The Secrets of Lizzie Borden

by Brandy Purdy

  Much to my surprise, pining for my architect as I was day and night, I think I fell a little in love with Dr. Bowen after that. It wasn’t that I no longer cared for my architect, but he was a whole world away with a great big ocean between us and Dr. Bowen was here now and just across the street. Maybe I was just so hungry for love that any love would do as long as it was lasting and true?

  The pictures I’d hung on my walls to remind me of my “sweet taste of freedom” only seemed to mock me with bittersweet memories. And I had been too afraid of my family’s mockery and laughter to show myself in any of the dresses I had bought in Paris. In the end, when I could no longer bear to look at them, I bundled them up and discreetly, anonymously, left them for the church to distribute to those in need. I was mortified the Saturday I ventured into the worst part of town with my arms full of peonies with the other ladies of the Fruit and Flower Mission and saw a fancy woman with a painted face and black hair glinting bold blue lights wearing my discarded caramel and apple-green stripes. She’d shortened the skirt to show off her shapely calves, trim ankles, and tiny feet, and recut the bodice to reveal as much of her bosom as was permissible on a public street and sheared off the sleeves to bare her fleshy white arms. Despite the indecent alterations, it looked much better on her than it ever had on me. I couldn’t believe I had been fool enough to buy it and was glad I had never been foolish enough to wear it in Fall River; I would surely have been laughed off the street if I had. In the months to come I also caught glimpses of some of her “sisters of the pavement” strutting about like flaunting peacocks in my forsaken finery. Every time, I felt the warring tug of admiration and envy. They were so bold, so brave, so beautiful, so free—free like I wanted to be! They lived their lives unchained, charting their own course, answering to no man, their hungers and desires unfettered by duty and rules.

  That summer, when my family went to the farm in Swansea I stayed behind. I wanted to be alone, I felt stifled and wanted space and time to reflect in; my hungry soul craved the illusion of freedom.

  Every Sunday Dr. Bowen would call for me in his buggy and drive me to church. We were neighbors, after all, and he was our family doctor, so I never thought anyone would make anything of it. But we soon became the subject of gossip, with people hinting that perhaps I was not entirely alone in the house at 92 Second Street.

  Bridget was there, of course, but without the drugs swimming like a school of brave and fearless sharks through my veins I was so ashamed of my drowsily and dreamily remembered morphine-induced attempt at seduction, I held myself aloof and kept my distance. I found it exceedingly difficult to meet her eyes without blushing, and trying to talk to her at all, even about the most innocuous, mundane things like marketing, laundry, and dinner, tied my tongue in knots every time.

  Yet most nights when I lay alone in my bed, staring at the ceiling, it was Bridget whom I thought of, so near, yet so far, in the attic above me. I thought of her lying there on her narrow cot. What was she wearing? Did she don a nightgown for bed or did she sleep au naturel or in her chemise? I wondered if she ever touched herself and if she ever thought of me and sighed, “Lizzie!” into the sultry night.

  At first, I would always stop and scold myself and try to make myself think of my architect, or Dr. Bowen, or the hero of the latest novel that I had read, instead, but dreams of Bridget, and sometimes, like a ghost from the past, vibrant images of Lulie Stillwell, straddling me stark naked in sugary-sweet clouds of perfumed powder, kept intruding no matter how hard I tried, and in the end I just gave up and put out the light, trusting my secrets to the night.

  One night, after I had put the candle out, I awakened suddenly at the feel of long hair grazing my face and tickling my naked breasts. I felt a hot breath caress my cheek. “This is just a dream,” a husky Irish voice whispered in my ear right before a pair of warm lips descended hungrily over mine. Wonderful things happened in the darkness. Wonderful, wonderful things!

  “This is just a dream,” the voice whispered again before love vanished from my arms and I was left alone again.

  The next morning in the kitchen I tentatively said to Bridget as she served me my breakfast, “I had the most wonderful dream last night.”

  “Did you now, Miss Lizzie?” she asked casually as she poured me a cup of coffee.

  “Yes.” I nodded, then added eagerly, “I hope I will have it again tonight.”

