated in the opulent velvet-cushioned softness of a sleek silver motorcar and a broadly smiling man and woman, Mama’s friends, my ardent supporters the Densmores, were pressing enormous bouquets of pink and white flowers into my arms and I was being whisked away to the quiet and splendid seclusion of their country estate, Cragsmore House. I was so stunned I couldn’t take in a single word. I merely sat there, dumb as a mute, trying to just breathe and staring at the back of the chauffeur’s head while Mama and Mrs. Densmore sat on each side of me, patting my hands, and Mr. Densmore kept smiling so much I’m sure his mouth must have ached long before we reached Newport.





It was a world I thought lost to me forever, only a dream I vaguely remembered—manicured lawns, sweeping marble staircases, antique statuary imported from digs in Roman ruins, crystal chandeliers, forest-green, plum, and deep blood-crimson plush velvet portieres, gilt accents, like golden lace to trim this lavish life, stucco embellishments, rich-veined woods, polished until they shone like brown eyes lit by love, brocade, damask, velvet, and leather upholstered sofas, chairs, stools, and benches, ancestral portraits and Old Masters in rich golden frames on every wall, photographs framed in silver, Wedgwood, Sevres, Dresden, Chippendale, Sheraton, Brussels tapestries, Aubusson carpets, graceful rococo splendor evocative of the vanished opulence of Versailles vying with discreet intrusions of the new, exciting and frightening, fast modern world tap-dancing to the tune of progress. I felt like a child, walking through a museum, afraid to touch anything. This world I had once taken for granted was now alien and frightening to me; I was a fish out of water terrified I’d never get back in it or, if I did, it would be only to discover that I had forgotten how to swim. That golden-ringleted girl who had flopped with careless, casual grace into Chippendale chairs didn’t exist anymore. That girl was dead, but I, the shell, the weary old husk, she left behind her, was still alive, desperate and frantic to find something to fill up that emptiness.

I was shown into a lovely rose-colored room, filled with light and vases of roses. I smiled and nodded politely whenever my hostess spoke to me, saying she hoped I would be comfortable and happy here, but all I could do was inwardly pray that my closely entwined feelings of unease and awkwardness would soon abate. I had to learn to swim again, and quick! This pretty room felt too good for me, as though by just being here, touching it, sleeping in that beautiful rose-pink bed, sitting in the fireside chairs, reading by the light of the rose silk–shaded lamps, I would pollute or damage it, as though black stains would spontaneously appear wherever I touched.

There was a balcony with a fine view overlooking a vast rose garden, with fountains and statues. A little lacy white wrought-iron table and chairs had been set out with one of the chairs drawn back as though in readiness for me.

“I thought you might like to work out here in the sunshine and fresh air sometimes,” Mrs. Densmore said.

“Work?” I asked, recalling instantly the hundreds and hundreds of shirts I had sewn in prison. I thought all that was over! I had, perhaps foolishly, thought that I would never have to work again. I had just assumed I would always be taken care of from now on. I’d never had to fend for myself or earn my own living before, and I feared I was rather old to start now.

Mama and Mrs. Densmore exchanged a lengthy look. Then Mrs. Densmore made her excuses and left me alone with Mama, to settle in and rest after my long and tiring journey.

“Work?” I repeated.

“Your book, o’ course,” Mama said as she pulled me back into the bedroom and, just like I was a little girl again, began to divest me of my hat, muff, wrap, handbag, and gloves. “You’ll want a hot bath; I remember that was always the first thing you wanted whenever we arrived in those happy days of our travels—”

“What book, Mama?” I persisted.

