August in Massachusetts can make Rangoon seem breezy and cool. The damp, pricking heat is pitiless; only sitting lightly draped on the porch with your feet in washtub of ice-water brings relief.
Imagine then how you would feel if you were constrained in corset, petticoats, corduroy dress and buttoned boots, imprisoned in a world of black horsehair upholstery and woolen carpets of hallucinatory floral patterns, as the sun beats down with the brutal violence of an iron bar.
The house on Second street in Fall River shimmered and wobbled in the heat, yet Bridget the maid was sent outside to wash all the windows. Old Andrew Borden, wearing his habitual black, headed briefly down to the bank and post office; Mrs. Borden bustled upstairs re-making the guest bed; and Lizzie heated flat irons in the kitchen in preparation for ironing her best handkerchiefs. It was a little after nine in the morning.
At eleven, Lizzie called Bridget down to the parlor, where her father half-sat, half-lay on the buttoned couch, as if napping – except that half his head had been stove in. As the house filled with neighbors, the maid looked in the guest bedroom to find Mrs. Borden, Lizzie’s step-mother, lying peacefully on the floor, felled by 19 (not forty) ax blows. The house had been locked; the screen door was hooked shut. No one had heard anything.
Nowadays, the story would revolve around the familiar forensic details of latent prints and spatter-patterns – but Fall River was a conservative police district, where character and testimony took precedence. The inquest revealed a household of tight-closed New England chilliness into which even the heat of August could not intrude.
Borden, a casket-maker and property owner, was a rich man, but one who willingly ate two-day-old cold mutton for breakfast. Money mattered to him; nothing and no-one else did. His second wife was more a domestic servant than a companion – though his gift of property to her family had caused a breach with her stepdaughters.
Emma, the elder, was a meek soul, resigned to spinsterhood, nursing her resentments in silence and piety. Lizzie, now thirty-two, was more forceful and self-willed, yet equally trapped in a life where one old man held the strings and liked to keep them tight. The four moved around the house in knight’s-move patterns, avoiding contact, taking meals apart, hurrying from the front door to the relief of their private bedrooms.
It was like the most oppressive of Bergman movies, and Lizzie’s testimony at the inquest had all the obliqueness and tension of his dialog: when asked to explain why she called her stepmother “Mrs. Borden,” she said, “I decline to answer because I do not know what to say.”
She said her parents were affectionate, “so far as I have had any chance of judging.” She said a description of her relationship with Mrs. Borden “depends upon one’s idea of cordiality perhaps.” Her account of her movements during the critical hours had the vagueness and particularity of a dream: reading an old issue of Harper’s, eating a pear, searching in the hayloft for a fishing-line sinker – and somehow seeing nobody and noticing nothing.
It was all too strange – there had to be a trial and Lizzie was the only reasonable suspect. Yet in the courtroom, this same flat vagueness, the residue of a life of charged silences and buried hatreds, meant that there no evidence, or at least not enough for a conviction. On this day in 1893, Lizzie Borden was acquitted.
The mystery remains – and plenty of people have produced attempts to solve it. Bridget has been accused; maids, after all, hate washing windows. Mysterious strangers have been spotted on Second street. There are sexual explanations – what if Lizzie and Bridget were discovered in bed by Mrs.
Borden? There are medical ones: what about petit mal seizures, or pre-menstrual tension, or sleepwalking, as in the recent case where a Canadian man drove fifty miles through the night, asleep, and killed his mother-in-law? A quarterly journal, The Hatchet, collects these ideas and many more; its readers make regular pilgrimages to the fatal house, now a themed B&B.
Their fascination – and ours – stems from the persistent unforthcomingness of the crime. The moon face and pale blue eyes of Lizzie Borden dare us to find an answer… reminding us that the real locked room is the human heart.
