The Ripper's Wife

by Brandy Purdy

  She finally found what she was looking for in her purse and came and shoved me aside and swatted at the rose marble counter between the two sinks with her lacy skirt, then began to carefully tap out two lines of white powder from a little golden vial. She took a dollar bill and carefully rolled it into a hollow tube and, bending over the counter, stuffed one end of it up her nostril and proceeded to suck the white powder right up her nose, while her friends just looked on shaking their heads and rolling their eyes. Apparently they were well accustomed to Gladys’s antics.

  When she was done, she casually flung the dollar in my direction; I suppose that was her way of tipping washroom attendants.

  “I’m tired of this!” she declared, turning back to regard her reflection in the big glass mirror over the counter. She reached back behind her and untied the bow of her sash and with a playful whoop flung it high in the air. Then she reached down and began tugging at her skirt. “Devil take you, black lace valentine Mary Pickford!” she cried, balling her lace overdress up and sending it sailing over the nearest stall door, into the toilet. Standing before the mirror in her slinky black slip, she began to do a shimmy dance, pulling her slim skirt up, inch by inch, to reveal her stocking tops. She stepped out of her black satin step-ins, explaining that they “spoiled the line,” and kicked them aside.

  Then my daughter spoke to me. For the first time since she was six years old, Gladys Evelyn turned, looked me right in the eye, and spoke to me, her mother.

  “Scissors!” she bellowed, thrusting out her hand. When I hesitated she got right up in my face and yelled, “Are you deaf or just dumb? I said: SCISSORS!”

  I opened the drawer and took out the pair of silver shears we kept on hand for ladies who needed help with hanging threads or repairing a sagging hem or loose button. She didn’t give me a chance to hesitate and snatched them from my hand.

  With Gladys’s girlfriends, I watched in horror as my daughter laughingly tugged at her corkscrew curls, pulling them down and watching them spring back up, “just like a piggy’s tail!,” then started to snip them off one by one. “Won’t Jim be surprised?” she cackled, blindly thrusting the scissors back at me, points first, like a dagger, then skipped out the door, calling back to me, “You can keep the dollar!”

  She never noticed the tears in my eyes as I stood there with the ruins of my daughter’s beautiful curls scattered round my feet, remembering the day her brother had given himself a haircut in imitation of the illustration of Oscar Wilde’s Happy Prince.

  Shaking their heads, Gladys’s friends tipped me with various coins and some generous dollars and followed her out.

  Alone, I knelt, gathered up my daughter’s curls, and cried and cried. I couldn’t bear to stay, to see her like this. She was certain to kill herself one day and I didn’t want to be there to see it. I’d had enough of death. As I stood up I caught a glimpse of my face, haggard and ashen in the mirror, and I had to stop and ask myself was I any better? I was a poor hag who drank and sold her sagging body for a few cents, while my daughter danced, wore designer gowns, injected heroin, and snorted white powder. Was Gladys another victim of my curse? Had she imbibed the seeds of death and destruction with the milk she’d sucked from my breast?

  I deserted my post then and there. I wouldn’t be paid, but I didn’t care. I got my coat and hat and went to the bar. There was something in my face that silenced the barman’s protests that I wasn’t supposed to be in there. He gave me the glass of gin I demanded.

  “This is the last one I’ll ever have!” I said, saluting him with the glass before I downed it.

  As I walked through the club’s ballroom, I caught one last glimpse of Gladys through the open glass doors. She was standing, balanced precariously, on the edge of the swimming pool’s diving board while her husband and friends anxiously tried to coax her back down. She attempted to dance a Charleston and fell, suffering a concussion and a broken arm. Dr. Corbyn, her husband, fished her out, gently wrapped her in a blanket, and carried her out to their car. I noticed as he passed me, with Gladys moaning and whimpering in his arms, that Dr. Corbyn didn’t look at all well. Though he was still in his late thirties, his hair was already gray as a tombstone, the lines on his face were carved quite deep, and behind his spectacles his eyes looked woefully weary. Marriage—or should I say marriage to Gladys?—clearly did not agree with him, it had aged him terribly.

  That last glimpse was well and truly enough. I never set eyes on Gladys again. And I can’t honestly say, even though she was my daughter and I loved her very much, that I wasn’t glad. There are some things a mother just shouldn’t have to see.

  38

  I was sitting in a movie theater surrounded by sighing half-swooning females all staring up at the screen, with longing eyes and heaving breasts, caught up in the fantasy that their idol hadn’t just died, dreaming that Valentino was still alive and, as The Sheik, was carrying them instead of Agnes Ayres across the desert sands to ravish inside his tent. Suddenly it occurred to me that I was just like them. I’d been a white zombie walking through life with the same glazed longing in my eyes.