“Florie, dear.” Mama went to sit on the bed and patted the rosy coverlet beside her. “I don’t like to say it, but you must be practical. It is an unpleasant but unavoidable fact that you will surely want for money, an’ soon. You cannot live off the generosity of your supporters and admirers forever. People are fickle, an’ their interest will fade. In this day an’ age when every edition of the newspaper proclaims a new sensation it is only a matter o’ time before they forget you entirely now that you have won your freedom an’ procuring that freedom has ceased to be a cause for them to champion. In short, your days o’ fame are numbered, darlin’. You have to make the most o’ them while you still can; you simply cannot afford to let an opportunity pass you by; you’re no spring chicken anymore an’ you’ve your future to think of. Your story must be told, an’ now is the time to tell it, an’ who better than you to tell it? An’ in a way that will provide you with an income until such time as we can find you a new husband. So, you’re goin’ to write a book. Isn’t that excitin’? Your agent, Mr. Charles Wagner, has already arranged everything, includin’ a generous advance for you, an’ then you’re goin’ on the lecture circuit. He’s already started bookin’ a tour for you, a hundred appearances at fifty dollars per, an’ that’s just for starters. If you look pretty an’ tell your story in an engagin’ fashion, so that all the women weep for you an’ all the men want to protect you, you might be able to stretch this out for a few years, maybe more!”

“Mama . . .” I sat there stunned and staring. I didn’t know what to say. This scheme of hers went against everything I wanted. I didn’t want any more notoriety. “Mama . . . I don’t want to do this! Please, don’t make me! I want to be forgotten; I don’t want to be remembered or reminded! I’ve paid the price, and now I want to live quietly, and I want my children back—”

“Florie!” Mama started back as though I’d struck her. There was a wounded look in her eyes that brought tears to mine. “I’m only thinkin’ o’ what’s best for you, darlin’, an’ if you want to secure your future, an’ not spend the rest o’ your days a pauper, rely-in’ on the charity o’ others, then this is the most logical course. I’m sure I don’t know what else you can do, darlin’. Mama’s not a magician; she cain’t pull wealthy bachelors out o’ her hat, you know. You no longer have your youth an’ beauty to fall back on, darlin’. You’re going to have to make some effort, an’ use what you do have—your tragic story o’ how the world has wronged you—to rouse their chivalrous an’ protective instincts. Men like to feel like knights in shinin’ armor ridin’ to the rescue of a damsel in distress; they want to think they can wrap her up in their arms an’ keep her safe like no other can. An’ you, Florie dear, are a damsel in most distressed circumstances, an’ they’re only goin’ to get worse, darlin’, if you don’t do something, an’ quickly. An’ your children are all grown-up, darlin’. Why, Bobo must be twenty if he’s a day! There’s just no way you can have those years back; they’ve grown up an’ forgotten all about you. You’ve got to face facts, darlin’; that dream is stone-cold dead!”

When this only made me hang my head and weep, Mama said, “I’ll tell you what you do, darlin’. You write them a nice long letter layin’ your heart bare. I’ll give it to the chauffeur an’ have him take it straight to the Fullers’ door. If they want to see you, they’ll answer, an’ if not . . . you just move on, the same as those ungrateful brats have.”

So I wrote a book, or rather a very efficient bespectacled spinster secretary whose fingers flew with alacrity over the keys of a typewriting machine that Mr. Wagner sent round wrote a book while I supplied the story of my woefully unfortunate life and the Hell on earth I had endured behind prison bars and ate bonbons and waited for a letter that never came and for my hair to grow out and was fitted with a new wardrobe to start my new life in courtesy of the ever-generous Densmores. A melodramatic plea for prison reform packaged between midnight-blue covers with some choice details about my alleged crime and the travesty of my trial thrown in for good measure, the book appeared on bookstore shelves as Mrs. Maybrick’s Own Story: My Fifteen Lost Years, and Mama and I packed up, bid a fond farewell to the Densmores, and went on the lecture circuit.

I wasn’t the great success everyone envisioned—I was nervous and fraught with worry and gnawed my nails before every appearance—but Mama just whispered, “Make ’em fall in love with you, Florie; that’s all you have to do!” and shoved me out onstage, slapping my hands away when I tried to turn and cling to her in fright. The truth is I hated every moment of it. My life might read like a melodrama, but I was totally unsuited for the stage, and it wasn’t long before everyone knew it.

