by Brandy Purdy
Sarah gave her hand to me. I took it. She was easy to talk to. She seemed to understand as no one else did. That night I found myself sitting before a fireplace again, nestled in a cozy cocoon of cushions and blankets, orange flames dancing, crackling, casting a magical golden glow to warm both my body and my cold, ailing soul. Staring into a cup of hot spiced tea, I saw myself before another fireplace, with Orrin on the night that made me think that Heaven could very well be a place on earth. Tears rolled down my face, drip-dropping into my tea, as I remembered, and relived, every excruciatingly sweet caress and tender kiss, and the way he had filled and fulfilled me.
Sarah took the cup away and put her arms around me and I leaned into her gratefully.
“God never closes a door without opening a window, Lizbeth,” she said, her lips so soft and warm against my face as her kisses gently followed the trail of my tears. I shivered, arched my back, and sighed as her lips strayed down to the hollow of my throat. “There is always something more for us, Lizbeth,” she continued, “waiting out there; we have only to go out and seek . . . and find . . . or invite it in to us. . . .”
I turned to her. I needed someone so badly; I was in so much pain and throbbing with need! Our lips met and our bodies followed suit, merging and melting together until I felt I was alone no longer.
For two weeks, history repeated itself every night. Every day I walked the sands while Sarah wrote, and we made love every night in front of that fireplace, and in bed one last time before putting out the light, and every morning before we rose to breakfast. Sarah firmly believed “love feeds the soul like nourishing food feeds the body, Lizbeth, and a wise person always starts the day with a good breakfast.”
God had been kind after all; when He slammed the door on Orrin He opened a window and showed me Sarah. I had finally found someone who really could understand me, someone who had also drunk from the vinegary cup of fame and wouldn’t be frightened away by its foul taste. Or so I thought, and then I found the notebook.
One night when I couldn’t sleep and didn’t want my tossing and turning to wake Sarah, I picked it up in idle curiosity from the desk and went to sit by the fire with it. I’m both glad I did and wish that I didn’t. It was like opening Pandora’s box. It was all about me, page after page, a rush of words written in frantically flowing black ink, as though she had been desperate to get it all down before she could forget a single thing, the script cramped and crooked because of her painful hands, ideas for a novel based upon my life, with all the names and places changed of course, but still completely recognizable so that any half-wit would know her inspiration, her muse, was Lizzie Borden. There was my heart laid bare and bleeding upon those ivory pages just as though Sarah had ripped it right out of my breast and offered it up as a cannibal sacrifice for the greedy public to devour! My every confidence betrayed! Everything I had told her and ideas about how to weave it into the plot. Descriptions of people and places, snippets of dialogue, and whole scenarios!
I had been a fool to trust her! So desperate and needy that I was blind! The only thing to be thankful for was that I hadn’t told her the truth about the murders or mentioned David Anthony; I clung tenaciously to the truth of my innocence. I had told her that I only stayed in Fall River in the hope that someday the real killer might be discovered and I would truly be vindicated and acquitted in the court of public opinion, which seemed in the end to matter more than any legal one.
As I closed the covers I thought I heard God laughing. He seemed to take a fiendish delight in slamming doors upon my heart. Would it ever hurt and bleed enough to satisfy Him?
I flung the notebook from me in disgust, straight into the fire, without stopping to think that it wasn’t mine to destroy. But I didn’t care! To me that was just a trivial point. It was my life filling that notebook; thus, to my mind, I had the right. I sat and watched it burn. Then I silently gathered up my clothes and went back to my own cottage. I packed my carpet bag and caught the first train I could. I didn’t care where it took me, as long as it was far away from Sarah and the place where I thought I had found happiness when I was least expecting it.
I left no word for Sarah. The cold and dead ashes she would find in the fireplace would convey everything I had to say more succinctly than any actual words spoken by me ever could.
She never wrote to me to apologize or explain. I suppose she was too ashamed. No phoenix ever rose from those ashes. For years to come I would always feel afraid whenever a new book by her appeared on the store shelves, but she never wrote a character or situation that seemed even remotely inspired by me, and for that I was most grateful. God extended me one small mercy at least.
