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All of Western New York watched the unfolding drama. In the late 19th century, public sanitation was such a life-and-death concern that faint stirrings of a Cleveland-for-governor movement began to appear in the Buffalo press. Even the publisher Norman Mack joined the campaign.

In the seventh month of his administration, as July came around, Cleveland prepared to go on vacation. As usual, he planned to visit his mother in Holland Patent. Then a telegram arrived with unsettling news: Ann Cleveland was close to death. The forty-five-year-old mayor hurried to Holland Patent. All the surviving Cleveland children once again gathered, even Anna Cleveland Hastings. She lived in Ceylon with her missionary husband and happened to be on one of her rare visits home when her mother was stricken.

The matriarch of the family lingered for several days, and the Cleveland siblings remained at her bedside until the end. Mrs. Cleveland was seventy-six when she died on July 19, 1882. Grover was disconsolate. Of all her children, he held a special place in her heart. She died without ever knowing that her bachelor son had fathered a son.

Cleveland sent a telegram to Harmon Cutting, notifying his clerk of his mother’s death. The Express, almost certainly after a briefing by Cutting, reported that the mayor “has always been devotedly attached to her, and will feel her loss deeply.” Holed up in a room at his mother’s house, Cleveland said he could only imagine “the desolation of a life without a mother’s prayers.” He conducted what city business he could and answered telegrams and letters of condolences. He poured his heartache into the inscription he composed for her memorial stone: “Her children arise and call her blessed.”

Mrs. Cleveland was buried in the same cemetery where a monument—inscribed with the legend, “Loving and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided”—had been erected for the two Cleveland brothers lost at sea in the Missouri disaster of 1872.

Holland Patent had not changed much since Grover’s departure nearly thirty years before, and he got a chance to get reacquainted with his siblings. Reverend William Cleveland had moved to Oneida County, not far from his late father’s parish. Mary Cleveland Hoyt was still in Fayetteville, and Louise Cleveland Bacon lived in Ohio. Susan Cleveland Yoemans was raising a family near the Canadian border. Only the gifted youngest sister, thirty-six-year-old spinster Rose, remained in their mother’s house.

In Albany, Edgar K. Apgar was following the reports out of Buffalo with genuine curiosity. The Yale-educated Apgar was a leading Democratic political operative and the deputy treasurer of New York State. With shoulders so slender he looked like a boy, the forty-year-old made an improbable political boss. He weighed just one hundred pounds, ate two meals a day, and shunned sleep. “I shrink from it every time with just the same reluctance you would feel in surrendering yourself to the influence of ether in a dentist’s chair,” he once said. Until the end of his brief time on earth, he was cursed with a malfunctioning digestive system that one friend said left him at the mercy of a “capricious stomach.”

Apgar read all the state’s major dailies to keep on top of local political developments. He saw how the street-cleaning contract in Buffalo was erupting into a major scandal that was galvanizing the citizenry of Buffalo. He followed every aspect of it. One day, he went to see his friend Daniel S. Lamont, the chief clerk of the New York State Department of State. Like Apgar, Lamont was a young functionary who served on the Democratic Party’s central committee. Apgar asked Lamont if he knew of a “Grover Cleveland of Buffalo.” Lamont answered that he did not. Apgar said this Cleveland was the new mayor of Buffalo, and his intuition was telling him that Cleveland was someone worth considering for statewide office. An “ugly-honest man,” Apgar called him, with “undaunted courage.” Apgar even wondered whether Cleveland would make a dark-horse candidate