The Devil's Gentleman (9 page)

16

W
hen they met again a week later, Barnet showed none of his former ardor. Seated across the table from her at an uptown café, he extracted a cigarette from his engraved silver case and smoked it in silence, looking at her calmly—even coldly.

Blanche was fighting back tears. “What has happened?” she said in a tremulous voice. “What has Roland said to you?”
¹

“He knows I’m interested in you,” said Barnet.

“Have you told him about us?” asked Blanche with a little gasp.

“No, but he knows it,” Barnet said. “He says you are wearing his ring—that you are going to marry him. Is that so?”

Blanche took a moment to answer. “Perhaps,” she said at last. “If I did, it would be through selfish motives. He has money—his father is very wealthy. You know how desperately I wish to study music abroad.” She paused for a moment before adding: “But I am not in love with him.”

“Then it is the promise of Europe?” he said, a trace of bitterness in his voice. “Nevertheless, he has made it perfectly plain to me that he wants you and means to marry you. He said I was to keep out of this.”

“How did he come to tell you so much?” Blanche asked.

“Well, you know what good friends we are,” said Barnet with only the slightest hint of irony. “I knew all about your affair from the beginning. He told me all about you, how gay and alive you were, how much in love with life.”

Barnet took a long drag on his cigarette before expelling the smoke from his nostrils. “I know what happened on the yachting trip. He told me that you were a virgin.”

A flush rose to Blanche’s face—not of shame but of anger. Clearly, Roland had let it be known, either directly or by implication, that he had deflowered Blanche on board the
Monhegan.
It wasn’t the dishonesty of the claim that upset her. She prided herself on being a free spirit, a woman who had overcome the benighted sexual attitudes of her puritanical mother. Had Roland proved capable of performing, she would happily have relinquished her virginity to him.

What sent the blood rushing to her cheeks was her sense of violation. To have been made the subject of such unseemly talk was, she felt, a terrible betrayal—not only by Roland but by Barnet as well.

“And what else did he tell you?” she said, making no attempt to hide her indignation.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry this came up at all. I never intended that you should realize all I know.”

“You must have thought I would be an easy mark,” she said in the same scornful tone. “That’s what men usually think, isn’t it, if they know a woman has already capitulated once to a man?”

“Stop!” he cried. “Don’t say that! You insult both yourself and me. I’ve told you I’m crazy about you.”

A short time later, they drove back in silence to Alice Bellinger’s brownstone. Barnet walked her into the dimly lighted vestibule. In her hands, she clutched the bouquet of gardenias he had brought her. She was still upset at Barnet. But as they stood facing each other in the faint light that filtered in through the delicate grillwork of the entrance doors, she felt the stirrings of that “ecstatic something” which existed between them.

She began to say good night, but before the words were out of her mouth he took her in his arms. “You are trembling,” he said in a voice thick with emotion. “I won’t let you go.”

Then they were kissing madly.

That night, after Barnet had left, Blanche found herself unable to sleep. Her thoughts were not on her departed lover, but on the man who—even while claiming her as his future bride—had spoken so cavalierly about such intimate matters. “There smoldered within me,” she writes in her memoirs, “a wordless displeasure and the sense of an injury which I felt Roland had dealt to me.”

The next day, she telephoned Roland at the club and demanded that he come see her at once. He arrived within the hour.

“There followed a stormy interview,” Blanche writes. “A meeting between us full of bitterness and reproach.”

Pulling the
mizpah
ring from her finger, she tossed it onto a table. It bounced from the surface, rolled across the floor, and came to a rest in a far corner of the room.

“Why did you discuss with Barnet what you ought to have kept inviolate?” she cried. “There are things between us that ought to be deep and secret. But you talked of them—boasted to him!”

Roland stiffened, as if he had taken a blow. “That’s a damned lie. I’ve known Barnet for a long time,” he said coldly. “I know the sort of man he is. He will have a fling with you—then forget all about you.”

“You think that?” she said scornfully.

“Has he said anything about marrying you?” Roland asked. “I’ll wager he has not.”

“We’ve never discussed it,” Blanche said. “You yourself know I’m not interested in being married—not now. I want my music and a career.”

“I’ve offered you both,” said Roland. “But why prolong this? It’s getting us nowhere.”

He reached for his hat, which he had tossed onto a chair. “It is ended, you say? Very well, if that’s the way you wish it.” His voice was steady and cool. He bowed to Blanche, then crossed the room.

Just before he disappeared through the doorway, he paused, looked back at her, and with a hard, bitter laugh, said, “Tell Barnet the coast is clear—he wins.”

