By 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