The Ripper's Wife

35

The next two years I tried to lose myself and maybe find myself at the same time. I vowed that I would never set foot on a stage again. I was done with lectures and book signings. I wanted everyone to forget me, so I tried to forget me too, hoping they would follow my example, and, for the most part, they did. It’s shocking just how easy it is sometimes to fade from memory. You can be the world’s darling one day and a forgotten soul the next.

I drifted with the tide of life, hitching rides and hopping trains, living off bad coffee and not much better pie at greasy, decrepit little diners, ravenously devouring candy bars and more daintily indulging myself with dishes of ice cream and strawberry sodas, sitting at drugstore counters leafing through magazines and watching the world go by without me. I told everyone who cared enough to ask that my name was Florence Graham. I got the idea from a box of crackers that was staring me in the face the day a lady asked my name in a little country grocery store.

Little by little, piece by piece, to pay for my food, hotel rooms, and train tickets, I pawned my jewelry and clothes, except for my pearls. Mama always said pearls were the emblem of a true lady, so I thought I should hold on to those; they just might be the anchor that kept me from sinking too far down in the world. But the rest were just a burden weighing me down when I wanted to be light and free as the air. I wanted my whole life to fit inside a single suitcase, to pick up and go as I pleased. I pawned my big, heavy trunks and cast all the couture confections out of my life, saying good-bye to all the easily wrinkled satins and silks, heavy, hard to clean velvets, and crinkled chiffons, opting instead for simple, serviceable clothes and sturdy shoes I could walk a mile or two or three in any day and practical hats to keep the sun from my eyes.

Of course the money eventually ran out and I had to find other ways to pay my way. I was still too proud in those days to sup in soup kitchens or ask the Salvation Army for a bed.

I pulled myself together for a time, persuaded a kindly landlady to launder and press my best black suit and white shirtwaist, polished my shoes, and pinned up my silver-streaked burned-butter hair in a neatly braided bun, put on my pearls, and got myself a job behind the gingham counter in a department store. They could tell I was a lady who had known better days and they were happy to have me. But I hated dealing with the customers—flighty, featherbrained, obnoxious, arrogant ladies who couldn’t make up their minds about the color or length of a simple thing like gingham. The customer is always right, even when they’re wrong, I had to constantly keep reminding myself. I couldn’t sleep nights for dreading what the next day would bring—I found those women insufferable, and I hated gingham and all that cutting and measuring, folding and packing, and writing out sales slips, always with a smile. I’d lie awake staring at the ceiling or the gradually lightening gray square of the window dreading the first true light of morning. And after I slept in once too often, they let me go. They weren’t paying me, after all, to waltz in whenever I pleased, at half past noon or even one fifteen, the manager said; some ladies are simply not suited to employment despite the reduced circumstances that compel them to pursue it.

Next I found a job peddling books and magazines door-to-door. That didn’t last long either; the Southern sun was hot, and I’d much rather sit in the shade and read them than try to sell them. In Georgia—or was it Iowa? I’m not altogether sure—a man with a chicken farm asked me to be his housekeeper. But I was woefully inadequate at that kind of thing, and just standing in the doorway, observing the inside of his house, which looked as though a hurricane had swept through it, made me feel weary and oppressed. And when I discovered that the free room and board he was offering meant sleeping in his bed I simply had to decline. Despite my slide into increasingly shabby circumstances, I was still rather fastidious, and I wasn’t sure which smelled worse—him or his chickens.

Like adding beads onto a string, there were a lot more little jobs along the way, some lasting a month or a week, maybe two if I could make myself stick, and some not even a whole day.

There was another time in another department store, during the Christmas season, I stood behind a counter in my good black suit and snow-white shirtwaist and pearls with a sprig of cheerful holly on my lapel and sold children’s toys. But the desperate gleam in my eyes and the way I knelt down and gazed hungrily into their faces and held their little hands as though I never wanted to let go frightened the children and disturbed their parents and I was let go. I encountered a similar predicament the week I spent working in a candy shop. My employer said I made the children nervous and I was caught giving certain boys extra portions too many times. “We sell candy; we don’t distribute it as charity,” he kept telling me, but it did no good. When I was staring mesmerized into a certain pair of chocolate-brown eyes and my fingers were twitching, itching to reach out and smooth back a careless fall of dark hair . . . toffee, licorice, and spice drops were the only way I could safely show my affection. Mr. Hershey’s were the only kisses I could give them.

