The Ripper's Wife

36

As soon as I got back to New York, before I even left the train station, a woman I hadn’t seen in years bumped into me and started to commiserate about Bobo’s passing. The Fullers were family friends; she’d heard the news almost as soon as they did. I cut her off, my voice like an ice pick; later, when she recounted our encounter to the press, stirring all the old scandal up, she said my eyes were blank, cold, and dead. “I have no son. The past is dead. That boy has been dead to me for more than twenty years,” I said, and walked on. The past is dead, the past is dead . . . I kept on telling myself.

Then and there I decided to try to reinvent myself. If I couldn’t lose myself, I reasoned, maybe I could change myself so much that I wouldn’t even know me. Straight from the train station, suitcase still in hand, I marched into the first beauty parlor I saw.

“I want to walk out of here a whole new woman!” I said, and laid my money down.

They took me at my word and went to work on me. I left there with a bright red hennaed head, finely plucked and high-arched brows lending me a perpetual expression of surprise, a sack of cosmetics to replicate the painstaking paint job they’d given me after rubbing and slathering oils and cold cream into my skin, and perfectly manicured nails, shell pink and shimmering. I stopped and bought three new dresses. “Out with the old, in with the new!” I rebelliously cried as I stood before the fitting-room mirror, hands on hips, modeling a persimmon silk dress and a long strand of pink coral beads.

On the way to the pawnshop to sell my old clothes—money was, after all, still a loathsome necessity of living, and I never wanted to see that gray suit and hat or that violet-blue blouse ever again—I caught a glimpse of my reflection in a store window. I truly was a new woman now. “A scarlet woman!” I laughed. Then I thought of the blood of those long dead women and the initials etched on the back of Jim’s watch—PN, AC, ES, CE, MJK—and I felt the immediate urge to shave my head. Instead, I got drunk and stayed drunk for a very long time.

I floated to the surface again weeks later and found myself staring up at a single flickering lightbulb swinging like a pendulum from the dusty water-stained ceiling above me. I was naked except for a pair of grubby pink panties reeking of urine. I had vague memories of a man telling me that this was a magic glass, it could never be emptied, and the gin would never run out no matter how much I drank, and of myself laughing too loud, a hand inching up my thigh, clumsy feet and even clumsier kisses, scuffling and staggering in the darkness, and the creak of rusty bedsprings. My battered beige suitcase was flung in a corner and my clothes scattered across the coarse crimson carpet littered with coral beads. My purse was empty and my pearls—the only thing of real value I possessed—were gone, stolen by a man whose face I didn’t remember and whose name I don’t think I ever knew.

“Mama always said pearls were the emblem of a true lady; now I can’t even pretend anymore!” I sobbed into my pillow, suddenly feeling even more naked now that the last pretense of respectability had been stripped from me. As soon as I was able, I staggered into a store and sought a set of “imitation pearls for an imitation lady!” I laugh-cried when I tried them on. I didn’t buy them; it just didn’t feel right.

I was desperate to get a job, but once I got one I didn’t want to go. I pulled the threadbare coverlet up over my head the next morning and peeped out from time to time at the moving hands of the clock, knowing, for a little while, that I could still make it if I tried, that if I went now a good excuse for my tardiness would surely suffice—the woman had been nice; she’d seemed to understand how much I needed this job—but I pulled the covers up and closed my eyes until I knew it was far too late and the chance had passed me by. Later I sat tousle headed, musing over a cup of tepid tea, wondering why. I still haven’t found the answer.

I started to sell myself, the only thing I had left. Now that I knew I couldn’t trust myself to hold a job, I guess I thought maybe I could hold a man’s cock for five or ten minutes at least. Whenever I led another stranger into a dark alley to grunt and thrust into me I thought my gin-bleary eyes saw the ghosts of the women my husband had murdered looking at me over his shoulder, watching me with sad eyes. We truly were sisters now. Sometimes I even selfishly borrowed their names so it didn’t have to be me doing this.

