Miss Lizzie (2 page)

“Today?” I said, and I think some disappointment slipped into my voice. Annie and I were planning a swim at four (the time at which, by happenstance, Roger Drummond habitually took his).

“If not today,” said Miss Lizzie with a small shrug, “then perhaps some other time.”

“No,” I said, suddenly deciding. “This afternoon would be fine. I'd love to. Really.”

She turned to Annie. “Of course you're invited as well, dear.”

Annie nodded numbly.

“At four, then,” said Miss Lizzie to us both. She adjusted her packages, turned, and went bustling down the street.

When she was out of earshot Annie clutched at my shoulder and whispered frantically in my ear, “That was
her
! That was really
her
!”

Casually, I shrugged. The cloak of sophistication still lay, regally, upon my shoulders.

“Lizzie Borden,” Annie hissed, jumping up and down beside me. “Lizzie
Borden
! Took an axe and gave her mother forty
whacks
!”

“The jury in the trial said she wasn't guilty.”

Annie stopped jumping and stood back. “Oh no,” she said, horrified. “
Amanda
. You're not really going to go there?
Amanda!
You
can't
! Are you screwy?”

“Legally,” I announced, “she is entitled to our respect.”

If Father had been there that day, I am certain that I would have asked him for permission to visit Miss Lizzie's house, and I am equally certain that he would have given it. But he was in Boston, back at the office where he did something immensely important but rather vague with stocks and bonds, and would not be returning to the shore until Friday.

There was no question whatever of discussing the visit with my stepmother. She would have flatly refused. Not because she feared for my safety (I think that by this time in our lives she would have gladly handed me over to a bona fide witch, providing she received in return an iron-clad guarantee that I would be roasted and eaten), but because the neighbors might learn of it and be scandalized. She dreaded the idea of scandal attaching to herself, probably because she was such an assiduous collector of the scandals that attached to others.

I shall have to talk about my stepmother for a moment, for she will play an important if unwilling role in the events which follow.

It was said during that August—although by no one who actually knew any of us—that my brother and I hated her. This was simply not true. Hate, like love, requires an acceptance of the other, a recognition of his or her reality. What we felt for our stepmother was something worse, something far more shameful. It was contempt.

I never knew my natural mother; she died shortly after my birth. When I was five years old, Father was diagnosed as tubercular and shipped off to a sanitarium in the dry therapeutic Southwest. My brother William and I were sent to my father's parents, to live with them in a rambling stone mansion built before the Revolutionary War, a conflict which, from the way my grandmother spoke of it, displaying an easy familiarity with its participants, I assumed had occurred some few short months before.

It took over a year for Father to regain his health, and, in the process, he gained a new wife while my brother and I gained, so he told us upon his return, a new mother.

She had been his nurse, out there in the Wild West of cowboys and Indians and recuperating consumptives, and before me now I have a photograph, brown-edged and brittle, that shows him sitting back on a chaise, gray mountains folding and unfolding off into the background, a blanket around his legs and a smile across his lips that seem so absolutely radiant with vitality that it is impossible to believe he was ever in his life unwell. She stands behind him in her medical whites, her hand upon his shoulder, and the smile she wears (or so it has always seemed to me) is at once relieved and triumphant, that of the cat who has, after a long-sustained and wearisome stalk, finally snared the canary.

In an attempt, no doubt futile, to avoid cattiness myself, I must say that I believe she made an honest initial effort (and probably much against her natural inclinations) to like my brother and me. That first day, I remember, she beamed at me and, bending down, swept me up against a broad buoyant bosom smelling strongly of lilacs. “Amanda!” she said against my ear. She squeezed and released me, abruptly, a woman uneasy with children, with touching them, and she held me out at arms' length, her head cocked to the side, and said, “We're going to be great chums,
aren't
we, dear?”

The strain behind the smile was so obvious, even to a six-year-old girl, that I looked up in confusion to Father. Surely he could see that this blowsy woman, overdressed and (even then) overweight, was acting a part? That her affection was, transparently, affectation? Father stood looking down at us happily—proud, I think, of both of us, his wife, his daughter.

I looked to William, four years older than I, and he, at least, had seen what I had. Arms tightly crossed atop his chest, he pursed his lips at me and rolled his eyes heavenward.

I turned back to my stepmother and with the effortless cruelty of childhood I said, “I don't think so.”

For only a second her smile flickered; then, immediately, she relit it. “Now, dear,” she said, “you must give me a chance. After all, you know, Rome wasn't built in a day.”

Petulant, willful, I pushed her away and screwed up my face and shouted, “
No
!” Then, chanting it viciously, “
No no no no no
,” I turned and ran from the room.

I wince now, thinking of that moment, and of others. At our cruelest, William and I laughed outright at the clichés and the narrow-minded strictures around which she structured her life and around which she expected us to structure ours (
ours
, two children who had learned, from a year of doting and wealthy grandparents, that we were unique, privileged:
anointed
). At our kindest, our politest, we pretended to ignore her; and I suspect that our kindness was far more cruel than our cruelty.

Our obvious scorn did nothing to improve her relationship with Father, who was trapped between two loyalties. But I truly believe (trying neither to minimize our awfulness nor to seek forgiveness for it) that the marriage would have deteriorated in any event. He and she were no longer playing the roles in which they had met and first loved each other; and, without the starched white uniform and the coarse woolen blanket, they were merely two (very) dissimilar individuals who happened to be living under the same roof. Father came from a tradition that believed that nothing but death could terminate a marriage, even a bad one; and so resigned himself to his lot. And she, I think, knew this, and so resigned herself to hers. She retreated into a sullen silence, nibbling her bonbons and lancing her needle in and out that taut circle of fabric, while her bosom, harking (as all flesh must) to the croon of gravity, slowly grew broader and less buoyant.

If there was no question of discussing the visit to Miss Lizzie with my stepmother, there was equally no question of my not making it: I had told Miss Lizzie that I would; I had given my word. And so, at a quarter to four that day I left our cottage by the back porch, slipped through the hedges at the rear of the yard, turned right, and trod across the warm sand for the distance of a half a block, past the parasols and the scurrying children and the recumbent adults. The breeze had the bite of sand to it, and tugged at my bonnet. Breakers curled and thumped and swooshed against the shore. Three houses down, I followed the path that led through some azaleas back to Water Street, turned right once more, and walked down to the Borden house.

All of this was unnecessary—my stepmother was taking her usual afternoon nap. But I possessed (and regrettably continue to possess) a fondness for intrigue and mystification.

I unlatched the gate, latched it behind me, went up the flagstone walk, up the wooden steps to the front door, and rang the bell.

TWO

“PICK A CARD,” said Miss Lizzie, peering at me over her pince-nez. With one hand, she fanned the deck of blue-backed Bicycle playing cards and held it out across the table. I leaned forward, around the teapot, over the plate of scones, and plucked one from the deck.

“Look at it carefully,” she said, shuffling the deck. The cards clicked and whirred between fingers that were, despite their plumpness, remarkably nimble. “Don't let me see what it is, but you memorize it.”

It was a seven of clubs. I had played gin rummy with Father and knew the names of the suits.

“Will you be able to remember it?” she asked.

“Of course,” I said, pique putting an edge along my voice.

Miss Lizzie smiled. “No insult intended, Amanda.” She squared the deck on the table, left it there, sat back, and said, “Right. Put the card back in the deck. Anywhere you like.”

I slipped the card back into the deck about a third of the way up from the bottom, and then made quite certain, proud of my caution, that all the cards were carefully aligned.