The Ripper's Wife

by Brandy Purdy

  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.

  37

  The tail end of 1920 found me in Atlantic City, recovering from jaundice and a gallbladder operation, performed at a charity hospital by a doctor who was adamant that I should give up drinking. Something he said must have struck a chord so deep within me I couldn’t consciously hear it. I had, incredibly, come out of the darkness into the light. It just happened. Maybe it was one of God’s tiny miracles? I just woke up one day and decided that I was tired of being drunk, tired of being pushed, punched, and pawed, and just tired of being tired all the time. I had a little money. A Mr. Alden Freeman, a philanthropist who used to attend my lectures, had died and remembered me with a small bequest in his will. So I made my way to Atlantic City. I thought the salty air might bring clarity and help me find a new and better way to live.

  I hadn’t felt better or more hopeful in years. I had even woken up that morning thinking I might like to take up china painting again. I’d always loved it so when I was a girl and had time for such things. Maybe I could rent a little stall and sell my handiwork? I was letting my hair go natural after years of hennaing and dyeing it a harsh, brassy blond, and letting my skin breathe freely, devoid of makeup after years of tumbling into bed drunk with more paint on my face than a Rembrandt.

  After my operation, my hair had gone all stringy and started to fall out and I had reluctantly surrendered to the nurse’s suggestion that I have it bobbed. After all those years of enforced prison shearings I thought that was another thing I’d never do again. I shut my eyes and trembled and tears seeped out from under my tightly clenched lids when I felt the cold steel of the scissors against the nape of my neck. But afterward I was glad that I did it. M
y head felt surprisingly light and cool, and all the ladies at the salon said the style suited me beautifully and took years off me.

  As soon as I got to Atlantic City, I had bought myself a new blue-and-white-striped dress and a white straw hat with long blue ribbon streamers and was strolling idly on the boardwalk, smiling over a little sack of pink and white saltwater taffy, remembering how I used to love my candy-pink dresses and candy-striped corset until Alice Yapp put it on and spoiled it for me. I could almost laugh about it now without being too bitter. I was thinking that I might like to try for a job in one of the tiny taffy shops that dotted the boardwalk. I was older now and I was finally starting to make peace with the loss of my son. Maybe I would be calmer now and not frighten the shop’s eager little patrons? It was worth a try, I thought, and popped another taffy into my mouth. When I bit down I felt the most excruciating pain.

  Fortunately, I was able to procure a dentist’s appointment that very afternoon on account of a last-minute cancellation and I had money enough to attend to that rotten tooth. I was sitting there waiting, flipping through a copy of Photoplay magazine and trying not to be too nervous, when I came to a picture that made my heart jump.

  It was him—the Biograph boy! Full page, in profile, it was unmistakable! Handsome, sensitive, sweet, and vulnerable, he still had the power to pull at my heart. All grown-up, he was still that same boy. My mind raced back to 1908, where I could see him in living color not just as a flat black and white printed page, and the day I had dared brush back his dark hair and let my fingers linger caressingly over his face. At last I learned his name; it was Bobby—Bobby Harron. It suited him perfectly; no other could be more fitting. I smiled. However had I missed him becoming a movie star? Had I really been that tired and drunk? I’d have to make a point of seeing his next picture; I was so excited I was of half a mind to wait until the nurse’s back was turned and tear the page out for my scrapbook, I was so proud of him. My own son had shunned the gift of beauty God had given him and chosen math and mechanics over being worshiped and adored as a matinée idol, but, I couldn’t believe it; my sweet, shy little Biograph boy—I still couldn’t help but think of him as mine even though I only knew him for a few precious minutes all those years ago—had become a movie star! Then I read the small print under his picture: “The boy you knew”—Why was it in past tense? I started to feel the sneaking creep of fear, but I kept on reading—“on the screen was the real Robert Harron, ‘Bobby,’ as friends and fans called him—human, lovable, genuine. His passing, as a result of an accidentally inflicted bullet wound, left a place no one can fill.”

