The Emperor's General

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by James Webb


  “I feel sick,” she said.

  “I’m sorry, Divina Clara.”

  “I have morning sickness and I can’t even tell my mother.”

  I walked to her and sat on the bed, embracing her. Outside, the jeep’s driver slammed another door, started the engine, and turned on the lights, an impatient signal to me. I held her some more.

  “It will be a boy,” she said, nestling her head against my chest and making it sound like a question. “My grandmother always said that’s what the morning sickness means.”

  In the jeep, the radio went on. “I wish I could stay to help you. But I have to go, Divina Clara.”

  “What would you like to name him?”

  “I need some time to think about that.”

  The radio volume went up louder. A country song twanged through the window, lamenting lost love and cheating hearts, threatening to awaken the entire household.

  “You always have to go. I think you always will be gone.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said again. “I have no control over my life.”

  I held her more tightly. Then she abruptly pushed me away, as if my leaving were permissible if she decided that it must take place.

  “Hurry up, Jay. You’ll miss your plane.”

  “I’ll be back. Soon.”

  “Maybe,” she said.

  And then she turned away from me, feigning sleep.

  The courier flight that would return me to Atsugi left Nichols Field just after dawn. I was addled and melancholy as I boarded the brand-new C-54. My insides churned from the cup of bad coffee that the driver had poured for me from a thermos as I climbed into the jeep. My eyes were pasty from lack of sleep. I took my seat next to an already soundly snoring colonel, strapped the seat belt across my lap, and tried again to understand what was happening to me.

  I could not stop thinking of Divina Clara pressing my hands into her smooth, hard belly as the perfumed night air wafted over us and the moon made ribbons on the bed as it shone down through the wooden window slats. Remembering her tearful face and the unspoken accusations in her simple, pointed questions left me queasy, as if I myself were going through morning sickness.

  The loadmaster strolled the narrow aisle of the C-54, counting his passengers and finally signaling to the copilot that we were ready to roll. In the bluing sky above the runway the moon had just gone down. Somewhere a clock ticked over. The plane began to taxi along the runway. And again I was leaving her behind, this time holding a belly full of child.

  We were not yet married, but what did that matter? She had loved me with an incomprehensible fullness. She had trusted me. We were joined now, inextricably and forever, in blood as well as spirit. She had taken me inside her and together we were going to bring new life into the world. And in the middle of the night she had asked me questions, giving me an intuitive and indecipherable test. And I had failed it.

  And so I knew not only that I loved her but that I owed her. She had been living with a terrifying panic that I had dismissed as simple loneliness. Indeed, what did she possess, other than my words, that showed the strength of my commitment to her? I was now living in another country. I had been sleeping with another woman. For all she knew I might decide to go home to California or Arkansas or wherever—having never left the Philippines they were all mere words to her anyway—or perhaps simply stay permanently in Japan and never even come back to Manila to say good-bye. She had been waiting, waiting, trusting words that were uttered before the world had changed and the war had gone away, carrying the child of a man who, despite his plaintive reassurance, she might never see again.

  And what of me? In one slow night the world had turned, and another mirror had been held resolutely before my face. What a glorious time I had been having in Tokyo as Divina Clara’s life was being swept away by uncertainty and fear! What right did I have to my dinners and my clever conversations, to my grand thoughts about the future of Japan, when the future of Jay Marsh, and the eternal veneration of Divina Clara Ramirez, had entered this microcosmic thermonuclear crisis?

  I had no choice. It was time for me to leave the army and return to Manila for good.

  The plane neared the end of the runway and lifted easily into the air. I began to rehearse the words I might use, first to General Court Whitney and then to MacArthur himself, in order to expedite my discharge. I would tell them that I was a reserve officer, anyway, hardly the sort to have the words “essential to the success of the occupation” stamped into my personnel file in the first place. That I had done my part during these extraordinary three months in which history had been rewritten and the future of Japan quietly agreed upon. That it had been an honor to be trusted and to have been involved in so many momentous events. But that now they should allow me to leave.

