Lizzie Borden (22 page)

Emma lay in bed, head pounding, body aching. She slowly, painfully turned on her side and saw the breakfast tray that Lizzie brought still on the bedstand. The thought of food nauseated her, yet she knew she should eat. She needed the strength. She needed lots of strength just to heal.

With a thin, trembling hand, Emma grasped the side of the mattress and pulled herself into somewhat of a sitting position. Then she reached out and took a cold piece of toast that had been spread with jam. It looked awful. She took a bite, then another. It tasted as sour as her breath. She put the toast back, swallowed with difficulty, then slid back beneath the covers.

Her arms looked stringy and pale, and a large, round bruise puffed on one shoulder.

She was afraid to look into a mirror.

She’d been home from New Bedford for a week, and still she was hardly able to move. Since undressing with Lizzie’s help and getting into bed, she hadn’t been up yet, except to urinate some dark, foul smelling stuff into the slops pail. Her hair felt greasy and her scalp itched. Her teeth were furred and the bleached and sun-dried sheets rasped her sensitive skin.

“I’ll never go back there,” she said softly to herself. “This was the worst. This time I mean it. I’ll never go back.” And yet, deep in her heart, she knew that she was as likely to stop herself, once she was riding high on the fury that was her mother’s legacy, as she was likely to stop a slow-moving freight train. The lunacy was beyond her control.

She always went to New Bedford with agitated anticipation. She began to drink alone in her room and then she would suddenly “wake up” and find herself in some tavern or another, some loud, boisterous woman’s voice coming from her lips. Sometimes she would “come aware” back in her hotel room, and sometimes she would awaken again in someone else’s hotel room or house, and sometimes she would awaken and there would be many people around her. And each time she would have no knowledge of where she was nor memory of how she got there. But a little more liquor seemed to soothe the stomach-clenching fear of being out of control. And it wouldn’t be long again before she awakened somewhere else, in some further state of disrepair.

Somehow, it always came back to the same thing. Somehow, she always found someone to beat her. Always.

Maybe a trip to New Bedford wasn’t really a trip to New Bedford without being beaten silly, she thought with a wry grin that hurt her head. Or, more likely, the trip wasn’t over until she could barely walk, what with being sick half to death from a two- or three-week binge, not to mention the physical damage done to her by person or persons unknown.

This time was the worst by far. She’d awakened in her hotel room, dried blood smeared on her sheets and pillowcases. She’d dressed somehow, covering her face with her darkest veil. She called down to the front desk and the bellman had helped her down and into a cab. Then the cabbie had helped her onto the train, where she was afraid she would fall senseless and miss her stop. Another cabbie brought her home and half-carried her up the walk, until Lizzie could help her up the stairs and into bed. She hated all that help, but there was no way she could have made it on her own. She would have fallen. She would have died.

At least this time she wasn’t bleeding, except from a few scrapes on her face, knees and hip, from some apparent fall she couldn’t remember. There had been times—one time in particular—when she had bled, not her monthly bleeding, but from the same place, and it had gone on and on and on, for more than a month. She knew without being told that permanent damage had happened inside.

Perhaps that’s why she never ended up in trouble, because surely during those times, men had. . .

She knew they had. At first she had been able to pretend that it hadn’t happened, but as time went on, the evidence was all around her that men, faceless men, had taken advantage of her in her inebriated state. And yet, she could not remember it.  She could not remember a single instance. Apparently, it only happened when she was “gone away from herself,” as she referred to those vacant periods, those lapses in her memory during her drinking.

At first, her face burned with the thought of her behavior during times she could not be aware, those times when she had no control over herself. But as time went on and lack of control over the trips to New Bedford increased, the fact that she was continually sexually molested by blurry-faced men in dark rooms was lost in the overflow of the horror of it all.

And occasionally, when she was at home afterward, secure if not welcome, safe if not protected, and warm if not loved, she would try to remember those times, and now and then a face would ripple up from the dark, or a gesture, a word, a sensation, a thrust against her hips, and she would almost remember, and she would almost smile.

