The Ripper's Wife(119)

Several stray cats found their way to my door, and I took them all in and loved every one of them as though it were my very own child. Tiny tins of fish-flavored food for them and my movie tickets became my greatest expenditure and joy. I had a little door cut into the bottom of my back door so they could come and go as they pleased and would never feel like prisoners of my love. Their warm, wiggly, soft bodies and contented purrs provided me with the comfort and affection I’d been missing all these years. Why hadn’t I thought of that before? I’d finally found the love I’d been waiting for. Of course, it wasn’t the same as holding or being embraced by a man or boy in lust carnal or maternal, but it was enough and in some ways it was better. Those cats certainly made better friends than anyone I ever met in the Currant Jelly Set.

I went to the movies several times a week, sometimes walking or hitching rides into adjoining towns to see different features or to follow a film I especially favored and wasn’t ready to say good-bye to just yet. All the managers and ushers, even the candy counter boys and girls, knew me and were very kind to me; they seemed to understand how much the movies meant to me.

I was mesmerized by Pandora’s Box. I watched entranced as the doomed Lulu, who had destroyed everyone who had ever loved her, unwittingly led Jack the Ripper to her room one lonely, foggy Christmas Eve. In my mind’s eye, Louise Brooks’s sleek black-helmet bob grew long and swirled into a mass of gilded curls and her shabby short skirt grew rich and sprouted lace and melted down to her feet and filled out to billow and bounce with a perky bow-bedecked bustle as she became me and her companion became Jim. She turned on the stairs and, smiling, reached out her hand to him as the audience gasped at the knife he was hiding behind his back. “I am she; she is me,” I kept whispering as I watched her until the candle of her life went out. It was such a scandalous picture—shocking, immoral, wanton, lurid—everyone said, and Mrs. Dutton and Mrs. Roberson were simply appalled that I had seen it. It was quickly withdrawn, but I sat riveted to my seat through every showing. It made me wonder if someone else knew my and Jim’s secret, but no, it could not be. Vivacious, impetuous Lulu’s resemblance to the girl I used to be was merely a coincidence, and Jack the Ripper was only a melodramatic and morally convenient method for her demise; women like her had to be punished.

I was particularly partial to the costume pictures and those sparkling-witted comedies poking fun at the gay and giddy rich with their Pekingeses and protégés and scavenger hunts, with colorful casts of Champagne Charlies and madcap heiresses often falling for ordinary working-class Janes and Joes or even the butler or an absentminded scientist.

I watched the love goddesses of the modern world flit by fleetingly as butterflies. I saw the vamp Theda Bara become a living caricature; thankfully the real-life woman had the sense to gracefully retire when the public would not let her change with the times. I watched the fast-living redheaded “It Girl,” Clara Bow, who replaced her crash and burn. And “the platinum blond” comet who was Jean Harlow, the tart with a heart both men and women took into their own, blaze briefly across the silver screen only to die, suddenly, at twenty-six. Why did no one ever notice that her eyes never smiled? She made sex seem like an alluring dress she could put on or take off at random; you just instinctively knew she was still a little girl inside only playing at dress-up in all that slinky white skintight satin, feathers, diamonds, and furs, and the sassy, tough cookie dialogue was all bravado.

I cried like a baby over Stella Dallas. When Barbara Stanwyck stood out in the rain watching her daughter’s wedding through a window, I saw myself watching Gladys. And Madame X and Madelon Claudet sacrificing themselves for their sons’ greater good; if only I had been so noble, if only I had stayed away from the Le Roi Gold Mine. And there I was embodied by Kay Francis as the happy, breathless young bride falling in love with the house on 56th Street, wanting to live and love there forever, just like the long-lost Florie the day she first set foot in Battlecrease House.

I lost myself in the musicals, now that the movies not only talked but sang, watching Fred and Ginger fall in love as they danced, tapping their way through all sorts of silly romantic complications to the inevitable happy ending, while Nelson and Jeanette made love in soaring operatic trills, like a pair of bittersweet warbling lovebirds. And I marveled at the Busby Berkeley spectacles, where the master deployed beautiful chorus girls in military-like maneuvers that his camera captured at clever angles. I loved to sing along with the musicals. Sometimes I’d get so carried away that despite my increasingly stiff joints and rheumatism, I’d get up and dance up and down the aisle, brandishing my Eskimo Pie ice-cream bar like an orchestra conductor’s baton, spattering those seated nearest with droplets of melted chocolate and vanilla, as I sang until an usher inevitably came and escorted me back to my seat, explaining the manager was worried I might break a hip if I kept on and then I wouldn’t be able to come watch movies anymore.

I sat and stared in unflinching fascination at the monsters—Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Mummy—and wondered who they were before and if love had been responsible for their sinister transformation, if it had done to them what it did to my husband. I pondered the allure of the sphinx-like Garbo as Mata Hari, Queen Christina, and Camille and sat torn between love and hate for the fast-talking, rum-running, gun-toting gangsters, wept over doomed romances, and quaked with laughter at the comedies.