I began accepting charity from the Salvation Army, a cup of coffee, a bowl of soup, a bed for the night, even if it meant I had to listen to a bunch of do-gooders spouting platitudes that only made me feel worse. “A fallen woman is a sister to be saved, not a sinner to be punished”; “No one escapes this life without suffering”; “There but for the grace of God . . .” It was like being surrounded by a bunch of squawking parrots. I wished they’d all go back to converting cannibals and leave me in peace; I really only wanted the soup and sometimes a bed I could lie in alone without some man’s prick poking me.

There was one particularly earnest young preacher who tried to wean me off alcohol and got me a job in a secondhand store. He saw things in me that I had forgotten I possessed. He wanted to help me save myself and have me put on the uniform and stand up in front of other poor, wretched sinners and tell my story. I got roaring drunk and turned on him like a tigress; I almost brained him with a gin bottle. “You’re not Jesus Christ, and I’m not Mary Magdalene; you can’t save me!” I remember shouting as I stormed and staggered out, back onto the streets and into the arms of the first man who was willing to buy me a drink.

Now that I was no longer too proud to take charity, I started writing begging letters to some of the rich society people who had once been my most ardent supporters. They felt sorry for me, but not enough to embrace and welcome me back into their world again, thank goodness! Small sums of money began to trickle in from time to time; the envelopes had a knack of showing up just when I needed them most. I tried to tell myself that it was God’s way of looking after me.

In those years I existed, nothing more. Even reinvented, I still needed to lose myself in a world of dreams; it was the only way I could survive. First in rented halls with a white sheet tacked up onto the wall in front of a row of benches, then in opulent, gilded movie palaces with plush velvet seats, I sat enthralled, safely out of the elements, surrounded by people who were more or less just like me, trying to escape life’s problems and the dreary drudgery of reality even if it was only for an hour, breathing in air perfumed by melted butter. Subsisting on popcorn, ice cream, candy, and soda pop, I let myself be mesmerized or lulled to sleep by those silent black, gray, and white flickering images. Sometimes an organ or a piano played; sometimes the only accompaniment was the audience—laughing, murmuring, coughing, belching, or shouting at the magical moving pictures up there on the screen. This was my twilight world where all that existed was a dream within a dream.

I adored the comedies—jolly Fatty and blank-faced Buster, and Charlie, the Little Tramp; life has enough tears and tragedies, so why should we spend our nickels and dimes to see those things projected on a screen? Better to laugh than to cry if you can.

I worshiped Theda Bara, the black-haired vampire with bloodred lips and dead white skin who devoured men’s souls and bank accounts until she’d drained them dry. I tore pictures out of magazines of her voluptuous scantily draped body leaning over a skeleton as though she’d just delivered the fatal kiss and of her holding up her long hair like devil horns. To think that I would live to see a day when such a wicked woman was adored and celebrated! She could have played a husband-murdering adulteress and the world would have thrown roses round her feet! When the title card gave her an imperious voice that cried, “KISS ME, MY FOOL!” I laughed and applauded her power.

But I didn’t care much for the virginal “virtue is its own reward” valentines—Mary Pickford, that girl with the golden curls, reminded me too much of the late, lamented Florie, and the Gish sisters with their candy box beautiful faces always called to mind another candy box and all the ugly secrets concealed inside it. I’m sure they were very nice girls, and talented, but whenever I saw them I twiddled the key I now wore on a chain around my neck, wondering if a day would ever come when I would dare go back to England and unlock my own Pandora’s box filled with evil. I couldn’t stand to watch them; it was just too painful for me. Whenever they appeared on the screen, I drifted back out into the sun or night, the sudden intense need for gin drawing me like a siren’s song. Only when I felt my back hit a wall, hard flesh stabbing soft, rough fingers digging into the tender white skin beneath my thigh, and heard animal grunting and heavy breathing in my ear would I stop thinking about that key and what it would unlock.

