Part 9

Around Christmas time in 1918 I received a letter from Miss Daisy Harding, with whom I have always corresponded more or less regularly. After I had read it I enclosed it in one of mine to her brother Warren. He had given me $50 that Christmas, with which I had purchased the long-coveted mesh-bag of which I have spoken. In his reply to my letter he enclosed a letter which _he_ had recently received from his sister Daisy in which she thanked him for his Christmas gift to her of $10. Miss Harding remembered having received this amount of money from him as a Christmas gift when I recalled it to her mind in June of 1925.

I remember hearing my mother tell how Mrs. Sinclair had told her that Warren Harding, upon being at their residence one Sunday morning when she was about to leave for church, had given her $25 to put in the collection basket. Although he did not attend the church Mrs. Sinclair attended, nor even attended his own church regularly, Mr. Harding was quick to recognize the good in any organization, religious or otherwise, and wanted to contribute to its progress. Warren Harding was one of the three kindest men I have ever known.

_35_

I have gotten away from my main story, but these things occur to me and I wish to set them down. Little things that happened, or that dropped, unconsciously perhaps, from Mr. Harding’s lips, often gave me clues as to how he felt about important matters concerning which we had no actual discussion.

In this connection, I remember well a dinner at the Manhattan Hotel early in 1918. Woodrow Wilson, then President, was making spectacular efforts which occupied front-page space. However, the newspaper headlines that night carried the latest news from the battle-front, and Mr. Harding’s eyes were heavy when he looked up at me. He was quiet for several seconds and his eyes went wet.

“The world’s in a bad way, Nan,” he said, shaking his head.

I myself had had no intimate contact with the war except through my friends, having had no relatives--at least no near relatives--who had gone over, and its grim horrors were not felt by me as deeply as those who had sent their dear ones to the front. In fact, the two years the United States was in the war were the two years I shall ever look back upon as the happiest of my life, as one cherishes the memory of precious hours with one’s sweetheart. And if I ever during that time voiced a desire to be of more active help in war-work, I was reminded by both Mr. Harding and my employer in the United States Steel Corporation that an employee of that Corporation, in view of the vast part steel played in the war, was doing his or her bit effectively.

Perhaps something of this was going through my mind as I watched Mr. Harding over the dinner-table. So far as I knew, he had no near relative “over there” either, but I was sure he was very close to the war situation as a United States Senator. His tone changed into one of severe criticism with his next remark.

“Wilson’s a plain damned fool!” he muttered, as to himself, still perusing the front-page headlines.

I meekly acquiesced in Mr. Harding’s view that the world was “in a bad way” and that Wilson was “a plain damned fool.” “But, sweetheart,” I reminded him, “wait until the next election, when _you_ will be President!” He smiled indulgently and leaned over the table, head bent to one side in the appealing pose he sometimes affected when he made love to me.

“If I’m President, Nan, I’ll make you White House stenographer!” were his exact words. “A President can do just about as he pleases, you know!” he added, smiling.

I recalled vividly that statement three years later when I visited him at the White House and heard from his very lips, lips that were set in grim determination to bear up at any cost, that “the White House was a veritable prison,” and that he could not even retire to the privacy of his toilet without being guarded--“shadowed” as he termed it.

“I’m in jail, Nan!” he would say in a broken voice, shaking his head sadly, “and I can’t get out; I’ve got to stay,” and he would lift his hands in a gesture of futility. No, Warren Harding did _not_ like being President of the United States, as I am sure no man with real American blood and a love of life and fair play and freedom would or could like it. What a pity the highest honor a great republic can bestow upon a loyal citizen should be one which saps that citizen’s vitality, and makes impossible the achievement of certain ideals through breaking him down physically! And, in my humble opinion, the “system” of American politics is wholly responsible for these hellish conditions. No, Warren Harding did not like being President. Six months after he went into the White House he was a broken man. The seven million majority of votes cast for him by the American people was his death sentence. And I, too, cast my vote for him!

