Chapter V: Part 5

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_

About a week before my confinement my mother wrote me, demanding to know the reason for my continued stay into October at Asbury. I had previously written her that I intended to go to Chicago, but that was when I thought I might go there to have the baby. She said her alarm about _why_ I was remaining so long had been to her such a nightmare that, had she the necessary funds, I would have long since seen her in Asbury Park. Poor mother! What worry I must have caused her!

Inwardly terrified at the possibility of her coming on, but realizing that I would not dare indicate such terror to her, I wrote immediately, expressing my regret at not being able to supply the funds she would need for fare, and saying that “Mrs. Christian” had elected to remain longer in Asbury and I could not of course desert her when she had been so lovely to me all summer. That seemed to satisfy my mother.

Then I wrote my sister Elizabeth that I did not think it at all necessary for her to come on, entailing an unnecessary expense, and gave her as nearly as possible the date of my confinement. This I did also with Mr. Harding, so they both knew exactly where I would be and when I expected to be confined.

Mr. Harding wrote immediately and asked me to please write him a love-letter before I would be in such position (in bed) that I couldn’t write him for some time. I remember well the tone of that letter from him. I knew he was homesick to see me, and it reacted to make me more impatient for the day to come which would give me our baby so that I could begin to plan to see _him_ again. I went over to Dr. Ackerman and asked him when he thought I would have the baby. My hands were somewhat swollen, I complained, and I was getting uncomfortable generally. He assured me I was in excellent shape and that I would soon have my baby. Somewhat mollified, but still irritable, I walked down to the post office. I found another letter from my sweetheart and devoured it as I walked back home. I think that was Saturday, perhaps Friday.

On Sunday afternoon, a gorgeously brilliant autumn day, I went over to the woods to my three-cornered seat, which was a board nailed to three trees. I sat there for a couple of hours and wrote to my darling. I remember I wanted to cry my eyes out that afternoon, I was _so_ homesick to see him, and very likely this longing was written vividly into the letter which I mailed at the post office late that afternoon. Incidentally, I used to take his letters to various towns all along the shore just to avoid sending too many from one post office. As though they would have noticed to whom the letters were addressed! But it was just another of those precautions which were responsible for the absolute safeguarding of our secret from the world.

On Monday I walked most of the day, anxiously. Tuesday evening I found a letter from Mr. Harding, telling me he had never in his life received from me a love-letter equal to the one I had written Sunday out of the depths of my longing for him. He cautioned me to “take it easy,” and stressed, as he had all summer in his letters, the necessity for complete recuperation after the baby’s birth. “It will mean your health, Nan, so be deliberate in getting up afterward. I cannot emphasize this point enough.” Elizabeth wrote me the same thing, telling me I wouldn’t be at all the same afterward, my strength would be gone, and I must rest all I could. I smiled to myself; they didn’t realize how strong I felt, nor how well I was! Probably many women who were weak would have to wait through long periods of recuperation, but I was sure I would be strong enough to travel soon after my baby came.

I spent a great deal of time conjecturing about the baby’s looks. Mrs. Tonnesen and her brother Billy took a great interest in the coming event, though I stayed away from the house and away from everybody as much as possible, talking with them only when necessity commanded. On Monday or Tuesday Helen Evans, the nurse Dr. Ackerman had recommended, came to call upon me. She told me all the different things I would need to have for a home confinement, and I was surprised, for I had thought all I needed was clothes for the baby! I liked Miss Evans. She was Scotch, and had something of a burr, though she said she had been quite a while in this country. I decided we would get on splendidly.

_40_

Wednesday, October 22nd, 1919, dawned clear and bright. My room, though tiny, had three windows on the front and one on the side and my bed was by the latter window. It looked out upon the loved park where I had done much of my reading, and the trees were beautiful in their autumn colors.

I was awakened very early, about five o’clock, by pleasant sensations which reminded me of caresses, except that they were inside. I lay there marveling. My baby would come today, I was sure of it. _My_ baby, and my darling Warren Harding’s child!

