Chapter 3
Returning to Fall River and reentering my father’s house felt just like being found guilty of a terrible crime and being sentenced to live out the rest of my life in a dreary prison with no amenities to make life pleasant or even bearable.
The first thing that greeted me when I stepped through the front door of 92 Second Street was the smell of mincemeat. Abby was in the kitchen baking a pie and I could hear her singing as she bustled about the kitchen, her voice mingling with Bridget’s rhapsodizing about “the golden slippers I’se goin’ to wear to walk the golden street.”
There were times when I thought hating Abby was more trouble than it was worth just to keep the peace with Emma, and this was one of them.
Emma was thirteen when our mother died; she had already built up a treasure trove of memories, and was ready to resent any woman Father married. And if I forgot, as any child would, and shared a smile or a laugh with Abby, Emma always made sure I regretted it; she would call me “a traitor to our mother’s memory,” punish me with a savage pinch, and refuse to speak to me for days afterward. And in the early years of their marriage, she was always quick to remind me that Abby was still young enough to bear children. She was old enough to make it dangerous for herself, that was certainly true, but she still bled every month. Father had always wanted a son; I was supposed to be the boy he always wanted. But if Abby gave him the son our mother never could . . . he—that boy, Abby’s greedy, suckling male piglet—would inherit everything, what should, by right, be ours, and another male would follow in Father’s footsteps and have control of us until the day we died. God we could trust to be merciful, but NEVER the son of Abby and Andrew Borden!
Emma made me see all the possibilities; she relentlessly hammered them into my head and made sure I never forgot that Father could at any time change his will, and even if Abby never gave him a son—and she never did, and within a few years all possibility of that had ceased—he could still leave everything to her and make us beholden to “The Cow” for every blessed little thing all the days of her life, until Abby herself died and left everything to her precious little piglet sister Sarah. So I let Emma, “my little mother,” guide and counsel me, I let her fuel my fears, and I erected an ice-cold wall between myself and Abby.
But hearing her in the kitchen still made me smile. How she loved to bake sweet things, all my favorite things—cookies, cakes, and pies! I was five years old when she married Father, and I used to spend my days with her while Emma was at school and Father was away tending to business. Abby told me the secret of her mincemeat pies, exactly what made them so special—she only baked them for people she liked, and always sprinkled them with rosewater. And now she was baking one to welcome me home. Tears pricked my eyes and I fought the urge to go into the kitchen and give her a hug, something I hadn’t done in years.
One day, in that first year, when we were all still getting used to one another, Abby made me a pretty pink dress with ruffles and a sunshine-yellow sash even though Emma said girls with red hair should never wear pink. And Abby curled my hair with hot irons, taking the time to make sure that each ringlet was perfectly shaped and shining. I remember she held my hair up to the light and showed me the multitude of shades, the red, orange, brown and gold, the colors, the ingredients, like the love and rosewater she always put in her mincemeat pies, that made redheads so special. She knew children could be cruel and that I had already been teased many times about my red hair, and she was trying to make me feel better, just like when she told me that each one of the freckles I detested was a kiss from an angel, a blessing on my very own skin. Then she stepped back to look at me, clasped her hands over her ample breasts, and, beaming, declared that I looked “just like a little French doll.”
When Emma saw me she flew into a rage. She dragged me upstairs to our room, barking my shins against the steps, and tore that beautiful dress off me. She took it outside and pounded it into the pile of horse manure Father kept for fertilizer. She stood there with a shovel, hitting it, again and again and again, until her arms were too tired to continue and she was splattered head to foot with manure and bleeding from where she had bit her lip clean through. Then she came back to deal with me. She ripped the ribbons from my hair and poured water into our basin and plunged my head into it. I began to cry, I thought she was trying to drown me, but she was just wetting my hair. Then she took the comb and raked it viciously from the top of my scalp to the ends of my hair. I screamed as the teeth bit into my scalp, brutal enough to draw blood. When the ringlets resisted she yanked the comb harder, pulling the hair out in clumps, until I was afraid she would snatch me bald headed. But that was Emma’s way. How very ironic that all the world sees her as the very picture of the meek as a mouse prim and pious brittle and birdlike little maiden lady in eternal mourning too afraid to ever say Boo! to a goose. They don’t know the real Emma; no one does except me.
