The Ripper's Wife(113)

After my operation, my hair had gone all stringy and started to fall out and I had reluctantly surrendered to the nurse’s suggestion that I have it bobbed. After all those years of enforced prison shearings I thought that was another thing I’d never do again. I shut my eyes and trembled and tears seeped out from under my tightly clenched lids when I felt the cold steel of the scissors against the nape of my neck. But afterward I was glad that I did it. My head felt surprisingly light and cool, and all the ladies at the salon said the style suited me beautifully and took years off me.

As soon as I got to Atlantic City, I had bought myself a new blue-and-white-striped dress and a white straw hat with long blue ribbon streamers and was strolling idly on the boardwalk, smiling over a little sack of pink and white saltwater taffy, remembering how I used to love my candy-pink dresses and candy-striped corset until Alice Yapp put it on and spoiled it for me. I could almost laugh about it now without being too bitter. I was thinking that I might like to try for a job in one of the tiny taffy shops that dotted the boardwalk. I was older now and I was finally starting to make peace with the loss of my son. Maybe I would be calmer now and not frighten the shop’s eager little patrons? It was worth a try, I thought, and popped another taffy into my mouth. When I bit down I felt the most excruciating pain.

Fortunately, I was able to procure a dentist’s appointment that very afternoon on account of a last-minute cancellation and I had money enough to attend to that rotten tooth. I was sitting there waiting, flipping through a copy of Photoplay magazine and trying not to be too nervous, when I came to a picture that made my heart jump.

It was him—the Biograph boy! Full page, in profile, it was unmistakable! Handsome, sensitive, sweet, and vulnerable, he still had the power to pull at my heart. All grown-up, he was still that same boy. My mind raced back to 1908, where I could see him in living color not just as a flat black and white printed page, and the day I had dared brush back his dark hair and let my fingers linger caressingly over his face. At last I learned his name; it was Bobby—Bobby Harron. It suited him perfectly; no other could be more fitting. I smiled. However had I missed him becoming a movie star? Had I really been that tired and drunk? I’d have to make a point of seeing his next picture; I was so excited I was of half a mind to wait until the nurse’s back was turned and tear the page out for my scrapbook, I was so proud of him. My own son had shunned the gift of beauty God had given him and chosen math and mechanics over being worshiped and adored as a matinée idol, but, I couldn’t believe it; my sweet, shy little Biograph boy—I still couldn’t help but think of him as mine even though I only knew him for a few precious minutes all those years ago—had become a movie star! Then I read the small print under his picture: “The boy you knew”—Why was it in past tense? I started to feel the sneaking creep of fear, but I kept on reading—“on the screen was the real Robert Harron, ‘Bobby,’ as friends and fans called him—human, lovable, genuine. His passing, as a result of an accidentally inflicted bullet wound, left a place no one can fill.”

I automatically turned the page, hoping for more details, as though knowing more would in any way change anything. Even if I knew everything he would still be dead, just like my son. My eyes skimmed over the words without reading them until one popped off the page like a boxer’s fist—Intolerance. That was why he’d seemed so familiar! But I hadn’t been able to see past the drama and the dark mustache he was sporting for that particular picture. Distracted by the similarity to my own story, I let myself be convinced that it was all a trick of the mind, only it wasn’t; there was another, much deeper, reason he’d been able to capture my heart without saying a word. “The Boy” on the screen was my Biograph boy. And now he was dead, just like my son. Bobby was only twenty-seven. Bobo died at twenty-nine.

Accidental—The papers said my son’s death had been accidental too. He had everything to live for, a successful career, a girl he meant to marry, a bright, bright future. But they didn’t know what I knew; they hadn’t seen the watch under the microscope, the evil confession signed and spelled out in scratches. Surely it really was an accident. It just couldn’t be anything else! That would be too cruel! Accidents happen all the time. One young man, troubled and distracted, pours cyanide into a glass and drinks it down like milk; another one drops a gun on the floor and puts a hole in a perfectly good heart—and it was a good heart. I could tell that from the first glance. They were both so young and had everything to live for. But in the end only God knows for sure.

I remembered that soft, baby smooth cheek against my palm; I could feel his skin, just as real, living and warm, after all these years as though I had only just touched him. When I caressed him that day in the Biograph office had I also cursed that sweet, innocent boy with the death and misfortune I brought to all my loved ones?

I got up from my chair and walked out of the dentist’s office without saying a word, the magazine trailing listlessly from my hand, pages flapping against my ankles like the wings of Death. I stayed more or less drunk for the next ten years. I never went back to that dentist or any other; I let that tooth rot and fester in my jaw as a penance and numbed the pain with alcohol.

I went back to Chicago and then New York and started painting my face and coloring my hair again. I returned to the vagabond vagrant’s world of Salvation Army cots and soup kitchens, meaningless couplings in dark alleys against walls, just for the money, and the only place I found any small measure of happiness—the movies. My diet was every child’s dream—any given day for breakfast, lunch, or dinner I might have Cracker Jacks or hot buttered popcorn, orange, grape, or strawberry soda, or even Coca-Cola, which had replaced coffee and tea in my heart, and a handful of sticky peanut butter Mary Janes or some of Mr. Hershey’s blissful Kisses, with an Eskimo Pie for dessert, and in between I was constantly sucking on sassafras, horehound, or red anise drops, peppermint stars, and butterscotch buttons. I was profoundly disappointed in myself, but I just didn’t care enough to do anything about it.