The General's Women

by Susan Wittig Albert

  “London is full of courage,” Kay said.

  “So I see,” Eisenhower said. “Thank you.”

  • • •

  The next morning, Kay drove the two generals to the RAF aerodrome at Northolt, where they would fly to Scotland and then back to the States. They got out of the car and shook hands politely, and General Clark thanked her for driving.

  But Eisenhower handed her a box. “For you, Kay.”

  She gasped as she took it in her hands. Chocolates! “Oh, thank you,” she whispered, deeply touched. “How very kind. Mum and Evie will be thrilled.”

  “Not at all,” the General replied with a wide smile. “If I’m ever back in London, I’d like you to drive for me again. Will you?”

  “I will, sir,” Kay said promptly, and saluted, more precisely this time.

  “That’s better,” Eisenhower said, and laughed.

  The minute the men were aboard the plane, she tore the box open, greedy for the first chocolate in months. On top of the candy was a note. “To Kay, with thanks for the glimpse into your war. I won’t forget.” It was signed DE.

  Kay watched as the plane disappeared into the overcast and Eisenhower was gone. She felt a small, unsettling sense of loss. She never expected to see him again.

  And again, she was wrong.

  CHAPTER THREE:

  The General’s Wife

  Washington, D.C.

  September 1942

  “To be honest, Cookie, I feel like a durn football.” Mamie took a cigarette out of her case. “You know the drill. When Ike was ordered to London, I was ordered off the post. I had seven days to move and I’m still bouncing around. I don’t have a bed to call my own.” She thought of adding, “Which stinks.” But she made it a rule not to criticize the army, even to longtime friends. You never knew when a careless word might get back to the commander.

  Cookie Wilson clasped her hands under her chin. “I don’t blame you for being upset, dear. How many times have you moved just since you got back from the Philippines?”

  Mamie gestured to the waiter to take her half-finished plate. She and Cookie were having lunch at Giovanni’s, a little Italian restaurant near the Mayflower Hotel. It had been one of their favorite Washington haunts back in the early thirties, when their husbands—Cookie was married to Brigadier General Marv Wilson—were both working for General MacArthur. But this was the first time Mamie had been here in five or six years, and she did not approve of the changes. The restaurant was too crowded, with too many tables jammed too close together, and much too noisy.

  “More coffee?” the waiter asked, but not encouragingly. Eager customers were lined up inside the door and he was impatient to get the table cleared and a new pair of diners seated. It wasn’t just Giovanni’s, though. The war had turned Washington from a sleepy Southern city into a boom town. There was too much traffic and crowds everywhere, with people—half of them boys in uniform—lined up in long queues waiting for a table, a seat in a theater, a pack of cigarettes, a chocolate bar.

  “Yes, more coffee, please.” Mamie held a lighter to her cigarette, refusing to feel guilty for lingering over coffee with all those people waiting. She wasn’t through talking to Cookie and she was not ready to fight for a taxi. These days, cabs were as hard to find as nylons (which were nearly nonexistent because DuPont had stopped making stockings and was making parachutes instead). You could stand on the curb and shout for an hour before a cabbie would condescend to notice you. Which, as far as Mamie was concerned, was another reason to stay home.

  But it was good to be with Cookie, whom she hadn’t seen since she and Ike left Manila in late 1939. As usual, her friend was dressed to the nines in a dark-green serge suit with wide, padded shoulders and a nipped-in waist, topped with a perky lime-green felt hat with a single red feather that swept down over one ear. Her amusing, animated recital of her recent moves, her daughter’s wedding, and her husband’s assignment to Ike’s London headquarters had taken them through the entrée and dessert—cheesecake for Cookie, but Mamie had declined. She didn’t eat much these days. “Peck, peck, peck, like a sparrow,” as her apartment mate Ruth put it. In fact, she had managed to get down only half of the lasagna, although she had enjoyed that glass of wine. Just one glass, though. That was all she allowed herself when she was out in public.

  And now they had arrived at coffee and cigarettes and it was her turn.