Even in gayer mood, I seemed to see in Mr. Harding a certain pathos. People have observed it in Elizabeth Ann, our daughter, not knowing of course whose child she is. “There is something pathetic about watching her at play,” a girl friend of mine said to me last winter. And so it was with her father. There was something pathetic about watching him at play. But he had a keen sense of humor.

I think it secretly amused him to realize, as he did and I did, that the scandal that came up in the presidential campaign of 1920 in which Mrs. Arnold’s name and his were linked very frequently, was for us the source of greatest protection, for while the Democrats who were “slinging mud” played with Mrs. Arnold’s name they were not looking for mine or any other.

One time, when we were dining, Mrs. Arnold’s name came up naturally. Of course Angela, her daughter, had been my childhood playmate, and when I went to Marion I usually saw her either at a party or dance or on the street, and likely this had been the case and I was relating to him how lovely she looked. She was a stunning girl. I had never mentioned Mrs. Arnold’s name to him in connection with the old-time gossip I used to hear, but something I asked him brought forth this spontaneous ejaculation, “Mrs. Arnold is a damned fool--a brilliant conversationalist but a damned fool--if she had _half_ the sense of her daughter....”

I do not know a thing about the truth of things that were said concerning Mr. Harding’s one-time relations with Mrs. Arnold. I never pressed him to tell me anything, nor did I care what he had done before we became sweethearts. I only know that during our six and a half years I remained true to him in those essentials that are demanded and expected by one’s sweetheart, and I most certainly know that Mr. Harding was most loyal and true to me. There were times when I made frantic endeavors to break away from him, feeling that I was becoming so growingly dependent upon his love and support in every way as to make it inconceivable for me to do without him, but he was constantly in the background of my thoughts--why, I have thought about him every hour of the nine years now since we first met at the Manhattan Hotel in 1917, and not a day has passed since I first saw him in Marion when I was a child that I have not thought lovingly of Warren Gamaliel Harding.

_36_

During his visits to our 60th Street apartment, Mr. Harding had advised me to deliberate well before deciding upon a suitable place to summer, and await my confinement. He suggested numerous avenues of procedure with regard to helping determine the best place to go, and I remember it was with some timidity that he even made the suggestion that I might look into the Catholic institutions here in the East where I might find comfort and quietude and safety, and perhaps some occupation for diversion. However, this appealed to me not at all, because an institution immediately presented to me a picture of enforced seclusion. I vetoed the idea and he then suggested I take a taxi and go along the Jersey Shore and also over into Long Island, sizing up the possibilities and going there leisurely afterwards. I spent several days going about week-ends in search of a place where I felt I might live happily for the several months intervening. Long Island did not appeal to me and I finally decided upon Asbury Park, New Jersey. There seemed to be plenty of entertainment there, good air, pleasant surroundings, and yet it was far enough from New York to make embarrassing contacts improbable. As a matter of fact, I saw only one man during the whole summer whom I knew, and that was during my first week in Asbury Park while I was still in such figure as to excite no comment.

I registered at the Hotel Monmouth, one block from the ocean, under the name of Mrs. Edmund Norton Christian. Mr. Harding had suggested that I simply keep on using the name E. N. Christian, prefixing it with a “Mrs.” instead of “Miss” and substituting for the initials “E. N.” a man’s full name. I used to go a bit with a young fellow back in Marion whose name was Edmund, and had always liked the name. So Edmund it was for the first name. “N” was rather difficult, but one of the managers of a theatre in Chicago where my sister Elizabeth was in charge of the orchestra had the name of Norton. “Edmund Norton Christian!” It sounded rather well and we agreed to it.

My “story” which I took to Asbury Park and which Mr. Harding and I had rehearsed carefully was as follows:

During the war I had married a Lieutenant Christian, serving in the U. S. Army, who had been sent to Europe almost at the close of the war. My mother had not approved the marriage, so that explained my presence in Asbury Park alone when I more logically would have been under my mother’s wing at such a time, with the baby coming.

