Part 24
Monday morning following our marriage on Saturday evening I returned to work. I had not given my employer any notice and I knew I would have to remain at the office until he found someone to take my place. Moreover, Captain Neilsen had told me during the previous day that he would immediately send to Norway and get some money which his legal guardian was holding for him; and he would also start negotiations for the sale of certain property which he, as the eldest child in his family, should have urged the sale of long ago, after the death of his parents. It would amount to $90,000 in all, and $30,000 would come to him as his share.
From the Alamac we moved up to Bretton Hall, and I kept my secretarial position for a couple of weeks. I had not been married more than a week when I discovered, through questioning the captain closely, that he did not actually have sufficient funds in the bank to enable us to live even another month. But he assured me that his next trip to Europe would net him a commission of $20,000 on a ship he expected to sell. It seems to me he must have procured a loan, and with some of this money and $40 of my own salary I bought myself a diamond circlet wedding ring, for which I paid $165 and which I wore on my engagement finger next to the ring given me by Mr. Harding.
I grew fonder of the captain during the two weeks before he sailed for Europe. He was so enthusiastic about taking Elizabeth Ann, and said that just as soon as he returned from Europe we would begin the arrangements.
During his absence abroad, after I had given up my position, a friend of mine from Chicago came on to New York. When I learned she was coming, and realized how little money I had, I borrowed $150 from Helen Anderson, assuring her the captain would return it to her just as soon as he came back from Europe. With part of this I bought new shoes, a new dress, and entertained once for my Chicago friend at a small theatre party. I really felt quite dignified as Mrs. Neilsen.
As soon as the captain stepped into our room at Bretton Hall I asked him what success had attended his trip. He had not sold the boat. Nor had his money come from Norway. He looked very much distressed about it and I felt genuinely sorry for him. He kept telling me to be patient, something would “break soon.” But the weeks passed, and he said he would have to make another trip to Europe, and still nothing had “broken”--except my hopes.
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I planned to go to Athens, Ohio, to visit my mother in early March while Captain Neilsen was in Europe. I had promised my mother that she could come East to be with me that oncoming summer, thinking of course that I was to have an apartment and that I would be fully established in my new home with Elizabeth Ann. I despatched a letter to my sister Elizabeth, asking her to let Elizabeth Ann come to Athens for several weeks, and this she did, my mother going to Chicago for another purpose, but bringing Elizabeth Ann back with her to Athens on her return. I was heartsick to think I could not return to New York with my baby and feel free to become settled permanently. But I knew enough by then of the captain’s financial situation to know this was impossible. I felt I had been trapped all around, though I could not that early accuse the captain of having misrepresented himself to me, and indeed I did not believe he would do such a thing. He had loved me so much, and he had actually thought that he would be able to get the money, I was sure. Still, I could not help remembering that he had told me distinctly that he had sufficient funds to keep us comfortably, and _that_ had been an untruth, for I was not even at liberty to lease an apartment because we could not pay the rent in advance. The whole situation was inexplicable. The captain’s generosity of former days, when he had sent me $200 to Europe and had had $200 awaiting my demand in New York, and had deprecated my repayment of these advances, all pointed to comparative affluence.
The more I thought about it the more distressed I became, and I could not even then admit to my family the truth of the matter. Instead, I found myself lauding the captain on all sides. I felt the situation would surely right itself, if, as he had asked me, I would give him just a little while to “get on his feet.” Like a pendulum I swung from one decision about him to another, and in the night when I reflected that after all I might not be able to have my baby with me, it almost crazed me. No one knew the state of mentality I was in, for I could not admit that I had failed in marriage, and I had not divulged our plans of taking the baby away from my sister and her husband.
Here in Athens, Ohio, at my mother’s home, I again had my baby with me and we slept together and played together, and I thought I could not stand it to give her back. I wanted her so badly that I didn’t care whether or not I ever returned to New York if I could not take her with me and have her to _keep always_. I wanted to die rather than to go on as I might have to go on--without my child. Nevertheless, after the most severe misunderstanding I had ever had with my sister Elizabeth, who came on to Athens to get Elizabeth Ann after about a month, I regained control over myself and accompanied her and the baby back to Chicago, where I visited for a week or two longer before proceeding back to New York and to my husband.
I had received instructions from him to go to live with a woman whose husband was the captain of a U. S. liner, on which Captain Neilsen had accepted the position of second officer. I lived with her for a couple of weeks and when the captain returned from a voyage, we went temporarily to a hotel again.
The first of May we moved into a furnished apartment on West 114th Street. I realized, however, that we could not live there and pay the rent of $100 a month, unless I, too, went to work. So at Columbia University I obtained a position in the Appointments Office. I worked there a part of the time, and also took small pieces of dictation from the various professors, sometimes going to their offices and getting the work and doing it at home upon a typewriter which I had rented for the purpose. I never in my life worked so hard as I did that summer of 1924.