  “Dreams don’t work that way, macushla,” Bridget said, then went on with her work. “Oh, dem golden slippers, oh, dem golden slippers, golden slippers I’se going to wear because they look so neat . . .” she sang with gusto as she turned her back to me and began to wash the dishes.

  That night I lay tense and hopeful in the darkness, my breath catching at each creak of the old cracker box house, hoping it heralded a footstep outside my door followed by the knob turning. But I was destined to pass that night, and every other after, alone in disappointment. Bridget was right about dreams. I never did have that one again.

  On the last Sunday of the summer, before my family returned, Dr. Bowen and I went for a buggy ride after church. I was wearing the blue eyelet dress with the satin sash I had worn that magical day at Glastonbury and a new straw hat with silk ribbon streamers trailing down my back.

  We alighted, to stretch our legs and let his team of handsome chestnuts have a rest and graze upon the emerald grass. The sun was blazing bright and we sought a respite under a shady tree and I shamelessly let him kiss me. My mind was an ocean away, and I suppose I was trying to re-create the most magical moment of my life.

  Dr. Bowen drew back from me as if I were a snake and had bitten him, though he had initiated our embrace . . . I think? There are moments, I admit, when I am really not quite sure and think perhaps that I may have kissed him.

  “My word, you are a forward girl; aren’t you, Lizzie?” Dr. Bowen said, his voice a disturbing, shaky blend of disapproval and feigned joviality. The smile wavered uncertainly on his lips but never quite reached his eyes.

  The sky had begun to darken, portending one of those sudden summer storms, and we sat in tomb-like silence as we drove home under a leaden sky.

  A few months later when Dr. Bowen married the beautiful sylphlike brunette Phoebe Southard I was there, florid faced, sweating, and straining to keep my false smile from slipping into an honest scowl, laced to lung-bursting tightness in a fussy bow and ruffle-bedecked lavender chiffon bridesmaid’s dress and an enormous ruffled monstrosity of a hat haphazardly dripping swags of seed pearls and sprouting lily of the valley like a garden grown out of control. It was the fussiest, ugliest bridesmaid’s dress I had ever seen in my life! There were swags of imitation pearls all over it, draped around the shoulders, bodice, and skirt, that snagged on every blessed thing! Phoebe Bowen had the most abominable taste of any female I ever knew! Her parlor looked like it was decorated by circus clowns!

  As Dr. Bowen, with his beaming bride clinging to his arm, passed by me, on their way to their ribbon-and-flower-bedecked wedding buggy, the new Mrs. Bowen’s veil caught briefly on the bouquet I clutched murderously in my trembling and perspiring pig-pink hands. I wanted to beat her over the head with it! But Phoebe didn’t have a clue, she just smiled at me, radiant with a delight we both knew I could never share, and I don’t think her eyes actually even saw me, they were so blinded by bliss, as she quickly disentangled her hideous veil.

  Dr. Bowen didn’t even glance at me, not even when the girl standing beside me caught the wedding bouquet. He stared pointedly past me.

  Forwardness in a New England girl is not easily forgiven, or forgotten.

  As for my Englishman, he kept his promise; he did indeed write to me. But he was a man meant to go out into the world and do great things, and I was a woman, a daughter, meant to bide at home, chained and bound by convention and familial duty. Had I only possessed the courage to break the shackles of tradition and risk the loss of my inheritance . . . But would he have had me with such a stain upon me? Men prize a wom
an’s virtue and respectability, her obedience, and chastity; they make us into ivory statues of domestic goddesses, paragons of the hearth and home, and put us up on pedestals to venerate and admire. Never realizing, or caring, how precarious it is to teeter up so high and to look down and see how far one risks to fall. And if perchance one actually does fall . . . How many fallen women have managed to claw their way back up to that dizzyingly high pinnacle of respectability? A good name once blackened can never be scrubbed virgin white clean again.

