Elizabeth Ann helped me in her adorable little way to “pack,” and at three o’clock on the appointed day we awaited the drayman. The captain had not returned as yet, but I felt sure he would be up on 116th Street with some money when we reached there. I had barely enough to pay the drayman.
The phone rang. It was the captain. He was leaving within an hour unexpectedly for Newport News to be gone two weeks with the U. S. liner for repairs. “But, goodness,” I said in utter despair, “what am I to do in the meantime for the rent? and food?” He told me to go right down to his lawyer, who had $100 which he would give to me.
Leaving things as they were, with the possibility of the drayman coming any minute, Elizabeth Ann and I boarded a subway train, and within the next thirty-five minutes were at the lawyer’s office in 43rd Street. But he didn’t seem to know to what money I referred. He asked me to phone “Angus,” as he called my husband, so that he might talk with him. I brought my little daughter in and introduced her to the lawyer. He scarcely acknowledged the introduction and I was hurt and embarrassed to tears. To think that the daughter of Warren G. Harding should be so slighted! I didn’t care how he or anybody else treated me, but I was furious if they were not entirely lovely to my darling. The lawyer himself had children, and I thought at least he might have shaken hands with her. What kind of a man was this lawyer my husband employed? He asked us to leave the room while he talked with the captain. There was no money from that source. This I found out after the lawyer’s lengthy telephone talk with the captain. I took Elizabeth Ann and went downstairs and telephoned Captain Neilsen from a booth. I reached him just before the liner had disconnected the telephonic service prior to sailing. He said his friend, the ship’s commander, wanted to speak to me. He came to the phone. He said he had called his wife and that she would come down that night to see me with the rent money, $110. That left $50 from the $110 for Elizabeth Ann and me to live on until further remittances from the captain might come. So, after all, Elizabeth Ann and I slept in our new apartment that night.
I have since gone over that whole situation thoroughly and fair-mindedly, and I am sure that no one could have done more to help a husband get on his alleged normal financial feet than did I to help Captain Neilsen. That is, I helped until February 1st. Helen Anderson, ever glad to assist when she could, advanced the necessary initial kindergarten fee of $108 and I placed Elizabeth Ann in school, paying $30 a month extra to have her remain there all day so that I might keep an all-day position. I had a girl from Columbia come in the mornings and take her to school and go after her at night, and in that way the baby and I reached home about the same time. In the evenings I would clean her up and clean myself up and we would go out for our dinner. I was so tired at night sometimes I thought I could not get up the next morning, and very likely I could not have done so had I not retired every night with Elizabeth Ann at seven or eight o’clock.
I was then working at The Town Hall Club on 43rd Street. I began to work there in October, 1924, and remained there for a year and a half until April, 1926, as assistant to the Executive Secretary, who had had charge of the Appointments Office at Columbia when I worked there the previous summer.
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When the latter part of January of 1925 came, I knew I just could not go through the spring as I had done the greater part of the winter, and I wrote Elizabeth, who was at that time with her husband in charge of certain music work at the Ohio University at Athens, Ohio, to come and get Elizabeth Ann if she could. It hurt me to do this, for I had taken my child with the full intention of being able to provide a home for her permanently. But I could not longer stand the physical strain of keeping up the apartment, though that strain was not equal to the mental strain of never knowing whether or not the captain could meet the rent and other obligations. The last month we lived there, January, I was obliged to go to a friend for $75 to help me out with the rent, and I did so, taking Elizabeth Ann with me and meeting the friend in the lobby of the Pennsylvania Hotel. I have not been able to pay that back any more than I have yet been able to repay the Italian the $90 borrowed in 1923. And January of 1925 found me owing other debts also—school tuition for my baby, Helen Anderson’s loans amounting in the aggregate to over $300, and others.
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I began very early to acquaint Elizabeth Ann with the likeness of her father, and she could pick him out in the Sunday supplements when she was as young as two. She knew, of course, my autographed photograph of Mr. Harding which always stood in a silver frame on my bedroom table, as well as pictures of other members of the Harding family, all of which hung on my wall, and my sister Elizabeth’s photograph of Mr. Harding which he had autographed for her early in 1921.
In many ways Elizabeth Ann reflects my own moods, but love for Mr. Harding seems to have developed of itself in her heart with an almost uncannily independent force. When we first moved into the apartment on Lafayette Parkway in Chicago, Elizabeth Ann was about two and one-half years old. I had a small book written by Joe Mitchell Chapple, entitled “Harding, the Man,” on the cover of which was a small picture of Mr. Harding, an excellent likeness, set against a background of American flags. The frontispiece was a larger, though not as good, picture of Mr. Harding, and throughout the book were various other pictures—one of Mrs. Harding, one of the old Harding homestead, one of The Marion Daily Star Building, one of the Harding home on Mt. Vernon Avenue in Marion, and also one of their Wyoming Avenue home in Washington.