The Secrets of Lizzie Borden

by Brandy Purdy

  Reporters laid siege to Maplecroft, shouting impertinent questions about the seven years’ difference in our ages, making it sound more like seventy, like I was a dirty old woman snatching a baby boy from his innocent blue-blanketed cradle. To make matters worse, Emma looked at me as if she agreed, pursing her lips and dolefully shaking her head. For shame, he’s just a child, Lizzie! her damning dark eyes seemed to say every time she looked at me. But the only thing she ever actually said to me upon the subject was even worse: “Of course you lost him; you didn’t deserve him, Lizzie. You would have only brought him sorrow, and Orrin deserves better.” I hated her for saying it, and I hated her even more for being right. I tried to avoid her as much as possible. Fortunately that wasn’t at all difficult; the sisterly bond was well and truly broken, and when no one was looking we didn’t bother to keep up the pretense of liking, let alone loving, each other. We were just a pair of strangers sharing a roof, old maids bound by blood in more ways than one, nothing less, nothing more.

  Locked gates didn’t deter the bloodhounds of the press; they simply climbed the fence, ruining the roses with their boots. Forgetting, for the moment, that they were rivals employed by competing papers, they affably gave one another boosts; they trampled the flowers, pressing their noses right up against the windows trying to see in through the lace curtains, iron bars, and glazed glass. Their constant ringing finally broke the doorbell; then they rapped their knuckles raw knocking on the door. Calling the police did nothing to deter the reporters! The officers they sent out only proffered a nominal good-natured chiding: “Come on, boys, leave the old girl in peace”—old girl, indeed, I was only thirty-seven, blast their eyes!—while they hung about outside the gate for a while smoking and catching up on their gossip. One of the reporters actually put on women’s clothes and tried to gain entry by impersonating a cleaning woman replete with pail and mop and another pretended to be a messenger bringing “Miss Borden flowers from her fiancé”! Oh, how wickedly low they were! All that just to sell newspapers!

  I locked myself in my winter bedroom and took the phone off the hook until after midnight, when Orrin would call, and refused to let the servants answer the door unless they recognized the person on the other side and knew with complete and utter certainty that it was not a reporter in disguise. When Emma invited her friends the Reverend Jubb and his sister into the parlor I flatly refused to come down; I just knew they were talking about me—what else could they possibly have been talking about?—but I was too proud, and stubborn, to show my face. Since I was not welcome in his church anymore, I had no use for the Reverend Jubb or his sister! I didn’t want to see or talk to anyone except Orrin. Late at night, after everyone was asleep, he would telephone, and I held on to that receiver like a lifeline, clinging desperately to the sound of his dear voice and the soft, comforting words he whispered into my ear.

  The so-called “gentlemen of the press” were relentless! They flocked to Swansea, to lay siege to Orrin’s parents’ home, to see the new house, to interview the workmen, and every time he set foot out of doors they chased poor Orrin like a lynch mob. He ran so much he lost eight pounds!

  Poor Caroline couldn’t even do her marketing in peace without reporters trailing after her writing down everything she purchased, asking what was for supper and if she was going to share the recipe with me and just how she felt about me marrying her “baby boy.” That roast, and the carrots and onions that accompanied it, provided fodder for a whole newspaper column! And at the barbershop the reporters crowding around the chair actually made the barber so nervous that he nicked Orrin’s father on the throat. It bled quite badly!

  The reporters even went to the school to pester the poor innocent children! They offered them candy and coins, cat’s eye marbles, dollies, and tin soldiers to answer their questions and tell what they thought of their teacher and what they had seen and heard of me. One little girl even got a new doll with long golden curls for confiding that she had seen me leafing through a fashion magazine with a wedding dress on the cover! The parents of Orrin’s pupils were naturally very upset. They hounded him as if he had done something wrong, as if he were himself a criminal, not just the betrothed of a murderess whose wily lawyers had helped her to elude worldly justice. And wherever children played, they chanted that never-dying ditty that has dogged my every step since 1892 and will doubtlessly live on long after me:

  “Lizzie Borden took an ax

  And gave her mother forty whacks.

