The Fall River Axe Murders-2
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Here they lie iogether, living embodiments of two of the Seven Deadly Sins, but he knows his avarice is no offence because he never spends any money and she knows she is not greedy because the grub she shovels down gives her dyspepsia.She employs an Irish cook and Bridgets rough-and-ready hand i fulfils Abbys every criterion. Bread, meat, cabbage, potatoes -- Abby was made for the heavy food that made her. Bridget merrily slaps oable boiled dinners, boiled fish, eal mush, Indian pudding, johnnycakes, cookies.
But those cookies. . . ah! there you tou Abbys little weakness. Molasses cookies, oatmeal cookies, raisin cookies. But wheackles a sticky brownie, oozing chocolate, then she feels a queasy sense of having gone almost too far, that sin might be just around the er if her stomach did not imm<tt>?t>ediately palpitate like a guilty sce.
Her flannel nightdress is cut on the same lines as his nightshirt except for the limp flannel frill round the neck. She weighs two hundred pounds. She is five feet nothing tall. The bed sags on her side. It is the bed in which his first wife died.
Last night, they dosed themselves with castor oil, due to the indisposition that kept them both awake and vomiting the whole night before that; the copious results of their purges brim the chamber-pots beh the bed. It is fit to make a sewer faint.
Back to back they lie. You could rest a sword in the space between the old man and his wife, between the old mans bae, the only rigid thing he ever offered her, and her soft, warm, enormous bum. Their purges flailed them. Their faces show up deposing green in the gloom of the curtained room, in which the air is too thick for flies to move.
The you daughter dreams behind the locked door.
Look at the sleepiy!
She threw back the top sheet and her window is wide open but there is no breeze, outside, this m, to shiver deliriously the s. Bright sun floods the blinds so that the linen-coloured light shows us how Lizzie has goo bed as for a levée in a pretty, ruffled nightdress of snatched white muslin with ribbons of pastel pink satin threaded through the eyelets of the lace, for is it not the "naughty ies" everywhere but dour Fall River? Dont the gilded steamships of the Fall River Line signify all the squandered luxury of the Gilded Age within their mahogany and deliered interiors? But dont they sail away from Fall River, to where, elsewhere, it is the Belle Epoque? In New York, Paris, London, champagne corks pop, in Monte Carlo the bank is broken, women fall backwards in a crisp meringue of petticoats for fun and profit, but not in Fall River. Oh, no. So, in the immutable privacy of her bedroom, for her own delight, Lizzie puts on a rich girls pretty nightdress, although she lives in a mean house, because she is a rich girl, too.
But she is plain.
The hem of her nightdress is rucked up above her knees because she is a restless sleeper. Her light, dry, reddish hair, crag with static, slipping loose from the night-time plait, crisps and stutters over the square pillow at which she clutches as she sprawls oomach, havied her cheek oarched pillowcase for ess sake at some earlier hour.
Lizzie was not an affeate diminuti<tt>9９ｌｉb?t>ve but the h which she had been christened. Since she would always be known as "Lizzie", so her father reasoned, why burden her with the effete and fancy prolongation of "Elizabeth"? A miser ihing, he even cropped off half her name before he gave it to her. So "Lizzie" it was, stark and unadorned, and she is a motherless child, orpha two years old, poor thing.
Now she is two-and-thirty ahe memory of that mother she ot remember remains an abiding source of grief: "If mother had lived, everything would have been different."
How? Why? Different in what way? She wouldnt have been able to ahat, lost in a nostalgia for unknown love. Yet how could she have been loved better than by her sister, Emma, who lavished the pent-up treasures of a New England spinsters heart upotle thing? Different, perhaps, because her natural mother, the first Mrs Borden, subject as she was to fits of sudden, wild, inexplicable rage, might have takechet to Old Borden on her own at? But Lizzie loves her father. All are agreed on that. Lizzie <bdo></bdo>adores the ad father who, after her mother died, took to himself another wife.
Her bare feet twitch a little, like those of a dog dreaming of rabbits. Her sleep is thin and unsatisfying, full of vague terrors and ierminate meo which she ot put a name or form once she is awake. Sleep opens within her a disorderly house. But all she knows is, she sleeps badly, and this last, stifling night has been troubled, too, by vague nausea and the gripes of her female pain; her room is harsh with the metallic smell of menstrual blood.
Yesterday evening she slipped out of the house to visit a woman friend. Lizzie was agitated; she kept pig nervously at the shirring on the front of her dress.
"I am afraid. . . that somebody. . . will do something," said Lizzie.
"Mrs Borden. . ." and here Lizzie lowered her void her eyes looked everywhere in the room except at Miss Russell. . . "Mrs Borden -- oh! will you ever believe? Mrs Borden thinks somebody is trying to poison us!"
