The Secrets of Lizzie Borden (35 page)

I think a reporter from
The Boston Herald
described her best. The morning after our first night together, while I still lay cocooned in Nance's champagne-colored satin sheets, tensely enduring the orange baboon's insistence on searching my head for fleas, Nance donned a demure dress of flowing white chiffon, loosely did up her hair, sent for the Angora kittens, kissed me “
adieu
for now,” and went out into the sitting room to assume her carefully calculated pose for the man
The Boston Herald
was sending to write a feature.

At once pensive and playful, maternal and virginal, she arranged herself upon the floor, playing with the kittens, with the sunbeams pouring in through the windows, catching her just right, and shining a spotlight, like a halo, onto her golden hair. When the reporter walked in and saw her thus, he was completely enchanted.

In her sun-flooded apartments,
he wrote,
her masses of glorious golden hair were caught loosely up on the top of her shapely head, and held in place by a huge Spanish comb. Nance O'Neil is not always tragic, nor even serious minded. She impresses one from the start as a girl, a very young girl. She is as unaffected by her great success as a child. It may be truthfully said that she is even more interesting personally than she is as an actress—and that is saying a great deal. She is subject to melancholy and decidedly moody in temperament. There is a constant intermingling of sunshine and shadow in her nature. And it is this that makes her so entirely fascinating.

When she came back to me, she laughed about it as she nestled on the bed beside me, snuggling deep into my arms.

“Don't
ever
believe
anything
an actress ever says, darling; we never open our mouths to speak or even to kiss except to further our careers. All the kisses and pretty speeches are to that end and no other. The stage is the only lover we can ever be true to.”

I laughed with her at what I thought was a clever quip, a featherlight flippancy of her profession. I should have seen the warning in those words. I should have heeded it. In all the time I knew her, it was the most honest thing she ever said.

She was a rare charmer and very skillful at manipulating her image, as well as other people. But none of that mattered at the time, though in hindsight it should have. But I was head over heels in love and willing to overlook any and all of Nance's foibles and flaws; she was only human after all. I chose to be blind and believe our souls had been wandering in the wilderness all these years, crying out for each other, until, at long last, fate brought us together and that she would never discard me as coldly and cavalierly as she did all her other conquests.
I
was different;
I
was her soul mate.

Before the next leg of her tour, we detoured, for a much needed respite. I took Nance to Maplecroft. It was Heaven having her there with me despite Emma's sour-faced frowns and private protests that Nance was using me and making a fool of me and I was too blind to see it. Emma's small Fall River mind equated all actresses, even a star like Nance O'Neil, the greatest tragedienne of the modern stage, with common whores. She considered Nance's presence in our household not only a scandal we could never hope to live down but also a personal insult against all decent, God-fearing women. Father, Emma said, would turn in his grave, like a chicken roasting on a spit, if he knew we were hosting a troupe of actors in our house. We quarreled every time Emma could get me alone. She said I was dazzled by the footlights and glamour and bewitched by the world of make-believe and happy endings. She was right, she summed everything up so precisely, if not at all nicely, but I didn't care. I was in love.

“If I am dreaming let me dream some more!” I said dismissively, and blocked my ears to the outraged torrent spewing from my sister's mouth.

I remember the first morning when Nance floated downstairs straight into my arms, just like a dream, in a flowing gown of soft pink mousseline with wisps of her flaxen hair, caught up in a loose topknot, caressing her cameo-perfect porcelain-pale face, idly swinging a straw bonnet, trimmed with silk flowers, by its broad pink satin streamers. She looked like she belonged at Maplecroft. I have a picture of her in that dress, holding that bonnet behind her back, staring coyly out at the camera, at once angelic and fey. It stands in a silver frame beside my bed and, even now, I lay flowers, as an offering, a tribute, before it each and every day. Sometimes I even light a candle. The heart wants what it wants; I still love her. But I was just a new sensation, a novelty, the latest in a long line of diversions, to Nance. I am too wise a fool to pretend it was ever anything more no matter how much I like to imagine otherwise. Like Mr. Carroll's muse Alice, Nance took me to Wonderland:
Still she haunts me, phantomwise, . . . moving under skies / Never seen by waking eyes
.