  When she saw what she had done,

  She gave her father forty-one.”

  It was “that carnival in New Bedford” all over again! Only this time I wasn’t on trial for my life; I was fighting for my happiness, my dearest dream! Why was everyone so nasty and mean?

  A week before what would have been our wedding day, Orrin and I met in Boston, in a little out-of-the-way tearoom. We sat in the shadows. Both of us were pale and gaunt with sunken eyes, red from weeping and lack of sleeping. I kept my veil down. I wore black as if I were in mourning even though I had vowed to never wear that woeful color again. But, for the first time in my life, I truly was in mourning; no one will ever know how much I grieved for what I had lost, the love, the rosy golden glowing future that now could never be mine. It was the last time we were ever to sit across from each other with our hands touching on the tabletop, fingers fondly clasping and entwining. We could barely bear to look in each other’s eyes! The reporters had turned our love into something ugly and awful and made it the butt of jokes. Everyone was laughing at us!

  He just could not do it, and I could not do it to him. He did not deserve to be tarred and feathered by my notoriety, to become Mr. Lizzie Borden and live the rest of his life like a specimen under a microscope, his every deed open to scrutiny and published in the newspapers, even his simplest actions exaggerated and embellished just to sell more newspapers. He would lose his identity. He would no longer be Orrin Gardner, schoolteacher; he would be “Lizzie Borden’s husband,” “Mr. Lizzie Borden,” just as the world would never let me retire from the public stage into a quiet private life as Mrs. Gardner. No matter what name I took, whether I changed it myself like when I became the self-styled Lizbeth of Maplecroft or I married and took my husband’s name, I would never be free of Lizzie Borden, I could never be anyone else; the world simply would not let me. And I could not bear it that they might take teaching away from him; several parents had already threatened to keep their children away from his classroom if he married me. Teaching was Orrin’s life, and there are more ways than just murder that you can kill someone. I did not want to see the light go out of his eyes; it would make the gold of my wedding ring glow ostentatiously bright, a gloating golden emblem of shame.

  And so we said good-bye. I never saw Orrin Gardner again. He abandoned our dream house, sold it to a pair of newlyweds, and moved away to Tennessee, to a small, primitive backwoods town called Sewanee, and a rough-hewn one-room schoolhouse with a leaky, sagging roof on the verge of falling down, filled with barefoot children in clothes made out of burlap sacks. His mother, Caroline, told me the only thing he took from the house was the lamp with shooting stars on it. Maybe we should have wished on that star after all? We should not have taken it for granted!

  As the headlines screamed LIZZIE BORDEN JILTED BY SCHOOLTEACHER! I wrote letters to acquaintances and so-called “friends” who, avid for gossip, wrote in feigned solicitousness, denying the whole thing, denouncing the whole engagement as just a silly rumor, a ludicrous tale, concocted by the press to sell papers, explaining that Orrin was my cousin, and childhood playmate, nothing more, and that I had volunteered to help him choose furnishings for his new house. I lied, I denied our love, I sacrificed my heart’s fondest dream, to give Orrin back his life; the sooner the story was forgotten, the sooner he could go on. It was the only thing I could do that would not destroy him!

  I gave him back his ring, that precious platinum band set with a sapphire heart with dainty white diamonds trimming it
like lace, and went home to Maplecroft and withdrew from the world again, to wait until some new sensation came along and caught the fickle public’s fancy and made them forget, at least momentarily, all about me. I sat beside the fireplace in my bedroom and hugged my wedding gown over my broken heart as the tears poured down my face.

  It was pale-blue satin with the faintest hint of gray, not white—the newspapermen had gotten that part wrong. I had chosen it because the color reminded me of the eyes of someone I had known long ago, someone who had given me a moment of magic underneath the thorn tree at Glastonbury that I had never ceased to cherish. And when I saw his eyes in that bolt of blue-gray satin it just seemed right, like he was reaching out to me from across the distant sea and giving me his blessing.