It’s devilish hard to be likable and engaging and stand there looking pretty as a picture while you’re talking about the death of your husband, the father of your children, the man you almost went to the gallows for murdering, and recounting all the horrors and deprivations and punishments packed into fifteen years of imprisonment. It hurt me so having to endlessly relive it and answer the audience’s prurient and often impertinent questions about it. And there’s just something downright tasteless about standing there with your now rounded and well-fed woman’s body dressed in the latest fashions and top-dollar hairpieces with a fortune in pearls draped about your throat while describing the dismal prison uniform and the humiliations of having your head shorn down to stubble and not having the use of a nightgown or toothbrush for fifteen years. Every time I’d talk about the heavy, ill-fitting prison boots I’d feel every eye in the house being drawn down to my elegant little boots or French heels and silk stockings. I felt like a fraud and just as much a hypocrite as every man and woman I’d ever met in the Currant Jelly Set.

My body might have looked well enough, but my face was haunted and haggard. I couldn’t sleep. Every night I lay there with my heart galloping, racing fast enough to win the Grand National, my mind endlessly replaying scenes from my life, trying to pinpoint what I could’ve and should’ve done differently and how I might have averted this fate. Some nights I was the strong, independent woman who threw up her hands and said, The hell with you! and walked out of Battlecrease House with her children in tow without ever looking back. Other nights Jim and I succeeded in waking dreams where we had failed in real life and found a way that was not altogether clear to me to be the happily ever after fairy-tale couple and grow blissfully old and gray together and dance at our children’s weddings and our own golden anniversary. There were nights when I, the giddy bride exploring her husband’s private sanctum, found only towels and toothbrushes in the bathroom cabinets and others when Jim, reformed and repentant, poured all his drugs down the drain, then took me in his arms and told me that I was the only drug he needed and couldn’t live without.

Suffice it to say, it was all bound to fizzle. The only surprising thing is that it lasted as long as it did, almost five years, thanks to Mama and Mr. Wagner working so relentlessly to prolong my popularity. The best I can really say about my stint on the lecture circuit is that I got paid fifty dollars every time I stepped in front of an audience and I wore some very fetching frocks, smart suits, stupid hats, and shirtwaists with cameo brooches, flowing lace jabots, and pouter pigeon b-reasts.

Ultimately Mama decided I should marry a Texas cattle baron, a big, beefy, barrel-round, pink-faced man with buck teeth and bushy white hair and surprisingly small feet crammed into ornate silver-tooled black leather boots whose silver spurs jingle-jangled everywhere he went. He was given to whooping ecstatically at the least provocation and danced a little jig whenever he was happy and sometimes, in particularly exuberant moments, discharged his pistols into the air, then casually doled out hundred-dollar bills to pay for any damage he had caused to chandeliers and ceilings. One evening when he came to my hotel room, to dine and afterward take me to the opera, he told me I was the calf he had set his heart on roping and he wasn’t about to take no for an answer, whereupon he wrestled me onto the bed and had my drawers off so fast I wasn’t at all surprised that he had won so many awards for speed in hogtying and calf-roping contests.

I tried to be sensible and think of my future like Mama said. I was no longer young and beautiful, and marriage really was the easiest route for a woman in my predicament. I had no practical accomplishments to fall back on that could guarantee me a living. God never intended me to be a seamstress or typewriter girl.... So I lay back, looking forward, listening to his spurs jingle-jangle as he mounted me—he kept his boots on, to give him traction, he said, and his big ten-gallon Stetson hat too, though for that he gave no reason. But he weighed so heavily upon me, crushing me like a great big writhing and snorting pink hippopotamus trying to attempt coitus with me, and it had been so long since any man had touched me that my body had forgotten how to give and receive pleasure. I was tight as a virgin down there, and it hurt so much, I just wanted him to stop. I kept telling him he was hurting me, begging him to stop—“Please!” I kept screaming and pounding his back with my fists and when that didn’t work planting my palms on his chest and trying to push him away. “Please!” My tear-filled eyes kept turning desperately to the vase of roses on the bedside table. I wanted to grab it and smash it over his head, but each time I saw terrifyingly vivid visions of him lying there dead and bleeding on the floor, policemen pouring in, handcuffing me, and dragging me downstairs crying and pleading every step of the way, and pushing me into the Black Maria, to await a second trial and condemnation, and I just knew that if that happened there would not be a second reprieve. If I went back to prison again I’d never leave it alive.

