“Where are you going?” It was all she could say. No other words came to her. She had just arrived, and he was leaving.
“I’m going back to Washington.”
“Right now? But I’ve just got back!”
He saw the look on her face as her features crumpled into tears beneath recent make-up.
He walked round the car towards her, put his arms around her and led her back into the house, kicking the front door shut behind him. He held her close.
“Orders. Immediate return. The president has appointed me chief of staff.”
She began to cry. She couldn’t help it. “I know. I saw it in the paper. Congratulations,” she said. “I’m sorry. This is a bit sudden.”
“Kay, we knew this was coming. Don’t worry – I’ll send for you. Be patient and look after Telek.”
“But ... when? It won’t be long, will it?”
“No. You’ll be over in a couple of weeks with the rest of the gang. We’re all going back.”
“Put your hand on my heart and say that.”
He looked at her, puzzled. “What?”
“Like you did with that captain.”
“Who?”
“The officer who didn’t want to fly on D-Day. McMichael. Remember?”
“Oh, him. Sure.”
He put his hand just above her left breast and she covered it with hers.
He opened the door and gestured at the car that was taking him back to the airfield she had just come from. They were like two ships in the night flashing semaphore signals at each other as they passed. She felt sick and faint, as if someone had punched her hard in the stomach. It was the same feeling as when she had seen that letter from Mamie. Then he kissed her softly on the forehead and was gone.
It was afternoon when she woke in her apartment. She made scrambled eggs, breaking two into the pan and whipping them up with butter, then put coffee in the percolator and watched it bubble through the filter. Women would sell themselves for coffee and eggs on the streets outside – there was hunger, fear and anger in this and every German city.
In the womb of the US Army, however, with its canteens and commissariat, little was lacking and there was nothing to be afraid of. But she was a little afraid. He had left so quickly. She realised she had not had time to give him his Wilfred Owen poems.
She sat down to drink her coffee and go through her post. Telek was whining and growling for a walk. She put the post aside, put on his lead and took him round the block.
Sitting down with the post on her return, she came across the US Army magazine Beachhead News. Ike was on the cover and on almost every page inside: there were photographs of him with Bradley in Paris, him on the Normandy battlefield posing with Montgomery, both men looking stiff and awkward, and him holding up the two pens after the German generals had signed the surrender document at Reims, with Bradley, Tedder and Clark alongside him smiling.
She flicked the pages forward, and then stopped. There was something wrong with the surrender photograph. Something was missing.
She turned the pages back. Ike was smiling in the centre of the photograph, holding up the two pens with his officers on either side of him. They all looked so happy, she thought, even though it was 3 a.m. Then she saw it. She was not in the photograph. She knew with certainty that she had been there when it was taken. The army photographer had checked with her afterwards to get all the names right – he hadn’t had to ask for hers; everyone knew Kay Summersby.
She went to her bureau and got out the original photo, one of a file she kept of pictures of herself with Eisenhower. There she was, standing just behind Ike, smiling as the camera flashed, and very visible. She looked again at the photo in the magazine. She took a deep breath. She had been airbrushed out. George Marshall must have ordered that, probably at Mamie’s suggestion.
Mamie would have hated that photo. The Pentagon brass wouldn’t have liked it either. It would have been embarrassing to have the new chief of staff pictured with his mistress beside him at the moment of victory.
She wondered if Ike had agreed to the deception. No, he wouldn’t do that. He probably hadn’t even seen the magazine. She would tease him about it when they were together again.
20
November 1945
Eisenhower’s crowded programme in Washington began with an appearance before the Senate armed forces committee. The senators were deferential in their questioning about the conduct of the war to the point where the hearing almost became a eulogy, which both embarrassed and irritated him. Immediately after the two-hour hearing he was summoned to meet George Marshall for the first in a series of handover meetings at the Pentagon.
Marshall stood to greet him as he walked in. There was a handwritten letter sitting face up on his desk. They shook hands. Neither man sat down.
“Before we go any further, you wrote me a letter concerning your personal life,” Marshall said matter-of-factly.
“I did.”
“In that letter you sought my permission to file for divorce.”
Eisenhower sighed, looked out of the window and said nothing.
“That’s right, isn’t it?” Marshall spoke slowly without raising his voice but emphasising each word so that they sounded like an accusation. Eisenhower turned to face him.
“Yes,” he said.
“And you got my reply?”
“I did.”
“Is there any more to be said?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think so?”
The two men looked at each other in silence. Marshall, a steely-eyed disciplinarian who exuded more than a whiff of New England sobriety, had done more than anyone, including the late president, to promote the man who stood before him.
Eisenhower, exhausted and finally feeling the burden of the European campaign, began to cough. He reached for a handkerchief in his trouser pocket. His chest felt tight and a sore throat was beginning to pain him. He didn’t even want a cigarette, not that Marshall allowed smoking in his office.