  It was a gaudy, magnificent thing festooned with bows and swags of ribbon, seed pearls, and silk roses over row upon exquisite row of silver-veined white lace.

  Slowly, I tore the roses off, one by one, and then the bows. As I cast each one into the fire a door slammed shut in my mind, with a harsh, brutal, adamant finality, but not before I had caught a tantalizing glimpse of what might have been. Scenes of domestic tranquility, the life I longed for more than anything, and the future that could never be.

  A door slammed shut upon our wedding day, Orrin and I staring deep into each other’s eyes as we solemnly spoke our vows, promising a lifetime of devotion, and shared our first kiss as husband and wife.

  Another door slammed shut on the tender scene of our wedding night, as Orrin carried me to our marriage bed and ever so gently laid me down upon it and undressed me, slowly, almost reverently, shedding each lacy layer of feminine frills until I was naked as a newborn babe. Oh, the exquisite torment as he took his own sweet time over the long row of tiny pearl buttons marching down the back of my gown! And oh, the passion that followed! It was just as well that the door slammed shut. I didn’t want to see it; I didn’t want to remember that night by the fireplace in the home that should have been ours, our little nest of domestic bliss.

  Then through another closing door I saw Orrin embrace me from behind, and kiss my neck, as his hands reached round to enfold and caress my stomach, swollen great with our child, as the door cruelly slammed shut like a gunshot, right in my wretched, tearstained face.

  Then another door closed, just as I caught a glimpse of myself sitting up in bed, wearied and disheveled, worn out by the travail, but smiling, in triumph, the greatest victory of my life, as I held the blue-blanket-swaddled bundle of our newborn son in my arms, and Orrin sat on the bed beside me and embraced us both. How bittersweet that banished joy! It broke my heart all over again!

  When all the roses and ribbons were gone, I ripped away the pearls and lace; then I buried my face in the folds of my would have been, should have been, wedding gown and let the smooth cool blue satin caress my hot, swollen, raw, red face and soak up some of my tears before I consigned it too to the greedy, always hungry flames. I sat and wept as I watched it burn. I cried until I had no tears left, then I got up and went to my cold and lonely bed, but I didn’t sleep; instead I lay awake in the darkness and said farewell to all my hopes and dreams, and tried to find some semblance of peace in the solitary future I knew lay before me.

  “We met again because we were meant to be together,” Orrin had said. But I knew now with complete and utter certainty that I would spend the rest of my life alone. Was this my punishment, my penance, justice delayed catching up with me when I least expected it and condemning me to a lonely and loveless existence before I died and God banished me to Hell to burn for all eternity?

  Although I said farewell to my dreams that night, they have not said farewell to me; they still come unbidden to torture me. It has been thirty years since I last saw Orrin Gardner, but there are nights when I still start awake from the dream of him lying atop me, naked and warm, gazing deep and longingly into my eyes as he enters me.

  Upon waking I feel such emptiness; it is unbearable and almost indescribable, because I once knew what it was like to be filled, to be complete. My arms ache to enfold him, my legs to twine around him, and there is such a keen, sharp yearning in the intimate place between, such an unbearable, aching emptiness to have him back and hold him deep inside me, to feel again that sacred moment of completeness. And to know that I never will again . . . I do not think the Spanish Inquisition could have devised any torture equal to or greater than the feeling that accompanies that knowledge.

  In Orrin’s arms I felt complete, as if I had been wandering lost all my life and had finally found my home, my home sweet home, not gaudy, magnificent Maplecroft as I always thought, but my true home, the place where I belonged that I had been searching for my whole life long. They say home is where the heart is, and my heart was—and still is—with the man I love, but I am a wanderer once again, damned like the Wandering Jew, destined to walk alone for the rest of my life, and perhaps for all eternity as well. Emma was right! God sometimes punishes those He only seems to favor by giving them exactly what they want—but I would amend that and add “and then He snatches it away again.”

