The Secrets of Lizzie Borden

by Brandy Purdy

  Emma slapped me again. “Don’t you even care that our inheritance is being stolen right out from under our noses?”

  “How so, Emma?” I lay back and frowned as I examined the ugly brownish-red paint stains marring the whole left side of the skirt of my lovely new diamond-patterned sky- and navy-blue housedress. It made me want to cry! I had been careless and brushed up against a wall of wet paint when Father had given in to my complaining and had the painters in last month just to please me, “to spiff the old place up.” Then I had gone and ruined my new dress the very first day I had worn it and Mrs. Raymond didn’t have any of the fabric left to make me a new one and I didn’t like any of the other patterns she offered me. Emma said I was just being obstinate, but I didn’t think so; those double blue diamonds arranged so you couldn’t quite decide whether they were dark blue on a light blue ground or the other way around were quite unusual and I hadn’t seen anything else like them. Abby and Bridget had both tried all the remedies they knew for removing stains, but to no avail; their well-intended ministrations had only left my lovely dress looking woefully tired out and faded. To look at it now, one would think it was ten years old instead of a practically new dress.

  “It’s just another rental property,” I continued. “The money will go into Father’s bank account, just like the other rents do.”

  Emma slapped down my ruffled hem in disgust—“I don’t know why you don’t tear that thing up for rags or, better yet, burn it! I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing it in the state it’s in!”—and caught my chin in her hand, her nails biting into my skin as she leaned over me and stared deep into my eyes. “And what if he leaves the house to Abby in his will and she gives it to the Whiteheads? Did you ever bother to think about that, Lizzie? Whether she gives it to them in her lifetime, or leaves it to them in her will, the result is the same—we will lose all future claim to it!”

  “Emma”—I pulled away from her, frowning as I rubbed at the smarting red indentations her nails had left in my skin—“the three little pigs could have built a sturdier and more attractive house out of sticks and mud! As rental properties go, it’s a raging headache; let someone else have it, even if it is Abby and, eventually, Sarah! It’s just one little ramshackle falling-to-bits house, and I for one don’t care a fig about it and you shouldn’t either!”

  “But I do!” Emma leapt up and began pacing frantically back and forth before my bed, her black skirt sweeping the floor as I kept meaning, and forgetting, to do. “It’s the principle of the thing, Lizzie! Father’s money—our inheritance—will buy the house, and if he gives it to Abby, now or later, he will be cheating us out of money that is rightfully ours! That Cow is cheating us right under our very noses and you’re either too blind to see it or too stupid to care! But I do, I do! By Heaven, I won’t let them get away with this!” Emma shook her fist in the air like some madwoman in a melodrama, then stormed out of my room, slamming the door behind her.

  I rolled my eyes and flopped back onto my pillows and returned to my book. Frankly, I was more interested in the fate of Snow Lily than I was in the Whiteheads and their miserable hovel of a house.

  Emma raised such a row over the Whiteheads’ house that, just to quiet her, Father ended up deeding our grandfather’s old house on Ferry Street jointly to us, so we could draw a monthly rent, divided and deposited into each of our bank accounts, to save or spend as we pleased.

  It seemed at first an ideal solution for all. But we resented being bothered by the tenants—we only wanted their money, not their problems. We didn’t want to hear hard-luck stories or their wretched whining about problems with the plumbing; they made our heads ache. And I, for one, resented taking money out of my bank account to pay for repairs to a house someone else was living in. Why did they have to try to make their leaks and breaks my problem? Why didn’t they just deal with it themselves and leave me alone? We—Emma and I—were giving them a roof over their heads, keeping them out of the rain, for God’s sake; they should have been grateful! And I had problems enough of my own without taking on theirs! In the end, just to appease us, and avoid a lawsuit, Father bought the house back from us for $5,000, which was more than it was worth. He said it made his head ache too and this was a perfect example of why women should keep to the home and hearth and leave business matters solely in the hands of men.

  Privately, I couldn’t help but agree and decided then and there that if I ever had to deal with the like again I would hire a trusty and efficient business manager who would never even think to bother me about such trifles, and in addition to that I would purchase the best insurance to cover every eventuality.

