George Tryon Harding, M.D. the President’s father
It was in fact during that very visit to Marion that I had gone over to the Dr. Harding home on East Center Street one afternoon to join Mrs. Votaw, and be there so Mrs. Mouser could pick us both up and take us for a drive. Passing through the house out to the garden I had come across Dr. Harding, lying down on the couch in the living-room. I had not seen him before on that particular visit, and I went over and leaned down and kissed him on the cheek and spoke to him. His eyes were closed but I knew he was not asleep. He opened them and recognized me immediately. I doubt very much whether I have ever encountered Dr. Harding even in passing greeting that he did not remark in the same exclamatory fashion, “Oh, yes,—Nan, Nan! Yes, I remember how your father used to tell me how you stood up for Warren! He said you thought Warren was the finest man in the country—yes, your father used to say....” And I have known Daisy Harding to interrupt more than once and say, “Yes, dad, you’ve told Nan that before,” or, “Yes, dad, Nan knows.” And when I bent and touched his cheek with my lips and took his dear old wrinkled hand in mine, he spoke to me immediately of his son Warren. But now the voice was the far-away voice of a grief-stricken aged man, and so pitifully weak that I bent over him and listened intently to catch the words. Bless him! He was trying to recall to me my father’s words to him about my love for his son. But the feeble voice trailed off and I felt more than heard his whispered heart-cry, “Too bad Warren had to die!” My heart was so full of love and sympathy for him whose son I worshipped that something which must have been the maternal in me longed to stoop and take the snow-white head on my arm and mingle my tears with his against the wrinkled cheek. But, instead, I stood looking down upon him and seeing in the deep-set faded eyes of the father the eyes of the other, the younger man, his son and my beloved.
I have yet to see, however, except in the eyes of my baby, who is the soul of Warren Harding, the spiritual lights of understanding, gladness, and sorrow that shone from the eyes of him whose gaze was ever fixed beyond the pale of the material. I recall how one time Mr. Harding and I were motoring in New York, in a car hired by him for the purpose by the hour, and were passing under the elevated bridge at Broadway and 64th Street, when I said to him, “Darling, you have such beautiful eyes. Somehow I never can really see into them.” And he smiled and answered, “Aren’t they too sad, Nan?” Yes, I told him, they were sad, but beautifully and spiritually sad.
He, in turn, seemed to delight in telling me how he loved my eyes, my lips, my teeth, my woman’s body, my voice, and my nose. It was when he said he loved my nose that I would interrupt him. “Oh, now I know you must be fooling,” I would say, “because I have always heard from my family how big my nose is!” But he would shake his head and smile and plant a kiss right upon the end of that emphasized feature and swear over and over again, “I love your nose!”
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It was with a great sense of relief that I looked now to my return to New York. Daisy Harding was my friend, she knew the whole story, she loved her brother dearly, and I was sure she would act quickly in acquainting her family with a situation which needed immediately to be righted for the sake of her brother’s child.
The motor trip to Washington with Carrie Votaw and her friends was, for me at least, a lark. Not since my early days in France, before the tragic news of Mr. Harding’s death reached me, had I experienced such comparative relaxation, mentally. We were a jolly four, singing songs, reciting pieces, and talking about everything—everything except those things which lay nearest my heart. I was thankful that there would be no more mental metastasis to shock and hurt me. My answer to all fears henceforth would be, “Daisy knows; Daisy knows!” And I would soon, through the goodness which I knew was as inherent a quality in the Hardings as was their knowledge of right, have my baby with me permanently.
Many and many a time I thought to myself, as my eyes drank in every move Carrie Votaw made, “What a wonderful family, these Hardings! Each superlative in individual ways!” I visualized Mrs. Votaw with her brother’s child on her lap, and thought within myself that God always compensated in His own beautiful way for the things we longed for but which were not always within His will. I had so prayed that I might see our child with her father, on his knee, but instead I was to see her with his sisters whom I also loved.
Our first night enroute to Washington was spent in Uniontown, Pennsylvania. Mrs. Votaw and I shared the same room, and, after we had retired, it occurred to me to inquire casually concerning her opinion of Tim Slade. She answered very briefly, and said she thought that he, like a good many others, had been “roped in” unconsciously, and that he was very probably not a bad sort of man at all. I explained my curiosity in some way which did not at all arouse her suspicions or lead her to think I knew him personally, and it was very gratifying to me to know that she held no unfavorable opinion of him.
Proceeding on our way, the following day we had luncheon in the mountains at the log cabin of Mrs. Votaw’s friend, Miss Barnett. The only knowledge I had ever had of log cabins was through conversations with Mr. Harding. I think it was his friend, Senator Weeks, who had many times entertained fellow senators and friends at his camp, which was in New Hampshire. And Mr. Harding’s final exclamation, when he described for me the beauty of the country up there and the comforts of the lodge in the mountains, always was, “I wish I might have you up there, Nan, way off in the woods!” He longed, he said, to carry me away to some spot like that for “weeks at a stretch.”