A Secret Life_ The Lies and Scandals of President Grover Cleveland - Charles Lachman [16]
At least Cleveland could still enjoy the easy congeniality of his male friends. He found true contentment with his band of bachelor brothers.
Observing all this with a disapproving eye was his Aunt Margaret, Uncle Lewis’s wife. Her nephew had stopped attending church and was associating himself with some very “queer people,” she remarked. (At that time, queer meant “odd,” not “homosexual,” just as gay would have meant “carefree.”) Margaret found everything about her nephew’s personal life offensive. From her home in Holland Patent, Ann Cleveland was distressed to hear these reports of her son, the incorrigible bachelor. She herself sometimes found his personality inflexible, and she also noted with “pain” that of all her nine children, Grover alone was capable of being rude.
Cleveland and his law partner, Vanderpoel, rented out space at the old post office at Seneca and Washington streets and hung up their shingle. John C. Level, the livery owner, gave the firm its first $100 retainer.
“They needed it too,” Level said. Level was one of those local political players who were considered a “good man to know.” He was in and out politics, at various times serving as chief of detectives, United States marshal, and Overseer of the Poor. But mostly he ran the livery stable.
Those early days were a struggle. Cleveland’s former boss, Dennis Bowen, tried to throw a little business his way and arranged for him to handle the estate sale of a house owned by a man suffering from a mental disorder—a “lunatic” in Cleveland’s estimation. The work netted Cleveland a $15 referee’s fee, but when the payment was late, Cleveland had to write Bowen to expedite it, saying, “I am a trifle hard up today.”
He detested taking on criminal cases. It was said that he would never accept a retainer from a client he knew to be guilty—and he absolutely refused to defend murderers. Cleveland preferred civil litigation and negotiating settlements. A lawsuit was like a gun, he once said—a dangerous instrument that could go either way without “lock, stock or barrel.” When a wealthy grain dealer sued the editor of the Buffalo Commercial Advertiser newspaper for libel, Cleveland took the case and won. He had an impressive aptitude for crystallizing legal issues and articulating the law in a common-sense style that jurors found genuine and believable. It was said that he could work through the night, take a bath at dawn, wake himself up with a pot of hot coffee, and make a first-rate presentation in court.
Cleveland was still sending his mother and sisters whatever spare change he could when he finally scrounged up the $25 to repay Ingham Townsend, his kindly benefactor from Oneida County who had loaned him funds when he was a teenager to set out for the west. It may have taken twelve years, but it was a matter a pride for Cleveland to take care of the debt, with interest. He wrote Townsend a letter.
My Dear Mr. Townsend:
I am now in a condition to pay my note which you hold given for money borrowed some years ago. I suppose I might have paid it long before. But I never thought you were in need of it, and I had other purposes for my money.... The loan you made me was my start in life, and I shall always preserve the note as an interesting reminder of your kindness.
Yours respectfully,
Grover Cleveland
Cleveland had moved out of the Southern Hotel and was now living in a boardinghouse at 47 Niagara Street. It had once been the mansion of William G. Fargo, cofounder of the great stagecoach and banking concern Wells Fargo & Company. Fargo had built the ornate brick Italianate mansion in 1851, and it was now a boardinghouse, run by a widow, Alison B. Ganson, with the help of her comely daughter Alice. If Cleveland was interested in Alice Ganson, he failed to pursue the young lady, and Alice ended up marrying another