The Secrets of Lizzie Borden (33 page)

Chapter
12

I
can hardly bear to write the next chapter. Some wounds go so deep not even twenty years can heal or even cauterize them.

The first time I saw Nance O'Neil was on Valentine's Day 1904 at the Colonial Theatre. I had arrived late in Boston and, to my supreme annoyance, missed half the play. As the usher escorted me to my box, I was so spellbound by the sight of her that I quite forgot to sit down until the lights went up and the applause broke my trance. I simply could not take my eyes off her! I could hardly bear to blink for the moment it might deprive me of the sight of her. I almost forgot to breathe!

There she was—a slim gilt figure, like a beacon of softly glowing golden flame, living, breathing, sparkling champagne that went straight to my head! So tall for a woman, almost six feet, yet thoroughly feminine, she was at once sensual and vulnerable in a flowing midnight-blue velvet dressing gown, the collar furred with ermine that at times drooped to reveal the curve of a bare shoulder and breast, with a girdle woven of gold and jewels snugly hugging the hourglass of her waist, hair like waving fields of golden wheat flowing down to her waist in the most beguiling disarray, as though she had indeed just risen—naked, as a thrilling flash of white thigh revealed through the folds of her robe when she moved—from the rumpled bed that stood at the far corner of the stage in the shadowy background. She was like no one I had ever seen before—virgin and harlot, siren and sweetheart, vampire and angel all in one body I would give ten years of my life to hold and caress.

Entranced, as if she were a mesmerist's gold watch swinging to and fro before my eyes, I followed her as she moved sightlessly across the stage as the sleepwalking Lady Macbeth. Center stage, seeing without seeing, she turned to face the audience and sank slowly to her knees—there was that lightning-fast flash of white thigh and trim, slim limbs again; surely no other actress who ever portrayed Lady Macbeth had ever been so sensual and bold!—scrubbing frantically at her lily-white hands with soap and water that only she, in her slumbering madness, could see. The great ruby on the ring finger of her left hand shimmered like a teardrop of fresh-spilt blood and drew my eyes like a firefly.

“
Out, damned spot! Out, I say! One; two; why, then 'tis time to do't: Hell is murky! Fie, my lord, fie! A soldier, and afeared? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account? Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?
”

Her luscious lips trembled in a way that portended tears and the desperation in her voice rose with every angst-sodden syllable, chilling and scalding my soul at the same time and raising every hair on the nape of my neck. I felt the gooseflesh rise and prickle all over me and my nipples spring painfully erect, hard and adamant as accusing, pointing pink fingertips straining against the gold-and-champagne-beaded bodice of my apricot satin evening gown. I wanted my fur to warm me, but it had slipped from my shoulders and fallen, unnoticed, to the floor, and I couldn't bear to tear my eyes from the stage long enough to retrieve it.

“
Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?
” Those words almost felled me like a blow from a hatchet. In my memory's eye, vivid and clear as if it were only yesterday, I saw Father napping on the sofa as I brought the blade down, for the first time, and then again and again and again. Even after a dozen years I could still
feel
his blood upon my skin, warm and red as rubies, soaking in,
scorching
my soul, staining it forever with my rash and impetuous sin. I could still
taste
it, salty and metallic upon my tongue, and the smell still filled my nostrils. I felt nauseous and a red starry mist drifted across my eyes, momentarily obscuring the dazzling blue and gold vision upon the stage.

Like a modern-day Lady Macbeth, my hands could never be washed clean; in my own sight or society's, my soul was caked and sticky with blood, I was marked with guilt like Cain, and there were moments when I feared that madness was close enough to reach out and touch me. Whenever people saw or spoke of me blood filled their minds. It had become a part of me.
Blood is the life,
both the Good Book and Mr. Stoker's fiendish count Dracula said, and I more than any other saw the truth in it. Blood was
my
life; it
defined
who I was—the self- or hatchet-made heiress. To buy my freedom, my
worldly
freedom, I had bathed my soul in blood that could
never
be washed away.