  I’d spent my whole life waiting for someone to save me, to just swoop me up in his big, strong arms and carry me away from whatever troubles I was facing. James Maybrick had rescued me from the aimless, roving existence I led with Mama and given me a wedding ring and a home to call my own. Countless nameless, faceless salesclerks had sold me the illusion I was more than willing to pay for that buying pretty things could cure me of my doldrums, discontent, and boredom. Before he became my undesired paramour, Edwin had been my playmate in evading adult responsibilities; it had all been one long, diverting game of follow-the-leader. And Alfred Brierley had helped me escape the painful reality of my marriage when it all went sour; he’d been my Sir Lancelot, the knight in shining armor come to carry his Guinevere away to a squalid rented room that she saw, through dewy wet-violet eyes, as Joyous Garde, and the exotic desert sheik who would turn his lily-white, golden-haired captive into his love slave, all rolled into one magic carpet of a man who in real life could never measure up to those fantasies. It was a terrific burden, I realize now, to heap upon the shoulders of a man who only wanted a lover, not love. My dreams were all I’d had to sustain me in prison, ludicrous fantasies about soaring high and making love in a hot-air balloon with my beloved, or waltzing with my husband, feeling his kiss again, welcoming his touch the way I did when I was a new bride. And, after I was miraculously set free, released into a new wall-less, bar-less prison of book signings and lectures, gin and flickers had helped me keep ducking and dodging in the perpetual game of blindman’s buff I was playing with the truth about my life.

  “Why have you brought me here?”—“Are you not woman enough to know?” the title cards were asking in what seemed like an omen when I got up and walked out into the misting rain. The past was not dead because I would not let it die. “Time heals,” the sage Salvation Army angels in their midnight-blue wool uniforms said, “but time heals slowly.” “Yes,” I agreed, “but how long does it have to take?” They didn’t have to tell me the answer; I already knew—Sometimes, a lifetime. When I reached the dilapidated sagging-roofed rooming house where I was staying I sank down onto the wet front steps and hugged my knees to keep from shivering. A voice I thought I had forgotten spoke to me, like a phantom whispering right in my ear. It was Sister Patia saying, You cannot forget until you forgive.... I do not just mean others; I also mean yourself.. . .

  I’d been carrying around that anger, letting it fester, eating me up inside just like a cancer, and feeling sad and sorry for myself for more years than I liked to tally. And it didn’t start with my trial or prison term, much as I liked to pretend it did, and it certainly didn’t end there. If I couldn’t be bothered to save myself, why should anyone else lift a finger or bother?

  Sometimes, my child, failure is a gift from God, though it may not seem so at first glance. Failure is the chance to start again; it is not an end, but a ne
w beginning, the shade of Sister Patia said to me.

  Suddenly I knew I had to go back to England. I curled my fist determinedly around the key resting in the hollow between my breasts. It was time to reclaim the diary. I’d left the truth sleeping in that dark bank vault far too long.

  “Remember ye not the former things, neither consider the things of old. Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert.”

  Thank you, Sister Patia!

  I got up and started walking. There wasn’t time to write a letter and sit around waiting and hoping; this time I was going to go and hold my hand out for charity. I knew where the Densmores and a nice old spinster lady with a penchant for hopeless causes lived, and between them I was certain to get enough cash to carry me across the sea to England.

  I went first to the house I had hoped would be my home. I could still see myself as a giddy young bride, falling in love at first sight with what I thought then was “home, sweet home,” dreaming of all the wonderful things I expected to happen within those walls. I could see myself impetuously wishing “to live and love here forever with Jim.” Thinking the Cupids smiling down on me in my bedroom would ensure that I would always be lucky and loved.

  Battlecrease House had been broken up into bed-sit flats and wired for electricity. Nothing was the same anymore, except the outside structure, though a closer inspection revealed chipped paint upon the windowsills and a couple of cracked panes. The lavish gardens were gone; where once Jim and I had strolled arm-in-arm or sat kissing beneath the gracious trees and I had sat with the children feeding bread crumbs to the silver and gold fish or coaxing the peacocks to eat from my hand there now stood a parking lot.

  Giving my name as Mrs. Graham and presenting myself as a widow with her veil down—I was still afraid someone might recognize me even after all these years—I went in and inquired about a room. I just had to see inside that house again!

  Though the face had changed, the grace remained; it was and it wasn’t still the same. All our furniture was long gone and cheap linoleum had replaced the costly carpets, but the wood and stucco work, the paper and plaster, the carved grapes festooning the fireplaces, were mostly still there. As I followed the chatty manageress upstairs, only half-listening to her droning on about a murder in one of the bedrooms during the last century, “arsenic in her poor husband’s lemonade,” put there by a scandalous “American hussy” of a wife, I paused, letting my fingers linger caressingly over the banister and to admire the stained-glass waterbirds nesting amongst the reeds. It was all still there, just as I remembered it. In my heart, I was that young bride again, going up the stairs of her new home for the very first time. Tempus Omnia Revelat, I traced the familiar crest, the hawk perched upon a pile of golden bricks with a sprig of flowering may in his beak. Time Reveals All. I was very glad then of my veil; it hid the tears in my eyes, dripping down to give a salty tang to my sad little smile.

