Page 15 of If Looks Could Kill
She nodded, once. We’d reached our base, and the smell of dinner cooking downstairs wafted out to greet us.
“But I don’t think we’re doing that girl any favors by dwelling on whatmight have been,” I said. “We see the tragedy. The question now is, what are we going to do about it?”
I had Pearl’s attention, but she couldn’t let herself hope.“Do?”she said. “Whatcanwe do?”
“You said it yourself,” I said. “We’re here on a rescue mission.”
A new gleam appeared in her eyes. “Yes,” she said slowly, “we are.”
“If we steered her wrong,” I told her—big words, too big—“it’s up to us to fix it.”
We sat, distracted and preoccupied, through the Hallelujah Spree (no easy task). We went home to our barracks—meaning we went home to the tenement flat we shared with two other volunteer women. (Everything was styled like the military in the Salvation Army.) We spoke no more of the girl. We changed into nightgowns and went to bed.
Pearl went to sleep. I stewed over the events of the day, trying to make sense of them all. Not the events; the people. At the center of it all was Pearl.
And me. Me and her. Why did it have to be me and her?
Wasn’t it good of me to have come here? There; I said it. Childish or no.Wasn’t I good?
Surely I’d been at least a little bit good. I could be at home with Aunt Lorraine, hosting tea parties and shopping for hats. I had truly wanted to make a difference in the world.
Then why wasn’t I assigned to someone else? One who would be a comrade and a friend?
Why was I stuck with this human monster?
Why Pearl?
I could almost admire her, sometimes, when she wasn’t being a sappy, soppy sponge dripping with religion, judging my every move, or otherwisedriving me to distraction, such as by floating about Manhattan looking like a pre-Raphaelite maiden in a Salvation Army suit.
Almost.
Her conviction ran deep. She was willing to work. She had courage, or something like it. Stupidity? Who can say? Perhaps it was stupid of all of us recruits in God’s army of salvation to think we could make one single dent in the hell of the Bowery.
But that night as I lay in bed, listening to Pearl sleeping, I remembered the expression on her face when she saw the ribbons, and then when she saw the girl in the window in the rain. Both longings felt similar. To shine, and to serve. Both tinged with heartache.
Perhaps that was what it meant to her to “lay up treasures in heaven.” Perhaps faith mattered so much to Pearl because it was the one bit of beauty she could afford.
Whitechapel, East LondonJack’s Fever(September 1888)
The fever is hot upon his brow. The hallucinations have only increased. He must get back to the States and take the sulfur cure at Hot Springs as soon as he can arrange it. That’s what he needs after all this agitation and commotion. Rest, quiet. There’s no quiet in a London boiling over with “Red Fiend” murder mania.
He has a mania of his own.
That girl. He seems to see her everywhere. Passing through a narrow street, he looks up and sees her watching him through a second-floor window. In a crowded tea shop, she serves his sandwiches. At railroad stations, she stands behind him in the ticket line.
It can’t be real. He never was one for women’s faces. They all look more or less the same to him. It’s the stress of his fruitless search pressing down upon him.
And the elixir, which eludes him. The philosopher’s stone is no stone, but a metaphor for a recipe, a concoction science is bound to discover, but not fast enough for him, so he must leap where other men fear to step. He must soar where other men crawl.
And yet, the girl. When he turned and saw her in the queue at the train station, he could swear that a thin forked tongue darted out at him between her smiling lips. Her curls began moving of their own accord.
It’s the fever. Fevered body, fevered mind. The present phase of the illness.
To be rid of the girl is to be rid of the pain. Soon, soon, he must strike again.
The Bowery, Lower East Side, ManhattanTabitha—Red-Hot Preaching(Sunday, September 16, 1888)
My father often says, “Things will look different in the morning.”
