The Secrets of Lizzie Borden Read online

  I had imagined feeling something of the thrill a bride must experience on her nuptial morning knowing that a whole new life lies before her, but now . . . the blood and bulky towel had spoiled it all. I was so angry I could cry! I grimaced and drew my knees up tighter as another wave of pain washed over me, and tried to recapture some of the joy by thinking of all the money-pinching misery and resentment I was leaving behind me.

  By the time Mother died Father was well on his way to becoming one of the richest men in Fall River. He had worked hard, scrimping and saving, shrewdly investing his earnings, seizing, like a champion wrestler, every opportunity to profit in a stranglehold, and persuading heartbroken and tear-blinded mourners that if they truly loved their dearly departed spouses, siblings, and offspring they would prove it by laying them to rest in the safe, luxurious, moisture-proof, vermin-impervious padded snow-white satin-lined embrace of a Crane’s Patented Burial Casket, a bed for eternity finer than any these humble folk had likely ever slept on in life, of which he had the honor of being the exclusive local distributor. There was no finer casket to be had in all Massachusetts, not even in Boston, he would declare, proudly patting the one he kept for show in his office, sometimes even inviting them to climb inside and see for themselves, always describing the proffered experience as “a little taste of Heaven.”

  When they hemmed and hawed about the expense, protesting their love, but uncertain if they could actually afford to lavish their hard-earned dollars upon the dead, Father would offer a simple and happy solution for all—in lieu of his customary fee he would gladly, and graciously, accept a lien upon their property; thus they would have several months to discharge the debt. More often than not, dazed by their bereavement, they put their trust in Father and nodded blindly, acceding to his every expensive suggestion for giving their loved one a grand send-off, thus accumulating a debt these simple country people could hardly ever even hope to repay.

  In six months to a year, depending on the terms they had agreed upon, they would have cause to weep again when the bank—by then Father sat proudly on the Board of Directors of half a dozen—inevitably foreclosed and they found themselves homeless and Father snapped their property up like a lucky penny. In this manner he gradually acquired a number of profitable rental properties and a reputation for being the most hard-hearted landlord in Fall River and its environs. If he heard that one of his tenants was prospering, he immediately raised the rent, and if they fell on hard times, out they went. “Which is harder?” a popular joke went. “Granite, marble, or Andrew Borden’s heart?”

  What little comfort the dispossessed might have derived from the knowledge that they had beggared themselves for a noble cause would be considerably diminished if they knew how great an advantage Father took of broken hearts and tear-blinded eyes.

  Those much-touted Crane’s Patented Burial Caskets Father was so proud of were just about as sturdy and moisture proof as matchboxes; an earthworm bumping its head against one could have knocked the walls down if the lid didn’t cave in after the first shovel full of earth thudded down on top of it.

  Whenever Father proudly petted his prized display model, which truly was an object of beauty painstakingly crafted with exquisite care, unlike the shoddy product turned out by the factory, and caressed the “heavenly soft” white satin within he was in reality selling a fantasy.

  Father always led the bereaved away before the actual interment, telling them they could best honor their loved one’s memory by remembering them in the glorious bloom of health and vigor instead of watching their coffin being lowered six feet into the ground and hearing the thud of earth—such a sad sound with the harsh, inescapable ring of finality!—upon the lid. Nor did they know that most adult men, and a few women too, were consigned to their eternal rest without their feet, and also their jewelry, gold fillings, and teeth, and ladies with particularly handsome tresses habitually entered the Kingdom of Heaven shorn like convicts while Father hastened to sell their hair to a wigmaker in Boston with whom he had a lucrative and congenial arrangement. He had a similar agreement with a dentist who used the teeth of the dead to craft dentures to fill the mouths of the living. To cut costs, Father habitually purchased the shortest adult-sized coffins the Crane Company manufactured and then sawed the feet off corpses to make them fit. I often wondered if centuries after we were all returned to dust an archaeologist came along and excavated the land behind the chicken coop of our Swansea farm what he would make of the mass burial of hundreds of human feet. When the rare mourner exhibited a glint of shrewdness and remarked that their loved one looked uncommonly short in his coffin, Father was quick to retort that without life to fill them people always looked smaller in death.