The captain wrote Elizabeth and Scott under date of May 16, 1924, and told them that we now wished to take Elizabeth Ann. I had determined that if the captain did not make good his promise to me to provide a home for her and me without my having to go back to work as I was then doing, that I would not under any circumstances permit her to be taken permanently by us, for I would eventually have to leave a man who had so erroneously represented himself to me. But I clung to the hope of fulfillment on his part and tried hard to banish these unpleasant thoughts, so together we devised a letter which the captain signed.
In his letter to Elizabeth and Scott the captain said that we would come that fall to get Elizabeth Ann, after she had returned with them from the farm where they went every summer, and where they expressed a wish to take Elizabeth Ann with them on a farewell visit to Scott’s people.
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About the middle of September I went to Chicago and got the baby. We had committed ourselves to the extent of expressing in our letter our desire to take the baby ourselves, and this was the understanding that Elizabeth and Scott had when I went to Chicago to get her. Scott looked unfavorably on the whole thing, feeling that I should not have given her into their keeping only to take her away. I had never breathed a word to them of Mr. Harding’s promise to me to take her himself as soon as circumstances made it possible, but I knew that in that event _I_ would have had her through him, and was only endeavoring to get her in another way since her father’s way was impossible.
I could not work, now that I had Elizabeth Ann, until I had put her in kindergarten somewhere, and I had no money with which to do that. The captain kept saying, or writing when he was away, that something was bound to “break,” but the first of October came and nothing had “broken.” Our apartment lease ran out October 1st and it was necessary for Elizabeth Ann and me to move. As an officer on the liner, the captain spent quite a bit of his time there, even having to sleep on board certain nights. I found it difficult to find an apartment suitable for three and comparatively cheap, but decided upon a large room which would suffice until I could find more suitable quarters. It was in 109th Street, and, although the sun streamed in at the back court window all afternoon, the place was frightfully dirty and full of vermin. My little girl was bitten at night and I soon knew we could not stay there.
The captain had said he would be in the city two weeks steady before making another sea trip. It had only gradually dawned upon me that these trips he was taking were in themselves the only source of income that the captain had, and up to this time not one of the things he had told me about converting property into money had come true. And I, who had been frank with him to the point of possibly hurting his feelings in admitting I was marrying him so that I might have a home for my child, could not understand these misrepresentations.
I cast about for a suitable apartment and at last found I could get two rooms and bath, very clean and nicely furnished, on 116th Street West, for $110 a month. We were paying $22 a week for the one room we were living in then. The captain went with Elizabeth Ann and me to look at the apartment, approved the price, and signed the lease. But he was able to pay but $50 down. I promised to pay the other $60 when we moved in, and the captain said that he would have that and more besides before I would need it.
Elizabeth Ann helped me in her adorable little way to “pack,” and at three o’clock on the appointed day we awaited the drayman. The captain had not returned as yet, but I felt sure he would be up on 116th Street with some money when we reached there. I had barely enough to pay the drayman.
The phone rang. It was the captain. He was leaving within an hour unexpectedly for Newport News to be gone two weeks with the U. S. liner for repairs. “But, goodness,” I said in utter despair, “what am I to do in the meantime for the rent? and food?” He told me to go right down to his lawyer, who had $100 which he would give to me.
Leaving things as they were, with the possibility of the drayman coming any minute, Elizabeth Ann and I boarded a subway train, and within the next thirty-five minutes were at the lawyer’s office in 43rd Street. But he didn’t seem to know to what money I referred. He asked me to phone “Angus,” as he called my husband, so that he might talk with him. I brought my little daughter in and introduced her to the lawyer. He scarcely acknowledged the introduction and I was hurt and embarrassed to tears. To think that the daughter of Warren G. Harding should be so slighted! I didn’t care how he or anybody else treated _me_, but I was furious if they were not entirely lovely to my darling. The lawyer himself had children, and I thought at least he might have shaken hands with her. What kind of a man was this lawyer my husband employed? He asked us to leave the room while he talked with the captain. There was no money from that source. This I found out after the lawyer’s lengthy telephone talk with the captain. I took Elizabeth Ann and went downstairs and telephoned Captain Neilsen from a booth. I reached him just before the liner had disconnected the telephonic service prior to sailing. He said his friend, the ship’s commander, wanted to speak to me. He came to the phone. He said he had called his wife and that she would come down that night to see me with the rent money, $110. That left $50 from the $110 for Elizabeth Ann and me to live on until further remittances from the captain might come. So, after all, Elizabeth Ann and I slept in our new apartment that night.