“You’ve been a fine commander in one of the greatest wars ever fought. You gave us a great victory over the forces of evil. You are a hero here, and I hardly have to tell you that your future may well extend beyond the military.”
“Thank you.”
“So let me make sure I’ve made myself absolutely clear.”
Marshall picked up the letter on his desk and held it briefly in his right hand, not looking at it but showing it to the man he faced across his desk. It was handwritten in three paragraphs, with a scrawled signature at the bottom. Eisenhower didn’t look at the letter. He didn’t have to.
Marshall spoke slowly with a voice lowered to just above a loud whisper.
“If you seek a divorce, the army will not stand for it. Nor will the people of this country. You will be finished here. Most likely you would have to make a home for yourself abroad, in England. You would not be wanted here. You understand?”
“Yes.”
“I repeat – you would be finished here. Do you get that?”
“You have made that very clear.”
Marshall paused, fiddled with something on his desk and said, “I take it therefore that in accepting your new role as chief of staff you have made a clear choice in this matter.”
“That is correct.”
“Good. Now, let’s get down to business. By the way, you look awful. Have you seen a doctor?”
After a week of speech-making and giving evidence to various senate committees, Eisenhower was taken to hospital with bronchial pneumonia. It was the 22nd of November. Kay learnt of his illness in the Frankfurt office canteen, where she overheard a conversation at the next table.
The words “Ike” and “hospital” floated across to her.
“Excuse me,” she said, “did you say something about General Eisenhower being
in hospital?”
The two men at the next table looked up from their coffee.
“Yes,” said one. “It was on the wires this morning. Pneumonia.”
“Do you know which hospital?”
“A clinic in White Sulphur Springs, apparently.”
“Did the report say anything else?”
The man shook his head and returned to his coffee.
Someone should have told me, she thought. After all, I have been working closely with him here in Frankfurt and I am still doing the job, and there he is seriously ill in America. People die from that, don’t they? Why didn’t they tell me?
She wrote the date down in her personal diary when she got home. Dates mattered more than ever to her now. She was counting not just the days but the hours now until her return to Washington.
Of course she knew why she hadn’t been told. She also knew she couldn’t send Ike a message. Mamie would be with him at his bedside, caring for him, reading the letters and cables of goodwill that would be pouring in, and the American and European newspapers, who had been following his every move, would have reporters waiting outside the hospital.
The next entry she wrote in her diary consisted of two exclamation marks underlined in red crayon. The corrugated texture of the page suggested it had been splashed by water. The movement orders for the remaining members of Eisenhower’s headquarters staff in Frankfurt had come through in a long telex. Their names and ranks were listed with details of departure times for the military aircraft taking them home.
No one was given much time, two or three days at most to pack up and leave. Kay Summersby’s name was not on the list. She had cried at first, then told herself she was not surprised. She knew that there would be a separate movement order for her.
It was obvious, really. Ike didn’t want her to be seen travelling with the rest of this staff. For discretion’s sake he would want her to fly back after the main airlift. There would be crowds and a lot of press at the airport in Washington when those planes landed. Her flight might well be routed via New York or Philadelphia.
She smiled at the thought that the man who had never bothered to conceal her presence in his life in Europe was now becoming so discreet. It would have been nice to have received a message from him, even if he was in hospital recovering from pneumonia, but she understood. She wished she could be there with him. She would read him some of his westerns, maybe even a few poems from Wilfred Owen. He would like that.
Two days passed. The other members of the team, including orderlies, cooks and communications people, were beginning to disappear. Eisenhower’s rented house was locked up and the blinds drawn. The headquarters offices in the Farben buildings were almost empty. The cleaners that remained moved among rows of desks, past empty water-coolers and phones that never rang.
There must have been a mistake, confusion in the flight orders that explained the delay. He had placed his hand on her heart and said that she was to join him, had he not?
The next telex that arrived was addressed to all remaining Frankfurt headquarters personnel and pinned on the main staff noticeboard. There were a series of announcements about the times of flights and about medical checks for those staff who had been working in camps for displaced persons in the city, a list of names of those eligible for the remaining flights to the US, and a further short list of those “not eligible for repatriation”.
Kay Summersby. Not eligible for repatriation. It said exactly that. The telex didn’t carry the signature of any person but merely cited the authority of the Pentagon department responsible for the transportation home of foreign-based personnel.
She hadn’t been overlooked. She’d been deliberately excluded from the airlift back to America of Ike’s headquarters staff. Ike had obviously decided to get her to the US by other means. There could be no other explanation. They had both known that her return to Washington could cause problems.
Kay took the day off and went riding. It was what he would have done; she could almost hear him saying, Don’t worry, Kay, it will be all right, just a snafu. You’ll be here soon – I promised you that, didn’t I? Have you ever known me break a promise?