It was the same apparent admission of defeat he had made to Harry Cornish. And like Cornish, Blanche had no way of knowing just how ominous those words really were.

17

B
y 1898, Sigmund Freud had already embarked on his fearless exploration of the unconscious mind. Among his many discoveries was a phenomenon that seems particularly relevant to the case of Roland Molineux.

Freud describes it in an essay called “On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love,” which deals with “psychical impotence”—that is, impotence rooted in psychological, as opposed to physiological, causes. Men who suffer from this disorder, according to Freud, are not totally impotent. They are able to sustain an erection—but only with prostitutes or partners they view as degraded. With their well-brought-up wives or other respectable women, they find themselves unable to perform. As Freud puts it: “Where they love they do not desire and where they desire they cannot love.”
¹

Certainly Roland Molineux seems to fit this pattern. After all, he had engaged in sex with Mamie Melando—an uneducated factory girl and part-time prostitute—for nearly a decade. With the well-bred Blanche, however—a woman from his own social circle who shared his class biases and cultural pretensions—he apparently suffered from a disabling inhibition.

There is another, less psychoanalytic, explanation for Roland’s behavior with Blanche. Evidence strongly suggests that he had contracted a venereal disease from Mamie, the symptoms of which had begun to manifest themselves by 1897.
²
Sexual debility, shame, or possibly the fear of infecting the woman he planned to marry might have kept him from consummating his relationship with Blanche.

Whatever the case, one thing seems clear: between his sexual problems with Blanche, her attraction to the more virile Henry Barnet, and Harry Cornish’s gloating victory over him at the Knickerbocker Athletic Club, Roland Molineux, in the waning days of 1897, suffered a series of humiliations that could not fail to undermine his sense of manhood.

Little is known about Roland’s life in the months following his falling-out with Blanche. Though he joined the New York Athletic Club at the invitation of his friend Bartow Weeks, he continued to live in his room in the paint factory, where despite their breakup, he received an occasional unbidden visit from Mamie Melando. It was during this period—so the evidence suggests—that he also began frequenting some of the city’s less savory haunts.

Throughout the 1890s, “slumming” was a popular pastime among the smart young members of the better classes. Looking for cheap thrills in the seedy precincts of lower Manhattan, they visited the dance halls, dives, and other vice-ridden hangouts, where they mingled with showgirls, “dope fiends,” and prostitutes of both sexes.

Their tour guide, more often than not, was a colorful character named George Washington “Chuck” Connors. A onetime bouncer who affected a gaudy costume of “bell-bottom trousers, a blue-striped shirt, a bright silk scarf, a pea jacket and big pearl buttons everywhere,” Connors became the public face of the Bowery: a lowlife impresario who squired parties of upper-class slummers around the various “degenerate resorts,” and even set up his own bogus opium den where his customers could gawk at “a white woman named Lulu and a half-Chinese man named Georgie Yee, who posed as addicts.”
³

There were, of course, a considerable number of actual opium dens in Chinatown: dark, squalid cellars where the noisome air was thick enough “to float wooden chips.” There, for a fee of twenty-five cents, a person could lay on his side on a narrow shelf, his head pillowed on a wooden block, while the proprietor prepared the narcotic in a clay-bowled pipe, then extended the bamboo stem to the smoker.
⁴

While a look inside an opium den was de rigueur for the serious slummer, few were moved to sample the product, let alone smoke it on repeated occasions. Only someone with a strong taste for the forbidden and a serious bent for disreputable behavior would be drawn to such an experience.

Someone like Roland Molineux.

Blanche and Barnet, in the meanwhile, continued their affair, conducted largely under the roof of Alice Bellinger’s home, where Barnet had taken to spending the night.
⁵
Blanche rarely set foot inside the Knickerbocker Athletic Club anymore. A rare exception occurred in the spring of 1898, when she attended the yearly Amateur Circus as Barnet’s guest—a delightful evening for Blanche, capped by an unchaperoned visit to her lover’s second-floor bedroom.

For six months, neither one of them saw or heard from Roland. But Roland wasn’t in hiding.

He was simply biding his time.

He reappeared suddenly, and as if by accident, on a summerlike evening in the second week of May. Barnet had promised to take Blanche to one of her favorite dining places—the restaurant of the Claremont Hotel, whose terrace offered a spectacular view of the Hudson and the Palisades.

She had dressed for the occasion in a flowing chiffon gown, a broad-brimmed spring hat tied with a matching chiffon scarf, and long white kid gloves.
⁶
A gardenia, presented to her by her unfailingly attentive lover, was pinned to her dress at the base of the V formed by her deep-cut neckline.

