The Ripper's Wife

39

After a few more years of wandering, I finally found a home and a haven in Gaylordsville, Connecticut. I had recently read a novel someone had left behind in a bus station, Show Boat by Edna Ferber, and the gambler, the reckless wooer, Gaylord Ravenal, reminded me of Jim, and maybe I saw a little something of myself in Magnolia, the woman who loved her husband through thick and thin. I could just see Jim’s smile lighting up his eyes and the diamond horseshoe twinkling in his tie again. I took it as a good omen, that I had finally found the place where I belonged.

I met a pair of ladies on the train, a Mrs. Clara Dutton and a Miss Amy Lyon, who were respectively the matron and nurse of a boys’ school. Seeing that I had nothing, they offered to share their hamper of sandwiches and slices of lemon jelly cake with me. They were kind to me, and for the first time in many long years I told them something of my story, making it clear as the finest crystal that I didn’t want notoriety, I longed only for peace.

“You poor soul, it has been a long and wearying journey for you; hasn’t it?” Mrs. Dutton said. Then she shared a lengthy look with Miss Lyon, who smiled and nodded. “But I think it’s over now,” she clasped my hand.

They told me about a spot of land near the school that nobody wanted because it was too near a railroad track. “When the trains go by they would make any walls near there shake, and I’m sure they’d shake the thoughts out of anybody’s head too,” Mrs. Dutton said. But the land could be had very cheaply if I didn’t mind the noise and a little discomfort. It turned out I had just enough money saved to buy it and build a little shack to call my home. There wasn’t enough money for electricity or running water, but I had always preferred the kind, gentle glow of candles and lamps and there was a stream just a few steps outside my back door and the trees and blackberry brambles around it provided me enough privacy to bathe. I was no longer a pert-breasted blond beauty, so I couldn’t imagine anybody braving those brambles to spy a glimpse of my nakedness.

To welcome me to my new home, Mrs. Dutton brought me a blanket she had crocheted in orange, pink, and white stripes, in remembrance of how that first conversation had begun when I admired the orange and pink taffy-colored clouds outside the window. Her sister-in-law, Mrs. Roberson, the wife of the school chaplain, sent me a loaf of the fresh-baked banana bread she was famous for. And Miss Lyon gave me several packets of vegetable and flower seeds. Some of the boys from the school—how sweet of them, since they hadn’t even set eyes on me—painted me a little placard that said “Home, Sweet Home” in bright pink letters, with the sun smiling down on my little house and flowers springing up all around it, and Mrs. Dutton said that some of them had even volunteered to come hoe and weed the earth for me.

The “friendless lady” wasn’t friendless anymore. For the rest of my life, I would bear the name I had been born to—Florence Chandler. They respected my wishes and kept my secret. No one ever asked me a single question about my former life or my guilt or innocence; they let those tired old ghosts rest.

I can’t say there were no more dark moments to mar my newfound happiness—no one can say that—but, on the whole, I was content. Sometimes the demons would rear their ugly heads and pull me back into the sticky, sluggish black tar pool of depression, but I fought them back down into the pit of Hell as best I could and just got on with the business of living. From time to time, especially as I got older, the diary would beckon to me from the dark corner where it lay hidden, demanding that its story must be told now that there was no one who needed protecting anymore. But, following the philosophy of out of sight, out of mind, I just piled more of the magazines, old newspapers, and discarded books I endlessly collected on top of it, trying to stifle its evil whispers.

Mrs. Dutton, Mrs. Roberson, and Miss Lyon found me little jobs to do around the school, nothing too taxing, as I was getting on in years, but simple, pleasant things like helping in the library, decorating the chapel, and assisting Miss Lyon in the dispensary, helping to minister to and soothe her little patients who were trying so hard to be brave little men in the face of scrapes, burns, and the occasional dislocated shoulder or broken limb. It was just enough to make me feel that I had actually earned my nickels and dimes and the hot lunches I was provided.

Some of my benefactors still remembered me, and tiny bequests came in the mail from time to time, though these trickled off during the years of the Great Depression, when times were lean for almost everyone and many millionaires were feeling the hard pinch of poverty. Some even, I’m told, ended up selling apples on street corners or jumped out of windows when faced with the prospect of living without their fortunes.

