Kay knew the words by heart. She knew just how many steps it took to reach the Doric pillars and the entrance to the Low Library. She knew too that the building that many called the heart and soul of Columbia was no longer a library. The university’s archives and books were now housed in a larger, more modern building that had been built before the war.
The Low Library was now a series of offices from which one of the world’s great universities was administered. The president of the university worked from a suite of rooms on the ground floor. Every day of the working week, usually just before nine in the morning, the president walked through Columbia’s iron gates, crossed the large forecourt, climbed those steps and walked past the pillars into the beating heart of the university. He would go to his office and the academic day would begin. It was a familiar routine welcomed by students and staff because it spoke of both great tradition and open governance.
Kay knew this, just as she knew the location of every classroom and lecture hall on campus. For weeks since the appointment had been announced she had taken the subway from Greenwich Village to 116th Street every day in those autumn months of 1948 to walk the campus, take coffee with students and listen and learn about the workings of the university.
She had ignored the advice of close friends and given into a desire so deep in her being that it defied rational explanation. She was obsessed – an obsession born not of love or loss, she told herself, but of certainty. Kay was certain that General Dwight Eisenhower, who had taken up his position as the new president of Columbia University in the fall of 1948, wished to see to her again.
She knew he would be glad of the chance to remind himself of what they had had known together and what they had lost. She knew also that it was only force of circumstance and the rigorous code of army conduct that had made him turn his back on her
Now he was free of the army and unconstrained by the stifling conventions of high military office. He was married, of course, but he had also been married in the years they had spent together during the war. He had been married when he told her he would never let her go. He had been married when he promoted her, gave her a position in the US Army and arranged American citizenship for her. He had been married when he sent her a four-leaf clover pressed into a greetings card. A well-wisher in Ireland had sent it to him and he had given it to her with a note saying it would bring them both luck. She knew his feelings couldn’t have changed deep down. No man could deny such elemental emotions for ever.
Ike had come to New York to become the top administrator and fundraiser for a major university. This was so far out of his area of expertise that there had to be another reason why he had accepted the post. After all, Kay had read in the papers, like everyone else in America, that the famous General Eisenhower was inundated with offers of well-paid corporate positions, all of which would generously allow him time to write his memoirs.
It must be because he knew she was in New York. He would have read the stories about her book contract and the impending publication date this autumn. He would have heard about the many speaking engagements that had been planned, and that there was so much interest in the book that a nationwide tour had been talked about.
She had been careful not to say anything that might embarrass him – the book was a fair and accurate record that showed him as the victorious commander of Allied military forces in a hard-fought war. If anyone wished to draw inferences from the fact that the book showed how closely they had worked together, how she had been promoted from his driver to his secretary, and then to his personal aide, well let them. Why should she care? That scuttlebutt had been going on for years anyway.
It was clear to Kay, beyond doubt, as it would be to any reasonable woman, that when Ike had decided to move from Washington to New York, he had done so not just to accept the mortar board, gown and hefty salary from Columbia but with a more subtle design in mind. His arrival was a sign, whether he consciously recognised it or not, that they were destined to be together in the end. He had come to New York because somewhere deep in his heart flickered the desire to see her again.
The ten-thousand-dollar advance she had received for her memoirs had enabled her to move into a larger apartment and rent a cottage in Long Island. Men were anxious to take her out, and one man in particular, a stockbroker called Morgan, seemed intent on deepening the relationship. She spent nights at his apartment. He was caring, kind and rather boring. He said he liked Telek, but she could see that wasn’t true.
New York knew all about Telek. The black Highland terrier was well known in all the good restaurants and the nightclubs, too, where he was allowed to stay in the coatrooms while she drank, dined and danced with her admirers. She made sure that the press stories mentioned Telek. When reporters asked what the name meant, she said it was a private matter between her and her old boss. She said she had given him the little puppy as a mark of her esteem and he had chosen the name. That was all.
And now, this autumn, she had decided the time had come to redress what was clearly a wrong done to both of them. It was asking too much to expect him to initiate contact. She would do it. She would arrange an encounter somewhere on the campus, a casual chance meeting that would bring together two old friends.
She had her story ready. Her sister in England had a cousin who was studying at the college. She had asked Kay to look him up. She knew Eisenhower would never believe it, but that wouldn’t matter. What mattered was that he would see her again for the first time since that terrible forced parting in the Pentagon. And it had been forced. He would never coldly have turned his back on her like that if he had not been forced to do so.
Their chance meeting would give her the excuse for a conversation, just a few warm words of surprise and affection that would lead to a meeting for tea in one of the great hotels. There they would talk about old times. Telek would be there and would make much of his old master. She would bring a present for him. A box of luxury chocolates like the ones he had given her when he’d left London for the first time back in 1942. He would remember that. He would remember everything.