  Two years after our mother died, Father decided to forsake the funerary trade and the farm at Swansea and concentrate on his more lucrative and refined business ventures involving banking, textiles, and real estate in the business district of Fall River, thus necessitating our move to that city.

  He put the farm, the only home Emma and I had ever known, up for rent, and moved us all into town and an ugly cracker box house at 92 Second Street, painted the most hideous shade of drab I ever saw, sort of a dull, muddy olive green tinged with an even uglier gray or brown depending on how the light struck it, though personally I always felt it would have been far better if lightning had struck it. Surrounded by a picket fence and situated on an almost pleasant street lined with elms and poplars, the house itself was a monstrosity. It was a former duplex that had been converted, ineptly and as cheaply as possible, into a single-family dwelling; thus there were no hallways and all of the rooms led directly into one another, so no one could reach the privacy of their bedroom without first passing invasively through another’s private sanctum. But Father had “gotten it for cheap” and fully, if hideously, furnished by hopelessly outmoded people who hadn’t the faintest clue about what was au courant even twenty years ago. I hated it on sight, but Father said I was the most ungrateful girl he ever knew or heard tell of; I didn’t even know the meaning of the word gratitude, and I should be thankful to have a roof over my head when so many others didn’t even have that much.

  The sudden change from country life to city life was jarring. We had known no other life. Emma and I had loved the clean, fresh air, green grass, wildflowers, pure water streams, fishing holes, animals, and wide-open spaces of the farm, and the days spent frolicking with our cousins and nearest neighbors, the Gardners. Leaving Swansea for Fall River was almost like moving from Heaven to Hell. Fall River was a thriving mill town booming with big brick chimneys belching clouds of black smoke and red sparks into the sky day and night to the music of the constant thrum, hum, and roar of machinery from the eighty-seven mills that earned it the proud sobriquet of “Spindle City” and made it the largest producer of cotton in America.

  But an even more drastic change lay in store. Father decided to take another wife. When Emma wept and said it was disloyal to Mother’s memory, Father countered that life was for the living and Mother was as dead as she was ever going to be. It was the sensible thing to do, he said, far cheaper than hiring a housekeeper to look after the house and a pair of growing girls who needed a woman’s guidance. When I suggested a governess—Emma had just finished reading Jane Eyre and had told me the story—Father glared and leveled a finger at me like a Puritan minister about to denounce a woman as a witch or a whore before his entire congregation and thundered the word SPENDTHRIFT! as though it was the worst insult he could think to hurl at me.

  The year was 1865. Though I was only five, I remember well the Sunday Father took us to the Central Congregational Church and, after the service, introduced us to the woman he had chosen to be our stepmother.

  Her name was Abby Durfee Gray; she was thirty-seven years old and had long since resigned herself to spinsterhood and embraced the consolation of sweets in lieu of a sweetheart. She was shy, short, and round as a full moon. Though she was descended, like us Bordens, from one of the first f
amilies of Puritan settlers who had arrived in Fall River in the seventeenth century, the branch she sprang from was a poor one. Like our own grandfather, whose poverty-stricken ghost Father was always running away from, hers had been a pushcart peddler, though he sold gewgaws made of tin to delight children, and little pies and cakes his wife baked instead of stinking fish.

  She was wearing a massive crinoline beneath her Sunday best and I could not help but stare; I’d never seen a hoop so enormous. She’d made the dress herself, proof of her talent as a seamstress that, along with her cakes, cookies, and pies that no picnic, women’s gathering, or church social was ever complete without, often supplemented her meager income. It was charcoal-gray damask trimmed with ribbons the color of ripe plums, with wide pagoda sleeves billowing over puffed clouds of gauzy white under-sleeves trimmed with frills of lace and silk ribbons at the wrists. Beneath a matching feathered hat, her thick dark hair, actually an impressive false piece artfully braided in to lend volume to her own sparse tresses, was caught up in a net of braided purple silk sewn here and there with seed pearls. A pair of amethyst and pearl earbobs dangled like heavy ripe plums from the fleshy pink lobes of her ears and a mother-of-pearl brooch carved in the shape of a peony that her mother had worn upon her wedding day bloomed in the snowy lace at her throat.

