What Alice Knew (23 page)

His fingers twisted the next button on her dress and released it from its hold, exposing the full sweep of her throat. His hand brushed against her flesh, and now his fingers moved quickly, opening the line of buttons until the thick cloth of the dress opened like a flower and revealed not nakedness but what, in its way, was more intimate than nakedness: the stiff encasement of her corset. He put his hands to the tightly laced garment, feeling the heat of her body underneath. Above the ledge of the bodice, he could see the top of her breasts, rising and falling. Beads of perspiration dotted the skin of her throat. His own clothes felt thick and confining. He would have liked to stop to strip off his waistcoat and shirt, but instead he moved his hands to the back of the corset and, with the instinct bred from years of married life, found the hook holding the laces in place.

It was that instinctual motion that brought him back, for the movement of his fingers suddenly transported him to the space of his bedroom at home. He heard whispering inside his head, the words that had roused him to laughter a week earlier when he had fumbled with the laces of his Alice’s corset. “Female suffrage is all well and good,” she had said, “but liberate us first from our corsets.”

“Liberate us first from our corsets.” Why did he have to recall those words now? The recollection of his wife’s voice in its familiar cadence, the laughter they had shared, the image of his bedroom with the child’s crib in the corner caused his fingers to freeze. The desire he had felt for the woman pressed against him seemed to evaporate. His hands fell from her back, and he was overwhelmed with the enormity of the crime he had been about to commit. A vision of his Alice, gentle but accusing, engulfed his consciousness. He saw her, the way her hair curled under her cap near her ears, the way her eyes half closed and her head bent when he embraced her. He desired Ella Abrams more than he had desired any woman before, but his Alice was his life. She was the mother of his children, she shared his grief over their dead Hermie; she had cared for him and listened to his litany of complaints about colleagues and work; she was waiting for him at home.

He wondered, was the desire he had felt really the opposite of the murderous desire of the killer, or was it a variation on the same thing? The opposite of murder was not desire, but love—the steady, willed love that one felt for wife and family. He looked at Ella’s face. It was the most beautiful he had ever seen, but beauty, like ugliness, was a great seducer, an objectifier of the human.

He stood frozen for perhaps a minute until Ella slowly moved away and began to button her dress. When she had finished, she straightened her hair in the small mirror near the door, took her coat from the chair, and touched William’s arm as if to register that she was not angry. He had remained rooted in place, in a kind of stupor, horrified at what he had almost done and awash with regret at what he had failed to do. When he finally roused himself to look around, she was gone.

The portrait of Alice took longer to complete than expected. Sickert had originally said he would need her for four sittings—or rather lying downs, given her condition—but at the third, he announced that he would need more time, at least two more days, probably three. This was despite his arriving every day promptly and remaining for more than two hours.

Alice had forbidden her brothers to enter the room again, and Katherine remained out of town nursing her sister until the following Sunday. Occasionally Archie or Sally came in with a tray of biscuits or a decanter of port, and Sickert charmed them both by performing snippets from his music hall numbers. But these interruptions were short-lived, and for most of the time Sickert was present, he and Alice were alone.

The week they passed in each other’s company, Alice secretly understood, constituted a romance. She knew that people would laugh at the idea. She was ten years older than he was, bedridden, and plain. She existed, moreover, in a comfortable relationship with Katherine that resembled a long-standing marriage. But her feeling for Sickert was different, closer to the kind of pulse-quickening feeling that she had read about in books and had believed she would never experience.

At the end of each visit, after he put away his paints and covered the portrait with a sheet, he would come over to her bed, take her hand in a rather formal manner, and kiss it, lingering a bit longer than was necessary. The scene, to a superficial eye, was conventional enough. This was a charming young man, handsome and pleased with himself, used to getting women, no matter the age, to fall in love with him. Yet Alice felt that, appearances notwithstanding, he desired her as she desired him. The idea would be too ludicrous to utter aloud, and yet she knew it to be true.

When the picture was finally done, Sickert covered it and prepared to take it away. “I don’t want you to see it until it is framed,” he explained. “The frame marks the end; it says with finality that this bit of reality has been set aside and can no longer be altered. But I should warn you,” he added, “seeing your portrait for the first time can be a shock.”

“I’m sure I will like it,” said Alice. “I am not vain.”

“It’s not a matter of vanity; it’s seeing yourself as someone else does. I’ve known people who say that it’s like seeing themselves in their coffin. I don’t agree. But it can be strange to see how another sees you.”

