The Secrets of Lizzie Borden (32 page)

A warrant was sworn out for my arrest, but it was never served and, when the episode found its way into the papers, as it inevitably did, with headlines shouting
LIZZIE BORDEN AGAIN! A WARRANT FOR HER ARREST! TWO PAINTINGS MISSING FROM TILDEN & THURBER STORE!
a fictional female name was substituted in place of Lulie's.

I threatened to sue and set Mr. Jennings on it. I explained that the paintings had been inside the package with the vase that I had bought and had shipped to me. I thought they were included as a small gift to show how much Tilden & Thurber appreciated my business, and it never occurred to me that there was anything amiss when I sent them to an old school friend in token of fond memories I still cherished.

Everything was settled out of court eventually for a few hundred dollars, after which Mr. Jennings and I parted ways, with him heatedly declaring, “I will have nothing more to do with that woman!” by which he of course meant me, the client whose murder trial had made him famous and earned him the stupendous sum of $25,000. As Father would have said, some people just don't know the meaning of gratitude.

Chapter
11

I
spent the next several years living quietly, mostly at Maplecroft, and occasionally at grand hotels whenever the wanderlust seized me and I couldn't abide sitting still in the same old place a moment longer. But I was increasingly a solitary creature, ill inclined to let anyone get too close to me; I shied away even from paid companions and more often than not chose fantasy over reality. I just didn't want any more disappointments or complications. As lonely as I was, my head kept telling my heart it was better to be alone. It seemed the world just kept on kicking me when I was already down. Orrin, Sarah, the humiliating and idiotic incident at Tilden & Thurber, my bold yet veiled baring of my feelings to Lulie, and her rejection, it was all just
too
much, too soon, coming all in a row like that. I needed time to heal, to lick my wounds and get back up on my feet again.

In those days, I preferred to find my romance in books and plays instead, and I still had my dreams. I would always have those. It was safer and less painful that way, though it made the loneliness that consumed my soul throb like a toothache sometimes. Many sleepless nights I lay awake wondering if it was love itself that I was in love with more than I could ever be with any real-life man or woman. Did love ever really last a lifetime? Was “happily ever after” just an idyllic ending for storybooks as I suspected? Did all those novels and plays only foster false and impossible hopes in the hearts of the lovelorn? Nevertheless, I thrived on them, I devoured books, and wherever I was I arranged to have a bookshop send me a new batch of novels every fortnight.

I read so much I wore my eyes out. I began to sport an elegant pince-nez, silver or gold depending on my whim and what I was wearing, but always accented with diamonds, and I had some lovely lorgnettes, silver and gold, with enameled and jeweled accents that I wore on long glittering chains around my neck when I went out in the evenings to restaurants and the theater. I felt so chic, elegant as Lillian Russell herself, scanning the menu at Delmonico's with a gold lorgnette flashing radiant red rubies to match my red velvet gown or a silver one sparkling with amethysts to complement my lavish embroidered and appliquéd silver and lilac. It was just an illusion, I know, but, for a moment, at least, it made me feel good . . . until I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror. Lillian Russell I was not.

My fortieth birthday found me back in Fall River. I stood before the gilt-framed mirror in my summer bedroom after my bath and opened my robe and took a long hard look at myself. For most of my life, I had promised myself that I would start dieting, but it was
always
tomorrow, just
one more
slice of pie or piece of cake, another bonbon or cookie . . . but all those one mores added up and as a result, I had the stout, dumpy, lumpy figure to show for my lack of fortitude. But I knew better than to think I had the willpower to do anything about it. I would never have the perfect hourglass figure as curvy and breathtaking as the roller coaster at Coney Island in real life, only in my dreams, where I was always young and beautiful as a Gibson Girl, coveted and courted by gallants galore.

I was dismayed to see how much white was encroaching upon the red of my hair. In some places the color had actually faded to a soft peach or was entirely white. I thought it a most unattractive combination to grace the human head, this parti-colored streaky mass of dark rusty red, peach, and white. I would have to do something about it. I just was not ready to be a white-haired old woman yet. I had lost so much of my youth as a prisoner in my father's house, I just wanted to go on pretending and prolong that pretense as long as I possibly could. Was that so wrong of me?