Still fancying I possessed some ladylike pretensions, I wasted a few of my precious pennies and advertised myself as a companion for invalid ladies. The first one to avail herself of my services was unbearably flatulent and crotchety and cursed with an obsequious oily-haired toad of a nephew who was very eager to come into his inheritance. When he started dropping discreet hints about his auntie’s medicine, that a few more drops might finish the old girl off and if we went about it just right no one would ever suspect anything, I was so frightened that I never went back. I snatched up my suitcase and hitched a ride into the next state and from there took a train into another. I was terrified that Fate was trying to play some cruel trick on me, and I wasn’t about to relive the past if I could help it.

I next tried tutoring a little blond-haired girl in geography and history—I thought she was a safe choice since my heart only succumbed to brunet boys—but she ended up failing to make her grade. Apparently the War of the Roses had nothing to do with horticulture at all; thank you, Mama! The girl’s parents blamed me and turned me out of their home without a cent or a letter of recommendation.

Then I fancied I could play the piano and sing well enough to sell sheet music in a music store, but I was wrong. I was even more mistaken when I thought I could operate a typewriting machine and take dictation; that was a most humiliating failure. As was the tactfully worded rejection when I applied for a job modeling ladies’ ready-to-wear fashions and found myself the only applicant over twenty-one. I fared no better when I responded to an advertisement for a counter girl at a combination tobacco and confectionary shop; the proprietor told me that mostly men frequented his establishment and they liked seeing a pretty young girl behind the counter they could flirt with. He didn’t have to say more. Time hadn’t been very kind to me.

I eventually found myself sewing shirts again just like I had done in prison, the one thing I’d sworn I’d never do, paid by the completed garment, not by the hour. I leapt at the offer to leave that behind and go work in a bakery’s kitchen after-hours. But I found the heat and exertion of baking bread and lifting big trays of biscuits far too wearying for words and had to resign.

I told fortunes at a county fair, read tea leaves in a tea shop, and dropped too many trays and broke too many dishes to get paid when I tried waiting tables; I ran away from that job owing more money than I earned. I sold matches and flowers, apples and peanuts. I even picked fruit; at least it left my mind free to wander and dream.

I knocked on doors again, this time hawking boxes of laundry soap instead of periodicals, until I sprained my ankle and fell into a ditch running away from a barking dog. The soapboxes that I pulled along on a little wagon tumbled into the muddy water after me and I found myself sitting there soaking with white suds up to my shoulders. My employer was not a smidgen sympathetic and insisted I pay for the damages out of my own pocket or he would have the law on me. Terrified by any mention of the police, and the prospect of jail, I emptied my purse into his palm.

My pride was slipping fast, down and down the rungs of the ladder of success. But I had to eat. I needed to bathe and wash my clothes—I just couldn’t bear the thought of stinking. I needed some pillow on which to lay my weary head, somewhere safe, out of the elements. And I had to keep moving along. If I lingered in any one place too long there’d inevitably be another brunet boy who unknowingly took my heart hostage, like the Biograph boy who still haunted my dreams, waking and sleeping, merging with memories of Bobo and fantasies about what might have been and could never be. All it took was for one special boy to cross my path and I’d find myself forsaking my work and spending hours sitting in parks or casually meandering past schools, churches, or the place where he worked after school, waiting, hoping, and longing just for a glimpse to feed my love-starved heart and fuel my futile dreams.

From time to time a New York paper would find its way to me, bearing word, in the social columns, about my children—travels to Europe; summers at Newport; Gladys’s beaus, all handsome young men of prominent families, squiring her to dances, opening nights of plays and operas, exhibits at art galleries, garden parties, and horseback riding in Central Park, the columnists assiduously cataloging the beautiful clothes my daughter wore—she still loved purple. And Bobo, serious as the grave about his work—my son, like a nun forsaking the world and all its pleasures, fun, and romances, had wholeheartedly embraced the boring, facts and figures world of engineering. How that made me cry! My beautiful boy should have grown up to grace the stage and screen as a matinée idol; there were plenty of ugly men in the world to do all those dreary calculations! Sometimes there were even pictures in the papers, pictures that I treasured! I bought a little scrapbook from a five-and-ten-cent store and some paste. These newspapers were both a balm and a blister to my heart and always left me longing for more.

