Free The Devil's Gentleman by Harold Schechter Page B

merely gave his strange, enigmatic smile, waved his hand blithely, and said, “You win.”
    Then he mounted the stairs to his room, where he proceeded to pack his belongings. By the following morning he was gone from the club, never to return. 4
             
    In the nineteenth century, the word
molly
(derived from the Latin
mollis,
meaning “soft”) was derogatory slang for a male homosexual, the Victorian equivalent of the later slur
fairy.
It was also, as it happened, phonetically identical to Roland’s nickname, “Mollie.”
    On the evening of his climactic encounter with Molineux, Cornish, as was his custom, visited Jim Wakeley’s saloon. There, beneath the portraits of bare-chested pugilists and other athletic luminaries, he regaled his drinking chums with an account of his triumph over his longtime adversary.
    As he repeated Roland’s submissive parting words, Cornish snorted with contempt. It was just the sort of response, he and his cohorts agreed, that a man would expect from the aptly named Mollie.

15
    I ncreasingly preoccupied with thoughts of Henry Barnet, Blanche was oblivious to Roland’s troubles with Harry Cornish. Nor did Roland inform her of his resignation from the club. He had, after all, suffered a humiliating defeat in his final showdown with his nemesis and wasn’t eager to reveal it to the woman he sought to impress.
    The day after New Year’s 1898, Blanche herself changed living quarters, moving in with a family friend named Alice Bellinger, a forty-year-old divorcée who quickly became her closest confidante. In the meantime, Roland retreated to his apartment in the Newark paint factory, where amid his books, laboratory equipment, and shelves of toxic chemicals, he passed much of his time brooding.
    He had a good deal to brood about. His heart still rankling with hatred, he sent letters to various acquaintances, detailing Cornish’s transgressions, which—so he insisted—were doing such harm to the KAC that Roland could no longer associate himself with the club. 1
    Blanche’s relationship with Henry Barnet had also begun to eat at him. Roland had made it very clear that he desired to marry her, and he had no intention of putting up with her increasingly open flirtation with Barney.

    In all of the public statements she was ever to make on the subject, Blanche would insist that her relationship with Harry Barnet had been purely platonic—nothing more than a warm friendship, conducted with the approval, even encouragement, of Roland Molineux. Only much later, when she set down her memoirs in old age, would she confess the truth.
    Her description of the fateful evening when her flirtation with Barnet took a far more serious turn occupies an entire chapter of the manuscript. It reads—as does so much of her writing—like an overheated excerpt from a pulpy true romance magazine. Precisely because it
is
so clichéd, however, it serves as a revealing self-portrait of the author. More revealing, perhaps, than she intended, since it shows her in a not-very-flattering light: as a hopelessly histrionic woman who sees herself as the star of a glamorous grand opera even while coming across as a character in an embarrassingly cheesy bodice ripper.
             
    It began on a wintry Monday evening in late January. Blanche had been asked to perform at a late-night soiree. Though Roland was to be her escort, her mind was focused entirely on Barnet. He, too, had been invited, and his presence was all she could think about.
    It would be, she writes in her memoirs, “the first time Barney heard me sing.” 2 Eager “to look particularly well” for him, she dressed in a “filmy tulle gown, together with black satin slippers, the high heels of which were studded with brilliants.” Then, for the finishing touch, she added her diamond butterfly pin from Tiffany’s.
    It had, of course, been a gift from Roland. But she was wearing it for Barnet.
    Descending from her bedroom to the parlor,