Mr. Harding’s suggested address in Paris of “17 Rue Can Martin” was adopted by me as my “husband’s” permanent address, to which address I sent Lieutenant Christian several letters, allowing the envelopes to lie about conspicuously upon my bedroom dresser for the possible observing eyes of my landlady. I was to surround myself in Asbury Park with the atmosphere of the bride of a war veteran who could not be with his wife during the trying experience of a first childbirth.

I secured a Post Office box immediately in Asbury Park in the name of Mrs. E. N. Christian. My mother of course knew nothing about my physical condition, nor indeed anything about my relationship with Warren Harding, so I was under the necessity of having her write me as Nan Britton. However, I wrote her I was planning to do social secretarial work for a Mrs. Christian for the summer and that I could be addressed in her care, Box so-and-so. My sister Elizabeth was apprised of my fictitious name for the summer, and so in that way I had letters coming from both Elizabeth and Mr. Harding in the name I had assumed. Mr. Harding’s letters were tender and solicitous--sweeter love-letters I am sure no one has ever written--and there were many of them, in lieu of our ability to see each other.

My sunny room at the Hotel Monmouth was comfortable, except for an egregious rose-red rug upon the floor, but I felt somewhat conspicuous, living alone with apparently no friends, and I determined to leave and go to a regular rooming-house.

I stayed at the Monmouth, however, two weeks, during which time the following incident added to my temporary dissatisfaction and comparative unhappiness:

I had left New York for Asbury Park on the 7th of July. One evening on the Boardwalk I read among the society items of the local newspaper which I chanced to glance through that the Frelinghuysens and Senator Harding had been bathing at the Casino on the Boardwalk. My sweetheart in Asbury Park! And he did not look me up! My first sensation was one of fright. Fright occasioned by the suggestion that he was possibly “dropping me.” This was followed by a feeling of nausea, a faintness due to the shock which the reading of the announcement gave me. Then, I experienced hurt and a cynicism that would have vented itself in unkind words, I am sure, had I been able to say them to him I loved. After all, I had not got into my condition by myself, and why should he have any feeling of shame about being seen with me! I was seething with indignation. I hurried back to the hotel and wrote him. I referred sarcastically to the incident, expressing my regret at not having taken my books and done my reading down at the Casino on the morning when I might have witnessed an interesting bathing party. I tried to be as unkind as my hurt pride encouraged me to be, and still infuse an element of shame into my reproach.

In New York, shortly afterward, I met him for luncheon. He had not alluded to the bathing party incident in his reply letter, only specified where we should meet, and I felt sorry for what I had written. After all, he was shut up all day long and at night he was not always with congenial companions. Why not allow him a little respite with those he enjoyed? So I had determined to let it pass unmentioned at our luncheon. However, before we had finished, he remarked quietly and with appealing intonation, “Sweetheart, on what date did you leave New York?” I replied that it had been the 7th. “Well, Nan, I was in Asbury Park on the 5th, two days before you got there.” Not even a retaliatory tone, simply a statement of fact! He was nearly always right, and made me feel ashamed of myself more than once. I just worshipped him when he proved himself and his love for me in ways like this.

_37_

I went from the Monmouth Hotel to a rooming-house. My new quarters proved to be very unsatisfactory--damp, dark and dusty. Moreover, the roomers were mostly elderly people who looked at me severely as I passed in and out. But while there someone told me of a boardinghouse where three meals a day could be obtained for the nominal sum of $9 a week. I began eating there and it was then that I met Mrs. Marietta Tonneson.

I do not recall how I met Mrs. Tonneson. But I secured a front room in her rooming-house on the third floor for $14 per week, and moved into it immediately, having been at the other place about a week. This combination brought my room and board to $15 a week, which I decided was as well as I could do in Asbury Park. I had been paying $40 a week at the Hotel Monmouth and both Mr. Harding and I agreed that it was steep. Mr. Harding was always very generous with me and I had ample funds for my comfort during the summer, but I seemed to need a good bit of money even then, and it was a satisfaction to have my board and room reduced to the minimum.