That summer I found myself aimless and adrift and not quite sure what to do with myself in Providence, Rhode Island. I shopped to alleviate the boredom and bring more beautiful things into my life. One of my favorite stores was the city’s oldest and finest, Tilden & Thurber, a combination art gallery, gift shop, and jewelry store that had been in business since 1790. As I idly browsed their shop on Westminster Street I was smitten by two little oval paintings on porcelain in frames like golden lace.
I was rather surprised to see them in Tilden & Thurber; their amorous motif seemed a trifle risqué for such a formal and reserved establishment. The first, Love’s Dream, depicted a beautiful young woman sleeping as Cupid, with his arrow poised, like an erect phallus, hovered above her. She was naked and her black hair tumbled over the pillows; one arm was flung out as though her slumber was a restless one, troubled by dreams. As further proof of her restlessness, she had kicked the sheets off, and one knee was bent and her legs slightly parted, suggesting perhaps that her dream was an amorous one. Roses, their pink petals suggestive of a woman’s intimate parts, wreathed the entire scene. The second painting, Love’s Awakening, showed a lover in powdered wig and knee breeches, stealthily approaching, and the sleeping beauty rousing, aroused, and opening her arms and legs to him as she drew him down into her welcoming embrace.
What struck me most was the young woman’s resemblance to Lulie Stillwell at the height of her ebony-haired, ruby-red-lipped, snow-white-skinned fairy-tale princess beauty. The titles that had been given to the paintings seemed to fit so perfectly our, or rather my, peculiar circumstances. Lulie had been my ideal, my dream of love, for so many years, and the passage of years and her marriage to Johnny Hiram had never diminished that; she was still the ghost who haunted my dreams, the figure in my favorite fantasies, the one whose reincarnation I was always hoping to find in the women I took to my bed. She had been the one who had truly awakened my desires.
Then I did a foolish thing, a very foolish thing. I was sick of seeing my name in the newspapers, of everything I did being gossiped about, so I asked the clerk if I might see a vase that was locked in a glass display case. While she had her back to me, I swiftly slipped the two little paintings into my handbag.
On impulse, as soon as I returned to Maplecroft I packed them up carefully in blue tissue paper and sent them to Lulie. I dreamed of you last night, I wrote with a tremulous hand, but I don’t dare put my dreams down on paper. I let the paintings speak for me instead, and be my declaration of desire, the words I could not say.
Lulie’s response was to wait until she was next in Providence to do some Christmas shopping and take the paintings back to Tilden & Thurber. The labels I had left in place, pasted on the back of each painting so she would know that my gift came from one of the finest shops in all New England, made it quite easy for her to do this. She explained to the clerk that she had received them as a gift—an unwanted gift!—from Miss Borden, but they were really not to her taste and she would like, if possible, to exchange them for a toiletry case or perhaps a lap desk as a gift for her husband to take with him, as a constant reminder of her love, as he traveled often on business.
The clerk at Tilden & Thurber knew quite well that the paintings had never been purchased by me, or anyone else for that matter; on the contrary, they had simply disappear
ed one late-summer day. She remembered me visiting the shop, and records soon confirmed that I had bought a vase the same day that the paintings had first been missed and had it shipped back to Maplecroft.
Lulie left the paintings at Tilden & Thurber and emphatically declined their polite offer of an exchange; they were after all the rightful owner of the items and she didn’t want anything further to do with the matter, or Lizzie Borden. “That woman makes my skin crawl every time I think of her!”—Lulie actually said that to the clerk! Lulie asked that her name be kept out of it entirely, as she didn’t want the police or reporters showing up at her door. She had been brought up to believe that a woman’s name should appear in the newspapers only when she was born, engaged, married, or buried. Before she left, Lulie bought a handsome ebony wood toiletry case inlaid with mother-of-pearl and filigreed silverwork complete with mother-of-pearl-and-silver-handled accessories inside, everything the immaculate and refined gentleman would need for grooming, as a gift for her husband. It was her way of making a point, I suppose.
