The Secrets of Lizzie Borden (2 page)

I had so wanted to feel fresh and clean when I awoke and put on my new midnight-blue bengaline dress figured with a delicate pattern of arctic-blue roses and the matching wide-brimmed hat, its crown wreathed with a ring of dainty ice-blue satin rosebuds, and now my monthly visitor had come and spoiled it all. Even my underthings were new, pure white cotton with white lace threaded with blue silk ribbons, and now I must either don old or risk soiling them if the blood overflowed or leaked through the bulky towel pinned to my homemade blue calico waistband and slung between my thighs, raising blisters and chafing them raw every time I moved.

I had been frivolous and ordered an ice-blue satin corset, matching garters trimmed with lace, and black silk stockings from Boston, and navy-blue kid gloves and button boots with
French heels,
the very height of fashion, instead of the usual sensible and sturdy low-heeled brown or black best suited for everyday wear. How Father had frowned over the bills!

“
Blue
boots and gloves, Lizzie!
Mother-of-pearl
buttons
dyed blue! Shame! French heels!
I doubt they will last a fortnight! And
blue silk ribbons
on your unmentionables! Ribbons and lace where no one but you, and the Maggie when she does the laundry, will ever see them! Even if you had a husband, men don't notice things like that, not even on a painted Parisian whore!
Shame, Lizzie, shame!
Will you
ever
learn the value of a dollar? You cannot possess a penny for even half a day without it burning a hole through your pocket! Your mother could stretch a dollar like molasses taffy. I was always amazed at how far that woman could make her pin money go! She could have outfitted herself three times over for what you've spent on your
under
clothes! Why, all the Sunday dresses she owned during our entire marriage, God rest her frugal soul, cost less than your traveling dress alone! People said she had the dress sense of a gypsy, it's true, but that woman was canny with her coins! But
you
. . . ! I almost died when the dressmaker's bill arrived! Just thinking about it gives me heart palpitations! You'll have us all in the poorhouse yet!
Blue
boots and gloves,
French
heels, mother-of-pearl buttons,
God help us all!
Do not expect
me
to sell fish out of a pushcart like my father did to support this family after
your
excesses have
ruined
us, you greedy, ungrateful thing!”

Of course, “the miserly millionaire” was exaggerating, and I rolled my eyes accordingly. It was nothing I hadn't heard before.

I had imagined feeling something of the thrill a bride must experience on her nuptial morning knowing that a whole new life lies before her, but now . . . the blood and bulky towel had spoiled it all. I was so angry I could cry! I grimaced and drew my knees up tighter as another wave of pain washed over me, and tried to recapture some of the joy by thinking of all the money-pinching misery and resentment I was leaving behind me.

By the time Mother died Father was well on his way to becoming one of the richest men in Fall River. He had worked hard, scrimping and saving, shrewdly investing his earnings, seizing, like a champion wrestler, every opportunity to profit in a stranglehold, and persuading heartbroken and tear-blinded mourners that if they
truly
loved their dearly departed spouses, siblings, and offspring they would
prove it
by laying them to rest in the safe, luxurious, moisture-proof, vermin-impervious padded snow-white satin-lined embrace of a
Crane's Patented Burial Casket,
a bed for eternity finer than any these humble folk had likely ever slept on in life, of which he had the honor of being the exclusive local distributor. There was no finer casket to be had in all Massachusetts, not even in Boston, he would declare, proudly patting the one he kept for show in his office, sometimes even inviting them to climb inside and see for themselves, always describing the proffered experience as “a little taste of Heaven.”

When they hemmed and hawed about the expense, protesting their love, but uncertain if they could actually afford to lavish their hard-earned dollars upon the dead, Father would offer a simple and happy solution for all—in lieu of his customary fee he would gladly, and graciously, accept a lien upon their property; thus they would have several months to discharge the debt. More often than not, dazed by their bereavement, they put their trust in Father and nodded blindly, acceding to his every expensive suggestion for giving their loved one a grand send-off, thus accumulating a debt these simple country people could hardly ever even hope to repay.

In six months to a year, depending on the terms they had agreed upon, they would have cause to weep again when the bank—by then Father sat proudly on the Board of Directors of half a dozen—inevitably foreclosed and they found themselves homeless and Father snapped their property up like a lucky penny. In this manner he gradually acquired a number of profitable rental properties and a reputation for being the most hard-hearted landlord in Fall River and its environs. If he heard that one of his tenants was prospering, he immediately raised the rent, and if they fell on hard times, out they went. “Which is harder?” a popular joke went. “Granite, marble, or Andrew Borden's heart?”

What little comfort the dispossessed might have derived from the knowledge that they had beggared themselves for a noble cause would be considerably diminished if they knew how great an advantage Father took of broken hearts and tear-blinded eyes.

Those much-touted
Crane's Patented Burial Caskets
Father was so proud of were just about as sturdy and moisture proof as matchboxes; an earthworm bumping its head against one could have knocked the walls down if the lid didn't cave in after the first shovel full of earth thudded down on top of it.

Whenever Father proudly petted his prized display model, which truly was an object of beauty painstakingly crafted with exquisite care, unlike the shoddy product turned out by the factory, and caressed the “heavenly soft” white satin within he was in reality selling a fantasy.

