The General's Women

by Susan Wittig Albert

  Ambulance driver, Eisenhower thought. That’s why she handled the big Packard with such skill. Would’ve taken a lot of courage, though. He’d seen newsreels of the horror in which those drivers worked.

  “Bomb spotters?” Clark asked, his attention caught as well.

  “Incendiary bombs fall on the roof, in the back garden, anywhere. They’re only about a foot long, but if you let them lie, they blaze up. Next thing you know, the whole block’s afire. Mostly happens at night. Mum and the others pick them up, drop them into a bucket of sand, and carry them to a disposal depot. The next morning, they wash their faces and off they go to work.” She chuckled. “You’ve seen the posters? ‘Keep calm and carry on.’ It became our family slogan after our flat was bombed.”

  “My God,” Eisenhower said softly. He was thinking of Mamie, how shielded she was from the war, as all American women were. Not their fault, of course, that’s just how it was, and how he wanted it, how any red-blooded American man would want it. Still, he couldn’t imagine his wife—Mamie’s health had always been fragile—having the courage to pick up a bomb and haul it to a disposal depot, or pilot an ambulance through blazing streets, or carry on calmly after her apartment got bombed. And here was a whole family—mother, daughters, sisters—doing just that, putting all they had into the war effort.

  At the wheel of the Packard, Kay caught Eisenhower’s glance in the mirror again and was surprised to see the compassion in it. She was finding this American backseat passenger to be much different from others she had driven. The stiff, formal British officers kept quiet so as not to reveal their ignorance. Americans and Canadians were free with their innuendos and their hands. General Clark was not inclined to talk. She thought he was shy.

  But Eisenhower, easy and comfortable and entirely natural, peppered her with curious questions about the landscape and the people and their reactions to the war and to the American soldiers who were beginning to arrive by the boatload. He seemed especially interested in what women were doing, so Kay told him what she knew about women acting as air-raid and Home Guard officials and serving in the auxiliary forces—the WRENs, the WAAFs, the ATS, and of course, the MTC.

  “We’re not just cooks and clerks and telephone operators and typists.” She added proudly, “We’re also drivers, mechanics, armorers, searchlight operators, radar technicians. Why, I have a friend who operates an anti-aircraft gun in Hyde Park.”

  “Just what we need,” Eisenhower said to Clark. “They’ll release the men for combat.”

  “Excuse me, sir,” Kay said firmly, remembering the gun emplacement that had been blown up in Wormwood Scrubs, killing several women. “Driving an ambulance, operating anti-aircraft guns—that is combat. People die.” She looked in the mirror. “Women die, sir. Women die serving.”

  Eisenhower cleared his throat. “Noted, Miss Summersby. Thank you.” She was still Mrs. Summersby, but not for much longer. She didn’t correct him.

  The harried days were packed with meetings and conferences from early morning until late at night, and Kay noticed that her passengers were losing the spring in their step. She was feeling the effort, too, since getting them where they needed to go, on time, was something of a challenge. On Saturday, after a long morning’s meeting at the War Office, Eisenhower collapsed in the backseat.

  “The war can do without us for a few hours,” he said. “Clark and I are playing hooky for the rest of the day, starting—” He looked at his watch. “Starting now. Where’s a good place for lunch, Kay?”

  She was caught off-guard by the General’s deliberate use of her first name—how had he learned it? But she knew the answer.

  “You’ll like the Connaught, sir. It may be the only place in London where you can get a halfway decent piece of fish.”

  “Eating high on the hog, huh?” he said with a grin. “Let’s do it.”

  She frowned, puzzled. “Ham? Yes, I suppose, but—”

  “That just means we’re aiming to have a good meal,” Eisenhower said, and grinned again. “You know. Two countries divided by a common language.”

  Kay had to laugh. When they reached Mount Street, she got out and opened the door for the two men, then started to get back into the car, as usual.

  “Where are you going, Kay?” Eisenhower asked. “You’ve earned a good lunch. Come on and join us.” He pulled his brows together. “That’s an order.”

