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to Blanca, and included that heartbreaking incident when Blanca had waited hours for her husband at the railroad station, only to return home alone. She said she had left Blanca in 1913 and didn’t see her again until 1916, in Westbury, at which time she noted a great change in her appearance, due, she suspected, to Blanca’s tormented domestic life. This transformation was even more apparent the next time she saw Blanca, in September 1917, in the Mineola jailhouse. “I did not know her; I went right past her. She was so white.”
    “Mrs. De Saulles was always more or less pale, wasn’t she?” Weeks asked.
    “Not when I first went there.” 71
    After Ethel left the stand, Uterhart read out a deposition from Felipe Cortez, who had been unable to attend the trial, confirming the circumstances of the auto accident in Chile. Cortez said he had been driving, and in the passenger seat had been Miss Marie Errázuriz, a cousin of Blanca’s. “Mrs. De Saulles was sitting at Miss Errázuriz’s feet, holding on to a strap with her right hand. I was going to the club to get some cigarettes. I was going very fast, and suddenly a man on a bicycle came into the path of my car, so I had to stop it suddenly to keep from killing the man. I saw Blanquita fall to the road. I rushed to her. Her head and face were all bloody. Next day I noticed her eyes were all blind black, her face spotted and her chin was cut.” 72 (Earlier, Blanca had angrily refuted Weeks’s claim that on the night of the accident she had gone to a ball with a bandage on her head.)
    Two nurses then took the stand to describe the debilitating effect that marriage had inflicted upon Blanca. One, Miss Isabelle Flaherty, who tended Blanca when Jack Jr. was born, confirmed that at Larchmont in August 1913, Blanca had been the picture of health. “She had color in her cheeks all the time and was extremely pretty.” 73 Thereafter, her health had gone into freefall.
    A third nurse, Maude Cowan of Glengarry, Canada, who took care of Jack Jr. at the Hotel Gotham for five weeks in 1916, testified to her employer’s generosity. She had only asked for twenty-eight dollars a week, but Blanca had insisted on paying her thirty-five as “there was a terrible responsibility in taking care of the little boy.” 74 She said that each day the boy was taken away at 3:00 p.m. by his father, and was in “a disagreeable mood” 75 when he came back. Often he was returned late and his clothes were dirty. He told her that “Boobie” (Mrs. Mooney), the nurse at the father’s home in Westbury, asked him not to be nice to Miss Cowan. Weeks had just two questions.
    “The boy went out with his father and came back somewhat dirty?”
    “Yes.”
    “The fact is, isn’t it, that the boy didn’t like you and did like Boobie?” 76
    The nurse flushed and did not reply.
    After testily warning the lawyers that he might hold a night session the next day, Justice Manning adjourned court until 10:00 a.m. the following morning.
    The reporters rushed off to file their copy. That evening or next morning their words would be devoured by millions across America. And no one was paying closer attention or was more anxious about the outcome than a certain aspiring actor in Los Angeles—Rodolfo Guglielmi. According to a highly colored account by Mae Murray, her young friend was utterly distraught. “Through the ten days of the trial he was like a trapped animal. He would come and sit with me beside a burning candle and whisper prayers . . . the prayers of a boy’s heart for a mother, the prayers of a man for a woman, a lover begging that a life be spared, asking forgiveness.” 77
    All hyperbole aside, Rodolfo had been extremely fortunate. Blanca had survived her ordeal on the witness stand and not once had his name been dragged into evidence. But there was still time for it all to blow up in his face. And there was still that nagging self-doubt, weighing his desire to help Blanca against a personal