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at once. Called before the House Committee, however, Harry denied having made such slanderous remarks and the matter was dropped.
    Though Roland was left feeling deeply aggrieved, he had more serious things to worry about than his feud with the detested athletic director. A far more urgent matter was his relationship with the individual who had been arrested in the Jersey City brothel. This person hadn’t been there as a customer but as an employee.
    It was Roland’s longtime lover, Mamie Melando.
    Even before he learned that she was moonlighting in a whorehouse, Roland had begun to tire of Mamie. Now—by having the police phone him at his club to help get her out of trouble—she had exposed him to public ridicule. And there would soon be another reason why he wished to rid himself of the increasingly burdensome factory girl.
    Roland—insofar as he was capable of feeling such an emotion—was about to fall in love.



7
    L ike Colonel Beriah Sellers—the lovably feckless hero of Mark Twain’s
The Gilded Age,
who hatches one ridiculous get-rich-quick scheme after another—Blanche Chesebrough’s father, James, had a brain that fairly crackled with supposedly surefire moneymaking ideas. Not all of them were completely worthless. He held a number of patents and sold the rights to one of his inventions—a hydraulic washing machine—for a decent sum. He even made some money from his device for curing diseases of the nose and throat. “He was either a crank or a genius,” opined one New York City newspaper. 1
    Time would make it abundantly clear which of those two categories he fell into.
    In pursuit of the pot of gold that always seemed to lie just beyond the horizon, he was constantly uprooting his family—his uncomplaining wife, Harriet, and six children. No sooner were they settled in a new home than James’s wanderlust would seize him, and off they’d go to some distant place where his long-elusive fortune presumably awaited. At times, when one of his deals bore fruit, they enjoyed a fair degree of comfort. As the years progressed, however, their circumstances grew increasingly straitened, even desperate.
    Blanche—the second-youngest child, born in 1874—spent her earliest years in Westerly, Rhode Island. It was there, according to later accounts, that she lost an eye when an unruly playmate threw a rock at her head. She was fitted with a glass eye and remained so sensitive about it that, for the rest of her life, she refused to be photographed except in profile—and only then at an angle that hid her left eye from the camera. 2
    Toward the end of her long life, Blanche—who would survive the other principals in the Molineux affair by many years—finally set down her memoirs. It is a work written in the sentimentalized style of the Victorian romances of her youth. (“In looking back, I see a girl—a young woman—who is now at a great distance…. She was in love with life—the life which her imagination painted in glowing colors. Naive, credulous, and filled with illusions, she did not recognize nor understand its verities until the enchanting rose color had turned to gray.”) In her recollections of her childhood, she glosses over some of the most painful episodes. Beyond lamenting her father’s lack of “sagacity in relation to money matters,” for example, she does not dwell on the hardships that his family was made to endure as his behavior grew increasingly erratic. 3
    She was still a young girl when he dragged them from New England to the Midwest on another hopeless business venture. They were living in Minneapolis when Blanche experienced the “first stirrings” of the ambition that would dominate her life for many years to come. Her neighbors were a family named Beatty, whose youngest daughter, Louise, was Blanche’s best friend. One day, while the two girls played jacks on the front stoop of the Beatty home, Blanche heard Louise’s older sister practicing her singing lessons