The Ripper's Wife(110)
“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.