“Don’t lie to me!”
“I’m not lying to you.”
Kay seized the letter from him and read it out loud.
“We had such fun on the summer, didn’t we? As long as we remain apart even if briefly keep writing your warm and loving letters.”
“Give me that back,” he said, angry now and coming towards her. She quickly moved around the desk.
“It is wonderful and very moving to hear how our love is still strong and has survived the flames of war. That makes me very happy.”
They paused, staring at each other over the desk
“Well, that doesn’t make me very happy, sir!”
“You had no right to read my private correspondence.”
“It was open on your desk. “My darling Ike” it began. How was I supposed not to read that? Anyway what the hell’s that got to do with it? You’ve written a love letter to you wife. You probably made love to her in the summer on that hero’s tour. Where does that leave me?”
“Come here, Kay.” He opened his arms and walked towards her.
“Did you? Did you sleep with your wife in all those fancy hotel rooms you two were staying in?”
“Stop being ridiculous. Come here.”
“No, I bloody well won’t.”
She picked up the letter-opener and pointed it at him.
“Don’t come anywhere near me. You’re a lying cheat.”
“Stop it, Kay I can explain.”
“Know something? Every woman in history has heard that before.”
“Put that knife down, come and listen to me.”
She threw the knife on the table.
“Go on then. Explain. I’m listening,” she said.
“All right, I do miss Mamie, why shouldn’t I? I miss my boys. I miss my friends back home. I love them all. That’s why I miss them.”
“Nice speech. I miss my family too but that’s not exactly what we are talking about here, is it?”
“Stop this right here.” He leant across the desk. She could see the veins beginning to throb on his temple. The last time she saw that look on his face was when they had argued about the uniforms. But this was very different.
“Mamie has had a miserable war. She’s lonely, depressed and she misses me. What do you want me to say? Sorry I don’t love you any more, my dear wife. I love this Brit women with blue-green eyes and a nice long legs and she makes me happy and by the way, dear wife, when this bloody war is over I’m going to kiss you goodbye and set up with her?”
“You think I’m going to fall for that old baloney?”
“God, you’ve got an Irish lip on you.”
“And you’ve got a lying tongue in your head.”
She was crying now and reached for a handkerchief.
“You told me it was all over between you two.”
“I said no such thing.”
“Well, you let me believe it!”
“Oh for Chrissakes, Kay – you’re making a mountain out of this.”
“All I want to know is whether you love me.”
“Of course I do, I’ve told you that. You’re in the army, you’re an American citizen, what more do you want?”
“But Mamie, your letter to her ...”
“I write to her all the time. You know that. I love her but it’s different. I wouldn’t be much of a man if I didn’t have feelings for a woman I’ve been married to for God knows how many years. Mamie has done nothing wrong. Why should I hurt her?”
That was true, she thought. Maybe he was in love with them both although in different ways. Maybe he did have a right to pen loving billets doux to his far away wife while taking her in his arms here in Germany and covering her with kisses. That was a lot of maybes.
She blew her nose, aware he was watching her.
“I need a drink,” she said. He came around the table and tried to put his arms around her. She stepped back and shrugged him off.
“That very nice cognac you’ve got locked away in your drawer will do. Make it a double with ice.”
That was when she should have walked away. She should have resigned, gone back to England and started a new life. But he had reassured her, explained himself. A woman in love will believe anything, that’s what Charlotte had said.
Looking back, Kay could see she really did believe then that her boss, the Supreme Commander General Dwight Eisenhower, was preparing to seek permission to divorce his wife.
A few days later she prepared to mix their evening drinks. The row had not been forgotten but she persuaded herself it had simply been a silly misunderstanding, an overreaction on her part. “How about a game of bridge with some of the boys – twenty cents a hundred?” she said.
This was the only way she could get him to take his mind off the secret cables, the complaints, the commands, the pleading letters and all the other wreckage of war and occupation that washed up on his desk.
She poured the cocktails, just one each to ensure a clear head if they played later. Sometimes these bridge games went on well after midnight if Ike was in the mood – and when he was wound up he was usually in the mood for bridge.
He lit a cigarette. He was on to his third pack that day.
“No thanks, and no bridge tonight. But I’ll take that drink.”
She passed him the cocktail and sat down to listen. He was in that that sort of mood.
“I think if you spend a lifetime in the army, you believe that every problem can be solved,” he said. “That force, or the threat of force, can be used to obtain the objectives given to you. Life is clear-cut. You have your orders and you obey them. But once you leave the army ...”
“But you haven’t left,” said Kay.
It was the first time he had mentioned leaving the military. Kay suspected there was some truth in all the gossip about a political career back home. She had come to realise that he would never accept the generous offer of a London home from the British government, nor seek a comfortable career as an author and speaker in England. That was a silly daydream. Her man was going home, but as what? And when she went with him, how would she survive as a Washington wife?