Several stray cats found their way to my door, and I took them all in and loved every one of them as though it were my very own child. Tiny tins of fish-flavored food for them and my movie tickets became my greatest expenditure and joy. I had a little door cut into the bottom of my back door so they could come and go as they pleased and would never feel like prisoners of my love. Their warm, wiggly, soft bodies and contented purrs provided me with the comfort and affection I’d been missing all these years. Why hadn’t I thought of that before? I’d finally found the love I’d been waiting for. Of course, it wasn’t the same as holding or being embraced by a man or boy in lust carnal or maternal, but it was enough and in some ways it was better. Those cats certainly made better friends than anyone I ever met in the Currant Jelly Set.

I went to the movies several times a week, sometimes walking or hitching rides into adjoining towns to see different features or to follow a film I especially favored and wasn’t ready to say good-bye to just yet. All the managers and ushers, even the candy counter boys and girls, knew me and were very kind to me; they seemed to understand how much the movies meant to me.

I was mesmerized by Pandora’s Box. I watched entranced as the doomed Lulu, who had destroyed everyone who had ever loved her, unwittingly led Jack the Ripper to her room one lonely, foggy Christmas Eve. In my mind’s eye, Louise Brooks’s sleek black-helmet bob grew long and swirled into a mass of gilded curls and her shabby short skirt grew rich and sprouted lace and melted down to her feet and filled out to billow and bounce with a perky bow-bedecked bustle as she became me and her companion became Jim. She turned on the stairs and, smiling, reached out her hand to him as the audience gasped at the knife he was hiding behind his back. “I am she; she is me,” I kept whispering as I watched her until the candle of her life went out. It was such a scandalous picture—shocking, immoral, wanton, lurid—everyone said, and Mrs. Dutton and Mrs. Roberson were simply appalled that I had seen it. It was quickly withdrawn, but I sat riveted to my seat through every showing. It made me wonder if someone else knew my and Jim’s secret, but no, it could not be. Vivacious, impetuous Lulu’s resemblance to the girl I used to be was merely a coincidence, and Jack the Ripper was only a melodramatic and morally convenient method for her demise; women like her had to be punished.

I was particularly partial to the costume pictures and those sparkling-witted comedies poking fun at the gay and giddy rich with their Pekingeses and protégés and scavenger hunts, with colorful casts of Champagne Charlies and madcap heiresses often falling for ordinary working-class Janes and Joes or even the butler or an absentminded scientist.

I watched the love goddesses of the modern world flit by fleetingly as butterflies. I saw the vamp Theda Bara become a living caricature; thankfully the real-life woman had the sense to gracefully retire when the public would not let her change with the times. I watched the fast-living redheaded “It Girl,” Clara Bow, who replaced her crash and burn. And “the platinum blond” comet who was Jean Harlow, the tart with a heart both men and women took into their own, blaze briefly across the silver screen only to die, suddenly, at twenty-six. Why did no one ever notice that her eyes never smiled? She made sex seem like an alluring dress she could put on or take off at random; you just instinctively knew she was still a little girl inside only playing at dress-up in all that slinky white skintight satin, feathers, diamonds, and furs, and the sassy, tough cookie dialogue was all bravado.

I cried like a baby over Stella Dallas. When Barbara Stanwyck stood out in the rain watching her daughter’s wedding through a window, I saw myself watching Gladys. And Madame X and Madelon Claudet sacrificing themselves for their sons’ greater good; if only I had been so noble, if only I had stayed away from the Le Roi Gold Mine. And there I was embodied by Kay Francis as the happy, breathless young bride falling in love with the house on 56th Street, wanting to live and love there forever, just like the long-lost Florie the day she first set foot in Battlecrease House.

I lost myself in the musicals, now that the movies not only talked but sang, watching Fred and Ginger fall in love as they danced, tapping their way through all sorts of silly romantic complications to the inevitable happy ending, while Nelson and Jeanette made love in soaring operatic trills, like a pair of bittersweet warbling lovebirds. And I marveled at the Busby Berkeley spectacles, where the master deployed beautiful chorus girls in military-like maneuvers that his camera captured at clever angles. I loved to sing along with the musicals. Sometimes I’d get so carried away that despite my increasingly stiff joints and rheumatism, I’d get up and dance up and down the aisle, brandishing my Eskimo Pie ice-cream bar like an orchestra conductor’s baton, spattering those seated nearest with droplets of melted chocolate and vanilla, as I sang until an usher inevitably came and escorted me back to my seat, explaining the manager was worried I might break a hip if I kept on and then I wouldn’t be able to come watch movies anymore.