She saw him the moment he walked through the gates in a long gabardine raincoat. He was wearing a trilby hat that looked so different from the peaked braided army caps of the past that it seemed out of character. He was holding a briefcase in his hand and looked stern. It had been raining in the night and there were puddles on the paving. His polished brown shoes splashed into them, but he didn’t notice.
Students laden with bulging satchels were crossing the forecourt in that aimless manner of those who wanted to be doing something else, almost anything else, other than going to a class.
She walked, head down, as if deep in thought so as to cross his approach to the library steps.
She heard her name. “Kay!”
She looked up. Eisenhower had stopped, a look of total surprise on his face.
“Ike! Hello!”
“Kay! What are you doing here?”
“How are you? Congratulations on the new job.”
“Kay ... why are you here?”
She began to tell her story, garbling the words, and stopped. She could see disbelief on his face. He had gone red in the face again with a familiar look of anger and embarrassment.
“Kay, you shouldn’t be here.”
“But I thought ...”
“Kay, I can’t do anything for you.”
“... we might just talk.”
“No, Kay. It’s not possible. We talked about this last time. I wish you well, but ... I’m sorry.”
He stood there and shook his head. Around them students streamed towards the steps, some turning to look back at the famous face they had passed.
“Ike, can’t we just talk – old times and all that?”
“It’s not possible, Kay. There’s nothing I can do. You know that.”
She felt a sudden urge to throw this man the snappy
salute he had taught her. A small gesture of defiance that would embarrass him in front of his students and probably made her look like a mad woman. Well, maybe she was – maybe this is what it had come to. The woman who could not let go of a man who had long left the stage. There she was, the last of the cast in a darkened theatre. Everyone had gone home.
She watched him turn and walk away up the steps of the library. The inscription above the entrance he passed through might as well have read “THE END”.
But it wasn’t the end. How could it be?
Everybody knew that Eisenhower would become president of the United States of America. That’s what all the smart columnists in Washington and New York kept writing and the radio commentators kept reporting. They said he was being very clever in biding his time and not running against Truman this year but waiting until ’52.
Then he and Mamie would move into the White House, the president and his First Lady. She would watch him greeting foreign leaders with that familiar smile and frowning at press conferences as reporters threw curveball questions at him. He would play golf just as he had done at Telegraph Cottage and maybe go riding as they had every day in Richmond Park. He might even try his hand in the White House kitchen at one of the favourite stews he had made at the cottage. It would be very Ike to move the White House chef aside and say, “Let me show you how to do this.”
He was the kind of man who would do that. He would gather a new family around him in the White House, men and women who would work hard for him, look after him, and some of whom would maybe lose a little of their hearts to him.
She watched him disappear into the library, then turned and walked back to 116th Street. She knew now what she should have known the moment those movement orders were placed on the board in the Frankfurt office. She had been cut out of the life of a man who she thought had loved her.
The sky was turning dark; it was going to rain. She wanted a cloudburst to drench the streets and calm the rage rising within her. Let thunder roll over Columbia’s ancient buildings and lightning strike the Low Library. She had been stupid of course, guilty of falling in love with the man who had just humiliated her. The humiliation lay not in the abrupt way he had walked off. It lay in her own stupidity. She had been credulous, allowing emotion born of make-believe to swell into the fantasy that flowered in cheap romance novels and corny love songs.
It began to rain, a light shower which opened umbrellas along the street. Heavy traffic was moving in both directions. Soon the street would be pedestrianised in a deal that had been struck with the mayor. It had been Ike’s first act as Columbia’s president. The announcement had made him very popular with the students. He’d always liked to show his troops he was on their side, that he cared, that he could make a difference to their lives. Those were the people he really loved.
She walked down the steps to the subterranean world below ground and caught the subway for the sixteen-stop ride down to Greenwich Village. In the womb of the transit system she felt calmer. Manhattan was so eye-catching, so unlikely, so startlingly original above ground that the fetid warmth of the subway was like a counter-reality, the real world of New York City.
Every stop on the subway added to the architecture of this dark world. She knew them all now. After Central Park North the line would swing south towards the Hudson River and turn again to run beneath Upper West Side, beneath the Lincoln Centre and the Columbia Circle. The track would slide deeper after 50th Street, then run closer to the surface from 14th Avenue to her stop near SoHo.
The familiarity of this underground world, the warmth and safety far from the shiny, traffic-choked streets above, the symphonic rattle of steel wheels on iron tracks, calmed Kay and sent her into a sleepless reverie.
She closed her eyes and drifted back to her last days in Germany. She wondered why she had never thought to ask what the E in Charles E. Burrows stood for. Ernest perhaps, it suited him. He would be back home now with his wife and family. Would he remember, as she did so clearly, the night they had danced in a ruined school in Berlin? Would he recall, as she could, every moment in that hotel room when two naked strangers had collided and clung together between damp sheets?
