The Ripper's Wife(107)

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.