The Secrets of Lizzie Borden (13 page)

I have not kept up with the details of his life. Though I wish him every happiness, I do not want to know, I cannot bear to know, about the woman who walks and sleeps at his side and has the life, the love, that should have been mine. In the years to come, whenever I visited New York and Boston and mingled with people who regularly traveled abroad I would feel such a sharp sense of dread, of trepidation, that made my head so light and my knees frightfully wobbly and weak, as I both yearned and feared to hear his name spoken, but I never did.

I've often wondered what he must have thought of me when news of my infamy crossed the sea. And yet, somehow, I've always felt a little less lonely knowing that he is out there somewhere, living his life, even if a whole ocean and half the world lie between us. I like to think of him working in his office in London, brow furrowed with concentration as he bends over his plans, meticulously drawing the lines that would give birth to a new building or rechecking his calculations, pencil smudges on his hands and his blond hair flopping down vexingly into his eyes, or walking across the countryside with his sketchbook and charcoal pencils sketching the great wonders of mankind and nature.

Sometimes the sadness still steals over me and I cry for what might have been. How different my life would have been! I would have been lost to history; there would have been no murders at 92 Second Street, no immortal singsong rhyme about forty whacks; no one would have even remembered my name after I died—I would have had a
different
name; he would have changed that, just like he changed my life.

Chapter
4

W
hen Emma came in I was lying on my bed, dreaming over a romance novel about a beautiful geisha girl named Snow Lily dying of love for an American sailor who treated everyone who ever loved him badly. Emma slammed the lid back on the nearly empty box of chocolates beside me and shoved it away in disgust and snatched the book from where it lay open over my breasts and flung it across the room so that its spine cracked against the wall.

“You rot your brain and your insides with such rubbish!” she cried.

“If that's all you came for, Emma . . .” I endeavored unsuccessfully to stifle a yawn as I reached for the candy box again.

Emma just glared at me, then heaved a heavy sigh and sat down on the bed beside me.

“That treacherous sow is at work again; she and her greedy piglet are conniving against us. . . .”

Emma's eyes burned like coal as she proceeded to tell me that Sarah Whitehead had come that very morning to visit Abby. Over coffee, watered down with Sarah's tears, and mincemeat pie—Sarah ate two slices and Abby four—Sarah had sobbed out her dilemma. Her mother wanted to sell the house and move away, to a warmer clime more hospitable to her rheumatism and asthma, and Sarah and her drunken, good-for-nothing husband could barely make ends meet, so it was simply
impossible
for them to buy the house.

“We shall have to move!” Sarah sobbed and laid her head down, blind in her despair to the slice of pie Abby had just set on her empty plate.

Clucking sympathetically, Abby gathered Sarah in her arms, tenderly wiping the mincemeat and crumbs from her blotchy wet face, and promised everything would be all right, they wouldn't lose the house. “I'll have a word with Mr. Borden as soon as he comes home. . . .”

“Don't you see what's going to happen, Lizzie?” Emma hunched over me like an evil black crow.

I shrugged and yawned disinterestedly, then, since Emma clearly required it, recited tiredly: “Abby will persuade Father to buy the house, which he of course will, since he
never
lets the chance for another rental property pass him by, and the Whiteheads will be
so grateful
to have a roof over their miserable heads, even if it does leak and threaten to fall down on them at every turn, that they will forget that in the bargain they have also acquired a landlord who makes Satan look like Father Christmas and being related to him by marriage doesn't ease their plight any. If they don't already know it, woe to them if they're late with the rent by so much as half a day or short by even one penny. Father only takes goods in exchange for money if he can sell them at a profit. And what have the Whiteheads got to offer him? George is drunk all the time, the garden went to weeds long ago, and even if it hadn't none of them can grow beans; the hens don't lay and wander around eating worms until foxes or thieves carry them all off. No one would pay to eat Sarah's cooking; her baked goods don't win her prizes like Abby's do, only black eyes for her and bellyaches for her husband and children. She can't take in laundry; Heaven knows that woman ruins everything she tries to clean; you'd think bluing and starch were her worst enemies the way they act in her hands! And she can't sew either! Remember the time she ran over here weeping to Abby, begging her to fix George's shirt before he woke up and needed to put it on, and it turned out that in trying to sew the buttons back on she'd actually sewn it shut. If it weren't for Abby, the children would be running around stark naked or else wearing flour sacks with holes cut out for their heads and arms; they go to school barefoot as it is.”