  But Emma just could not let go. She never did stop simmering about the Whiteheads’ house. She took it as a personal slight. Father had in fact deeded the property to Abby, warning her not to be too softhearted and to think of her own future and not just of her kinfolk’s comfort and well-being, and to remember that after he was gone the rents on that house would provide her with a regular income. Emma was even more miffed when Father took the rent the Whiteheads paid to Abby and started a savings account; “a nest egg for her widowhood,” he called it.

  I really couldn’t understand why Emma was so upset. I, for one, hated being a landlord. I was happy to let Abby have that house; even squinting and looking at it from across the road with one eye covered I could tell that it was nothing but a pile of headaches waiting to happen, and I didn’t want to be the one they happened to. I much preferred the dividends from the shares in the Globe Yarn Mill and the Crystal Springs Bleach Company that Father had given me in lieu of a graduation present when I dropped out of high school. As for Abby’s little nest egg, I thought it rather sensible; I honestly didn’t see it as the “greedy siphoning of our inheritance” like Emma did.

  The situation only worsened a few months later when George Whitehead woke up after a long drunk and found a stray goat that had wandered in through the broken back door licking his bare feet and took it into his head that he and his family deserved better and that Abby, being married to Fall River’s miserly millionaire, could do much better for them if she really wanted to. If she loved Sarah as much as she said she did, why didn’t she prove it? Mincemeat pies and clothes for the children were all well and good, but a decent house would be much better.

  After a lengthy series of drunken rants and beatings Sarah ended up back at our kitchen table in tears again with both her eyes blackened and her lips burst and blood crusted.

  I don’t know if the idea sprang from George’s head into Sarah’s or straight from Abby’s, but someone suggested our farm in Swansea as the perfect happy and wholesome home for the Whiteheads, somewhere green where they could make a fresh start.

  Emma and I were in complete accord—this was a betrayal of the worst kind. That farm, where we had spent our childhoods, playing with our cousins the Gardners, and even after we had moved to Fall River often returned to spend the summers, was bound to our mother’s memory as though with a lovers’ knot. It was special; it was sacred; it was OURS, Emma’s and mine. Renting it was one thing, but giving it away . . . The very idea of the Whiteheads, or anyone else, taking it away from us made us see red. It was unthinkable that it could ever belong to anyone but us!

  Father put his foot down and flatly refused to even discuss it with us; sentiment, he said, had no place in business. Whenever we tried to plead our case, he turned a deaf ear. The situation with the house on Ferry Street had shown him that we were not equipped to deal responsibly with real estate, and he had seen nothing since to persuade him that we deserved another chance. And we wouldn’t lower ourselves by going begging and beseeching to Abby. Whenever she tried, often with tears in her eyes, to talk to us about it, we turned our backs on her.

  It was then that Emma decided that we would steal from Abby the same as she was stealing from us even if it must, by necessity, be on a much smaller scale. So we began a series of, in hindsight, rather childish and obvious burglaries. We ransacked the master
bedroom one rare Thursday afternoon when both Father and Abby were out, choosing Bridget’s day off so she could not be blamed, since in novels suspicion always falls first upon the servants.

  The fruits of our first little foray into crime consisted of $110 in greenbacks and gold, and some streetcar tickets, Abby’s meager collection of earbobs and brooches (excluding the mother-of-pearl peony brooch and pearl earbobs she was wearing that day), a red pebbled-leather pocketbook with a gold clasp, a rope of imitation pearls, a gold tassel necklace set with red glass stones, and a lady’s gold pocket watch. We hid our mean-spirited little haul in the barn, beneath the straw in the cage where I kept my pet pigeons, until we could safely dispose of it.

  The biggest prize was Abby’s watch, the one Father had given her on their wedding day, a delicate gold ladies’ pocket watch I had helped him pick out at Gifford’s with a lovely lavish floral design encircled by a double border of white diamonds and Abby’s initials engraved upon the back of the case. Emma later took it and the rest of Abby’s jewelry and dropped it in the Taunton River inside the red leather pocketbook weighed down with stones, since it would have been too dangerous to pawn. We burned the streetcar tickets, since they were numbered and could have been traced if we had dared use them, and divided the cash between us and spent it carefully over many months lest we draw suspicion to ourselves.