I was still standing there savoring the scent of Abby’s mincemeat pie when Emma appeared, staring me in the face with hard, piercing eyes, pulling me out of the past to confront the present.
“Father is waiting for you in the sitting room,” was all she said. It was all she had to say.
Then I was standing before him. I had not even taken off my hat and sealskin cape or removed my muff and gloves.
I saw him rise up from the sofa. He was clenching his jaw and that made his snow-white whiskers quiver. He was looking at me with such utter contempt that I wanted to run away and hide.
And then he began to speak, unleashing a torrent of angry words, coming closer all the while, until he was gripping my shoulders and shaking me so hard that my hat fell off and my hairpins rained down onto the carpet.
“I never thought I would have cause to say this, Lizzie, but I am ashamed of you! I let you, out of the goodness of my heart, go gadding off to Europe, let you see something of the world, I let you have your heaping dose of culture, and what do you do? Fall in love with some foreigner! Some scoundrel who preys on innocent women traveling abroad! Gullible American women are probably his bread and butter! For shame, Lizzie! Shame! I thought you had more respect for yourself, for your family, for me! I thought you were a decent, respectable girl, a virtuous, God-fearing girl, but I was wrong; you’ve proven that! What did you just say? Don’t you dare tell me not to treat you like a child, miss! I treat you like a child because you act like a child! A silly, credulous child who would believe the moon is made of green cheese if someone told her so, especially if he was handsome and had an English accent!”
Father released me so suddenly that I stumbled and fell to my knees. I caught frantically at his hands. I tried to reason with him, I tried to tell him that he was wrong, that it had not been like that at all. My architect was not the sort of man he thought. He was not one of those oily faux counts who preyed on American heiresses, or a barefoot peasant selling olives on the street; he was kind, and intelligent, a hard worker, diligent and respectable in every way. Father was free to make all the inquiries he wished; I knew my love and was confident that he could withstand even the most painstaking scrutiny. But private detectives cost money—lots of money—and Father wasn’t about to pay a Pinkerton man to confirm what he already knew; he was that certain that no respectable man of solid and impeccable reputation and means could ever fall in love with me.
“I don’t want to hear another word about him!” Father cut me off. “I am ashamed of you, Lizzie Borden! Ashamed, of you, my own flesh and blood! And you a Sunday school teacher!” he shuddered. “God help those poor Celestials with you for a teacher!”
Suddenly he reached down and jerked me to my feet. “Did you let him touch you?” he demanded. “Did you let him kiss you?”
The memory of that kiss flashed behind my eyes and Father saw that he had struck a nerve, that there was something: No matter how innocent it might have been, there was something.
“You DID! No! Don’t bother to deny it; I can see it in your eyes! Your own face betrays you!”
“Father, please, let me explain—”
“Explain what? That you behaved like a whore? I already know that! For all your churchgoing, you’re a hypocrite, Lizzie Borden. You have the soul of a whore; just like a bitch in heat, you want a man between your legs no matter the cost. Someone must have a care for your soul, since you are unfit to govern yourself, and as your father that duty falls to me, and as long as I live you will walk the straight and narrow; there’ll be no straying onto the primrose path and dillydallying with fortune hunters, worthless men who want to fritter away my hard-earned money!”
“Father, no, it isn’t like that—”
He dealt me a stinging slap that knocked me flat upon the floor.
“I am ashamed to call you my daughter!” he roared.
And he walked away from me. There was no hesitation in his footsteps and he never looked back. I lay on the floor and wept, watering the faded flowers on the carpet with my tears. No one came near me. Not Abby, not Emma, not even Bridget. I cried until I had no tears left.
The next morning, when I came downstairs, Father informed me that he had made an appointment for me to see Dr. Bowen promptly at three o’clock.
“You are looking a little fatter, a little rounder, than you were when you left us, Lizzie, and I want to make certain there are no surprises a few months from now.”
I grasped his sleeve as he was walking away from me and tried to tell him about all the rich foods, the pastries in France, the pastas and sauces in Italy, all the cheese and cream, the sinfully soothing chocolates, but he would not listen or believe me.
“Three o’clock, Lizzie, promptly at three,” was all he would say to me.
