The Ripper's Wife

by Brandy Purdy

  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.

  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, a
sking 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!