The Ripper's Wife(111)

“Mama always said pearls were the emblem of a true lady; now I can’t even pretend anymore!” I sobbed into my pillow, suddenly feeling even more naked now that the last pretense of respectability had been stripped from me. As soon as I was able, I staggered into a store and sought a set of “imitation pearls for an imitation lady!” I laugh-cried when I tried them on. I didn’t buy them; it just didn’t feel right.

I was desperate to get a job, but once I got one I didn’t want to go. I pulled the threadbare coverlet up over my head the next morning and peeped out from time to time at the moving hands of the clock, knowing, for a little while, that I could still make it if I tried, that if I went now a good excuse for my tardiness would surely suffice—the woman had been nice; she’d seemed to understand how much I needed this job—but I pulled the covers up and closed my eyes until I knew it was far too late and the chance had passed me by. Later I sat tousle headed, musing over a cup of tepid tea, wondering why. I still haven’t found the answer.

I started to sell myself, the only thing I had left. Now that I knew I couldn’t trust myself to hold a job, I guess I thought maybe I could hold a man’s cock for five or ten minutes at least. Whenever I led another stranger into a dark alley to grunt and thrust into me I thought my gin-bleary eyes saw the ghosts of the women my husband had murdered looking at me over his shoulder, watching me with sad eyes. We truly were sisters now. Sometimes I even selfishly borrowed their names so it didn’t have to be me doing this.

I began accepting charity from the Salvation Army, a cup of coffee, a bowl of soup, a bed for the night, even if it meant I had to listen to a bunch of do-gooders spouting platitudes that only made me feel worse. “A fallen woman is a sister to be saved, not a sinner to be punished”; “No one escapes this life without suffering”; “There but for the grace of God . . .” It was like being surrounded by a bunch of squawking parrots. I wished they’d all go back to converting cannibals and leave me in peace; I really only wanted the soup and sometimes a bed I could lie in alone without some man’s prick poking me.

There was one particularly earnest young preacher who tried to wean me off alcohol and got me a job in a secondhand store. He saw things in me that I had forgotten I possessed. He wanted to help me save myself and have me put on the uniform and stand up in front of other poor, wretched sinners and tell my story. I got roaring drunk and turned on him like a tigress; I almost brained him with a gin bottle. “You’re not Jesus Christ, and I’m not Mary Magdalene; you can’t save me!” I remember shouting as I stormed and staggered out, back onto the streets and into the arms of the first man who was willing to buy me a drink.

Now that I was no longer too proud to take charity, I started writing begging letters to some of the rich society people who had once been my most ardent supporters. They felt sorry for me, but not enough to embrace and welcome me back into their world again, thank goodness! Small sums of money began to trickle in from time to time; the envelopes had a knack of showing up just when I needed them most. I tried to tell myself that it was God’s way of looking after me.

In those years I existed, nothing more. Even reinvented, I still needed to lose myself in a world of dreams; it was the only way I could survive. First in rented halls with a white sheet tacked up onto the wall in front of a row of benches, then in opulent, gilded movie palaces with plush velvet seats, I sat enthralled, safely out of the elements, surrounded by people who were more or less just like me, trying to escape life’s problems and the dreary drudgery of reality even if it was only for an hour, breathing in air perfumed by melted butter. Subsisting on popcorn, ice cream, candy, and soda pop, I let myself be mesmerized or lulled to sleep by those silent black, gray, and white flickering images. Sometimes an organ or a piano played; sometimes the only accompaniment was the audience—laughing, murmuring, coughing, belching, or shouting at the magical moving pictures up there on the screen. This was my twilight world where all that existed was a dream within a dream.

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.