The Ripper's Wife(105)

I was so ashamed of this new notoriety I had acquired that I just couldn’t face them.

Sometimes I made it all the way to the street where they lived. I’d stand at a discreet distance and stare and curse myself for a coward for not going up and knocking on that door. Every time it opened or a car drew up before it my heart would leap into my mouth and I’d stand there frozen, rooted to the spot, hoping for a glimpse of them. And when I did see them, it was a balm that both comforted and burned my heart.

I saw Gladys first, her face exasperatingly overshadowed by a huge red-rose-laden straw hat. She was in the midst of a gaggle of gossipy girls of similar age, in the back of a big chauffeur-driven car crammed full of parcels, fresh from an afternoon of shopping in New York’s finest stores. As Gladys traipsed gaily up the front steps, swinging her sables and only slightly hindered by her pea-green hobble skirt and high heels, she turned and waved and called back to her companions, confirming a date at a fashionable tearoom the following afternoon.

My heart beating like a drum, I was there the next day, seated at the table nearest theirs, devouring my daughter with my eyes. She was so beautiful—porcelain skin, violet eyes, and a pompadour of jet-black curls crowned by a hat piled high with purple and lavender roses, dressed in a lavender linen suit, with amethysts at her throat and a silver fox stole swaddling her slender shoulders. It reminded me of the grand birthday party I’d given her, the mammoth rose-covered cake, and the fairy princess costume she’d worn. Some things at least never change—Gladys apparently still adored purple.

But her conversation! It was Dr. this and Dr. that! Twice she even pulled a pretty porcelain-lidded pillbox out of her purse and popped a couple of pills into her mouth! She told her friends she was going visiting in Saratoga for two weeks because Dr. Glass recommended rest and Dr. Hartley recommended exercise and she didn’t like to disappoint either of them on account of they were both so handsome and, with luck, one of them might be her husband someday. She could think of nothing more exciting than being married to a doctor, all the prescriptions he could write for his loving little wife free and gratis, and just think of his hands caressing her in passion and discovering a hitherto-undiagnosed ailment, which reminded her, she had quite made up her mind to let either Dr. Bramford or Dr. Ashe, she wasn’t quite sure which, remove her appendix when she returned from Saratoga. All that horseback riding she planned on doing was surely bound to agitate it; why, she might even have to go straight to the hospital the moment she got home for an emergency appendectomy! The way her violet eyes lit up you would have thought the girl had been invited to open a royal ball by dancing with a prince! But she was bound and determined to have Dr. Tafford, and no other, take her tonsils out! Then she was on about another doctor; she was seeing him twice and sometimes thrice a week for her “poor shattered nerves,” for specialized treatment involving intimate paroxysm inducing stimulation with some sort of vibratory device that didn’t sound at all like proper medical treatment to me.

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.