  Kay was dumbfounded. She had been driving the War Office top brass for almost a year, and she had never heard of generals taking a driver to lunch. But she tucked in her chin, saluted, and parked the car.

  In the elegant Connaught dining room, the maître d’ seated the three of them at a table covered with snowy-white damask, studded with silver and crystal, and centered with a bowl of white roses. They decided on a green salad (a real luxury for Kay), poached salmon, and for dessert, strawberry tarts.

  “A bottle of your best house white,” Eisenhower said to the hovering waiter. As the wineglasses were filled and refilled and the salads came and went, he and Clark traded funny stories from their military past while Kay laughed with them, surreptitiously watching the man she’d mostly seen in her rearview mirror. He had alert blue eyes, a hearty laugh, and a vibrant, resonant voice that he used with authority. His hands as he talked were emphatic, underlining his points. His baldness somehow made him more masculine, and his grin was enormously appealing, especially as the meal went on and he relaxed in the congeniality of Clark’s friendship.

  But the two men didn’t leave her out of the conversation. They invited her to share in the stories and the laughter, so that diners at nearby tables frowned—until Eisenhower turned that infectious grin on them and they succumbed to what Kay was now calling his natural “charm.” She had met enough officers to know that the general across the table was someone special—a man’s man with the kind of personal authority that could compel attention and respect from those under him without frightening them into whimpering ninnies. A man who somehow made every other man in the room a little less . . . well, manly.

  On the other side of the table, Eisenhower was having the time of his life. He had always enjoyed the company of pretty women. Like Marian Huff, the woman who had been his frequent golf and bridge partner in the Philippines—so frequent that Mamie (who was still back in the States) heard the gossip and figured she’d better join him.

  But Kay was even prettier than Marian. In fact, when she took off her cap and fluffed up her auburn hair, he saw with pleasure that she wasn’t just pretty, she was beautiful, with a fey Irish beauty. Of course she was young, he thought with something like wistfulness, probably young enough to be his daughter. She was pert and playful and lively, with that lilting Irish accent and some unusual—to his ear—Irish turns of phrase. When dessert was served, she stared down at the luscious-looking strawberry tart on her plate and reverently whispered, “Jeanie Mac.”

  When he asked, she laughed. “It’s short for ‘Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and all the Holy Martyrs’—a way of saying ‘Jesus Christ’ in front of the nuns, and getting away with it.”

  Wondering how Mamie would react if he suddenly came out with “Jeanie Mac,” Eisenhower gave a rueful chuckle. His wife was forever nagging him about his profanity, which was perhaps why it felt good to let loose with it when he was with the men, or with someone who took it lightly, like Kay. If he’d stopped to think about this, he might have recognized that the freedom he felt in this woman’s company was due to the fact that he saw nothing judgmental in her eyes or in her light laugh. Just pleasure and perhaps, something of surprise. Recognizing that, he might have retreated to the safety of a uniformed formality.

  But instead, when they’d finished dessert and coffee, he found himself saying, “We’ve seen nothing but military installations on this trip, Kay. How about showing us an English village or two?” He turned to Clark. “What do you say, Wayne?”

  Clark shook his head. “Got something else in the works. You two go on.”

  “Kay?�
�� Eisenhower asked.

  “Sure, and that’ll be wonderful!” Kay’s smile grew even brighter and her eyes seemed to dance. “We’ll go north into Buckinghamshire—all the cobbled lanes and lambs and thatched cottages you’ve ever hoped to see.”

  It seemed natural to Eisenhower, since this was an informal outing, to get into the front seat beside Kay, where he could better hear her tour-guide descriptions of the sights they were seeing. They drove through charming little villages that looked as if they were right out of an eighteenth-century painting, with spired churches, red roses tumbling over mossy stone walls, and, yes, thatched cottages and lambs playing in the meadows. They stopped in West Wycombe, where Eisenhower somewhat belatedly thought to visit a quaint shop and ask Kay to pick out a brooch for Mamie. He pulled a handful of unfamiliar coins out of his pocket and held them out on the flat of his hand so that she could choose the right ones to pay the proprietor. He might have asked himself why he noticed that her fingers were cool and deft and her hair whispered of fresh lavender, like the sheets in his mother’s linen closet. But the pleasure was too startling and too brief and Eisenhower wasn’t accustomed to asking such an intimate question of himself. He let it go.