  When the robbery was discovered, and Abby rushed back downstairs, hysterical and spouting tears like a fountain, we were sitting placidly in the parlor. Emma was sewing and I was idly leafing through a magazine. When the police came and found the cellar doors standing open wide I helpfully pointed out an eight-penny nail wedged into the padlock.

  While Abby wept and blubbered to the police, “I prize that watch very much, and I wish and hope that you can get it back, but I have a feeling that you never will,” Father just frowned and stood there stiff-backed and silent and stared first at Emma, then at me, then back at Emma again, and then at me, back and forth, just like a tennis ball bouncing between two rackets.

  Later he had some quiet words with the police outside. I don’t know what was said, but they never came back, and no one ever said another word about the burglary; it was as though it had never happened at all. But from that day forward, whenever Father went out he made a point of locking the door of the bedroom he shared with Abby and laying the key prominently, in plain sight, right smack in the middle of the sitting room mantel, as though he was daring anyone to touch it. It was as though he knew we were the ones responsible but was punishing us with his silence. And that was somehow much worse than dragging it all out into the open and having hot words. Instead, he let the guilt hang, like a sword, over our heads.

  About a week later, I was late getting home for supper. I had been helping to revive poor Flossie Grew, who had fainted dead away after a beastly drunken brute of an Irishman had seized her in his arms and kissed her—right on the mouth in front of everyone!—then vomited all over her new shoes when the Women’s Christian Temperance Union was protesting outside of McCurdy’s Saloon. Naturally we had all gone after him, whacking him over the head with our parasols and purses until the police came along and carried him off to jail, as the wretched coward was sniveling for them to do, where he would be safe from our outrage. Poor Flossie! I just hoped she would be recovered in time to go out with the Fruit and Flower Mission on Saturday to hand out bouquets of cherry blossoms as a sweet thank-you to the Celestials who worked so hard in the town’s laundries and mills.

  I had just put down the handsome placard I had painted, depicting the Devil in all his vile scarlet, horned, hoofed, and forked-tailed satanic glory, swilling from a bottle of rum, too drunk to hold on to his own pitchfork, and taken off my hat and was sliding into my chair at the dining room table and was making my apologies to everyone for my tardiness, though it truly was for a noble cause and thus completely excusable, when Bridget brought in a tray.

  “Ah! Eight tender young squabs!” Father beamed with delight and reached out a fork to spear one. “Two for each of us! I hope you’re hungry, Lizzie!” He smiled like the Devil as he deposited a pigeon on my plate, stabbing it with the fork, right in the breast, to show me how succulent and juicy it was!

  I blanched and bolted from my chair. I ran out into the barn. My pigeons were gone! All that remained were a few gray and white feathers and some blood on the straw and staining the blade of the hatchet that had been left standing propped up against their empty cage. I fell down on my knees and vomited.

  Later that night, Bridget crept into my bed and comforted me as best she could.

  “I know just how you feel, macushla,” she said, hugging me close as she spooned her body around mine.

  She told me about a little red hen she’d made a pet of back in Ireland when she was a little girl. Even though she knew the hen was meant for the cooking pot she could not help but love it. She’d clung to her brother and cried as he marched steadfastly across the yard with the hatchet in his hand and watched in horror as he chopped off the chicken’s head. To teach Bridget a lesson, her ma had made her sit by the hearth, even though she was crying her eyes out, and pluck the bird naked for the pot.

  “I soaked ev’ry feather with my tears, I did, macushla,” she sighed. “An’ only the hunger gnawin’ at my belly made me eat it, but I sicked it all back up afterward.”

  She lay with me for hours, softly crooning sweet Irish lullabies, stroking my hair, and calling me “macushla,” and kissing me until I slept. When she started to creep out I stirred sleepily and reached out a hand and caught hold of her wrist.

  “Stay with me!” I whispered urgently, and she did. I passed the entire night in her arms.

  Father never said a word about my pigeons. Everyone pretended it hadn’t happened. No one ever mentioned that supper or the pets that no longer drew me out to spend hours in the barn. It was as though my pigeons had never existed. The only good to come out of Father’s malicious act was that it had brought Bridget to my bed.

