The Secrets of Lizzie Borden (23 page)

“I think I will burn this old thing up,” I announced as I headed for the stove, and had shoved it in before anyone had time to approve, or disapprove, of my intentions.

I tried to be blasé about it, treating it like any other old, useless rag I was disposing of. It bothered me how closely the reddish-brown paint mimicked the color of dried blood; I was worried that the resemblance might occur to the police and in some way damn me. I knew just how Lady Macbeth felt with blood that only she could see staining her hands, impervious to soap and water and vigorous scrubbing. I just couldn't stop thinking about it! I kept seeing the glistening gilt head of the hatchet nestled in those paint-streaked blue folds,
feeling
it nudging against my leg like a living animal's head as though a bloodthirsty silver demon possessed it, giving life to the inanimate. Faded diamonds of warring blues, the glimmer of silver, and the ugly brown-red smears all down the left side. They looked
so much
like blood, I was afraid if people sat and scrutinized those stains they would come to believe it actually was blood. Father had been unexpectedly generous and allowed me to choose the color of paint, and I, feeling grateful, had tried to choose a conservative color that he would like, hence the bloody brown. One thinks the oddest things at times and now I simply
loathed
that color and wished with all my heart that I had been true to myself and chosen something more charming and cheerful, like apple green, lemon yellow, dusky mauve, or apricot.

“Yes, why don't you,” Emma said without glancing up from where she sat stirring her coffee at the kitchen table. “That's a
very
good idea, Lizzie.” She
hated
that dress and never understood why I bothered to keep it, much less wear it, after my mishap with the wet paint. She thought it most slovenly and lackadaisical of me, and now that she knew there
might
be blood on it she didn't even want it in the house. When she saw it hanging in my closet the night before she had told me it made her sick just to look at it, and that if she were me she would “burn it up.”

Alice Russell had stood right beside me at the kitchen stove and watched as the flames devoured it. Then, as though butter wouldn't melt in her mouth, that prim goody-good had looked me right in the eye and said, “If
I
were
you,
Lizzie,
I
wouldn't have let
anyone
see me doing
that
. I'm afraid that burning that dress is the
worst
thing you could have done!”
Besides killing your parents of course!
her chilly blue eyes silently finished the sentence.

With wide, innocuous eyes, after it was already too late to snatch the dress back from the grasping flames, I turned to Alice, dug my fingers into her arms, and cried, “Oh, Alice,
why
did you let me do it?
Why
didn't you tell me? I
never
thought . . .
Oh, Alice! What have I done?
” Whereupon I burst into tears and fled the kitchen.

I knew then that she would turn on me. A friend had become an enemy. And I was right. Alice went and tattled straightaway to the Pinkerton man hired to assist the investigation. Then, two-faced as the head of Janus, she came in tears and told us what she had done. Emma squeezed my hand tight and squared her shoulders and told our former friend, “You must do what you think right.” We would never speak to Alice Russell again.

To make matters worse, that ignorant, imbecilic ass of a druggist Eli Bence had gone scurrying, like the scurvy rat he was, straight to the newspapers to tell his story.
LIZZIE BORDEN VISITS A DRUGSTORE TO INQUIRE ABOUT POISONS!
the headlines screamed.

I chose to be dignified and deny it. “It's a
LIE!
” I hotly insisted. “I was never in that store in my life! I wouldn't be caught dead there; it's on the
wrong
side of town!”

And when a rumor implying that my father's discovery of a damning secret, that I was with child, provided fodder for more headlines, I demanded a retraction or else I would sue. I received an apology in print two days later, but the damage was done. I always wondered if David Anthony hadn't been behind it and whispered his “theory” in the right ear. But in the end it didn't matter. I never saw him alone again. He eventually married and had a family. I would occasionally catch glimpses of them from a distance riding out together, for a picnic I imagined, in first an open black carriage and later a shiny red motorcar. His wife always wore very large hats and kept her veil down—to protect her eyes from the dust or to hide the black eyes he gave her? I suppose both could be possible.