Mrs. Marietta Tonneson (Mrs. Martin Tonneson she had been until her husband’s death made her a widow about a year or so previous) lived with her brother Billy in a large house just around the corner from my boardinghouse. They had lived, she told me, in Marlborough Road, Brooklyn, and after her husband’s death, probably wishing to conserve all of his monetary bequests, she and her brother had decided they would defray their summer expenses by keeping a rooming-house that season. That accounted for the rather unusually nice furniture in her house. I think my being alone excited her curiosity, but I was so perfectly well, and my physical soundness coupled with a growing sense of ease as I lived myself day by day into the plausibility of my “story” and my situation, made it a pleasure for me to witness evidences of this curiosity and deliberately refuse to satisfy them.

I wrote Mr. Harding, telling him all about Mrs. Tonneson, my feelings concerning her, and how she did attempt to take sort of a motherly interest in me, and his reply brought forth the advice that she might prove a valuable person to “hang onto,” and that I should simply “pay my way” and stay out-of-doors away from her and everybody else who might be interested in knowing more about me.

During the latter part of the summer Mrs. Tonnesen had also as roomers a Jewess and her husband. The woman was a nurse and her husband a musician. She had charge of a Brooklyn hospital and it seemed to me an excellent idea to accept her proffered invitation to visit her in the hospital after she returned there with a view to deciding whether such a place would be desirable for my approaching confinement.

I shall never forget that visit. I had luncheon with the nurse, whose name has slipped my memory. The food seemed to me to be half swimming in grease. I walked all over the place, and even submitted to an examination by the head doctor, who was, I thought, rough and uncouth and who informed me gruffly, when I complained that he really hurt me, that I would be “hurt harder than that when my baby came.” A woman who had given birth to a child that morning lay apparently unconscious from the agony of her experience, and I went in and touched her to see if she really lived. The nurse took me into the baby ward where a dozen or more babies lay in baskets, each tagged on their tiny wrists with numbers to identify them. Many were crying loudly.

The building itself stood alone and lonely with no companion buildings within several blocks, and I thought when I had done looking the place over that I could not possibly consider having Warren Harding’s child born there. Goodness! I thought, to have our baby _tagged_! Perhaps it was customary and the only safe way, but I preferred to keep her in my room where she would not need identification. I say “her,” but as a matter of fact, when I thought _then_ about our child I thought of a boy, for as I have said Mr. Harding and I always talked about “the young lieutenant.”

While I was in Brooklyn I looked at possible apartments and decided after a weary afternoon, in which I trailed around in the heat, that I would stay in Asbury Park, and possibly right with Mrs. Tonnesen. She was sympathetic and willing to do anything to help me.

As the summer progressed and early fall set in, Mrs. Tonnesen told me of her plans to take for the winter a small cottage on Bond Street, a veritable “doll’s house,” as she described it. Not committing myself to the promise of staying on with her through the fall, I went with her to see the house. It was No. 1210 Bond Street. I passed it this summer. It is very near the North Asbury Park Railroad Station, near a wood I was fond of, and I agreed with her that its cozy sun porch would be a delight through the winter, and the rooms, though small, were certainly cheerful. And infinitely preferable to a hospital!

Mrs. Tonnesen, having learned not to inquire into my affairs too far, suggested that it would be foolish for me to go to Chicago just to have the baby, as I was contemplating, when I might better remain with her and her brother Billy and have my sister Elizabeth come on to Asbury Park. She even suggested that I allow her to snap my picture and that I send it to Elizabeth to show her how healthy I was looking--which fatal thing of course I did not do.

