The Secrets of Lizzie Borden (3 page)

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 entertain; 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!

Father scoffed at our desires and called us pretentious and silly; to him all men were fortune hunters and his dollars, not his daughters, were the glittering prizes that dazzled their eyes. The idea that any man could ever love us for any other reason was utterly absurd to him. Emma in her perpetual black, gloomily and dutifully mourning Mother and a life that had passed her by, was dried up and old before her time. She would have made the perfect witch flying on her broomstick across the midnight sky of a picture postcard for Halloween. And I was a short, stocky, stout-waisted, ruddy-faced redhead with skin inclined to freckle, and washed-out, almost colorless, blue eyes, and whose jawline was inclined to be jowly. I was beautiful only in my dreams, inspired by the romantic novels I devoured, where I dwelled in splendid castles and danced through life in my lover's arms in sorbet- and candy-colored dresses of the latest Parisian fashion with my fiery red hair piled up in mounds and masses of curls entwined with silk ribbons, diamonds, and pearls. In my sleeping kingdom my complexion was porcelain and pink roses perfection and not the least bit florid or mottled, my profile was as perfect as the one on the cameo at my breast, and my waist formed an exquisite hourglass my beloved could easily span within his two strong, manly hands, and after the dancing was done he carried me away in his arms to make love in a bed of roses or upon a blanket of ermine depending on the season. And sometimes he sang his love to me in a wonderful tenor voice, thrilling my soul with his high notes. (I was always rather fanciful.)

But Father could
never
see it my way—we
had
the money to make our dreams come true if we could only
spend
it! Good solid investments that paid well and regular dividends so the wolf of poverty wasn't even lurking anywhere remotely near our door, why he wasn't even within shooting range! But no, Father
always
shook his head and said it was better that we bide at home and save our money, make it last the whole of our lifetimes, instead of spending it on fripperies to try to attract some worthless fellow; we would only be disappointed otherwise. We really were poor little rich girls, prisoners in a day and age when nice, respectable girls didn't leave their father's house except to go to their husband's.
We
were Bordens and thus above the poor mill girls and Irish “Maggies,” as the denizens of Fall River always called the poor Irish girls who hired out as maidservants and had to earn their bread and butter and even the plate it was put upon. We were too good, and proud, to go out and work for a living, to actually earn the pennies to pay for the lives we longed for, if we even could; no typewriter girl or governess I ever heard of wore diamonds and ermine.

I remember the summer I turned thirteen and my courses came for the first time. We were visiting our farm in Swansea. Emma, in our mother's stead, explained what it meant and showed me how to fashion the thick cloth towels, fold, and attach them to the homemade calico belts women used in those days, and how to soak them in a pail of cold water and borax kept discreetly out of sight beneath the bed or under the sink in the cellar until the Maggie laundered them and tucked them away in the bureau drawer in readiness for the next month. Father took me fishing. As we sat on the bank, holding our poles, waiting for the fish to bite, he spoke to me for the first time of courtship and marriage. I will
never
forget the words he said to me: “When men look at you, Lizzie, they will
never
see anything but my money;
no one
will
ever
love you for anything else. It's the way of the world; when people know you've got money they all want a share. You will
never
be anything but a dollar sign in men's eyes, Lizzie!”

Father always did have a low opinion of my personal attractions. He had a definite knack for making me feel worthless and was endlessly “just funning” about my figure, calling me things like “piggy in a blue gown,” shaking his head dolefully and clucking his tongue whenever he saw me taking a second helping at table or grazing idly on sweets, and urging me to take a good long look in the mirror and see myself the way others saw me. And if I dared lose my temper, or angry tears appeared in my eyes, he would say I was devoid of humor and could not take a joke.