The Secrets of Lizzie Borden (7 page)

But we all had a weakness for the sweets. The French pastries—chocolate éclairs, cream puffs, marrons glacés, and chocolate bonbons stuffed with decadent creams, supple caramel, or rich fruity syrups.

I saw the
Mona Lisa
on my own; I thought she looked like a woman made most unhappy by love and wondered what secrets she had kept in the lockbox of her heart. I saw love—its promises, fulfillment, the lack or loss of it, and the longing for it—in almost every painting and statue my lovesick eyes lighted upon.

I heard the bells of Notre Dame and gazed up in awe at its magnificent Gothic edifice, the first to use flying buttresses, to prevent stress fractures in the walls, my architect had told me. Inside I stood, with my arms spread wide and my head thrown back, and let a rainbow of light wash over me as the sun shone through the stained glass, bathing me in vibrant color.

And I went, alone, to see Monsieur Eiffel's controversial tower, the tallest in the world, just completed the previous year. Some called it “an eyesore,” “a pox upon the skyline of Paris”; they thought that it was too modern, that the riveted iron structure lacked the romance and grace of Gothic cathedrals and the palaces of kings. They did not see it the way my architect did—as a triumph of engineering and mathematics—or understand the prime importance of wind resistance in its design. Though I far preferred the palaces and cathedrals myself, I still thought it magnificent. I climbed its many stairs and stood for over an hour, alone with my thoughts, staring out at the view wishing my love were there beside me.

The one place my traveling companions did accompany me was to the Moulin Rouge, the notorious Red Mill; even Miss Mowbry roused herself from her bed of wounded dignity, because she felt a chaperone was an absolute necessity if we were to venture into such a hedonistic atmosphere, though the hotel desk clerk assured us that respectable ladies went there all the time and we simply could not miss the Can-Can; we would reproach ourselves for the rest of our lives if we left Paris without seeing that. Then he kissed his fingers and launched a volley of rhapsodic rapid-fire French so dizzyingly fast that it went right over our heads but set our curiosity on fire. So away we went to the Moulin Rouge to see the Can-Can.

And it
was amazing,
to see the blades of the giant windmill spinning slowly against the night sky, lit up with
thousands
of red, gold, and white electric lights. I never dreamed there could be so many lightbulbs on one structure!

Inside, it was as big, bright, and gaudy as it was out. Amidst the rapid, carefree music and babble of voices we were relieved to see a great many women of seemingly respectable appearance, both escorted and unescorted, seated at the tables, and this eased our fears somewhat. A band in red and gold jackets played and the floor swarmed with dancers. It was the most vibrant and vivid place I had ever seen and I longed to lose myself and become a part of it.

There were bejeweled courtesans, the famed and fabled Grand Horizontals, in extravagant gowns trimmed with feathers and gems, silk flowers, ermine, sable, beads and glittering appliqués, so décolleté that every time they moved their breasts threatened to overflow like cherry-topped blancmanges. Jewels sparkled on their ears, necks, and wrists, the cold, star-bright light of diamonds and whole rainbows of vibrant colors—emeralds, rubies, sapphires, amethysts, and topazes. Their faces were rouged and painted, their lashes blackened, and their eyes lined dramatically with kohl, and they wore their hair, its color often of such a startling shade it could hardly be natural, piled high in mounds of curls, twists, and braids, embellished with feathers, flowers, and jewels. One woman even had a small gilded birdcage with a chirping canary perched on a tiny swing inside woven into her tall pompadour of very blond hair, like a modern-day Marie Antoinette. Her hairdresser must have been something of an architect himself to build such a towering mass of hair!

We were shocked to see a Negro man, his skin as black as tar, seated intimately at a table with a woman with milk-pale skin and the reddest hair I had ever seen in my life. She wore canary-yellow satin, her bare shoulders and overflowing bosom ringed with billowing yellow feathers, and what must have been a fortune in honey-colored topaz and diamonds glittering on her gown and about her neck and wrists and snaking through her scarlet tresses. The Negro boldly opened her purse, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for him to do, and took out a gold cigarette case. He put two in his mouth and lit them, then took one out and put it between his companion's lips. We had never seen such a thing in America nor thought to see it elsewhere. In America just looking at a white woman would have been enough to get the Negro lynched, but in Paris no one seemed to think anything of it at all.
Freedom,
glorious
freedom!
the whole city seemed to scream. No one was a slave here—except to their own passions!