My inquest was like an open-invitation talent show, so many people turned up and took to the stage, seizing on anything they could to have a few minutes of public attention and see their names in the newspapers. And the ears of the reporters and the doors of the newspaper offices were equally open and inviting. I soon ceased to marvel at anything I might hear or read about myself. My hometown papers always used the most unflattering likeness of me they could muster, showing me scowling with protruding eyes and jowls like a bulldog, but the out-of-town papers offered their readers an idealized image, stylishly dressed with a flawless hourglass figure and curves in all the right places. There was one picture of me swooning in court while wearing a hat covered with petunias that I particularly admired, I looked so lovely, fresh, and enchanting. No wonder all the marriage proposals I received came from hundreds of miles away. It really is surprising how many gentlemen are gallant enough to want to offer the protection of their good name and holy matrimony to an accused murderess.

My cousin Anna Borden, who had been with me on the Grand Tour but whom I had hardly seen since, turned up looking more beautiful, buxom, and voluptuous than ever, with her silver-gilt hair and violet eyes, complemented by a violet linen suit and a hat heaped high with a colorful array of silken pansies and green silk fern fronds, to tell the Attorney General how upon the return voyage I had often bewailed my misfortune at having to return to such an unhappy home. She looked
so
beautiful when she lifted her net veil to swear to tell the truth and nothing but, with her lace-gloved hand resting light as a feather upon the Bible; the sight of her made me dizzy.

My mind in a fog of fear and morphine, for three whole days I muddled and blundered my way through the inquest testimony, vexing everyone with my jumbled recollections of the story Bridget and I had hastily concocted at the kitchen table.

When the District Attorney, Hosea Knowlton, questioned me, like a tenacious bulldog, about Abby, referring to her as my mother, I blurted out rudely, raising my voice in a manner I admit was most ill becoming to a lady, “
She is not my mother; she is my
step
mother!
”

That caused quite a stir in court. Soon everyone who claimed to know me was running to the newspapers with a mean-spirited tale to tell or to quote rude comments I had supposedly made about Abby, like the dressmaker who said I had called her “a mean old thing.” Maybe I did; maybe I didn't. I didn't keep a journal of every word I uttered.

And when Mr. Knowlton asked if my relations with my
step
mother had always been cordial, I coldly retorted, “That depends entirely on one's idea of cordiality!”

Cold, cold, cold!
Everyone said I was, icy and unfeeling, a human icicle. But I didn't care. Despite the sweltering August heat, I felt like an ice queen swathed in crystals and ermine sitting on a throne carved out of ice despite the blood-boiling heat of that courtroom. I knew that was how they must all imagine me
. Cold, cold, cold!
“That girl has a heart of ice!” I heard a lady seated behind me hiss to her neighbor, who was emphatic in her agreement.
Cold, cold, cold!

Everyone kept waiting for the incessant and probing questions to wear me down, for my icy cold composure to crack, and finally it did.

“I don't know what I have said. I have answered so many questions, I don't know one thing from another!” I practically shouted in Mr. Knowlton's face as I wiped the exhausted and angry tears from my eyes.

I saw triumph in his expression; he
knew
he had gotten the best of me, God blast him! He'd made me crack, and I wanted to slap him
so hard
his eyes would stay
permanently
crossed. How
dare
he smile at me in that condescending gloating fashion?
That
was no way to treat a
lady!

Yet in spite of their
private
suspicions,
publicly
no one wanted to believe that I, a respectable New England spinster lady who taught Sunday school, had done it; that would have been unthinkable and shattered too many dearly cherished illusions.
The New York Sun
summed it up best:
She is either the most injured of innocents or the blackest of monsters. She either hacked her father and stepmother to pieces with the fierce brutality of the ogre in Poe's story of the Rue Morgue or some other person did it and she suffers the double torture of losing her parents and being wrongfully accused of their murders
.