  “How many times have I moved?” Mamie rolled her eyes. “Oh, golly, I’d have to count. There was Fort Lewis, where we had a lovely four-bedroom brick, but it was terribly grimy with coal soot and the drapes were impossible to clean so I had to get all new ones made. We were there for nine or ten months, until Ike was ordered to Fort Sam Houston—just in time for our twenty-fifth.” She held out her wrist, proudly displaying the expensive platinum watch he had given her for their anniversary, and was gratified by her friend’s drawn-out ooh. “Really, Cookie, such a gorgeous house, with five bedrooms and the breeziest sleeping porch. It was such a joy to be back in San Antonio. That’s where we started out as young marrieds, you know.” Thinking of it, she felt terribly nostalgic. Those early days, they had been the very best. Oh, if she could only—

  Cookie forked up a bite of cheesecake. “I suppose you still do your bedroom in pink, with green walls?”

  “Well, of course,” Mamie said, pleased that Cookie had remembered. “I adore pink, and the green is so restful—just what Ike needs when he gets home, tired enough to drop.” She picked up her coffee cup. “Anyway, he got his first star while we were at Fort Sam, which meant of course that he was entitled to an orderly. We found this young private, as Irish as he could be, who used to be a bellhop at the Plaza in New York.” She tapped her cigarette into the ashtray. “Mickey is in England with Ike now, but when I had him, he did the shopping and a lot of the cooking.”

  “That must have been a help,” Cookie remarked, a bit arch. “I remember that woman who cooked for you when Ike and Marv were with MacArthur here in Washington. If you don’t mind my saying so, Mamie, she was simply awful. We were always glad when Ike put on an apron.”

  Mamie made a face, thinking of all the cooks she had hired and fired over the years, paying them out of the fifty dollars a month her father sent her—and still did—because he knew how terribly hard it was for her to get by on Ike’s meager officer’s pay. She had been raised like a Southern belle, to do nothing but organize the housekeeping, manage the servants, and entertain. Her mother said that ladies didn’t cook, they hired their cooks, so Mamie had never learned. Which was why for the first few months of their marriage, she and Ike had spent forty dollars a month to take their meals at the officers’ mess across the street from their quarters at Fort Sam. It was also why Ike took over the kitchen back in those early days—self-defense, he said. If he wanted to eat at home, he had to cook it himself. Now, of course, he only cooked on special occasions, and always man-food. Steaks, fried chicken, beef stew, baked beans. He hated “high-falutin’ gourmet stuff,” as he called it.

  There was a commotion at a nearby table as three young men in army uniforms pulled out chairs and sat down. They were in the middle of a conversation about the disaster of the Dieppe raid, which had happened in August, several weeks before. Ike hadn’t written to her about it. He didn’t share his work, and the censors would have stripped it from his letter if he had. But she had been chilled to the bone when she read the awful stories in the Washington Post. The Allied casualties had amounted to nearly sixty percent, which the Germans were treating as an immense propaganda coup. She doubted that her Ike had been part of the planning, though. If he had, she was sure it wouldn’t have been the catastrophe it obviously was. Somebody else must have been in charge.

  Mamie shut out the soldiers’ conversation as best she could and went on. “Anyway, Ike was called to Washington right after Pearl Harbor, to the War Plans office. Our son John was at West Point and there I was, all by myself at Fort Sam and in utter limbo. In the dark, really, not k
nowing what was happening from one day to the next, until General Marshall told Ike he just had to have him available every minute—of course poor Ike was working just brutal hours—so he was ordered to Washington and we moved to Fort Myer. Quarters Seven,” she added carelessly, and pulled on her cigarette. “On Generals’ Row.”

  On Generals’ Row. Cookie heard the words with a stab of envy. Of course, she had known about Ike’s latest promotion. Everybody knew it by now, unless they had their heads in the sand. She liked Mamie well enough and she wouldn’t for the world let her know how deeply she resented those incredibly swift second and third stars Ike was wearing. Why, he now outranked Marv, even though they had graduated together in the West Point Class of 1915 and Marv had made it to full colonel three years faster. Nobody wanted to deny Ike what he had legitimately earned, but really—

  She couldn’t resist adding just a bit of a barb to her smiling compliment. “My gracious, Mamie. Generals’ Row! Whoever could have imagined, after all those years Ike spent as a major and a lieutenant colonel?” She smiled to herself, remembering a funny story going the rounds. It had taken place at a Washington cocktail party when Eisenhower was working for MacArthur. Milton Eisenhower, who was forever promoting his older brother, said to a prominent reporter, “I want you to meet Dwight Eisenhower. He’s going places.” When the reporter learned that Ike had been a major for sixteen years, he said to a friend, “If that guy’s going places, he’d better get started soon.”