Later, when I was perfumed and presentable again in café au lait satin overlaid with black diamond-dusted Alen?on lace, naked neck and wrists weighed down with diamonds and pearls, my big braided bun of a hairpiece straightened and secured again with diamond-tipped pins, and a rag stuffed in my drawers to sop up the bleeding, he sat me down to a gargantuan steak and lobster dinner, with potatoes bigger than my shoe, and opened a red velvet–lined box, flashing a diamond ring as bright as the stars at me. When I saw that it was shaped like a horseshoe, I blanched; I just knew it was a bad omen.

My mind flooded with pictures of Jim, remembering all the times we had both stroked the diamond horseshoe he always wore in his tie, caressing it like a pet; it had even been, at his request, buried with him when he died. I sat there like one lost in a trance, remembering all the good times, the smiles and laughter, excitement, dances, champagne, wagers, and nights of love we had shared with that horseshoe sparkling all the time, like the sparks of exploding diamond-white fireworks raining good luck down on us as we danced through life together. And I just couldn’t do it. I closed the lid on that great big gaudy sparkler and got up from the table without a word and walked out of my own room and just kept walking, on and on, wearing holes in the fragile soles of my black satin French heels, with the ghost of Jim always on my mind. In the darkness before dawn I found myself standing, shivering bare shouldered and bare armed without my fur, and staring down into the black river. I didn’t throw myself in; I didn’t even think of it. Instead, it was the chance the cattle baron was offering me, to again live a life of luxury and ease ensconced like a queen within the respectable and secure embrasure of marriage, that I threw away.





In 1908, when attendance at my lectures was growing alarmingly sparse and the booking bureaus were starting to look upon me as the Typhoid Mary of the lecture circuit, Mama and Mr. Wagner decided motion pictures were the answer. The flickers were so popular that if a photoplay was made of my story it would surely boost attendance to standing room only, my bookings would soar, as would my price—Mama and Mr. Wagner would see to that!—and I would soon be the darling of the lecture circuit again.

They made an appointment with the top man—“we don’t deal with underlings,” Mama said scathingly, and Mr. Wagner agreed—at the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company on East 14th Street and Mama and I duly arrived decked out in big hats and feather boas, with Mama carrying Napoleon, her fat and ornery Pekingese, and wearing enough jewelry to stock the front window of Tiffany’s.

“If we look like we don’t need it, they’re more likely to give it to us,” Mama said shrewdly. “An’ remember, Florie, mention our cousins the Vanderbilts ev’ry chance you get; nothing impresses these movie people more than knowing you are intimately related to someone rich enough to use dollar bills for matches. They will feel privileged that you are willing to consider lettin’ them make a photoplay o’ your life. Remember, it’s you doin’ them a favor, darlin’, not the other way around, even if the idea originally came from us!” Then she looked me over good in my new lemon linen suit trimmed with bright green silk braid and fancy frogging fastening the front of the jacket and adorning the skirt and decided that I would do.

When we stepped into the studio’s office, early despite Mama’s insistence that we be late, Mr. Wagner, who was to meet us there, hadn’t arrived. We were greeted by the sweetest boy, soft-spoken and somewhat shy, not chatty or cheeky like the bellboys at the hotels we stayed at whom Mama always likened to “Satan’s imps in training.” He had a film can and the menu from a nearby restaurant tucked under one arm and was holding a broom in his other hand, and a torn costume was draped around his neck, all of which he immediately set aside as he took the time to greet us, see us seated comfortably, and ask if he could get us anything while we waited.