The new year of 1910 found me back in Alabama where I was born. I had come full circle and found myself back where I started from. There was a man, let’s call him Fred. He was the proprietor of the Moran Hotel, a big, graceful white former plantation house, with stately columns supporting a broad front porch and balconies. He bought me a green silk dress and paid for me to visit the beauty parlor, where a clever woman banished the silver and made my hair shine like gold again. I spent my days sitting on the front porch in a rocking chair, lazily plying a palmetto fan, sipping iced tea and mint juleps, and admiring the dogwood trees, plate-sized magnolia blossoms, and blazing pink azaleas that thrived under the Southern sun.

It was there that word reached me that Mama had died in a French convent. She did it in style, in a cream lace nightgown trimmed with yellow ribbons, with her hair freshly coiffed, piled up in a mass of gleaming, lacquered white curls, sending out for enough yellow roses to cover her bed to help alleviate the stink of the sickroom and death when it came. At the end, a photographer came and took her picture and afterward hand-tinted it and sent it to me. That was my last sight of Mama, lying there oh, so peacefully framed by a fortune in yellow roses. The florist, hairdresser, and photographer sued her estate to have their bills paid, but there was nothing left, for them or for me.

Fred was kind. He held and comforted me. He bought me a black lace dress and hat, new black shoes and silk stockings, ordered masses said for Mama’s soul, and introduced me to the consolation of Catholicism. But, after a decent interval had passed, he asked me about the land.

It turned out that Mama, still trying to help me after all, even though I thought she’d long since given up, had written to him secretly, asking him not to tell, as I had had some bad experiences with fortune hunters that had left me rather sensitive, confiding in him about the two and a half million acres of land I would inherit whenever that vexing legal knot was finally untangled. It was like a bucket of ice water in my face. I told him there was no land; that was just one of Mama’s fairy tales. I was heiress to nothing except the free air.

He lost his temper. I couldn’t really blame him. He’d wasted so much time and money on me, not to mention all those tender words and touches at night in his bed. I was a fraud and he was a fool, he said. I just sat there on the floor and cried, cradling my cheek, smarting and pink from where he had struck me. He told me to get out. I’d grown accustomed to the comfortable life again, regular meals and a soft bed and wearing pretty clothes, and hats and shoes more frivolous than practical, and I wept even harder at the thought of taking to the roads again.

But Fred was not entirely without a heart. He offered to see if he could get me settled in an old-age home. Fancy that! And me only forty-eight! It was downright insulting! The thought of being confined in an institution again with rules to govern everything I did, when I got up, when I went to bed, what I ate and wore, made me sick to my very soul. I told him to go to the Devil and that I would rather die in a gutter than go to a place like that. He told me to do it then and get out. I packed my bags—I had enough to fill two suitcases by then—and hitched a ride in the back of a truck carrying pigs. At that moment those fat, oinking pink creatures seemed a lot better company than Fred!

By judicious pawning, I reduced my possessions to a single suitcase again and made my way slowly back to New York, inch by inch, trying to get my courage up. I had by then discovered that gin is wonderful for drowning cowardice. Mama’s death had made all my longings for my children bubble right back up to the surface again. I couldn’t stop thinking about them no matter how hard I tried. I was determined to be brave this time and see them face-to-face. Surely enough time had passed . . . the lectures and the book, and me along with them, had faded from public memory. I was their mother; I had every right. I had never surrendered my rights; they had been taken from me by force, by Michael Maybrick and a pack of liars in his pocket. I told myself to stop dillydallying and hiding and fight for my right to hear Bobo and Gladys call me “Mother” again.

I arrived in New York in time to stand outside the cathedral and see Gladys emerge as a bride, gowned in white lace with delicate touches of lavender ribbons, tiny crystals, and seed pearls, trailing yards of white lace train and veil behind her, and a dozen bridesmaids wearing chiffon dresses in three different shades of purple. There was an enormous emerald-cut slab of a deep purple amethyst flashing on her finger. I smiled; clearly my daughter had her own ideas about engagement rings.

“No more beautiful bride ever lived!” I cried as she walked past me, without a glance, taking the compliment as simply her due if she even heard it, and climbed into the back of the big silver car decked with bunches of lavender and white ribbons, roses, and bunting.

