The General's Women Read online

  Mickey had just served breakfast in the drafty, high-ceilinged dining room, and Telek immediately took his usual place on Kay’s lap so he could share her breakfast bacon, just as they had back in England. In other ways, it was like England, too. The General sat across the table from her, a frown on his face, reading glasses on the end of his nose. He was buried in the Times, which arrived daily in the diplomatic pouch. Butch was tossing down a handful of aspirin as an antidote to last night’s champagne. Mickey was hovering with a pot of fragrant hot coffee and a plate of toast while Moaney and Hunt rattled pots and pans in the kitchen. A wireless on a nearby shelf was broadcasting a BBC news program, the commentator reporting heavy fighting at Guadalcanal, aimed at driving the Japanese out of their fortified positions on Mount Austen. Under his breath, the Boss muttered something about being damned glad that Vandegrift had gone back to Washington and Sandy Patch was calling the shots in the Pacific.

  Kay listened and looked and hugged Telek to her, loving the small, squirming body, the fervent kisses on her nose, the smell of the coffee, the General’s muttering, Butch’s complaint. Home. Yes, in spite of the frozen-faced guards outdoors and the house’s alien surroundings, she was at home, because her family—all in uniform and all committed to the same vital purpose—was here. She could have lost it all when the torpedo tore through the hull of the Strathallan, but she hadn’t. She was here, where she knew she was meant to be.

  But still, the distance across the table from the General felt very great, and she sensed a difference in him. Had she offended him the night before? After all, he was only being playful, having a bit of holiday fun. But perhaps he’d had a bit too much champagne and regretted his kiss. Perhaps he was putting her on notice that from now on, it would be strictly business between them. He was her commanding officer. She was his driver. And that was that.

  And then, as if in answer to her unspoken question, he glanced up across the table. For the first time that morning, he looked directly at her, intent, unsmiling. “Good morning, Kay,” he said. Then, folding his paper, he turned to Butch.

  “Time we went to work.” His voice was sharp, crisp. “Butch, bring that report we were looking at before breakfast. Kay, you bring Telek. Now that you’re here, that pup can come to the office and learn to take orders, instead of lollygagging around this place all day, thinking he’s running the show.” He pushed back his chair and stood up. “Come on, people. We’ve got a war to win.”

  “Did you hear that, Telek?” Kay said. “The Boss says it’s time to go to work. Let’s get a move on.”

  Telek, always happy to be going somewhere, erupted in a flurry of happy barks. Kay smiled. Yes, truly. Truly, she was home.

  CHAPTER NINE:

  “Durn Those WACs”

  Washington, D.C.

  February 1943

  When she thought about it afterward, Mamie would realize that her wartime worries had been spawned, like fierce little dragons, from that first Life magazine photograph. That picture of Kay Summersby, a member of her husband’s official family, the “pretty Irish girl who drives for General Eisenhower.” The girl he hadn’t mentioned in any of his letters.

  Mamie knew she had always been . . . well, possessive. Very possessive. Her mother said so, her sister said so, even Ike said so, especially after she took him to task about that woman in the Philippines. She had already given him (by letter, right after she saw that first photo) what he ruefully called “Hail Columbia,” letting him know that it was not a good idea—for appearance sake, if nothing else—to spend so much time driving around England, alone, with a pretty woman, especially a civilian. He had to drop her from his staff, right now, right this minute. If he didn’t, people were bound to get ideas.

  To which he had replied soothingly that nobody in the world could ever fill her place with him and that he needed her and loved her—a comforting declaration that she thought of whenever she thought of that photo, which was often. Too often. And even if she had wanted to forget it, her friends wouldn’t let her. Everybody had seen it, just everybody: the girls who came to the apartment to play mah-jongg, the volunteers at the Stage Door Canteen on Lafayette Square, the army wives with whom she traded letters and phone calls. They all repeated pretty much the same thing, like a phonograph record with the needle stuck in the groove.

  Like Cookie, who arrived a little early for mah-jongg one afternoon. “My gracious, Mamie, what a beautiful girl, that driver! Now, tell the truth, my dear. Aren’t you just a little bit jealous? Heaven knows, I would be. After all, she’s a WAC and everybody knows all about them.”

