I am reminded in connection with these gay evenings of the many times
Mr. Harding told me how proud he was as a youth to play in the local
band in his very small home town of Caledonia, Ohio. He said he played
the bass horn, and would chuckle over recollections of his vociferous
contribution to the ensemble.
Despite the fact that I cut out and preserved pictures of him in his
band uniform, I have always been unable to visualize a youthful Warren
Harding in any capacity. He always seemed to me too dignified to have
ever been less than the statesman I first beheld; yet he said that he
felt far more eminently important and dignified as a member of the
Caledonia Band than as United States Senator from Ohio!
Shortly after this, Mr. Harding invited me to Washington. He met me at
the station and announced zestfully that he had secured the apartment
of a friend of his with whom he sometimes played cards. I registered
at the New Ebbitt Hotel, and he called for me there. The apartment to
which he took me was not far from the New Ebbitt and we walked. He told
me on the way over that it was quite a “cute little apartment” and he
guessed it was all right for him to borrow it, although he knew the
fellow to whom it belonged would undoubtedly come after him for some
political favor as a result. When we entered the apartment, a walk-up,
on the second or third floor, it seemed so dark, and when we found the
room untidy and things in quite a mess, poor Mr. Harding was more than
embarrassed. “Really, Nan, it is quite a nice place when it is fixed
up,” he apologized, and I felt so sorry for him in his embarrassment.
He never borrowed it again.
In January of 1919 Theodore Roosevelt died. Mr. Harding came over with
many other notables to attend the funeral. I met him at the Biltmore
Hotel. A good many of his friends and colleagues were standing about
the lobby, looking very dignified and important in their formal clothes
and top-hats. How stunning Mr. Harding looked! That time and once in
the White House on Sunday morning were the only occasions on which
I ever saw him “dressed up.” We dined at the Biltmore that evening,
and as we passed through the aisle of tables in a dining-room which
sparkled with atmosphere under glittering candelabra, I heard a woman
say, “There goes Harding!” I told him this and he identified her as a
friend with whom he sometimes played billiards in Washington.
_26_
Mr. Harding and I had often talked of how wonderful it would be to have
a child, and Mr. Harding told me frankly he had often wanted to adopt
one, but “Florence” would not hear of it. He told me this in connection
with his recital of his domestic unhappiness, and his usual final
exclamation was, “She makes life hell for me, Nan!” And I, knowing
this, did all within my power to make up to the man I loved all his
legal wife failed to do. There was a time in 1918 when Mrs. Harding was
very ill but Mr. Harding came over to New York to see me just the same.
I remember once he said they had a trained nurse there constantly for
a period. I felt sorry for Mrs. Harding, but I must confess I doubted
very much Mr. Harding’s love for his wife at any time in his life.
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_