I have since gone over that whole situation thoroughly and fair-mindedly, and I am sure that no one could have done more to help a husband get on his alleged normal financial feet than did I to help Captain Neilsen. That is, I helped until February 1st. Helen Anderson, ever glad to assist when she could, advanced the necessary initial kindergarten fee of $108 and I placed Elizabeth Ann in school, paying $30 a month extra to have her remain there all day so that I might keep an all-day position. I had a girl from Columbia come in the mornings and take her to school and go after her at night, and in that way the baby and I reached home about the same time. In the evenings I would clean her up and clean myself up and we would go out for our dinner. I was so tired at night sometimes I thought I could not get up the next morning, and very likely I could not have done so had I not retired every night with Elizabeth Ann at seven or eight o’clock.
I was then working at The Town Hall Club on 43rd Street. I began to work there in October, 1924, and remained there for a year and a half until April, 1926, as assistant to the Executive Secretary, who had had charge of the Appointments Office at Columbia when I worked there the previous summer.
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When the latter part of January of 1925 came, I knew I just could not go through the spring as I had done the greater part of the winter, and I wrote Elizabeth, who was at that time with her husband in charge of certain music work at the Ohio University at Athens, Ohio, to come and get Elizabeth Ann if she could. It hurt me to do this, for I had taken my child with the full intention of being able to provide a home for her permanently. But I could not longer stand the physical strain of keeping up the apartment, though that strain was not equal to the mental strain of never knowing whether or not the captain could meet the rent and other obligations. The last month we lived there, January, I was obliged to go to a friend for $75 to help me out with the rent, and I did so, taking Elizabeth Ann with me and meeting the friend in the lobby of the Pennsylvania Hotel. I have not been able to pay that back any more than I have yet been able to repay the Italian the $90 borrowed in 1923. And January of 1925 found me owing other debts also--school tuition for my baby, Helen Anderson’s loans amounting in the aggregate to over $300, and others.
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I began very early to acquaint Elizabeth Ann with the likeness of her father, and she could pick him out in the Sunday supplements when she was as young as two. She knew, of course, my autographed photograph of Mr. Harding which always stood in a silver frame on my bedroom table, as well as pictures of other members of the Harding family, all of which hung on my wall, and my sister Elizabeth’s photograph of Mr. Harding which he had autographed for her early in 1921.
In many ways Elizabeth Ann reflects my own moods, but love for Mr. Harding seems to have developed of itself in her heart with an almost uncannily independent force. When we first moved into the apartment on Lafayette Parkway in Chicago, Elizabeth Ann was about two and one-half years old. I had a small book written by Joe Mitchell Chapple, entitled “Harding, the Man,” on the cover of which was a small picture of Mr. Harding, an excellent likeness, set against a background of American flags. The frontispiece was a larger, though not as good, picture of Mr. Harding, and throughout the book were various other pictures--one of Mrs. Harding, one of the old Harding homestead, one of _The Marion Daily Star_ Building, one of the Harding home on Mt. Vernon Avenue in Marion, and also one of their Wyoming Avenue home in Washington.
I liked the manner in which Mr. Chapple had written about the President-elect (for the book came out during the campaign of 1920) and I had written Mr. Harding that if Mr. Chapple needed a secretary I would consider it a pleasure to work for him. Anyone who was so manifestly strong for my sweetheart appealed to me as the “slickest” kind of a boss imaginable. Mr. Harding was evidently amused at my reason for wanting to work for Mr. Chapple for I remember he said it would “do no harm to write to him and ask.” However, I never did.
Elizabeth Ann took a curiously decided fancy to this Chapple book. She seemed actually much to prefer it above her own picture books, and, on the floor, her chubby little legs spread apart the book in front of her, she would sit for long stretches leafing through the pages and “reading” aloud to me the story improvised in her baby language. She had a habit of telling her stories in the form of questions, answered by herself in a slightly different tone, sometimes ringing in a third party and adapting her voice to this person also. Often, too, her stories would take the form of letters, and I can hear her now in her babyish oratory “reading” aloud to me about her own father. Slightly embarrassed because she knew she was really not following the text, she would look up at me, and with impish delight and with the smile of her father, which made me gasp, she would continue, “My _dear_ Mr. Harding, how are you? I love you, dear Mr. Harding. Mamma Nan loves you too, ver’ ver’ much....” Then she would turn to me and raise her great deep blue eyes and set her lips in the soft line which so imaged the serious sweetness of her father’s expression, and say, “Nan, dear, isn’t he a _darling_ man!” And with that I would crush her to me and smother her with kisses. Nor would I forget to tell her father on my next trip to the White House her latest sayings about him, and he would look at me exactly as she had looked and would say, “She’s rather like her mother in some respects, isn’t she, dearie?” And then he would lapse into audible musings over his extraordinary feeling for little girls, which had come over him since his own daughter’s birth, and with the most pitifully tense, unsmiling sweetness he would say, “How do you think she would _like_ me for her father?” or, “Just think, Nan, how grand it is to be a father!” and I would pat his hand and swallow to keep back my tears for I knew he was but remarking his very heart’s desires.
Often in her two-and-a-half-to-three-year-old days I would call Elizabeth Ann into my room, which was at the far end of the apartment, front, and she would come trudging down the hall, her “Harding book” under one arm, and her other favorite, an abridged edition of Webster’s Dictionary sometimes dragged along by a few of its leaves, which was the easiest way for her small hand to grasp such a grown-up volume. And once, when we snapped her picture in the back yard beside her doll carriage, her Harding book lay in the carriage, open to Mr. Harding’s picture, and the whole “took” very distinctly.
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Here in New York in 1924, when I brought her on from Chicago to be with me, she was five years old. She had the same love for Mr. Harding then as when she was more babyish, but spoke of it now in an amazingly grown-up fashion. For instance, she listened when those present thought she was not listening, and naturally heard Mr. Harding discussed pro and con. But whatever she heard did not influence her deep-rooted love for the man who was her father. She so often said to me during that winter of 1924-25, raising the question herself, “We won’t let anybody talk about our dear Mr. Harding, will we, Nan dear?” And I would gaze at her and reiterate softly, “No, indeed, precious Bijiba, we won’t let anybody talk about our dear Mr. Harding,” knowing she meant “against” him, when she said “about.” “Bijiba” was her own baby interpretation of “Elizabeth Ann” and has clung to her as a fond nickname ever since.
Then again, she would request that I take down from the mantel the picture of Mr. Harding so that she could kiss it, and she would shake her head and exclaim, “Isn’t he just the _sweetest_ man!” And once she repeated what she had of course heard, “Mr. Harding is dead ... what does ‘dead’ mean, Nan dear?” And with tears I would tell her that our dear Mr. Harding has just gone away, into another land. And once, curiously twisting her query as though she knew whereof she spoke, she asked, “And won’t he ever see _me_?” And she seemed for all the world to be unconsciously expressing her father’s disappointment more than her own. And I thought sadly, as I searched for a suitable reply, no, he will never see his own daughter, not on this earth. It was all so cruel, so cruel!
I simply _had_ to ask Elizabeth and Scott to take Elizabeth Ann back by the time the latter part of January had come around. Even as early as the previous October, when the baby had been with me scarcely more than a month, I had a bitter taste of what real need was. I had exactly seven cents in my purse when I took Elizabeth Ann with me one day to the Provident Loan Society to pawn my wedding ring. I had the captain’s watch also which he had given me permission to pawn, and the combined pawnings brought $75. This enabled me to buy my darling little girl a new coat and hat and a couple of school dresses, shoes, etc., in preparation for her kindergarten. Everything seemed to cost so much; but I thought that must be because I was not used to a limited income. I wondered how people who had no more than we had really got along; I know I fervently wished that I had learned the ability that makes a dollar stretch five times its worth.
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Shortly after I had pawned my wedding ring and had bought Elizabeth Ann some new clothes, I had a letter from Miss Daisy Harding, saying she was to be in New York soon to do some shopping. I surmised that she would soon be married to Ralph Lewis and in truth learned afterward from her that the trip East was for the purpose of purchasing linens, and certain garments to complete her trousseau.
Even the knowledge that my child’s aunt was, according to her own written statement to me months before, liberally cared for as a result of her brother Warren’s will, did not cause me for one moment then to consider as advisable or proper an appeal to her for financial assistance. Moreover, I had launched myself upon matrimonial waters, and, though I knew the craft which carried my child and me appeared to be headed toward the rocks, there was still hope.
While in the city, Miss Harding stopped with a girlhood friend whose father had been a prominent judge in Ohio. They lived at Broadway and 71st Street in an apartment building, and it was there that I took Elizabeth Ann one afternoon to call upon Miss Harding. Helen Anderson, who had always wanted to meet Miss Harding, about whom she had heard me speak so often, went with us.
I was glad it was cold enough to warrant my wearing my winter coat, which was trimmed with the squirrel from the coat Mr. Harding had given me the money to buy back in 1920. Thus I looked as presentable as my child. Pride would not yet allow me to admit to certain people that in less than a year I had found that, in my instance, marriage was a failure. I could not in the same breath confess I had married for a home for my child, and without such explanation I would be stamped mercenary, and rightly so.
I do not know whether the explanation I offered Miss Harding in extenuation of Elizabeth Ann’s separation from her foster parents sufficed to satisfy her natural speculation about the situation. I do remember, however, that we repaired for a little private chat, toward the end of our visit, to the play-room of the little daughter, where she and Elizabeth Ann had been playing together, and I remember distinctly that I made a broad statement to the effect that if I ever for a good reason found I could not live with my husband, I would not hesitate a moment to seek my freedom. And Daisy Harding, standing there before me, not yet a bride, echoed my statement.