Partly through the offices of her teacher, Frank Damrosch, Blanche became the contralto soloist at a church in Brooklyn Heights, whose choir included the wife of the famous American composer Harry Rowe Shelley. Her salary was ten dollars a week—a respectable sum for a part-time position at a time when the average yearly income for an American workingman was less than a thousand dollars.1
By then, her family was in desperate need of her earnings. Her father’s improvident ways and successive failures had driven the little household perilously close to penury, and James was too proud to turn to his affluent offspring for help. As his material prospects grew grimmer by the day, he looked to religion for comfort, becoming increasingly caught up in a particularly zealous brand of evangelical Christianity.
Finally, in 1894, just before Blanche’s twentieth birthday, James abandoned his worldly pursuits altogether. With his wife in tow, he returned to Rhode Island and consecrated himself entirely to church affairs, becoming, as newspapers later reported, “a constant attendant at revivals.” In April 1895, Harriet died after a brief illness. Six months later, James himself fell ill. He refused medical attention, putting his faith in the Lord. He died shortly thereafter, in mid-October.2
By then, Blanche’s younger sister, Lois, was living in high style on West End Avenue and Seventy-second Street. Following a “whirlwind courtship,” she had married Howard Oakie, a member of a socially prominent family with a big estate on Long Island.3
Alone and unwed, Blanche chose to remain in the Gramercy Park neighborhood, moving into a “diminutive” apartment at 51 East Twenty-third Street.4 Her belongings were few: a console holding a silver-framed portrait of her parents alongside a slender flower vase; stacks of books and music cluttering the floors; a few nice sketches and drypoints adorning the walls; a bed and dresser, couch and easy chair. And, of course, her beloved piano.
Losing both parents within so short a time filled Blanche with a “terrible sense of desolation and sorrow.” She distracted herself with her choir work, her vocal studies (now with the celebrated operatic teacher Emilio Agramonte), and her friendships with fellow students and other struggling young artists. She earned extra money by singing for socialites at “private musical evenings.”
On one of these occasions she so impressed a wealthy female philanthropist that, as Blanche later wrote, the woman declared her “intention to help me realize my consuming ambition to study in Europe.” Before this promise could be fulfilled, however, the woman took a transatlantic trip on the French liner La Bourgogne, which collided mid-ocean with a merchant vessel and went down with more than seven hundred crew members and passengers, including Blanche’s would-be patroness.5
Blanche was introduced to another potential patron through her wealthy new brother-in-law, Howard Oakie, whose family was on friendly terms with Gordon McKay, the millionaire industrialist who had earned his fortune in the shoemaking business. Hearing enthusiastic reports of Blanche’s singing abilities from Howard’s cousin, Corinne, the elderly McKay paid a visit to Blanche’s modest apartment one early spring night in 1897. There—after serving him tea in one of the Sévres cups she had inherited from her mother—Blanche so impressed him with her rendition of Manuel Ponce’s “Aimant la Rose” that he invited her to accompany Corinne on a visit to his Newport estate that summer.
It turned out to be a magical vacation for Blanche: her first direct experience of “what the possession of unlimited wealth really meant.” Nearly fifty years later, she could still conjure up in her imagination every detail of that enchanted scene:
It was early June and we sailed through the Sound on the steamer Puritan. Upon our arrival, the beauty of the place was revealed in all its allure. With a background of blue waters, there were undulating grounds of velvety green, masses of foliage, blossoming shrubs and a rose terrace sloping away in the direction of the sea. There were also stables and a carriage house with the inevitable victoria and landaulet and phaeton of that day.
The greenhouses were a marvel to me, with their forced growth of flowers and fruit. Ripening in the warm sun, which filtered through the ceiling of glass, were grapes that dropped in great clusters from the vines overhead. Beauty was everywhere! Hedges of Japanese roses ran along the edges of a portion of the grounds. A profusion of wild roses was growing and blooming in natural loveliness—pink and coral coloring against a purple and cobalt sky.
In the distance was Rough Point. Some days the wind came out of the North, and from the cliffs we could gaze far off and watch the flying spray. We could glimpse the ocean, tearing and racing and curling in long lines over the white sand.
There were drives each afternoon when all of fashionable Newport society would be abroad in glittering equipages. The Casino and the tennis matches were also open to us. There were luncheons aboard the yachts of McKay’s friends, and for the first time in my life, I tasted champagne.6
It was not merely the beauty and grace of her surroundings, however, that made her stay in Newport so special for Blanche. Something else occurred during those long, bewitching days: her sudden awakening to the power and allure of what, in her memoirs, she consistently refers to as the “masculine element.”
Though by no means conventionally beautiful, Blanche was, by all accounts, a captivating presence, even with her peculiar left eye. As one chronicler describes her, she was “possessed of a divine figure and a splendid carriage. She was tall, sinuous, yet graced by those happy and promising curves which were the splendor of the Gibson girl, the regnant beauty of her time. She wore clothes with astounding effect, and had the poise of a woman of the world.”7 In her memoirs, Blanche confirms that, from her adolescence on, men found her “vibrant” and “arresting.”8
Up until her twenty-second year, however—at least according to her late-life recollections—she had never “given the slightest consideration to men. Music had been my one absorbing interest.” All that changed, however, in the summer of 1897.
On several occasions during her stay in Newport, a group of “fledging Navy officers” from a nearby training station came to dinner at Gordon McKay’s estate. Among them was a dashing lieutenant named Dillingham. In the company of these “smartly uniformed men,” Blanche “suddenly discovered something—something that I really didn’t understand. But whatever it might be, it was arresting! I decided that the masculine element…was rather disturbing and at the same time enormously interesting. I was suddenly infatuated with these gay young officers, with their poise and their savoir faire—their impressively good looks and sophisticated ways with women. I seemed to be treading on air. The flattery and attention was heady to a young girl experiencing it all for the first time.”9
Though she “flirted outrageously” with the handsome Lieutenant Dillingham, Blanche rebuffed his physical advances. At the time, her sexual attitudes mirrored those of her mother: “Natural impulses and the sex-instinct must not be discussed or even thought about. Sex apparently was a thing to be ashamed of. The very word was tabu.” She came home from Newport with her virtue intact.
From that point on, however, everything was different. She began to question her mother’s “old-fashioned precepts” about sex:
I couldn’t understand why something that should be the most wonderful and beautiful of anything in existence must never be spoken of. It puzzled me a whole lot, and I began to study it out for myself. I decided it was all due to distorted vision. People were looking through lenses that were cracked; surely they saw only the doubtful and ugly reflections of their own minds! I wanted passion and love in my life; I wanted my existence to be fervid and glowing!10
Because of her mother’s puritanical teachings, Blanche had been kept “from a full realization of sex.” Now, she “wanted to know it in its completeness, what it was all about.” It wasn’t mere curiosity that lay behind this desire, but the awakening of a long-suppressed hunger.
As Blanche, many years later, would say of her urgent new interest in erotic experience: “I was breathless for it.”11