I spared no expense to entertain her and her troupe. Every night the house blazed with golden light, and glorious music, played by a full orchestra, wafted out into the darkness. There were hothouse palms in gilded pots and silver trays of sweet and savory delights. Lobster tails and oysters, steaks, and cakes galore. Tiered silver trays towered over the tables displaying the most tempting array of pastries. Champagne and Nance's magical elixir of the green fairy flowed like water, and if any of my fair-weather friends from the Women's Christian Temperance Union had dared say one word about it I would have snapped my fingers in their face.

Nance wore a clinging mint-green silk gown embroidered in silver and gold with a wreath of blue-green satin roses around her naked shoulders, and she sparkled with emeralds, sapphires, and diamonds everywhere she could think to put them.

And I wore the most
fantastic
creation of chartreuse and amber, cut daringly low and baring my shoulders in a fashion that was far too young for me. But that was how Nance made me feel—young and alive! When I was with her I was in the springtime of my life and not the autumn. My freshly hennaed hair was piled perilously high in a root-straining pompadour garnished with gold tinsel fringe and amber and chartreuse satin roses and I was weighed down with jewels.

I was a woman of forty-five making a fool and a spectacle of myself, but I was so in love I didn't even care if the whole world was laughing at me. I was so
gloriously
happy I could even laugh at myself.

We danced in each other's arms; none of the theatrical folk thought there was anything unusual about it, and even Nance's husband smiled indulgently and saluted me as we waltzed past. I took puffs from her strange cigarettes and heady, intoxicating sips from her glass that made my head spin beautifully. The green fairy seemed to make the whole world shine; everything and everyone was beautiful and brilliant that night, and I couldn't stop smiling and bestowing a thousand compliments left and right. I just had to stop everyone and tell them how wonderful they were and to thank them for coming to grace my home with their glorious presence.

As the evening wore on, Nance and I stole away to my summer bedroom. I was wild to be alone with her. Every time I looked at her I wanted to tear off her clothes and mine. On the pink-and-chocolate-striped sofa, Nance sat back, lost in ecstasy, the liqueur in her crystal glass glowing like the most perfect peridot or that subtle hint of green at the heart of a white rose, as I knelt reverently at her feet, lifted her skirts, and licked her sex, lapping it up like a cunning, greedy cat left alone in the kitchen where a bowl of rich cream had been left sitting out on the counter. I couldn't get enough of her! She felt like liquid silk and I was
starved
for her!

That was when Emma walked in like a black storm cloud to rain on our picnic.

That was the end. That one wild, rash, uninhibited “lewd and unnatural and unforgivable” act cost me my sister. Emma hurriedly packed her clothes—every garment she owned fit into a single carpet bag—and walked out without a backward glance. She left all her religious ephemera behind for me, saying tartly that I had greater need of the Lord's grace and forgiveness than she.

I ran down the stairs after her, weeping and shouting at her—“Emma,
PLEASE!
”—heedless of what my guests might think, trying desperately to make her understand, but she wouldn't stop walking or even turn around and look at me.

“
I fear for your soul, Lizzie!
” Those were the last words my sister ever spoke to me, shouted back over her shoulder, as she slammed the front door.

I never saw her again. We never exchanged another word, not even by letter; those I wrote to her were returned unopened. She went to live briefly with the Reverend Jubb and his sister, and then with Orrin's mother, Caroline Mason Gardner, in Swansea.