Of course, the public wanted to believe the latter, that poor innocent Lizzie was the living victim of this tragedy, but it was admittedly very difficult to do, even the most charitable souls were sorely tested. No one liked to think of a
lady
simmering day in, day out for
years
with such a potent stew of pent-up rage, grievances, frustration, self-denial, secrets, and maybe even—gasp!—repressed carnal passion, all bottled up for
years
just waiting to
explode!

Yet what fool or madman would be so bold as to stride, hatchet in hand, into a house in the broad bright light of a summer morning, with the maid outside washing windows, and the womenfolk most likely still at home at that hour, and go right upstairs and kill Abby while she was bending over making the bed in the guest room, then linger about, hiding somewhere on the premises, for well over an hour hoping he would not be discovered while he awaited a fortuitous opportunity to kill Father, and me downstairs in the kitchen desultorily ironing handkerchiefs or lazily leafing through a magazine or loitering outside under the pear tree or out in the barn rummaging for bits of iron for one reason or another? It was just too mad, too brazen to believe; not even the most crazed killer would take such risks. Only Bridget and I were in the right place at the proper time, and Bridget, pardon the pun, “had no ax to grind.” She had always spoken highly of Abby, and had been seen by several passersby that morning outside washing the windows just as she always said she was and hanging over the fence having a gossip with Mary Dooley, the neighbor's Maggie. So it
had
to be
me
. Practical, New England common sense could point the finger at no other culprit than Lizzie Borden. No one else had so much hate in their heart for the miserly millionaire and his fat cow of a wife.

I knew things were going badly. I barely made it back into the matron's room before I vomited twice and my face broke out in mottled purple blotches and I could not draw a deep breath. When they came to arrest me I was lying slumped over on a sofa with my stays unlaced after receiving another injection from Dr. Bowen, with Emma and the police matron appointed to watch me hovering anxiously over me, one armed with smelling salts, the other vigorously rubbing my hands.

Since Fall River's jail did not have suitable accommodations, they informed me I would be transported to Taunton in the morning, to the Bristol County Jail, there to await trial for my life.

I remember standing up. Then everything went black. The next thing I remember is the train station, walking sandwiched between Reverend Buck and a police matron, with uniformed officers trailing behind and all the people, curious and crowding close, hemming me in, pointing and hissing, “There
she
is!
Lizzie Borden! The murderess!
” while I stood there stoically with my veil down—the police had insisted on it, but no one was fooled—and not moving a muscle. Many took my air of detachment as proof of my guilt. I suppose they expected tears and terror or even for me to swoon. I remember the Reverend Buck holding tight to my arm and loudly insisting to all, “Her calmness is the calmness of innocence!”

Shellshock
I think now would be a better word for it. Years later when I saw the walking wounded come back from the Great War stunned and scared, with that glazed, vacant look in their eyes, starting at every sound, I saw myself in them the day I was taken to jail.

Our family attorney, Father's boyhood friend, Mr. Andrew Jennings, was most solicitous; he promised to care for me, and my interests, as though I were his very own daughter. A gentle, portly man with a horseshoe of white hair encircling his shiny bald pink pate and brows like snowy fat caterpillars, he held my hand in a fatherly manner and spoke softly, as though he were endeavoring to gentle a wild, frightened horse. “It's going to be all right, little girl,” he told me over and over again until I almost believed him. He seemed so confident and sure, and so very kind, consoling, and warm.... If only my father had been like that! It might all have been a different story—one of the nice ones with a happily ever after ending.

Mr. Jennings urged me to have a greater care for my image and valiantly set to work trying to undo the damage I had done in the court of public opinion.
Black
dresses and nothing but until the verdict, he emphatically insisted; not even my darkest blue would do. And to redress the persistent reports of my icy indifference, he had me give an interview from my cell, filled to near bursting with flowers from well-wishers, and cards inscribed with such uplifting and inspiring sentiments as “God is with the poor storm-tossed girl. He will vindicate and glorify her.”