“We’re all sinners, Emma,” Nathan had told her soon after he’d met her at that tent meeting in Naperville, where he’d so impressed her with the power and the purity he radiated when he came forward to give his testimony, call on them all to give themselves up to Christ. “One reason you’re so strong is because you know who and what you are. When you commit a sin, you don’t waste your strength denying it ever happened, or pretending that you’re better than you are and had some perfectly good excuse. You admit you were wrong and try to do something to make things better afterwards.” And that was true, truer than even Nathan had ever known: she had never lied to herself, never told herself something was somebody else’s fault when the blame was hers. That was why she had outlived everyone she had known when she was young, why she was still alive to provide Mary with the strength and love that Teddy would never be able to give her.
“Do you know what day it is, Grandmother?”
She squinted at the calendar. October 29th.
“Of course. It’s my birthday.”
“Right, Mother,” Theodore said, smiling fatuously. “And we’ve got a telegram of congratulations for you from President Johnson.”
“President Johnson? I thought his name was…” She couldn’t remember. “Some Irish name.”
“That was President Kennedy, Mother. The one who was assassinated two years ago. Lyndon Johnson’s president now.”
“Anyway, you have to be a hundred years old before the President sends you a telegram.”
“They send them to you when you’re ninety now, too. Do you want me to read it to you?”
“Not now. Just put it there, by the bed.” She turned to look at Mary, dismissing him, and smiled at her. “When you’re an old lady like me you’ll find it’s a lot easier to remember things that happened when you were a little girl than things that happened just a year or two ago. How are you doing, Mary?”
“All right.” But she wasn’t all right, that was obvious, now that Emma peered at her more closely and saw the rigid way she was standing with her face closed and wooden, her hands clenched. Something was wrong. Something secret, that she didn’t dare talk about in front of Teddy.
“Teddy, could you go get me a glass of water? No. Get me a Coca-Cola. Two Coca-Colas, one for me and one for Mary. They must have a machine here somewhere.”
He just gaped at her.
“Well, what are you waiting for?”
“Mother, you never drink Coca-Cola!”
“How would you know? I feel like one. At my age I may die tomorrow and this will be the last chance I’ll ever get to drink a Coca-Cola. Anyway, I’m sure Mary could use one. Couldn’t you, Mary?”
“Yes, Grandmother.”
“I just don’t know if it’s good for you.”
“Then go ask a nurse. If she says I can’t have it, just bring one back for Mary and get me whatever she says I can drink. But get going, now.”
She waited until Teddy was gone, then held out her hand to Mary. Mary took it.
“What is it, Mary? I can tell something’s wrong.”
Mary nodded.
“Is it school? A boyfriend?”
Mary shook her head.
“Drugs, then, something like that?”
“Grandmother! Of course not!”
“Then what is it? I’m your grandmother, and I love you. You can tell me. Even if you can’t tell your father.”
“It’s Dad. He’s—you know his secretary, Miss McCullen? The one with the red hair and the tight sweaters you said made her look like a prostitute?”
“What about her?”
“I hate her! Dad’s sleeping with her. He always comes home late and sometimes he doesn’t come home at all, he just stays with her all night. He said he’s going to leave Mother. He’s going to get a divorce and marry her!”
“That’s right.” Emma looked up, startled. Teddy was standing in the doorway, holding two bottles of Coke.
“I hadn’t planned on telling you yet, Mother. Not on your birthday, and not with Mary here like this. But as long as you had to find out, I might as well confirm things for you. I’m going to divorce Jean and marry Sharon.”
“Jean’s always been a good wife to you.”
She tried to keep herself calm, not feel anything, stave off the rage building within her, the old, cold rage she had thought her years with Nathan had exorcised forever.
“Yes, a perfectly good wife! She cleans, she sews, she takes Mary to church on Sunday, she goes to every PTA meeting. This isn’t Victorian England, Mother. You think that’s what I want out of life?”
For an instant Emma was thirteen years old again, back in Millers Court, the narrow alley where she was waiting hidden in the shadows, clutching the long knife from her father’s bag as she watched Father with the whore they called Kelly, the young one who would have looked almost like her mother, if the depravity her mother had kept hidden behind her modest façade had instead been blazoned across her face for the whole world to see. Kelly was leaning back against the wall with her skirts lifted and her legs spread, taunting Father on, and he was swearing at her even as he undid his trousers and let them fall, half squatted and pushed himself clumsily into her, shouting at her all the while that she was evil, she was filth, and calling her Margaret, calling her by Mother’s name. But Kelly only laughed at him, told him that was why he wanted her, wasn’t it, because she was filthy, she was a whore, that was what he wanted, not some nice clean-smelling little wife who would never take her clothes off for him except under the bedclothes in the dark with the curtains and shades drawn. And all the while Emma forced herself to watch, waiting for him to finish and pay the whore and stumble away, blind with self-loathing, so that she could use the knife, rip Kelly open and cut her father’s seed out of the whore’s diseased womb.