It was quite seven-thirty before I felt I should call Mrs. Tonnesen and have her send for Miss Evans. Having no telephone in the house, Billy was obliged to go to the nearby drug store and phone the doctor, who in turn sent the nurse over immediately. I dressed and went downstairs and ate a hearty breakfast. Mrs. Tonnesen suggested I’d better eat all I could, but I thought she was fooling when she said it would be all I would get for awhile. I wanted so badly to go once more to the post office, but the nurse refused to let me.

I continued at intervals to have the little sensations which gradually increased into intermittent pains growingly severe as the morning advanced. The doctor came to examine me. Toward noon he came again, and I heard him say to Mrs. Tonnesen on his way out that I was “physically superb,” or “superbly fit,” or something like that, which encouraged me. But I didn’t need much encouragement. I really was not the least bit frightened.

I had taken the two front rooms, both facing the street. One I occupied and the other was for the nurse. Mrs. Tonnesen supplied a clothes basket for a temporary bed for the baby. I roamed around in and out of the four rooms on that floor, watching the proceedings of the nurse with interest.

At two o’clock sharp, on one of the most beautiful afternoons imaginable, a little girl baby was born to me. The doctor said that I was an excellent patient, and I know myself, despite the agony of that experience, that God made possible to me a perfect birth. After the ordeal, still, as I felt, in the “pink of health,” I ran up against the first law of medical care in that connection that bothered me: I requested a chicken dinner with all of the appetizing accessories that go with it! Imagine my disappointment when I was given nothing then but a glass of cold water, and later some weak tea!

I am reminded of a point right here that has often occurred to me. I am not very superstitious, but I do think queer things happen sometimes, in that the same number or the same day figures strongly in one’s life. _Two_ seems to me to have a weird way of springing up in Mr. Harding’s life. He was born on November 2nd. He died on August 2nd. He was elected our 29th President on November 2nd, having accepted the nomination on July 22nd. I saw him on September 22nd, one month before the date of my confinement which was October 22nd. Our baby came at exactly 2 o’clock in the afternoon. These are not the only 2’s that occurred in our chronology. I used to note how often the number 2 appeared, though I did not jot the times down, nor remember them, except for those I have given above which were the outstanding recurrences.

_41_

Even as early as the day of her birth, the “young lieutenant,” as Mr. Harding and I had always referred to the girl we thought might likely be a boy, there was a distinct resemblance to the Hardings, and more particularly to her distinguished father. As she grows older this resemblance is strikingly like his sister Daisy, but she retains her father’s smile, his eyes, and many of his mannerisms. As she lay in my arms, a few hours old, drawing her mouth into comical contortions, and wrinkling her face in what seemed a thousand wrinkles, I saw Warren Harding--oh, I saw him so strongly that it seemed I was holding a miniature sweetheart in my arms! She was born with black hair which afterwards disappeared to give place to the soft blond fuzz which was more like her mother’s.

I could not nurse her of course, because I did not know how our difficult situation would work out, but oh, how I longed to! Miss Evans put her on a good brand of infant’s milk, and would feed her and then bring her in to me. It seemed to me almost sacrilegious to submit to the treatment I was obliged to undergo in order to have my breasts dried up, and somehow I thought the pain I experienced in this procedure was the merited punishment for not nursing my baby. How strong was my urge to nurse her! Even before she came, when I would lie on the bed and watch the various shapes my body assumed as she moved around inside, I used to think of the natural nourishment process and picture it. I wanted to experience every one of the sensations belonging to a mother. One time, after I had been up a week or so, I took her on my lap and gave her an empty breast that two or three weeks previous had been swollen with milk, and I shall never forget her tiny hands nor the feel of her mouth at my bosom, nor the indescribable thrill that swept over me in those moments of pretended nursing. I just seemed to want to keep her a part of me, and this denial gave the keenest suffering I had ever known.