  And he didn’t ask himself why he was delighted when Kay pulled up in front of a pub, turned to him, and asked, a little shyly, he thought: “Would it be too outrageous if I suggested that it’s a gin-and-tonic sort of day?”

  “Not at all,” he said, happy to extend the afternoon. “I should have thought of it myself.”

  So they sat outdoors with their drinks, across from the village’s Memorial Green and its statue honoring the dead of the Great War, decorated now with wreaths for the dead of this war. The glimmering day slid into dusk and the little village folded itself away for the night. He asked Kay about herself and learned of Inish Beg, where she had ridden and sailed and tormented her governesses, and of her forays into acting and modeling. There had been a marriage and a separation and now a divorce in the offing, and he wasn’t at all surprised to learn that there was also a man, an American captain in Chaney’s Observer Group, and that they were to be married when both of them were free.

  But of course there was a man, he thought. She was beautiful and brave and young, and while he couldn’t acknowledge the sharp thrust of envy he felt when he thought of the other man, he could smile and say that he wished the two of them well. And he could even feel quite relieved as he said it, for he had the feeling that he had been standing on the brink of something forbidden and undoubtedly foolish, from which he had been saved by this young American captain.

  All that lovely afternoon, the war had seemed like a bad dream barely recollected. But the next day Eisenhower met with Churchill and the war was back with a vengeance, a pack of angry wolves snapping at him from all directions. After Churchill it was another day with the Chiefs of Staff, and then the mission was over and he and Clark were scheduled to fly back to Washington.

  But fog had set in again and the flight was delayed until the next evening, so Miss Summersby—Kay—had driven them back to the hotel. The following morning, as he was shaving and trying to decide how to spend the extra day, the phone in his hotel room rang. When he picked it up, he heard a breathless Irish voice say, “I was wondering, sir—since you’re grounded, p’rhaps you’d like a tour of London. I’d be glad to do the honors.”

  He felt it then, a quick, warm surge of pleasure, overlaid with a shadow of guilt. He understood what it meant and was grateful once again to the young captain, who made it possible for him to say, “Clark is off somewhere, but I think it’s a fine idea, thank you, Kay. If you’re sure you’ve nothing else to do—”

  “No, nothing.” There was a quick chuckle. “At least, nothing I’d like better. Twenty minutes? Out in front?”

  • • •

  Afterward, Kay wondered where in the world she got the appalling nerve to ring up Eisenhower. She caught her breath as he picked up the phone, realizing how brazen she must sound and bracing herself against a terse “Sorry, I’m busy.” When he agreed, she was flooded with relief and so delighted that she gave a little skip as she put down the phone and hurried to brush her uniform jacket.

  They spent the morning being tourists. She took him to the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, and the Guildhall, as well as Fleet Street—the home of most of the British newspapers. Pulling up to the curb opposite an imposing building in Bryanston Court, she pointed out where Wallis Simpson had lived when the Prince of Wales was pursuing her.

  “You were here then,” Eisenhower said. “What was it like for you? That abdication business, I mean.”

  She thought about that for a moment. “It seemed quite an intriguing romance. Edward was immensely popular among the people, you see. He was modern and democratic, very unlike the old king. We ordinary people, we didn’t want him to abandon the throne. We thought the church and the royal family ought to stop being so old-maidish and stuffy about Mrs. Simpson’s divorce. Which was, after all, a bit of a cock-up, the way the law is written. Let him have her, if that’s who he needed to help him do his job.”