There was something else I noticed, though Lord knows I wish I hadn't—I had my father's face. Maybe the white hair brought out the resemblance or I had been too blind to see it was there all along, but from that day forth whenever I looked into a mirror I didn't see only me; I saw him too, like a ghost haunting me, possessing my own skin and bones so I could never be free of him. The courts might have acquitted me in 1893, but that July morning in 1900 I
knew
that the mirror would condemn me every day and night for the rest of my life. Abby was in my body, Father was in my face, murder was in my soul and on my conscience, and I
was
guilty no matter how much I pretended and proclaimed my innocence. Our deeds travel with us from afar; they make of us what we are. No matter what I did, or where I went, I would
never
be free, of him, or me, or my murderous deeds.

“This is what it is like to be damned,” I said to my face, and Father's.

Rather than calling in a hairdresser to attend me and having her go gossiping all over town that “
Lizzie Borden is a dyed-haired woman!
” I asked Monsieur Tetrault if he would be so kind as to help me. He had trained as a hairdresser in his youth in Paris, before immigrating to America, and had worked at that trade for several years before going into private service with his wife as an inseparable coachman and cook combination. He was a kind man and readily agreed. By then he had been in my employ a number of years and I felt I could trust him.

The next morning right after breakfast, he arrived with an armful of jars, bowls, and brushes and sat me down at my dressing table with a combing cape draped over my pink dressing gown and gave my hair a good brushing. One hundred strokes—he counted each one, in French. Then he wet it and snipped off the dead ends. He sang in a loud, and slightly discordant, tenor voice as he happily mixed his ingredients with all the enthusiasm of a housewife baking a birthday cake. I was a little alarmed to see that the concoction he ladled on top of my head, then used a brush to spread in long, even strokes from roots to tips looked just like bright green cake batter, but he assured me the results would be
ravissante!

“You mustn't worry about a thing, Mademoiselle Lizbeth,” he said as he wrapped a thick towel around my head like a Turk's turban and sent me to sit as near as I could bear beside a blazing fire, instructing me not to stir for two hours. So I obediently sat there, sweating like a racehorse that had just won the Kentucky Derby, and tried to lose myself in a book and not worry about what was happening to my hair beneath the towel.

When the two hours had passed, Monsieur Tetrault promptly came back and guided me into my bathroom and instructed me to kneel by the tub and hang my head over it. I groaned miserably and nearly burst into tears when I saw the stream of brown liquid as ugly as mud running toward the drain as he rinsed my hair.

“Do not despair, Mademoiselle Lizbeth; when you look in the mirror you shall fall in love with yourself,” Monsieur Tetrault promised as he helped me up and guided me gently back to my dressing table.

When I saw myself I was stunned speechless. I gasped, burst into tears, and then I began to laugh and flung my arms around his neck. I must have kissed his face two dozen times in sheer delight. My hair was as bright as a blazing fireball. I'd never seen a redder head of hair in my life! I was
ecstatic!
I looked, and felt,
striking!

Unfortunately, it was at the precise moment that I was clinging to Monsieur Tetrault and kissing him that Emma walked in. She took one long sour look at us, then turned around and walked right back out. I don't think it could have been any worse than the expression she would have worn if she had walked in on me while I was wielding the hatchet over Father's face as he lay napping on the sofa. But, at that moment, I was too happy to give a fig what Emma thought; I knew better than to expect her to approve of anything I did.

As soon as my hair was dry and Monsieur Tetrault had styled it in a high curling pompadour just like a Gibson Girl, I put on a gay dress of emerald green, ruby red, and white stripes and a turquoise extravaganza of a hat dripping green wax grapes over the broad brim and went right out to Gifford's and, to express my gratitude, bought him the biggest and most ornate gold watch they had and ordered it engraved with his initials. Impulsively, I also selected a large gold fob set with an onyx intaglio carved with a horse's head to go with it; since he had been my driver all these years, first horses, followed by automobiles, I thought it a most fitting gift.

