The Secrets of Lizzie Borden

by Brandy Purdy

  And I had a phonograph. I had a fine collection of classical works like Mozart and Beethoven, popular songs and soul-stirring hymns, the clever whimsy of Gilbert and Sullivan, and sparkling operettas like Naughty Marietta and The Merry Widow, and several operatic recordings. I could sit and listen to the great Caruso’s magnificent voice for endless hours, losing myself in the music, the passion and feeling, remembering the time I had seen him as Rodolfo in La Bohème at the Metropolitan Opera House and heard his majestic voice soaring as though up to Heaven when he sang “Che Gelida Manina [Thy tiny hand is froze].” I’d never heard anything so powerful and beautiful; his voice truly seemed to touch the divine.

  But there was another song that struck a deeper chord in me. Whenever he sang “Vesti la Giubba [On with the motley]” tears poured down my face like rain.

  I felt a special kinship with Canio, the tragic clown of Pagliacci, who after discovering his wife’s adultery must nonetheless go out and give a performance, only, overwhelmed by heartache and madness, to kill the treacherous pair onstage, in full view of the audience. He rips the mask off with an anguished cry, “I am a clown no longer!,” and plunges the knife in, and then he does it again. And then the broken man sobs out, “La commedia è finita! [The comedy is finished!]”

  Recitar! Mentre preso dal delirio,

  Non so piú quel che dico,

  E quel che faccio!

  Eppur è d’uopo, sforzati!

  Bah! Sei tu forse un uom?

  Tu se’ Pagliaccio!

  Vesti la giubba e la faccia infarina.

  La gente paga, e rider vuole qua.

  E se Arlecchin t’invola Colombina,

  Ridi, Pagliaccio, e ognun applaudirà!

  Tramuta in lazzi lo spasmo ed il pianto

  In una smorfia il singhiozzo e ‘l dolor, Ah!

  Ridi, Pagliaccio,

  Sul tuo amore infranto!

  Ridi del duol, che t’avvelena il cor!

  Recite! While in delirium,

  I no longer know what I say,

  And what I do!

  And yet it’s necessary. . . . Make an effort!

  Bah! Are you a man?

  You are a clown!

  Put on your costume and powder your face.

  The gentlemen pay, and they want to laugh.

  And if Harlequin shall steal your Columbina,

  Laugh, Clown, and all will applaud!

  Turn your distress and tears into jest,

  Your pain and sobbing into a funny face—Ah!

  Laugh, Clown

  At your broken love!

  Laugh at the grief that poisons your heart!

  It took me back to a time when, my mind befuddled and dulled by morphine and panic, I didn’t know what I was saying. And the life I had led afterward, bravely putting on my paint and powder and fine dresses, my own particular fool’s motley, hennaing my hair a clown-bright red, plastering a smile on my face, and going out into the world, trying to live my life, as though the past were dead and didn’t matter. It always made me wonder when the comic tragedy of my own life would be finished.

  And there were books, always books. Romances, adventure stories, and collections of poetry. I began to keep a scrapbook of sorts, a blank book, like a diary, into which, on dragging, dreary afternoons, or long sleepless nights, I wrote or pasted snippets of prose or verse that struck a chord within me, words of wisdom I wished I could live by, a path of letters I hoped might someday lead me to peace of mind and contentment. Things like:

  Driftings, anchorings,

  All in God’s keeping,

  This is life!

  And these lines by Alexander Pope:

  Honor and shame from no condition rise.

  Act well your part: there all the honor lies.

  And a touching snippet of a Christmas poem by Edith Matilda Thomas:

  Deep in the heart

  As each heart doth know—

  Is a buried village

  Called Long Ago.

  Once, just once, I dared attempt to reach out to Nance. I sent her a poem I copied out of a book, The Wings of Icarus by Susan Marr Spaulding:

  Two shall be born the whole world wide apart,

  And speak in different tongues, and have no thought

  Each for the other’s being, and no heed.