  She laughed a little, thinking of her own divorce, which was rather an embarrassment. The only acceptable grounds were adultery, and Gordon was off in India, where she couldn’t charge him, even though he and Nancy were sleeping together whenever they were in the same country. So by mutual consent and in order to get it done, she had agreed to be the adulteress.

  She pulled herself back to the conversation. “The abdication was terribly romantic, I suppose. A crown in exchange for a lady. But still, we were all a little hurt when he preferred Mrs. Simpson to the lot of us.”

  “The King should have remembered his duty.” Eisenhower’s mouth was a hard, flat line and his voice was chilly. “Especially at a time when Europe was clearly in such jeopardy.”

  Kay felt an odd jolt of something like disappointment, but of course you couldn’t expect an American general, however sympathetic and likable, to understand a king who had lost his heart.

  “Well, I suppose that’s why Queen Mary gave old King George a couple of spares, in addition to the heir,” she said, chuckling. “Anyway, everybody loves our new King George. He never wanted to be king but he tries very hard to do it up right. He’s absolutely devoted to us, which is heaps of comfort in the mornings after the bombings. He and the Queen come out of the palace and climb through the rubble and commiserate with people, which counts for a great deal, really. I doubt Mrs. Simpson—the Duchess, as she is now—would do as much.” She put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb. “Where next?”

  Eisenhower lit a cigarette. “How about showing me where you were stationed during the Blitz.”

  She glanced at him, surprised. “Why? There’s not much left.”

  “I haven’t seen many signs of the war in what we’ve visited so far,” he said. “Either the area wasn’t bombed, or it’s been cleaned up. I want to see the worst.” He looked at her. “Do you mind?”

  “No, of course not,” she said, although that wasn’t quite true. She didn’t like going back to the bad places. There were too many horrible memories. But she drove him across Vauxhall Bridge to Lambeth, and along the river. She stopped in front of a heap of burned-out brick and timber, a building that had been leveled on the last day of bombing.

  “This is where I was stationed,” she said. “My group of ambulance drivers practically lived here during the Blitz. It was Armageddon every night.” She pointed toward the Thames. “The oil depots at the wharves went up in great pillars of fire and black smoke, and the streets were so full of rubble we couldn’t get our ambulances through.” She shuddered. “No light, of course, only the fires. And no sounds, except for exploding bombs and the anti-aircraft guns. And the horrible cries of people who were trapped and burning in the collapsed tenements.” She closed her eyes, then opened them again. “It was hell.” Her voice broke. “Pure hell.”

  Eisenhower looked down at her, not smilin
g now, his blue eyes dark and very serious. “And you were driving through that, with the bombs still falling?”

  “I had to,” Kay said simply. “I was needed. We were needed. So we did it. I don’t know how, but we did it, all of us.” She closed her eyes and saw it all again, wishing that he could see it too, so he would understand—he and all the Americans who thought that war was something that happened somewhere else, to someone else. This war had happened at home, to her and her family and their friends, and she could never forget it—or forgive Hitler for causing it.

  She shivered and felt the General’s big hand on her shoulder, comforting, as if she were a child remembering a bad dream. She took a breath and went on. “The worst was one night when we ran out of bags for the bodies and piled the corpses in the back of the ambulance, with location tags tied to their ankles. When I got the load to the mortuary—” She gulped. “When I got to the mortuary, there was no room. They sent me to another mortuary, but it was full too. They sent me to a half-ruined warehouse that had nothing in it but dead bodies. Stacks and stacks of dead bodies. And the stench—” She put her hand to her face, remembering how it had smelled, and how the bombing had gone on and on and there had been no end to the dead filling her ambulance, to be delivered to morgues that were already full. “As if I were . . . Charon,” she whispered.

  “The ferryman of the dead,” Eisenhower said. His fingers tightened on her shoulder. “Sail upon the wind of lamentation, my friend, and pass over Acheron to the sunless land that receives all men.”

  She raised her eyes and stared at him, surprised. “Yes,” she said. “Yes.”

  Eisenhower dropped his hand and pulled out a cigarette. “That took courage, Kay.”