As the two of them descended the stoop of Alice Bellinger’s brownstone, they noticed a man standing at the curb, apparently about to step inside a waiting hansom cab. Drawing closer, they were startled to see that it was Roland Molineux. In the months since they had last set eyes on him, he had grown a large handlebar mustache.

Concealing his surprise with what Blanche described as “admirable savoir faire,” Barnet greeted him warmly. “We were just on our way to the Claremont for dinner,” he said after the two men shook hands. “Come along, won’t you?”

Blanche hastened to second the invitation. “Won’t you come? Please do,” she urged. “It’s such a heavenly evening. You will come, won’t you?”

Roland, however, merely regarded them coolly. “It sounds delightful,” he said with audible irony. “But thanks, no. I’m only in town for a short time tonight. I’m going over to Brooklyn.”

“You’re sure you won’t join us?” asked Barnet.

“I think not,” Roland said dryly. His eyes, Blanche noticed, “were suddenly hard.” With a curt “good night,” he turned and entered the cab.

For the rest of the evening, even as Blanche tried to focus on Barnet and the splendor of the riverside setting, her mind kept reverting to Roland. She thought of his “calm, cold indifference—that note of sarcasm in his voice—that tightening about his mouth, drawing it to that thin immobile line.” It was clear that he still harbored a bitter resentment.

As for herself, she was aware that something powerful had been stirred in her by seeing him again, though she was “unable to interpret” her emotions. One thing, however, was certain: the brief, seemingly fortuitous encounter with Roland had left her with a “strange feeling of uneasiness.”
⁷

18

I
t’s conceivable that Roland just happened to be standing outside Alice Bellinger’s home when Blanche and Barnet walked out the front door. In view of subsequent events, however, it seems far more likely that he had come there with a specific purpose in mind—likely, to renew his relationship with Blanche. If that was indeed the case, he clearly hoped to have a private moment with her. It is hardly surprising that he reacted so badly when he found her heading out for a romantic evening with Barnet.

Seeing her on the arm of his rival might have been galling to Roland. But it did not deter him from his goal. On the contrary, it only seemed to strengthen his resolve. Despite his apparent capitulation to Barnet, Roland meant to have Blanche back.

First, though, there were certain problems that he had to take care of.

Nicholas Heckmann, forty years old, owned a small advertising agency located at 257 West Forty-second Street in Manhattan, not far from Jim Wakeley’s saloon. To bring in extra income, Heckmann also rented out private letter boxes at the rate of fifty cents per month.

At approximately ten minutes past six on the evening of May 27, 1898—just a few days after Roland Molineux’s encounter with Blanche and Barnet—the door to Heckmann’s office opened and in strode a well-dressed gentleman who looked to be in his thirties. Though he did not know the gentleman’s name, Heckmann recognized him right away, having passed him many times on the street. He was of medium height, with a slender, athletic build and the air of a man of breeding. He had strikingly handsome features and sported a large handlebar mustache.

Did Heckmann rent letter boxes? the gentleman inquired.

Heckmann confirmed that he did and quoted his rate.

“Very good,” said the fellow, who explained that he wished to take a box for at least three months.

Heckmann got out his ledger, and seeing that box 217 was available, assigned it to his new customer.

“Name, please?” asked Heckmann, pen at the ready.

As Heckmann inscribed the information, the man looked down and, spotting a misspelling, pointed out that there was only one
t
at the end of his name. Heckmann made the correction.

Then, after paying for three months in advance, the gentleman—who had given his name as “Mr. H. C. Barnet”—turned and left the building.
¹

Dr. Vincent G. Hamill, a graduate of the University of Buffalo, was president of the Marston Remedy Company, headquartered at 19 Park Place in Manhattan. It was a thriving business, serving as many as twelve thousand customers each year, all of them male and all responding to the company’s widely distributed advertising circulars:

PERFECT MANHOOD

AND HOW TO ATTAIN IT

A BOOK FOR MEN MARRIED AND SINGLE

A full explanation of a wonderful method for the quick restoration of
PERFECT MANHOOD
,
in all that term implies.

A method that overcomes
EVERY EVIL CONDITION
of the sexual system.
Gives to the weakest organs and parts their
NATURAL VIGOR AND TONE.
And to those shrunken and stunted their
NORMAL AND PROPER SIZE.

IT EXPLAINS
how to build up all sexual vigor.

IT EXPLAINS
how to avoid all the physical evils of married life.

IT EXPLAINS
how to cure sexual weakness in any stage for all time.

IT EXPLAINS
how to cure unnatural losses from dreams, in urine, etc.

IT EXPLAINS
how to cure nervousness, trepidation, lack of self-confidence.