The first two days at home all she did was sleep and drink the juice Lizzie brought to her. The next two or three days she lay staring at the stains on the ceiling, at the uneven application of wallpaper, and felt bedsores ripen on her elbows and heels. She begged Lizzie to ask Maggie not to bleach and starch the sheets so heavily, but Lizzie was absent-minded about things, and when Maggie came and changed the sheets, their rawness scraped Emma’s sores anew.

Emma tried to ignore the sores, so she thought about her life. And then she began to think about the family.

Something odd was happening in the family.

After so many years in the same home with the same people, one became so finely tuned to a place that any breath of newness reverberated soundly.

There was newness all around.

None of it good.

Emma wished she were well enough to be up and about, sniffing out changes, seeing what affected her and how much, but the most she could do from her bed was to talk to Lizzie when she brought a meal tray, emptied slops or just sat by her bedside for a while.

She could discern little from Lizzie, although Emma had a feeling that Lizzie was the epicenter of it all.

Days and nights blurred for Emma; she slept so often during the day and was awake so often during the night that the two were completely interchangeable in her mind. During the day, the stiff blinds and heavy curtains were drawn against the sun that hurt her eyes and her head; during the night she lit a stub of a candle that flickered and waved against the walls, creating monstrous shadows, and she would lie quietly and think strange thoughts.

And sometimes there was another presence pacing in her room. She couldn’t see it, but she could feel it. Something paced in her room at night. Something troubled. At times it seemed as if she could almost see it, just a shadow upon a shadow. Sometimes it seemed to pass right through the wall into Abby’s dressing room. Emma could feel its absence. And then she could feel its presence, again, when it returned.

She didn’t mention it to Lizzie, because in the daytime, it seemed like a ludicrous notion, and when she thought about it, which was not often, she more likely feared that it was the work of a brain that had been damaged by excesses.

Then at night when it began again, there was no doubting its existence, and Emma longed to call out, to touch it, to give it peace and rest.

But she had no peace and had never rested herself, so what made her think she could offer solace to another troubled soul?

So at night the shadow paced the floor and Emma’s mind paced in place.

~~~

Reentry into the family was always a considerable chore for Emma. She felt like a stranger. She felt almost as if during the six weeks she was absent from the household—three in New Bedford, three in bed—that her opening in the family had healed closed.

She felt reluctant to approach her father; she felt unworthy. She found she could not meet his gaze. She kept her eyes lowered, not because she was ashamed, necessarily, although she would be if her father knew where she’d been and what she’d been doing, but rather because she felt like an outsider again, and had no voice in the family affairs. She felt she had to first gain reentry to the family and then reclaim her station.

She could not speak to Abby for a long time after each trip to New Bedford. Abby did make her feel shame. As difficult as Abby was, as bewildering and dangerous as she was to Emma and Lizzie’s welfare, Abby did many of the things that Emma secretly longed to do. She longed to be the mistress of a well-run house. She longed to hold her head up as a matronly pillar of the community, having reared her share of the world’s next generation, and be on to one’s own interests. Next to Abby, Emma felt such burning, torturous shame that she could not look her stepmother in the face for a long time after returning from one of her sojourns.

Emma had few interests outside the family. There were some cousins in Fairhaven that she had always got on with, but Lizzie was the social butterfly in the family, not Emma. Emma had no patience for small talk and insignificant nonsense.

Lizzie made Emma believe that Emma’s presence in the household meant nothing. Lizzie acted as if Emma had never been gone, and while she oohed and aahed and squeezed her hand and spoke words of sympathy to Emma while she was healing, life went on at the Borden household with nary a ripple of discomfort or neglect because Emma had been absent for six weeks.

The first family supper together was always uncomfortable as well. Emma always felt as though she ought to make application to come down. And then once seated, Emma was always anticipating the question, the question that would have her face her father and choose to either tell him the terrible truth about herself or look him squarely in the deep brown eyes and lie. Every time it was the same; Emma pushed food around her plate until the meal was over, the question almost visible in everyone’s minds, but never spoken.

If it wasn’t spoken at the first supper together, it wouldn’t ever be spoken—at least not until the next time. And there would never be a next time. Emma had vowed.