“I should like to see how you see me.”

“Then be patient.” He was, he said, off to Cornwall for a few days, where he had agreed to meet with a group of old school friends, fellow artists. When he returned, the portrait would be framed, and he would drop it off so they could look at it together.

He walked over to the bed to say good-bye, but this time he did not take her hand as he generally did, but touched her face as he had that first day. He held his hand against her cheek for a long time until she turned her head and kissed his palm. She looked up, and he lowered his face almost to hers, holding it there for a long time. For a moment, she thought he would kiss her, but she flinched slightly, and he pulled back.

“I look forward to seeing how you see me,” she repeated, her voice wistful.

He did not respond but rose from the bed, took the easel in one hand and the painting in the other, and left without another word.

It was just as well that he had gone, Alice thought. Katherine was due back the next day.

William lay awake that night in an agony of self-recrimination and relief. Although he had contemplated an act of monstrous betrayal, he had abstained from committing it. He had come to the brink, yet he had stepped back. Should he lament that he had been tempted, or celebrate that he had resisted temptation? The disparity between thought and deed was at once great and negligible, depending upon one’s perspective. But as always, his perspective was multiple, so he could not find rest. He was racked with guilt and driven to rationalization.

The struggle continued through the night, and only close to dawn did he fall into a fitful slumber. He slept until midmorning and would have gone on sleeping, had he not been awakened by a clamor in the outer room. A minute later, Mrs. Smith appeared at the door to his bedchamber. She had the obsequious manner she assumed when she wasn’t being surly and uncooperative. “There’s a man from Scotland Yard who wants you to come with him right away, Professor James,” she simpered.

William stumbled out of bed and dressed quickly. When he entered the parlor, he found a stocky, red-faced officer waiting impatiently. “Inspector says you should come,” the officer asserted bluntly.

Remembering the mistake made with Archie’s mother, William asked if the man was certain that the situation wasn’t a false alarm.

“Certain as the devil,” was the reply.

They drove in silence to the East End, where they descended in front of a two-story house of discolored brick. Next to the house was a shabby yard, where a sickly looking dog, barking feebly, had been tied to the gate. The building looked to be a multiple dwelling, perhaps a boardinghouse for people who had yet to fall into outright indigence. In front, a collection of official carriages stood, blocking the narrow road.

He followed his guide up to the second floor and through a narrow doorway. Abberline was standing with a circle of police officers and a white-smocked medical examiner. He acknowledged William when he came in—a short nod with a mere flicker of his eyes; no more was needed.

William stood near the door. He had always prided himself on seeing things clearly, on being less abstract and more clear-sighted and practical than his European peers. As an American, he had the energy and courage to look life straight in the eye.

Yet just as he took hold of what he saw before him, his grasp of it seemed to slip. The very act of thinking and articulating transformed the thing before him into something else, something already labeled and filed away: old, known, detached from his perception of it.

Death. What did it mean? He had seen his father’s and mother’s weakening conditions, his Hermie’s racking coughs and fevers. But the death that came ultimately to these loved ones had been based on words already in circulation: death from circulatory disease, death from pneumonia, death from whooping cough. These people had disappeared from his life, but it was as though “death” had been affixed to them at a crucial point and blotted them out. Their actual demise was a blank.

He had seen the photographs of the dead women of Whitechapel and understood the modus operandi of how and when they had died, but had he truly grasped the fact of their deaths? Even the body of Catherine Eddowes and of Archie’s mother were only the ghastly residue of something already out of sight and beyond comprehension. How close to actual death was it possible to get? Only so close before the thing swerved away into a diagnosis, an idea, an abstraction.

William averted his gaze and then looked again. The scene was too terrible to hold in view for more than a few seconds. It was a plain room—or was it? He assumed it was plain because it was in a squalid part of town; the public houses and pensions of Whitechapel were not likely to be fancy, devoted as they were to sleeping, eating, and the animal acts that people engaged in either as their only diversion or as the source of their livelihood. His mind shifted suddenly to the thought of himself in such a room with Ella Abrams, his hand on the button of her dress, and then his thoughts were wrenched back to the scene before him.

No, one couldn’t say whether the room was plain. There was no knowing what it had been like. It could have been a nice room. The occupant could have arranged it with some taste, perhaps sought out colorful fabric for the bed and pillows and kept it neat and swept. Perhaps there had been flowers on the night table.