She used to call her stepmother "mother", as duty bade, but, after a quarrel about money after her father deeded half a slum property to her stepmother five years before, Lizzie always, with cool scrupulosity, spoke of "Mrs Borden" when she was forced to speak of her, and called her "Mrs Borden" to her face, too.
"Last night, Mrs Borden and poor father were so sick! I heard them, through the wall. And, as for me, I have myself all day, I have felt se. So very. . . strange."
For there were those somnambulist fits. Since a child, she endured occasional "peculiar spells", as the idiom of the plad time called odd lapses of behaviour, ued, involuntary trances, moments of dise. Those times when the mind misses a beat. Miss Russell hasteo discover an explanation within reason; she was embarrassed to mention the "peculiar spells". Everyone khere was nothing odd about the Borden girls.
"Something you ate? It must have been something you have eaten. What was yesterdays supper?" solicitously queried kind Miss Russell.
"Warmed-over swordfish. We had it hot for dihough I could not take much. Then Bridget heated up the leftovers for supper but, again, for myself, I could only get down a forkful. Mrs Borden ate up the remains and scoured her plate with her bread. She smacked her lips but then was sick all night." (Note of smugness, here.)
"Oh, Lizzie! In all this heat, this dreadful heat! Twice-cooked fish! You know how quickly fish goes off in this heat! Bridget should have knower than to give you twice-cooked fish!"
It was Lizzies difficult time of the month, too; her friend could tell by a certain haggard, glazed look on Lizzies face. Yet her gentility forbade her to mention that. But how could Lizzie have got it into her head that the entire household was under siege from malign forces without?
"There have been threats," Lizzie pursued remorselessly, keeping her eyes on her nervous fiips. "So many people, you uand, dislike father."
This ot be denied. Miss Russell politely remained mute.
"Mrs Borden was so very sick she called the doctor in and Father was abusive towards the doctor and shouted at him and told him he would not pay a doctors bills whilst we had our own good castor oil in the house. He shouted at the doctor and all the neighbours heard and I was so ashamed. There is a man, you see. . ." and here she ducked her head, while her short, pale eyelashes beat on her cheek bones. . . "such a man, a dark man, with the aspect, yes of death upon his face, Miss Russell, a dark man Ive seen outside the house at odd, at ued hours, early in the m, late at night, whenever I ot sleep in this dreadful shade if I raise the blind and peep out, there I see him in the shadows of the pear trees, in the yard, a dark man. . . perhaps he puts poison in the milk, in the ms, after the milkman fills his . Perhaps he poisons the ice, when the i es."
"How long has he been haunting you?" asked Miss Russell, properly dismayed.
"Since. . . the burglary," said Lizzie and suddenly looked Miss Russell full in the face with a kind of triumph. How large her eyes were; promi, yet veiled. And her well-manicured fingers went on peg away at the front of her dress as if she were trying to unpick the shirring.
Miss Russell knew, she just khis dark man was a figment of Lizzies imagination. All in a rush, she lost patieh the girl; dark men standing outside her bedroom window, indeed! Yet she was kind and cast about for ways to reassure.
"But Bridget is up and about when the milkman, the i call and the whole street is busy and bustling, too; who would dare to put poison iher milk or ice-bucket while half of Sed Street looks on? Oh, Lizzie, it is the dreadful summer, the heat, the intolerable heat thats put us all out of sorts, makes us fractious and nervous, makes us sick. So easy to imagihings in this terrible weather, that taints the food and sows worms in the mind. . . I thought youd plao go away, Lizzie, to the o. Didnt you plan to take a little holiday, by the sea? Oh, do go! Sea air would blow away these silly fancies!"
Lizzie her nods nor shakes her head but tio worry at her shirring. For does she not have important business in Fall River? Only that m, had she not been down to the drug-store to try to buy some prussic acid herself? But how she tell kind Miss Russell she is gripped by an imperious o stay in Fall River and murder her parents?
She went to the drug-store on the er of Main Street in order to buy prussic acid but nobody would sell it to her, so she came home empty-handed. Had all that talk of poison in the vomiting house put her in mind of poison? The autopsy will reveal no trace of poison iomachs of either parent. She did not try to poison them; she only had it in mind to poison them. But she had been uo buy poison. The use of poison had been denied her; so what she be planning, now?
"And this dark man," she pursued to the unwilling Miss Russell, "oh! I have seen the moon glint upon an axe!"
When she wakes up, she ever remember her dreams; she only remembers she slept badly.