During those days I had a colored laundress, Mrs. Jones, whose daughter, about eleven or twelve, used to come for my laundry. She also went to the post office for my mail. As soon as I could prop myself up fairly comfortably, I wrote notes to Elizabeth and to Mr. Harding and “Lieut. Edmund Norton Christian.” The one to “Lieutenant Christian,” addressed fictitiously to Paris, I handed to the nurse to mail, for obvious reasons; the other two the little colored girl mailed. My first letter from Mr. Harding after the baby arrived had been mailed from Philadelphia, and was sent to me at the house, 1210 Bond Street, Asbury Park, instead of the post office. It was written in pencil, as most of his letters were, and in it he said he had received my note. Evidently he thought he should take precautionary measures in writing this first letter lest it fall into another’s hands, so he wrote that he had “conveyed the news to the Lieutenant who was proud to hear it.” That was all right and might have served to throw anybody off the track who read the letter had he not followed it immediately with the sentence, “If she looks like her mother, _I will be satisfied_,” directly alluding to _himself_ as the party who was really interested in the news! Bless his heart! He tried to protect me and himself and everybody, but sometimes he surely did stupid things. Forgetting all about “the Lieutenant” he proceeded in his letter to urge again my leisurely recuperation, and the manner of his concluding would hardly have been construed by an outsider as the heart-promptings of his friend “the Lieutenant” who would obviously have written his own love messages and not sent them second-hand!

_42_

No sooner was I upon my feet than I was nervous and anxious to get to Chicago to my sister Elizabeth. The superb strength which had been mine before the baby came had completely left me. My appetite was forced, my cheeks were pale, and constant letters from my mother as to when I was coming West worried me terribly.

Several mornings after the baby was born Dr. Ackerman came to see me. He sat on a straight chair at the foot of the bed and took out a notebook. I was amazed at myself for becoming frightened, but somehow my nerves were shattered and things troubled me which amounted to nothing at all. He informed me that he needed certain data for registering the child’s birth. I didn’t know exactly what that might mean to Mr. Harding, and so I inquired if it was necessary to register a child’s birth always. “Unless you want to pay a fine of $100,” he replied in his business-like voice. He said he merely wished to know my maiden name, my husband’s, and our ages, my husband’s business, etc. I thought quickly about whether I ought to tell him at least the partial truth--that I was _not married_! I didn’t know whether or not it was a criminal offense to say you were married when you were not. I longed to shout the whole truth to the world, that my baby was Warren Harding’s baby, that we were not married in the eyes of the world, but truly married in the sight of God, and that I was proud, proud, proud to be her mother!

Within, I was growing hysterical in those brief moments, but controlled my voice as I told him that my age was twenty-three, my husband’s thirty-two, his business was an officership as Lieutenant in the U. S. Army, and that my name before I was married was “Nanna Eloise Britton.” I said this I thought very clearly, but when he repeated it he said “Emma Eloise Britton?” I nodded. The first name did not matter anyway, I thought, but I wanted my surname to go into the records in the only right way--Britton. I could not give her the name Harding without betraying my darling, but I could give Britton. “Eloise” was a middle name I had adopted when a child in substitution for my real name of “Popham,” which was always so objectionable to me. I have postcards from my father which he addressed to me “Nanna Popham Eloise Evelyn Britton,” the full name I cherished as an ideal combination when a child!

