The President's Daughter (Britton)/Chapter 37
I went from the Monmouth Hotel to a rooming-house. My new quarters proved to be very unsatisfactory—damp, dark and dusty. Moreover, the roomers were mostly elderly people who looked at me severely as I passed in and out. But while there someone told me of a boarding-house where three meals a day could be obtained for the nominal sum of $9 a week. I began eating there and it was then that I met Mrs. Marietta Tonneson.
I do not recall how I met Mrs. Tonneson. But I secured a front room in her rooming-house on the third floor for $14 per week, and moved into it immediately, having been at the other place about a week. This combination brought my room and board to $15 a week, which I decided was as well as I could do in Asbury Park. I had been paying $40 a week at the Hotel Monmouth and both Mr. Harding and I agreed that it was steep. Mr. Harding was always very generous with me and I had ample funds for my comfort during the summer, but I seemed to need a good bit of money even then, and it was a satisfaction to have my board and room reduced to the minimum.
Mrs. Marietta Tonneson (Mrs. Martin Tonneson she had been until her husband's death made her a widow about a year or so previous) lived with her brother Billy in a large house just around the corner from my boarding-house. They had lived, she told me, in Marlborough Road, Brooklyn, and after her husband's death, probably wishing to conserve all of his monetary bequests, she and her brother had decided they would defray their summer expenses by keeping a rooming-house that season. That accounted for the rather unusually nice furniture in her house. I think my being alone excited her curiosity, but I was so perfectly well, and my physical soundness coupled with a growing sense of ease as I lived myself day by day into the plausibility of my "story" and my situation, made it a pleasure for me to witness evidences of this curiosity and deliberately refuse to satisfy them.
I wrote Mr. Harding, telling him all about Mrs. Tonneson, my feelings concerning her, and how she did attempt to take sort of a motherly interest in me, and his reply brought forth the advice that she might prove a valuable person to "hang onto," and that I should simply "pay my way" and stay out-of-doors away from her and everybody else who might be interested in knowing more about me.
During the latter part of the summer Mrs. Tonnesen had also as roomers a Jewess and her husband. The woman was a nurse and her husband a musician. She had charge of a Brooklyn hospital and it seemed to me an excellent idea to accept her proffered invitation to visit her in the hospital after she returned there with a view to deciding whether such a place would be desirable for my approaching confinement.
I shall never forget that visit. I had luncheon with the nurse, whose name has slipped my memory. The food seemed to me to be half swimming in grease. I walked all over the place, and even submitted to an examination by the head doctor, who was, I thought, rough and uncouth and who informed me gruffly, when I complained that he really hurt me, that I would be "hurt harder than that when my baby came." A woman who had given birth to a child that morning lay apparently unconscious from the agony of her experience, and I went in and touched her to see if she really lived. The nurse took me into the baby ward where a dozen or more babies lay in baskets, each tagged on their tiny wrists with numbers to identify them. Many were crying loudly.
The building itself stood alone and lonely with no companion buildings within several blocks, and I thought when I had done looking the place over that I could not possibly consider having Warren Harding's child born there. Goodness! I thought, to have our baby tagged! Perhaps it was customary and the only safe way, but I preferred to keep her in my room where she would not need identification. I say "her," but as a matter of fact, when I thought then about our child I thought of a boy, for as I have said Mr. Harding and I always talked about "the young lieutenant."
While I was in Brooklyn I looked at possible apartments and decided after a weary afternoon, in which I trailed around in the heat, that I would stay in Asbury Park, and possibly right with Mrs. Tonnesen. She was sympathetic and willing to do anything to help me.
As the summer progressed and early fall set in, Mrs. Tonnesen told me of her plans to take for the winter a small cottage on Bond Street, a veritable "doll's house," as she described it. Not committing myself to the promise of staying on with her through the fall, I went with her to see the house. It was No. 1210 Bond Street. I passed it this summer. It is very near the North Asbury Park Railroad Station, near a wood I was fond of, and I agreed with her that its cozy sun porch would be a delight through the winter, and the rooms, though small, were certainly cheerful. And infinitely preferable to a hospital!
Mrs. Tonnesen, having learned not to inquire into my affairs too far, suggested that it would be foolish for me to go to Chicago just to have the baby, as I was contemplating, when I might better remain with her and her brother Billy and have my sister Elizabeth come on to Asbury Park. She even suggested that I allow her to snap my picture and that I send it to Elizabeth to show her how healthy I was looking—which fatal thing of course I did not do.
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However, her interest was becoming more appreciated by me since my trip to the Brooklyn hospital, and finally I wrote my sister in Chicago not to bother about hospital accommodations there for I had decided to remain in Asbury Park, away from everybody, and go through it all by myself. I was so free from fear concerning any serious complications that I even welcomed the coming pain of childbirth; I have never been so superbly healthy as I was that summer.
Mr. Harding had listed some books which had been favorites of his at different times in his life and these books I obtained from the public library in Asbury which was just down the street. I have a notebook which contains many of the names of these books, copied from the list Mr. Harding gave me, and others which I read that summer. Among them were Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Far From the Madding Crowd, Gertrude Atherton's The Conqueror (Mr. Harding said he had met Mrs. Atherton, and had told her how he admired her novelized life of Alexander Hamilton, his favorite character in American history); O. Henry's books, and many others. I can see Mr. Harding now as he wrote down the list for me—the way he would look up and ask me if I had read this or that, and his hearty, "Oh, you must read that, Nan!"
My time was delightfully idled all summer, reading, crocheting baby's jackets and writing love-letters to my beloved. The latter consumed a great deal of my time. His letters to me were the most beautiful things imaginable, always full of cheer, and ever implying that he wanted to do everything in his power to make me comfortable. He spoke often of the "reverential love" he felt for me as the mother of our coming child. I used to wish in moments when I naturally yielded to the longings I felt for him, that we were together on the longed-for "farm" and that he could minister to me personally in the manner portrayed in his incomparable letters.
It was Mrs. Tonnesen who suggested my seeing the "society doctor of the Jersey shore," as Dr. James F. Ackerman is called. He was of a very sympathetic and kindly nature, albeit brusk. I liked him immensely from the start. He advised me that I should make a reservation for my confinement period in the hospital in Spring Lake, not far distant, but I said I would wait, for I might yet decide to go on to Chicago. It was only my fear of hospitals that made me say that, and when I found he would attend me at Mrs. Tonnesen's home, I indicated to him definitely that I wished him to take my case. I was happy in the contemplation of having the baby in my own sunny room.