Of course, the clerk at Gifford's talked. What other man could I possibly know in Fall River with the initials
J.H.T.
but Joseph Henri Tetrault? The design on the fob confirmed the recipient's identity. Speculation was so rife that it quite eclipsed the townsfolk's wonderment at how red my head had suddenly become.
And why should Lizzie Borden be giving her coachman such an expensive and extravagant gift? And what does his wife have to say about it?
Everyone wanted to know, arching their brows and suspecting the worst as they
always
did where I was concerned. And when Monsieur Tetrault was seen about town wearing my gift, it confirmed all their dire and dirty-minded suspicions. Obviously he was being paid to do more than just drive me. He was French after all, they said with knowing nods, and no woman employs a chauffeur that handsome unless she has something more than driving in mind. Soon they were all putting their heads together and tallying up all the times they had seen him trailing after me in his elegant uniform carrying a pile of parcels, my fur coat, or one or the other of my pair of Pomeranians, Cinnamon and Sugar, and saying that my hand had lingered overlong in his whenever he was handing me into or down from the carriage or car, and that his fingers had lingeringly brushed my thighs in a caressing manner when he draped a fur lap rug over my knees for my wintertime rides. Of course, it was all nonsense. There had
never
been any impropriety between Monsieur Tetrault and me.

Emma was so mortified by all these lascivious insinuations that right after church one Sunday she burst into my room, her face red as a tomato, her whole body quaking like a volcano about to erupt, and
demanded
that I discharge the Tetraults
at once
. Before I could say a word she
dragged
in a tall, gangly-limbed man named Clayton Fogg to replace him as my coachman, then shoved him right back out the door again before he could say so much as
how d'you do
so we could talk privately. I
hated
him on sight and said so.

“He looks just like a frog!” I told Emma. “I will not have such an ugly man as my chauffeur!”

But Emma said that was all well and good: “No one will ever suspect
him
of hopping into your bed, Lizzie!”

I was so angry I almost slapped her. Heaven knows, I had to sit on my hands not to I was so
furious
. She was
my sister;
how
dare
she say such
awful
things to me? It was almost as though she actually
believed
the lies! I was so hurt, I couldn't help but weep.

Emma was adamant, “Cry all you like, Lizzie, but the Tetraults
must
go and
now
.”

There was no discussing the matter with her; Emma was impervious to my tears and wouldn't hear a word I had to say in my defense or theirs.

“Either the Tetraults go or
I
go,” she declared, “and think how bad it will look if
I
go, Lizzie. Everyone will think you have chosen your French
lover
over your own sister—the one who stood by you through thick and thin and would defend you to her last breath!”

Oh, how scornfully and witheringly she spoke that word—
lover!
She made me feel filthy inside and out, even though I had done nothing wrong. I felt so dirty I had to take the hottest bath I could stand as soon as Emma left me alone.

It wasn't fair! My relations with Monsieur Tetrault had always been perfectly proper; no amorous thoughts about him had ever entered my head. And Madame Tetrault had
never
suffered a moment's disquiet because of me! Both of them had told me they were as sorry as could be that my innocent and generous gift had led to such gossip; I was a good woman, they said, and didn't deserve to have everything I did distorted and twisted all out of proportion. It was such a shame; I couldn't even reward a faithful servant who had been in my service for years without everyone seeing evil and immorality in it. But Emma was
not
as understanding as Monsieur and Madame Tetrault. And she was also right, as much as it pains me to admit; it would look
very
bad for me indeed if she left and the Tetraults stayed. In the end, I gave in. I paid for the Tetraults to move to Canada, to start a new life there, even though I wept to see them go.

As I stood on the porch, with Emma glowering beside me, and watched them drive away with all their belongings tears rolled down my face.

“Everyone leaves me,” I whispered tremulously.

“I never will.” Emma laid a hand on my shoulder that I'm sure was meant to be reassuring but felt more like a steel-toothed bear trap springing shut upon my soul. “
Someone
must have a care for your soul, and reputation, Lizzie, since
you
won't.”

I started and spun around to face her. My heart was pounding so, I pressed a hand against it as though that would keep it from bursting out of my breast. “Emma! You sound just like Father!”

“He wasn't wrong about
everything,
Lizzie,” she said over her shoulder as she went inside and upstairs, back to her religious bric-a-brac, leaving me alone, the way everyone always did in the end.