I yawned again and got up to retrieve my book. Snow Lily had been about to throw herself in a volcano and I was very anxious about her fate; I was hoping the handsome cannibal chieftain who loved her secretly from afar would come to her rescue in time. “So what's to worry about?” I shrugged again and asked Emma. “The Whiteheads don't have anything
I
want.”

“
You stupid girl!
” Emma cuffed my ear. “Look to the future! Or are you too lazy to even
think
about tomorrow?”

“Just a moment, Emma,” I said tartly as I cradled my smarting ear. “Let me try and think where I left my crystal ball.”

Emma slapped me again. “Don't you even
care
that our inheritance is being stolen right out from under our noses?”

“How so, Emma?” I lay back and frowned as I examined the ugly brownish-red paint stains marring the whole left side of the skirt of my lovely new diamond-patterned sky- and navy-blue housedress. It made me want to cry! I had been careless and brushed up against a wall of wet paint when Father had given in to my complaining and had the painters in last month just to please me, “to spiff the old place up.” Then I had gone and ruined my new dress the very first day I had worn it and Mrs. Raymond didn't have any of the fabric left to make me a new one and I didn't like any of the other patterns she offered me. Emma said I was just being obstinate, but I didn't think so; those double blue diamonds arranged so you couldn't quite decide whether they were dark blue on a light blue ground or the other way around were quite unusual and I hadn't seen anything else like them. Abby and Bridget had both tried all the remedies they knew for removing stains, but to no avail; their well-intended ministrations had only left my lovely dress looking woefully tired out and faded. To look at it now, one would think it was ten years old instead of a practically new dress.

“It's just another rental property,” I continued. “The money will go into Father's bank account, just like the other rents do.”

Emma slapped down my ruffled hem in disgust—“I don't know why you don't tear that thing up for rags or, better yet,
burn
it!
I
wouldn't be caught dead wearing it in the state it's in!”—and caught my chin in her hand, her nails
biting
into my skin as she leaned over me and stared deep into my eyes. “And what if he leaves the house to Abby in his will and she gives it to the Whiteheads? Did you ever bother to think about
that,
Lizzie? Whether she gives it to them in her lifetime, or leaves it to them in her will, the result is the same—
we
will lose all future claim to it!”

“Emma”—I pulled away from her, frowning as I rubbed at the smarting red indentations her nails had left in my skin—“the three little pigs could have built a sturdier and more attractive house out of sticks and mud! As rental properties go, it's a
raging
headache; let someone else have it, even if it is Abby and, eventually, Sarah! It's just
one
little ramshackle falling-to-bits house, and I for one don't care a fig about it and you shouldn't either!”

“But
I
do!” Emma leapt up and began pacing frantically back and forth before my bed, her black skirt sweeping the floor as I kept meaning, and forgetting, to do. “It's the principle of the thing, Lizzie! Father's money—
our inheritance
—will buy the house, and if he gives it to Abby, now or later, he will be cheating us out of money that is rightfully
ours!
That Cow is cheating us right under our very noses and
you're
either too blind to see it or too stupid to care! But I do,
I do!
By Heaven, I won't let them get away with this!” Emma shook her fist in the air like some madwoman in a melodrama, then stormed out of my room, slamming the door behind her.

I rolled my eyes and flopped back onto my pillows and returned to my book. Frankly, I was more interested in the fate of Snow Lily than I was in the Whiteheads and their miserable hovel of a house.

 

Emma raised such a row over the Whiteheads' house that, just to quiet her, Father ended up deeding our grandfather's old house on Ferry Street jointly to us, so we could draw a monthly rent, divided and deposited into each of our bank accounts, to save or spend as we pleased.

It seemed at first an ideal solution for all. But we resented being bothered by the tenants—we only wanted their money, not their problems. We didn't want to hear hard-luck stories or their wretched whining about problems with the plumbing; they made our heads ache. And I, for one, resented taking money out of
my
bank account to pay for repairs to a house someone else was living in. Why did they have to try to make their leaks and breaks
my
problem? Why didn't they just deal with it themselves and leave me alone? We—Emma and I—were giving them a roof over their heads, keeping them out of the rain, for God's sake; they should have been
grateful!
And I had problems enough of my own without taking on theirs! In the end, just to appease us, and avoid a lawsuit, Father bought the house back from us for $5,000, which was more than it was worth. He said it made his head ache too and this was a perfect example of why women should keep to the home and hearth and leave business matters solely in the hands of men.

