The Devil's Gentleman (7 page)

11

D
escribing that moment many years later, Blanche would strike a particularly portentous note: “On that day, how could I have guessed that Fate had already begun to spin her web? How casual that first meeting! Weighted—unknown to me—with such a significance! But the sun had shone and the wind was sweet, and lighthearted happiness was abroad that day. And now, even as it had been earlier at McKay’s estate at Newport, the sea and all its allure was the background.”
¹

Perceiving the spark of attraction that had instantly flashed between “Mollie” and the charming Miss Chesebrough, Morgan excused himself to attend to his other guests. No sooner had he gone than Roland led Blanche “to a couple of deck chairs in a snug corner, sheltered from the sun and wind.” There, they “drank champagne and laughed over the most inconsequential things.” Blanche could not fail to be captivated by the handsome and cultivated young man:

He was clever and witty and amusing…. He had charm, grace of manner, and a bearing that was aristocratic. Normally rather fair, he was now tanned by exposure to wind and sun. He was debonair, and his poise and air were those of the cosmopolite. He possessed a decided gift for repartee, and about him there was a gay insouciance, an ease, a smiling indifference. For a time we both forgot the others in the party. I was absorbed in him as we talked together and he lounged there in his summer flannels.
²

As their talk grew more intimate, Roland confessed that he had felt an immediate attraction to Blanche but had held back because he thought that she “had eyes only for Morgan.” Blanche assured him that Morgan, though a delightful host, meant nothing to her.

By then, she had discovered something else about Roland that strengthened her belief that she and the handsome young man were, as she put it,
en rapport
: Roland was a music lover. “He had gone frequently to the Opera and numbered amongst his friends a few gifted people known in the musical life of New York.”

When Blanche told Roland of her “own ambitions and work,” he revealed that he held season tickets to the Metropolitan Opera.

“If you wish,” he said with his engaging smile, “you shall have a surfeit of music this winter.”

“To be surfeited would be impossible,” she cried. “But to have a feast of music—how wonderful that would be!”
³

Soon afterward, their tête-à-tête was interrupted by the appearance of Morgan and the others, who came over to join them. Blanche records in her memoirs that, for the rest of that day, “there was only a brief word or two exchanged between us; but I found myself frequently turning to glimpse him as we mingled with the others; and always his eyes followed me; and it was as though a silent and intriguing understanding had already begun to exist.”
⁴

According to Blanche, her first encounter with Roland Molineux ended around sunset, when she, Isia, Clark Miller, and his two male friends returned to the
Monhegan
aboard the launch that had carried them to the
Viator
earlier that day:

We descended to the motor boat which had been bobbing alongside. Once more it noisily churned the waters and, leaving a long path of white foam in its wake, swung back to the other pleasure craft. The sails of Clark’s racy schooner-yacht bellied out to the wind. Turning, she nosed into the channel and cruised slowly out through the sparkling blue waters of the bay….

The
Viator
with Morgan’s guests aboard still lay anchored in Portland harbor. Those of us aboard the
Monhegan
were now heading in before a stiff breeze that swept the waters off Beaver Tail. The sky had faded from rose—that shade like the inner heart of a shell—to opal and mother-of-pearl. The pearl drifted into blue-gray against the horizon, and the sea and sky blended into one. The wind stiffened and ruffled the surface of the waters into wavering threads of white. The great sails also caught the force of it, and we were cutting through, clean as the blade of a knife. We keeled far over, and soon the decks were awash so that we were drenched with the flying spray. I sat huddled on the upper edge of the companionway. My hair was wet, my frock limp with the spindrift….

Clark came and wrapped a great coat about me. We laughed in high glee, like children. How tremendously exciting it was!
⁵

That, at any rate, was Blanche’s official version of events. Other people privy to what transpired on board the
Viator
had a different tale to tell.

According to these sources, at the end of that intoxicating, champagne-soaked day, the men and women aboard Morgan’s yacht—Blanche and Isia included—paired off, and a mock marriage ceremony was held for each couple. Then each set of make-believe newlyweds retired to a stateroom, intending to indulge in a very real consummation of their union.
⁶

Which of these accounts is true has never been definitively established. In any case, the outcome—in one very crucial sense—was the same.

As events would show, Blanche, despite her earnest wish to divest herself of her virginity, returned from her trip aboard the pleasure-craft
Viator
still innocent of (as she put it) the “full realization of sex.”

12

R
oland returned from the yachting cruise determined to pursue the enchanting young woman he had met aboard the
Viator.
First, however, he had to sever his ties with Mamie Melando.