“
What, will these hands never be clean? Here's the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Oh, oh, oh!
”

With every word she spoke to my soul, she reached across the footlights and darkened void where the audience sat enraptured to my box and
touched
me, reaching right through skin and bone, as no one else ever had, not even Orrin. Though Shakespeare, not Nance O'Neil, had written the words that came out of her mouth, like a spirit speaking through a medium it was the
way
she spoke them, the
anguish
and
torment
and
pain
with which she imbued them, that told me that
she knew, she understood
. My body was made of glass and she was looking through it clear to my soul! There would be no keeping any secrets from her. I would
always
be naked with Nance no matter how many layers of clothes I wore or locked doors I hid behind. It both
thrilled
and
terrified
me to be so helpless and bare.

I was back the next night to see her in
Judith of Bethulia,
as the beautiful but chaste widow who, to save her people, under siege by the Assyrians and nearing starvation and surrender, dons her finest raiment and goes to the enemy camp and offers herself as a sensual sacrifice to the lust of General Holofernes. But the cunning beauty outwits him, and as he lies deep in a drunken slumber she cuts off the tyrant's head. The Assyrians, left without a leader, scatter to the winds and Bethulia is saved and Judith celebrated as their savior.

Even though she could not know it, through the parts she played Nance O'Neil spoke to me. In every role she played I seemed to find something of myself. Like Judith, I also had spilled a tyrant's blood for the greater good.

I was there every night as the woman the papers hailed as “the most emotional actress of our age” worked through her repertoire. I saw her in
Camille, Trilby, Sappho, Leah the Forsaken, Hedda Gabler, The Passion Flower, Lysistrata, The Magdalene,
and
Elizabeth, Queen of England
. I applauded so hard I split my gloves every time and went back to the Bellevue Hotel with sore and smarting palms, yet feeling there was one alone out there in the world who could understand me better than any other even though we had never exchanged a single word or even a polite nod in passing and were in truth strangers.

After that first night, I was never late again. I was early, the very first in line; I was so anxious all day that some mishap might occur to make me late and I couldn't bear to take that chance. I must have loitered about for an hour or more outside the theater before each performance, gazing at her pictures, trying to decide if her eyes were truly mint green with a smattering of little chocolate kisses, ice blue with drifts of hazel, or the delicate gray of a dove's feathers lightly brushed with copper, and if the hue of her hair was more like honey or wheat. I anonymously sent her two dozen long-stemmed red roses and every night as she made her final bow I saw them handed to her, cradled in her arms, adoringly against her beautiful breasts, like blood on snow.

My eyes
adored
her! And so apparently did every other pair of functioning eyes in Boston. The headlines proclaimed
BOSTON IS NANCE O'NEIL MAD!
Photographs and exquisite hand-tinted postcards of her in costume for her most famous roles or elegant gowns from her own wardrobe were sold in shops and I became an avid collector, giddy each time I discovered a new image not already pasted in my album.

Her beautiful face graced candy boxes, and in magazines she was seen advertising
Lady Elegant Bridal Pink Powder
and
Egyptian Dreams Perfume;
these I tore out too and even bought the products just to feel closer to her, that the powder and perfume that touched my skin were the same as graced hers.

Copies of her hats and dresses appeared in shop windows and I was amongst the many who, in our enthusiasm and adoration, forgot the fact that we lacked Miss O'Neil's tall, willowy-slim physique and such fashions would not flatter us in the least, and flocked undeterred to buy them. It was not an uncommon sight in those days to see two, four, or even five, or maybe more, women of various ages and shapes promenading in the park or sitting in church on Sunday with the same hat on their heads or dress on their backs, forming a discordant chorus of would-be Nance O'Neils. Some were not content just to have her hats and coveted what was under them and the city's wigmakers did a thriving trade in Nance O'Neil wigs; many a poor lass in need of money I'm sure had her head shorn down to stubble to supply the demand for those golden waves. When a necklace Nance wore in
Elizabeth, Queen of England
was auctioned at a charity benefit I was ready to beggar myself to win it. Even if the stones were paste and the metal was base that turned my skin green I was
wild
to possess it because it was a
true
relic of
her
—the one I worshiped from afar with all my body, soul, and heart!—not just an imitation of something she had worn.

