The Ripper's Wife(69)
“The best father in the world!” Bobo and Gladys used to call me. I always took such pride in that!
Suddenly my grand scheme, to make all the little whores pay for the Great Whore’s sins, seems so futile, so pointless! I don’t want to be Jack the Ripper anymore! My God, what was I thinking? I MUST have been mad! Why did I ever stray from the path of righteousness? I want to be the man I used to be, the one who won Bunny’s heart; I want to forget the crimes I committed when I was consumed and transfigured by rage, lust, and madness. I want absolution and to make amends.
I went to visit my parents’ graves today. It was my fiftieth birthday. I can scarcely believe I’ve lived half a century. I didn’t sleep at all last night. I dreamed I cut my darling Bunny up instead of a birthday cake and, with a devilish smile and a mad gleam in my eyes, served pieces of her—heart, cunt, kidneys, liver—to the children and guests. I woke up screaming. I flung off the covers and ran and woke Bunny up, hugging and kissing her a thousand times. I was so very glad that she was still alive and all in one piece, that I hadn’t risen from my bed in a trance and hacked her to bits. We made love, really made love, for the first time since this horrid business began. She gave freely and willingly; I didn’t just take. Warm and welcoming, she took me into her body, into her sweet arms, comforted me, and told me that she still loved me and always had. I want so much to believe her! “I never stopped loving you, Jim!” she cried as she clung to me. “It was just that I was so hurt and mad!” Hurt and mad, we both had been hurt and mad, but in my pain and madness I had become the Devil’s tool. God help me! I was a mad FOOL!
I stood for a long time gazing down at my parents’ graves, slumbering serenely in perpetual peace in the shadow of a stone cross. I prayed for tranquility and guidance, for God to shine a beacon on the path to absolution to help me find my way back. How I wished that they had loved me! Sometimes I think that’s why I love my own children so much, because I know what it is like to grow up lonely and unloved. When Mother died, her hand in mine, not Michael’s—mine, Mine, MINE!—her last words to me were a plea that I endeavor to be more like Michael. When I remembered that, I kicked the cross and trampled the violets I had brought my parents, CRUSHING them, PULVERIZING them with my heel, GRINDING them, leaving a pulpy purple, green, and brown dent in the sacred ground.
I get no rest. I toss and thrash and talk in my sleep. Fever burns my brain. Pain gnaws my belly. There are hours when my limbs are locked and useless as iron bars. Sometimes I rise and walk without waking. Damn Edwin for telling Michael! I am writing this from his house in Regent’s Park. Michael insists I see another specialist. He’s taken to locking me in at night so I don’t fall down the stairs and break my neck.
The doctors are useless, Useless, USELESS; I see that now. Were they not necessary to procure prescriptions I would be done with the lot of them altogether. I’m more down on doctors now than I am on whores, but I lack the energy to start a new regime of ripping. They use words like hypochondria, melancholia, gross indulgence, and dyspepsia and dose me with harmless tonics that might as well be sugar-water for all the good that they do me. Liver pills! Digestive lozenges! That fool Hopper actually had the gall to caution me against trebling the doses of his prescriptions, as though one spoonful of anything ever did anyone any good, and mixing them with other drugs. He said if I continued to do so I might do myself a grave injury! That’s his polite and careful physician’s way of saying I might kill myself. If I didn’t take matters into my own hands and dose myself with arsenic and strychnine I would be dead already!
None of them understands how sick I am! They call me a hypochondriac, ignoring the obvious fact that I am sick all the time! Dr. Humphreys even gently alluded to the tale of the boy who cried wolf as though I were a child in the nursery! Of all the impertinences and absurdities! Drysdale actually had the gall to roll his eyes when I told him our neighbor had just been diagnosed with diabetes and I was afraid to have him over for dinner and cards lest I catch it. The doctors think I just want attention, to be coddled, that I like being sick! That IDIOT Drysdale thinks my condition is due to “suicidal self-indulgence at the dinner table,” nothing more! Haven’t I just reason to be afraid? The coldness and numbness continues creeping over my limbs. I fear I will wake up one morning and find myself paralyzed and not able to move at all, not even an eyelash; it almost makes me afraid to go to sleep. The pains in my belly bend me double; the doctors think I’m just being dramatic when I say it’s like rats gnawing or a blazing fireball burning me from gullet to bladder. One quack suggested I try cold cream enemas and pills of powdered rhubarb and a healthful and replenishing tonic of celery! COLD CREAM ENEMAS! RHUBARB! CELERY!
I’m so afraid of dying! I’m afraid of going to Hell and of who will be waiting for me at the portal. I’m afraid of phantom whores rattling chains, waiting for me on the other side of Heaven to drag me down to Hell, where even I know I belong. God help me; no one else can!
I’ve been beastly to the children! I DESERVE death for scaring them! What has become of the father I used to be? So loving, so kind! When they prattle on about Christmas—more than a month away! Will I even live to see it?—and try to coax me into revealing what presents I will give them, I lose my temper and snap, “A nice sharp knife like Jack the Ripper’s!” and watch their little eyes fill with tears and terror before they run away from me, the man who used to play for hours with them on the nursery floor and buy them licorice and toffee apples. My God, how I have changed! I don’t know myself anymore! God help me, even I am afraid of me!