Father always led the bereaved away before the actual interment, telling them they could best honor their loved one's memory by remembering them in the glorious bloom of health and vigor instead of watching their coffin being lowered six feet into the ground and hearing the thud of earth—such a sad sound with the harsh, inescapable ring of finality!—upon the lid. Nor did they know that most adult men, and a few women too, were consigned to their eternal rest without their feet, and also their jewelry, gold fillings, and teeth, and ladies with particularly handsome tresses habitually entered the Kingdom of Heaven shorn like convicts while Father hastened to sell their hair to a wigmaker in Boston with whom he had a lucrative and congenial arrangement. He had a similar agreement with a dentist who used the teeth of the dead to craft dentures to fill the mouths of the living. To cut costs, Father habitually purchased the shortest adult-sized coffins the Crane Company manufactured and then sawed the feet off corpses to make them fit. I often wondered if centuries after we were all returned to dust an archaeologist came along and excavated the land behind the chicken coop of our Swansea farm what he would make of the mass burial of hundreds of human feet. When the rare mourner exhibited a glint of shrewdness and remarked that their loved one looked uncommonly short in his coffin, Father was quick to retort that without life to fill them people always looked smaller in death.

Two years after our mother died, Father decided to forsake the funerary trade and the farm at Swansea and concentrate on his more lucrative and refined business ventures involving banking, textiles, and real estate in the business district of Fall River, thus necessitating our move to that city.

He put the farm, the only home Emma and I had ever known, up for rent, and moved us all into town and an ugly cracker box house at 92 Second Street, painted the most
hideous
shade of drab I ever saw, sort of a dull, muddy olive green tinged with an even uglier gray or brown depending on how the light struck it, though personally I always felt it would have been far better if
lightning
had struck it. Surrounded by a picket fence and situated on an almost pleasant street lined with elms and poplars, the house itself was a monstrosity. It was a former duplex that had been converted, ineptly and as cheaply as possible, into a single-family dwelling; thus there were no hallways and all of the rooms led directly into one another, so no one could reach the privacy of their bedroom without first passing invasively through another's private sanctum. But Father had “gotten it for cheap” and fully, if
hideously,
furnished by hopelessly outmoded people who hadn't the faintest clue about what was au courant even twenty years ago. I
hated
it on sight, but Father said I was the
most
ungrateful girl he ever knew or heard tell of; I didn't even know the meaning of the word
gratitude,
and I should be thankful to have a roof over my head when so many others didn't even have that much.

The sudden change from country life to city life was jarring. We had known no other life. Emma and I had loved the clean, fresh air, green grass, wildflowers, pure water streams, fishing holes, animals, and wide-open spaces of the farm, and the days spent frolicking with our cousins and nearest neighbors, the Gardners. Leaving Swansea for Fall River was almost like moving from Heaven to Hell. Fall River was a thriving mill town booming with big brick chimneys belching clouds of black smoke and red sparks into the sky day and night to the music of the constant thrum, hum, and roar of machinery from the eighty-seven mills that earned it the proud sobriquet of “Spindle City” and made it the largest producer of cotton in America.

But an even more drastic change lay in store. Father decided to take another wife. When Emma wept and said it was disloyal to Mother's memory, Father countered that life was for the living and Mother was as dead as she was ever going to be. It was the sensible thing to do, he said, far cheaper than hiring a housekeeper to look after the house and a pair of growing girls who needed a woman's guidance. When I suggested a governess—Emma had just finished reading
Jane Eyre
and had told me the story—Father
glared
and leveled a finger at me like a Puritan minister about to denounce a woman as a witch or a whore before his entire congregation and thundered the word
SPENDTHRIFT!
as though it was the worst insult he could think to hurl at me.

The year was 1865. Though I was only five, I remember well the Sunday Father took us to the Central Congregational Church and, after the service, introduced us to the woman he had chosen to be our stepmother.

Her name was Abby Durfee Gray; she was thirty-seven years old and had long since resigned herself to spinsterhood and embraced the consolation of sweets in lieu of a sweetheart. She was shy, short, and round as a full moon. Though she was descended, like us Bordens, from one of the first families of Puritan settlers who had arrived in Fall River in the seventeenth century, the branch she sprang from was a poor one. Like our own grandfather, whose poverty-stricken ghost Father was always running away from, hers had been a pushcart peddler, though he sold gewgaws made of tin to delight children, and little pies and cakes his wife baked instead of stinking fish.

She was wearing a massive crinoline beneath her Sunday best and I could not help but stare; I'd never seen a hoop so enormous. She'd made the dress herself, proof of her talent as a seamstress that, along with her cakes, cookies, and pies that no picnic, women's gathering, or church social was ever complete without, often supplemented her meager income. It was charcoal-gray damask trimmed with ribbons the color of ripe plums, with wide pagoda sleeves billowing over puffed clouds of gauzy white under-sleeves trimmed with frills of lace and silk ribbons at the wrists. Beneath a matching feathered hat, her thick dark hair, actually an impressive false piece artfully braided in to lend volume to her own sparse tresses, was caught up in a net of braided purple silk sewn here and there with seed pearls. A pair of amethyst and pearl earbobs dangled like heavy ripe plums from the fleshy pink lobes of her ears and a mother-of-pearl brooch carved in the shape of a peony that her mother had worn upon her wedding day bloomed in the snowy lace at her throat.

She had such a kind face, round and open, the sort of face that knows no artifice and shows every joy and hurt as it happens. She was not like most adults, who when introduced to children stare down at them with superior eyes and a slight, tolerant smile. When Father introduced us she immediately crouched down to shake my hand and smile at me face-to-face.