  Sometimes I wished I could kick the old man down, plant my foot on the back of his head, and grind his face into a pile of fresh manure and say, Thank you for that, at least! while I remembered the sweet touch of her lips and the way she had passively allowed me to untie the green silk ribbons of her nightdress and slip my hand inside. I had given her those ribbons, casually tossing them down one day while she was ironing, saying I had no use for them and thought she might like to have them. I’d even wrinkled them to make it look like they truly were odds and ends I’d found at the bottom of my sewing box instead of new ones I’d bought just for her. I’d die of embarrassment if she ever knew about the fifteen minutes I had spent agonizing over the selection at Sargent’s to choose the shade of green that was the best match for her beautiful eyes. But those memories were mine, and precious, and I was a coward; I didn’t have the courage to crow like a rooster and gloatingly proclaim my sweet, sweet secret shame to one who had it within his power to punish me for the intoxicating and doubly sinful combination of unnaturalness and bliss.

  Chapter 5

  I never meant for it to happen. David Anthony was not the man for me. He was too young, too wild, dark and dangerous. Oh, but he was a handsome, sulky, sultry brute, all man and muscle, leather and spice, with his slick black hair and pencil-thin mustache. He reminded me a little of the suave and slightly dangerous men I had seen at the casino on the Riviera, but in a much cruder, rougher way. His hands were calloused, and hard with dirt-caked nails not immaculate, soft, manicured ones with silky finesse instead of brute force in their caresses. While the sophistication might have been lacking, the veneer of danger was not. He drove his father’s meat wagon, drawn by a team of four sturdy white steeds. It was painted a glaring white and each side was emblazoned with a big red pig branded ANTHONY & SWIFT MEAT CO. OF FALL RIVER in white letters. David made the daily deliveries to private residences and businesses, and was rumored to entice pretty girls into the back of the meat wagon with the promise that h
e would give them a nice, fat sausage.

  Reason decreed that he was far too young for me; at twenty-two he was a full ten years my junior. But Passion was blind. And when you’re starved for love and the sensual glide of a tender, knowing hand, sometimes being wanted is enough. After all, there are worse compromises.

  In another couple, ten years might not have made such a difference, but between us it was a yawning chasm. Besides, he was the butcher’s son and I was Andrew Borden’s daughter and I knew what my father—and other people—would say: that David only wanted an old maid like me for my father’s money, that when he looked at me visions of dollar signs danced in his head like a child’s sugarplum dreams the night before Christmas. We had nothing in common, no shared interests, and our conversations were awkward and stilted at best. But he wanted me, and I wanted to be wanted. And, for a little while, I deluded myself into believing that that was enough. So I kept reality at bay; whenever it threatened to rudely intrude I shoved it away, and let myself go on dreaming. But I let things go further than I should. It only happened once, but once was enough to change my life forever.

  I had started teaching a twice-weekly evening reading and writing class for the poor immigrant girls who worked in the mills. Afterward, David would be waiting for me outside, to walk me home—or almost home; we’d always say good night on the corner so Father wouldn’t see us together. I was flattered by the attention. Then we started to meet in the barn where I used to keep my pigeons and go and visit the horse, before Father decided I spent too much time out there and that the carrots and apples I snuck sweet Fred as treats rightly belonged in the stews and pies Abby made instead. You don’t feed animals that don’t feed you, Lizzie! Father always said; it was his way of justifying the slaughter of my pets and the selling of Fred. The barn quickly became our favorite trysting spot. Sometimes we sat and fondled and kissed each other in the old sleigh Father had been unable to sell because of its deplorably decrepit state, with the cracks in the red leather seat pinching the bare flesh above my black stocking tops whenever David could coax my skirts up over my hips. Sometimes we sat and snuggled in the straw of Fred’s former stall, sharing a sack of penny candy and sugary kisses, or lolled about in the loft eating pears from the tree in our backyard or grapes from our straggling vine. Once David brought decadent dark cherries from his mother’s garden and dangled them enticingly by their stems over my mouth as he fed them to me one by one. Another day, when Abby unexpectedly went out, we stole the blueberry pie she had left cooling on the windowsill and left telltale blue stains all over our skin wherever we touched and kissed.