  And these o’er unknown seas to unknown lands

  Shall cross, escaping wreck, defying death;

  And, all unconsciously shape every act

  And bend each wandering step to its very end—

  That, one day, out of darkness they shall meet

  And read Life’s meaning in each other’s eyes.

  And two shall walk some narrow way of life,

  So nearly side by side that should one turn

  Even so little space to left or right,

  They need must stand acknowledged face to face,

  And yet, with wistful eyes that never meet,

  With groping hands that never clasp, and lips

  Calling in vain to ears that never hear,

  They seek each other all their weary days,

  And died unsatisfied, and this is Fate.

  I enclosed it in a pebbled-leather folder with a gilded clasp shaped like a heart that I found at a stationer’s shop on one of my increasingly rare trips to Boston. The deep-red color was called “Heart’s Blood.” It seemed like a good omen. At the height of our passion, I had given Nance a heavy golden ring set with a large heart-shaped pigeon’s blood ruby. She said she would wear it forever. So I sent the poem and waited, but she never replied. By then she was the darling of Broadway under the personal management of impresario David Belasco. Faithless as ever, with not even a shred of loyalty clinging to her heel, the moment Belasco beckoned Nance had abandoned her mentor, McKee Rankin, the man who had made her a star. It was all about who could do the most for her career. Sentiment, Nance firmly believed, had no place in the life, or the heart, of a star. Rankin promptly sued her of course, but there was a whole muddy tangle about contracts and borrowing money on her jewelry and in advance against her salary, and a lot of ugly bickering back and forth in the newspapers, but it was all sorted out eventually and Nance stayed with Belasco. But she would leave him eventually, the moment a brighter prospect appeared upon the horizon.

  I kept my promise to myself and never let love into my life again. I kept everyone at a distance, even those who looked my way and smiled and made overtures. I couldn’t trust their intentions or believe in anyone’s sincerity anymore. I didn’t want to be an anecdote, a footnote, in someone’s life, or the dollar sign in men’s eyes. And it was already too late for me to be a mother, and the passage of the years and the reflection in my mirror told me the only alluring thing left about me was my fortune. No, I was done with love, and lust, forever. Fantasies were better; I made a diligent effort to convince myself I was content with those and to live vicariously and idealistically through novels and songs.

  As the decades rolled past, my body began to wear out, just as Fall River itself went into a decline. The mills began to fail in the 1920s; the once grand and prosperous “Spindle City” simply could not compete with the cheaper cotton-producing facilities down south. Every day it seemed like more and more mills were closing. Jobs were lost, and the wages of those still fortunate enough to have employment plummeted, until the antiquated machinery finally ground to a halt and the massive brick buildings stood empty, and the immigrants who once worked in their humming, thrumming interiors began a mass exodus to the South to find work in the mills down there.

  It seemed like my fate and Fall River’s were indelibly entwined; we had, in a sense, grown up together, and now we were both falling apart at the same time. I no longer bothered to fight the ravages of time or worried about my weight. I grew quite stout. In my white dresses I looked just like a big marshmallow that had sprouted a snowy head waddling about with stubby, stout little arms and legs. But I didn’t care anymore. I ate what I liked. And if one more piece of cake made
my lonesome plight more bearable, so be it.

  In 1926, I had to go into the hospital for a gallbladder operation. It simply could not be postponed any longer. I chose the prestigious Truesdale Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island, and had myself admitted as Mary Smith. But of course everyone knew who I was. As I felt myself groggily emerging from the fog of the anesthetic I heard one nurse whispering to another, “Do you know whose abdomen you just had your hand inside? LIZZIE BORDEN’S!” She shuddered and spoke my name in a delighted whisper-squeal.

  I proved a difficult patient. As soon as my wits had fully returned I demanded that my gallbladder be brought to me in a glass jar. I was afraid that if I didn’t it would soon be touring the country, the star exhibit of many a county fair, sitting on a table in a tent, under a spotlight, while a man in a straw boater and striped jacket stood outside shouting, See Lizzie Borden’s gallbladder—only five cents a gander!