~~~

Friday morning, Emma ferreted out the first “newness” in the house. She had come down for breakfast and found Abby with her nose in her plate, shoveling food in as fast as she could, and her father dressed slick and preening. It was as clear as the dawn. Andrew had a lover. That explained why his mind had been absent from the house.

A lover!
For a moment, Emma’s world rocked. What if he ran off with her? What if he took his assets and left? What if
she
took him for substantially more than he carried in his wallet?

Emma closed her eyes. There was the Borden name, she thought. He will not sully the Borden name. She breathed a little easier, and regarded Abby. It was clear that Abby knew; she was putting on weight as fast as she possibly could. Her mind was on the ice box, of that there was no doubt at all. Abby’s world was crumbling, and she was finding solace in the bread box.

And while Andrew’s mind was on his snippet, he would pay no attention whatsoever to the family. He would still have his afternoon sessions with Lizzie, and his naps, but beside that, he would be either at work or else lost in some sort of daydream. Emma looked at her father and felt empathy for him, which surprised her. It’s a shame that the man never really found true love, she thought, at least not one that lasted. He may have loved their mother, but he had murdered her as sure as he was now murdering Abby with his wenching and his faithlessness.

So the household was without parental constraints.

That left Lizzie and Maggie.

Maggie, that simple-minded Irish twit most likely used her unsupervised time to chat over the fence with the neighbor’s maid, another Irish. She always was a lazy brat, and for sure, the windows hadn’t been washed in a month of Sundays. Well, that nonsense would end, and it would end right now! Someone had to take the reins of this family, and the way Lizzie has been these past few weeks, it was surely not to be her.

Lizzie.

Lizzie rarely showed her face at the breakfast table, being prone to bedding late and rising around noon. In fact, more often than not, Emma had heard Lizzie coming in the house very late in the evening, and of course no one else had noticed, because they were all so busy, buried deeply within their own activities.

Well, midnight was way too late for a young woman to be coming home. Unescorted, yet.

The breath caught in Emma’s throat. It could be that she’s been going out with a
man
. Oh Lord, that would never do. No, that would never do. All this time Emma had assumed that Lizzie was out for some church reason or WCTU meetings or committee work of some sort—that had always been something Lizzie was prone to, poor dear, but to be coming home so consistently late. . .

Emma lay her fork on her plate and folded her hands in her lap. Her heart beat so hard she thought for sure her parents would hear it—if only they paid attention to something other than themselves.

Andrew kept smoothing his hair down—what a fool! And Abby helped herself to a huge third portion of fried potatoes and gravy.

I will sit here quietly until Lizzie comes down, she thought. And then I shall get to the bottom of this.

But the more she thought about it, the more she could not sit still.

She excused herself from the table, took her plate into the kitchen. Bridget had just come down from her room, her face still puffy with sleep. She poured herself a cup of coffee and took a muffin from the warming oven.

“The windows must be washed today, Maggie,” Emma said. “I’d like all the windows washed on the first floor today. You can do the second floor tomorrow.”

The maid’s eyes opened wide. The house was small, but there were many windows. To do all of the windows on the ground floor in one day was unthinkable. But Emma’s mouth held its firm line and the maid dropped her eyes. “Yes, Miss Emma,” she said, then took her breakfast to the dining room to eat.

Emma paced back and forth in the kitchen. She must stop Lizzie from seeing this man. She must stop it. She must
stop
it.

Her fists balled into knots, Emma looked toward the ceiling. “I swear, Mother, she will not marry. She will not end up like you and that poor wretched Abby. No man will do that to Lizzie. Or to me. I promise. I promise upon your grave. I promise upon your memory—”