Brief Overview
Elsa Havelock (née Auerbach) is an NPC (non-player character). She is the wife (and later widow) of Fabian Havelock, as well as the mother of Farley and Theodore Havelock. Shes dies shortly before Farley and his fiancée, Moira O'Farrell, fled New York City for Berlin, Germany.
Early Life & Coming to America
Elsa was born in Berlin, Germany, and immigrated to the United States in the late 1880s. She came from a fairly wealthy family, but was disowned when she took up with Fabian Havelock both romantically and sexually. She married him, moved to the Lower East Side of Manhattan to be with him, and bore him two sons. Cut off from everything she had known, Elsa took comfort in the volunteer work she did with her Lutheran church as she adjusted to life as a working-class woman in New York City at the turn of the century. However, she never adjusted well.
Elsa leaned on her eldest son, Farley, for a great deal of emotional support. When Fabian was killed in a shooting at their family-owned bar and eatery, The Hound Pits Pub, Elsa treated Farley as the man of the family
and as the resident breadwinner, although she herself did the pub's bookkeeping.
Madness, Codependency & Death
When Farley ran away to Canada to enlist in the Canadian Expeditionary Force to Europe in 1916, Elsa fell into despair and disarray. This condition was worsened by the sickness and then death of her younger son, Theodore, in the influenza outbreak of 1918. When Farley returned home, Elsa had given up attempting to manage the pub's finances, keep it open and running, and even to take care of herself. She needed a great deal of help from her remaining son in order to come back from her despair, and leaned more heavily than ever on Farley.
When Moira O'Farrell entered the picture as a hired waitress at the Hound Pits Pub and then, later, as Farley's romantic partner, Elsa experienced a mixture of distaste and jealousy; she was unhappy that her son wanted a woman of color as a wife, and nor did she enjoy her demotion from the most important woman in her son's life.
While covertly pawing through Moira's belongings, Elsa discovered the grimoire that Maeve O'Farrell had left to her daughter. She was driven to true, raving madness and then death by what she read within it.