But he could not see the room for what it had been. It was awash in blood. The word “awash,” with its suggestion of a great, engulfing flood, was apt, yet it was also wrong. There was too much flourish to it, too much of a vague suggestion of the Great Flood. The place didn’t need to be compared to something else, didn’t need to be helped along by literary props and foils. Blood was not metaphorically present in this room; it was literally so, and it was everywhere. Could one body produce so much of it? From a purely scientific point of view, it was interesting. It raised the question of how much blood was needed to produce such an effect, perhaps less than appeared by virtue of spattering and seeping. Painters diluted their paint and used quite a little to cover large canvases; they made washes that could stretch for, really, miles.

His mind was drifting again, finding a way to detour from the fact of the scene into the academic and the metaphorical. He mustn’t do that. The room was soaked with blood. Take a dozen cans of paint and throw them about, and one could not do it. It was not just the horrific extent of the coverage, but the differing thicknesses of the globs and stains, the gradations in color—bright red here on the sheets, duller on the walls where the spatter was thicker, brick red on the curtains and the shades, where the globules were round and glistened like giant teardrops; a jewel-like beading in vermilion on the side of the lamp.

Central to the spatter and stain was the body. “Body.” The word was an absurd descriptor for the mutilated thing on the bed, yet there was no doubt that it had been a human being only hours before, a woman once named Mary Jane Kelly. The name had been whispered to him by one of the officers near the door. But a woman’s body was precisely what the murderer had tried to erase. For the body was a canvas for such extraordinary viciousness that horror alternated with wonder. It was the feeling one had in front of great art. One could not take it in.

He tried to make an accounting of what was before him. The lower torso of the woman’s body had been hacked entirely open. The blood filling the body cavity had created ponds of fluid that had spilled over to soak the sheets and drench the walls and the floor. The puncturing of certain organs must have resulted in geysers, for even the ceiling was spattered. The upper torso too had been hacked and seemed to float in a sea of vermilion. Although in places the fluid had congealed and turned almost black, here the pools of color were bright and grotesquely festive.

The face, what had been the face, had been mutilated beyond recognition. Catherine Eddowes’s face had been treated delicately by comparison. Here, the nose was cut off, the ears, the eyebrows, the cheeks slashed. And most appalling of all: this grotesquerie was propped up as if the murderer had wanted to present it for particular inspection, to make it the focus of ghoulish appreciation.

William could hear Abberline speaking softly to his assistant in a dream-like colloquy off to the side. “Multiple mutilations to arms; abdomen and thighs flayed; labia, right buttock cut off.” The inspector motioned to the night table, where William saw a drenched clump of red-stained flesh, firm but dripping, like bloody wedding cake piled near the lamp. “Breasts hacked off.” (Now he could see that the upper body was in fact two connecting puddles of blood where the breasts should be.) “Kidneys, uterus, one breast placed under the head.” (He glanced to see that there was another bloody clump propping the head up in its ghastly pose.) “Other breast, part of it,” Abberline pointed to the left of the body. “Spleen.” He indicated the right. “Liver.” He motioned to a lump between the legs.

William had almost fainted at the sight of Catherine Eddowes’s body, but now he felt strangely calm. The degree of mutilation was so extreme that the mind could not possibly—

“In all my years…” he heard Abberline mutter.

“‘In all my years.’” It was a useful phrase. Other phrases came to mind: “an atrocity of extravagant proportions,” “a grotesque demonstration of human depravity.” Such statements would inevitably be applied. They would remain in use until someday another murder would be referred to as “even worse than the Ripper murder in ’88.” That’s how it worked, language; it organized, compared, and placed things in categories from which they could be taken out and examined in the future. Words were the first line of defense, the most subtle and most elementary abstraction. Use words that had been used before. Putting the unspeakable into words, the reality receded.

However much one tried to take hold, it happened. One killed the poor woman again by describing her death. It was the fundamental paradox that one had to kill again and again in order to live. And the paradox went further when one thought about the killing itself. For one might say that Jack the Ripper’s escalating brutality was a means of confronting the reality of death rather than obscuring it with abstract notions or averted glances. Each murder required that he keep it from receding into the unreal, and each time, it required greater ingenuity, greater viciousness to do this. It made the murderer not just an artist, William thought bitterly, but a philosopher. A murderer was perhaps by definition an applied philosopher.

He could feel his mind moving in the direction he feared most: forgetting the distinctions that constituted life, forgetting the scale of things, making everything into some version of the same. Morality was predicated on distinction and scale. He must never forget that. To forget was the path to madness.