  I flatly refused to eat the dreadful bland hospital food. They actually expected me to breakfast on a single raw egg floating in a dish of milk, and for luncheon there was some indescribable mush I shuddered just to look at. I insisted that my chauffeur bring me meals three times a day from the finest restaurants in town, with orange sherbet for dessert. I also disdained the bedpan. I didn’t care one whit if using it would make things easier on the nurses; when Nature called, my dignity demanded to be supported and escorted to the bathroom. Soon all the doctors and nurses had had enough of me and I was allowed to go home to Maplecroft to convalesce, though Dr. Truesdale insisted I must have round-the-clock care from experienced nurses. By that point, I was so eager to go home, or anywhere, to get away from there that I would have agreed to anything.

  Blissfully back in my private sanctum, I continued to relish the role of difficult patient. I doubt even my thorny rose Nance could have played it half so well as me. The nurses came and the nurses went. I couldn’t keep the same one a fortnight. An enfant terrible verging on seventy, “the devil with white hair and granny glasses,” they called me.

  But at least they came, my money ensured that, and dying ensconced like a queen in my own bed at Maplecroft is far better than dying in a stark, sterile, white hospital. Here I can breathe my last safely, comfortingly, cocooned by my dearly bought velvets, satins and silks, heirloom laces and quality leathers, polished oak, parquet, maple, cherry wood, and marble, fine china and crystal, stained glass, silver, and gilt, all purchased upon the credit of my eternal soul, in this magnificent mausoleum of a mansion, my ostentatious Maplecroft, this palace devoid of fawning courtiers, the house on The Hill I spent my whole life dreaming about.

  Oh, how I vex them! I keep them on their toes and constantly running to complain on the telephone to Dr. Truesdale like tattletale children. But I don’t care! I refuse to live my life such as it is now by their clock. I won’t take naps, send my pets out, or lay my book aside when they say it’s time, or even attempt to carry on a conversation with anyone who insists on addressing me in a condescending singsong voice as though I were a small child, or submit to enemas and sponge baths—one really must draw the line somewhere! —and I shove away the bland invalid foods they lay on a tray before me; if I must have my meals in bed on a tray they must equal or surpass the fare at Delmonico’s.

  I imperiously demand my daily bowl of peach ice cream crowned with crumbled golden cake and a warm, decadent, rich topping of brandied peaches, a dessert fit for a queen, as I sit propped up in bed against a mountain of lace-trimmed, gold-embroidered pastel sherbet-colored satin pillows, wearing a ludicrous, flirtatious lacy beribboned ivory silk negligee that looks laughable on a fat, florid-faced, pendulous-bosomed bespectacled woman of sixty-six with only a few lingering streaks of fading peach left in her snowy hair to remind everyone of the angry red it used to be.

  My dogs and cats curl loyally up beside me so that I am not quite alone in the vast and lonely barren wasteland of this gilded monstrosity of a bed, four postered, gilt tasseled and fringed, canopied, curtained, and king-sized, fit for a French courtesan, like a valentine from Louis XV to Madame Pompadour. But the comfort of my dear pets’ presence and their unconditional love cannot quite erase the sorrow of all the lovers I longed for who never came or only lingered for a while, arousing my hopes as well as my body, yet never staying.

  Even my collection of souvenir spoons evokes only sadness and longing for that which is lost and, despite a lifetime of looking, never found; the way they nest together never fails to remind me that there is no one to curl up behind me and wrap their arms around me.

  No matter how many spoonfuls of peach ice cream I shovel into my mouth, it cannot mask the bitter taste of regret. Or the fear that when I face Father again in whatever life of bliss or unrelenting torment comes after this mortal span he will frown, nod knowingly (always right, even in death!) and say, You see, Lizzie, I was right all along. . . . No one ever did love you for yourself, only my money, and even then . . . not for long. I built a fortune that outlasted any love—I hear the scorn drip like poison from his lips as he pronounces that word, turning it into something sinful, ugly, vulgar and wrong—you were ever given.