“No, I haven’t, and I’m not going to,” he said, “but my point is that the military creates a world for every man jack in uniform, from the ordinary grunt to top brass like me. Once you step out of that world and look around, you see that life isn’t really like that. In a world where there is no control, no order and no one seems in charge.”
“You’re talking about politicians.”
“No, I’m talking about people generally – you can’t prescribe for them. You never know what they’re going to do next.”
“You mean it would be better if we were all in the army?”
Eisenhower laughed, sipped his drink, and smiled in appreciation at the mix of gin and bitters as he lit another cigarette. She could see he quite liked the idea.
“That’s the first sensible idea I’ve heard in a long time,” he said.
She waited for him to pat the sofa and say, “Come here.” She would sit down beside him, feel his arm slide around her. They would undress, not quickly as that first time but slowly, stroking and teasing each other. In the sweet clemency of sex they would both find forgiveness.
But he didn’t do that tonight. He just lay back with his cigarette watching the smoke rising to the ceiling. It was as if she wasn’t there.
19
October 1945
Eisenhower celebrated his fifty-fifth birthday on October 14th. He had remained in Frankfurt with a reduced staff since the wartime “family” had returned to the US, all except Kay, who stayed on as his personal assistant.
Ike hated the Frankfurt headquarters and the tedious bureaucracy that went with administration of the US area of occupation. His days now began with a refrain familiar to those who work
ed with him.
“Anything to get me out of this goddamn city! Anything. Christ, this place is enough to drive a man mad!”
The histrionics were not necessary, but neither Kay nor anyone else felt able to point this out. They knew he had been told by President Truman that he was to succeed George Marshall as chief of staff. He just had to wait for the formal appointment later that year. Then he would shake the dust of Europe from his feet, turn his back on the rubble of war and fly home where he belonged.
Kay could see that the weathervane of his mind had swung from Europe to Washington. There was no doubt that he would take her with him. The only issue was that of her citizenship.
“I think we can fix that this fall,” he said. He had just opened an envelope containing a cable from the Pentagon. “It looks like I’ll have to go to DC and see Marshall. Perhaps I could push it through then.”
“That would be great,” she said, “But try and be back for your birthday.”
“You’ll have to go to DC yourself to sign all the papers,” he said. “You do know that?”
He looked up, smiled briefly and returned to the paperwork on his desk.
Ike’s birthday had been circled in her diary for months, but she began to make a note of other dates, too, especially his flights to Washington and return to Frankfurt. Time and place had begun to matter. She wanted to hurry the clock forward to get to Washington. Once she had citizenship, she’d never have to leave him again.
Kay had wanted Ike’s birthday present to be two of the finest steaks she could find in Frankfurt, but such luxuries were only a memory in a city of half-starving people. Every food shop was either closed or had long queues outside. She had some dried pasta in the cupboard; spaghetti would be an unusual birthday dinner, but it would have to do.
It was Friday, the end of a long week, and this was Ike’s birthday dinner. She baked a small cake and decorated it with the numerals 55 picked out in bright red pins. She placed just one candle on it and propped a small framed photograph of Telek against the cake. That was her present to him. He would want nothing more.
She had found tomato ketchup and onions to make a sauce and a hard cheese to grate on top. Once that was simmering on the stove she opened a bottle of red wine from a case donated by a liaison officer with the Free French Forces.
The birthday supper would be little different from what had become almost a domestic routine at the end of every week – drinks, dinner and then long talks together sitting side by side on the sofa after the servants had left for the evening. Outside, as the temperature dipped towards freezing, soldiers patrolled around the house.
In all the time she had known him, there was no greater surprise than when her boss put his arms around her that Friday evening and said, “Close your eyes. I have a present for you.”
“Just a minute – it’s your birthday. I have a present for you.”
“I was first. Close your eyes.”
“No, I’m first.”
“Close your eyes, that’s an order!”
She closed her eyes, held out her hand and opened them to find an envelope in her palm. She opened it to find a single slip of embossed paper. It was a travel warrant stating that Kay Summersby was officially authorised to fly on the Allied commander’s personal plane, a Flying Fortress, to Washington two days hence on Sunday evening.
At first she thought that some strange practical joke was being played. She took a large sip of her drink. Ike was not a joker.
“Washington? But I thought you –”
He put a finger to her lips. “You’re going first. I discussed this with the president in the summer. He agreed, but it has taken a while for the paperwork to come through.”
“But to do what?”
“You’re going to become an American citizen – that’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?”
She turned around once, put her drink down, swirled around again, opened her arms and flung herself into his, sending his drink flying from the glass.
“You’re wonderful! Thank you!”