If Blanche, in her memoirs, often sounds as if she’d sprung from the pages of
Sister Carrie
(“Life’s shop windows were filled with alluring things,” she exclaims at one point. “I desired them with a great intensity!”),
¹
Roland himself, in the fall of 1897, had come to resemble a character from a Theodore Dreiser novel: a young man caught between a coarse if devoted factory girl who had grown increasingly repellent in his eyes and the infinitely more refined, elegant, socially suitable woman he craved. Sometime in late October, in an effort to free himself of Mamie, he dismissed her from the Herrmann paint factory, giving her—as a reward for her many years of varying sorts of service—a new dress.
²

Blanche, in the meantime, had moved to a different apartment. Wishing to be closer to her younger sister Lois, she had taken rooms at a fashionable boardinghouse on West Seventy-second Street, owned by a landlady named Mary Bell. An enormous bouquet of roses, sent by the ever-thoughtful Roland, was waiting to welcome her to her new living quarters.

It was only one of many gifts—baskets of fruits, boxes of sweets, the latest best-selling novels, such as Mr. Frederic’s
The Damnation of Theron Ware
—that he would lavish on Blanche that fall, as he set about wooing her with the same singleness of purpose he applied to all his pursuits, from his amateur athletics to his persecution of Harry Cornish.

As promised, he provided Blanche with a surfeit of social activities. On a typical Saturday evening, they might take in a Broadway show or a comic operetta—Marie Dressler doing her star turn as Flo Honeydew in
The Lady Slavey
at the Casino Theater or Lillian Russell performing her piping high Cs in Gilbert and Sullivan’s
Patience
at the Bijou.

Even more glorious were those nights when they attended the Metropolitan to hear the celebrated De Reszke perform the title role of Le Cid, or the great dramatic soprano Lillian Nordica sing
Siegfried.
Eyes fixed raptly on the stage, heart thrilling to the strains of Wagner or Verdi or Bizet, Blanche would, at certain moments, feel so overcome with emotion that she could not keep from reaching out and seizing Roland’s hand. During intermission, they would stroll among the glittering crowd and excitedly discuss the performance. Their “mutual love of this enchanting art,” writes Blanche in her memoir, “established a sympathetic bond between Roland and myself.”
³

Afterward, they would dine at the Waldorf or Delmonico’s or Louis Martin’s smart new establishment on Twenty-sixth Street, outfitted like a Parisian café with marble-topped tables and cushioned banquettes. Or perhaps Roland would take her to Louis Bustanoby’s Café des Beaux Arts on Sixth Avenue and Fortieth Street, where a gypsy violinist would greet them at the door and serenade them with a polonaise as the headwaiter escorted them to their table.
⁴

When they weren’t together, they were in constant communication by letter, telegram, and the telephone in Mrs. Bell’s parlor. As the winter approached, Roland’s gifts became more expensive: an opal broach and a diamond butterfly pin, both from Tiffany’s, where he had an account.

Then came the costliest—and most serious—gift of all.

It was a diamond ring, also from Tiffany’s, inscribed with the Hebrew word
mizpah,
typically translated as “watchtower” or “lookout.” Implicit in its meaning is the prayer: “May God watch over you when we are apart.”

For Roland, the ring carried a solemn significance. By that time, he had not only resolved to marry Blanche but had made his intentions known to her.

Blanche, however, felt deeply divided about her suitor. She was happy to accept the diamond
mizpah
ring as a token of his friendship. But whenever the subject of marriage came up, she “would not be serious about it; always parried it; always laughingly told him I did not think I cared deeply enough for him.”
⁵
Her teasing demurrals were partly a game, a way of playing hard-to-get. But she also had serious doubts about Roland.

With his physical beauty, charm, and money, he was certainly a good catch. And then there was their shared love of the opera.

At the same time, however, he seemed strangely deficient in that “masculine element” so prized by Blanche. She had certainly given him every opportunity to display it. Indeed, by November 1897, Roland had taken to spending so much time in Blanche’s room—entire nights included—that Mrs. Bell’s chambermaid, Rachel Greene, assumed the two were already husband and wife.
⁶

And yet, despite Blanche’s obvious willingness, their relationship remained unconsummated. Recalling that long-ago summer day in Boston, when she’d first been aroused by the sight of the teenaged boy pulling his girlfriend to the ground, she longed for a man who would take her in the same “masterful way.” “When a woman senses an elusive intimation of mastery in a man, it is irresistible,” she would declare in her memoirs. “There is a kind of brutality which is part of a great tenderness in the lovemaking of some men, and it is absolutely overwhelming.”
⁷

It was that “brute masculine force” that she dreamed of surrendering to. And Roland, she had come to conclude, “possessed none of it.”
⁸

13

R
esiding down the hall from Roland on the second floor of the Knickerbocker Athletic Club was a thirty-two-year-old bon vivant named Henry Crossman Barnet. Brown-haired, blue-eyed, with a small, neatly trimmed mustache and a decided paunch, he had joined the club, as one commentator put it, “with a pleasant hope of reducing his weight.”
¹
With his robust appetites and cheerful aversion to exercise, however, he had quickly abandoned that goal. Still, though he made little use of its impressive athletic facilities, the social life of the club perfectly suited his temperament. A thoroughly gregarious creature, he was well-liked by men and possessed an easy charm that made him—despite his fleshy cheeks and pudgy frame—highly attractive to women.