Hers is a pleasant room of not ungenerous dimensions, seeing the house is so very small. Besides the bed and the dresser, there is a sofa and a desk; it is her bedroom and also her sitting room and her office, too, for the desk is stacked with at books of the various charitable anisations with which she occupies her ample spare time. The Fruit and Flower Mission, under whose auspices she visits the i old in hospital with gifts; the Womens Christian Temperanion, for whom she extracts signatures for petitions against the Demon Drink; Christian Endeavour, whatever that is -- this is the golden age of good works and she flings herself into ittees with a vengeance. What would the daughters of the rich do with themselves i.99liｂ.he poor ceased to exist? There is the Newsboys Thanksgiving Dinner Fund; and the Horse-trough Association; and the ese version Association -- no class nor kind is safe from her merciless charity.
Bureau; dressing-table; closet; bed; sofa. She spends her days in this room, moviween each of these dull items of furniture in a circumscribed, uing, plaary round. She loves her privacy, she loves her room, she locks herself up in it all day. A shelf tains a book or two: Heroes of the Mission Field, The Romance of Trade, What Katy Did. On the walls, framed photographs of high-school friends, seally inscribed, with, tucked inside one frame, a picture postcard showing a black kitten peeking through a horseshoe. A watercolour of a Cape Cod seascape executed with poignant amateur inpetence. A monoe photograph or two of works of art, a Delia Robbia madonna and the Mona Lisa; these she bought in the Uffizi and the Louvre respectively when she went to Europe.
Europe!
For dont you remember what Katy did ? The story-book heroiook the steamship to smoky old London, to elegant, fasating Paris, to sunny, antique Rome and Florehe story-book heroine sees Europe reveal itself before her like an iing series of magitern slides on a gigantic s. All is present and all unreal. The Tower of London; cliotre Dame; click. The Sistine Chapel; click. Then the lights go out and she is in the dark again.
Of this journey she retained only the most circumspect of souvenirs, that madonna, that Mona Lisa, reprodus of objects of art secrated by a universal approval of taste. If she came back with a bag full of memories stamped "o be Fotten", she put the bag away uhe bed on which she had dreamed of the world before she set out to see it and on which, at home again, she tio dream, the dream haviransformed not into lived experie into memory, which is only another kind of dreaming.
Wistfully: "When I was in Florence. . ."
But then, with pleasure, she corrects herself: "When we were in Florence. . ."
Because a good deal, in fact most, of the gratificatiorip gave her came from havi out from Fall River with a select group of the daughters of respectable and affluent mill-owners. Once away from Sed Street, she was able to move fortably in the segment of Fall River society to which she belonged by right of old name and new money but from which, when she was at home, her fathers plentiful personal etricities excluded her. Sharing bedrooms, sharing state-rooms, sharihs, the girls travelled together in a genteel gaggle that bore its doom already upon it, for they were the girls who would not marry, now, and any pleasure they might have obtained from the variety aement of the trip oiled in advance by the knowledge they were eating up what might have been their own wedding-cake, using up what should have been, if theyd had any luck, their marriage settlements.
All girls pushing thirty, privileged to go out and look at the world before they resighemselves to the thin dition of New England spinsterhood; but it was a case of look, dont touch. They khey must not get their hands dirtied or their dresses crushed by the world, while their affeate panionship en route had a certain steadfast, determined quality about it as they bravely made the best of the sed-best.
It was a sour trip, in some ways, sour; and it was a round trip, it e the sour place from where it had set out. Home, again; the narrow house, the rooms all locked like those in Bluebeards castle, and the fat, white stepmother whom nobody loves sitting in the middle of the spider web, she has not budged a single inch while Lizzie was away but she has grown fatter.
This stepmother oppressed her like a spell.
The days open their cramped spaces into other cramped spaces and old furniture and never anything to look forward to, nothing.
When Old Borden dug in his pocket to shell out for Lizzies trip to Europe, the eye of God on the pyramid blio see daylight, but ravagance is too excessive for the misers younger daughter who is the wild card in his house and, it seems, have anything she wants, play ducks and drakes with her fathers silver dollars if it so pleases her. He pays all her dressmakers bills o and how she loves to dress up fine! She is addicted to dandyism. He gives her each week in pin-mohe same as the cook gets fes and Lizzie gives that which she does not spend on personal adoro the deserving poor.
He would give his Lizzie anything, anything in the world that lives uhe green sign of the dollar.
She would like a pet, a kitten or a puppy, she loves small animals and birds, too, poor, helpless things. She piles high the bird-table all winter. She used to keep some white peons in the disused stable, the kind that look like shuttlecocks and go "vroo croo", soft as a cloud.
