A Secret Life_ The Lies and Scandals of President Grover Cleveland - Charles Lachman [145]
“Well, it’s all up,” he told them.
It was a narrow defeat. As in 1884, the outcome hinged on New York, but this time, Cleveland’s home state went for the Republican candidate. Cleveland won the national vote by 90,000, but was beaten in the Electoral College 233 to 168.
After getting a few hours sleep, Dan Lamont found the president at his desk, having just eaten lunch. Cleveland gave his aide a wan smile. He wondered how he had lost his home state.
Lamont frankly replied, “I do not know.”
All Cleveland could do was laugh. He thought he had the answer: “It was mainly because the other party had the most votes.” He advised Lamont not to take it personally. “One party won and the other party has lost—that is all there is to it.” Lamont observed that the president “never looked more calm or self-possessed.”
Frances said what she was required to say. “I am sorry for the president and, for his sake, wish it had been otherwise, but what cannot be helped must be met.” As the First Lady and her husband pondered what to do next, Emma Folsom gave a candid interview, divulging for the first time intimacies about her daughter’s married life, which had been the subject of so much speculation. Emma had for a spell lived at the White House, assisting Frances in her duties as First Lady, so she knew all about the marriage.
“The president had the greatest blessings in his young wife, and he is in his heart too happy to be long cast down by political fortune. Though older, considerably, than she, he does not permit her to realize it, and her affection for him is extreme.” The marriage was sturdy, Emma said. Frances had found in Cleveland “the tenderness of a father with the devotion of a husband.”
“Mrs. Cleveland looks up to her husband with the trust and confidence she felt as a child in him.” It had to be obvious to anybody reading the interview that Cleveland’s rejection of Emma in favor of her daughter was still galling.
As to the reports that Frances had been the victim of domestic violence, Emma had this to say: “The only comfort I find in the defeat of the president is that the public will have the opportunity to correct some misapprehensions entertained toward him and his wife. He is a peculiar man, but one of the noblest in the world.”
Emma surprised Frances with the announcement that she would be marrying Henry Perrine, a distant cousin and genial widower from Buffalo with three grown children.
President Cleveland came to a decision: He and his wife would settle in Manhattan. Buffalo was not even in consideration. It was, Cleveland told William Vilas, his secretary of the interior, “the place I hate above all others.” He still could not forgive his hometown. Frances supervised the move to New York. The White House attic was a “jungle of gifts” that had to be cleared out, and Cleveland sold off his team of seal brown horses. “I am now eagerly counting the days till March 4, when I shall be free,” he told a confidante. Finally, the time came when Mr. and Mrs. Cleveland had to depart. It was the morning of Benjamin Harrison’s inauguration, March 4, 1889. Frances was coming out of the family living quarters when she saw Jerry Smith, a White House steward. Smith stood as erect as a grenadier and held her handbag out for her.
“Now, Jerry,” Frances told him, “I want you to take good care of all the furniture and ornaments in the house, and not let any of them get lost or broken, for I want to find everything just as it is now, when we come back again.”
Smith was aghast. “Excuse me, Mis’ Cleveland, but just when does you all expect to come back, please—so I can have everything ready, I mean.”
“We’re coming back just four years from today.”
Frances and her husband moved into a four-story brownstone at 816 Madison Avenue near 68th Street, and Cleveland’s faithful servant William Sinclair accompanied