Dr. Seabury Warren Bowen lived across the street from us. I had known him almost my entire life; it seemed like he had always been our family physician, neighbor, and friend. Indeed, I could not remember a time when he had not been there. He was a kind man with gentle and wise brown eyes. His brown hair was receding from his brow, and he had a fine mustache which he always kept waxed in a perfect handlebar.
As three o’clock approached, I sat in his waiting room staring down at my shoes, my knees shaking bad enough to bruise beneath my blue flowered skirt. I was so embarrassed, so ashamed, at what I knew was about to happen. I had never had cause to submit to an intimate examination; I thought they were only for expectant ladies. He had to call me twice before I could make my legs obey and stand up and stagger clumsily through the door he held open for me.
He pointed to a dressing screen and asked me to strip down to my chemise and remove my drawers, then lie flat upon his examination table. He draped a white sheet modestly over me and asked me to spread my legs wide and draw up my knees. I stared up at the ceiling, my face burning with shame and tears blurring my eyes. He asked me when I had last had fleas. That was a euphemism unique to Fall River that we used to refer to a woman’s monthly illness, and any stains resulting from it were known as flea bites. I answered his question as best I could. He nodded and bent down and lifted the bottom edge of the sheet.
I tensed at the sudden intrusion of his fingers as he parted the pink petals of my sex and reached inside to test my purity. He told me to try to relax, that it would all be over soon. But I was only able to relax when he finally withdrew, after what seemed like an eternity but was only minutes, I’m sure, and turned away to wash his hands.
“Intact. I shall assure your father that all is as it should be,” he said. Then he turned back to face me. I was sitting up, but my face still burned scarlet with shame, and I could not meet his eyes.
He came to me and gently took my hand.
“I am a doctor, Lizzie; I am your doctor, Lizzie, and anything you say to me is just between us. Would you like to tell me why your father insisted on this examination? It might make you feel better.”
I hesitated for a moment; then it all came pouring out, and once I started talking I couldn’t stop. I told him all about my Englishman, the wonderful architect who I was quite certain loved me. When I had finished, Dr. Bowen put his arms around me, drew my head down onto his shoulder, and let me cry.
“Your father is a hard man, Lizzie,” he said. And I saw the anger in his eyes. He had been our family doctor for years; he knew what Father was like. Doubtlessly Father would wrangle with him over the bill he presented for this examination too; he always put up a fuss about Dr. Bowen’s bills, though everyone else thought he was quite reasonable.
“I want to give you something, Lizzie,” Dr. Bowen said. “Just a little morphine to calm your nerves and help you rest. Don’t be afraid,” he said when I gasped and instinctively drew back at the sight of the fearsome metal and glass syringe.
He took my arm and, as gently as he could, injected the drug. He made soothing noises, as one would for a hurt and frightened child or animal, when I winced and whimpered at the sharp pinch as the needle penetrated my skin and sent liquid rest into my vein.
By the time I had finished dressing, my head felt very strange, like my brain had turned into a great big sopping-wet ball of cotton. I had trouble speaking, I confused and muddled my words, I could not think clearly or say what I meant, and my feet found walking to be a nearly insurmountable quandary.
“It’s all right, Lizzie,” Dr. Bowen said soothingly as he took my arm, “nothing to be afraid of. Apparently a very small dose of this affects you more strongly than it does most; I shall have to remember that in the future should you have need of it again. Come on now; I’ll see you safely home. And your father is waiting for my report.”
Dr. Bowen took me home and I never forgot the last thing he said to me before he rang our doorbell. “You have a friend in me, Lizzie; always remember that.”
Bridget helped me upstairs to my room, her arm about my waist, holding me close to her, coaxing me to be “careful now, Miss Lizzie,” whenever I stumbled like a drunkard.
“Oh, Bridget!” I sighed with the most wanton delight as she undressed me.
I fell onto my bed, clad only in my drawers and chemise, and tried to pull her down on top of me. Smiling good-naturedly, Bridget wriggled out of my embrace, chiding me gently when I untied her apron strings and tried to kiss her with clumsy lips that wouldn’t quite obey.
“Now, now, macushla”—she smiled and stroked my brow—“you just lie there an’ rest quietly now like a good girl. You’re not quite yourself, but you’ll be better soon, Dr. Bowen said.”