Privately, I couldn't help but agree and decided then and there that if I ever had to deal with the like again I would hire a trusty and efficient business manager who would never even
think
to bother me about such trifles, and in addition to that I would purchase the best insurance to cover every eventuality.

But Emma just could not let go. She never did stop simmering about the Whiteheads' house. She took it as a personal slight. Father had in fact deeded the property to Abby, warning her not to be too softhearted and to think of her own future and not just of her kinfolk's comfort and well-being, and to remember that after he was gone the rents on that house would provide her with a regular income. Emma was even more miffed when Father took the rent the Whiteheads paid to Abby and started a savings account; “a nest egg for her widowhood,” he called it.

I really couldn't understand why Emma was so upset. I, for one,
hated
being a landlord. I was happy to let Abby have that house; even squinting and looking at it from across the road with one eye covered I could tell that it was nothing but a pile of headaches waiting to happen, and I didn't want to be the one they happened to. I much preferred the dividends from the shares in the Globe Yarn Mill and the Crystal Springs Bleach Company that Father had given me in lieu of a graduation present when I dropped out of high school. As for Abby's little nest egg, I thought it rather sensible; I honestly didn't see it as the “greedy siphoning of our inheritance” like Emma did.

 

The situation only worsened a few months later when George Whitehead woke up after a long drunk and found a stray goat that had wandered in through the broken back door licking his bare feet and took it into his head that he and his family deserved better and that Abby, being married to Fall River's miserly millionaire, could do
much
better for them if she
really
wanted to. If she loved Sarah as much as she said she did, why didn't she prove it? Mincemeat pies and clothes for the children were all well and good, but a decent house would be much better.

After a lengthy series of drunken rants and beatings Sarah ended up back at our kitchen table in tears again with both her eyes blackened and her lips burst and blood crusted.

I don't know if the idea sprang from George's head into Sarah's or straight from Abby's, but someone suggested our farm in Swansea as the perfect happy and wholesome home for the Whiteheads, somewhere green where they could make a fresh start.

Emma and I were in complete accord—
this
was a betrayal of the
worst
kind. That farm, where we had spent our childhoods, playing with our cousins the Gardners, and even after we had moved to Fall River often returned to spend the summers, was bound to our mother's memory as though with a lovers' knot. It was
special;
it was
sacred;
it was
OURS,
Emma's and mine. Renting it was one thing, but
giving
it away . . . The very idea of the Whiteheads, or anyone else, taking it away from us
made us see red.
It was
unthinkable
that it could
ever
belong to anyone but us!

Father put his foot down and flatly refused to even discuss it with us; sentiment, he said, had no place in business. Whenever we tried to plead our case, he turned a deaf ear. The situation with the house on Ferry Street had shown him that we were not equipped to deal responsibly with real estate, and he had seen nothing since to persuade him that we deserved another chance. And we wouldn't lower ourselves by going begging and beseeching to Abby. Whenever she tried, often with tears in her eyes, to talk to us about it, we turned our backs on her.

It was then that Emma decided that we would steal from Abby the same as she was stealing from us even if it must, by necessity, be on a much smaller scale. So we began a series of, in hindsight, rather childish and obvious burglaries. We ransacked the master bedroom one rare Thursday afternoon when both Father and Abby were out, choosing Bridget's day off so she could not be blamed, since in novels suspicion always falls first upon the servants.

The fruits of our first little foray into crime consisted of $110 in greenbacks and gold, and some streetcar tickets, Abby's meager collection of earbobs and brooches (excluding the mother-of-pearl peony brooch and pearl earbobs she was wearing that day), a red pebbled-leather pocketbook with a gold clasp, a rope of imitation pearls, a gold tassel necklace set with red glass stones, and a lady's gold pocket watch. We hid our mean-spirited little haul in the barn, beneath the straw in the cage where I kept my pet pigeons, until we could safely dispose of it.