However, her interest was becoming more appreciated by me since my trip to the Brooklyn hospital, and finally I wrote my sister in Chicago not to bother about hospital accommodations there for I had decided to remain in Asbury Park, away from everybody, and go through it all by myself. I was so free from fear concerning any serious complications that I even welcomed the coming pain of childbirth; I have never been so superbly healthy as I was that summer.

Mr. Harding had listed some books which had been favorites of his at different times in his life and these books I obtained from the public library in Asbury which was just down the street. I have a notebook which contains many of the names of these books, copied from the list Mr. Harding gave me, and others which I read that summer. Among them were _Tess of the d’Urbervilles_ and _Far From the Madding Crowd_, Gertrude Atherton’s _The Conqueror_ (Mr. Harding said he had met Mrs. Atherton, and had told her how he admired her novelized life of Alexander Hamilton, his favorite character in American history); O. Henry’s books, and many others. I can see Mr. Harding now as he wrote down the list for me--the way he would look up and ask me if I had read this or that, and his hearty, “Oh, you must read _that_, Nan!”

My time was delightfully idled all summer, reading, crocheting baby’s jackets and writing love-letters to my beloved. The latter consumed a great deal of my time. His letters to me were the most beautiful things imaginable, always full of cheer, and ever implying that he wanted to do everything in his power to make me comfortable. He spoke often of the “reverential love” he felt for me as the mother of our coming child. I used to wish in moments when I naturally yielded to the longings I felt for him, that we were together on the longed-for “farm” and that he could minister to me personally in the manner portrayed in his incomparable letters.

It was Mrs. Tonnesen who suggested my seeing the “society doctor of the Jersey shore,” as Dr. James F. Ackerman is called. He was of a very sympathetic and kindly nature, albeit brusk. I liked him immensely from the start. He advised me that I should make a reservation for my confinement period in the hospital in Spring Lake, not far distant, but I said I would wait, for I might yet decide to go on to Chicago. It was only my fear of hospitals that made me say that, and when I found he would attend me at Mrs. Tonnesen’s home, I indicated to him definitely that I wished him to take my case. I was happy in the contemplation of having the baby in my own sunny room.

_38_

On September 22nd, just one month before the baby was born, I made a trip to Washington, stopping while there at the Capitol Park Hotel near the Railroad Station. I telephoned Mr. Harding immediately upon my arrival, at the Senate Offices, and he told me afterward that the man who answered the phone was Heber Herbert Votaw, his brother-in-law, “Carrie’s husband.” When he heard me on the other end of the wire he seemed so pleased and said that he would come right over. Which he did.

I shall never forget how he rejoiced to see me, even in the shape I was in! I remember we sat by the window, I on his lap, and talked about everything. It was while we were sitting with our cheeks together looking down upon the passing automobiles that he sighted Senator Newberry’s car. With some pride he told me the occupant was the richest man in the Senate, and said what he would like to do for me “if he had Senator Newberry’s money.” I forthwith assured him he could have done no more that summer to make me happy if he had had the combined riches of all his senatorial colleagues.

He provided me with ample funds to tide me over my confinement period and to buy our baby’s layette, found out about trains for me as he always did, and took me to the station. There he bought me magazines--I even remember distinctly that they were _Smart Set_ and _Harper’s Bazaar_--and candy and fruit, then sat in the station and talked to me until my train was called. At that time Mrs. Votaw, his missionary sister, “Carrie,” was on the Washington police force in the capacity of welfare director--as Mr. Harding explained to me with a sly smile, “one who cares for fallen girls”--and we had quite a bit of fun wondering just what his sister would say could she see me at that time with him! I told him _I_ certainly had _fallen_--for _him_! He took me to the train, kissed me adorably, asked me to tell him I was happy, and stood on the platform talking to me through the window until the train pulled out.

I went to Philadelphia, where I stopped at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel over night and did my shopping at Wanamaker’s the following day. My baby’s clothes cost me the outrageous price of $75, which I knew afterwards was far too much to spend for clothes which were so soon outgrown. But it was heaps of fun to pick them out.

Then I returned to Asbury Park.

_39_