Read Online The Secrets of Lizzie Borden by Brandy Purdy - Free Book Online Page A

eased our fears somewhat. A band in red and gold jackets played and the floor swarmed with dancers. It was the most vibrant and vivid place I had ever seen and I longed to lose myself and become a part of it.
    There were bejeweled courtesans, the famed and fabled Grand Horizontals, in extravagant gowns trimmed with feathers and gems, silk flowers, ermine, sable, beads and glittering appliqués, so décolleté that every time they moved their breasts threatened to overflow like cherry-topped blancmanges. Jewels sparkled on their ears, necks, and wrists, the cold, star-bright light of diamonds and whole rainbows of vibrant colors—emeralds, rubies, sapphires, amethysts, and topazes. Their faces were rouged and painted, their lashes blackened, and their eyes lined dramatically with kohl, and they wore their hair, its color often of such a startling shade it could hardly be natural, piled high in mounds of curls, twists, and braids, embellished with feathers, flowers, and jewels. One woman even had a small gilded birdcage with a chirping canary perched on a tiny swing inside woven into her tall pompadour of very blond hair, like a modern-day Marie Antoinette. Her hairdresser must have been something of an architect himself to build such a towering mass of hair!
    We were shocked to see a Negro man, his skin as black as tar, seated intimately at a table with a woman with milk-pale skin and the reddest hair I had ever seen in my life. She wore canary-yellow satin, her bare shoulders and overflowing bosom ringed with billowing yellow feathers, and what must have been a fortune in honey-colored topaz and diamonds glittering on her gown and about her neck and wrists and snaking through her scarlet tresses. The Negro boldly opened her purse, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for him to do, and took out a gold cigarette case. He put two in his mouth and lit them, then took one out and put it between his companion’s lips. We had never seen such a thing in America nor thought to see it elsewhere. In America just looking at a white woman would have been enough to get the Negro lynched, but in Paris no one seemed to think anything of it at all. Freedom, glorious freedom! the whole city seemed to scream. No one was a slave here—except to their own passions!
    There was a group of women, a select society, like a club unto themselves, in which all others were unwelcome. They did not paint their faces and seemed to disdain feminine frills and flirtatious manners. Some of them wore men’s clothing, complete suits that looked straight out of the shops on Savile Row, dove gray, coffee and toffee colored, dark blue, or black frock coats with carnations in the buttonholes, beautiful brocade or watered-silk or garish checkered waistcoats, striped and flowered neckties, and tight-fitting trousers, or starkly elegant black and white evening clothes with black silk top hats and long, dashing opera cloaks lined in either red or white silk. Many of them wore their hair cropped short just like a man’s, slicked back until it shone like patent leather or else erupting in a riot of curls or waves that would have made a seasoned sailor seasick. Some of them even smoked cigarettes, pipes, or cigars and drank strong liquor! There were a few who were a tad more feminine; they dressed in proper women’s suits, but severely tailored, with mannish jackets and prominent, padded shoulders, and no feminine frills at all, not a bit of lace anywhere that I could see, or even a silk rose or a flirty feather on their hats, and their hair was plainly coiffed, severely scraped back from their faces and painfully pinned with not even a curl or a frizz to soften the effect. The only softness was in their manner to each other. These women danced together, waltzing in each other’s arms, lost in their own little word, or else sat close together holding hands, sharing cigarettes, and even daring to kiss, openly, upon the mouth,