A warrant was sworn out for my arrest, but it was never served and, when the episode found its way into the papers, as it inevitably did, with headlines shouting LIZZIE BORDEN AGAIN! A WARRANT FOR HER ARREST! TWO PAINTINGS MISSING FROM TILDEN & THURBER STORE! a fictional female name was substituted in place of Lulie’s.
I threatened to sue and set Mr. Jennings on it. I explained that the paintings had been inside the package with the vase that I had bought and had shipped to me. I thought they were included as a small gift to show how much Tilden & Thurber appreciated my business, and it never occurred to me that there was anything amiss when I sent them to an old school friend in token of fond memories I still cherished.
Everything was settled out of court eventually for a few hundred dollars, after which Mr. Jennings and I parted ways, with him heatedly declaring, “I will have nothing more to do with that woman!” by which he of course meant me, the client whose murder trial had made him famous and earned him the stupendous sum of $25,000. As Father would have said, some people just don’t know the meaning of gratitude.
Chapter 11
I spent the next several years living quietly, mostly at Maplecroft, and occasionally at grand hotels whenever the wanderlust seized me and I couldn’t abide sitting still in the same old place a moment longer. But I was increasingly a solitary creature, ill inclined to let anyone get too close to me; I shied away even from paid companions and more often than not chose fantasy over reality. I just didn’t want any more disappointments or complications. As lonely as I was, my head kept telling my heart it was better to be alone. It seemed the world just kept on kicking me when I was already down. Orrin, Sarah, the humiliating and idiotic incident at Tilden & Thurber, my bold yet veiled baring of my feelings to Lulie, and her rejection, it was all just too much, too soon, coming all in a row like that. I needed time to heal, to lick my wounds and get back up on my feet again.
In those days, I preferred to find my romance in books and plays instead, and I still had my dreams. I would always have those. It was safer and less painful that way, though it made the loneliness that consumed my soul throb like a toothache sometimes. Many sleepless nights I lay awake wondering if it was love itself that I was in love with more than I could ever be with any real-life man or woman. Did love ever really last a lifetime? Was “happily ever after” just an idyllic ending for storybooks as I suspected? Did all those novels and plays only foster false and impossible hopes in the hearts of the lovelorn? Nevertheless, I thrived on them, I devoured books, and wherever I was I arranged to have a bookshop send me a new batch of novels every fortnight.
I read so much I wore my eyes out. I began to sport an elegant pince-nez, silver or gold depending on my whim and what I was wearing, but always accented with diamonds, and I had some lovely lorgnettes, silver and gold, with enameled and jeweled accents that I wore on long glittering chains around my neck when I went out in the evenings to restaurants and the theater. I felt so chic, elegant as Lillian Russell herself, scanning the menu at Delmonico’s with a gold lorgnette flashing radiant red rubies to match my red velvet gown or a silver one sparkling with amethysts to complement my lavish embroidered and appliquéd silver and lilac. It was just an illusion, I know, but, for a moment, at least, it made me feel good . . . until I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror. Lillian Russell I was not.
My fortieth birthday found me back in Fall River. I stood before the gilt-framed mirror in my summer bedroom after my bath and opened my robe and took a long hard look at myself. For most of my life, I had promised myself that I would start dieting, but it was always tomorrow, just one more slice of pie or piece of cake, another bonbon or cookie . . . but all those one mores added up and as a result, I had the stout, dumpy, lumpy figure to show for my lack of fortitude. But I knew better than to think I had the willpower to do anything about it. I would never have the perfect hourglass figure as curvy and breathtaking as the roller coaster at Coney Island in real life, only in my dreams, where I was always young and beautiful as a Gibson Girl, coveted and courted by gallants galore.
I was dismayed to see how much white was encroaching upon the red of my hair. In some places the color had actually faded to a soft peach or was entirely white. I thought it a most unattractive combination to grace the human head, this parti-colored streaky mass of dark rusty red, peach, and white. I would have to do something about it. I just was not ready to be a white-haired old woman yet. I had lost so much of my youth as a prisoner in my father’s house, I just wanted to go on pretending and prolong that pretense as long as I possibly could. Was that so wrong of me?