IT EXPLAINS
how the entire sexual system of the male may be brought to that condition so essential to general good health and peace of mind.

IT EXPLAINS
how to develop, strengthen, enlarge all weak, stunted, undeveloped, feeble organs and parts of the body which have lost or never attained a proper and natural condition, whether through early errors, ill-health, or other causes.

IT EXPLAINS
how to be free from degrading thought, superior to debasing conditions, to feel

A VERY KING AMONG MEN!

The book, along with a one-month supply of an accompanying medicinal “remedy,” cost five dollars. On May 31, 1898, Dr. Hamill received a letter, signed “H. C. Barnet.” It contained the necessary amount of cash with a request that the manual and impotence remedy be mailed to box 217, 257 West Forty-second Street.

Dr. Hamill immediately sent back a “diagnosis blank,” a four-page confidential questionnaire that potential patients were required to answer “as carefully as possible,” so that—as the instructions explained—“a full and perfect understanding of each case may be had, and the proper remedies selected.” There were sixty-three questions altogether, beginning with the applicant’s age (given as thirty-one) and occupation (“clerk”), and continuing on to the most intimate matters of sexual functioning.

In answer to question thirty—“Have you had gonorrhea?”—the applicant answered yes. He went on to reveal that he had masturbated (“practiced self-abuse,” in the idiom of the time) for ten years; that his erections were “very feeble” and that “during connection” (sexual intercourse), his ejaculations were “very long delayed.”

He was also asked for the size of his waist and chest, which he gave as thirty-two inches and thirty-seven inches, respectively.

On June 6, one day after Dr. Hamill received the completed form, the book and impotence medication were mailed out to the person who identified himself as H. C. Barnet but whose measurements, as he gave them, were those of a man with a far trimmer physique.
²

Dr. Hamill was not the only peddler of impotence “remedies” in the latter years of the nineteenth century. Far from it. The 1890s were the golden age of patent medicines, a totally unregulated era when the American marketplace was flooded with snake oil. Generally compounded of little more than alcohol, opiates, and enough bitter-tasting ingredients to give them a suitably medicinal flavor, these high-sounding nostrums—Dr. Pierce’s Golden Medical Discovery, Munyon’s Miracle Phosphate, Horsford’s Neuralgia Tonic, and thousands more—promised to cure every ailment known to man, from head colds to consumption, asthma to arthritis. Beyond inducing a mild state of intoxication, however, they had no effect at all.

Over a two-week period, beginning on June 4, 1898, packages addressed to Mr. H. C. Barnet arrived on an almost daily basis at his private letter box at Nicholas Heckmann’s establishment. Virtually all of them contained marriage manuals, books of sexual advice, and guaranteed cures for impotence. Some of the latter came in liquid form, like Dr. Rudolphe’s Specific Remedy for Impotence, sold by a physician named Fowler of Moodus, Connecticut. Others consisted of tablets or capsules, like a product called Calthos, touted in full-page newspaper ads as “the greatest sensation in the medical world today.”

The purported invention of the “famous French specialist, Prof. Jules Laborde,” Calthos had (so its maker claimed) restored the “vital forces” of countless satisfied customers, including several thousand male insane-asylum inmates, who had been reduced to their pitiable condition by youthful self-abuse. Anyone who suffered from “Lost Manhood or weakness of any nature in the Sexual Organs” could receive a free five-day trial treatment by sending a request to the manufacturer, the Von Mohl Company of Cincinnati, Ohio.
³

On June 1, 1898—at precisely the same time that the man calling himself H. C. Barnet was sending out his requests for various remedies—an envelope of a distinctive blue color arrived at the Manhattan office of Dr. James Burns. In addition to his private practice, Dr. Burns sold a mail-order nostrum called the “Marvelous Giant Indian Salve.” Supposedly concocted from a secret Native American recipe—“buffalo tallow combined with healing herbs and barks”—Dr. Burns’s ointment was, according to its ads, a “guaranteed, permanent” cure for male “atrophy.” For twenty-five cents in cash, money order, or stamps, a sample box would be “mailed in a plain wrapper.”
⁴

The blue envelope was opened by Dr. Burns’s bookkeeper, Agnes Evans, who was struck by the elegance of the enclosed sheet of stationery. It was the same robin’s-egg hue as the envelope and embossed with a crest of three interlaced silver crescents. “Please find enclosed 25 cents, for which send remedy, and oblige,” read the handwritten note.

The sender gave his return address as 6 Jersey Street, Newark, New Jersey—the location of the Morris Herrmann and Company paint factory. The letter was signed “Roland Molineux.”