The Secrets of Lizzie Borden (30 page)

There it all was spelled out in black and white for the whole world to read.
DAMN YOU, Mr. Edwin H. Porter!
I wanted to spit on his byline and gouge out his eyes with one of my silver spoons! I threw the paper on the floor and stamped on it, then ground it to pieces with my French heels. Did he pay the Judas who betrayed me thirty silver dollars for the story?
Damn him! How dare he spoil it? How dare he deny me
my
greatest desire? He
had a happy home, a wife and children, so who was
he
to decide that
I
didn't
deserve
the same? That I hadn't been punished enough, that since I had gotten away with murder, I should be deprived of a true and lasting love and made to grow old and die alone? He was just a newspaperman,
not God,
but he set the dogs on me.
GOD DAMN HIM, he,
Edwin H. Porter, led the pack of filthy newshounds straight to my door and ruined
EVERYTHING!

 

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:

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.