Macushla! She had called me her darling, her dear! Macushla! I’d never heard a sweeter word! I smiled up at her with love shining in my eyes as she covered me with my quilt. I slept the rest of the day and the whole night through. Morphine and Morpheus, the God of Sleep, stripped away my shame and sent me dreams so sweet, so luxuriantly lascivious, it would tarnish them forever if I dared set them down on paper. Macushla! Then as now—I’ll live on that word for the rest of my life!
Much to my surprise, pining for my architect as I was day and night, I think I fell a little in love with Dr. Bowen after that. It wasn’t that I no longer cared for my architect, but he was a whole world away with a great big ocean between us and Dr. Bowen was here now and just across the street. Maybe I was just so hungry for love that any love would do as long as it was lasting and true?
The pictures I’d hung on my walls to remind me of my “sweet taste of freedom” only seemed to mock me with bittersweet memories. And I had been too afraid of my family’s mockery and laughter to show myself in any of the dresses I had bought in Paris. In the end, when I could no longer bear to look at them, I bundled them up and discreetly, anonymously, left them for the church to distribute to those in need. I was mortified the Saturday I ventured into the worst part of town with my arms full of peonies with the other ladies of the Fruit and Flower Mission and saw a fancy woman with a painted face and black hair glinting bold blue lights wearing my discarded caramel and apple-green stripes. She’d shortened the skirt to show off her shapely calves, trim ankles, and tiny feet, and recut the bodice to reveal as much of her bosom as was permissible on a public street and sheared off the sleeves to bare her fleshy white arms. Despite the indecent alterations, it looked much better on her than it ever had on me. I couldn’t believe I had been fool enough to buy it and was glad I had never been foolish enough to wear it in Fall River; I would surely have been laughed off the street if I had. In the months to come I also caught glimpses of some of her “sisters of the pavement” strutting about like flaunting peacocks in my forsaken finery. Every time, I felt the warring tug of admiration and envy. They were so bold, so brave, so beautiful, so free—free like I wanted to be! They lived their lives unchained, charting their own course, answering to no man, their hungers and desires unfettered by duty and rules.
That summer, when my family went to the farm in Swansea I stayed behind. I wanted to be alone, I felt stifled and wanted space and time to reflect in; my hungry soul craved the illusion of freedom.
Every Sunday Dr. Bowen would call for me in his buggy and drive me to church. We were neighbors, after all, and he was our family doctor, so I never thought anyone would make anything of it. But we soon became the subject of gossip, with people hinting that perhaps I was not entirely alone in the house at 92 Second Street.
Bridget was there, of course, but without the drugs swimming like a school of brave and fearless sharks through my veins I was so ashamed of my drowsily and dreamily remembered morphine-induced attempt at seduction, I held myself aloof and kept my distance. I found it exceedingly difficult to meet her eyes without blushing, and trying to talk to her at all, even about the most innocuous, mundane things like marketing, laundry, and dinner, tied my tongue in knots every time.
Yet most nights when I lay alone in my bed, staring at the ceiling, it was Bridget whom I thought of, so near, yet so far, in the attic above me. I thought of her lying there on her narrow cot. What was she wearing? Did she don a nightgown for bed or did she sleep au naturel or in her chemise? I wondered if she ever touched herself and if she ever thought of me and sighed, “Lizzie!” into the sultry night.
At first, I would always stop and scold myself and try to make myself think of my architect, or Dr. Bowen, or the hero of the latest novel that I had read, instead, but dreams of Bridget, and sometimes, like a ghost from the past, vibrant images of Lulie Stillwell, straddling me stark naked in sugary-sweet clouds of perfumed powder, kept intruding no matter how hard I tried, and in the end I just gave up and put out the light, trusting my secrets to the night.
One night, after I had put the candle out, I awakened suddenly at the feel of long hair grazing my face and tickling my naked breasts. I felt a hot breath caress my cheek. “This is just a dream,” a husky Irish voice whispered in my ear right before a pair of warm lips descended hungrily over mine. Wonderful things happened in the darkness. Wonderful, wonderful things!
“This is just a dream,” the voice whispered again before love vanished from my arms and I was left alone again.
The next morning in the kitchen I tentatively said to Bridget as she served me my breakfast, “I had the most wonderful dream last night.”