Surviving photographs of Lizzie Borden show a face it is difficult to look at as if you knew nothing about her; is cast their shadow across her face, or else you see the shadows these events have cast -- something terrible, something ominous in this face with its jutting, regular jaw and those mad eyes of the New England saints, eyes that belong to a person who does not listen to you. . . fanatics eyes, you might say, if you knew nothing about her. If you were s through a box of old photographs in a junk shop and came across this particular, sepia, faded face above the choked collars of the 1890s, you might murmur when you saw her: "Oh, what big eyes you have!" as Red Riding Hood said to the wolf, but then you might not even pause to pick her out and look at her more closely, for hers is not, in itself, a striking face.
But as soon as the face has a name, once ynise her, when you know who she is and what it was she did, the face bees as if of one possessed, and now it haunts you, you look at it again and again, it secretes mystery.
This woman, with her jaw of a tration-camp attendant, and such eyes. . .
In her old age, she wore pinez, and truly with the years the mad light has departed from those eyes or else is deflected by her glasses -- if, indeed, it was a mad light, in the first place, for dont we all ceal somewhere photographs of ourselves that make us look like crazed assassins? And, in those early photographs of her young womanhood, she herself does not look so much like a crazed assassin as somebody ireme solitude, oblivious of that camera in whose dire she obscurely smiles, so that it would not surprise you to learn that she is blind.
There is a mirror on the dresser in which she sometimes looks at those times when time snaps in two and then she sees herself with blind, clairvoyant eyes, as though she were another person.
"Lizzie is not herself, today."
At those times, those irremediable times, she could have raised her muzzle to some ag moon and howled.
At other times, she watches herself doing her hair and trying her clothes on. The dist mirror reflects her with the queasy fidelity of water. She puts on dresses and theakes them off. She looks at herself in her corset. She pats her hair. She measures herself with the tape-measure. She pulls the measure tight. She pats her hair. She tries on a hat, a little hat, a chic little straw toque. She punctures it with a hatpin. She pulls the veil down. She pulls it up. She takes the hat off. She drives the hatpin into it with a strength she did not know she possessed.
Time goes by and nothing happens.
She traces the outlines of her face with an uain hand as if she were thinking of unfastening the bandages on her soul but it isnt time to do that, yet: she isnt ready to be see.
She is a girl of Sargasso calm.
She used to keep her pigeons in the loft above the disused stable ahem grain out of the palms of her cupped hands. She liked to feel the soft scratch of their beaks. They murmured "vroo croo" with infienderness. She ged their water every day and ed up their leprous messes but Old Borden took a dislike to their g, it got on his nerves, whod have thought he had any nerves but he ied some, they got on them, oernooook out the hatchet from the woodpile in the cellar and chopped those pigeons heads right off, he did.
Abby fahe slaughtered pigeons for a pie but Bridget the servant girl put her foot down, at that: what?!? make a pie out of Miss Lizzies beloved turtledoves? JesusMaryandJoseph!!! she exclaimed with characteristic impetuousness, what they be thinking of! Miss Lizzie so nervy with her funny turns and all! (The maid is the only one in the house with any sense and thats the truth of it.) Lizzie came home from the Fruit and Flower Mission for whom she had been reading a tract to an old woman in a poorhouse: "God bless you, Miss Lizzie." At home all was blood ahers.
She doesnt weep, this o isnt her nature, she is still waters, but, when moved, she ges colour, her face flushes, it goes dark, angry, mottled red. The old man loves his daughter this side of idolatry and pays for everything she wants, but all the same he killed her pigeons when his wife wao gobble them up.
That is how she sees it. That is how she uands it. She ot bear to watch her stepmother eat, now. Each bite the woman takes seems to go: "Vroo croo."
Old Borden ed off the hatchet and put it ba the cellar, o the woodpile. The red reg from her face, Lizzie went down to ihe instrument of destru. She picked it up and weighed it in her hand.
That was a few weeks before, at the beginning of the spring.
Her hands awit her sleep; the nerves and muscles of this plicated meism wont relax, just wont relax, she is all twang, all tension, she is taut as the strings of a wind-harp from which random currents of the air pluck out tuhat are not our tunes.
At the first stroke of the City Hall clock, the first factory hooter blares, and then, on another note, another, and ahe Metaet Mill, the Ameri Mill, the Meics Mill . . until every mill iire town sings out aloud in a on anthem of summoning and hot alleys where the factory folk live bla with the hurrying throng: hurry! scurry! to loom, to bobbin, to spio dye-shop as to places of worship, men, and women, too, and children, the streets bla, the sky darkens as the eys now belch forth, the g, bang, clatter of the mills ences.
Bridgets clock leaps and shudders on its chair, about to sound its own alarm. Their day, the Bordens fatal day, trembles on the brink of beginning.
Outside, above, in the already burning air, see! the angel of death roosts on the roof-tree.
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