Miss Lizzie Read Free Page A

Patience , Amanda. Here, try pressing the deck like this.” She put her hand flat atop the deck in demonstration, pressed, and then sat back. “And try to concentrate more.”
    â€œI am concentrating.” Hardly my fault if a silly playing card refused to violate the laws of nature.
    â€œWell,” she said, “try it again, then.” Closing her eyes, she reached under the table again with her left hand. “Don’t forget, press hard .”
    I pressed hard, still suspicious, still eyeing her.
    Suddenly she smiled, sat back, and moved her hand up above the table. “There we are,” she said. She was holding the seven of clubs.
    I frowned at her. It was a trick, I knew that; the card had not actually passed through the table. But I had no idea how she had worked it. “Do it again,” I demanded.
    And Miss Lizzie laughed.

    I had stood there on the front porch for a few minutes before Miss Lizzie opened the door. When she did, she seemed harried, slightly out of breath and slightly out of focus. Her pince-nez was a shade askew and a few fine strands of white hair had escaped her chignon. She ran her right hand back over her scalp, smoothing them into place, exhaled elaborately with her left hand to her breast, and smiled at me. Once again, the smile transformed her face. “I’m sorry, dear, I was out back.” She looked around the porch, looked back at me, raised her eyebrows. “Your friend didn’t come?”
    â€œShe had a previous engagement,” I explained.
    â€œAh,” she said, smiling again. “Well, come in, come in.”
    She stood back to let me enter. She was wearing the same clothing she had worn earlier, or its duplicate, a full-length black dress with buttons climbing up the bodice to her neck. With more presence of mind now, I noticed that the cut of the dress was very fine, and that the material was brocaded silk. As before, she wore no jewelry and no makeup.
    She led me down the hallway and through the house. (“And this,” I remember saying to myself behind her, with a strange but very real sense of accomplishment, as though I were somehow responsible for her existence, “is Lizzie Borden .”) Passing the parlor, I caught a glimpse of a dark polished mahogany coffee table, a large wall mirror, a Persian carpet, three red plush chairs, and a red plush sofa, all of them antimacassered, and the sofa supporting a very large fluffy white cat who was either fast asleep or quite dead. Everything (including the cat) looked a great deal more substantial and expensive than any of the things in our cottage next door, or, for that matter, in our house in Boston.
    â€œI thought we’d have our tea out here,” Miss Lizzie said as we reached the rear porch. “There’s a nice breeze today.”
    Like ours, her porch was enclosed with screening, but unlike ours it had at its center a square mahogany table. The table was set with enough food to feed a small battalion. There was a Wedgwood teapot, a Wedgwood platter heaped with sandwiches, a silver salver piled high with scones, a small porcelain crock of strawberry jam, another of marmalade, and a plate of brightly colored petit fours. If Miss Lizzie had prepared all this by herself, in the time since I had seen her last (and I knew, from my surveillance, that she had brought no servants with her to the shore), she had good reason to look harried.
    â€œSit, sit,” she said, sitting down herself and directing me to the chair opposite her. “Tell me all about yourself.”
    â€œWhere shall I start?” I asked. I sat down, watching her so as to learn what to do next. This was my first Afternoon Tea, and I was not entirely sure of the Rules.
    She lifted the damask linen napkin from the placemat before her, unfolded it, draped it across her lap. I did the same. “Well,” she said, “tell me where you’d like to be ten years from