  And that is even worse.

  Chapter 10

  After I lost Orrin, and the frenzy of public interest had subsided somewhat, I ran away from Fall River. I wanted to mourn, to shed my tears, in solitude, without everyone in town staring, straining to see through my veil, avid to catch a gloating glimpse of my red-rimmed, swollen eyes when I finally did come out of hiding. I couldn’t hide from the world forever, and the longer I put it off I knew the worse it would be. Finally, when I couldn’t stand the dread gnawing at my stomach a moment longer, I decided to just get it over with so I could put it behind me. I couldn’t go back in time, and I had lingered in limbo long enough, so the only choice left to me was to go forward.

  I put on a fancy fringed dress of chartreuse and emerald satin diamonds all sewn together like patchwork with bold gold thread and a hat like a gilt-sprigged chartreuse chiffon nest cradling a dark-green bird and hung my throat and ears with pearls and emeralds and ordered Monsieur Tetrault to get the carriage ready and drive me to Gifford’s. I held myself erect and regal as an empress carved out of ice as I bought a set of fruit forks with mother-of-pearl handles, and a second set of monogrammed silver pickle forks, and a faux eighteenth-century music box with a white-wigged couple dressed fit for a ball at Versailles dancing to Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. Then I went home, packed a single carpet bag, and away I went with the dawn on the first train out of Fall River.

  I took a cottage on Cape Cod. It was the off-season, so most of them were empty, leaving me blessedly free to walk the sands in peace and blame my red eyes and nose on the wind without being subjected to false smiles, smirks, and knowing nods. And there were no lovers or happy families on the beach to torment me with reminders of all that I had lost. Every day I stood for hours, hugging myself and shivering beneath my shawl, staring out at the choppy gray sea that seemed to mirror the turmoil within my soul, watching the waves crash and roll, and the gulls soar and dive, always seeking, sometimes finding.

  One day the wind snatched my shawl away. I let it go. It was just one shawl, a common knitted one, and I had many more much finer. I watched it fly away, like my love, beyond my grasp, its maroon folds momentarily taking the shape of a heart—a bleeding, wounded heart!—as it rose high in the grim gray sky.

  To my surprise, sometime later—mere minutes or hours I cannot tell you; I had by then, in all those aimless hours spent walking the shore, lost all sense of time—I felt it settle comfortingly around my shoulders again. It came back to me, the way I wished Orrin would. I spun around to find myself staring into the kindest pair of brown eyes I had ever seen. They warmed me like a cup of hot cocoa.

  She looked as weary as I did, there were fine crinkled lines and dark shadows around her eyes, and even when she smiled sorrow tried to pull her pink lips down. Though she couldn’t have been much older than me—ten years, just like Emma, Time would soon reveal—the golden
hair coiled high atop her head was threaded thickly with silver. I would soon learn that arthritis was her own private devil that had tormented her joints unceasingly since early childhood and she was in almost constant pain. She had traveled several times to Europe searching for, if not a cure, at least some relief, in the baths or in liniments, but never drugs; she could not bear to have anything dull her mind.

  Her name was Sarah Orne Jewett. She was a lady novelist who had come to Cape Cod to finish a book unencumbered by the distractions of daily life. Lately there had been too many of them; seemingly every time she turned around another tempest was brewing in the teapot or someone was making demands upon her time, wanting her to do this or that and making it impossible for her to say no. Finally, she just had to throw up her hands and say Enough!, pack her bags, and run away. Quite renowned, famous even, she knew a little something about notoriety and insatiable public curiosity. That was the common ground we met upon. In her case, love at first sight with her publisher’s wife had led to a cordial, if not legal, severance of the marital bond and the two ladies setting up house together in Boston. It was almost as shocking as murder. The number of books the scandal sold almost made up to Mr. Fields for the loss of his wife.