A Secret Life_ The Lies and Scandals of President Grover Cleveland - Charles Lachman [131]
Her family gave Frances an amazing graduation gift: a trip to Europe. Some have suggested there was an ulterior motive behind Emma Folsom’s generosity. After all, for a disapproving mother who frowns on her daughter’s beau, putting an ocean between the couple can do wonders. Before Frances departed, she spent a lazy summer at the family farm in Folsomville, New York. Then she journeyed to Scranton, Pennsylvania, to spend some time with her college chum, Grace Storrs. Grace had black hair and cobalt eyes, and a serious expression set on a very pretty face. Her father was the general superintendent of the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad, so the Storrs family stood at the apex of Scranton’s social pecking order, and Frances had a grand time mingling with the other young swells in town. During her stay in Scranton, Frances received a letter that changed everything. It came from the president of the United States. Wrote Cleveland, “Would you put your life in my hands?”
It was a formal proposal of marriage.
“Yes,” Frances wrote back.
Everyone was sworn to secrecy. She told only her mother, grandfather, and cousin, the Buffalo lawyer Ben Folsom. None of her kin raised any objection about the propriety of the match, even though Cleveland had known her from babyhood. By now, despite her misgivings, Emma was coming to the realization that nothing could keep Frances and the president apart.
“Frank made a hero out of him before she was out of short dresses,” Emma would later explain. Her daughter, she ruefully remarked, “looks at him through the glamour of love’s young dream.”
So it was done. Frances wanted a quickie wedding, but Cleveland told her she should take the time to think things through. Did she really want to be Mrs. Grover Cleveland? He even expressed remorse for their infatuation to have reached this stage and said, from the bottom of his heart, how he wished that he were not president of the United States and thus not subjecting his “darling” to the harsh glare of life in the public arena. “Poor girl,” Cleveland would remark some time later, “you never had any courting like other girls.”
Women in that era rarely traveled abroad without a male escort, hence Ben Folsom wrote Cleveland a letter, assuring the president that he would accompany Frances and Emma Folsom to Europe and serve as their guardian. It would be Ben’s third tour of the Old World. A thirty-eight-year-old bachelor, Ben was fairly tall for those times, about five foot eight, with narrow shoulders, and a pleasant face marked by a trimmed brown beard that gave him the look of an English prince. His reputation in Buffalo was that of a bon vivant.
Frances’s grandfather, Colonel John Folsom, paid all the expenses for the European voyage and told Frances that when she found herself in Paris, she had to shop for a trousseau befitting the bride of the American president. She was under instructions from her grandfather to buy “as fine a costume as possible” for her wedding. Family honor required nothing less.
President Cleveland heartily approved of Frances’s adventure. He saw the experience as an invaluable education for the future First Lady. The nine-month separation would also give her a stretch of time to ponder whether she truly wanted to be his wife. In the meantime, the president kept a photograph of her in his bedroom. Just before she boarded the transatlantic ship, Cleveland sent Frances a telegram,