  The C-54 bounced lightly on sudden puffs of wind, rising above Manila Bay. Below me, like an old and distant dream, the still-wounded city sprawled and twisted, its long, straight streets beginning to fill with jitneys, pedicabs, and an occasional army jeep. In the bay the fishing boats were already moving languidly toward the outer banks of Bataan and Cavite. Where the bay broke into the sea the guardian island of Corregidor loomed above the water like a teardrop, still fractured from the millions of pounds of bombs and artillery that had pocked its fields and flattened its buildings. Saying good-bye to Manila was always emotional and nostalgic, especially in those sleepy, remembering moments just after dawn.

  Watching all this disappear below me, I vowed that I would be back permanently by Thanksgiving. That gave me three weeks. Could I do that, with the pace the army normally worked? My heart raced. Why not? The question was how to negotiate my exit. Exit. The word suddenly sounded clandestine, foreign and forbidding. Leaving MacArthur seemed almost like running away from home.

  Not only from home but from a calling for which he had prepared me and which I had come to love. After the past three months it seemed to me that I was born to live in the diplomatic world, with its playful, smart double-talk, historic stakes, and immersion into powerful, exotic cultures. I knew I was a natural and that the longer I played this game the more I might flourish. It was almost as though I had grown to manhood serving General Douglas MacArthur. And after this first taste, I could not imagine doing anything for Carlos Ramirez that would offer up the same intellectual satisfaction and emotional thrill as the work I had done in Japan.

  But no matter, I thought again. The issue was settled. I had no choice. Divina Clara was having my child, it was as simple as that. Still, this would not be easy for me. Frank Witherspoon may have been right, after all. Perhaps I did love my job too much.

  There was another consideration. Despite my lowly rank, I knew that MacArthur would resist my request. The General had a way of holding on to people who served near him. Over the past three years he had screened me, picked me, tested me, and finally come to trust me. I had been selected, brought inside the room. And I knew I was being groomed for even bigger responsibilities.

  Since our first landing at Atsugi I had been told repeatedly that I was expected to remain in Japan for as long as he needed me. With MacArthur’s tendencies, that could mean years. Indeed, General Willoughby had now served under MacArthur continuously since 1939, and Court Whitney had known him longer than that. Once the General decided that he trusted someone, once he had allowed a man (for it was always a man, he did not even meet with women) inside the room to hear his private thoughts and witness his manipulative genius, the staffer was expected to make the fulfillment of Douglas MacArthur’s destiny his career. In particular, so long as MacArthur wished to retain an unofficial line of communication with the emperor through Lord Privy Seal Kido, he would view me as irreplaceable.

  And, finally, there was something else that would drive MacArthur’s resistance to my leaving. Lowly peon that I was, I could hurt him.

  In subsequent years I learned that this unspoken but enormous fear is ingrained in most men of power who have trusted their private thoughts to subalter
ns. But even then I sensed both the importance and the danger inherent in what I had observed. I had listened to vital confidences, secret observations. I had watched intemperate outbursts of raw vanity. In short, I now possessed what Court Whitney jokingly liked to call “guilty knowledge.” And in those areas that reflected on him personally, the General could not simply demand that I remain silent forever. So long as my career continued to depend at some level on these shared secrets, I could never tell them. So long as my future was shaped in some way by my relationship with Douglas MacArthur I could never betray him. But if I escaped him clean, without an obligation to continue my loyalty and with my reputation intact, he might decide that for the rest of my life I could be a threat to his reputation and his legacy.

  So I knew that if I abruptly told MacArthur that I wished to leave, he might become nervous and just as suddenly decide that I could only do so with damaged credibility. When I did face him in the privacy of the walnut-paneled office at the Dai Ichi building, I knew I might need every skill I possessed to protect my reputation while breaking clean from Douglas MacArthur’s grasp.