Caroline doted on Emma, they were not that far apart in age, and the two of them became best friends. She even insisted that my sister accompany her on a holiday trip to sunny Catalina Island one year. Orrin, back from Tennessee to visit his mother, was with them. I heard he also became “quite fond” of Emma. Caroline sent me many postcards, enthusing about the fragrant fruit trees, bright, sunny beaches, Sugar Loaf Bay, and the fascinating fishes spied through glass-bottomed boats while sailing over the sunlit blue waters, but not one word from, or about, Orrin or Emma. Did that silence, I have often since wondered, say more than words? They had such a good time in Catalina that the following year the three of them went to New Orleans, and there were more postcards about Mardi Gras and alligator parks.

I've often wondered, despite the seventeen-year age difference, did Orrin, unable to have me, transfer his affections to Emma? I knew my sister was far too timid to defy social convention and marry a man almost two decades her junior, but that doesn't answer the question:
Did they fall in love?

Over the years that followed, I heard many bedeviling rumors that kept me awake at night. But I never discovered the truth, if there ever was any truth behind those rumors. I never delved into the matter or asked any questions of Caroline or any mutual acquaintances who would have been in a position to know. I was too afraid of what might be the answers. The truth is, I didn't want to know.

Three years later, Emma abruptly left Caroline's home and moved to Newmarket, New Hampshire, where, calling herself “Miss Gardner,” she led a reclusive existence in a cheap rented room on a farmstead belonging to a pair of spinsters, the Connor sisters, leaving only at dusk to take a long, solitary walk in the gloaming. She attended church services every Sunday with her veil down and rebuffed all attempts at friendship. Sugar cubes, which she had long been addicted to sucking on—they were cheaper than candy—and a rocking chair were the only luxuries she permitted herself. She kept her money in the bank and wore her plain black dresses and sturdy leather shoes until they fell apart and were past mending before she would deign to purchase new. Word later came back to me—as any unpleasant news had a way of doing—that whenever people asked about her family, Emma said she had had a sister once, but that she was dead.

I suppose it
had
to end sometime, but I wish it had not been like
that
.

But at the time of our parting, I was too enraptured with Nance to try to win Emma back, and later . . . after Nance . . . I was too embarrassed. Emma would have only said,
I told you so,
and even if she only actually spoke those words once, she would say them again every time she looked at the disgusting, unnatural thing I had become in her eyes. And by then there were also those rumors about Orrin and Emma standing between us. So I just let it go. For better or worse, I let things be.

 

“Never mind,” Nance purred huskily into my ear as she led me back to my bedroom, soothing me with sips from her glass, urging me to let the green fairy take all the shameful, painful feelings and inhibitions away and leave only the body behind and all its wild naked animal urges. Her hand was at my breast, and then between my legs, making me forget . . . at least for a time. “Never mind, Lizbeth; you still have me. . . .” she purred.

But in the end, I lost Nance too. Nothing worked out the way I thought it would!

 

Our idyll continued. There was still time before Nance must resume her tour and she
begged
me to come with her to Tyngsboro; she
longed
to show me her farm. After Emma's abrupt departure, I just wanted to run away, to forget and escape, from all the gossip in Fall River about our abrupt parting after so many years and lose myself in the world of waking dreams I dwelled in whenever I was with Nance. So I went most willingly to her farm. I would have followed her anywhere, I think.

She was so proud of that quaint brown and white—or “chocolate and ivory,” as Nance picturesquely described it—Tudor-style gingerbread house sitting ensconced in the heart of a lovely garden. She called it “Brindley Farm.” She was always buying cows, donkeys, goats, pigs, and sheep whose sweet, docile dispositions or attractive appearances caught her eye and having them shipped back to the farm. She chose the chickens for their plumage too, declaring that the speckled hens' eggs tasted the best and she absolutely abhorred the plain, boring white ones.

Every morning, sitting up in bed, with diamonds sparkling like stars on her ears and around her wrists, she would blissfully breakfast on scrambled eggs and champagne and sigh about how many times she had to absolutely “
stifle,
like a murderer pressing a pillow over a victim's face, with all my might, the urge to abandon the stage for the simple life, domesticity, sweet tranquility, the homely virtues, the fireside, and little children calling me Mother.”