When I had been out of bed about a week, one morning a man called. I heard Mrs. Tonnesen say, “Yes, Mrs. Christian lives here.” I was abnormally apprehensive those days, an inexplicable nervousness seizing me when the least little thing went wrong, and I called downstairs quickly, “What do you want of Mrs. Christian?” I sat down on the top step of the stairs. He called up to me, “What’s your baby’s name?” Immediately I thought maybe something was wrong. They wanted to take her away from me! The most absurd possibilities danced like demons in my mind. “Who wants to know?” I asked, almost quivering. “Gotta have it for record,” he replied, in what seemed to me a surly voice. I breathed a great sigh. “Oh, I see! Well, I haven’t named her yet!” I said. “What! Two weeks or more old, and you haven’t named her?” he shouted. I became frightened again. Maybe _this_ was an offense under the law! “Oh, that’s all right,” I said timidly, “you may register her as ‘Elizabeth Ann!’” Only that morning I had had a letter from my sister Elizabeth in which she said she would love to have me call the baby Elizabeth, and my own name, Nan, didn’t seem to go as well with Elizabeth as Ann. So Elizabeth Ann it was. Elizabeth Ann Christian it was, and was so written into the records of the Department of Vital Statistics in Trenton, the capital of New Jersey. Afterward, when I said it to myself, I used to think, “Elizabeth Ann Harding! Elizabeth Ann _Harding_!” And as she lay in my arms in bed I would whisper to her, “Say, you darling (a verbal salutation I so often heard from her father), do you know _who your dad is_? Oh, wait until he sees _you_! Wait till you see _him_, sweetheart!” She would lie there complacently blinking her eyes and working her mouth. It seemed to me as if Harding were written in every twist of her lips.

_43_

I went to New York about six weeks after the baby came, which was about the first week in December. My clothes were very shabby, and so I bought a new hat at Arnold, Constable’s, and some other things I needed. The cape which I had worn all the fall, during the two chilly months before Elizabeth Ann came, now seemed big enough for two, and I was so thin that I was sure I must look ill. The hotels were filled with automobile show visitors, and after trying several places I finally was given a room at the Hamilton Hotel on 73rd Street, though with the stipulation that I would give it up the following day to another guest who had reserved it several days in advance. I registered as Nan Britton, and I remembered it was with almost a sense of relief that I did so. I had moved in an atmosphere of make-believe for so long that somehow it was refreshingly good to be myself.

I was so pitifully weak that I should not have gone over to New York in the first place, but once there, there were several things I wished to do. One was to go up to my friends, the Johnsons, for my mail, for when I had moved down on East 60th Street I had not apprised many people of the change, and I knew there must be mail for me at the Johnson home. I knew that even Marie Johnson (Mrs. Johnson) did not know the number of my apartment on East 60th Street, so could not have forwarded my mail there.

Another thing was to call Mr. Harding on long distance, a thing I would not have attempted while in Asbury Park.

The following day I went up to Marie Johnson’s. She was surprised to see me, of course, and I am sure the manner in which I conducted myself must have given her reason to think something was wrong with me. I had to lie down almost as soon as I got in the house. She handed me a big bunch of mail, among which was a telegram. I almost fainted at the sight of it. Probably somebody had found out that I had had a child by Warren Harding! I said, “You open this, Marie.” Then I caught myself. Suppose it was some kind of a summons, or even suppose it was from Mrs. Harding! I opened it myself. It was from a girl in Cleveland who wondered why I had not answered her letters!

At the apartment of a friend up the street I secured a room. I think I stayed one night there at that time. After I had deposited my bag, I went to the corner drug store at 136th Street and phoned Mr. Harding at the Senate Chambers in Washington. He had scarcely said “Hello!” when I began to cry. I told him I was so _weak_ and asked him when he thought I would be strong again. He said, “Why, Nan darling, you should go back and rest at Asbury Park another month. Don’t do a thing but rest. Everything’s all right.” But that was just the thing I couldn’t do. I told him I seemed to have lost all my courage. Wasn’t it possible for him to come over? He said he was in fact coming over to New York, but he thought it unwise for us to be seen together if I were in the weakened condition I said I was. I told him that I was sure I would be stronger if he would only take me in his arms. Bless him! I realized it would be dangerous for us to be together when I felt so weak that it seemed I might faint every minute. He begged me to return to Asbury and rest, and urged me not to stop to see my mother in Ohio when I did go on to Chicago.