It was only when it was almost too late that I found the courage to approach her. When she bid farewell to Boston with an encore performance of
Elizabeth, Queen of England,
I boldly bribed my way backstage, into her dressing room, after the show to present my roses in person. I knew it was now or never and I would forever despise myself as a coward if I didn't.

Her maid was just finishing fastening the back of a shimmering olive-green dress overlaid with sparkling black net and lace adorned with teal, purple, and orange beaded lotus flower appliqués while Miss O'Neil stood before a full-length mirror fussing with the emerald and diamond tiara—a gift from the Khedive of Cairo, it had been in all the newspapers—perched atop the high-piled gleaming masses of her golden hair.

The moment our eyes met . . . it was electricity and ecstasy, a quivering, rapturous
frisson
rippling through our bodies head to toe.

Blushing berry ripe, I clumsily blurted out a compliment about the women she brought to life upon the stage. Nance came to me and took both of my trembling hands in hers and stared deep into my eyes before she led me to sink down upon a red velvet sofa beside her.

“I know who you are,” she leaned in close and whispered in a soft, husky voice, breathy and sensual.

I started to draw back in alarm, but she would not let me.

“No, no.” She held tight to my hands. “Don't be alarmed! I wish only to say that your story has touched me. And with the words you have just spoken to me. . . .” Her eyes lit up like stars! “You have divined my secret! I find the character of unloved, shunned, and misunderstood women—women like you if I may so presume, my dear Miss Borden, who have been
crucified
by conventional traditions—
fascinating;
it strikes a chord deep within the soul of me and provokes and stirs me more than any happily ever after storybook heroine ever could! Give me a role like that over a musical or a comedy no matter how sparkling or witty any day, for
there,
in a forsaken and mistreated woman's life, is
true
tragedy and drama! Far too often, I find, women live out their destinies in the small places to which they have been
driven
and
thrust, forced,
into, and there is a storm that broods inside them that far too often hardly ever bursts because womankind is constrained to corset her soul, and her emotions, like her waist, and keep her emotions in check because the powers that be—men and society!—think it undignified to express them.
Tradition has made women cowardly!
But when, on rare occasion, that storm
does
break . . .” She squeezed my hands and her eyes were like mysterious, exotic opals, dancing, playing a coy, flirtatious game, and shifting shades with the wooing light. “
Better to be an outlaw than not to be free! We
are
rebels
because those who govern or claim to love us, to be acting for our own good, all too often
betray
us! The unloved and misunderstood woman is usually thus, the victim of someone, some man, too stupid to know the difference between Heaven and earth!”

She was the most passionate person I had ever met!

“How right you are!” I breathed, and squeezed her hands right back. She might have been painting a portrait of me with her words! No one had ever gleaned the tragedy of my life so completely and precisely! She had indeed seen straight into my soul!

From then on there was no more Miss O'Neil or Miss Borden. We would be only Nance and Lizbeth, close as a pair of those tragic twins one sees in freak shows and dime museums, joined perpetually at the hip.

She was everything I ever wanted and ever wanted to be; I spent my whole youth dreaming of being just like her—beautiful, celebrated, and adored! Worshipfully I knelt at her feet and fastened the emerald and diamond bracelets around her slender wrists, feeling the pulse throb against my fingertips. When she stood to leave, I draped a white fur cape about her shoulders, then, carrying the bouquet of roses—
My
roses! She said she would have no others!—reverently in my arms, like the Christ child, I trailed after her, following blindly even if she would lead me to the very ends of the earth.