Acting for all the world like Catherine the Great sitting on her throne, twiddling her pearls and stroking her Pekingese, Mama imperiously demanded sauerkraut juice, watermelon relish, sweet potato pie crowned with pink whipped cream two inches thick, a bottle of champagne, caviar, and a dish of creamed chicken hearts and livers for Napoleon. She’d already told me that whether I actually appeared in the picture or was only on the set in the capacity of a consultant I should “constantly endeavor to tax the ingenuity an’ resourcefulness of the go-for boys an’ keep ’em runnin’,” as it would make these theatrical types respect me more. “Bein’ demandin’ keeps you from bein’ treated like a doormat, Daughter!”

But at the startled look on the boy’s dear little face I quickly intervened and assured him Mama was just teasing, at which news he seemed greatly relieved and quickly offered us coffee or tea instead, assuring us that both were freshly brewed.

I have a spot in my heart soft as a marshmallow for sweet boys with dark hair and brown eyes, especially ones at ages I missed being with my own boy, and there was something about this one that just tugged at my heart. This licorice-whip-skinny boy didn’t have Bobo’s breathtaking beauty or his vibrant vivacity, but there was something there.... I simply could not take my eyes off him. I wanted to cup his face in my hands and drink him in, and my arms ached to reach out and hug him and never let go. I reckoned he was about fourteen, the age Bobo had been when he’d taken his stance about the photographs. Looking at him, I practically had to sit on my hands not to reach out and smooth back the brown hair falling carelessly over his brow, and before I even knew what I was doing I was already reaching for my handkerchief, thinking to wet it with my mouth, to scrub away the smear of green paint staining his left cheek. Mama read my mind and yanked the hanky from my hand and barked at the boy that tea would be fine, “with milk, sugar, lemon, an’ cream if you please! An’ some little cakes would not be unwelcome! Bake ‘em if you have to, but don’t keep us waitin’, boy!”

While he scurried off to see to our tea—I think he just wanted to get away from Mama, and maybe even me, the way I kept looking at him like I wanted to devour him—I stood up and wandered over to the window, to stand before it without actually looking out and just be alone with my thoughts. I wanted to block my ears to Mama’s stinging cat-o’-nine-tails tongue castigating me about “that longing look” I got sometimes and could never hide whenever a boy possessing a certain coloring and quality came along to remind me of what I missed most of all. Restlessly I turned from the window to the desk. It was then I saw the stack of schoolbooks bound with a leather strap and the violin case lying beside them. He must have come straight from school. My fingers reached out to caress them and the gray cap lying beside them, my fingers lingering, lovingly tracing over the herringbone pattern of the tweed.

It was then that I really started thinking and realized that I could not make this movie no matter how much Mama and Mr. Wagner wanted me to. What if my son and daughter saw it? Some pretty young blond actress up there on the screen pretending to be me, reliving the whole sordid, scandalous, and sensational spectacle, not as a valentine to their dead father or validation of their mother’s innocence but as an advertisement—that’s really all it amounted to—for my book and lectures, both of which I loathed! I just couldn’t do it! Mama and Mr. Wagner just kept stirring it all up, bringing it back to a full roiling boil, when all I wanted was for the flames to die out. I didn’t want to be remembered or reminded! Why couldn’t anyone understand that?

Decisively I crossed the room to stand before Mama. If at fourteen my son could decide he didn’t want to pose for photographs anymore, at forty-six I could certainly put my foot down to quash every notion of this photoplay!

“I’m sorry, Mama,” I said. “I know you want this, you think it’s in my best interests, but I don’t. I won’t do this, and you can’t make me!”

I was walking toward the door just as the boy came back in with a heavily laden tea tray. God bless his eager to please little heart, he had even found some cake somewhere. He politely stepped aside to make way for me. With a nervously trembling hand, I dared reach out and lightly caress his cheek, smooth and baby soft, such a sweet, endearing face, and brush back the fall of dark hair tickling his brow.

