The Secrets of Lizzie Borden (12 page)

By the time I had finished dressing, my head felt very strange, like my brain had turned into a great big sopping-wet ball of cotton. I had trouble speaking, I confused and muddled my words, I could not think clearly or say what I meant, and my feet found walking to be a nearly insurmountable quandary.

“It's all right, Lizzie,” Dr. Bowen said soothingly as he took my arm, “nothing to be afraid of. Apparently a very small dose of this affects you more strongly than it does most; I shall have to remember that in the future should you have need of it again. Come on now; I'll see you safely home. And your father is waiting for my report.”

Dr. Bowen took me home and I never forgot the last thing he said to me before he rang our doorbell. “You have a friend in me, Lizzie; always remember that.”

Bridget helped me upstairs to my room, her arm about my waist, holding me close to her, coaxing me to be “careful now, Miss Lizzie,” whenever I stumbled like a drunkard.

“Oh, Bridget!” I sighed with the most wanton delight as she undressed me.

I fell onto my bed, clad only in my drawers and chemise, and tried to pull her down on top of me. Smiling good-naturedly, Bridget wriggled out of my embrace, chiding me gently when I untied her apron strings and tried to kiss her with clumsy lips that wouldn't quite obey.

“Now, now,
macushla
”—she smiled and stroked my brow—“you just lie there an' rest quietly now like a good girl. You're not quite yourself, but you'll be better soon, Dr. Bowen said.”

Macushla!
She had called me
her darling
,
her dear! Macushla!
I'd never heard a sweeter word! I smiled up at her with love shining in my eyes as she covered me with my quilt. I slept the rest of the day and the whole night through. Morphine and Morpheus, the God of Sleep, stripped away my shame and sent me dreams so sweet, so luxuriantly lascivious, it would tarnish them forever if I dared set them down on paper.
Macushla!
Then as now—I'll live on that word for the rest of my life!

 

Much to my surprise, pining for my architect as I was day and night, I think I fell a little in love with Dr. Bowen after that. It wasn't that I no longer cared for my architect, but he was a whole world away with a great big ocean between us and Dr. Bowen was here
now
and just across the street. Maybe I was just so hungry for love that
any
love would do as long as it was lasting and true?

The pictures I'd hung on my walls to remind me of my “sweet taste of freedom” only seemed to mock me with bittersweet memories. And I had been too afraid of my family's mockery and laughter to show myself in any of the dresses I had bought in Paris. In the end, when I could no longer bear to look at them, I bundled them up and discreetly, anonymously, left them for the church to distribute to those in need. I was mortified the Saturday I ventured into the worst part of town with my arms full of peonies with the other ladies of the Fruit and Flower Mission and saw a fancy woman with a painted face and black hair glinting bold blue lights wearing my discarded caramel and apple-green stripes. She'd shortened the skirt to show off her shapely calves, trim ankles, and tiny feet, and recut the bodice to reveal as much of her bosom as was permissible on a public street and sheared off the sleeves to bare her fleshy white arms. Despite the indecent alterations, it looked much better on her than it ever had on me. I couldn't believe I had been fool enough to buy it and was glad I had never been foolish enough to wear it in Fall River; I would surely have been laughed off the street if I had. In the months to come I also caught glimpses of some of her “sisters of the pavement” strutting about like flaunting peacocks in my forsaken finery. Every time, I felt the warring tug of admiration and envy. They were so bold, so brave, so beautiful, so
free
—free like I wanted to be! They lived their lives unchained, charting their own course, answering to no man, their hungers and desires unfettered by duty and rules.

That summer, when my family went to the farm in Swansea I stayed behind. I wanted to be alone, I felt stifled and wanted space and time to reflect in; my hungry soul
craved
the illusion of freedom.

Every Sunday Dr. Bowen would call for me in his buggy and drive me to church. We were neighbors, after all, and he was our family doctor, so I never thought anyone would make anything of it. But we soon became the subject of gossip, with people hinting that perhaps I was not entirely alone in the house at 92 Second Street.

Bridget was there, of course, but without the drugs swimming like a school of brave and fearless sharks through my veins I was so ashamed of my drowsily and dreamily remembered morphine-induced attempt at seduction, I held myself aloof and kept my distance. I found it exceedingly difficult to meet her eyes without blushing, and trying to talk to her at all, even about the most innocuous, mundane things like marketing, laundry, and dinner, tied my tongue in knots every time.