  “But she’s not a WAC,” Mamie had protested. “She’s a British civilian. She’s wearing that uniform because she belongs to the Motor Transport Corps, which is like our motor pool, only volunteers. She drove an ambulance during the Blitz.”

  She had pried that little bit of information out of Mickey McKeogh, Ike’s orderly. Mamie had instructed him to write to her regularly—and secretly, since she didn’t want Ike to think that Mickey was spying. But Mickey’s letters were never informative enough to suit her. He would write things like, “The Boss isn’t sleeping real good but he’s not smoking any more than usual and he’s eating three meals a day. Oh, plus he got a new dog who he likes a lot.” When she finally got him to tell her something specific about Kay Summersby, though, he provided an unsettling detail: “Back during the Blitz, she drove a bunch of corpses around in her ambulance while the bombs were falling.”

  Mamie shuddered. The idea of hauling a load of dead people while bombs were raining down. . . . Well, the woman must have nerves of steel, that’s all. No lady that Mamie had ever met would do something like that.

  And then, under duress, Mickey had mentioned the other assignment Ike had given Miss Summersby: “She’s our rec director,” he wrote. “She got some golf clubs for the Boss and told me to build him a shooting range and horseshoe pit, except it’s not for horseshoes, it’s for something called koyts. She’s real good at bridge. Also horseback riding.”

  Mamie only briefly felt guilty for asking Mickey to tittle-tattle on Ike. She was too bothered by the fact that her husband had appointed the multi-talented Miss Summersby as the staff “rec director.” If everybody in his command was as busy as they claimed, how did they find time for golf and horseback riding and koyts, whatever that was?

  The more she thought about this, the more anxious she felt, for Mamie had never been an outdoor woman. She’d had rheumatic fever when she was eight. The doctors had told her that her heart might be weak and advised her not to exert herself. Ike had managed to get her on a horse a few times, but it wasn’t an experience that either of them remembered with pleasure. She’d taken up golf after that business in the Philippines with Marian Huff, just to keep Ike company on the course, but she wasn’t what you’d call good at it. And Mickey’s remark about bridge was also troubling. Mamie hated to play bridge with Ike. She just wasn’t in his league. She had trouble keeping track of the cards and he was forever losing his temper over her playing.

  Mickey, pressed just a little harder, was disappointingly (or maybe tactfully) vague about Miss Summersby’s appearance. “Well, I wouldn’t say she’s pretty, exactly. About average, maybe, sorta. Anyway, we’re all too busy to notice. We got jobs to do.”

  Mamie had reread Mickey’s reply several times, then looked at the “official family” photograph again, a flare of jealousy burning hotly in her heart. Mickey was wrong about Miss Summersby. Even in uniform, she was much, much prettier than average. And much, much prettier than Mamie herself. Mamie knew that she was too skinny and that her forehead had slipped back almost as far as Ike’s, bless him, so that her Claudette Colbert bangs had become essential camouflage. She had one nice feature—her sparkling china-blue eyes—and her creamy skin was flawless. That was why she wore pink whenever she could, and also why she had such a large collection of clothes.

  “You need to work with what you’ve got,” she often told her sister Mike. “I
don’t have a lot these days, beauty-wise, so whatever I’m wearing has to make up for the lack.” Plus, she always insisted on the best quality. Her nightgowns had to be silk and her bedsheets linen or satin, never that awful percale. She liked lots of frilly lace on her dresses, and hats with flowers. She simply could not understand how any woman could bear to wear a uniform. The color was horrible, olive drab—nobody could look good in that, for heaven’s sake. And it was always the same thing, day in and day out. How utterly boring.

  But Cookie wasn’t finished with Kay Summersby. “Well, if she’s not a WAC, what does he want with her? And if she’s a British civilian,” she added, taking her cigarettes out of her handbag, “why is she in uniform? And what exactly is she doing on the personal staff of the Supreme Commander? Besides driving, I mean.” She eyed Mamie. “Does Ike say why he insists on keeping her?”