  She had such a kind face, round and open, the sort of face that knows no artifice and shows every joy and hurt as it happens. She was not like most adults, who when introduced to children stare down at them with superior eyes and a slight, tolerant smile. When Father introduced us she immediately crouched down to shake my hand and smile at me face-to-face.

  She so wanted to be liked! That never changed in all the time I knew her. In that open, sincere, trusting way she had—she truly did wear her heart upon her sleeve—she told me how much she had always wanted a daughter, a little girl, to play dolls and dress-up with, to sew and bake with; she said we could try out new recipes and have a different cake or pie every Saturday. She complimented my hair—“what lovely hair for curling!”—and said that she hoped we would be real friends. Her shy smile and hopeful words touched my heart, but even as I nodded and answered her with a smile of my own, I was aware of fifteen-year-old Emma standing vigilantly, and sullenly, behind me, like a skinny black crow, still wearing mourning for our mother and keeping a steadfast, iron grip upon my shoulder while glowering a warning at Abby. Emma had stepped into our mother’s shoes where I was concerned and was not about to vacate them. I was hers and she aimed to keep it that way. And I soon found myself caught between my sister and stepmother like a rag doll two little girls were waging a war over.

  In those days, when I was a child and thought like one, I genuinely liked Abby; I might even have loved her. But Emma hated her right from the start; “the Cow,” “that useless cow,” “that greedy fat slug,” she always called her.

  Emma made me choose between herself and Abby—between my own flesh and blood sister who had been like a mother to me since our own had died and the usurper who had come to take, to steal, our mother’s place—and with the cruelty unique to children, I broke Abby’s heart. I turned my back on the woman who, from the day I started school until I left it, made sure the smell of cookies, moist and hot, straight from the oven, greeted me the moment I walked through the door. The woman who had scoffed at Emma’s imperious pronouncement that redheads could not wear pink and made me a dress that color and curled my hair with pink ribbons to satisfy my childish craving for that candy-sweet color. The woman who had laboriously lowered her hefty bulk down to sit on the floor and carefully cut the figures of fashionably dressed ladies from the pages of Godey’s Lady’s Book to make paper dolls and play with me. But Emma was always there to goad and remind me, to make me feel guilty, and force me to choose. So, to please Emma, and honor our dear dead mother’s memory, I hardened my heart against Abby and slammed the door upon her smiling face and the hands that seemed to always be holding out a special gift for me or reaching out to hug me and soothe away all my childish hurts from cruel words spoken by schoolchildren to skinned knees. I know now that I should not have had to choose.

  And when Abby, denied the affection of her stepdaughters, and often even simple human courtesy, began to turn more and more to her half sister Sarah Whitehead, thirty-five years younger than herself and the perfect age to fill a daughter’s void, I hated her for it. I hated Abby, and I hated Sarah! We—Emma and I—used to call them “the greedy sow and her piglet.”

  Emma was convinced somehow, someway, if ever it were in Abby’s power, little Sarah, who grew up into a pathetic, tired, and sniveling woman, hopeless with housework, and saddled with too many children and a drunken brute of a husband who was unwilling to work and beat her regularly to prove himself a man and her master, would somehow supplant us and lay claim to Father’s fortune when he died.

  “She only married Father to stake their claim to the inheritance that should rightfully be ours,” Emma insisted.

  That was the bee in Emma’s bonnet and it buzzed incessantly and drove her mad! If Father died without a will, or wrote one that favored Abby above us, Emma relentlessly reminded me, then, like orphaned girls in a fairy tale, we would be beholden to our stepmother for our every want and need, having to go to her like beggars with our hands out, while Sarah reigned supreme like a little princess upon whom all good things were showered.

  This was Emma’s obsession, nursed like a poisonous black viper at her breast year after miserable year, and I shared it, faithfully nurturing and tending it alongside her, fearing that it might be true, and letting every act of generosity shown to Sarah fuel our fears and animosity, and goad us on to greater cruelty. We were not very kind to “the greedy sow and her piglet”; no wonder Sarah Whitehead despised “those uppity Borden girls” and urged Abby to do the same. But Abby only looked at us with the sad and wary eyes of a dog that has been kicked too many times by someone who used to love it. Her smiles grew tentative and fewer and her figure grew rounder as she found the cookies, cakes, and pies she baked more comforting and sweeter than her stepdaughters’ sour and cantankerous company. Could anyone, in all honesty, really blame her? We—Emma and I—did.