  The water-swollen rice fields along the Luzon coast slowly faded behind us. The aircraft’s cabin had cooled as the plane climbed. The C-54 throttled up, having reached altitude, and vibrated so strongly that my body trembled with it. The colonel next to me was hungover. He awakened and walked groggily toward the front of the aircraft, pouring tepid coffee into a paper cup from a metal container. I sat back in my chair as if locked inside a geography machine, one that would transfer me in cocoonlike sterility from Manila’s stifling reality into the contrived, fairy-tale world of 1945 Japan.

  And somewhere above the empty sea as I dozed under the rattling drone of the plane’s propellers, I had an awakening.

  Hadn’t Sam Genius shown me the way, after all?

  My eyes blinked open. I laughed aloud. My seat-partner colonel stared uncomfortably at me, sipping his coffee. I finally understood with clarity why Genius had ambushed MacArthur. Or more properly, why the irascible lawyer had simply planned his own ambush, perhaps laying the groundwork for weeks.

  The more I thought about it, the more obvious it became. Genius knew MacArthur’s flash point even better than I myself. Growing frustrated with the supreme commander’s selective jurisprudence, like me he had decided that he wanted out. Then he had calculated all the necessary parameters with the specificity of an algebraic formula, knowing when MacArthur would decide that he had become not simply a hindrance but a threat. And he realized exactly how he might then provoke his own dismissal.

  Merely asking for a transfer would have been tantamount to begging, an admission that at some level he had failed, that the problem was not the supreme commander’s orders but Sam Genius’s inability to carry them out. MacArthur would then have controlled the bargaining points. He could have sent Genius anywhere. He could have written whatever he wished in the colonel’s fitness report. He could even have ordered Court Whitney to “find” some deficiency in Genius’s performance or personal life that was unrelated to the war crimes issues, then preemptively discredited Genius and relieved him for cause. From MacArthur’s perspective there would have been strong logic for doing just that. Staining the lawyer’s reputation would have masked the true reason for his disenchantment and made any public criticism of MacArthur sound like mere bitterness.

  Would a five-star general on the threshold of becoming an historic figure have gone to such extremes simply to insulate himself in advance from the vitriol of a disenchanted staff member? I had no need even to ponder the question. Like Yamashita himself, MacArthur knew that his reputation was his truest legacy. And like Franklin Roosevelt, that longtime adversary whom he so secretly admired, he was a master at manipulating his own persona.

  If he would trump up charges and coldly hang an innocent Tomoyuki Yamashita, if he would loudly lay the blame for the fall of Corregidor at the feet of the devoted Skinny Wainwright, he would have no qualms over sending Genius home as a falsely compromised capon.

  But instead, Genius had struck first and through his clever boldness had become a free man. He had put himself directly into play, face to face with the supreme commander, betting his reputation in the process. And by striking quickly he had taken the game away from MacArthur, finessing all the subtle warnings and the quiet, discrediting maneuverings that might otherwise have happened. He had forced the issue of his future into the open, at the same time preserving for himself a reservoir of secrets to be kept like nuclear-tipped arrows in his own quiver, held for his protection. Not to be used but to be fired back at MacArthur only if he were fired upon.

  It could have backfired, but it had not. So Genius had escaped clean. He would not spend the next two years going through the ethical drudge of prosecuting show trials that would later pass in historical comment as having held Japan accountable for war crimes. Fort Ord would be lovely in the autumn, washed by the warm desert winds as an ugly winter descended upon Japan. He could spend his weekends carefully toasting—or rather, roasting—MacArthur in his favorite bar in San Francisco. The lawyers who were left behind, or the unknowing civilians who replaced him, would carry out the counterfeit proceedings that would never include those of the highest royal blood.

  Sam Genius had it made.