She thought of Charlotte, now the lady of the manor on a country estate far from her wild days in London. The thought was so improbable that Kay spun the story forward. There would be babies and nannies. Charlotte would become bored with her husband and the country. There would be a brief fling with a younger man, an under-gardener perhaps.
This would be a deliberate act on Charlotte’s part, a bid for freedom, but James Arbuthnot Wilberforce would not notice the indiscretion or choose to ignore it. Charlotte would then begin an affair with one of his friends, maybe another Yorkshire landowner, that would be too obvious to ignore. After a terrible row she would move to a flat London.
A divorce would follow, made much of in the society press. Charlotte would revert to her maiden name and resume life as a social butterfly. But she would be older. She would have the responsibilities of motherhood. It would not be the same. And that, Kay reflected, was the bitter truth. Nothing, especially happiness, stays the same.
When she surfaced it was a brighter day than she had left at Columbia. Low clouds carrying the promise of rain had shrouded the skyscrapers uptown. Here in the village there were no high-rises, and the sun shone fitfully as the clouds continued their leisurely journey to nowhere. It was quieter and calmer in this part of the city.
She walked slowly, not hurrying, thinking of the decision she had come to somewhere on the subway ride beneath the city. She hated the idea but knew she had to do it. She walked briskly the few blocks to a small green park alongside the Hudson River. Beyond the trees and lawns lay a walkway with railings bordering the river. She looked over the railings at the mud-brown waters flowing imperceptibly to the sea.
She looked around but saw no one nearby. She reached into her handbag and took out the Beretta. The gun fitted so well into her hand that even a passer-by would not notice it. There were a few dog walkers in the distance and a pair of lovers coiled around each other on a park seat.
Otherwise there were no witnesses. He had given her the gun five years ago in North Africa. It had stayed with ever since, a faithful companion and talisman of a mythical past. She raised her arm and threw the gun as far as she could, watching it fall in a silver arc into the dark waters. She turned and walked away.
Telek would be waiting impatiently for his walk. That night her stockbroker would take her to a candlelit dinner in an Italian restaurant they both liked in the village. A silver-framed mirror ran the length of one wall. An older and wiser woman would be watching her that night. There would be flowers and champagne on the table. He would propose to her, if not that night then very soon. She would say yes; they would kiss and she would cry, long pent-up tears that wouldn’t stop. She was a long-lapsed churchgoer marrying a protestant of good Scottish American stock. They would find a church somewhere in the village where they would celebrate their vows with a discreet ceremony.
She would send an invitation to General Dwight Eisenhower and Mamie. She would receive a polite typewritten reply. He would decline the invitation but offer his best wishes for her future happiness. He would mean that, just as he had surely, in his heart, meant every word he had said to her on the long road they had travelled during the war.
She knew he would never forget.
Historical Note
This is a historical novel based on careful research which I hope lends credibility to the extraordinary stories played out by the main characters, almost all of them real people living and fighting in what was a very real war.
I have drawn on the many accounts of General Eisenhower’s wartime service in Europe and his immediate post-war life in the US. The story of the man he faced across the Channel in 1944, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, is also based on voluminous records. Kay Summersby, Eisenhower’s driver, who
became his secretary, personal assistant and wartime companion, has told her story in two books. The first, Eisenhower Was My Boss (Prentice Hall, New York, 1948) was a factual and detailed account of her work for the wartime commander. The second, Past Forgetting (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1976) was dictated as she was dying in 1975, and revealed her wartime affair with the man she called “the boss”.
Many of Eisenhower’s biographers have cast doubt on Summersby’s account of the relationship, although I note that almost all of them quote from Past Forgetting. It is easy to see why. Although colourfully written in breathless prose, the book has the stamp of truth. One reason is that Summersby makes clear that although her relationship with Eisenhower was on occasion sexual, it was never fully consummated. If a dying woman was fantasising about her affair with a man who was to become president of the United States, she would hardly detract from her story with such an admission.
The real controversy about Eisenhower’s relationship with his driver is whether or not in the immediate aftermath of the war he wrote to the chief of staff, George Marshall, asking permission to divorce his wife Mamie with the obvious intention of marrying Summersby. This story surfaced in Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman by Merle Miller (Victor Gollancz, London, 1974), based on a series of taped interviews. Truman, then in his late eighties, was categoric that Eisenhower had written the divorce letter to Marshall and that the chief of staff had furiously refused the request. Truman went on to say that although he disliked Eisenhower, he had the letter removed from the Pentagon file and destroyed when he left office in 1953.
Again, most of Eisenhower’s biographers have gone to some lengths to dismiss the story, claiming it was no more than a malicious tale invented by an old man. However, the distinguished historian Jean Edward Smith in his recent biography Eisenhower in War and Peace (Random House, New York, 2012) not only credits the divorce letter story as the truth but goes to considerable and convincing lengths to justify that assertion.
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