  I automatically turned the page, hoping for more details, as though knowing more would in any way change anything. Even if I knew everything he would still be dead, just like my son. My eyes skimmed over the words without reading them until one popped off the page like a boxer’s fist—Intolerance. That was why he’d seemed so familiar! But I hadn’t been able to see past the drama and the dark mustache he was sporting for that particular picture. Distracted by the similarity to my own story, I let myself be convinced that it was all a trick of the mind, only it wasn’t; there was another, much deeper, reason he’d been able to capture my heart without saying a word. “The Boy” on the screen was my Biograph boy. And now he was dead, just like my son. Bobby was only twenty-seven. Bobo died at twenty-nine.

  Accidental—The papers said my son’s death had been accidental too. He had everything to live for, a successful career, a girl he meant to marry, a bright, bright future. But they didn’t know what I knew; they hadn’t seen the watch under the microscope, the evil confession signed and spelled out in scratches. Surely it really was an accident. It just couldn’t be anything else! That would be too cruel! Accidents happen all the time. One young man, troubled and distracted, pours cyanide into a glass and drinks it down like milk; another one drops a gun on the floor and puts a hole in a perfectly good heart—and it was a good heart. I could tell that from the first glance. They were both so young and had everything to live for. But in the end only God knows for sure.

  I remembered that soft, baby smooth cheek against my palm; I could feel his skin, just as real, living and warm, after all these years as though I had only just touched him. When I caressed him that day in the Biograph office had I also cursed that sweet, innocent boy with the death and misfortune I brought to all my loved ones?

  I got up from my chair and walked out of the dentist’s office without saying a word, the magazine trailing listlessly from my hand, pages flapping against my ankles like the wings of Death. I stayed more or less drunk for the next ten years. I never went back to that dentist or any other; I let that tooth rot and fester in my jaw as a penance and numbed the pain with alcohol.

  I went back to Chicago and then New York and started painting my face and coloring my hair again. I returned to the vagabond vagrant’s world of Salvation Army cots and soup kitchens, meaningless couplings in dark alleys against walls, just for the money, and the only place I found any small measure of happiness—the movies. My diet was every child’s dream—any given day for breakfast, lunch, or dinner I might have Cracker Jacks or hot buttered popcorn, orange, grape, or strawberry soda, or even Coca-Cola, which had replaced coffee and tea in my heart, and a handful of sticky peanut butter Mary Janes or some of Mr. Hershey’s blissful Kisses, with an Eskimo Pie for dessert, and in between I was constantly sucking on sassafras, horehound, or red anise drops, peppermint stars, and butterscotch buttons. I was profoundly disappointed in myself, but I just didn’t care enough to do anything about it.

  The world was moving even faster now. The twenties really were roaring. Faster cars, faster music, faster dances, and faster women in shorter skirts and shorter hair, who were not afraid to show their stockings and drink homemade gin brewed in somebody’s bathtub even if it meant risking death or blindness. They just thumbed their noses and laughed and made jokes about it. The world just kept evolving and revolving at a faster speed, in both morals and motion. Corsets, like bustles and crinolines, were a thing of the past, and I had a terrible time getting used to these new dresses without structure that hung as loose as society’s morals now blatantly and unapologetically did. I didn’t know whether I had been born too late or too soon or to laugh or cry or just curl up and die.

  My daughter was all I had left now, the only one to love, even if my love was unwanted and always given from afar. Though well into her thirties, Gladys didn’t show it; she was still beautiful and fit right in with the bright young things of the 1920s. I’d catch a glimpse of her sometimes, in the society columns or with my own eyes, getting out of a car in a cloche hat, t-strap high heels, and a bright purple coat trimmed with monkey fur to attend a ladies luncheon or a charity event at a fashionable hotel or restaurant and in sparkling evening dresses, encrusted with crystals or covered with tinsel fringe that flowed and danced over her slender body like liquid silver or gold.