There was a group of women, a select society, like a club unto themselves, in which all others were unwelcome. They did not paint their faces and seemed to disdain feminine frills and flirtatious manners. Some of them wore men's clothing, complete suits that looked straight out of the shops on Savile Row, dove gray, coffee and toffee colored, dark blue, or black frock coats with carnations in the buttonholes, beautiful brocade or watered-silk or garish checkered waistcoats, striped and flowered neckties, and tight-fitting trousers, or starkly elegant black and white evening clothes with black silk top hats and long, dashing opera cloaks lined in either red or white silk. Many of them wore their hair cropped short just like a man's, slicked back until it shone like patent leather or else erupting in a riot of curls or waves that would have made a seasoned sailor seasick. Some of them even smoked cigarettes, pipes, or cigars and drank strong liquor! There were a few who were a tad more feminine; they dressed in proper women's suits, but severely tailored, with mannish jackets and prominent, padded shoulders, and no feminine frills at all, not a bit of lace anywhere that I could see, or even a silk rose or a flirty feather on their hats, and their hair was plainly coiffed, severely scraped back from their faces and painfully pinned with not even a curl or a frizz to soften the effect. The only softness was in their manner to each other. These women danced
together,
waltzing in each other's arms, lost in their own little word, or else sat close together holding hands, sharing cigarettes, and even daring to kiss, openly, upon the mouth, just like lovers. No men, except the waiters, ever went near them. Yet no one except us bewildered Americans looked askance; to everyone else they seemed to be just part of the scenery.

Men and women behaved toward one another with a shocking degree of familiarity, as if they had completely forgotten that they were in a public place. We saw women sitting on men's laps and allowing themselves to be fondled and kissed. They did not even slap the men's hands away when they dared to slip boldly beneath their skirts. Sometimes coins changed hands before these actions commenced, so I doubted whether love had anything to do with it, but it was shocking to behold just the same.

We were in complete accord that we would leave just as soon as we had seen the famous dance—the Can-Can that everyone talked so much about.

All of a sudden the music stopped and the floor cleared before it struck up again, with an insistent, pulsing, lively, infectious rhythm as six women rushed in, shrieking and shaking their skirts wildly, black plumes billowing on their bonnets. The crowd began to applaud, raucously; some of the men whistled and stomped their feet or screamed out names, presumably those of the dancers they liked best.

The dancers' costumes were the most revealing I had ever seen a woman wear in public. Their ruffled white blouses were so sheer their nipples glowed through like hot pink embers, and their pink skirts were so short they barely grazed their calves. In the center of the floor they paused for one tantalizing, teasing moment to lift their skirts to show row upon row of white ruffles sewn onto their petticoats and gossamer white pantalets trimmed with ruffles and dangling pink silk ribbons that danced along with them; then they began to kick their legs high into the air, higher than I would have ever thought possible, fast and free to the music, while emitting exuberant shrieks.

Miss Mowbry was so mortified that she fainted, and some sailors from the next table tried to revive her by throwing her skirts up over her head and fumbling with her corset. She came to her senses with a cheeky young rogue's hands groping around inside her flannel drawers as though he was looking for buried treasure. She almost slapped his head off and, red-faced and weeping, she forgot all about her duties as chaperone and immediately fled, beating a path for herself through the gay and laughing crowd with her trusty black umbrella.

I had never imagined that the Can-Can would be so risqué! I sat there dumbstruck watching the dancing beauties' black-stockinged legs rise and fall in time to the music, captivated by the coy and joyful smiles that lit up their faces as they swiveled their trim ankles in the air, making the laces on their black ankle boots dance. Their drawers were so sheer I was certain I could see dark triangles of hair beneath, and a blazing hot blush set my face aflame. But I could not look away. I sat there staring, mesmerized. And I felt the strangest sensation in the pit of my stomach, and lower down, a sweet, frightening fluttering, something I knew I should not be feeling, followed by a sudden sharp aching wetness between my thighs. Instantly I knew what it was. The pain that followed and nearly bent me double made it quite clear. In my distraction, I had completely forgotten the calendar, useless as it was with my maddeningly erratic monthly visitor. It might at least have given me some inkling when to expect its arrival so I could have strapped on a towel or at least worn a darker skirt!