I sat and stared in unflinching fascination at the monsters—Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Mummy—and wondered who they were before and if love had been responsible for their sinister transformation, if it had done to them what it did to my husband. I pondered the allure of the sphinx-like Garbo as Mata Hari, Queen Christina, and Camille and sat torn between love and hate for the fast-talking, rum-running, gun-toting gangsters, wept over doomed romances, and quaked with laughter at the comedies.

It was a world where I found everything I was looking for, and I never wanted to leave it. Sometimes I was there when they opened the doors for the first show and the last to leave when the time came to lock them. Popcorn, candy, soda, and ice cream were like the nectar of the gods to me, and I wanted no other banquet. They fed my body as the flickering images on the silver screen fed my soul.

By lamplight late at night in my shack or sitting out on the steps in the bright light of day, I voraciously devoured all the fan magazines I found, fished out of rubbish bins, or was given or spent my scant coins on. I wondered how all these bright, beautiful young people who now filled my world never quite seemed to figure out that fame and fortune were not the answer. I charted the rise and fall of popularity, the slow fade into oblivion, or the sudden shock and abrupt departure ordained by death, and condoled and wept over their scandals. I’d felt the pinch of those shoes; I knew what it was like to fall.

It was in a movie theater in 1936 that God granted me my moment of grace, the greatest, most sweetest gift I never expected to receive. It was a cold, rainy day, so dreary, awful, and gloomy I’d almost stayed home. But I just couldn’t settle, no book or magazine could hold my attention, and the rain tapping on the tin roof overhead, usually so soothing, only needled my nerves. I felt some compulsion calling me to the movie house, so I pulled on my galoshes and raincoat and went out.

I arrived just in time to see the tail end of the first showing of a costume picture called Lloyd’s of London, sort of a frilly valentine about maritime insurance and thwarted love with lots of pretty people in even prettier costumes; I was sure I was going to like it. I was busy jostling my popcorn, soda, and candy and wiggling out of my raincoat when I happened to glance up at the screen. In that moment I froze. Every hair on the back of my head stood up, and my heart leapt into my throat when I glanced up and saw that face. It was a MIRACLE! Bobo was dead, but the movies, through the grace of God, had given him back to me, more beautiful than he had ever been in life, if that was possible.

In a dark dressing gown, he leaned weakly within a window, framed by heavy satin drapes trimmed with tassels, streaks of ludicrous, improbable silver painted into his black hair to give the suggestion of suffering and age to a boy barely past twenty. The most beautiful face I had ever seen rested its brow against the glass, lips parted, trembling, in grief and anguish, black-coffee-brown eyes shimmering, wet with tears, as he gazed down upon his childhood friend’s funeral cortège solemnly passing. Slowly, the eyes dropped, the head bowed, the camera drawing caressingly closer, until that face fully filled the screen, then the lashes fell, the same magical double row, so long and thick they cast shadows upon his cheeks. His name, the credits soon revealed, was Tyrone Power.

My husband was right, words of wisdom scattered amongst the carnage of his diary like a single diamond-bright star lighting up the blackest night—the Lord sometimes sends the strangest angels to those who least deserve it.

I sat through that picture three times that day. I was back again the next morning, waiting when the theater opened, and every day after that until they changed films. I sat there, spellbound in darkness, leaning forward, feasting my soul, drinking that boy in with my eyes, feeling as though I had been touched by the divine.

I like to think we never really lose the ones we love; they just come back to us, if we’re lucky and wait long enough, in different guises.

