The Ripper's Wife(114)
The world was moving even faster now. The twenties really were roaring. Faster cars, faster music, faster dances, and faster women in shorter skirts and shorter hair, who were not afraid to show their stockings and drink homemade gin brewed in somebody’s bathtub even if it meant risking death or blindness. They just thumbed their noses and laughed and made jokes about it. The world just kept evolving and revolving at a faster speed, in both morals and motion. Corsets, like bustles and crinolines, were a thing of the past, and I had a terrible time getting used to these new dresses without structure that hung as loose as society’s morals now blatantly and unapologetically did. I didn’t know whether I had been born too late or too soon or to laugh or cry or just curl up and die.
My daughter was all I had left now, the only one to love, even if my love was unwanted and always given from afar. Though well into her thirties, Gladys didn’t show it; she was still beautiful and fit right in with the bright young things of the 1920s. I’d catch a glimpse of her sometimes, in the society columns or with my own eyes, getting out of a car in a cloche hat, t-strap high heels, and a bright purple coat trimmed with monkey fur to attend a ladies luncheon or a charity event at a fashionable hotel or restaurant and in sparkling evening dresses, encrusted with crystals or covered with tinsel fringe that flowed and danced over her slender body like liquid silver or gold.
One of those rare summers when I was less drunk instead of more, I floated to the surface in Newport. I was going through one of my resurrection phases and decided to clean myself up. I left my badly faded red, yellow, and gray streaked hair alone and stopped painting my face, put on a dowdy plain dress, and went in search of respectable employment. I was hired at a fashionable country club as an urgent last-minute replacement for a ladies’ washroom attendant who had just eloped with a wealthy stockbroker’s nitwit son.
That night I couldn’t believe it. I found myself in the same room with Gladys. So close I could have reached out and hugged her. Because I was wearing what amounted to a maid’s uniform I was all but invisible to her and her glossy, gorgeous friends. In their eyes I was no better than a coatrack or an umbrella stand.
For one so beautiful, my daughter’s disposition was distinctly dour. Her constant complaining made crabapples suddenly seem as sweet as sugar candy. She was wearing the loveliest black lace dress, with cascading flounces floating over her shoulders and down her back, and yards of skirt billowing over a sheath of black satin beneath, and a lavender satin sash encircling her tiny waist. Her hair hung down to just above her waist in a mass of perfect inky black ringlets, with clusters of lavender roses at each side of her head. She looked a full dozen years younger than her actual age.
But was Gladys satisfied? No! She was sulking and pouting and stamping her feet and complaining because her husband wouldn’t let her bob her beautiful hair and she was tired of looking like Mary Pickford in mourning, with black curls instead of golden.
“If he wanted Mary Pickford, he should have married her instead of me!” She flopped down petulantly onto a velvet bench and hitched up her skirts, dug into her purse, and drew out what I thought at first was a spectacles case, popped it open, and proceeded to nonchalantly fill a silver syringe and inject it into the white thigh above her black stocking top.
“Heroin is simply heavenly!” she sighed, glancing round at her friends and extending the case as though it were a candy box.
Her friends very wisely demurred—apparently not all young people these days are devoid of sense, I thankfully thought—and changed the topic of conversation to that perennially popular feminine subject: the prevention of pregnancy.
Gladys, fumbling around in her purse again, shrugged it all off. “Dutch caps and watching calendars!” she snorted. “I don’t have the time or the patience for all that! I’d rather just have an abortion! I’ve already had nine; it’s a wonderful excuse to go to Paris and shop for Poiret gowns! I simply adore Dr. Jacquard!”
“Couldn’t you see Dr. Jacquard without having to have an abortion?” one of her friends asked, to which Gladys insolently barked,“Shut up, Mimsy!”
Just as quickly, Gladys’s angry snarl transformed into trills of the gayest laughter. “You all should have been with me the last time I was in Paris! I made Jim take me to the Café du Rat Mort—the Café of the Dead Rat. I was there the same night Olive Thomas drank the mercury poison,” she boasted, mentioning the beautiful young actress who had died a few years ago under mysterious circumstances. After a late night of partying in Paris she and her husband, Jack Pickford, had returned to their hotel, where she had drunk, intentionally or accidentally, no one knew for sure, the mercury solution he used for treating his syphilis sores. “. . . and we ate the most delicious food,” Gladys continued, glossing over this vibrant young woman’s sad and untimely passing, “watched a Negro bite the head off a giant rat, and some whip dancers—I tell you the welts they raised were real!—and then we danced to the gypsy orchestra, and they had these girls come round to all the tables offering lovely little bouquets of fresh flowers that they sprinkled with cocaine from silver shakers. I’d said I would have one, merci beaucoup, and was already sniffing it when the girl held out her hand and told Jim that would be twenty francs; you should have seen his face! He complained that the cost was exorbitant, but by then it was too late; it’d already gone up my nose and wasn’t coming back. And they have the most wonderful cocktails there—brandy and ether with a dash of liquid morphine and a spritz of essence of violets. I tell you, they’re the best in the world!”