The music soared in a dizzying crescendo and the dancers kicked and spun as pain gripped me in a series of stabbing, squeezing, clutching cramps, as if the pain were determined to wring every drop of blood from my womb. I knew the longer I sat there the worse it would be. Soon the blood would seep through my underclothes onto my pale blue satin skirt.
It's not going to get better; it's only going to get worse,
I kept telling myself over and over until the words began to blur and jumble and lose all meaning, yet I was powerless to make myself move, I just sat there staring at the dancers' tantalizingly veiled crotches and feeling shame flood my face as my nipples hardened.
I shouldn't be feeling this,
I told myself.
It isn't right; it isn't normal!
But I could not leave or look away.

I'm sure my anguish must have shown upon my face; it was all I could do not to burst into tears. I was so ashamed and confused I didn't know what to do. And someone
did
notice my distress. One of those mannish women approached me—an older woman, with deep lines etched around her eyes and mouth. Her thick, cropped, curly black hair was liberally peppered with gray and she wore an English tweed suit and a lemon-colored waistcoat and kid gloves and spats of the same vivid shade. She stubbed out her cigarette on Nellie's dessert plate, narrowly missing the remaining half of the chocolate éclair lying there leaking custard filling, and bent down as if to speak to me, but instead her lips lingeringly grazed mine. I was so stunned I could not react. I just sat there, blinking my eyes, surprised that my tears didn't start to boil against my flaming face.

“Surely it cannot be as bad as all that, mademoiselle?” she said kindly in heavily accented English. The same words Bridget used to always say to me!

I heard laughter all around me. Whether they were truly laughing at me, I do not know, but I felt like they were. I could not even turn and meet my companions' eyes; I did not want to see the expressions upon their faces. Oh, the horror! The
shame!

Life surged back into my limbs and I bolted up and ran, plowing through the crowd as if I were running for my life, certain that everyone was staring at the big red stain blossoming on the back of my skirt.

I don't know how I got back to the hotel; somehow I found a cab. I filled the bathtub and scrubbed my skirts as best I could, then gave up and left them for the laundress. Then I tried to scrub the shame from my skin. I lay on the bathroom floor, huddled in my flower-sprigged nightgown upon the chilly tiles, with a towel pinned to the homemade blue calico waistband clutched tight between my thighs, curled up and bent double with cramps, and cried and cried as if my world were about to end and the sun would never rise and shine for me again. I don't know how long I lay there before I finally dragged myself to bed.

All that night I was troubled by dreams of beautiful Can-Can dancers, taunting me with their raised skirts and veiled crotches and breasts, their diaphanous blouses and drawers suddenly dissolving before my astonished eyes like sugar crystals in the rain, and mannish ladies who were not afraid to put their lips, and hands, on me even though we both knew it was the dancing beauties with their feminine frills and hourglass figures, delicious and decadent as French pastries, that I truly hungered for. But I had to make do. What else could I do when the beauties only tormented and teased? Reminding me with every shake of their pink skirts and glimpse of what lay beneath that they, these
glorious
creatures, were not for me. Beauty wants beauty and only suffers plain or ugly to touch it if the dazzle of dollar signs and diamonds, the promise of opulent rewards, blinds its eyes. Suddenly their ranks parted to reveal one who was all in gold with yellow feathers and diamond-tipped pins in her raven hair. She was wearing black silk stockings and golden slippers with high diamond-encrusted French heels that flashed with every movement of her dainty dancing feet. She teasingly shook her skirts right in my face, the white ruffles and yellow silk ribbons on her petticoats tickling my nose, and I looked up, startled, to see that it was Bridget Sullivan, rouged and painted as I had never seen her before. The gold paint on her eyelids twinkled when she winked at me. Without thinking, I flung myself at her feet and yanked her cobwebby white drawers down right in front of
everyone
at the Moulin Rouge and buried my face between her legs, wallowing and kissing with such a powerful, hungry passion that I had never in real, waking life experienced.