  As much as I longed for his letters, I also came to dread them. I feared what he might one day tell me: that he had spoken the words I so longed to hear to another. Every time a letter arrived I would sit and hold it in my trembling hands for the longest time while an icy fear gripped my heart and threatened to loosen my bowels. My head would start to ache and a cold sweat would trickle slowly down my spine even though I felt so hot I would have to open my gown and loosen my corset.

  For what seemed like hours, I would sit there holding his precious letter, which had traveled all the way across the sea to bring his words to me, until the sun went down and it was too dark to read without lighting a lamp, and by then I was too tired, so I went to bed, always promising myself that I would read it in the morning, right after breakfast, only to postpone it as there was work to be done, an errand I must run, or a meeting I must attend, and then repeat the whole scene again and again and again.

  Somehow not knowing was better, but it was also worse. I left them unopened until I had accumulated a small stack. What must he have thought of me? That I was fickle and had lost interest or fallen ill or even died? Fear and longing possessed me; they fought a battle royal within my soul. I wanted to be with him so badly! I could not sleep or eat. My cheeks grew gaunt, fat melted from my frame, and my eyes sank into deep dark circles.

  At last, I summoned all my courage and carried the letters downstairs to the kitchen stove one Thursday afternoon when everyone else was out. I added kindling and watched the fire blaze and then, tears running down my face, with a wrenching cry, the howl of a broken heart, bursting from my breast, I threw them in and watched them burn. I regretted it the moment I did it and burned my fingers trying to snatch them back again. But it was too late . . . too late!

  The letters are long gone now, reduced to ashes, and I can but wonder what he had to say and whether it would have thrilled my heart or wounded it to the core. He will never know how much I loved him or that I never truly stopped, despite whatever I might have felt for others. He remains my one true love, the only one I never let myself, or the reality of my life, ruin; he exists only in my dreams, more god in his perfection than any flesh and blood man could ever hope to be. Perhaps it truly is better that way.

  From the moment his letters crumbled into ashes I wanted to turn back the clock and undo what I had done, to find a way to make everything right. Oh, the reams of paper I wasted trying to write and tell him, to explain everything, what I had done and why. But every word I wrote seemed to make even a worse muddle of it and in the end I stopped trying. Maybe silence truly was best? And I was too great a coward to write the truth that was in my heart. I was a lady. I could not be so brazen as to speak of love; a lady always waits for a gentleman to broach the subject first. I felt the distance that yawned between us so keenly, the miles of land and sea. I felt it grow greater with every day that passed until it was so vast that no mere letter or telegram, not even a steamship, could bridge the gulf between us. And so I let go of the one person I wanted more than anything to draw closer to me, even though Reason said it could never be. Father would never let me go, he would see marriage and a life abroad as abandonment and disinherit me, and I could not ask my architect to exchange bustling exciting, beautiful, cosmopolitan London and the whole wide world for the narrow confines and even smaller minds of Fall River. And I was far too proud to ask him to accept no other dowry but me—the miserly millionaire’s now penniless, spinster daughter. I loved him too much to do that to him; it would have been akin to a life prison term, a punishment, and in time his love for me, if it ever really was love, would have soured and turned to resentment and eventually hate. And I could not bear that.

  I have not kept up with the details of his life. Though I wish him every happiness, I do not want to know, I cannot bear to know, about the woman who walks and sleeps at his side and has the life, the love, that should have been mine. In the years to come, whenever I visited New York and Boston and mingled with people who regularly traveled abroad I would feel such a sharp sense of dread, of trepidation, that made my head so light and my knees frightfully wobbly and weak, as I both yearned and feared to hear his name spoken, but I never did.

  I’ve often wondered what he must have thought of me when news of my infamy crossed the sea. And yet, somehow, I’ve always felt a little less lonely knowing that he is out there somewhere, living his life, even if a whole ocean and half the world lie between us. I like to think of him working in his office in London, brow furrowed with concentration as he bends over his plans, meticulously drawing the lines that would give birth to a new building or rechecking his calculations, pencil smudges on his hands and his blond hair flopping down vexingly into his eyes, or walking across the countryside with his sketchbook and charcoal pencils sketching the great wonders of mankind and nature.