  Cookie had always been just a little too nosey, and Mamie sidestepped the question. “Every general has a couple of drivers,” she said. “It’s especially good that they’re British, since they have to drive on the wrong side of the road.” She laughed to show that she was making a joke. “Anyway, it’s all water under the bridge now. Ike has moved his headquarters to North Africa. She’s a civilian volunteer, and a woman. He would never in the world be responsible for sending somebody like that to the war zone.”

  Cookie turned down a carefully lipsticked mouth. “I’m sure you’re right, dear. But there will be others. The WACs are flocking over there by the thousands. Nobody’s husband will be safe.”

  Mamie hardly thought that Cookie had to worry. Marv was past fifty, overweight, and terribly unattractive. But she understood. Many of the wives she knew were concerned about the WACs who would be working shoulder to shoulder with their husbands overseas. Proximity was a powerful aphrodisiac, and war only heightened the attraction.

  It wasn’t just the wives who were opposed to the idea of women in the military. Many people were suspicious, and all kinds of stories about after-hours hanky-panky were going the rounds. The public backlash grew even louder after the New York Daily News ran a front-page exposé, reporting that the War Department was furnishing army women with “contraceptive and prophylactic devices.” After that, it didn’t matter how hard Colonel Hobby tried to emphasize the “high moral standards” of her WACs. They were branded as loose women.

  And even Mamie had to admit to sharing those feelings. Ike hadn’t mentioned it, but she had heard from Mickey that the General’s staff had celebrated New Year’s Eve in Algiers with a party. She was sure Ike hadn’t participated—working as hard as he was, he’d probably gone to bed early. But when she wrote to her parents, she mentioned the celebration and added, “Mickey said there were eleven men and five women. I suppose we can guess who the women were. Durn those WACs!”

  But this was really beside the point, as far as Mamie was concerned. Miss Summersby was a British civilian and her service in Ike’s command had already been terminated. Whatever her driving skills, she was pretty enough to be in great demand, so she had no doubt been reassigned to drive some staff officer around London—and cause trouble in someone else’s family. Anyway, Mamie firmly refused to believe that there could have been anything between Ike and Kay Summersby. Hadn’t he written, over and over, that he “lived in a goldfish bowl”? He was surrounded by men who watched his every move. Even if he wanted to stray (which she was sure he didn’t), he couldn’t.

  And Mamie had other things to worry about. There was that awful Darlan business, which had filled the newspapers with a cruel criticism of Eisenhower’s “deal with the devil.” It was all politics, of course, and politics had always bored her to tears. But some of the newspaper columnists had gone so far as to call Ike a fascist and even (Mamie could hardly believe it) a Hitlerite!—because he was cooperating with somebody who had cooperated, even just a little, with Hitler. It frightened her to death to think of her Ike, who liked to call himself “just a simple country boy from Abilene,” dealing with such devious people.

  And since everybody was talking about Admiral Darlan and what a snake he was, Mamie simply stopped going places where somebody might ask her opinion, and she actually felt relieved when, on Christmas Eve, the admiral was assassinated. Thank God Ike wasn’t in Algiers when the fellow was shot; he had gone to spend Christmas at the front. If he’d been around when it happened, she was sure they would have blamed the murder on him! They found the person who did it, though—a twenty-year-old French boy—and put him in front of a firing squad right away, which turned out to be a very lucky break for Ike. It took him off the hook, politically speaking.

  But not entirely. Some people hinted that he knew about it ahead of time, which was why he was out of town when it happened. And Mamie heard that the OSS director got sent to Tunisia immediately after the assassination, so he wouldn’t be available for the investigation. People said it was all a little fishy.

  There was another problem to worry about. Mamie was awfully fond of Ruth Butcher and grateful that Ruth had invited her to share her Wardman apartment. It eased the financial situation quite a bit and gave Mamie some peace of mind where money was concerned. But even though Ruth’s husband, Butch, was serving as Ike’s naval aide, the Butchers weren’t really military. Ruth had never lived on an army post and didn’t understand the pressures of being a career army wife—especially the wife of the Supreme Commander.

