by Brandy Purdy
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 occur
red? 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.
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.