  The house only added to our sorrows; it was a never-ending source of kindling to heap upon the bonfire of our hatred and discontent. Though he could easily have afforded to without any discomfort or sacrifice, Father refused to allow the house to be hooked up to the gas main. While even our poorer neighbors’ lives were lit by the warm and welcoming glow of gaslight, ours were illuminated by kerosene lamps and candles, and we often went to bed with the sun to save on both rather than listen to Father preach and prate about the expense.

  “Sensible people,” he always said whenever the subject was broached, “go to bed with the sun just like chickens; only madmen and fools sit up all night.”

  When I mentioned that I had read in a magazine that both Mozart and Beethoven kept late hours, burning the midnight oil to create immortal and beloved masterpieces that were with us still, he nodded and murmured “madmen and fools,” as though I were affirming, not contradicting, his assertion.

  Nor were we afforded the by then rather commonplace luxury of hot and cold running water and a proper bathroom with toilet and tub. Instead, in the privacy of our bedrooms we relieved ourselves into tin slop pails, or made our way, lamp in hand, down the steep, dark stairs to the crude cellar privy where we also bathed in a battered old tin tub filled with water heated on the stove that was already tepid by the time one stepped into the tub. The situation was made even more intolerable by walls so thin everyone knew when anyone was making use of the slop pail. A sputtering fundament, the plop of droppings, the tinkle of urine; no cough, belch, or breaking of wind was a secret in that house. Emma and I could even hear every time Father mounted his fat mare and rode her to a grunting, gasping finish. At times I almost envied our Maggie sleeping alone upstairs in a tiny sliver of a room beneath a sharply slanting ceiling. Emma and I could never enterta
in; we were too ashamed of our shabby outmoded furnishings, the oil lamps and primitive privy, the threadbare carpets and dingy, faded wallpaper where the flowers had lost all their color. “This house has sucked all the life out of them,” I once said to Emma, “just like it is trying to do to us.” And any thoughts of gentleman callers when we reached courting age were quickly abandoned; we just couldn’t bear for them to see the way we were made to live.

  We didn’t live rich, but everyone knew the truth—while reasonable thrift was in most eyes accounted a virtue, Father took it to the opposite extreme; he was niggardly to a fault and made sharecroppers look like the nouveau riche. His parsimony made us laughingstocks and kept us from assuming our proper place in society. We were, after all, descendants of one of Fall River’s founding families, and deserved to be right in the fast, beating heart of fashionable society, the crème de la crème who lived up on The Hill in opulent, modernized mansions, instead of sulking pitiably on its fringes.

  And neither Emma nor I could be considered a beauty even in the most charitable terms, to call us pretty was even a stretch of the imagination; we needed the promise of a generous dowry to help bait our traps for a suitable husband. But thanks to Father all we had was vinegar, not honey, and that was no way to catch a beau! No worthwhile gentleman of respectable means or prospects would ever bother courting a girl who lived in such deplorable and miserly conditions. Unless she was a rare and raving beauty, like a rose blooming through the cracked and parched sidewalks of a tenement slum, he would instead do the sensible thing and look elsewhere for a bride. And who could blame him?

  By then Father oversaw his business empire from a big three-story red granite building downtown bearing his name, the A. J. Borden Building, where he rented out shops to purveyors of luxury goods on the ground floor, while denying his daughters a house up on The Hill, where all the richest and best people lived a life of luxury and ease and even the dogs wore diamond collars. What good was all that money piling up in the bank if it couldn’t make our lives better? There were no debuts in white dresses and pearls for the Borden girls and we drifted wretchedly, painstakingly, through our marriageable years and became old maids without any gentlemen ever knocking upon our door, hat in hand, asking to go out walking with us or to escort us to a dance, clambake, sing-along, or sleighing party. We sat alone, or with other old maids, at church socials and Sunday band concerts in the park, enviously eying the more fortunate girls and their beaus, and privately wept over the marriage announcements in The Fall River Globe. Our dance cards were always empty because we never even made it to the dance. We never had the chance!