  Though my frail body must humbly submit, my still-proud spirit shuns and despises the nurses’ ministrations. I don’t want their eyes or their hands upon me, their humiliating help with my private functions, or the medicines they administer that might loosen my tongue. I learned long ago to be wary of morphine. “Did she confess?” they always whisper, thinking I can’t hear them, whenever they meet to change shifts. One night I came fearfully close.

  Tossing on waves of red-hot, molten-lava pain, I was given morphine. A nurse named Ruby—red, red, red, how it does run like a river of blood through my life!—was in attendance at my bedside. I was dreaming about David Anthony. He came unbidden to my mind even though I had not seen him in years except in passing, riding in fine cars with his family, his weary, wary-eyed wife with large shady hats and powder hiding her bruises, and their brood of children. I heard that he had died two years ago, that he had broken his skull riding his motorcycle out by Durfee Farm.

  In my hazy, muddled morphine dream, I told Ruby that David and I had been very much in love, that we were lovers, keeping secret, passionate trysts in the barn, and that he wanted desperately to marry me. But my father did not approve because David was a butcher’s son and socially beneath me, and quite bluntly informed me that I would make a laughingstock of myself if I married him, because he was ten years younger.

  “He killed for me, to set me free”—I don’t know why I did it, but I spun a tragic tale of star-crossed lovers for Ruby, and perhaps for myself as well, because I wanted to rewrite history and if it had to be, that’s how it should have been—“because he thought my parents were the only obstacle. He was so much younger than me and didn’t really understand that I also had misgivings. When I walked into the sitting room and saw him standing over Father with the hatchet . . . it was too late to stop him! I was horrified! Even as I bathed all the blood off him and dried his tears, I knew I would not have him. I broke off all contact with him. At first, I let him believe that we still might have a future, that the distance I insisted on putting between us was for his own good, to keep him safe from suspicion. But that was a lie; I wanted nothing more to do with him and was just too cowardly to say so. But I would never tell what he had done, because in my heart I blamed myself; if I had taken greater pains to make him understand maybe it would never have happened. I didn’t want to ruin his life, to see him hang, so I took the blame. I never mentioned his name or saw him alone ever again. And in the end, he shunned me too, like all the rest. He went on with his life and married someone else and had a family and, as far as I know, a happy life. I suppose he just couldn’t bear the blood between us, and maybe Time taught him that I was to blame, at least in part. He died a few years ago.... He sleeps now in the cemetery only a few feet from Father.”

  It made a good story. Nance would have loved it. But not a word of it was true except tha
t David Anthony had been my lover and right before the murders had wanted me for a wife even though I didn’t want him. But the hatchet, my hickory-handled Great Emancipator, killed that too and set me free forever from David Anthony.

  It has been thirty-five years since the bloody deeds that made me infamous. My body may be falling apart, but my mind is as sound and solid as the granite memorial standing in the midst of our family plot at Oak Grove Cemetery where I know they shall very soon lay me at my father’s feet. A position I once scorned and rebelled against but now see as just and emblematic of a wayward daughter’s humble plea for a forgiveness she doesn’t deserve.

  Thirty-five years spent watching people I once called “friends” cross to the other side of the street in order to avoid me, and listening to schoolchildren chant in innocent cruel singsong:

  “Lizzie Borden took an ax

  And gave her mother forty whacks.

  When she saw what she had done,

  She gave her father forty-one.”

  Will it never end? God help me, I am tired of living, but even more afraid of dying. Like Canio, I long to rip the mask away and see the comic tragedy of my life come to an end, to be free of every care, pain, and woe, freed from suspicion, guilt, and ostracism. But I also know that Justice is a thing not only of this world. There is always a price to pay . . . for everything, and there is a debt of blood I still owe. God help me!

  Postscript

  Lizzie Borden died on June 1, 1927, of complications resulting from her gallbladder operation. She slipped away quietly in her sleep; her heart simply stopped beating. She was sixty-six years old. Though she had spent lavishly, she still left a sizable fortune, the bulk of which was bequeathed to various animal charities, “because their need is great and so few care for them.” The Animal Rescue League of Fall River was the largest beneficiary. She left nothing to Emma “as she had her share of our father’s estate and is supposed to have enough to make her comfortable.”