“Thank you, darling; the tea looks delicious. I wish I could stay and have some. I’m sorry we put you to all this trouble for nothing,” I said, turning away quickly as the tears caught in my throat and overflowed my eyes.

What was it about this one? There had been boys before, briefly glimpsed, who had caught my fancy and become my adored-from-afar objects of obsession, only to be forgotten when I moved on and the next one came along, but this one was different.... I already knew he was going to be haunting my dreams for a very long time. As much as I wanted to stay and try to figure out why, I had to leave.

“Florie, you get back here!” Mama shouted after me. “We have an appointment; you can’t just walk out! I didn’t raise you to be so rude, inconsiderate, an’ ill-bred! Remember who you are! One o’ your ancestors acted as ring-bearer when Marie Antoinette married Napoleon! An’ I assure you, he didn’t attain to that high honor by actin’ the way you are now! Get back here!”

“I’m sorry, Mama.” I turned briefly on the threshold, just in time to see Mama, struggling with Napoleon, who had entangled himself in her feather boa and caught his claws in the lace yoke of her bodice, exasperatedly fling him aside, actually throwing the poor animal through the air, shouting, “Here, boy—hold Napoleon!” so that the poor lad had no choice but to drop the tea tray or have his head slammed into the wall by a fat, flying Pekingese.

I had said all that I had to say; I didn’t want to talk about it. I was afraid I was too much of a coward to stand my ground if I actually had to stay and stand there. I hitched up my skirts and ran out into the street, with Mama hot on my heels. She turned back only long enough to tell the boy, who had managed to catch Napoleon and was holding him against his chest, stroking him soothingly, while standing with the ruins of our tea on his shoes and spattering his skinny legs, that the diamonds on Napoleon’s collar were real and they’d best still be there when she got back if he knew what was good for him and she meant to count them—all 117 of them.

Poor thing! I almost went back to comfort him. The very idea that that darling boy would ever pry diamonds out of a dog collar was too absurd for words! For God’s sake, there was a rosary dangling out of his pants pocket! I had been tempted to tuck it back in so he didn’t lose it, but I knew boys that age could be a trifle skittish about being touched so familiarly by strangers and I didn’t want to scare him. But if I went back . . . that would mean facing Mama and having to go through with the appointment, with both her and Mr. Wagner, when he arrived, and maybe even the motion picture man, if he liked the idea, all against me, all talking and shouting at once, badgering me until I gave up and gave in and turned my poor brain back around to their way of thinking, and, as much as I wanted to see that child again, I just couldn’t do it. I had to keep moving, running as fast as I could, away from there, turning my back on yet another chance.

Without even looking, ignoring the blaring horns, screeching tires, and shouts of angry drivers, I darted out into the street and dived into the first cab I saw. “Drive; just drive! Get me away from here!” I shouted at the driver.

I flung myself back against the seat and wept; I never thought a day would come when I would run away from Mama. She was the only one who had never abandoned me, and this was how I repaid her, by leaving her standing on the sidewalk stamping her feet, snorting like a mad bull, and shouting at the top of her lungs outside a movie studio. I’d made her so mad she’d actually thrown her precious Pekingese into the air! As ornery as Napoleon was, I was glad the boy had caught him. I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I kept sobbing hysterically, beating my fists against the leather seat, but in my heart I knew I really wasn’t, I had done the right thing, and that, peculiar as it sounds, only made me feel worse.





Of course Mama was heartily disappointed in me. First I had forsaken the cattle baron and then the chance to have a movie made of my life.

“Heaven helps those who help themselves! Maybe someday you’ll learn that, Florie, my girl!” she said, her voice tart and scalding as she flung her furs around her shoulders, picked up her first-class ticket and her Pekingese, and flounced aboard the luxurious White Star liner that would carry her back to Paris, leaving me alone, to fend for myself, in New York.

The lectures gradually dried up and the book went out of print and people just weren’t that interested in me anymore. Invitations and marriage proposals stopped coming. Everything Mama predicted came true. But in my heart I was glad. That was not the life I wanted. I was tired of being a curiosity, a novelty, invited just so people could stare at me and pose impertinent questions or experience the thrill of being in the same room as a condemned murderess. All I wanted was my children and to live long enough to live my notoriety down, to just be me—whoever that was—again.

