A Secret Life_ The Lies and Scandals of President Grover Cleveland - Charles Lachman [99]
Maria’s brother-in-law, Simeon Talbott, was on the road in Logansport, Indiana, when he received a letter from Grover Cleveland. Talbott had not heard from Cleveland in eight years since he had negotiated the five-hundred-dollar out-of-court settlement with Cleveland on Maria’s behalf. At that time, Cleveland had found the traveling leather-goods salesman to be an even-tempered fellow you could do business with, and they had worked everything out amicably. He had no reason to believe they could not do so now. Cleveland had written to Talbott as someone he could level with, man-to-man.
When Talbott read the letter, he could not believe the arrogance of the governor of New York. In it, Cleveland urged him to make a public statement, declaring that Cleveland had always treated Maria Halpin with respect. If he did so, the governor promised him “anything I could wish for in case he was elected.” In his letter, Cleveland claimed that Horatio King’s smears—that Maria had been intimate with two and possibly four other men in Buffalo around the time of Baby Oscar’s birth—had been “wholly unauthorized by him and were not true.” He pledged that, in the event that Talbott issued the statement he proposed, the record regarding Maria’s alleged promiscuity would be “corrected.” Talbott felt like tearing the letter to shreds. His wife back in Jersey City had told him that Maria was offered a $10,000 enticement from the Democratic Party for her cooperation in defusing the scandal, but turned it down. According to Talbott, she said that she would rather “die” than issue any kind of public support for Cleveland. Talbott, seething with indignation, strode to the offices of the local newspaper, the Logansport Journal, to go public with what he really thought of Grover Cleveland.
“Yes, I know Cleveland, perhaps better than any man living. Maria Halpin is my sister-in-law. The story told in the newspapers is literally true, and the half has not been told. Grover Cleveland did seduce my sister-in-law under a positive promise of marriage, while she was living in Buffalo. This I know to be true, and Cleveland afterward paid the five hundred dollars to me for Maria Halpin when legal proceedings were about to be instituted against him. Cleveland now has possession of the child.”
James E. King Jr. was ten years old and vacationing with his mother, Sarah Kendall King, in Gilmanton, New Hampshire, that summer of 1884, blissfully unaware that the circumstances surrounding his birth had become the foremost issue of the presidential campaign. James was enjoying his summer, occupying himself with simple boyhood pleasures, when he became the focus of all this national attention. The day came when his mother, in a state of mounting panic, informed him that they were ending their vacation and immediately returning to Buffalo.
Minnie Kendall took note of her sister-in-law’s hasty departure with a mixture of relief and contempt. Minnie, who was married to Sarah’s brother, William Kendall, had been hired by Dr. James King in 1874 to nurse Baby Oscar. The Kendalls had raised the child for the first full year of his life, until they were obliged to surrender him and get out of Buffalo because they knew too much. They had relocated to their home state of New Hampshire.
Now in 1884, a reporter for the Chicago Tribune had come to her door and introduced himself. Her every instinct told