I liked the big, sprawling historical spectacles best. Even if I fell asleep, which I often did, there was always something interesting to see when I woke up. Intolerance was my favorite; I think I stayed in my seat for every showing of that one. I loved the wild, magnificent decadence of ancient Babylon, Belshazzar’s bacchanalian feast, the wanton virgins in the Temple of Love, and the pillars of palaces topped by giant white plaster elephants with their trunks turned up for luck. The massacre of the Huguenots on St. Bartholomew’s Day made me weep; I kept hoping it would end different each time and that the hero would carry the girl, his beloved Brown Eyes, over the threshold as a bride instead of a ravished corpse. And when Christ intervened and saved the adulteress from stoning, proclaiming, “He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone,” I wanted to kiss His feet in gratitude.

But it was the modern story that had me on the edge of my seat, riveted and tense, frightened enough to want to run, only I didn’t want to miss a moment, and in truth I don’t think I could have moved unless someone had set off dynamite beneath my seat. It was my story, only it was a young man playing the part. Truly innocent but accused and convicted of taking a life, he had a questionable reputation, a past, that counted against him.

Even though the film was silent—the actors had no voices then—his dark eyes truly were a window into his innocent soul, and I could “hear” his cries of “I didn’t do it!” clawing at my heart. There was just something about his face; even with that dark mustache, I’d never seen one more innocent. How could the judge and jury not see that too? I kept crying, shaking my fist, and railing at the screen, even though I knew it was all a fiction, not real life. Several times the ushers had to come in and quiet me down by threatening to throw me out if I didn’t sit down and shut up and stop spoiling the show for the other patrons. I kept thinking that I knew him, and maybe I had seen that actor in another film before, I saw and slept through so many, but I finally persuaded myself it was just an illusion, a trick of the mind. Seeing him bringing to life a story so uniquely like my own had worked a strange magic and created a false sense of kinship and familiarity.

“The Boy”—that was the only name the character had—was condemned to die. He passionately protested his innocence and fainted in the prison chaplain’s lap, just like I had, even as his young wife raced to waylay a speeding train and beseech the governor’s pardon. There was something otherworldly about his thin, pale face and the dark eyes he raised to Heaven when he took the Last Sacrament. I had to shake and pinch myself every time. I was so caught up in his magic, it was almost impossible to believe that this was just an actor playing a part, all in a day’s work for him. He made it seem so real, like all of us sitting out there spellbound in darkness were truly witnessing an innocent young man preparing to die. He made it all the way up to the gallows; the black hood was on his head and the noose around his neck before reprieve came at the last possible instant. It sent chills down my spine every time. I was so afraid the reprieve would come too late and that I would have to sit there and watch him die.

Then it was 1917 and the world was at war. I didn’t read the papers anymore, except the social columns now and then to try to catch a glimpse of Gladys, and I couldn’t quite wrap my bleary, weary mind around what it was all about. All I knew was that the streets were full of brave young men in uniforms and the walls papered with posters trying to coax more to join up. If my son had been alive he would have been one of them. I didn’t like to think about it, so I drank and drank. I still thought about the Biograph boy; he was rarely out of my thoughts for long. He must have been well into his twenties by then. Was he in uniform too? Was that baby face sporting a dapper mustache like so many of these boys, trying so hard to be brave and grown-up, were wearing nowadays? One evening when I woke up after sleeping all day with him still on my mind, so vivid I could almost reach out and touch him, I staggered into the nearest church and lit a candle and prayed that he would be spared, wherever he was. Even though I didn’t know his name, I was sure God would.

One day I woke up with the morning and took a cold bath, put on my most plain and decent dress, did what I could with my faded hennaed hair, and went out and tried to volunteer as a nurse, but one glance told the Red Cross how utterly unsuitable I was. So I gave what comfort I could to those poor boys going off to war or coming back wounded, missing limbs, and shell-shocked, in dark doorways and alleys, where the darkness and dim, distant streetlights still knew how to be kind to an aging woman.