“Be of good cheer, Nan!” came over the wire in a voice that was so sweet that it wrung my heart and brought the tears so fast that I could only cry, “Goodbye, sweetheart!” and stumble out of the booth.

_44_

I went back to Asbury Park faint and dizzy, but found our baby Elizabeth Ann in fine condition. This pleased me and seemed to give me some strength.

I dismissed Miss Evans at the end of three weeks, and the nurse I next employed, upon Dr. Ackerman’s recommendation, was a Mrs. Howe. She was what he termed a “practical nurse,” and not so expensive as Miss Evans, who was strictly a private nurse. Mrs. Howe had raised a family of five children and was more like a mother than a nurse. She sometimes held me close in her arms, and I felt so much safer now that I had her.

She did not get along well with Mrs. Tonnesen, and we decided that we would change quarters before I left for Chicago. I had discussed my plans with Mr. Harding, both over the phone and by letter, which were that I should go on ahead to Chicago and find a suitable place for Elizabeth Ann, having Mrs. Howe follow later with the baby as soon as I had found someone to take care of her in Chicago.

So one day Mrs. Howe and the baby and I bundled ourselves into a taxi and went around to a semi-sanitarium, nearer the downtown district of Asbury Park, and quite a distance from the Tonnesen abode. Here the lady usually took only those who were recuperating from illnesses, she said, and I thought it seemed like a fairly good place to leave Mrs. Howe with the baby until I could send for her to come on to Chicago with Elizabeth Ann. I trusted her implicitly.

Late that evening an automobile ambulance drove up with a woman on a stretcher. They brought her in and she and her nurse had a room on the same floor, across from my nurse and baby. About an hour or so after she arrived we began to hear the most horrible moans and groans accompanied with shrieks of, “Oh, I’m nervous! I’m nervous!” This kept up until I was myself completely exhausted listening to her and in such a high state of nervousness that I thought I, too, would scream. It didn’t seem to bother Mrs. Howe and I asked her to read aloud to me to take my mind from the moaning across the hall. But the walls were very thin and it was as though the poor woman were right in the room with us. I had to tell the landlady that if that kept up we would have to go to a hotel. They gave the woman some morphine which quieted her temporarily, and I went into my own room and soon fell asleep. About three o’clock next morning it started again. I crept into Mrs. Howe’s room and into bed with her, and lay there shivering and mentally crazed with nervousness until the morphine which they administered again took effect and the poor woman slept. The next morning they took her back to her home in Philadelphia. I was so tired of doctors and nurses and of shifting from place to place!

Someone had told me that it took about six months to recuperate completely from having a baby, and I began to count the weeks and try to find some improvement in myself as time passed. But when I took the train back to New York, from where I was going to leave for Chicago, I had to confess that in the seven or eight weeks that had passed since the baby’s birth I had grown weaker instead of stronger. In New York, in the same room I had when I had been there before, I stayed in bed most of the time. The lady who rented the rooms had been an actress and was very broad-minded, and once or twice her sympathy and tender solicitude tempted me to tell her why I was so ill. But I didn’t. I called Mr. Harding again on the phone and he urged me to get to Chicago and to rest after I got there. “Never mind about the baby now,” he said, “she will be all right. It is _you_ who need to be taken care of now.” But the baby was on my mind constantly. I phoned Mrs. Howe sometimes twice a day. I had given her my sister’s address in Chicago and I told her to write me immediately if anything went wrong.

I remember I bought a ticket for a Saturday train--it was almost impossible at that time to procure reservations, soldiers returning home for Christmas, the general rush of holiday travelers--and I was fortunate to get a reservation at all for that particular day.

A chum of mine, Dorothy Cooper, who lived where I had been staying, went down in the taxi with me to the train. I felt so faint that she suggested we stop at a drug store and get a bottle of smelling salts for me to have on the train. As a result, when we reached the Grand Central Station, we were just in time to see the iron gate close and watch the train pull out. I had wired Elizabeth I would be there for Sunday, and of course I was just sick over missing the train. I went to the Consolidated Ticket Office and learned that I could not get another reservation until the following Tuesday. Those days of waiting tortured me. When finally I found myself in the train, bound for Chicago, where I longed to creep into my sister Elizabeth’s arms and cry, I sighed audibly with relief.