Yet most nights when I lay alone in my bed, staring at the ceiling, it was Bridget whom I thought of, so near, yet so far, in the attic above me. I thought of her lying there on her narrow cot. What was she wearing? Did she don a nightgown for bed or did she sleep au naturel or in her chemise? I wondered if she ever touched herself and if she ever thought of me and sighed, “
Lizzie!
” into the sultry night.

At first, I would always stop and scold myself and try to make myself think of my architect, or Dr. Bowen, or the hero of the latest novel that I had read, instead, but dreams of Bridget, and sometimes, like a ghost from the past, vibrant images of Lulie Stillwell, straddling me stark naked in sugary-sweet clouds of perfumed powder, kept intruding no matter how hard I tried, and in the end I just gave up and put out the light, trusting my secrets to the night.

One night, after I had put the candle out, I awakened suddenly at the feel of long hair grazing my face and tickling my naked breasts. I felt a hot breath caress my cheek. “This is just a dream,” a husky Irish voice whispered in my ear right before a pair of warm lips descended hungrily over mine.
Wonderful
things happened in the darkness.
Wonderful, wonderful things!

“This is just a dream,” the voice whispered again before love vanished from my arms and I was left alone again.

The next morning in the kitchen I tentatively said to Bridget as she served me my breakfast, “I had the most wonderful dream last night.”

“Did you now, Miss Lizzie?” she asked casually as she poured me a cup of coffee.

“Yes.” I nodded, then added eagerly, “I hope I will have it again tonight.”

“Dreams don't work that way,
macushla,
” Bridget said, then went on with her work. “Oh, dem golden slippers, oh, dem golden slippers, golden slippers I'se going to wear because they look so neat . . .” she sang with gusto as she turned her back to me and began to wash the dishes.

That night I lay tense and hopeful in the darkness, my breath catching at each creak of the old cracker box house, hoping it heralded a footstep outside my door followed by the knob turning. But I was destined to pass that night, and every other after, alone in disappointment. Bridget was right about dreams. I never did have that one again.

On the last Sunday of the summer, before my family returned, Dr. Bowen and I went for a buggy ride after church. I was wearing the blue eyelet dress with the satin sash I had worn that magical day at Glastonbury and a new straw hat with silk ribbon streamers trailing down my back.

We alighted, to stretch our legs and let his team of handsome chestnuts have a rest and graze upon the emerald grass. The sun was blazing bright and we sought a respite under a shady tree and I shamelessly let him kiss me. My mind was an ocean away, and I suppose I was trying to re-create the most magical moment of my life.

Dr. Bowen drew back from me as if I were a snake and had bitten him, though he had initiated our embrace . . . I think? There are moments, I admit, when I am really not quite sure and think perhaps that
I
may have kissed him.

“My word, you are a forward girl; aren't you, Lizzie?” Dr. Bowen said, his voice a disturbing, shaky blend of disapproval and feigned joviality. The smile wavered uncertainly on his lips but never quite reached his eyes.

The sky had begun to darken, portending one of those sudden summer storms, and we sat in tomb-like silence as we drove home under a leaden sky.

A few months later when Dr. Bowen married the beautiful sylphlike brunette Phoebe Southard I was there, florid faced, sweating, and straining to keep my false smile from slipping into an honest scowl, laced to lung-bursting tightness in a fussy bow and ruffle-bedecked lavender chiffon bridesmaid's dress and an enormous ruffled monstrosity of a hat haphazardly dripping swags of seed pearls and sprouting lily of the valley like a garden grown out of control. It was the fussiest,
ugliest
bridesmaid's dress I had ever seen in my life! There were swags of imitation pearls all over it, draped around the shoulders, bodice, and skirt, that snagged on every blessed thing! Phoebe Bowen had the most abominable taste of any female I ever knew! Her parlor looked like it was decorated by circus clowns!

As Dr. Bowen, with his beaming bride clinging to his arm, passed by me, on their way to their ribbon-and-flower-bedecked wedding buggy, the new Mrs. Bowen's veil caught briefly on the bouquet I clutched murderously in my trembling and perspiring pig-pink hands. I wanted to beat her over the head with it! But Phoebe didn't have a clue, she just smiled at me, radiant with a delight we both knew I could never share, and I don't think her eyes actually even saw me, they were so blinded by bliss, as she quickly disentangled her
hideous
veil.

