After all, Captain Neilsen was not, in spite of his seeming misrepresentations, such a “bad fellow,” for he had simply loved me so much that he had thrown a veil over realities and had refused to accept true facts, preferring to pour all of his hopes into the scale of optimism, fancying perhaps he could in some miraculous manner clap his hands, and fortune, hitherto so elusive, would appear. So I didn’t really want to hurt him, but I wanted to rid myself of him now and start anew, never again to jump into matrimony with closed eyes. I had learned a very dear lesson. I was sure he had learned one also. And I had no wish to incur his enmity.
I moved into a hotel in West 55th Street the first part of February. I was working at The Town Hall Club, as you will remember, and the Club is on West 43rd Street, so my hotel was conveniently within walking distance of my place of business. My work at the Club was quite absorbing, especially because the executive secretary, whose assistant I was, was occasionally ill, which threw her work upon my shoulders in addition to my own routine work. I had been far from well myself all winter, and it was only by observing early-to-bed hours that I was able to carry on. I liked the atmosphere of the Club and came in contact with interesting people, and, for the period which I planned to go through in my immediate endeavor to seek a divorce, it was conventionally a good place for me to be employed.
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I had, as I have stated, always felt that there had been some provision made by Mr. Harding for me to care for our daughter, and, after my failure in marriage, it seemed to me I ought, for Elizabeth Ann’s sake, to ascertain whether or not such a bequest existed. But even so it did not occur to me to go then to the Hardings, feeling that, since Mr. Harding had not chosen to confide his long-continued relations with me to any member of his family during his health-time, it was not likely he had done so just before his death. The most logical person, in my opinion, and the man who most likely could tell me to whom to go if he himself did not know about such a bequest, was Tim Slade. He it was who had met me so many times and had escorted me to the White House, and had come to Eagle Bay and Chicago with funds from Mr. Harding. I knew Tim Slade had long since made a change from the governmental secret service to the brokerage business, but I did not know of any further changes he had made. So, not knowing where to address him now, I merely sent my letter to him at Washington, and apparently this address was sufficient.
My first note simply greeted him after the stretch of more than two years since I had last seen him, and I wrote that if he ever came to New York I would be glad to see him. To this letter, which I had signed of course with my married name, I had an early reply. Tim wrote that he would give me a ring on the phone the next time he was in the city; that he was glad to hear from me; and that I should address him in the future at his residence, giving the number and street. Very shortly thereafter he came over to New York, called me on the telephone at The Town Hall Club, and invited me to have dinner with him at the Waldorf, where, he told me later on, he always stopped. I do not remember that I accepted his invitation for dinner that time, but I do remember very well the talk I had with him there which was the first talk I had ever had with anybody about any money Mr. Harding might have left for our daughter and me.
We sat in the lounge which one enters beyond the lobby from 33rd Street, on a couch in the north-east corner. It seemed strange indeed to be sitting with Tim Slade discussing my sweetheart in the past tense. Heretofore Tim had been merely the messenger to take me to Mr. Harding. Tim really knew very little about me. I proceeded to tell him that I had been married since I had seen him, which accounted for my new name which he told me he had not understood. It was easy to talk to Tim Slade for he knew everybody connected with the Harding Administration, and our conversation gradually bordered upon the very topic I had been apprehensively waiting for an opportunity to broach. Tim was not so aggressively curious as to give me reason to feel his curiosity was other than that any man might display toward a girl who had apparently had certain claims upon the time and attention of the President of the United States. So I thought I should proceed to elucidate certain mystifying past actions on the part of both Mr. Harding and myself which must have excited speculation on Tim’s part. I tried to lead up to such explanation by first re-establishing in his mind certain facts which he very readily recalled—his first trip to Eagle Bay in the Adirondacks in 1920 with the packet of money from President-elect Harding, his many subsequent trips to Chicago, and the times he had escorted me to the White House. Also, I reminded him of the many letters I had sent in his care to Mr. Harding previous to the latter’s arrangement whereby I sent them all in care of his colored valet, Major Arthur Brooks.
Even then I shied at a direct revelation. I merely parried with the issue in such a manner as to hint at it strongly. I said since Mr. Harding’s death there was but one thing in all the world that I wanted. I found the tears coming into my voice as I talked, and oh, how distasteful it was to me to think of speaking of such a sordid thing as money in confessing why I could not have this one thing I wanted.
“What is it you want more than anything else in this world?” Tim asked me kindly, avoiding my eyes because he felt my sensitiveness.
And somehow I found great relief in confessing to him that I wanted the daughter of Warren Harding who was also my daughter. And when Tim turned to look at me there were tears in his own eyes as he said, “I thought so!”
After that I talked much and at random, explaining this and that, and Tim seemed genuinely interested in hearing the whole story. I told him how I had married Captain Neilsen with the idea of being able to take Elizabeth Ann, and how that marriage had been a failure from the standpoint of fulfilling this promise. And when I observed that it just did not seem possible that Mr. Harding could have entrusted money to someone for me who would deliberately fail to hand it on to me after his death, Tim ejaculated in great surprise, “Didn’t he leave you anything at all?” I said I would never, never believe that he had failed to do so, but I was convinced that the manner in which he had done so had been such as to make it a very simple thing for the person entrusted with the money to withhold it from me.