  I played this thought over in my mind again and again. What had Genius read in MacArthur that I had missed? And finally it occurred to me. Genius had daringly played to the supreme commander’s two crucial weaknesses. We all knew them. We had discussed them. First, MacArthur had a tendency to cringe before demonstrations of power. The emperor had proven as much in their closed-door meeting at the embassy a month before. But others had as well. MacArthur may have fought for years to keep the ever-loyal Wainwright from receiving his Medal of Honor, but he had felt no qualms in awarding a Silver Star to then-congressman Lyndon Baines Johnson for having participated—as a passenger—in one combat flight over enemy territory. He had approved the nation’s third-highest medal for heroism for the influential politician as if it were a souvenir of his journey to the war zone, simply because Johnson had said he wanted one.

  And second, MacArthur’s ego was so voracious that he had an unavailing need to be worshiped. As in the case of General Sutherland, MacArthur could tolerate all manner of arrogance and even abuse of power so long as the adoration continued. But he could not stand to be served close-up by those who did not openly profess their devotion and subservience. When the veneration stopped, when the genuflections ceased, MacArthur looked elsewhere. And when he did look elsewhere, unless those who had stopped genuflecting had also found a shield, their reputations upon their exit from his staff would be shredded like confetti, as a matter of course in order to protect his own.

  Sam Genius had bet that in the end the very secrets he could never tell would become his own guarantor. And I knew far more secrets than had Genius. I had heard them spoken and observed them being made. Indeed, in many cases I had discovered them myself. They were a leveler that made me equal to MacArthur, not in my impact on history but in my desire to decide my own future.

  I shivered with uncertainty as the plane droned on toward Tokyo. I knew what I would have to do, although the very boldness of it all was almost more than I dared to comprehend. If I did not rescue Divina Clara I could never gaze comfortably into a mirror again. In order to do that, first I had to accept that my embryonic career as a diplomat was over. Then I had to sever my relationship with the lord privy seal, so that I would no longer be considered in any way “essential to the success of the occupation.”

  And finally, I would have to ambush General of the Armies Douglas MacArthur, so cleverly that he would decide that he had ambushed me.

  CHAPTER 22

  Father Garvey was standing in the middle of his tiny, dim-lit room, packing uniforms and souvenirs into two olive-drab army footlockers. The room smelled strongly of whiskey and tobacco. As Father Garvey looked over at me his usually laughing blue eyes seemed to swi
m longingly inside their sockets. He rubbed the top of his greying head with a small, thick hand. And then he pressed his fingers into his eyes, as if to clear them.

  “Well, doesn’t the dear Lord sometimes answer our little prayers, then? I’ve been asking Him that I might see you before I left, Jay.”

  “I just got in from Manila. They told me you were leaving. You’re going home, Father?”

  “Well I’m going back, anyway. I received my orders two days ago.” He eyed me with a scarcely concealed envy. “And how was Manila?”

  “Hot and wet,” I answered. The rest of it was so complicated that I did not even know where to begin. “Where are they sending you?”

  “I’ll be out of the army.”

  He smiled sadly. His gaze went past my face, somewhere behind me. “There’s a Jesuit retreat in Annapolis. Just across the river from the Naval Academy, they say. I’ll be there for a year or so, until they feel I’ve properly repaired my soul.”

  He was staring at me again, this time with a forced and embarrassed grin. We both knew what he meant by repairing his soul. He had told his superiors about his time in Manila.

  “You’re soul is in fine shape, Father. Haven’t I always said that you’re the only man of God I’ve ever trusted?”

  “Yes, and look what’s become of you.”

  “Don’t scold me, Father. I told you I wasn’t proud of myself.”

  “How could I scold you?” He turned away, continuing to load one of his footlockers. “I’ve never been to Annapolis, but I know how homesick it will make me feel to stroll the grounds of Manresa and look down at the river and see the boats and the sailors on the other side.”

  “You don’t even like the navy, Father.”

  “I told you, I do like the navy. It’s going on the ships that I hate.”

 

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