I had taken an “extra fare” train, scheduled to reach Chicago earlier than the others, and that night I wakened after a first sleep to feel the train fairly skimming the tracks. “Gone wild!” I thought and sat up quickly in my berth. I pulled the curtains and peeked out. Everything seemed to be normal and the passengers were sleeping. How could they sleep, I thought, when every moment brought us nearer to destruction! It would be awful to die in a railroad crash, I thought to myself. And terrible fears assailed me when I thought that maybe Elizabeth wouldn’t be able to locate our precious baby, and perhaps my sweetheart would be afraid to claim her openly after my death--horrible, horrible! I felt I ought to get up and go forward to the engineer--but what could I tell him! Evidently he knew the train was going wild and couldn’t do a thing to stop it. Nor could I help him, surely. I became drowsy and concluded that a protecting Providence would intervene. At any rate, this was a case beyond human power! I lay back on my pillow praying, and gradually the rhythm of the flying wheels grew fainter and fainter and I slept.

* * * * *

I must have been a pitiful, broken-looking creature when Elizabeth met me the following day at the Englewood Station in Chicago. The train was late, after all, and had not made the usual fast time. I was amazed to learn this after the nightmare I had had. I told Elizabeth and she just laughed at me. I thought it would be impossible to explain to anybody what agony of mind I had been through. Elizabeth looked so healthy and strong and it seemed so good to be with her. She took me straight home and put me in bed, and I lay there until the waves of weakness which enveloped me had passed somewhat and I felt more serene.

In a few days Elizabeth located a nurse, recommended by the same doctor who had discouraged my having an abortion--a woman by the name of Mrs. Belle Woodlock, who would take Elizabeth Ann into her home and care for her for $20 a week. She lived within easy distance from my sister’s apartment, which was at that time at 6103 Woodlawn Avenue.

During the lapse of time--which was about three weeks, I think--between my arrival and my sending for Mrs. Howe to bring on the baby to Chicago, I carried on correspondence with her regularly. I received my letters, addressed to “Mrs. E. N. Christian,” in care of my sister Elizabeth (Mrs. S. A. Willits), usually getting the mail before my brother-in-law, or “kid sister” Janet, who was living with Elizabeth then, had a chance to see to whom they were addressed.

Once, I remember, my brother-in-law, Scott Willits, was quite put out because the postman requested him to sign for a special delivery letter from Mrs. Howe to me and he stoutly refused to do so, saying there was no such person as “Mrs. Christian” living there! In the end, the postman took the letter back and afterward I myself signed for it.

I remember also another incident. It was before Mrs. Howe brought Elizabeth Ann on from Asbury Park to Chicago that my mother came to Chicago to visit. It is possible the occasion of her visit was explained by the Christmas vacation from work in Ohio University where she taught, though possibly she was curious to see whether or not her daughter Nan was really safe and sound, perhaps not believing my written reports to this effect.

Mother and I had just come downstairs and were leaving the apartment to go shopping over on 63rd Street when I spied the postman across the street. Without thinking I called, “Any mail for us?” “A letter here for Mrs. Christian,” he answered. I knew it was foolish for me to disclaim knowing such a person before my mother, inasmuch as she had been told that I was living in Asbury with a “Mrs. Christian,” so I said, “Give it to me--it is for a friend of mine.” And I took it and put it away in my bag. Mother asked sharply, “Nan, what is Mrs. Christian having her mail sent to you for?” And I, searching my mind for a quick explanation, found this to say, “Why, she is coming here enroute to California and I shall see her soon. I told her I would take care of any mail she might want sent here.” This, you see, came to my mind because Mrs. Howe, the nurse, had written that she was planning to go on to California--so I simply substituted names.