She said goodbye to the girls who had shared her flat and all her other friends on the staff. They all hugged and kissed and promised to meet up for celebratory drinks in Washington as she watched them pack their bags into the transport bus and leave for the airport.
She wondered how long it would be until she followed. It was just her and Telek left now. What was it he’d said when people asked about the name? It’s made up of the two things that make me most happy, Telegraph Cottage and Kay. She just had to be patient.
The letter ended all her hopes. Kay prided herself on her emotional maturity, her ability to deal with the hard knocks life dealt to the credulous and unwary. She knew about men and their ways. After the pain of a divorce and the loss of a fiancé to the war, she had promised never to give herself lightly to anyone. But to her dying day she would tell those close to her that this letter broke her heart.
The official white manila envelope was handed to her in her office with the other official mail. Next door, Ike’s large office had been locked and sealed. She was almost the last one in the building now except for the security guards.
She saw that the letter had been stamped and franked by the War Department in Washington. At first it gave rise to the faint hope that this was it, that a note inside, handwritten in Ike’s inimitable scrawl, would apologise for the manner in which things were happening and for the delay. But a moment’s thought told her this could not be. Ike wouldn’t write; he’d call with such happy news.
She sat down at her desk, lit a cigarette, slid a nail under the rim of the envelope and opened it.
The typewritten note on War Department stationery read:
Dear Kay
I am terribly distressed, first because it has become impossible to keep you as a member of my personal official family, and secondly because I cannot come back and give you a detailed account of my reasons.
In this letter I shall not attempt to express the depth of my appreciation for the unexcelled loyalty and faithfulness with which you have worked for the past three and a half years under my personal direction.
I am sure you understand that I am personally much distressed that an association that has been so valuable to me has to be terminated in this particular fashion but it is for reasons over which I have no control.
Finally, I hope you will drop me a note from time to time – I will always be interested to know how you are getting on.
Below his signature Ike had written a postscript in his own hand:
Take care of yourself and retain your optimism.
Kay felt faint. She took a huge breath as the room revolved slowly and then breathed hard and fast, shaking her head to stop the world spinning around her. She crumpled the letter into a ball and flung it at the door, walked to the door, scooped up the balled paper and flung it harder at the window. It bounced back and rolled towards her as if a reminder that bad news was not to be so lightly dismissed. She walked across and kicked it into a corner.
She needed a drink badly. In the old days there would have been half a pint of whisky or vodka on a sideboard. Not now. They had even taken the pictures off the walls.
She picked up the crumpled letter, smoothed it out and read it again. The same words stared back at her. So it was true. She’d been literally airbrushed out of history. Their love affair – and what else could you call it? – had become an “association”; she had shown “loyalty and faithfulness” as if she had been a long-term secretary rather than the woman he had held in his arms and covered with kisses, and with whom he had stripped off his uniform.
He had kept her at his side from the summer days of 1942 right through to this moment. He had introduced her to Churchill, Roosevelt and all his top generals, especiall
y Bradley, Patton and Clark. They liked her. Why? Because they knew Ike could not do without her, and the imperative of the war overrode all else. More than that, they thought he loved her, that they were having an affair.
That was what Bradley and the others gossiped about, wasn’t it? Ike hardly concealed the fact. He had even insisted she stand in line to meet King George VI in North Africa despite the objections of royal aides. That cold, crowned fish had looked right through her and moved on without a word.
And after all that, she had received a typewritten note on Pentagon paper. The cold, hard tree-trunk of a man she had held and hugged so often was just that – cold and hard. He was a career soldier who had taken the ruthless step of dismissing her from his life when she was of no further use. He had done so to reclaim his marriage and embark on the next stage of his career. Could she blame him? Was that not what great men did? Use others around them to climb to the next level of the mountain?
How right Charlotte had been. A woman in love will believe anything.
Kay went out that night looking for a bar, anywhere to get away from the Farben building with its vile past and now its grim association with personal betrayal. Normally she would join the few remaining staff in the headquarters’ hospitality suite, a coy name for a shabby bar in the basement, but not tonight.
She waited a few minutes for a taxi she knew would never come. There were few in the city, and most didn’t work after dark.
She would walk in search of a bar if she had to. The streets weren’t safe, but she wasn’t afraid. The Beretta was in her handbag as always. She would occasionally take it out and marvel at how such elegant craftsmanship could be the agent of death.
She wanted to take it out and use it on these dark streets, to hold it as he had showed her and pull the trigger, watching the robber, the rapist crumple to the ground. The boys on the range had said the Beretta lacked stopping power, but Kay reckoned that a couple of .25 bullets at close range would stop anyone intent on harming her.
She was enjoying the fantasy when an unmarked car clearly cruising for passengers drove slowly past. She hailed it. This was against all military rules. She didn’t care.
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