10

Mrs. Chesebrough’s extreme reticence in relation to sex was, of course, perfectly in keeping with the mores of Victorian America. It was an age when marriage manuals advised young brides to avoid all “amorous thoughts or feelings” when family physicians routinely recommended the cauterization of the clitoris as a cure for the ruinous habit of “self-pollution” and when a woman with a healthy libido was likely to be branded as a hopeless “nymphomaniac.” Adolescent girls from respectable families were kept in such complete ignorance of sexual matters that they commonly entered into marriage without the slightest conception of what coition entailed.¹

In short, from a societal point of view, there was nothing at all wrong with Mrs. Chesebrough’s prudery. On the contrary, it was Blanche, with her avid interest in sex, who would have been looked at askance. In her late-life memoirs, Blanche presents herself as an admirable free spirit, a precursor of the Jazz Age generation that would kick over the traces of their parents’ Victorian values. To many of her contemporaries, however, Blanche would always be viewed in a very different light: as a frivolous young woman of limited means who was more than happy to sacrifice her chastity in order to achieve those material pleasures she so desperately craved—“good clothes, good dinners, good seats at the theatre.” In short, as someone little better than a prostitute.²

Avid as she was for sexual experience, Blanche—so she says in her memoirs—was in no hurry to find a husband. “I was subtly conscious that I was shying away from marriage. It seemed a narrowing of horizons, a curtailment of freedom.”³

It was precisely that sense of “freedom” that made some of her relatives nervous. To her sister-in-law Ellen—a prim Bostonian with traditional ideas about the proper role of women—Blanche’s single life in New York City seemed dangerously “Bohemian.”⁴

Blanche’s own sisters were less alarmed by her “bachelorette” lifestyle. Even they, however, were eager to see her settled. Lois’s marriage to the well-heeled Mr. Oakie had, to some extent, violated the natural order of things. By rights, Blanche should have been wed before her little sister.

Moreover, she wasn’t getting any younger. To be sure, in the summer of 1897, she was still a few months shy of her twenty-third birthday. But she lived in an age when an unmarried woman of thirty was regarded as an old maid. In another few years, Blanche would rapidly be approaching the bounds of spinsterhood.

Izcennia in particular had made it her mission to see that her sister found a suitable husband. She had been playing Pygmalion for years, right down to the diction lessons she had provided for Blanche. Now, all that time, money, and effort were in danger of going to waste. If Blanche weren’t careful, she would end up as the wife of one of the poor (if admittedly handsome) naval officers she had been dallying with all summer. The time had come to introduce her to some more financially desirable prospects.

In mid-August 1897, just a few weeks after Blanche returned from her idyll at Newport, a perfect opportunity presented itself.

She had been invited to stay with Isia and Waldo at their summer home, Craigsmere, on the Rhode Island coastline. Despite the beauty of the setting, life at the seaside estate, according to Blanche’s testimony, was “uncommonly dull.”⁵ Waldo, though devoted to his wife, was something of a stick in the mud, a homebody with little interest in socializing. By contrast, Isia loved to go out and have fun. The long, placid, uneventful days at Craigsmere might have been a balm to Waldo; to his wife, they had grown unbearably tedious.

When Waldo announced in early August that he had business in Boston and would be gone for two weeks, Isia pounced. Over breakfast that morning, she asked his permission to take Blanche on a visit to Jamestown. It would—so Isia assured him—be an excellent chance to introduce Blanche to some eligible young men. Waldo, always indulgent of his wife and considerate of his sister-in-law, agreed. What Isia didn’t emphasize, of course, was that the trip would be a treat for her, too—a holiday from her suffocating home life with the sweet but stodgy Waldo.

No sooner had he departed than Isia packed a bag with several of her nicest summer frocks and some accessories to augment Blanche’s simple wardrobe. Then, leaving the servants in charge of Craigsmere, she and her sister took the ferry to Jamestown.

There they were invited by an old friend of Isia’s—a socialite named Clark Miller—to accompany him and three male companions on a cruise to Portland, Maine, aboard his schooner-yacht, the Monhegan. The two women accepted without hesitation.

It was high noon when the Monhegan, flying the flag of the Larchmont yacht club, sailed into Portland harbor. “Bluest of skies were above, bluest of waters below,” Blanche would recall many years later as she described that splendid midsummer day “so freighted with import for me”:

White sails and hulls gleamed in the light of a noonday sun. The brilliance caught and flashed back the shimmer of burning brass; rails and spars and polished surfaces of glistening decks reflected its rays. From one of the yachts, with its short, squatty funnels, fluttered the pennant of the New York Yacht Club, and below it the owner’s flag lifted and fell again in the light wind from across the bay.

The waters of the harbor were dotted with a fleet of these craft, the luxurious toys of their owners. They rode at anchor, swaying lazily with the motion of the tide. They were like great white birds, lightly and gracefully resting on the surface of limpid sun-drenched waters.⁶

The Monhegan slid into a berth beside an even more spectacular vessel, the Viator, skippered by Albert J. Morgan, a member of the fabulously wealthy family that manufactured the country’s best-selling brand of soap, Sapolio. Before long, a luncheon invitation had been extended by Morgan, who sent his motorized launch to convey Blanche and the others across the sparkling water to his “great white pleasure craft.”⁷

Climbing aboard the Viator, Blanche saw “deep-seated, gaily cushioned deck chairs drawn forward on the polished decks. Awnings softened the intense light of mid-day.” After exchanging some pleasantries with his guests, Morgan disappeared belowdecks to issue orders to his steward, who emerged a short time later with a silver tray bearing pâté de foie gras sandwiches, small toasted squares piled with Russian caviar, and thin-stemmed flutes brimming with champagne.

“We drank the iced Moët & Chandon, its liquid amber like gold,” Blanche rhapsodizes in her memoirs. “And the sun that day was gold, with the sea the color of sapphire. The wind was warm and sweet and came laden with the tang of salt—the flavor of the marshes. There was gaiety and lightheartedness and laughter, for happiness was abroad that brilliant midsummer’s day.”⁸

Later that afternoon, Blanche found herself on the afterdeck, making small talk with Morgan, who stood quite close to her, his arm resting behind her on the railing. The warm attention of the millionaire bachelor made Blanche—already light-headed from the champagne—feel positively giddy.

All at once, Morgan glanced over and noticed that a nearby deck chair—vacant only a few moments before—was now occupied by a young man with an open book on his lap. Morgan called to the fellow, who closed his book, dropped his feet from the low rail in front of him, tossed his cigarette into the water, then stood up and approached.

Blanche would always retain a particularly sharp image of that moment:

One noticed that he was not very tall, but his body was slender, muscular and beautifully proportioned. He carried himself very erect and gave a nonchalant air of self-possession, poise and breeding. He had the most charming manners, greeting us with a quiet, infectious smile. Something flashed between us.⁹

Blanche, of course, had already been introduced to the handsome young man, though she had taken little notice of him, having been focused so intently on her host. Now, she felt her interest suddenly piqued by the debonair “Mollie,” as Morgan fondly greeted him—though his actual name, as she now recalled, was Roland Molineux.