Dr. Bowen didn't even glance at me, not even when the girl standing beside me caught the wedding bouquet. He stared pointedly past me.

Forwardness in a New England girl is not easily forgiven, or forgotten.

 

As for my Englishman, he kept his promise; he did indeed write to me. But he was a man meant to go out into the world and do great things, and I was a woman, a daughter, meant to bide at home, chained and bound by convention and familial duty. Had I only possessed the courage to break the shackles of tradition and risk the loss of my inheritance . . . But would he have had me with such a stain upon me? Men prize a woman's virtue and respectability, her obedience, and chastity; they make us into ivory statues of domestic goddesses, paragons of the hearth and home, and put us up on pedestals to venerate and admire. Never realizing, or caring, how precarious it is to teeter up so high and to look down and see how far one risks to fall. And if perchance one actually does fall . . . How many fallen women have managed to claw their way back up to that dizzyingly high pinnacle of respectability? A good name once blackened can never be scrubbed virgin white clean again.

As much as I longed for his letters, I also came to dread them. I feared what he might one day tell me: that he had spoken the words I so longed to hear to another. Every time a letter arrived I would sit and hold it in my trembling hands for the longest time while an icy fear gripped my heart and threatened to loosen my bowels. My head would start to ache and a cold sweat would trickle slowly down my spine even though I felt so hot I would have to open my gown and loosen my corset.

For what seemed like hours, I would sit there holding his precious letter, which had traveled all the way across the sea to bring his words to me, until the sun went down and it was too dark to read without lighting a lamp, and by then I was too tired, so I went to bed, always promising myself that I would read it in the morning, right after breakfast, only to postpone it as there was work to be done, an errand I must run, or a meeting I must attend, and then repeat the whole scene again and again and again.

Somehow not knowing was better, but it was also worse. I left them unopened until I had accumulated a small stack. What must he have thought of me? That I was fickle and had lost interest or fallen ill or even died? Fear and longing possessed me; they fought a battle royal within my soul. I wanted to be with him so badly! I could not sleep or eat. My cheeks grew gaunt, fat melted from my frame, and my eyes sank into deep dark circles.

At last, I summoned all my courage and carried the letters downstairs to the kitchen stove one Thursday afternoon when everyone else was out. I added kindling and watched the fire blaze and then, tears running down my face, with a wrenching cry, the howl of a broken heart, bursting from my breast, I threw them in and watched them burn. I regretted it the moment I did it and burned my fingers trying to snatch them back again. But it was too late . . .
too late!

The letters are long gone now, reduced to ashes, and I can but wonder what he had to say and whether it would have thrilled my heart or wounded it to the core. He will never know how much I loved him or that I never truly stopped, despite whatever I might have felt for others. He remains my one true love, the only one I never let myself, or the reality of my life, ruin; he exists only in my dreams, more god in his perfection than any flesh and blood man could ever hope to be. Perhaps it truly is better that way.

From the moment his letters crumbled into ashes I wanted to turn back the clock and undo what I had done, to find a way to make everything right. Oh, the reams of paper I wasted trying to write and tell him, to explain everything, what I had done and why. But every word I wrote seemed to make even a worse muddle of it and in the end I stopped trying. Maybe silence truly was best? And I was too great a coward to write the truth that was in my heart. I was a
lady
. I could not be so brazen as to speak of love; a lady
always
waits for a gentleman to broach the subject first. I felt the distance that yawned between us so keenly, the miles of land and sea. I felt it grow greater with every day that passed until it was so vast that no mere letter or telegram, not even a steamship, could bridge the gulf between us. And so I let go of the one person I wanted more than anything to draw closer to me, even though Reason said it could never be. Father would never let me go, he would see marriage and a life abroad as abandonment and disinherit me, and I could not ask my architect to exchange bustling exciting, beautiful, cosmopolitan London and the whole wide world for the narrow confines and even smaller minds of Fall River. And I was far too proud to ask him to accept no other dowry but me—the miserly millionaire's now penniless, spinster daughter. I loved him too much to do that to him; it would have been akin to a life prison term, a punishment, and in time his love for me, if it ever really was love, would have soured and turned to resentment and eventually hate. And I could not bear that.