  Mamie’s eyes narrowed for an instant, and Cookie bit her lip, hoping she hadn’t gone too far. Mamie liked to pretend that she was oblivious to rank, but of course she wasn’t. She was now a three-star wife, and she had always been good at manipulating Ike. As long as Marv was in Ike’s command, it would not be smart to antagonize her.

  For her part, Mamie heard Cookie’s barb quite clearly but felt that a little generosity was in order. She knew how much rank mattered to Cookie. And to tell the truth, she was flattered by her friend’s envy.

  “I was glad that Ike was working directly for Marshall, even though the hours were just brutal,” she said, blowing out a stream of smoke. “Of course, I would never say this to Ike—he always has too much on his mind. But I don’t mind telling you that the Fort Myer house was a headache. Beautiful, of course. But oh, so big! Twenty-some rooms and no help but Mickey to get things settled. Its saving grace was the gorgeous view of the Capitol dome and the Washington and Lincoln monuments across the river. I could have spent all my time just gazing out the window.”

  “Oh, I’m sure,” Cookie said. She raised her voice above the soldiers’ conversation, thinking that she should try to mend whatever damage might have been done with her little barb. “But I bet you didn’t spend any time at all at the window. You are such a hard worker.”

  “Oh, you’re right, of course. I had to close down the San Antonio house and get the army to move everything, again. More than sixty crates just for the china, and—would you believe?—fifteen tables and all the rugs.” Mamie laughed ruefully. “Ike says I missed my calling. I could have made a career as a quartermaster, or the manager of a moving company. But maybe I wouldn’t be so lucky with other people’s things. I’ve got our belongings trained to jump into their crates all by themselves.” She snapped her fingers to illustrate. “All I do is give the order.”

  Sixty crates of china? Cookie couldn’t imagine acquiring that much dinnerware. How could Mamie afford it, on Ike’s pay? And how in the world did she imagine she’d ever use it? But to each her own. And since Mamie outranked her, she was in no position to criticize. She laughed at Mamie’s little joke.

  “Well, Ike always used to say you were a pack rat. I don’t remember his ever refusing you, if you wanted something. Like those two fur coats you bought in Hong Kong.” With a slight smile, Cookie picked up her cup. “In fact, I remember Marv saying that your husband let you have anything you wanted.”

  Mamie returned the smile, a little acidly. As she remembered it, Marv used to say that Ike spoiled her rotten, which was true, at least as far as things were concerned. Her husband was never one to talk about love, and he wasn’t very free with kisses or cuddles. But from the very beginning, he had courted her with small surprise gifts, flowers, fruit, candy—an unexpected box of her favorite chocolates with a little note tucked inside. After they were married, the gifts got bigger and more expensive—pieces for her silver service, and the platinum watch.

  His time and full attention, though . . . well, that was a different matter. She’d often wished she could trade some of the things he gave her for a little more of him. But he had made it clear before they were married that his duty came first. She had learned that sometimes there just wasn’t room in the day, or in his mind, for anything or anyone else. Except for that year when he was in the Philippines and she was in Washington with Johnny and he found time to play golf and do who knows what else with Marian Huff.

  But she firmly closed the lid on that ugly, jealous jack-in-the-box thought, and put on a bright smile. “Well, it’s nice to be appreciated by your husband,” she said modestly.

  Cookie put her cup down. “But you’re not at Fort Myer now,” she went on, just to remind Mamie that while she might outrank her, the Eisenhowers no longer lived on Generals’ Row. “You’re ‘bouncing,’ I think you said?”

