The Borden House: Frame by Frame, Part 2

by Kat Koorey

First published in June/July, 2004, Volume 1, Issue 3, The Hatchet: Journal of Lizzie Borden Studies.

The domain of the two Borden girls seemed prettier and more opulent than the area that proscribed the elder Borden’s part of the house. The foyer is large and the banisters and balustrade are nicely stained and shining. Compared to the simple utility of the back hall, rear stairs, kitchen, dining room and sitting room as the common rooms of a rich man, the foyer, front stairs, upper hall landing, clothes press and front bedrooms all appear well-kept, nicely furnished and decorated, like a private apartment.

The girls used the guest room as a sitting room and sewing room. Their dress closet was large, five by eight feet, with a big window that would have had a pleasant view, except for the fact that the window was shuttered and the glass packed with paper or cloth to prevent the rising dust of the roadway from getting in. It was kept darkened to retard the colors from fading and a sheet-like cloth was tacked up to cover the contents from the wall to the door. I picture a room sequestered from the world and wrapped in bandages from torn sheets. The closet is now a beautiful and serviceable bathroom, kept shining and new. There are still shutters on the window, but they can be opened to let in the light.

Before ascending the front stairs I noticed the toe marks gouged and smeared with black shoe polish that adorn the steps. The steps are shallow and my heel oddly hangs over the edge into nothingness. The railing is lower than expected. In fact, the stairs are so unusual and uncomfortable to use, that I concentrated so much on my balance and footing that I almost forgot to turn to look at the most famous sight still available in this most infamous crime– the sight from the seventh step looking across the guest room, under the bed, toward the far wall, to see a body lying there! My guide, Bill Pavao, called out “Can you see me?” which returned my thoughts from a seemingly treacherous ascent to the weighty matter at hand– what could I see? Definitely I could see the form of our friend, who was so excited to be treating me to this experience that he had lain down on the floor in Abby’s death position. The unusual aspect of this re-creation is that I might not have looked if he hadn’t called out.

If the bed is approximately the same height off the ground as the original, then, for me at 5’3”, the seventh step gives the first sight of a form there, exactly at eye level. From the eighth step, the form was obvious to me, but that might be because I knew someone was there and I knew to look. If a person lived there for twenty years and was used to going quickly up those narrow steps, it might not be an automatic reflex to give a glance under the bed, especially if the room was in partial gloom where not all the shutters were open, which was the case on August 4th.

The light shirt Bill had on distinctly attracted my eyes. The photo of Abby lying there in death gives a sort of radiance to the lightness of her gown, so it may have been more noticeable than if she had worn a dark color. If Lizzie stood on the landing near her bedroom door when her father came home, she could not have seen the body of Abby, as engineer Kieran stated in his testimony. At 5’4”, if Lizzie stood on the stairs giving a laugh when her father was let in the front door, it would probably have been the seventh stair, from which she could also be seen by Bridget and by Andrew. In her inquest testimony, Lizzie said that the guest room door was closed, and if so, the whole experiment is moot, but interesting nonetheless: an expected experience, like kissing the Blarney Stone when visiting Ireland.

I entered the guest room as Bill straightened the clothing adorning a form in the corner by the door that opens directly to Lizzie’s room. This is a strange arrangement of doors because that corner overlaps Lizzie’s room. Elizabeth Montgomery wore this dress in the “Legend” movie, a costume that now seems tiny and evokes the courtroom scene where Lizzie was acquitted. I had the feeling that I was meeting an old friend as it represented the fictional Lizzie, and I wondered if she would clash with the real Lizzie if they ever met somewhere in time.

Across the room there is a sewing machine and chair, with a drape of red fabric. The scene implies someone had been working there and had pushed the chair back to stand up. Lizzie was asked about where she thought Abby might have been all that time she was not noticed or missed by Lizzie and by Bridget and her convoluted reply formed the opinion that it was possible Abby was sewing. Yet it is Lizzie who claims that she herself was upstairs “sewing a little piece of tape on a garment” – another sewing connection. Did Lizzie keep these sewing things in her room, or did she get supplies from the guest room? She was not asked. Lizzie had come up stairs with her clean laundry and did a bit of sewing. Was that while Abby was dead or dying? Or was that later and more current with Andrew’s arrival home and Lizzie laughing from above? Where were you Lizzie when your father came home, and why didn’t you let him in?

I was drawn to the area of the sewing machine and tried to imagine the extra chairs there, which were not included today in the recreation of the room. A camp chair would have stood at the head of the bed between the bed and the bureau, and a rocker by the window at the end of the bureau. There is not much room there by the bed, even without these additions. Thirty-four inches, according to city engineer Kieran, the distance he measured between the bed and the bureau. He admits that he had seen the room on August 16th, and had no knowledge of furniture in the room being moved, which, of course, it had been. Dr. Dolan thought there was about a foot distance either side of the body and, combined with Abby’s bulk, equaled approximately thirty-seven inches, which he measured subsequently as well. The trunk of my car is wider than that.

I knelt down near the foot of the bed and looked up into the bureau mirror, and from that angle I could see nothing of the rest of the room–not even the doorway. If someone entered I would have to turn my upper body to look around toward the right. With Abby’s first strike resulting in a flap-wound to the left side of her face above the ear, if she was kneeling there fixing the bed the killer would have had to approach her from her left and be standing in front of the window. She would have to turn her upper body to the left to view who was standing there. It was then that the first hatchet blow fell and the crime began. With such close quarters, anyone coming that near would probably be someone known to her- if Abby was kneeling. I still can’t conceive of that much carnage in that small space. The victim had no chance, no choice and no defense wounds.

Abby died brutally, alone with her life’s blood and brain seeping into the carpet in a room in which she was not welcome: a room in her own home – a room over her favorite private parlour which no one ever entered. Her blood might well have seeped through that flowered carpet, through the wooden floor boards, and subtly stained the ceiling of Abby’s best private room, the only one which truly belonged to her.

Turning from that mesmerizing spot, I saw the mantle behind the bedstead. It is black and has flowers painted on the front. It is odd to realize that the bed covers the fireplace- a useful and warming hearth that was closed up and sealed and hidden by a guest bed. That black and sealed hearth seemed a symbol of a black and sealed heart- but whose?

Leaving the guest room to enter Lizzie’s room, I was struck by the air of a private apartment. Her larger room, gained only after she was thirty and had been to Europe, combined with the smaller room which had been traded down to Emma, together presented the air of a unified flat or suite. It is said that the smaller room had the only privacy on that floor, being the single room with just one door as entrance and exit. Did Emma crave that room for privacy purposes after sharing egress and ingress in the larger room with her sister for eighteen years? Emma could go in there and shut the door and no one could walk through. Was her life smaller then, in 1890, than it had been previously? Was Emma ready to retreat- or did Lizzie earn the larger room in some way we may never know? Did they make a deal, a trade- or was it an expanding Lizzie who needed more space after seeing the world? Emma’s room is the size of a nun’s cell and has no heat, no radiator, no fireplace, and no comfort in a home devoid of comforts.

There is now a mannequin in what was Emma’s room, dressed in Lizzie’s lilac outfit from her later years as “Lizbeth of Maplecroft.” There is Lizzie, headless, posing nonchalantly in that room of Emma’s. Because of that, Lizzie seems to still occupy it, still control it. Lizzie takes over and dominates the room- she is the focus. It is Lizzie’s essence displayed there, come all the way from 1927 back to this house, to this small cell, the earlier room of her adolescence, in her despised neighborhood, imprisoned here still, returned here from her place on the Hill.

TO BE CONTINUED IN AUGUST.