“Did you now, Miss Lizzie?” she asked casually as she poured me a cup of coffee.
“Yes.” I nodded, then added eagerly, “I hope I will have it again tonight.”
“Dreams don’t work that way, macushla,” Bridget said, then went on with her work. “Oh, dem golden slippers, oh, dem golden slippers, golden slippers I’se going to wear because they look so neat . . .” she sang with gusto as she turned her back to me and began to wash the dishes.
That night I lay tense and hopeful in the darkness, my breath catching at each creak of the old cracker box house, hoping it heralded a footstep outside my door followed by the knob turning. But I was destined to pass that night, and every other after, alone in disappointment. Bridget was right about dreams. I never did have that one again.
On the last Sunday of the summer, before my family returned, Dr. Bowen and I went for a buggy ride after church. I was wearing the blue eyelet dress with the satin sash I had worn that magical day at Glastonbury and a new straw hat with silk ribbon streamers trailing down my back.
We alighted, to stretch our legs and let his team of handsome chestnuts have a rest and graze upon the emerald grass. The sun was blazing bright and we sought a respite under a shady tree and I shamelessly let him kiss me. My mind was an ocean away, and I suppose I was trying to re-create the most magical moment of my life.
Dr. Bowen drew back from me as if I were a snake and had bitten him, though he had initiated our embrace . . . I think? There are moments, I admit, when I am really not quite sure and think perhaps that I may have kissed him.
“My word, you are a forward girl; aren’t you, Lizzie?” Dr. Bowen said, his voice a disturbing, shaky blend of disapproval and feigned joviality. The smile wavered uncertainly on his lips but never quite reached his eyes.
The sky had begun to darken, portending one of those sudden summer storms, and we sat in tomb-like silence as we drove home under a leaden sky.
A few months later when Dr. Bowen married the beautiful sylphlike brunette Phoebe Southard I was there, florid faced, sweating, and straining to keep my false smile from slipping into an honest scowl, laced to lung-bursting tightness in a fussy bow and ruffle-bedecked lavender chiffon bridesmaid’s dress and an enormous ruffled monstrosity of a hat haphazardly dripping swags of seed pearls and sprouting lily of the valley like a garden grown out of control. It was the fussiest, ugliest bridesmaid’s dress I had ever seen in my life! There were swags of imitation pearls all over it, draped around the shoulders, bodice, and skirt, that snagged on every blessed thing! Phoebe Bowen had the most abominable taste of any female I ever knew! Her parlor looked like it was decorated by circus clowns!
As Dr. Bowen, with his beaming bride clinging to his arm, passed by me, on their way to their ribbon-and-flower-bedecked wedding buggy, the new Mrs. Bowen’s veil caught briefly on the bouquet I clutched murderously in my trembling and perspiring pig-pink hands. I wanted to beat her over the head with it! But Phoebe didn’t have a clue, she just smiled at me, radiant with a delight we both knew I could never share, and I don’t think her eyes actually even saw me, they were so blinded by bliss, as she quickly disentangled her hideous veil.
Dr. Bowen didn’t even glance at me, not even when the girl standing beside me caught the wedding bouquet. He stared pointedly past me.
Forwardness in a New England girl is not easily forgiven, or forgotten.
As for my Englishman, he kept his promise; he did indeed write to me. But he was a man meant to go out into the world and do great things, and I was a woman, a daughter, meant to bide at home, chained and bound by convention and familial duty. Had I only possessed the courage to break the shackles of tradition and risk the loss of my inheritance . . . But would he have had me with such a stain upon me? Men prize a woman’s virtue and respectability, her obedience, and chastity; they make us into ivory statues of domestic goddesses, paragons of the hearth and home, and put us up on pedestals to venerate and admire. Never realizing, or caring, how precarious it is to teeter up so high and to look down and see how far one risks to fall. And if perchance one actually does fall . . . How many fallen women have managed to claw their way back up to that dizzyingly high pinnacle of respectability? A good name once blackened can never be scrubbed virgin white clean again.
As much as I longed for his letters, I also came to dread them. I feared what he might one day tell me: that he had spoken the words I so longed to hear to another. Every time a letter arrived I would sit and hold it in my trembling hands for the longest time while an icy fear gripped my heart and threatened to loosen my bowels. My head would start to ache and a cold sweat would trickle slowly down my spine even though I felt so hot I would have to open my gown and loosen my corset.