  Chance, the Fool’s name for Fate, led her to show me what had once been a part of my room, now a small, single, simple bed-sit with yellow-ivory walls and curtains of yellowed lace, coarse beige carpet, a single bed, white paint flaking from its iron frame, a table, scarred by cigarette burns and rings where someone had carelessly set glasses or beer or soda bottles without a coaster or napkin underneath, and a chest of drawers, one of which didn’t seem to want to close completely. It had a stuck, lopsided look to it.

  The fireplace drew my eye. The Fragonard reproduction and eighteenth-century beauties were long gone, but my little guardian angel, the Cupid medallion, set right in the center of it like a cameo on a lady’s lace collar, was still there. I was sure he remembered me even though Lady Luck had forgotten all about me long ago. My fingers reached out to lovingly caress his little plump baby cheek and I remembered all those I had loved and lost. Their faces flickered past like a movie playing inside my mind, projected fleetingly upon the screen of memory, making me smile through my tears.

  While the landlady was busy with her back to me, demonstrating that the window really did open—“it just sticks a bit, but you’ll soon acquire the knack for opening it . . .”—I mouthed a silent good-bye to my little angel and quietly slipped out.

  “The past is dead,” I whispered as I swiftly descended the stairs. I lingered just a moment on the threshold, slowly, softly closing the front door, just saying good-bye. “The past is dead,” I whispered, and never looked back.

  When I finally stood before Jim’s grave in Anfield Cemetery I was surprised at how little I felt. I thought I would feel more. I thought all the anger I had been carrying around inside me all these years would come bubbling right up and I’d push the cross from its pedestal, scream, and hurl myself onto the ground and rend and pummel the sacred earth like a madwoman. But I did nothing of the kind. I just stood there like any other ordinary mourner with a bunch of violets in my hand and let the truth sleep in its uneasy peace.

  The Bible says that the truth will set you free. But would it? I’ve always wondered what would really have happened if I had revealed the diary and that candy box full of ghoulish souvenirs. Would it have really been as bad as I imagined? Would the wounds have never healed and remained raw and livid throughout all our lifetimes? Would I have been vindicated and acquitted? Or would my adultery still have cast too great a shadow? Would Judge Stephen, with his obsessive need to punish unchaste and misguided females, all those Delilahs, Salomes, and Jezebels, have still accounted my sins far greater than Jim’s? Judge Stephen hadn’t blinked an eye or cocked a brow at Jim’s Mrs. Sarah and their five bastards. Would the murder of five prostitutes in Whitechapel have stirred any horror in his heart at all? Would it have all been for nothing? A daring act doomed to failure? Would I have been convicted and lost those fifteen years and my children anyway? Would they have scoffed at the whole story and said it was all a sham I had concocted? Would Michael’s deep pockets have paid for experts to denounce the diary’s authenticity? Experts are not infallible; sometimes they see only what they want to see or what they are paid to see. Maybe the diary and those macabre remembrances would have turned and rebounded against me like a boomerang. Maybe Michael, with the family’s reputation, his career, and political ambitions to protect—he had given up the stage and become the Mayor of the Isle of Wight while I was in prison— would have found some way to twist the truth and lay those crimes on my lap too. And, in a sense, they really were mine. Those women died standing proxy, for me. Maybe my fifteen lost years truly were a just punishment.

  It’s too late now. Wondering is as futile as walking a mile for exercise, then eating a pound of fudge as soon as you get home. I’ll never know. I let the chance go by. The gambler in me wasn’t brave enough to chance it and lay my cards down. I put my children first and foremost as a mother always should, and I can’t really regret that in spite of the way things turned out. If I was going to do it, I should have done it before Jim died, but I made the decision to leave Jim in God’s hands instead of surrendering him and the evidence against him to worldly justice of judge, jury, and hangman. I made the decision.

  Did we both play God, each of us in our own way? Jim took lives; I kept his secret. I aided and abetted him in my own fashion. Yes, I am guilty of that. I put the powder in the meat juice, I almost did what he asked me to, but then I spilled it. Maybe that is enough to convict me of evil intentions, even though a change of heart, a change of mind, came, in the form of an accident or divine intervention at the last minute.

  But the fact remains that I kept silent. I let the chance slip by when it might or might not have changed everything, for better or worse, in sickness and in health, just like the vows we make in marriage. And I still don’t know if that was right or wrong. Did I keep a vow I should have broken? I know I broke some that I should have kept.

  For years I’ve borne this terrible burden all alone. I made the sacrifice. Willingly I chose to carry that weight. In the en
d, I can blame no one but myself for what was and wasn’t and what might have been. Maybe those do-gooders, philosophers, Bible-thumpers, and would-be saints are right—maybe everything really does happen for a reason, and that reason is often God’s alone to know. Ask and ye shall receive. When we pray for it to be revealed, sometimes it is given. Sometimes the answer is yes, sometimes the answer is no, and sometimes it is not yet. Everything in God’s own time. Tempus Omnia Revelat; Time Reveals All. In the end, we are all the murderers of our own dreams.