The Ripper's Wife(115)

She finally found what she was looking for in her purse and came and shoved me aside and swatted at the rose marble counter between the two sinks with her lacy skirt, then began to carefully tap out two lines of white powder from a little golden vial. She took a dollar bill and carefully rolled it into a hollow tube and, bending over the counter, stuffed one end of it up her nostril and proceeded to suck the white powder right up her nose, while her friends just looked on shaking their heads and rolling their eyes. Apparently they were well accustomed to Gladys’s antics.

When she was done, she casually flung the dollar in my direction; I suppose that was her way of tipping washroom attendants.

“I’m tired of this!” she declared, turning back to regard her reflection in the big glass mirror over the counter. She reached back behind her and untied the bow of her sash and with a playful whoop flung it high in the air. Then she reached down and began tugging at her skirt. “Devil take you, black lace valentine Mary Pickford!” she cried, balling her lace overdress up and sending it sailing over the nearest stall door, into the toilet. Standing before the mirror in her slinky black slip, she began to do a shimmy dance, pulling her slim skirt up, inch by inch, to reveal her stocking tops. She stepped out of her black satin step-ins, explaining that they “spoiled the line,” and kicked them aside.

Then my daughter spoke to me. For the first time since she was six years old, Gladys Evelyn turned, looked me right in the eye, and spoke to me, her mother.

“Scissors!” she bellowed, thrusting out her hand. When I hesitated she got right up in my face and yelled, “Are you deaf or just dumb? I said: SCISSORS!”

I opened the drawer and took out the pair of silver shears we kept on hand for ladies who needed help with hanging threads or repairing a sagging hem or loose button. She didn’t give me a chance to hesitate and snatched them from my hand.

With Gladys’s girlfriends, I watched in horror as my daughter laughingly tugged at her corkscrew curls, pulling them down and watching them spring back up, “just like a piggy’s tail!,” then started to snip them off one by one. “Won’t Jim be surprised?” she cackled, blindly thrusting the scissors back at me, points first, like a dagger, then skipped out the door, calling back to me, “You can keep the dollar!”

She never noticed the tears in my eyes as I stood there with the ruins of my daughter’s beautiful curls scattered round my feet, remembering the day her brother had given himself a haircut in imitation of the illustration of Oscar Wilde’s Happy Prince.

Shaking their heads, Gladys’s friends tipped me with various coins and some generous dollars and followed her out.

Alone, I knelt, gathered up my daughter’s curls, and cried and cried. I couldn’t bear to stay, to see her like this. She was certain to kill herself one day and I didn’t want to be there to see it. I’d had enough of death. As I stood up I caught a glimpse of my face, haggard and ashen in the mirror, and I had to stop and ask myself was I any better? I was a poor hag who drank and sold her sagging body for a few cents, while my daughter danced, wore designer gowns, injected heroin, and snorted white powder. Was Gladys another victim of my curse? Had she imbibed the seeds of death and destruction with the milk she’d sucked from my breast?

I deserted my post then and there. I wouldn’t be paid, but I didn’t care. I got my coat and hat and went to the bar. There was something in my face that silenced the barman’s protests that I wasn’t supposed to be in there. He gave me the glass of gin I demanded.

“This is the last one I’ll ever have!” I said, saluting him with the glass before I downed it.

As I walked through the club’s ballroom, I caught one last glimpse of Gladys through the open glass doors. She was standing, balanced precariously, on the edge of the swimming pool’s diving board while her husband and friends anxiously tried to coax her back down. She attempted to dance a Charleston and fell, suffering a concussion and a broken arm. Dr. Corbyn, her husband, fished her out, gently wrapped her in a blanket, and carried her out to their car. I noticed as he passed me, with Gladys moaning and whimpering in his arms, that Dr. Corbyn didn’t look at all well. Though he was still in his late thirties, his hair was already gray as a tombstone, the lines on his face were carved quite deep, and behind his spectacles his eyes looked woefully weary. Marriage—or should I say marriage to Gladys?—clearly did not agree with him, it had aged him terribly.

That last glimpse was well and truly enough. I never set eyes on Gladys again. And I can’t honestly say, even though she was my daughter and I loved her very much, that I wasn’t glad. There are some things a mother just shouldn’t have to see.





38

I was sitting in a movie theater surrounded by sighing half-swooning females all staring up at the screen, with longing eyes and heaving b-reasts, caught up in the fantasy that their idol hadn’t just died, dreaming that Valentino was still alive and, as The Sheik, was carrying them instead of Agnes Ayres across the desert sands to ravish inside his tent. Suddenly it occurred to me that I was just like them. I’d been a white zombie walking through life with the same glazed longing in my eyes.

I’d spent my whole life waiting for someone to save me, to just swoop me up in his big, strong arms and carry me away from whatever troubles I was facing. James Maybrick had rescued me from the aimless, roving existence I led with Mama and given me a wedding ring and a home to call my own. Countless nameless, faceless salesclerks had sold me the illusion I was more than willing to pay for that buying pretty things could cure me of my doldrums, discontent, and boredom. Before he became my undesired paramour, Edwin had been my playmate in evading adult responsibilities; it had all been one long, diverting game of follow-the-leader. And Alfred Brierley had helped me escape the painful reality of my marriage when it all went sour; he’d been my Sir Lancelot, the knight in shining armor come to carry his Guinevere away to a squalid rented room that she saw, through dewy wet-violet eyes, as Joyous Garde, and the exotic desert sheik who would turn his lily-white, golden-haired captive into his love slave, all rolled into one magic carpet of a man who in real life could never measure up to those fantasies. It was a terrific burden, I realize now, to heap upon the shoulders of a man who only wanted a lover, not love. My dreams were all I’d had to sustain me in prison, ludicrous fantasies about soaring high and making love in a hot-air balloon with my beloved, or waltzing with my husband, feeling his kiss again, welcoming his touch the way I did when I was a new bride. And, after I was miraculously set free, released into a new wall-less, bar-less prison of book signings and lectures, gin and flickers had helped me keep ducking and dodging in the perpetual game of blindman’s buff I was playing with the truth about my life.