The Ripper's Wife (44 page)

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.

When young Mr. Power appeared in a feathered turban and brocaded tunic festooned with pearls and gems in
The Rains Came
I smiled and remembered Bobo in the little maharajah’s costume he had worn on Gladys’s sixth birthday, the day he cut his curls and made my tears fall like rain. And when Tyrone donned the Suit of Lights and played the matador in
Blood and Sand
I left before the end; I couldn’t bear to stay and watch him die, even though it was only a film . . . not this time. I sat outside in the sun and ate an Eskimo Pie and fingered the rosary Mrs. Roberson had given me with tears in my eyes and thought of Bobo and Bobby, my lovely lost and found-too-late Biograph boy. I wasn’t ready to watch Ty die, even if it was only in a movie.

But this young man I thought of affectionately as my surrogate silver-screen son was not the only boy in my life. On the contrary, my life was now
filled
with boys, and my heart was big enough to love
all
of them, not just the brunets. Living with my seventy-five cats in my little cluttered and untidy shack by the railroad tracks, wrinkled and withered, with no vanity or care for fashion anymore, I’d been afraid the boys would come to think of me like a witch in a fairy story, daring one another to knock upon the hag’s door. But no . . . oh no! Some were of course timid and some were bold, but the boys of South Kent School never shied away from me or treated me with disrespect. They never played pranks on me at Halloween or threw stones or eggs at my tin roof and walls.

When they helped themselves to the blackberries that grew on the outskirts of my property, like the thorns surrounding Sleeping Beauty’s castle, they always made sure to pick some for me. I’d come home and find a bucket or basket sitting on my steps, and of those they took home for their mothers to bake into pies, tarts, jellies, or cakes there would always be a sweet portion saved for me. They brought colorful pinwheels to spin in the breeze and little clay animals—squirrels, frogs, lizards, turtles, dinosaurs, and bunnies—they’d fashioned and fired in the kiln in their art classes to decorate my flower beds. And when they discovered how much I loved Tyrone Power, a boy would often approach me with one of the little colorful trading cards they found in packs of gum or candy or illicitly savored cigarettes and offer it to me, “since I know you like him.”

Every Christmas Eve the boys never failed to bring me a tiny tree, with garlands of popcorn and red berries and little ornaments they made to adorn it. One year, when a manufacturer of the popular dainty vanilla ice-cream cups was putting assorted movie stars’ pictures on their lids, the boys collected all the ones with Tyrone Power they could find, punched tiny holes in the tops, strung them with gold tinsel cord, and decorated them with red satin bows and hung them all over the tree they left on my front steps. They always shoveled the snow away from my doors and made sure I had enough firewood in winter and weeded my flower beds without my ever needing to ask, and even erected a scarecrow in my little vegetable garden, amidst my paltry crop of tomatoes, squash, peas, and pole beans. And one year, when they saw how weathered my walls were looking, they painted my shack a cheerful bright sky blue with rose-pink trim around the two windows to surprise me. They were all
so
good to me, gallant young gentlemen all.

T
he story ends as it began, with me and the diary fated to be mated, like a convict and his ball and chain, to the finish.

He still reaches across time to touch me. The Jim I fell in love with caresses my heart, making me fall in love all over again, and then the murderer I never knew reveals himself and stabs it. If there’s any lesson to be learned from all this, you, dear reader, must discover or divine it. I have no more stories to tell. It ends for me now—but it does
not
end in failure! I did what I set out to do, what even I doubted I could accomplish. I told the story, the truth as I know and lived it, start to finish. Yes, I faltered and laid down my head and cried from time to time, but I prevailed. I feel as though the final, tenacious lock has at long last been sprung and I am truly free at last.

I’ve given the beautiful candy box and the ugly burden it has carried so long a proper burial, with prayers from my heart and a rosary and sweet flowers laid within. I hope it will never be unearthed.

I had the strangest dream. I was standing on the staircase of Battlecrease House, a fetching young bride in her ice-white satin wedding gown and long veil, glowing and filled to near bursting with love. I turned and smiled and reached down my hand to Jim. A smile lit up his eyes as he gave me his hand. I felt his love in every part of me. The diamond horseshoe twinkled in his tie. So did the knife in his other hand. I saw five women I never knew in life, only in death, as names and descriptions first in newspaper columns and then in my husband’s diary. They were standing behind him with their throats gaping wide and weeping scarlet tears, wearing bloodstained rose-pink bridesmaids’ dresses. A dark-haired young man with soulful brown eyes and a shy, sweet smile stood and gazed up at us from the foot of the stairs, beautiful as an angel, with an opalescent rosary clasped in his hands. He recited a prayer, tranquil as cool blue spring water, to purge us of all our demons and send them packing with their suitcases full of anger, hate, and evil.

The bloodstains vanished and all the wounds of soul and skin were healed. The knife fell from Jim’s hand and disappeared, as though it had never been. All the wrongs were made right. And all that had been lost was at long last found. Jim took me in his arms and kissed me and I knew, this time, our love would last forever. There would be no more pain, suffering, or dying, waiting, or crying. There really was a new beginning waiting for me at the end.

That feeling of peace was still with me when I woke up. I lay in the gloaming gazing at the pictures arranged upon my windowsill: Jim and me—our wedding picture; Bobo and Gladys as children in their Easter finery, posing with baby bunnies and fluffy yellow butterball chicks; Mama in a black lace gown, big hat, feather boa, and diamonds looking as though she might have given busty, bawdy Mae West her inspiration for Diamond Lil; Edwin, dark haired and dashing as a Russian count in a black fur hat; Bobby, my sweet, shy, eternally young Biograph boy; and Ty, my surrogate silver-screen son, gazing at his own reflection in a mirror-topped table, making a sly, secret joke of the legend of Narcissus, because the handsomest man in Hollywood was devoid of personal vanity. It makes me wonder if Mr. Poe was correct when he said “all that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”

O
n October 23, 1941, Florence Chandler Maybrick was found dead in her bed, surrounded by her beloved cats, old photographs, and yellowed newspaper clippings, on a mattress crawling with bedbugs. She was seventy-nine years old. A rosary was in her hand and her Bible was at her side. Tucked inside, folded away, faded, and long forgotten, was a prescription for a facial wash containing a minuscule amount of arsenic written by Dr. Greggs of New York in 1878.

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Copyright © 2014 by Brandy Purdy

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eISBN-13: 978-0-7582-8890-5
eISBN-10: 0-7582-8890-5
First Kensington Electronic Edition: November 2014

ISBN: 978-0-7582-8889-9

First Kensington Trade Paperback Printing: November 2014