She’d married late, at twenty-nine. I hoped it meant she had taken her time and chosen right. I found a newspaper and carefully tore out the article for my scrapbook. His name was Dr. James Frederick Corbyn, a dark-haired physician of Welsh descent and quite handsome. Dusty and shabby as I was, I went into the cathedral. I took one of the purple ribbons tied to the pews to keep as a souvenir. I found my way into the little room where the bride had waited, hoping Gladys had left a handkerchief, embroidered with her initials, so I would know for certain it was hers, and found the empty pill bottle she had left behind instead. There was that familiar frog on the label, giving advice to a baby, the same nerve pills her father had favored. Apparently they were still around; they’d outlasted even the rose-scented cold cream I was fond of. I went back into the church proper and lit a candle. I prayed that Dr. Corbyn would always love Gladys and treat her well and that God would grant him the wisdom and the strength to steer my daughter off the path to self-destruction drugs were leading her down, just like they had her father.

I didn’t see Bobo amongst the wedding party, but my eyes had been glued to Gladys the whole time, I hadn’t even noticed the groom. I rented a room, bathed, and made myself presentable and went to a library and pored over old newspapers until I found out that Bobo was in Canada, working as a mining engineer at the Le Roi Gold Mine. I pawned the little gold rosebud earrings and matching pendant Fred had given me. They were so sweet and dainty, I had hoped to keep them, but this was more important; they would take me to Canada and my boy.





I don’t know how I did it, but I did, and without the false courage of gin. Wearing the blue-gray suit that had replaced my old trusty black, and a new violet-blue silk shirtwaist that paid the perfect compliment to my eyes, a gray hat adorned with silk violets, and my pearls—I never needed that ladylike reassurance more!—with my hair freshly gilded, I found myself standing in my son’s office at the Le Roi Gold Mine. He’d apparently just been called away. His lunch—a sandwich, a piece of cherry pie, and a bottle of milk open as though he’d been about to pour it into the glass sitting beside it when the telephone rang—was laid out on the paper-and book-piled table that doubled as his desk and laboratory. There was a microscope and some glass slides and bottles of chemicals nearby, too near for my liking. I shuddered, seeing the skulls and crossbones and the word POISON! screaming from all the labels. He’d also left his watch behind.

My heart stood still. My blood froze. A knife stabbed and ripped my heart wide open. It was his father’s watch. I picked it up with the same trepidation as I would have handled a live rattlesnake. I opened the back and squinted down at the secret scratches etching a terrible confession into the gleaming gold—I am Jack the Ripper! James Maybrick, ringed by five sets of initials: PN, AC, ES, CE, MJK.

“What are you doing? Who are you? What are you doing here?” a voice behind me demanded. I whirled around and found myself face-to-face with my son. I wanted to grab his face and kiss him and feel those glorious long black lashes fluttering like butterflies against my face. “That’s my watch!” He snatched it from my hand. “A thief—I should call the police—”

“Please don’t do that, Bobo,” I said softly. “I was just looking at it, remembering. . . .”

He gasped and recoiled from me as though I were a leper. The watch fell from his hand onto the floor. “No one has called me that since I was a child!” His eyes widened and I knew he recognized me.

“Get out of here!” He pointed at the door. “I have nothing to say to you!”

“Bobo, please, I’ve come a long way, it’s been such a long time, please . . . hear me out. . . .” I dared to cross the distance he had put between us and lay my hand, and with it my heart, on his sleeve. “Just this once . . . If I never see you again, please, let me tell you the truth. . . .”

He jerked away from me. “Your version of the truth, you mean! Well, whatever you have to say, I don’t want to hear it; go tell it to your lover, the man you killed my father for!”

“Alfred Brierley was one of the great mistakes of my life,” I said, and knew it was the God’s honest truth. “I haven’t seen him since 1889, and I didn’t kill your father, for him or anyone else. You must believe me! I loved Jim!”

“A judge and jury of twelve men, my uncles, Mrs. Briggs, Nanny Yapp, the servants, the police, who are accustomed to investigating these matters—you were not the first woman to attempt to use poison to rid herself of an inconvenient husband—and all the doctors and chemists”—Bobo ticked them off on his fingers—“they were all wrong?”

