A Secret Life_ The Lies and Scandals of President Grover Cleveland - Charles Lachman [119]
Sometimes, Cleveland stopped in Aurora to visit Frances on his way to Buffalo. One recent evening, Frances had been caught in a downpour. She had gotten out of her wet clothes, dried off, and snuggled into bed for a good night’s sleep when she got word that the governor had unexpectedly shown up and was waiting for her in the parlor. Frances quickly put on a frock and made herself presentable, but it wasn’t quick enough for Cleveland. When she finally descended the staircase, she found him impatiently pacing the floor. He was pretty peeved to have been kept waiting, and Frances had come down just in time. Years later, Cleveland was able to laugh off the incident. “Five minutes more that time and we should never have been married.”
Frances herself could only wonder at the attention Cleveland showered on her and what it all meant. Her dorm room was still fragrant with roses sent weekly from the governor’s greenhouse. Cleveland also sent fruits and mailed her campaign pamphlets that he thought she might find interesting. For now, she accepted everything and glowed in the aura of his attentions. A framed photograph of Cleveland hung in her dorm room. When another student asked her if it was her father, No, Frances responded, it was Grover Cleveland. Did anyone suspect a romance? Perhaps not. On the surface, Cleveland seemed like a devoted stepfather or caring uncle.
Frances followed every new lurid development in the Maria Halpin scandal. The only daily newspaper available on campus was a Republican sheet published in Auburn that aggressively covered the Halpin case in a way that Frances found deeply offensive. She considered the reporting so one-sided she couldn’t look at the paper without throwing a fit. She said it “disgusted” her. When another student got up the nerve to ask her about the scandal, Frances bristled, but handled the query like a lady. If “you” only knew Grover Cleveland like she did, she said, the man was, in her opinion, “more sinned against than sinning.”
Frances asked around and found somebody on campus who subscribed to the rival Auburn Bulletin newspaper and was willing to share it with her. At least the Bulletin slanted its news Democratic, the way Frances liked it. One can only imagine her distress when Cleveland’s own people planted the story that so conveniently linked her much-loved dead father to Maria Halpin. Many Americans were now of the opinion that Oscar Folsom had had an extramarital affair with the Halpin woman and was Baby Oscar’s biological father. And yet, right through the drama, neither Frances nor her mother Emma wavered in their affection for Cleveland.
As Election Day neared, at Wells, Frances became the center of attention. At that time the campus was a stronghold of Republican activism, and even though Frances and her roommate Katherine “Pussy” Willard were the only Democrats there, the other girls were encouraging Frances and, even if their hearts weren’t in it, rooting for Blaine. One night, as November 4 loomed, Frances gathered her friends around her.
“Girls, wouldn’t it be pretty nice for me to spend a winter at the White House?” she wondered dreamily.
“Why, of course,” one student answered. “But you must be sure to invite all of us to see you.”
The prospects for victory seemed dim, however; Frances’s friend confided as much in a letter home. “I am sadly afraid she will never spend such a winter, aren’t you?”
Time would soon tell. The election was almost here. Frances told everyone she was on her way to Albany. She and her mother had been invited by Grover Cleveland to await the returns at the governor’s mansion.
The day before the election, Grover Cleveland made a stealthy return to Buffalo, arriving in the city at 7:00 a.m. Only a few citizens who happened to be at the depot greeted him. Cleveland shook their hands, declined a ride uptown, and walked to