“... 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
I arrived in Chicago the following day.