For what seemed like hours, I would sit there holding his precious letter, which had traveled all the way across the sea to bring his words to me, until the sun went down and it was too dark to read without lighting a lamp, and by then I was too tired, so I went to bed, always promising myself that I would read it in the morning, right after breakfast, only to postpone it as there was work to be done, an errand I must run, or a meeting I must attend, and then repeat the whole scene again and again and again.
Somehow not knowing was better, but it was also worse. I left them unopened until I had accumulated a small stack. What must he have thought of me? That I was fickle and had lost interest or fallen ill or even died? Fear and longing possessed me; they fought a battle royal within my soul. I wanted to be with him so badly! I could not sleep or eat. My cheeks grew gaunt, fat melted from my frame, and my eyes sank into deep dark circles.
At last, I summoned all my courage and carried the letters downstairs to the kitchen stove one Thursday afternoon when everyone else was out. I added kindling and watched the fire blaze and then, tears running down my face, with a wrenching cry, the howl of a broken heart, bursting from my breast, I threw them in and watched them burn. I regretted it the moment I did it and burned my fingers trying to snatch them back again. But it was too late . . . too late!
The letters are long gone now, reduced to ashes, and I can but wonder what he had to say and whether it would have thrilled my heart or wounded it to the core. He will never know how much I loved him or that I never truly stopped, despite whatever I might have felt for others. He remains my one true love, the only one I never let myself, or the reality of my life, ruin; he exists only in my dreams, more god in his perfection than any flesh and blood man could ever hope to be. Perhaps it truly is better that way.
From the moment his letters crumbled into ashes I wanted to turn back the clock and undo what I had done, to find a way to make everything right. Oh, the reams of paper I wasted trying to write and tell him, to explain everything, what I had done and why. But every word I wrote seemed to make even a worse muddle of it and in the end I stopped trying. Maybe silence truly was best? And I was too great a coward to write the truth that was in my heart. I was a lady. I could not be so brazen as to speak of love; a lady always waits for a gentleman to broach the subject first. I felt the distance that yawned between us so keenly, the miles of land and sea. I felt it grow greater with every day that passed until it was so vast that no mere letter or telegram, not even a steamship, could bridge the gulf between us. And so I let go of the one person I wanted more than anything to draw closer to me, even though Reason said it could never be. Father would never let me go, he would see marriage and a life abroad as abandonment and disinherit me, and I could not ask my architect to exchange bustling exciting, beautiful, cosmopolitan London and the whole wide world for the narrow confines and even smaller minds of Fall River. And I was far too proud to ask him to accept no other dowry but me—the miserly millionaire’s now penniless, spinster daughter. I loved him too much to do that to him; it would have been akin to a life prison term, a punishment, and in time his love for me, if it ever really was love, would have soured and turned to resentment and eventually hate. And I could not bear that.
I have not kept up with the details of his life. Though I wish him every happiness, I do not want to know, I cannot bear to know, about the woman who walks and sleeps at his side and has the life, the love, that should have been mine. In the years to come, whenever I visited New York and Boston and mingled with people who regularly traveled abroad I would feel such a sharp sense of dread, of trepidation, that made my head so light and my knees frightfully wobbly and weak, as I both yearned and feared to hear his name spoken, but I never did.
I’ve often wondered what he must have thought of me when news of my infamy crossed the sea. And yet, somehow, I’ve always felt a little less lonely knowing that he is out there somewhere, living his life, even if a whole ocean and half the world lie between us. I like to think of him working in his office in London, brow furrowed with concentration as he bends over his plans, meticulously drawing the lines that would give birth to a new building or rechecking his calculations, pencil smudges on his hands and his blond hair flopping down vexingly into his eyes, or walking across the countryside with his sketchbook and charcoal pencils sketching the great wonders of mankind and nature.
Sometimes the sadness still steals over me and I cry for what might have been. How different my life would have been! I would have been lost to history; there would have been no murders at 92 Second Street, no immortal singsong rhyme about forty whacks; no one would have even remembered my name after I died—I would have had a different name; he would have changed that, just like he changed my life.