“Whoa!” he said, brushing down his jacket sleeve. “First things first. You’ve got to write a nice letter to Secretary of State Byrnes. This has to be done by the book. I’ll write a covering note.”
There and then he dictated the letter that would open the doors to her American citizenship. That’s when she knew she was safe.
Until now it was as if he had felt unable to complete the circle he had so patiently drawn around them in their years together. He could say, as he did, that he never wanted to let her go, that what they had found in each other felt so right, but the end of the war and the pull of his next big career move had placed the word perhaps between them.
“It’s too bad we didn’t meet years ago,” she had said to him once, and he had nodded.
“Trouble is, when you’re in the army you don’t see the world outside. You don’t sometimes see what is more important. Perhaps ...”
Perhaps what? she wanted to say. Perhaps if we had met earlier in our lives you would have married me and we would have been man and wife by now? Perhaps if there had been no war I would have emigrated to America as I had planned and we would have met and fallen in love?
Now there was no perhaps. The doubts in her mind had been banished. She was going to Washington on his personal plane. Secretary Byrnes would reply to the letter and set the wheels in motion. American citizenship would allow her to work at the Pentagon with him.
She wondered whether she would be stationed outside Washington to start with. He would have to start divorce proceedings and that might be awkward. He would want her assigned somewhere else, maybe in the Midwest, to avoid the gossip. There would be a firestorm of scandalous talk and condemnation.
She knew, and Ike would well know, how the American press would react. But he never seemed to mind that. He had nothing but contempt for newspaper chit-chat, as he called it. In the years she had known him he seemed impervious to the gossip he trailed in his wake. When Clark and the others openly called her his shadow in front of him, he paid no attention.
As he had said so often, he was a soldier living the military life and nothing penetrated that world other than training for the next war and learning the lessons of the last one.
With her flight authorisation in her handbag signed by the man she loved, Kay’s life became a blur.
Two days after the birthday supper she flew with a number of officials in the supreme commander’s personal Flying Fortress to Washington. There she spent days waiting in line, signing forms, producing this document and that, watching the wheels of bureaucracy grinding through the formalities of becoming a US citizen.
The press were unaware of her presence in a modest hotel, and no one else knew she was in Washington. In between the long waits in government departments she became a tourist, marvelling at the sights she had heard so much about but never seen. It was a warm autumn but she knew the winters were harsh and the summers steamy in the capital. She would need a new wardrobe, light colourful dresses for the summer and warm well lined coats for the winter. After the war years in London the big department stores offered an Aladdin’s cave of riches. If only Charlotte could see her now.
She would wait before writing to her. She could just imagine Charlotte’s reaction. Her friend would be sitting in a swanky bar with yet another married man, pointing to a photo in a newspaper and saying, “See that woman with Eisenhower. She’s my best friend, Kay Summersby.” Charlotte would conveniently forget, of course, that she had predicted a swift and sorrowful end to her relationship.
At the end of her four days’ stay, a story in the New York Times caught her eye. Citing White House sources, the report said that President Truman was about to appoint George Marshall, chief of the army staff, as a special envoy to China. That meant only one thing.
The job that Ike knew was coming his way was abo
ut to be formally announced. He had never expressed great enthusiasm for the role. Indeed he had told her that the idea of a desk in the Pentagon – in overall control of the sprawling defence bureaucracy – would be a shock after years of movement and action in the European theater of operations.
On the overnight flight back to Germany, she couldn’t sleep. There was a headwind and she found herself drinking cup after cup of bitter instant coffee and willing the plane to fly faster. It was November and they would be landing at the military airbase outside Frankfurt in what the pilot had announced would be a heavy rainstorm.
She had arranged to meet him at his house. A car picked her up and drove her straight there through the pouring rain. She had a present for him to make up for the failure to cook him a proper birthday dinner. Ike had said nothing about the simple pasta supper and had loved the framed photo of Telek, but he was an impossible man when it came to choosing proper grown-up presents.
The only gift she had ever seen him receive with real pleasure was the box of oysters that Roosevelt had sent from Washington the previous Christmas. She had bought him a book of poems by the English war poet Wilfred Owen. He had probably never heard of him, but she felt he would like the elegiac words of a man who so beautifully and painfully captured the futility of trench warfare, in which he was to lose his own life.
As they drew up outside the house, Kay saw the official car with the driver standing ready to open the passenger door. The engine was running and he was looking at his watch. Her heart sank. Ike would be flying off to another award ceremony in Europe. She was tired, but she would ask to go with him.
An orderly was bringing two large suitcases out of the house. They were the big leather ones with brass locks and D.E. stamped on the side that had followed him to France after D-Day. They held all the clothes he possessed; almost everything he owned, in fact.
Eisenhower came to the door, stopped, surprised, then smiled and said, “ Hi, Kay. Welcome back.”
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