Bobo was dead. I knew that; he’d been moldering in his grave for twenty-five years. But with this beautiful long-lashed boy up there on the silver screen, I could pretend Bobo was still alive, eternally young and immortally beautiful, impervious to wrinkles and time, that he had become the matinée idol of my dreams after all, instead of a dull, serious-minded mining engineer. I could imagine that though we were still sadly estranged, he no longer denied me images of himself; instead he generously gave me leave to look my fill. I could paper my walls and fill my scrapbook with his pictures, as many as the magazines and movie studio I wrote to could provide. I could pore over the articles, gaining glimpses into his personality—I just knew he would be kind; young Mr. Power was just as sweet and sincere as my boy should have grown up to be if Michael hadn’t gotten his wretched hands on him! I could discover Ty’s likes and dislikes and, like any mother, scrutinize the girls who caught his fancy—Janet, who looked as though butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, and Sonja, that baby-faced blond Norwegian ice-skater. And I could visit the movie theater and see him from time to time, like being invited to a palace for a personal audience with a handsome young prince. I no longer looked at the faded photographs of my real son anymore, the boy whose frozen images had at fourteen vanished abruptly from my life, and the smudged and tear-blurred, now indistinct images that had accompanied newspaper notices of his passing; I had found something better.

My surrogate silver-screen son was more generous than my real son had ever been. He gave me presents three or four times a year: clever modern dress comedies, frothy meringue musicals, swashbucklers, and historical romances, the most beautiful of all being the sumptuous, costumed confection of Marie Antoinette, when he brought to life the gallant Count Fersen. When Norma Shearer stood before him, gazing at him with stars in her hair and love in her eyes, I knew just how she felt. That night when I laid my head down upon my pillow I was a young bride in my blue linen suit again waltzing through Versailles with Jim, so happy and so in love, living a dream I never wanted to end.

When young Mr. Power appeared in a feathered turban and brocaded tunic festooned with pearls and gems in The Rains Came I smiled and remembered Bobo in the little maharajah’s costume he had worn on Gladys’s sixth birthday, the day he cut his curls and made my tears fall like rain. And when Tyrone donned the Suit of Lights and played the matador in Blood and Sand I left before the end; I couldn’t bear to stay and watch him die, even though it was only a film . . . not this time. I sat outside in the sun and ate an Eskimo Pie and fingered the rosary Mrs. Roberson had given me with tears in my eyes and thought of Bobo and Bobby, my lovely lost and found-too-late Biograph boy. I wasn’t ready to watch Ty die, even if it was only in a movie.

But this young man I thought of affectionately as my surrogate silver-screen son was not the only boy in my life. On the contrary, my life was now filled with boys, and my heart was big enough to love all of them, not just the brunets. Living with my seventy-five cats in my little cluttered and untidy shack by the railroad tracks, wrinkled and withered, with no vanity or care for fashion anymore, I’d been afraid the boys would come to think of me like a witch in a fairy story, daring one another to knock upon the hag’s door. But no . . . oh no! Some were of course timid and some were bold, but the boys of South Kent School never shied away from me or treated me with disrespect. They never played pranks on me at Halloween or threw stones or eggs at my tin roof and walls.

When they helped themselves to the blackberries that grew on the outskirts of my property, like the thorns surrounding Sleeping Beauty’s castle, they always made sure to pick some for me. I’d come home and find a bucket or basket sitting on my steps, and of those they took home for their mothers to bake into pies, tarts, jellies, or cakes there would always be a sweet portion saved for me. They brought colorful pinwheels to spin in the breeze and little clay animals—squirrels, frogs, lizards, turtles, dinosaurs, and bunnies—they’d fashioned and fired in the kiln in their art classes to decorate my flower beds. And when they discovered how much I loved Tyrone Power, a boy would often approach me with one of the little colorful trading cards they found in packs of gum or candy or illicitly savored cigarettes and offer it to me, “since I know you like him.”

Every Christmas Eve the boys never failed to bring me a tiny tree, with garlands of popcorn and red berries and little ornaments they made to adorn it. One year, when a manufacturer of the popular dainty vanilla ice-cream cups was putting assorted movie stars’ pictures on their lids, the boys collected all the ones with Tyrone Power they could find, punched tiny holes in the tops, strung them with gold tinsel cord, and decorated them with red satin bows and hung them all over the tree they left on my front steps. They always shoveled the snow away from my doors and made sure I had enough firewood in winter and weeded my flower beds without my ever needing to ask, and even erected a scarecrow in my little vegetable garden, amidst my paltry crop of tomatoes, squash, peas, and pole beans. And one year, when they saw how weathered my walls were looking, they painted my shack a cheerful bright sky blue with rose-pink trim around the two windows to surprise me. They were all so good to me, gallant young gentlemen all.