The Ripper's Wife(120)

It was a world where I found everything I was looking for, and I never wanted to leave it. Sometimes I was there when they opened the doors for the first show and the last to leave when the time came to lock them. Popcorn, candy, soda, and ice cream were like the nectar of the gods to me, and I wanted no other banquet. They fed my body as the flickering images on the silver screen fed my soul.

By lamplight late at night in my shack or sitting out on the steps in the bright light of day, I voraciously devoured all the fan magazines I found, fished out of rubbish bins, or was given or spent my scant coins on. I wondered how all these bright, beautiful young people who now filled my world never quite seemed to figure out that fame and fortune were not the answer. I charted the rise and fall of popularity, the slow fade into oblivion, or the sudden shock and abrupt departure ordained by death, and condoled and wept over their scandals. I’d felt the pinch of those shoes; I knew what it was like to fall.

It was in a movie theater in 1936 that God granted me my moment of grace, the greatest, most sweetest gift I never expected to receive. It was a cold, rainy day, so dreary, awful, and gloomy I’d almost stayed home. But I just couldn’t settle, no book or magazine could hold my attention, and the rain tapping on the tin roof overhead, usually so soothing, only needled my nerves. I felt some compulsion calling me to the movie house, so I pulled on my galoshes and raincoat and went out.

I arrived just in time to see the tail end of the first showing of a costume picture called Lloyd’s of London, sort of a frilly valentine about maritime insurance and thwarted love with lots of pretty people in even prettier costumes; I was sure I was going to like it. I was busy jostling my popcorn, soda, and candy and wiggling out of my raincoat when I happened to glance up at the screen. In that moment I froze. Every hair on the back of my head stood up, and my heart leapt into my throat when I glanced up and saw that face. It was a MIRACLE! Bobo was dead, but the movies, through the grace of God, had given him back to me, more beautiful than he had ever been in life, if that was possible.

In a dark dressing gown, he leaned weakly within a window, framed by heavy satin drapes trimmed with tassels, streaks of ludicrous, improbable silver painted into his black hair to give the suggestion of suffering and age to a boy barely past twenty. The most beautiful face I had ever seen rested its brow against the glass, lips parted, trembling, in grief and anguish, black-coffee-brown eyes shimmering, wet with tears, as he gazed down upon his childhood friend’s funeral cortège solemnly passing. Slowly, the eyes dropped, the head bowed, the camera drawing caressingly closer, until that face fully filled the screen, then the lashes fell, the same magical double row, so long and thick they cast shadows upon his cheeks. His name, the credits soon revealed, was Tyrone Power.

My husband was right, words of wisdom scattered amongst the carnage of his diary like a single diamond-bright star lighting up the blackest night—the Lord sometimes sends the strangest angels to those who least deserve it.

I sat through that picture three times that day. I was back again the next morning, waiting when the theater opened, and every day after that until they changed films. I sat there, spellbound in darkness, leaning forward, feasting my soul, drinking that boy in with my eyes, feeling as though I had been touched by the divine.

I like to think we never really lose the ones we love; they just come back to us, if we’re lucky and wait long enough, in different guises.

Bobo was dead. I knew that; he’d been moldering in his grave for twenty-five years. But with this beautiful long-lashed boy up there on the silver screen, I could pretend Bobo was still alive, eternally young and immortally beautiful, impervious to wrinkles and time, that he had become the matinée idol of my dreams after all, instead of a dull, serious-minded mining engineer. I could imagine that though we were still sadly estranged, he no longer denied me images of himself; instead he generously gave me leave to look my fill. I could paper my walls and fill my scrapbook with his pictures, as many as the magazines and movie studio I wrote to could provide. I could pore over the articles, gaining glimpses into his personality—I just knew he would be kind; young Mr. Power was just as sweet and sincere as my boy should have grown up to be if Michael hadn’t gotten his wretched hands on him! I could discover Ty’s likes and dislikes and, like any mother, scrutinize the girls who caught his fancy—Janet, who looked as though butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, and Sonja, that baby-faced blond Norwegian ice-skater. And I could visit the movie theater and see him from time to time, like being invited to a palace for a personal audience with a handsome young prince. I no longer looked at the faded photographs of my real son anymore, the boy whose frozen images had at fourteen vanished abruptly from my life, and the smudged and tear-blurred, now indistinct images that had accompanied newspaper notices of his passing; I had found something better.

My surrogate silver-screen son was more generous than my real son had ever been. He gave me presents three or four times a year: clever modern dress comedies, frothy meringue musicals, swashbucklers, and historical romances, the most beautiful of all being the sumptuous, costumed confection of Marie Antoinette, when he brought to life the gallant Count Fersen. When Norma Shearer stood before him, gazing at him with stars in her hair and love in her eyes, I knew just how she felt. That night when I laid my head down upon my pillow I was a young bride in my blue linen suit again waltzing through Versailles with Jim, so happy and so in love, living a dream I never wanted to end.