Lizzy Borden legend gets novelized
Lizzie Borden — a Victorian New Englander tried and acquitted for the ax-murders of her stepmother and father — whetted our national appetite for tales of violent death. She is memorialized in the Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast Museum in Fall River, Mass., where the crime stunned and stimulated a nation. Our fascination continues partly because the mystery was never solved, the murder weapon never found. Its chief suspect shattered Victorian notions of the feminine. The public could barely imagine a woman, let alone a daughter, capable of poisoning — certainly never a bloody, effortful chopping. Scholars believe this failure of imagination helped land Lizzie her acquittal.
Now comes Sarah Schmidt, a clever Australian, whose imagination does not fail. She keeps the reader guessing about Lizzie’s innocence until the final seven words.
“See What I Have Done” is a barn-burning, fever-ridden first novel. It makes blistering reading out of first-rate historical fiction, which must walk the tightrope of established facts while fashioning a story anew. She begins without clearing her throat. The first chapter is “Lizzie, August 4, 1892,” and the first two sentences are “He was still, bleeding. I yelled, ‘Someone’s killed Father.’ “Father is Andrew Borden, 69, a prosperous and stingy property owner who lived the entirety of his life in Fall River. The narrator is Lizzie.
Schmidt stays entirely in the voices of Lizzie and three more narrators: Emma Borden, Lizzie’s older sister by a decade; Bridget Sullivan, the family’s Irish live-in maid; and Benjamin, a violent drifter and Schmidt’s fictional creation. He is a bold stroke, and gives the author a quasi-witness outside the Borden home.
“See What I Have Done” is the perfect title — it might be a command from any of these speakers.
The Bordens are not merely loveless, their household seethes with malevolence. They practice all kinds of cruelties, some unintentional. Adding to the dread is a psychological haunting. The Borden daughters had a sister between them, Alice, who died at age 2. Their dead mother, Sarah Morse, adds an inescapable burden. She extracted a deathbed promise from 12-year-old Emma to protect and love toddler Lizzie, and another from her creepy brother John to watch over his nieces.
On the day of the murders, John is in Fall River. Emma, 42, is not; she is visiting an out-oftown friend. Back home Lizzie is repeating a favorite childhood prayer, one Andrew taught her: “As the Lord liveth, there shall no punishment happen to thee for this thing.” The macabre surges, and Schmidt salts her book with repetition, casting an incantatory spell.
The writing is vivid to the point of hallucination. Lizzie says, “Sweat ran down my temple, came to the corner of my mouth. I sipped it up. Nothing made sense anymore.”
Over and over, the mantel clock tick-ticks, a descendant of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart.” It is dark indeed.