There was something else I noticed, though Lord knows I wish I hadn’t—I had my father’s face. Maybe the white hair brought out the resemblance or I had been too blind to see it was there all along, but from that day forth whenever I looked into a mirror I didn’t see only me; I saw him too, like a ghost haunting me, possessing my own skin and bones so I could never be free of him. The courts might have acquitted me in 1893, but that July morning in 1900 I knew that the mirror would condemn me every day and night for the rest of my life. Abby was in my body, Father was in my face, murder was in my soul and on my conscience, and I was guilty no matter how much I pretended and proclaimed my innocence. Our deeds travel with us from afar; they make of us what we are. No matter what I did, or where I went, I would never be free, of him, or me, or my murderous deeds.
“This is what it is like to be damned,” I said to my face, and Father’s.
Rather than calling in a hairdresser to attend me and having her go gossiping all over town that “Lizzie Borden is a dyed-haired woman!” I asked Monsieur Tetrault if he would be so kind as to help me. He had trained as a hairdresser in his youth in Paris, before immigrating to America, and had worked at that trade for several years before going into private service with his wife as an inseparable coachman and cook combination. He was a kind man and readily agreed. By then he had been in my employ a number of years and I felt I could trust him.
The next morning right after breakfast, he arrived with an armful of jars, bowls, and brushes and sat me down at my dressing table with a combing cape draped over my pink dressing gown and gave my hair a good brushing. One hundred strokes—he counted each one, in French. Then he wet it and snipped off the dead ends. He sang in a loud, and slightly discordant, tenor voice as he happily mixed his ingredients with all the enthusiasm of a housewife baking a birthday cake. I was a little alarmed to see that the concoction he ladled on top of my head, then used a brush to spread in long, even strokes from roots to tips looked just like bright green cake batter, but he assured me the results would be ravissante!
“You mustn’t worry about a thing, Mademoiselle Lizbeth,” he said as he wrapped a thick towel around my head like a Turk’s turban and sent me to sit as near as I could bear beside a blazing fire, instructing me not to stir for two hours. So I obediently sat there, sweating like a racehorse that had just won the Kentucky Derby, and
tried to lose myself in a book and not worry about what was happening to my hair beneath the towel.
When the two hours had passed, Monsieur Tetrault promptly came back and guided me into my bathroom and instructed me to kneel by the tub and hang my head over it. I groaned miserably and nearly burst into tears when I saw the stream of brown liquid as ugly as mud running toward the drain as he rinsed my hair.
“Do not despair, Mademoiselle Lizbeth; when you look in the mirror you shall fall in love with yourself,” Monsieur Tetrault promised as he helped me up and guided me gently back to my dressing table.
When I saw myself I was stunned speechless. I gasped, burst into tears, and then I began to laugh and flung my arms around his neck. I must have kissed his face two dozen times in sheer delight. My hair was as bright as a blazing fireball. I’d never seen a redder head of hair in my life! I was ecstatic! I looked, and felt, striking!
Unfortunately, it was at the precise moment that I was clinging to Monsieur Tetrault and kissing him that Emma walked in. She took one long sour look at us, then turned around and walked right back out. I don’t think it could have been any worse than the expression she would have worn if she had walked in on me while I was wielding the hatchet over Father’s face as he lay napping on the sofa. But, at that moment, I was too happy to give a fig what Emma thought; I knew better than to expect her to approve of anything I did.
As soon as my hair was dry and Monsieur Tetrault had styled it in a high curling pompadour just like a Gibson Girl, I put on a gay dress of emerald green, ruby red, and white stripes and a turquoise extravaganza of a hat dripping green wax grapes over the broad brim and went right out to Gifford’s and, to express my gratitude, bought him the biggest and most ornate gold watch they had and ordered it engraved with his initials. Impulsively, I also selected a large gold fob set with an onyx intaglio carved with a horse’s head to go with it; since he had been my driver all these years, first horses, followed by automobiles, I thought it a most fitting gift.