  One of those rare summers when I was less drunk instead of more, I floated to the surface in Newport. I was going through one of my resurrection phases and decided to clean myself up. I left my badly faded red, yellow, and gray streaked hair alone and stopped painting my face, put on a dowdy plain dress, and went in search of respectable employment. I was hired at a fashionable country club as an urgent last-minute replacement for a ladies’ washroom attendant who had just eloped with a wealthy stockbroker’s nitwit son.

  That night I couldn’t believe it. I found myself in the same room with Gladys. So close I could have reached out and hugged her. Because I was wearing what amounted to a maid’s uniform I was all but invisible to her and her glossy, gorgeous friends. In their eyes I was no better than a coatrack or an umbrella stand.

  For one so beautiful, my daughter’s disposition was distinctly dour. Her constant complaining made crabapples suddenly seem as sweet as sugar candy. She was wearing the loveliest black lace dress, with cascading flounces floating over her shoulders and down her back, and yards of skirt billowing over a
sheath of black satin beneath, and a lavender satin sash encircling her tiny waist. Her hair hung down to just above her waist in a mass of perfect inky black ringlets, with clusters of lavender roses at each side of her head. She looked a full dozen years younger than her actual age.

  But was Gladys satisfied? No! She was sulking and pouting and stamping her feet and complaining because her husband wouldn’t let her bob her beautiful hair and she was tired of looking like Mary Pickford in mourning, with black curls instead of golden.

  “If he wanted Mary Pickford, he should have married her instead of me!” She flopped down petulantly onto a velvet bench and hitched up her skirts, dug into her purse, and drew out what I thought at first was a spectacles case, popped it open, and proceeded to nonchalantly fill a silver syringe and inject it into the white thigh above her black stocking top.

  “Heroin is simply heavenly!” she sighed, glancing round at her friends and extending the case as though it were a candy box.

  Her friends very wisely demurred—apparently not all young people these days are devoid of sense, I thankfully thought—and changed the topic of conversation to that perennially popular feminine subject: the prevention of pregnancy.

  Gladys, fumbling around in her purse again, shrugged it all off. “Dutch caps and watching calendars!” she snorted. “I don’t have the time or the patience for all that! I’d rather just have an abortion! I’ve already had nine; it’s a wonderful excuse to go to Paris and shop for Poiret gowns! I simply adore Dr. Jacquard!”

  “Couldn’t you see Dr. Jacquard without having to have an abortion?” one of her friends asked, to which Gladys insolently barked,“Shut up, Mimsy!”

  Just as quickly, Gladys’s angry snarl transformed into trills of the gayest laughter. “You all should have been with me the last time I was in Paris! I made Jim take me to the Café du Rat Mort—the Café of the Dead Rat. I was there the same night Olive Thomas drank the mercury poison,” she boasted, mentioning the beautiful young actress who had died a few years ago under mysterious circumstances. After a late night of partying in Paris she and her husband, Jack Pickford, had returned to their hotel, where she had drunk, intentionally or accidentally, no one knew for sure, the mercury solution he used for treating his syphilis sores. “. . . and we ate the most delicious food,” Gladys continued, glossing over this vibrant young woman’s sad and untimely passing, “watched a Negro bite the head off a giant rat, and some whip dancers—I tell you the welts they raised were real!—and then we danced to the gypsy orchestra, and they had these girls come round to all the tables offering lovely little bouquets of fresh flowers that they sprinkled with cocaine from silver shakers. I’d said I would have one, merci beaucoup, and was already sniffing it when the girl held out her hand and told Jim that would be twenty francs; you should have seen his face! He complained that the cost was exorbitant, but by then it was too late; it’d already gone up my nose and wasn’t coming back. And they have the most wonderful cocktails there—brandy and ether with a dash of liquid morphine and a spritz of essence of violets. I tell you, they’re the best in the world!”