And then she was trapped back in the present, shaking with the same impotent rage she had felt when Kelly called out to a passing man just as Father was finally staggering off, forcing Emma to follow as Kelly took the other man back to the warmth of the room—though the chill November street had been good enough for her with Father—then wait outside until he too left, and Kelly was alone again. But now Emma was ninety years old, and lying in a hospital bed with a cancer in her withered womb that was killing her more slowly, but just as certainly, as she had killed any of the whores who had tried to fatten themselves on her father’s weakness, who had used that weakness to humiliate and degrade him…and she was as helpless to do anything now as she had been to save him in the end.
“Not now, Teddy,” she managed to make herself say. “Not with Mary here. Come back some other time. Tomorrow. We’ll talk about it then.”
“You’re sick, Mother, so I’ll let you rest. And I’ll come back without Mary, because that’s what you want. But not because I think she needs to be shielded from any of this. She needs to understand what’s going on, and it doesn’t make much difference to me if she hears it with you here or on her own.”
“Teddy, just go now. Take Mary home and leave me alone. Please leave me alone.”
Nathan would have told her to forgive them, sympathize with them, and try to understand them, in the hope that with time she could bring them to see the error of their ways. She had never told Nathan what had really happened with her father, never thought it was fair to burden him with the crimes that were her responsibility and hers alone, but he had always known far more than she had ever told him, had perhaps even guessed most of the rest.
“Whatever you did, you did for love,” he had told her once, “and for that God will forgive you.”
Nathan had loved her anyway, had healed her broken life with his love, his loyalty, his devotion. He had lent her his strength and his vision of God’s mercy, so different from anything her father had taught her, and together they had been whole in a way she could never have been on her own. But she was alone now, Nathan was dead and buried, and she had only his memory to guide her, help her keep her rage under control. Yet ev
en if she could have been strong and generous and forgiving the way Nathan would have wanted her to be, she was still old and dying, and there would never be enough time for her to bring Teddy to see that what that woman was making him do was wrong.
Still, she had always known Teddy for what he was. She could have probably borne seeing Teddy leave Jean, watch their marriage trail off into another 1960s adultery and divorce, with nothing more than any other mother’s anguished regrets, the sympathy she would feel for Jean. But Mary was different. Mary was pure, loving, she had Nathan’s love and sweetness and generosity, so like her own father’s but without the weakness, and Emma loved Mary the way she had loved Father, totally, without reservation, without concern for herself.
Nothing could be allowed to sully Mary. Nothing. But Emma knew she wouldn’t be around to help Mary heal the wounds that would be left by a broken home, a father who would desert Mary just as Emma’s own mother had deserted Emma and her father. Even with Nathan’s memory preaching tolerance and forgiveness, Teddy’s Miss McClure was lucky that Emma was old and bed-ridden and dying.
No. That was insanity. Worse than insanity: stupidity. This was the 1960s, the era of scientific detective work, the FBI, fingerprints. They even had psychics like that Dutch man, whatever his name was, telling the police how to find murderers who had been too smart to leave any normal clues. Even if she’d been as strong as the girl she’d once been, there was no way she could kill someone and hope to get away with it again, no hope she could keep it a secret from Mary, or ever make her understand, and the knowledge that her beloved grandmother was a murderer would destroy Mary far more certainly than any outside taint Emma could shield her from.
As it had perhaps destroyed Father. Emma had never known if he had really believed the note he had left for the police, if he had really thought he had killed them all in fits of drunken insanity, or whether he had realized what she had done for him, and had sacrificed himself to save her.
A coward’s sacrifice, if that’s what it had been. If he’d just controlled himself, stopped drinking, refused to give in to temptation—but no. He’d been too weak, he’d preferred the cheap heroism of a quick, easy death to living out his life in sobriety, bearing his responsibility and his pain for himself. He would never have been able to have borne his guilt, as Emma had borne her own all these years, knowing she was damned, knowing, too, that that was no excuse, that there had been no point of no return after which suicide or any other sin would have been meaningless and permissible because you were already doomed to the torments of Hell anyway. Knowing, too, that she would do it again if she thought it would save him.
But there was no way to save Mary from the Miss McClures of the world. There were too many of them, they were everywhere today in their short skirts and high heels, almost naked on the beaches, selling their bodies like whores in movies and on billboards and in magazines so companies could sell toothpaste and deodorants and underclothes, and if something happened to this Miss McClure, Teddy would just find another to take her place.
Emma was helpless, too weak to strike, tear out the evil and destroy it before it could spread any further, even if that had been possible. As helpless as the surgeons who kept opening her up, cutting out a little more of the cancer suppurating in her diseased womb, but who were unable to keep it from extending its tentacles to her liver and lungs, through her bloodstream, spreading farther and farther throughout her body, like some tree of evil taking root in her every organ and cell…until soon she would be only a mass of diseased corruption. Like the world had become, the evil that had once been confined to the ghettos and slums now spreading with ever-increasing speed throughout the seemingly healthy tissue of society, so that the whole thing was rotten and tainted with filth beneath its shining healthy surface, eaten away from within.