I think about that time, however, my mother’s suspicions were definitely aroused, for she remarked to me on one occasion, “You think you are deceiving your mother about a lot of things, but you’re not.” Often she has said to me, “God has certainly protected you, my girl,” and of course I know that He has. More fortunate was this protection for my sweetheart, however, than for me, for his position, as United States Senator, _demanded_ protection.

_45_

The day arrived when Mrs. Howe and my darling baby girl would reach Chicago. It was difficult for my sister Elizabeth to go to the station with me, for she had a regular position as leader of an orchestra in a local theatre and she had to observe on-the-dot hours. But she went with me. We arrived fifteen minutes or so before the train came in, and I was so weak from the trip downtown and the excitement of seeing my baby again that I lay in Elizabeth’s arms in the waiting-room until Mrs. Howe came. She was a rather heavy-set woman, with grey hair and spectacles--mother-looking--and I can just see her as she came into the waiting-room, carrying my precious baby in her arms.

We had arranged for Mrs. Howe to go over to the Plaza Hotel on the North Side, so we bundled her into a taxi and I promised to get in touch with her the following day. Then Elizabeth, the baby and I took a taxi for Mrs. Woodlock’s on the South Side. I can’t remember that I had made a previous visit to Mrs. Woodlock’s, having let Elizabeth make all the arrangements and trusting implicitly to her judgment in the matter. In the taxi, Elizabeth held the baby and exclaimed over her prettiness. She had grown even in those brief weeks of my separation from her, and I thought there never could be a baby to equal her in sweetness. As soon as the taxi began to move she fell asleep. Elizabeth and I studied her little face and Elizabeth, too, marked the Harding resemblance.

Mrs. Belle Woodlock’s apartment was half a block from 61st Street, I think on Prairie Avenue, and Elizabeth lived at the corner of 61st Street and Woodlawn Avenue. So it was but a short street car ride for me. Mrs. Woodlock’s apartment was quite comfortable, like her good self. She was a fat, husky Irish girl, and quite pretty. She had a daughter about six, Ruth, and an old Aunt Emma who lived with her. I don’t know whether Belle Woodlock’s husband was dead or whether she had been divorced; I never asked her. But the atmosphere was not at all bad, I thought, and there was enough youth about the house to make it pleasant. I remember how grateful I was to see a little girl of six there.

Of course the excitement had been great and I know Mrs. Woodlock wondered why I broke down and sobbed as I knelt over my tiny treasure. We did not stay long, but went away, I back home to bed and Elizabeth to her theatre, leaving the baby in charge of her new nurse.

Mrs. Woodlock was a person not to be downed, I soon learned. In her position as nurse, she had acquired a hardness of a sort, but withal I found her extremely sentimental and sympathetic. She took an immediate fancy to Elizabeth Ann, as did her little daughter Ruth and her old Aunt Emma. Aunt Emma was a partial cripple, and she proved to be a great comfort to me because I knew she kept watch over our baby at times when Mrs. Woodlock’s attention was demanded elsewhere.

Mrs. Woodlock moved twice during the year and two months that the baby was with her. She soon moved over on 48th Street. That place, too, was accessible from Elizabeth’s, even though it was a longer trip for me to take. But my strength certainly seemed to be gone permanently. I ate normal meals, but I was just unable to do the things I formerly did. Mr. Harding urged me in every letter to rest, rest, rest, but it was growingly impossible. My mind was sick, and nothing would cure it except an arrangement whereby I could have my baby with me.

Mr. Harding was very generous, sending me as a rule $100 or $150 at a time, and of course I kept Mrs. Woodlock paid right up to the minute. I have in my possession a little red book in which I have jotted down at different times how I spent the cash Mr. Harding sent me in his letters. He used to send very old bills so they would not be noticeable to one handling the letter, and has sent me as much as $300 and $400 in one letter with nothing but a two-cent stamp to carry it. For instance, about this time I made the following notation: