Part 7

I used to think Mr. Harding might have liked to adopt _me_, though he never said so to me. However, he spoke very freely to me about what he would do if Mrs. Harding were to pass on--he wanted to buy a place for us and live in the country, and often during those days Mr. Harding said to me, “Wouldn’t that be grand, Nan? You’d make such a darling wife!”

This reminds me: It was Warren Harding who told me for the first time of Angela Arnold’s engagement. But he did not use the word “engagement.” “I understand Angela Arnold is announcing her betrothment,” he said to me one evening at dinner. He chose to use words which, though sometimes archaic, were somehow substantially good and seemed especially congruous coming from the lips of Warren Harding. But this bit of gossip interested me far less than his hushed exclamation across the table, “Gee, Nan, _you’d_ make a lovely bride!” Once in a while, as on this occasion, I answered him, “Would I, darling Warren?” I called him Warren very rarely. He used to tease me to say to him, “Warren, darling, I love you,” and it seemed to delight him to hear me say his name. But I was so much younger than he--exactly thirty years his junior--that somehow it seemed out of tune for me to address him by his first name. I just resorted to endearments, usually calling him “sweetheart.” He called me “Nan” from the first and his letters usually began, “Nan darling.” I remember the salutation very often seemed as though it might have been put in after the body of the letter had been written, and when I asked him about it he said that was the case, for he so often wrote his letters to me on memo paper during legislative discussions in the Senate Chamber.

The first part of January, 1919, I went over to Washington. I think I stopped at the Raleigh Hotel. Mr. Harding sometimes found it difficult to be with me all of the afternoon and of course I understood this. He himself would in that case plan my afternoon for me, sending me on a bus trip to Arlington Heights, or suggesting some other form of entertainment. That particular afternoon and evening, however, he did spend with me up until ten-thirty or eleven o’clock. We went over to the Senate Office in the evening. We stayed quite a while there that evening, longer, he said, than was wise for us to do, because the rules governing guests in the Senate Offices were rather strict. It was here, we both decided afterward, that our baby girl was conceived. Mr. Harding told me he liked to have me be with him in his office, for then the place held precious memories and he could visualize me there during the hours he worked alone. Mr. Harding was more or less careless of consequences, feeling sure he was not now going to become a father. “No such luck!” he said. But he was mistaken, and of course the Senate Offices do not provide preventive facilities for use in such emergencies.

“That’s a very stunning cape you have Nan,” were his words as he helped me slip into its brown woolly softness. That was the first time he had seen the cape which Marie Johnson had helped me to select in New York and for which I had paid $75, buying it of course on the instalment plan. I adored the casual intimacy of tone he used.

In mid-January Mr. Harding came over to New York. He telephoned me at the Steel Corporation and I shall never forget how thrilled I was because I hadn’t known he was coming and he had surprised me. “Ask Mr. Close if you can have the rest of the afternoon off,” he said. Also, he suggested that I borrow the apartment of a friend of mine, a girl of whom I had spoken to him many times.

I told Mr. Close that my sweetheart was here unexpectedly and he gave me permission to leave for the rest of the afternoon. Mr. Close as well as everybody else in the office knew, of course, that I had a sweetheart who lived in Washington. I usually referred to him as “my man”--seldom calling him by name and when I did using the name “Dean.”

Then I got my friend’s permission to go up to her apartment, at 120th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. Mr. Harding got off on the floor below and walked up one flight to prevent any suspicion on the part of the elevator man.

For a second time in less than two weeks, having none of the usual paraphernalia which we always took to hotels, and somehow not particularly concerned about possible consequences, we spent a most intimate afternoon. How indelible my memory of Mr. Harding sitting on the day-bed, his back against the wall, holding me in his arms and looking down at me with a smile that was so sweet that it made me want to cry from sheer contentment! “Happy, dearie?” he asked.

He thought my friend’s apartment very attractive and wished that I were earning enough to make it appear possible for me to have just such a place for myself, for he would love to give it to me. He picked up my Christmas mesh-bag, his gift, which I carried back and forth with me to work until the newness of its possession wore off. “Do you like this sort of thing. Nan?” Mr. Harding asked me as he examined the bag. The mesh in the bag is so soft that it seems almost like silver cloth. “Oh, _yes_!” I answered quickly and he smiled understandingly at my fervor. Sometimes I was almost ashamed because I _was_ so passionately fond of frivolous things like that.

_27_

Through mutual recognition of the trouble we might cause each other and the ensuing unhappiness that might befall, we early decided to destroy all love-letters. It goes without saying that this was a difficult thing for us to do, and we both clung to each other’s most recent letters as long as possible. Mr. Harding had a drawer in his desk in the Senate Office which he always kept locked and George Christian, his private secretary, had been instructed to destroy the contents, burn them I believe Mr. Harding said, if anything happened to him. Many of the heart-revealments of which I have spoken and will speak were put in writing by Mr. Harding--and declarations much stronger as well--and he himself admitted that nowhere except in French had he ever read anything comparable to the love-letters we used to write to each other.

When he wrote to me he enclosed his letter in an inside envelope which he invariably stamped with postage also, sometimes on the back as a seal, and when I wrote to him I enclosed and sealed my letter as many as three times, buying for this purpose envelopes of graduated sizes. I wrote on a small-sized note pad, ruled, and always used a pencil. Usually I addressed the innermost envelope to “Dean Renwick” so that if a letter were opened it gave the impression that it had been sent to someone merely in Mr. Harding’s care and was not meant for him personally.

He told me laughingly how he had once received a letter which was meant for a Rev. Harding, although the contents, he said, were far from religious. Also he said he had received mail for the Mr. Harding who was the Governor of the Federal Reserve, as well as mail meant for the Mr. Harding who was once the Governor of Iowa.

We lost several letters in transit. One that Mr. Harding addressed to me at the Steel Corporation, in a blue envelope, contained $30 in cash. It never reached me.

I sent Mr. Harding a letter one time, as he asked me to do, to Atlanta, Georgia. I have forgotten the occasion of his visit to that city. I put the letter in an inside envelope, as we always did, addressed it to him correctly at Washington, then in another outside envelope addressed to him as we had decided to address it, “Mr. A. Y. Jerose, General Delivery, Atlanta, Georgia,” each part of this name having for us an intimate meaning. Then I mailed it so it would reach him during his stay there. We puzzled a long time over the disappearance of that letter for it never reached him in Atlanta. Nor did the inside envelope which was addressed to him correctly in Washington. I remember we decided that _someone_ in the dead letter office must have got hold of it, and we wondered what they thought if they read it.

_28_

The latter part of February, 1919, I knew for a certainty that I was to become the mother of Warren Harding’s child. I remember one morning in the subway train I felt so queer and faint that I was obliged to ask someone for a seat. Too, I had faint spells from nausea. These things did not distress me except as I was sometimes taken with the feeling that I just could not sit there opposite Mr. Close a minute longer and take dictation. Yet, on the whole, I felt well. I wrote Mr. Harding as soon as my belief was confirmed in my own mind.

The effect of Mr. Harding’s letters whenever I was perturbed over anything was to calm me, and he wrote that this trouble was not so very serious and could be handled. I honestly felt from the very first that he was more interested in having the child by far than in helping me to “handle” the problem otherwise, but of course our difficult situation called for a discussion of an operation, or other means of procedure. He was a married man, and United States Senator from Ohio.

I think Mr. Harding came over once or twice before I left New York for Chicago--though curiously enough these meetings do not stand out in my memory for the very possible reason that my mind was at that time occupied with my immediate problem.

It was late March or early April when I went to Chicago, having received permission from my employer in the Steel Corporation to take a vacation in advance of the regular summer-time absence. I stopped in Washington enroute according to arrangement and went to the New Willard. Mr. Harding came up to my room. I remember well, how, in spite of the fact that his forehead was wet and he showed other signs of nervousness, he said in the low voice which always soothed me, “We must go at this thing in a sane way, dearie, and we must not allow ourselves to be nervous over it.”

The growing lapse of time since the conception of our child very likely had weighed upon his mind for that was, I think, the thirteenth week. His evident nervousness strangely belied his words, but it did not matter for I myself was by that time entirely free from fear. I recall also how he said repeatedly, “I do not fear for the future, after the child comes, but only for the now.” It was those frequent allusions to the future and his worded assumption that we were going ahead and have the baby, coupled with his letters telling me it could be “handled,” and his apparent indifference to an operation, that made me all the more determined to have the child. But most of all was I swayed by my visit with him at this time, the visit at the New Willard which convinced me absolutely that Warren Harding craved to be the father fully as much as I craved to be the mother of his child. His wistfulness was so precious to me. “You know, Nan, I have never been a father,” he said.

However, he was deeply concerned for both of us, and in an attempt at a simple solution, he went out and returned with some Dr. Humphrey’s No. 11 tablets, which, he said, Mrs. Harding used to take and found in some instances effective. I affirmed my belief that they would do _me_ no good. I even made fun of the tiny white pills. I remember how he smiled faintly at me from the lavatory where he stood washing his hands when I expressed my belief that the pills would not be effective in my case. “No faith, no works, Nan!” he said.

He sat in the big chair by the window and took me on his lap. He told me how I had filled him with the first _real_ longing he had known to have children. He said he had wanted them, yes, but Mrs. Harding had been a mother when he married her, and she had not wanted any more children, and, he reminded me, “You know Mrs. Harding is older than I.” I think very probably the glory and wonder of having a child or children could not be aroused within him to the fullest by Mrs. Harding because she had already shared the initial glory of that experience with another man. Mr. Harding always spoke disparagingly to me of Mrs. Harding, and in loving as well as in disposition and everything else he certainly failed to picture her as his ideal. Rather did I seem to be his ideal woman. This never failed to fill me with wonderment.

I told him in mock seriousness that since he had always had such a desire for children I’d have to raise a family for him. “All right, dearie, but let’s see how this one comes out!” he answered facetiously.

Again he told me, as he had written me so often since we knew of the coming of our child, how he had “enshrined” me in his heart as “the perfect sweetheart and perfect mother.” “Enshrined” was a word he so often used. Or, “You are my shrine of worship, darling Nan,” he would say or write to me.

This brings to my mind a scene in the New Ebbitt when I, upon a visit to Washington during 1917 or 1918, had waited beyond the appointed hour for him to come to my room. When he came, about half an hour late, he found me _en negligée_ and weeping! He kissed me tenderly and sat down on a chair to take me on his lap. But I, in mingled contrition and ingratiation, perhaps thinking a woman had been the cause of his being held up, dropped at his feet on the floor. He arose immediately and raised me up.

“Don’t you ever get down like that to me, you sweetheart!” he said, and the attempted gaiety in his voice somehow carried a note of self-reproach. “_I’ll_ do all the kneeling in _this_ family that is to be done!”

Then he explained how he just couldn’t get away earlier, and as he talked he fussed with a necklace I was wearing, asking me where I bought it, and pretty soon we were both smiling over my foolishness.

Now at the New Willard, facing our problem together, he was telling me how he had always thought of me as “the perfect sweetheart and perfect mother.” Of course those things were immeasurably sweet to hear. So were the things he visioned often for me of our life together after he had “finished with politics.” It was an old story to hear about “the farm” where he would like to settle down and just enjoy life. There would be dogs and horses, chickens and pigs, books and friends, and of course he would have to have “his bride!” Yes, this was an old story, but today it sounded strangely new to me. As he talked his voice grew tense. His hands trembled visibly. I took one of them in mine and held it tightly. His gaze was directed out the window and he spoke as to himself. I had to blink very hard to keep back my tears. I had never seen him so moved, so shaken....

“... and I would take you out there. Nan darling, as--my--wife....” He freed his hand with sudden force and grasped both my arms tightly. “Look at me, dearie!” he cried, “you _would_ be my wife, wouldn’t you? You would marry me, Nan? Oh, dearie, dearie,” brokenly, “if I only could ... if we could only have our child--together!” This last came as a hushed exclamation, almost a prayer, scarcely audible. The yearning of a heart laid bare! I nodded wordlessly. The very air seemed sacred.

When he spoke again it was as if he had returned to stern realities, and the return brought partial emotional relaxation. He smiled at me sadly. “Would be grand, wouldn’t it, dearie?” I could not yet safely answer but I nodded. He repeated it and looked out the window at his left. The voice grew stern again; he did not smile now; only just turned and looked at me hard as a man might who is trying not to cry....

To marry Warren Harding! To live on a farm and raise children with Warren Gamaliel Harding! What rapture! I put my lips against his and spoke through my kisses. “Oh, sweetheart, that would be too heavenly!” He whispered back, “You tell _me_ about it, dearie!” And so I in turn pictured for him just what it would mean to be his wife, to live with him before the world, to raise “the young lieutenant” and perhaps other children, to love him, to wait upon him, to worship him forever and ever as the true bride of his heart! And the light of a love divine was in his eyes as I spoke. “And the young lieutenant must be the image of his dad, remember!” I ended brightly. “The young lieutenant” we had always called our coming baby, and strangely enough this fitted in with the story we afterwards concocted in explanation of our very difficult situation. “Won’t it be g-r-a-n-d to have a son?” I asked him now. He nodded smilingly. But months later, as I roused up out of the influence of chloroform to inquire of the doctor, “Is it a girl or boy?” and he answered briefly, “girl,” I decided immediately that _I_ had wanted a girl all along!

“Grand” was a word Mr. Harding used to say, which seemed to him to express the different raptures he experienced in being with me. He used to drag the word out just as one might hold a morsel of ambrosially delicious food in his mouth to prolong the taste. “Isn’t this g-r-a-n-d?” he used to ask me.

Sometimes just to ingratiate himself with me, to make me feel he was really just human like myself, he would deliberately use words like “ain’t,” or he would deliberately mispronounce words, as he used to do with the word “pretty,” calling me “you purty thing!”

Once, remembering how someone from Marion had spoken of him to me as not having had a particularly good education, and that only his personality had “put him over” so strongly, I spoke unthinkingly of this to Mr. Harding. My object in telling him was merely to instance the manner of jealousy on the part of some people who were themselves unqualified to fill his position. And he replied, “Well, Nan, none of them is sitting in the United States Senate!” I assured him that that was just what I had told the Marionite who had gossiped about him.

But to return to the visit at the New Willard. Somewhat related to this characteristic visioning in which we both indulged were his many dreams of being able to have me in a “fitting atmosphere,” one, he said, which would, as he flatteringly put it, “become your beauty, Nan.” He used to tell me that he visioned me always in a “blue mantle,”--a fancy he had never had about anyone else before, he said. Perhaps that was why he seemed to like to see me in blue....

So the trend into which our “serious conversation” drifted--I had hoped Mr. Harding would tell me definitely to go on and have the baby--was not one, in truth, to decide the issue. Therefore our problem was left in the air, or rather for me to solve. The fact that my own fears about myself were in no degree comparable to his own brought him back into the mood in which I loved most to see him, and I left a far calmer Warren Harding upon my departure than I found upon my arrival. I am sure my own sense of comparative serenity was entirely due to the fact that way down deep in my heart I had resolved to have no operation.

_29_

I arrived in Chicago the following day.

Up to this time I had never told Mr. Harding that I had ever confided at all in Elizabeth, my sister. I knew it would worry him needlessly. The first afternoon Elizabeth and I were alone together we had a talk. Elizabeth must have felt that the letters I had received from Mr. Harding during my visit to her in June of 1917, and our trip together in Indiana when I met Mr. Harding in Indianapolis, would eventuate in a _liaison_, for she warned me before I had volunteered any information that I ought to be “very, very careful.” She herself had in the meantime married and was living in an apartment she and her husband had taken.

Perhaps my face betrayed me. I felt so free with Elizabeth and did not attempt to hide my emotions. In any event, when she said that I ought to be “very, very careful” I began to cry. I told her with an attempt at a smile that it seemed to be too late to be careful. She was distressed beyond measure, but I hastily assured her, as Mr. Harding had assured me, that it was “all right” and I could “handle” it while in Chicago. Though I had been amply funded for this emergency I had actually thought not at all about an operation. It frightened me so to contemplate such a thing. The thought of having a child held no terror for me; it was the natural thing, and I did not fear it.

Nevertheless I pretended to engage myself in the serious consideration of such an operation. My sister Elizabeth seemed far more anxious than I. She helped me to find a doctor who took care of such cases, and went with me to see him. I remember how he told me, after an examination, that I was of such a nervous temperament that he would be fearful of performing an operation upon me. “If it were your sister there,” he said, indicating that if I were as imperturbable as my sister’s plump figure made her appear to be, “it would not be taking such a risk.” But I knew that Elizabeth’s forced smile belied her real feelings.

Moreover, the doctor reminded me that I had allowed thirteen weeks to elapse.... “If you are, as you say, so situated that you _can_ have the baby, I say by all means go ahead and have it,” was his parting advice. He said also that the process of having the child would not be nearly so painful as a premature operation would be and not detrimental to my health.

Elizabeth, however, was far from being at ease, and she then sought the advice of a dear friend of ours, telling her that it was _she_ who needed advice. This friend helped her to prepare some “bitter apple” medicine for me which had to be compounded with painstaking effort, but after it was all ready and bottled I just could not bring myself to take it. The real reason was of course that I could not bring myself to destroy the precious treasure within me.

My letters from Mr. Harding further inclined me to believe that he himself was really indifferent to an operation. He wrote his distress at my having told Elizabeth, and said he really felt there was no need for that, that he had provided ample funds and it seemed I might have sought counsel without telling her, and so on. He wrote that if he had to choose between medicine and an operation he personally would prefer “the knife.” Just reading that word “knife” seemed almost to stab me every way, and served to strengthen my determination not to consider such a course. I remembered the wistfulness with which Mr. Harding had talked of a child. In short, I made up my mind to “go ahead and have the baby,” as the doctor had advised. I wrote that decision to Mr. Harding after I had taken occasion first to shame him for criticising me because I had confided in my sister. I wrote him that one would think from his letter that I had “shouted it from the housetops,” and that Elizabeth was an entirely safe person with whom to entrust our secret; and that, after all, one cannot solve such problems all alone.

He answered immediately that it was all right with him, he was sorry he had complained, he trusted me implicitly, and was “strong for me,” and that it was “the greatest experience a woman ever has,” and that he was looking forward to seeing me again. I welcomed the experience of childbirth with all my heart.

_30_

I returned to New York. The first of May I left the Johnson’s home on 136th Street and moved into a one-room-and-alcove-bedroom apartment in the Hotel La Salle Annex in East 60th Street. I sublet it from a woman whose husband was in Constantinople and whom she was planning to join there. There was a nice private entrance and my apartment was one flight up, on the second floor, rear.