  The situation had become especially awkward over the holidays. Ruth liked to entertain and had a great many friends, most of them connected with Butch’s work in radio and print journalism. There was a lot of drinking and carousing, and while Mamie liked to have fun as much as anybody else, there’d been some pretty wild goings-on, with loud music on the radio and sudden bursts of laughter that could be heard up and down the hall. It made Mamie worry about what the neighbors might think. She had asked Ruth to keep it a little quieter, but that hadn’t gone over very well.

  What’s more, she didn’t like the people Ruth invited to the apartment. One night, she was forced to flee to her bedroom when David Brinkley, a brash young fellow from CBS, quizzed her about Ike and Darlan, in her very own living room! And a couple of others asked her about when Ike was going to push into Tunisia. “What’s he waiting for?” they asked. “Why isn’t he putting Rommel out of business?”

  But she couldn’t answer because she had no idea. She always got Tunisia and Libya mixed up and of course she had no idea what Ike’s military strategies were. Ruth laughed at her and said she was being paranoid, but Mamie had reached the point where she was afraid that any silly little word she said might show up in the next day’s newspaper.

  There was another problem, too. Ike’s brother Milton, who always kept an eye on her, had cautioned her not to drink when she was with a group of people—any people, but especially Ruth’s journalism friends, who might happen to mention a little something in the newspaper. “I know you wouldn’t want anybody to get the wrong idea,” he said. “And you wouldn’t want to do anything that might compromise Ike.”

  Of course, Milton didn’t need to lecture her. She knew where her duty lay. Unfortunately, this meant that she couldn’t even have a ginger ale, because nobody could tell what was actually in the glass she was holding and if they wanted to think it was gin or vodka, why, of course they would. This was especially hard because at cocktail hour Mamie was used to enjoying a bourbon old-fashioned or two and sometimes even three, if it had been a trying day. But Ruth quite often had unexpected drop-in company, which made things . . . well, awkward. There had been one or two embarrassing episodes which might have led to some rather nasty gossip. Mamie didn’t want that to happen again, and naturally Ruth felt the same way.

  At the same time this was going on, Mamie was suffering from a flare-up of a problem she’d had for several years. She described it as feeling dizzy and unsteady on her feet. She had been seen by quite a few doctors but they couldn’t tell her what was wrong. One said it might be something called Meniere’s diseas
e (which nobody seemed to know much about), but most said they thought it was psychosomatic, probably brought on by stress, and a few acted as if they didn’t really believe her.

  Things came to a head one day in January. She was working at the Stage Door Canteen when she stumbled with a tray and accidentally spilled gravy on a soldier’s uniform. “Hey, lady, you better watch what you’re doing,” he yelled. Her face as red as fire, Mamie hurriedly fetched a cloth and sponged him off, but she knew there was snickering about it, and innuendo. She hated to give up her job because she thought she should be doing something for the cause. But she decided to resign as a volunteer, rather than give anybody a chance to say that they had seen her drunk in public, which would upset Milton and be a terrible black mark against Ike.

  The situation was becoming decidedly uncomfortable. Ruth began dropping broad hints that it was time for a change, and when the apartment across the hall became vacant in January, she jumped at the chance to move. Mamie was relieved. Living alone might be lonely, but it mean that she could sleep late without anybody nagging, eat whatever she wanted (or not, if she didn’t want to), and enjoy her old-fashioneds in peace. Since Ruth was no longer there to do the cooking, she hired a cook-housekeeper. And then, to celebrate, she bought a baby grand piano, using money that her father had given her. She had been an indifferent student in English and arithmetic at Miss Wolcott’s Denver finishing school “for ladies of refinement,” but she had at least learned to play the piano. She could play popular songs by ear, and the piano was a marvelous place to display her photographs of Ike.

  In fact, life was sailing along on a much more even keel, now that Mamie had the apartment all to herself. In February, she was overjoyed when Ike got his fourth star—only fifteen months after being a lieutenant colonel, but of course he was doing a splendid job. The promotion brought a huge flood of congratulatory mail, and she spent a couple of hours every day personally answering notes from well-wishers. She looked forward to the little mah-jongg parties with the girls once or twice a week, frequent letters from Johnny and her family, and Ike’s regular letters.