I could not stop thinking about them, even though they had never answered my letter. I knew where the Fullers lived, and several times I set out to knock upon their door again, the way I had in London. I’d done it once, I could do it again, I kept telling myself. But every time, I’d walk past posters with my picture, posed in profile, wearing a Paris gown and a big, fancy feathered hat, advertising my lectures, or I’d pass a bookstore window displaying my book, or someone on the street would rush up to me, to shake my hand or launch into a lengthy speech about how grievously I had been wronged, and every time my courage would falter and ultimately fail me.

I would think about Bobo and Gladys walking past those same posters, maybe even stopping to look, appalled, disgusted, hanging their heads, feeling sick to their stomachs at the sight of me and the vulgar way I was profiting from their father’s death. They might even be moved by curiosity to read my book, but what if they did and felt only shame, not sympathy? Every time I stood on the stage I’d find myself scanning the audience, squinting at every dark-haired young man and woman and wondering if my children had come to see me. After every show I’d wait and hope they would approach, but if these young people I’d spied ever did, nearness always revealed they were not the dear ones I was longing for.

I was so ashamed of this new notoriety I had acquired that I just couldn’t face them.

Sometimes I made it all the way to the street where they lived. I’d stand at a discreet distance and stare and curse myself for a coward for not going up and knocking on that door. Every time it opened or a car drew up before it my heart would leap into my mouth and I’d stand there frozen, rooted to the spot, hoping for a glimpse of them. And when I did see them, it was a balm that both comforted and burned my heart.

I saw Gladys first, her face exasperatingly overshadowed by a huge red-rose-laden straw hat. She was in the midst of a gaggle of gossipy girls of similar age, in the back of a big chauffeur-driven car crammed full of parcels, fresh from an afternoon of shopping in New York’s finest stores. As Gladys traipsed gaily up the front steps, swinging her sables and only slightly hindered by her pea-green hobble skirt and high heels, she turned and waved and called back to her companions, confirming a date at a fashionable tearoom the following afternoon.

My heart beating like a drum, I was there the next day, seated at the table nearest theirs, devouring my daughter with my eyes. She was so beautiful—porcelain skin, violet eyes, and a pompadour of jet-black curls crowned by a hat piled high with purple and lavender roses, dressed in a lavender linen suit, with amethysts at her throat and a silver fox stole swaddling her slender shoulders. It reminded me of the grand birthday party I’d given her, the mammoth rose-covered cake, and the fairy princess costume she’d worn. Some things at least never change—Gladys apparently still adored purple.

But her conversation! It was Dr. this and Dr. that! Twice she even pulled a pretty porcelain-lidded pillbox out of her purse and popped a couple of pills into her mouth! She told her friends she was going visiting in Saratoga for two weeks because Dr. Glass recommended rest and Dr. Hartley recommended exercise and she didn’t like to disappoint either of them on account of they were both so handsome and, with luck, one of them might be her husband someday. She could think of nothing more exciting than being married to a doctor, all the prescriptions he could write for his loving little wife free and gratis, and just think of his hands caressing her in passion and discovering a hitherto-undiagnosed ailment, which reminded her, she had quite made up her mind to let either Dr. Bramford or Dr. Ashe, she wasn’t quite sure which, remove her appendix when she returned from Saratoga. All that horseback riding she planned on doing was surely bound to agitate it; why, she might even have to go straight to the hospital the moment she got home for an emergency appendectomy! The way her violet eyes lit up you would have thought the girl had been invited to open a royal ball by dancing with a prince! But she was bound and determined to have Dr. Tafford, and no other, take her tonsils out! Then she was on about another doctor; she was seeing him twice and sometimes thrice a week for her “poor shattered nerves,” for specialized treatment involving intimate paroxysm inducing stimulation with some sort of vibratory device that didn’t sound at all like proper medical treatment to me.

