The Ripper's Wife(116)

“Why have you brought me here?”—“Are you not woman enough to know?” the title cards were asking in what seemed like an omen when I got up and walked out into the misting rain. The past was not dead because I would not let it die. “Time heals,” the sage Salvation Army angels in their midnight-blue wool uniforms said, “but time heals slowly.” “Yes,” I agreed, “but how long does it have to take?” They didn’t have to tell me the answer; I already knew—Sometimes, a lifetime. When I reached the dilapidated sagging-roofed rooming house where I was staying I sank down onto the wet front steps and hugged my knees to keep from shivering. A voice I thought I had forgotten spoke to me, like a phantom whispering right in my ear. It was Sister Patia saying, You cannot forget until you forgive.... I do not just mean others; I also mean yourself.. . .

I’d been carrying around that anger, letting it fester, eating me up inside just like a cancer, and feeling sad and sorry for myself for more years than I liked to tally. And it didn’t start with my trial or prison term, much as I liked to pretend it did, and it certainly didn’t end there. If I couldn’t be bothered to save myself, why should anyone else lift a finger or bother?

Sometimes, my child, failure is a gift from God, though it may not seem so at first glance. Failure is the chance to start again; it is not an end, but a new beginning, the shade of Sister Patia said to me.

Suddenly I knew I had to go back to England. I curled my fist determinedly around the key resting in the hollow between my b-reasts. It was time to reclaim the diary. I’d left the truth sleeping in that dark bank vault far too long.

“Remember ye not the former things, neither consider the things of old. Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert.”

Thank you, Sister Patia!

I got up and started walking. There wasn’t time to write a letter and sit around waiting and hoping; this time I was going to go and hold my hand out for charity. I knew where the Densmores and a nice old spinster lady with a penchant for hopeless causes lived, and between them I was certain to get enough cash to carry me across the sea to England.





I went first to the house I had hoped would be my home. I could still see myself as a giddy young bride, falling in love at first sight with what I thought then was “home, sweet home,” dreaming of all the wonderful things I expected to happen within those walls. I could see myself impetuously wishing “to live and love here forever with Jim.” Thinking the Cupids smiling down on me in my bedroom would ensure that I would always be lucky and loved.

Battlecrease House had been broken up into bed-sit flats and wired for electricity. Nothing was the same anymore, except the outside structure, though a closer inspection revealed chipped paint upon the windowsills and a couple of cracked panes. The lavish gardens were gone; where once Jim and I had strolled arm-in-arm or sat kissing beneath the gracious trees and I had sat with the children feeding bread crumbs to the silver and gold fish or coaxing the peacocks to eat from my hand there now stood a parking lot.

Giving my name as Mrs. Graham and presenting myself as a widow with her veil down—I was still afraid someone might recognize me even after all these years—I went in and inquired about a room. I just had to see inside that house again!

Though the face had changed, the grace remained; it was and it wasn’t still the same. All our furniture was long gone and cheap linoleum had replaced the costly carpets, but the wood and stucco work, the paper and plaster, the carved grapes festooning the fireplaces, were mostly still there. As I followed the chatty manageress upstairs, only half-listening to her droning on about a murder in one of the bedrooms during the last century, “arsenic in her poor husband’s lemonade,” put there by a scandalous “American hussy” of a wife, I paused, letting my fingers linger caressingly over the banister and to admire the stained-glass waterbirds nesting amongst the reeds. It was all still there, just as I remembered it. In my heart, I was that young bride again, going up the stairs of her new home for the very first time. Tempus Omnia Revelat, I traced the familiar crest, the hawk perched upon a pile of golden bricks with a sprig of flowering may in his beak. Time Reveals All. I was very glad then of my veil; it hid the tears in my eyes, dripping down to give a salty tang to my sad little smile.

Chance, the Fool’s name for Fate, led her to show me what had once been a part of my room, now a small, single, simple bed-sit with yellow-ivory walls and curtains of yellowed lace, coarse beige carpet, a single bed, white paint flaking from its iron frame, a table, scarred by cigarette burns and rings where someone had carelessly set glasses or beer or soda bottles without a coaster or napkin underneath, and a chest of drawers, one of which didn’t seem to want to close completely. It had a stuck, lopsided look to it.

The fireplace drew my eye. The Fragonard reproduction and eighteenth-century beauties were long gone, but my little guardian angel, the Cupid medallion, set right in the center of it like a cameo on a lady’s lace collar, was still there. I was sure he remembered me even though Lady Luck had forgotten all about me long ago. My fingers reached out to lovingly caress his little plump baby cheek and I remembered all those I had loved and lost. Their faces flickered past like a movie playing inside my mind, projected fleetingly upon the screen of memory, making me smile through my tears.