“Barney,” as he was known around the club, had formed a warm friendship with Roland, based partly on their shared dislike of Harry Cornish. To be sure, Barnet wasn’t weirdly fixated on the swaggering athletic director, the way Roland was. Still, he had his complaints. Cornish, he felt, was doing a poor job of managing the club facilities and was especially lax about supervising the janitorial staff. The pool area was always a mess after swim meets, and the hallway floors weren’t kept clean enough—a particular problem for Barnet, who liked to walk barefoot between his apartment and the bathroom.
²

One evening in early November 1897, Roland took Blanche to the Metropolitan Opera to hear the Banda Rossa, a highly popular touring group that had only recently recorded their sprightly rendition of “Funiculi Funicula” for Mr. Edison’s latest technological marvel, the phonograph.
³
During intermission, Roland spotted Barnet in the foyer, called him over, and introduced him to Blanche.

“From this encounter,” Blanche would later write with atypical understatement, “a friendship developed that came to have great significance.”
⁴

Following the concert, the three of them proceeded to Delmonico’s, where they were joined by the popular playwright Clyde Fitch, whose presence, as Blanche recalled, “gave the evening an additional bit of that glamor and brilliancy that so appealed to me.” As the supper progressed, she found herself drawn to Barnet. Though he possessed none of Roland’s cultivated wit, there was something about him—a “forcible, virile” quality—strangely absent from the infinitely more athletic Molineux.
⁵

The following night, Barnet dined with the two of them again, this time at the club. By the time the coffee and liqueur were served, “a delightful camaraderie,” in Blanche’s words, had developed among them.

The subject of the forthcoming Club Carnival arose, and Roland—who was to perform on the horizontal bars as part of the festivities—asked Barney if he would mind serving as Blanche’s escort until the show was concluded. Barnet was only too happy to oblige.
⁶

Blanche, too, was secretly pleased. From her very “first meeting with Henry Barnet”—as she confessed many years later—she “was conscious that he possessed a little more than the average qualifications for holding one’s interest. I sensed a hidden strength and a brute force in him, and it was as natural as breathing that I should capitulate to that!”
⁷

On the night of the carnival, after thrilling to Roland’s typically dazzling routine, the three of them repaired to his room to share a bottle of champagne. Though Blanche, who had never seen Roland perform before, gushed over his skill, her thoughts were really on Barnet. Indeed, by that time—less than a week after their first encounter—she was already entertaining highly charged fantasies about him. “Mentally, I had already yielded to him, and I was secretly thrilled at the thought of surrender.”
⁸

It didn’t take long for Roland to sense the growing attraction between Blanche and Barnet, and he was quick to stake his claim. One evening shortly after the carnival, while the three of them dined at the club, Barney, in his jocular way, began telling Mollie how much he envied him.

“Congratulations, old man,” he exclaimed, clapping him on the shoulder. “What a lucky fellow you are.”

“Why, what does that mean?” said Blanche, feeling a sudden rush of irritation. “Roland and I are not going to be married.”

“Oh, yes, we are,” Roland coolly replied.

“But we are not even engaged!” said Blanche, laughing to soften her petulant tone.

“True, but we are going to be,” said Roland, casting a pointed look first at Blanche, then at Barnet.

Blanche instantly understood what was going on. Roland had been observing her “growing infatuation for Barnet.” He was “determined to leave no one in doubt concerning his feelings for me, and he would discourage any interest that might develop elsewhere.”
⁹

But Blanche was not about to be pressured into marriage. She was not in love with Roland. Nor, for that matter, with his friend. But she was determined to act on the powerful physical attraction she felt for Barnet.

She knew, of course, that she was playing with fire. But the element of danger only made the situation more “exciting and alluring.” And why shouldn’t she fling herself into an affair with the virile Barnet? After all, she told herself, “I was free, free as air and owed no allegiance to anyone.”
¹⁰

She made that position unmistakably clear on Thanksgiving Day, when Roland got down on one knee and formally proposed to her.

Blanche—trying to take the sting out of the rejection by assuring him that she might feel otherwise in the future—turned him down.