In the prime of her life, my daughter already had more ailments than an old granny woman! With a sad, sinking heart, I realized that even if I could, by some miracle, find a way back into Gladys’s life again, I couldn’t help her; she was already drowning deep in medicine’s magical thrall. Just like Jim, I thought as I walked away, just like Jim.

Seeing Bobo—or “James Fuller,” as he now called himself—was just as bad. He had grown into the man I had feared he was becoming. Michael must have been so proud of the walking, talking ice sculpture he had created! Even from a distance, I could see the hard, harsh set of my son’s stone-serious face, often bent over a thick stack of papers he was reading as though his very life depended on their contents. He seemed almost never to look up, and when he was with anyone his conversation was terse and monosyllabic. I never saw him smile or heard him laugh. The mouth was firm and flat, and, even worse, the brown eyes, despite their warm shade, were cold and dead. Such grave austerity greatly diminished his beauty. The features were still very fine, but without that inner warmth lighting them up like the candle in a jack-o’-lantern . . . this was not the same little boy who used to sit on my lap and gobble sugar cubes from my fingers and wrap his arms around my neck and promise me a kiss for every one I fed him. I couldn’t even see the ghost of that winsome little fellow in this cold, grave young man in his conservative gray suits and boring black ties. Black hair, white skin, gray suit—he was as devoid of color as the voiceless actors in the photoplays, only they possessed emotions and projected varying degrees of personality. He was already old and cold, even in the bloom of youth. A lost cause; all hope is dead, a little voice I didn’t want to hear whispered inside my head.

Seeing Bobo so sadly changed made my tears fall like rain. Part of me wanted to bring a sugar bowl and race across that street, knock him down, straddle him, and shove just as many sugar cubes as I could into his mouth, in the vain hope of restoring at least some of his sweetness, though I would most likely be carted off to the nearest madhouse if I tried. Then the door of that stately tomb-gray town house would close behind him and I would find myself walking slowly back to whatever hotel was standing proxy for “home” and dreaming about that sweet boy at the Biograph studio and wishing he was mine.

Sometimes I’d meander down East 14th Street and catch a glimpse of him, always from afar, rushing in or out on various errands, coming straight to work from school or on his way home. But I never had the courage to approach him either, not even just to nod and say hello in passing like normal people would to any chance acquaintance they met on the street. Even though I had become accustomed to standing up and speaking in front of an audience, I had become increasingly shy and wary of people and what they might think of me. And I guess I always knew how strange and silly I seemed even to a child. All my easy, graceful charm had been lost in prison and I never got it back. I was always afraid that my unconcealed, unfulfilled yearning, that naked lust that wasn’t carnal at all, only a mother’s desperate longing for the son she had lost, would scare them, like the witch in “Hansel and Gretel” trying to lure them with candy, and send them running, screaming, for their parents or the nearest policeman.

It wasn’t every child who crossed my path that did this to me, thank God, for the world is full of brunet boys. There were just certain ones who through some combination of demeanor, coloring, or features or some special quality I can’t even name cast a spell over me without their even knowing it, and that Biograph boy cast an enchantment deep enough to drown me if I let it. All I had to do was look, and love and longing would bite like a bear trap, clamping its steel-sharp teeth deep and hard into my hungry heart. But all I could ever do was dream, and love these special ones from afar, ethereally, never in any tangible way, not even as a self-appointed eccentric auntie who loved to spoil and dote on them and buy them toys and candy. I could catch glimpses of these boys on the street or playing in the park, but I could never hold them, touch, or talk to them, or worm my way into their little hearts, and, in the end, I always had to let them go and move on, to another city, lest that unquenchable desire and that unshakable, insatiable yearning drive me mad.

The afternoon I found myself standing out on the sidewalk like a fool in the pouring rain that had already pounded my black umbrella down like a witch’s pointy hat several times, hoping for just a glimpse of the Biograph boy, I gave myself a good hard shake, packed up my bags, and caught the next train to anywhere.