She was too weak and helpless to do anything, there was nothing anyone could have done, but that night she started spitting out all the sleeping pills the nurses gave her, and hiding them in the little purse with the jet beads on it they let her keep in her bedside table’s drawer, though she never needed to use the few dollars she kept there to buy anything anymore, or ever went anywhere anymore except when they put her in her wheelchair and covered her with blankets and wheeled her out into the garden with the others, to bask in the sun like wrinkled, senile toads and lizards.
But even with the dull pain that never really went away, and the nights she spent sleepless, worrying about Mary or lost in the past, a little of her strength was coming back.
“I’m never going to get better, am I?” she asked Dr. Knight. “I mean, better enough to go home, even for a while.”
“No.”
“How much longer do I have?”
He shrugged. “There’s no way we can tell you. At least another month or two, possibly a year, maybe even more. A lot of it depends on how much longer you want to hang on, and on how hard you’re willing to fight.”
She had five sleeping pills saved up before Teddy came back to see her, alone this time.
“I don’t love her, and she doesn’t love me, Mother. We’d both be better off divorced.”
She could tell he was lying, like she could always tell when he was lying to her. Trying to justify himself, pretend he was innocent, just another helpless and blameless victim of circumstances, when it was all his fault, his and that woman’s, flaunting her body at him every day at the office like a cheap whore, and him too selfish and spineless to resist her or think about his responsibilities to his wife and daughter when all he cared about was getting her into bed, or maybe up on his desk after everyone else at the office had gone home—
“Mother!” To her horror she realized that she’d been mumbling her thoughts out loud, that he’d heard it all. “That’s insane! You don’t know what you’re talking about! That’s the exact kind of stupid puritan bullshit that’s always kept me from telling you about any of this. Because I knew you wouldn’t even try to understand.”
Emma caught her breath, tried to start over.
“Jean has always been faithful to you. Why can’t you be faithful to her?”
“Because Jean isn’t what I want! Any more than you were what Father wanted.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“What do you think I mean? You think that all he was doing away from home all day, every day, that he was just working up that half-hour sermon he was going to preach over the radio? That it took him all day to set things up, prepare himself, meditate on mankind’s ills and needs? Hell, he just walked in there about ten minutes before he was due to start broadcasting and made it up as he went along.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“He used to take me down there with him sometimes, didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“And where do you think he spent the rest of that time, when you thought he was preparing his sermons?”
“You’re lying. Nathan was never like that.”
“With women, that’s where! Whores—isn’t that what you used to call them, when you were warning me about spending my time with loose women, how they’d tempt me and subvert me and poison my life? Give me diseases?”
“Teddy—”
“Don’t start telling me all about your father and his holy mission to England and how he hung himself to keep himself from being tempted anymore, because I don’t care! He hung himself because he was a crazy drunk, not because of anything some woman did to him. And nobody poisoned my life! I’ve been seeing women all my life, but only because I wanted to, not because I was too weak to fight off some sleazy prostitute’s honeyed temptations.”
“He took you with him? When he went to see those women?”
“A few times. I mean, not up to see them, no, but I’d wait in the park or at some lunch counter for him, and he knew I knew what he was doing. I saw one of them once, a real pretty blonde woman, when she met him at the door.”
“Teddy, stop. Please stop.” She put up a hand, trying to ward hi
s words off, but he wasn’t listening, wasn’t even looking at her, he just went on.
“I never told you before because I knew you’d never understand. I didn’t want to hurt you, just like Father never wanted to hurt you. The only reason I’m saying it now is to get you to stop trying to tell me I’m committing some sort of horrible sin, just because I love Sharon and I want to get divorced so I can marry her!”
“What do you want me to do?” She found she was suddenly calm, glacial. Nothing he could say could touch her anymore.
“Stop lecturing me about right and wrong all the time. Stop telling me what I should and shouldn’t do. I’m not a child anymore. Just leave me alone.”
“And that’s all?”
“No, that’s not all. Stop poisoning Mary’s mind against me and Sharon.”
“So now I’m the one poisoning people’s minds?”
“You know what I mean! Sharon’s going to be Mary’s new mother, and she’s going to have to learn to live with her.”
“What about Jean?”
“Jean and I have already worked it out. I’ll take Mary for the first year, until Jean can find a job and then we’ll split her. She’ll be spending the school year with Jean and her summers with me and Sharon.”
“Jean agreed to all this?”
“She agreed. A lot of it was her idea. She’s as sick of me as I am of her, Mother.”
“Did you ask Mary about this?”
“She’s just a kid. She’ll do what we think is best for her.”
The Big Book of Jack the Ripper Page 90
