It was only at the General’s urging that Blanche agreed to make the move to the village of Sing Sing.1
He had confronted her on the day after Roland’s sentencing, as she sat in the parlor of the Molineux home on Fort Greene Place—“the house of gloom,” as she had taken to calling it.2
She was seated on a horsehair divan, gazing dully into the fireplace, when he lowered himself onto the cushion beside her. “How are you feeling, my dear?” he asked.
“Tired,” she said in a tremulous voice.
Taking her hand in both of his, the General said, “I know how hard this must be for you, my child. But”—here, his own voice broke—“think how much worse it is for my boy.”
He had never looked—or sounded—so tired, so worn. At the sight of the “fine and splendid and brave” old man reduced to “sudden helplessness,” Blanche felt a wrenching in her heart, and tears welled in her eyes.
“I think,” said the General after a moment, “that your feelings for Roland have changed. I know they have. But you must promise me that you won’t do anything rash.”
Gazing into his face, Blanche saw—along with his grief—something like real fear. It was a look she had never expected to see in the proud old warrior, and it shocked her.
At that moment, he sprang to his feet and began pacing the floor.
“Just because they’ve convicted him doesn’t mean that he’s guilty,” he said. “You know he’s innocent, don’t you?” There was, Blanche thought, a peculiar inflection in his voice—a note of uncertainty—as though he were addressing the question to himself.
Blanche merely repeated, “I’m so tired. I feel it’s never going to end.”
Pausing before her, fists clenched at his sides, the General cried, “We must not weaken! And so much depends on you. If you were to leave him—”
Blanche buried her face in her hands. “I won’t,” she groaned, though her muffled words were audible only to herself.
A few days later—her pity for the General bolstered by his assurances that, so long as she stuck by Roland, she would never lack for financial security—Blanche and her mother-in-law took the train up to Sing Sing, where they moved into the home of Mr. Henry G. Miller at 157 Spring Street, just a short carriage ride away from the prison.3
Though it was still the dead of winter when she arrived in the upstate village of Sing Sing, Blanche felt a “stirring of new life” as she stepped from the train. Raw as it was, the fresh country air seemed to carry a foretaste of spring. As the coach carried her and Roland’s mother to their new quarters in town, Blanche could see—“through the bare branches of trees etched in inky black against the western sky”—a “lovely vista of the Hudson.” The sight made her spirits rise. Just being away from the suffocating gloom of the Molineux home felt wonderfully liberating.
Her pleasant mood wasn’t destined to last. Through the windows of her second-story room the “massive gray pile of the old prison” was visible in the distance. The “feeling of uplift” she had experienced upon her arrival vanished as she gazed out at it.
“There, challenging me, defying me,” she would recall in her memoirs, “were those dark frowning walls, and the knowledge of what they held.”
She paid her first visit to Roland the next afternoon. She insisted on going alone. She “could not bear that anyone should witness that meeting.”
Accompanied by the warden, she crossed the inner courtyard, then “passed through endless corridors, shut off from those we had first traversed by steel and iron-barred doors. As these clanged behind us, we went on into what seemed a vast fortress of solid stone.”
Eventually, she stood at the entrance to the steel door that led into the Death House. The keeper released the “formidable bars” and let her into “the innermost vault.”
For a long moment, she stood looking down that gaslit oblong chamber, with its row of cells on either side, and the metal screen barriers fronting the padlocked, iron-barred doors.
“The third on this side, Mrs. Molineux,” said the guard, pointing to one of the cells.
Blanche crossed the gray stone flagging in the direction he had indicated. Pausing, she tried to peer inside the cell, past the metal netting and the heavy grating of the door. Suddenly, from the shadows inside the cell, someone rose from his cot and pressed close to the bars to greet her. It was Roland. The sight of him gave her a start.
“He was smiling, but he was ashen. His lips were very white—drained and bloodless. And his eyes—they were dead and expressionless, set in a stone mask that was immovable. The soul of him was dead—it had gone out of him.”
Roland spoke and she tried to answer, but her voice “died in my throat.” The guard brought her a chair and a glass of water. Soon, she and Roland were chatting, but their words were “perfunctory,” “without meaning.” His entire existence, Blanche saw, had narrowed to a single “obsession”—“release from the predicament in which he found himself.”
As for her, she knew “at that moment that the end of all things between us had come.” She felt nothing for her husband except pity. Still, she could “not tell him or anyone” her thoughts. Her “faith in Roland Molineux must appear unshakable.” She had promised the General that she would play the faithful wife, and until Roland’s fate was decided, she was bound and determined to keep up that “ghastly pretense.”4