  Sometimes the sadness still steals over me and I cry for what might have been. How different my life would have been! I would have been lost to history; there would have been no murders at 92 Second Street, no immortal singsong rhyme about forty whacks; no one would have even remembered my name after I died—I would have had a different name; he would have changed that, just like he changed my life.

  Chapter 4

  When Emma came in I was lying on my bed, dreaming over a romance novel about a beautiful geisha girl named Snow Lily dying of love for an American sailor who treated everyone who ever loved him badly. Emma slammed the lid back on the nearly empty box of chocolates beside me and shoved it away in disgust and snatched the book from where it lay open over my breasts and flung it across the room so that its spine cracked against the wall.

  “You rot your brain and your insides with such rubbish!” she cried.

  “If that’s all you came for, Emma . . .” I endeavored unsuccessfully to stifle a yawn as I reached for the candy box again.

  Emma just glared at me, then heaved a heavy sigh and sat down on the bed beside me.

  “That treacherous sow is at work again; she and her greedy piglet are conniving against us. . . .”

  Emma’s eyes burned like coal as she proceeded to tell me that Sarah Whitehead had come that very morning to visit Abby. Over coffee, watered down with Sarah’s tears, and mincemeat pie—Sarah ate two slices and Abby four—Sarah had sobbed out her dilemma. Her mother wanted to sell the house and move away, to a warmer clime more hospitable to her rheumatism and asthma, and Sarah and her drunken, good-for-nothing husband could barely make ends meet, so it was simply impossible for them to buy the house.

  “We shall have to move!” Sarah sobbed and laid her head down, blind in her despair to the slice of pie Abby had just set on her empty plate.

  Clucking sympathetically, Abby gathered Sarah in her arms, tenderly wiping the mincemeat and crumbs from her blotchy wet face, and promised everything would be all right, they wouldn’t lose the house. “I’ll have a word with Mr. Borden as soon as he comes home. . . .”

  “Don’t you see what’s going to happen, Lizzie?” Emma hunched over me like an evil black crow.

  I shrugged and yawned disinterestedly, then, since Emma clearly required it, recited tiredly: “Abby will persuade Father to buy the house, which he of course will, since he never lets the chance for another rental property pass him by, and the Whiteheads will be so grateful to have a roof over their miserable heads, even if it does leak and threaten to fall down on them at every turn, that they will forget that in the bargain they have also acquired a landlord who makes Satan look like Father Chri
stmas and being related to him by marriage doesn’t ease their plight any. If they don’t already know it, woe to them if they’re late with the rent by so much as half a day or short by even one penny. Father only takes goods in exchange for money if he can sell them at a profit. And what have the Whiteheads got to offer him? George is drunk all the time, the garden went to weeds long ago, and even if it hadn’t none of them can grow beans; the hens don’t lay and wander around eating worms until foxes or thieves carry them all off. No one would pay to eat Sarah’s cooking; her baked goods don’t win her prizes like Abby’s do, only black eyes for her and bellyaches for her husband and children. She can’t take in laundry; Heaven knows that woman ruins everything she tries to clean; you’d think bluing and starch were her worst enemies the way they act in her hands! And she can’t sew either! Remember the time she ran over here weeping to Abby, begging her to fix George’s shirt before he woke up and needed to put it on, and it turned out that in trying to sew the buttons back on she’d actually sewn it shut. If it weren’t for Abby, the children would be running around stark naked or else wearing flour sacks with holes cut out for their heads and arms; they go to school barefoot as it is.”

  I yawned again and got up to retrieve my book. Snow Lily had been about to throw herself in a volcano and I was very anxious about her fate; I was hoping the handsome cannibal chieftain who loved her secretly from afar would come to her rescue in time. “So what’s to worry about?” I shrugged again and asked Emma. “The Whiteheads don’t have anything I want.”

  “You stupid girl!” Emma cuffed my ear. “Look to the future! Or are you too lazy to even think about tomorrow?”

  “Just a moment, Emma,” I said tartly as I cradled my smarting ear. “Let me try and think where I left my crystal ball.”