A Secret Life_ The Lies and Scandals of President Grover Cleveland - Charles Lachman [46]
“I went through all the halls and rooms and saw all of the patients,” he wrote. “There were several noisy cases . . . but no extremely violent ones.” This inspector found a suicidal state pauper handcuffed in leather “muffs,” and two boys and a girl—“epileptic and feeble-minded”—living in the institution. The walls had been freshly whitewashed and the closets and bathrooms all redone. The patients were “comfortably clothed” and the bedding in overall good condition. The staff consisted of a part-time medical director, a laundress, a cook, an engineer, and his assistant. But the Sisters of Charity were in charge of everything.
On the morning of Maria’s first full day of incarceration, she was taken to the office of Dr. William Ring.
Dr. Ring was beloved in Buffalo. He was the first student to graduate from the Buffalo Medical College, in 1847, and it was said that he offered as much care for the underprivileged as he did for his wealthiest patients, and treated them with the same zeal. No physician did as much to benefit the sick and poor. On the day that Maria Halpin came into his office, Ring was fifty-two years old and had been affiliated with the Providence Insane Asylum since it had first opened its doors to serve fifteen impoverished patients. He came to the asylum once a week to offer his services gratis as attending physician. Standing at his side on these missions of mercy were his adolescent sons, William and Charles. Their visits to the asylum must had made a deep impression on the boys, because they both became doctors.
Like any good diagnostician, Dr. Ring was a keen observer of human mannerisms and conduct. He notes in his initial evaluation of Maria Halpin that she had been drinking—he would later use the word boozy to describe her disposition—although he could not yet tell whether she was a habitual abuser. But she seemed very “ladylike,” and there was nothing frenzied or manic about her behavior. It made Dr. Ring question the diagnosis of onomania and DTs. As he listened to Maria’s story and came to understand the powerful legal and political forces that had been arrayed against her, Ring grew indignant. This woman, he was beginning to realize, had been thrown into the asylum “without warrant or form of law.” Obviously, she was “not insane,” and the Providence Lunatic Asylum, he determined, had “no right to detain her.” He advised Maria to remain in the asylum for a few days—“long enough to get straightened out.” But after that, he refused to admit her as a patient. She was free to go.
On the morning of July 21, Maria felt well enough to leave. Her three days at the asylum had cleared her head, and now she was determined to find her son.
Milo A. Whitney was at his desk in his law office, pondering the woman seated across from him. Maria Halpin’s account was almost impossible to believe, and yet his lawyerly instincts told him she was telling the truth.
Whitney was forty-eight years old and stood five foot eight. He had light hazel eyes set above a prominent nose, was bald except for a fringe of gray hair, and had a mustache. Physically, Whitney was unimpressive, his features, by his own account, “ordinary.”
Taking on Grover Cleveland, one of the most admired lawyers in Buffalo, was something Whitney would have to think about. After all, the bar association of Erie County was a tight-knit professional organization of power brokers, influential insiders. Then there was the matter of linking Roswell Burrows to this messy scandal and the deceased lawyer Oscar Folsom; involving Folsom’s good name in it, however remote his connection, could backfire. And Roswell Burrows was more than a highly regarded former judge—he was also a