“Yes.” I nodded. “They had their reasons, and science is not equipped to answer every question yet, but, yes, they were wrong. Some of them lied outright, some of them just didn’t know the truth, or knew the right answers and couldn’t admit it. There are certain men who can never say ‘I don’t know,’ and I’m sure that’s quite an embarrassing admission for men who are called experts to make, especially when the eyes of the world are upon them. There was much that was not told, many lies covered truths, and my sins, my carnal sins, blinded and distracted many, but if all had been revealed, perhaps . . . the outcome would have been different.”

Bobo snorted and shook his head. “That was all years ago.” He shrugged. “I have my own life now, and you will never be a part of it. I’m not your son anymore. None of this has any bearing. My heart declared you dead when I learned what you did, or were accused of doing,” he quickly mollified when I took another step toward him, “and I will permit no resurrection now. There’s nothing you can say that will change that. I’m going to be married soon, and I’ve no desire to revisit the past, or to have my future wife and in-laws troubled by old scandals being dredged up after I’ve worked so hard to lay them to rest. Now please go. Leave me in peace and never trouble me again.”

All the things I’d meant to say, all the questions I was longing to ask, died upon my lips. What was the use? I felt crushed, defeated; I suddenly wanted a drink more than I ever had in my life. Gin drowns more than cowardice; it also numbs sorrow.

“All right, Bobo.” I nodded. It was then that I noticed the watch still lying on the floor and bent to retrieve it. Just this once, in innocently returning it, placing it in his hand, I could touch my son for what I knew, with complete and utter certainty now, would be the last time.

“Thank you,” he said. I was halfway to the door when he cried out, “Wait!”

My heart lurched and leapt with renewed hope. Had some miracle occurred? Had God sent an angel to whisper in his ear and change his mind?

“What are these scratches?” Bobo demanded. “What did you do to it?”

My heart sank like a stone. “Nothing; they’ve been there all along.”

“All right.” He nodded, his back still to me. “You can go.”

“Good-bye . . . Bobo. . . .” I lingered, one last long moment on the threshold, hoping, praying, to hear him call me “Mother,” even if it had to be coupled with “Good-bye.”

But he said nothing. I waited a moment longer, staring at the back of his gray coat, and the immaculately brilliantined black hair I longed to glide my palm over. He resumed his seat at his desk, and I knew I was still waiting for a love that was never going to come. I blew the back of my son’s sleek head a kiss and softly shut the door.

I was halfway down the hall when I heard the glass break.

I ran back. Bobo lay upon the floor, his body twisted, spine arched, fingers gnarled, brown eyes staring wide, his face a frozen mask of contorted horror, the perfume of bitter almonds hovering above his gaping mouth. Broken glass lay like a halo around his dark head and the telephone, scattered papers, the chair he had been sitting in, and his lunch all fallen around him. Had he been trying to call for help? After I left him, he must have wanted a drink as badly as I did. In his distraction, he didn’t look, he reached out blindly for the milk bottle, to pour into the glass, and his hand found the bottle labeled “Cyanide” instead. He’d gulped it down without a glance. Luck for the boy born with the lucky double row of eyelashes had run out.

As I knelt beside him, closing his eyes, feeling those long, long lashes caress my palm one final time, the glimmer of gold caught the corner of my eye. The watch! It was there beneath the microscope! I stood up and looked and, many times magnified, I read the words I already knew by heart. Bobo, in his last moments on earth, had learned the truth. Now I would never know for certain . . . that fatal drink . . . had it really been an accident? Or had I, in trying to plead my innocence, shown my son a truth he could not live with? Oh, why did I pick up that watch? He might never have noticed those scratches if I hadn’t! I should have left it, and him, alone!

I couldn’t stay; I couldn’t explain. I couldn’t let anyone know who I was or why I had come there. What if they thought once a poisoner, always a poisoner? They wouldn’t understand that my whole life had been poisoned, maybe because I was poison. When Lady Luck turned her back on me she truly became my enemy and left me with a curse—to bring death and misfortune to everyone I loved.

I put the watch back in his pocket, kissed my son good-bye forever, and left him lying there for someone else to find. There was nothing else I could do for him but disappear; he’d made it quite clear he didn’t want me there. I had embarrassed and shamed him in life; I wouldn’t do it to him in death, so I left, I just left . . . another piece breaking off my heart with every step.