  Mamie fluffed her bangs. It wasn’t pity she heard in Cookie’s voice, was it? Well, she certainly knew how to handle that. “Yes. Ike made a quick trip to London in May while I finished getting us settled at Fort Myer. But just a few weeks later, we got the news that he was being transferred to London, as commander of the entire Allied force. In charge of the ‘whole shebang,’ was the way he put it.”

  Their son John, a cadet at West Point, had been visiting that July weekend, and Ike had told them both that President Roosevelt had called him to the White House and put him in charge of the European command. Right afterward, he had gone to see Prime Minister Churchill, who was in Washington at the time, and Churchill had said that he’d be in charge of the Allies, too. John seemed stunned at the way his father had leapfrogged over so many men—like Cookie’s husband—who outranked him. Mamie herself had been flabbergasted, but she didn’t ask how or why it had happened. She had always made it a point never to involve herself in Ike’s work. The army was his job. Her job was to make a home for her soldier, a refuge from the stress and worry of military life, and boost his career by meeting their social obligations with energy and enthusiasm. She also volunteered hours every week for the Red Cross, the Army Relief Society, the USO, and the American Woman’s Volunteer Service. It was all part of her job.

  She stubbed out her cigarette. Whatever her feelings about Ike’s being assigned to London, Mamie knew he was thrilled with his new appointment. All those years he had been stuck behind a desk doing staff work, he had been dying for a command. And now he had the most important command there was, at the most crucial point in the war and— well, it was simply breathtaking, that’s what it was.

  Breathtaking, impressive, extraordinary, yes, all that. Mamie knew she ought to be proud. Well, of course she was proud, really, she was. But if she’d had her way, he’d be fighting this war from the Pentagon. She hated to have her man so far away, the way he’d been in Manila, when he and Mrs. Huff—

  She made herself stop. Ike had sworn up and down that there wasn’t anything to it, no matter what people whispered (and they whispered a lot). But he certainly hadn’t seemed keen on the idea of her coming to the Philippines, and his letters were infrequent and chilly. Of course, she herself had led rather a giddy social life in Washington while they were separated. She was a natural flirt and there were always escorts eager to take her out. In fact, on the very day she arrived in Manila, Ike had said, in a frosty tone, “I gather I have reason for a divorce, if I want one.”

  That had brought her down to earth with a thud. Yes, she had flirted with several men, and allowed several others to take her to parties. But she had done nothing t
hat would warrant such a remark, so she could only think that he had. Was it Marian Huff? Was he seriously thinking of divorce? She’d been afraid to ask, and grateful that he hadn’t brought up the subject again.

  Anyway, there was a different reason to worry now. It was wartime, and Ike was in London where anything could happen. He assured her that the bombing had ended, but she had seen the newsreels—so many English cities bombed to rubble during the Blitz, so many buildings burned and people killed—and she knew it could begin again at any moment. Her stomach hurt whenever she thought about him right there with everything blowing up all around him. She reached for another cigarette, her fingers trembling.

  “Well, of course Marv and I were simply thrilled when we learned that Ike had been given command,” Cookie said, smiling. Mamie thought it might even sound like she meant it. “But it’s too bad that you had to pack up again. And find a place to live—in this impossible town.”

  Mamie nodded. “My parents wanted me to come to Denver and live with them, but I’m staying here, where I can get Ike’s letters faster. They come in the diplomatic pouch and somebody brings them right over to me so I don’t have to wait. And I’m just a few hours by train from John, up at West Point, if he gets sick or something.”

  She and Ike had lost their little boy Icky to scarlet fever when he was only three, and she had blamed herself for it. If she had only paid more attention when he first got sick, that awful day—but that was the cause of her nearly phobic possessiveness over John, born the next year. He was now a cadet, a sophomore, and quite the young man, but she still hadn’t gotten over what Ike rebukingly called her “smother love.” He kept telling her she had to let Johnny grow up.

  She put that thought aside and went on. “Almost everything is in storage for now. When I find a place of my own, I’ll pull out a few more things so I’ll have something familiar around me—something that reminds me of Ike. But of course I’m hoping this war will be over soon and he’ll be home again.”