Though most of the crowd had long since dispersed, a dozen or so newsmen were still congregated outside the Molineux home when, at around 6:00 P.M., the front door opened and George Gordon Battle emerged. He was immediately surrounded by the reporters, who bombarded him with questions. The ever-gracious Battle took a moment to explain that, at the family’s request, he was on his way to the Murray Hill Hotel to escort Roland’s wife home. A moment later, he had boarded a waiting carriage and was gone.1
By the time he arrived at the door of her suite, Blanche had already heard the news. Entering, he announced with a smile, “Roland is free.”
From her seat in the parlor, Blanche merely looked at him, her face taut. Battle was no fool. He had known for a long time where matters stood between Blanche and her husband.
“You needn’t tell me—I think I know,” he said as her silence continued. “I appreciate how hard it’s been for you. But you must go on a bit longer.”
When Blanche finally spoke, there was such bitterness in her voice that even she felt “as though it came from another’s throat.” “Their son is returned to them. They have him. They don’t need me any longer.”
Battle’s tone was pure gentle persuasion. “But you’re wrong. They do need you. It’s imperative that you should be in the General’s home at this time. You can see why. The newspapers will blow it into a tremendous sensation if they learn you have not rejoined the family.”
Blanche struggled to control the emotions that threatened to engulf her: anger, resentment, despair. Nowhere among them was the slightest pleasure or relief at Roland’s acquittal.
“Oh, can’t I have my own life now?” she cried. “Or what’s left of it?”
“But think of the old General,” Battle urged.
Blanche was sobbing now. “I don’t want to hurt him,” she managed to say. “Only please, don’t ask me to go back. Let me go away!”2
But Battle persisted until, regaining a measure of control, Blanche made herself ready and allowed herself to be led down to the carriage. Throughout the drive to Brooklyn, she stared blankly out the window. She felt, as she would record in her memoirs, “quite dead.”
Beside her on the cushion lay a large bouquet of American Beauty roses. Battle had purchased them from a florist’s shop, so that Blanche would have something to present to Roland when she saw him—a token of her joy at their reunion.3
When the coach drew up at 117 Fort Greene Place, Blanche—handsomely dressed in a big feathered hat, dove-colored shirtwaist, black skirt, with a boa around her neck4—stepped onto the sidewalk and, ignoring the shouted questions of the newsmen, ran up the high stoop. Battle followed at her heels. In the excitement of the moment, he did not see that, either by accident or design, she had left the roses behind. By the time he noticed, the coach had already driven away.5
The front door was opened by the General, who held out his arms in welcome. Blanche, however, was so eager to see her husband that she rushed past her father-in-law and into the front parlor. At the sight of her, Roland—who had been seated in a chair reading congratulatory telegrams—sprang to his feet and the pair flew into each other’s arms. They spent the next several hours in loving communion behind the closed doors of the parlor, while the rest of the family left them discreetly alone.
That, at any rate, was the account that appeared in the next day’s newspapers.6 Blanche’s memoirs tell a different story.
Upon entering the Molineux home—her “dead heart carried inside me”—she strode directly “through the high ceilinged and paneled halls” and, without so much as a word to Roland or any other member of the family, proceeded straight “upstairs to my former sleeping chamber.”
Removing her wraps and hat but otherwise remaining fully clothed, she sank into an easy chair beside a window. From below stairs, voices floated up to her. “Roland was there with his family. The world believed I was lying in his arms. Yet I sat in my room alone, all night.”
By the time the “first faint streak of gray light” showed in the east, she had made her final decision. Moving to the desk, she took a sheet of stationery from a leather portfolio and began a letter.
It was addressed, not to her husband, but to the General. In it, she described “the slow death that had left me numb and cold. I wrote him of my hopes for their happiness, of my love and respect for himself, and my prayer that God would bless him.”
As for his son, “I left no word for him”—though she did not fail to deliver an eloquent message.
After sealing the letter with wax, she placed it on the mahogany table. Then she pulled off her wedding ring and set it on top of her farewell note.7
When the sun had fully risen, Blanche snuck downstairs and boarded a carriage that took her back to Manhattan.
She never saw Roland Molineux again.