The General's Women

by Susan Wittig Albert

  “I’d walk you out to your car,” he said, “but it’s raining.” The excuse—for that’s what it was—sounded flimsy in his ears. He was a coward, he thought, remembering that moment, that stir of desire, on the train. He was afraid not of her, but of himself. Awkwardly, he added, “Hope you don’t mind.”

  “Not a bit of it.” She took her umbrella out of the stand by the door. “You’ve already got a cold. You have to stay healthy, Ike. Everybody’s counting on you, you know.”

  The gold light glinted in her auburn hair and he could smell her perfume, a soft, intoxicating fragrance. She seemed suddenly very dear, and he forgot why he had decided it was better not to go out to the car. He only knew that he wanted desperately to kiss her but had to fight against the desire, conscious that Beetle or Ethel could walk in on them at any moment. Still, there were things he needed to say, and he was going to say them, regardless. The radio was playing a Noël Coward song—“I’ll See You Again”—and he lowered his voice under the music.

  “Kay, I want to thank you for keeping me sane in the past few months. You’ve become very important to me.” Telek, on the floor, pushed between them and he bent over to pick up the little dog, glad for the diversion. “You and Telek,” he said, scratching the Scottie’s ears. “If anything should happen to me, I want you to know—”

  “Nothing’s going to happen.” Her eyes darkened and she put a hand on his arm. “Don’t say that, Ike. Please.”

  “Then I won’t. I’ll just say, I’ll see you again—in Algiers.” He could feel the pressure of her fingers through the fabric of his sleeve. “You’ll be there for Christmas, I understand.”

  She nodded. “Tex untied all the red tape so I could get my passport—which includes visas for Portugal and Spain, just in case.” She laughed a little, lightly, and pulled her hand away. “Just in case we’re torpedoed and end up there, I guess.”

  His gut tightened. “Don’t even think it,” he said gruffly. “Don’t forget your Beretta.” He paused. “Tex says you’re sailing on the Strathallan.”

  “Yes, in the company of four thousand men and a bevy of WACs and nurses.” She tilted her head, her blue eyes dancing mischievously. “Should be fun, don’t you think?”

  He chuckled. “Sounds like a party. In the meantime—” He stopped. Drawn by her glance and by the laughter on her lips, he gave up fighting the desire and surrendered, bending forward, kissing her, his mouth on hers as long as he dared.

  At last he heard Beetle say something to Ethel in the kitchen and pulled back, feeling clumsy. “In the meantime, don’t take any chances. That’s an order, Kay. I want to see you—safely—in North Africa.”

  I’ll see you again, whenever spring breaks through again. The words of the song echoed between them. Her eyes were misty and she was smiling.

  “You will,” she promised. “Yes, you will.”

  But it was a very near-run thing.

  CHAPTER SIX:

  The General’s Family Photograph

  Washington, D.C.

  October–November 1942

  “Ike’s coming home!” Mamie cried, dancing into the living room of the comfortable Wardman Park apartment she shared with Ruth Butcher. It was almost noon, but she was still wearing her pink ruffled nightgown and waving the morning edition of the Washington Post—just one of the newspapers that were her lifeline to Ike.

  “He’s on his way to Washington,” she crowed, “to confer with the President! He’ll be here soon!”

  “Oh, gosh, Mamie! That’s wonderful.” Ruth looked up from the polish she was applying to her nails. Then her expression became skeptical. “Who says he’s coming? You know those gossip columnists—they can spin a story out of thin air.”

  Mamie dropped onto the sofa, her excitement spilling over. “It’s not a gossip column, Ruth. It’s news, See? Right there!” She put her finger on the headline on page two: EISENHOWER TO RETURN FOR WAR CONSULTATIONS. “The trip was supposed to be hush-hush, but a reporter got wind of it and asked the President at his press conference yesterday. Roosevelt said he couldn’t comment on the movements of army officers. He thought it wasn’t “appropriate” to report travel, since the enemy might be listening. He sounded pretty huffy about it.”

  “Well, if FDR was annoyed, it must be true,” Ruth said, capping the nail polish bottle. She pushed her brown hair out of her eyes. “Does the Post say whether Butch is coming with him?”

  “It says he’ll be accompanied by ‘several of his top command staff,’” Mamie said. “Which must mean Butch.”

  “Does the article say when they’re coming?” Ruth asked, frowning. “Maybe we ought to cancel tomorrow’s mah-jongg party. If so, I suppose I’ll have to call the girls and let them know.”

  Mamie understood why Ruth didn’t sound all that excited about her husband’s return. The war had come at a difficult time for Butch and Ruth. They had been growing apart for several years, and while they had tried to resolve their differences, Mamie knew that the marriage was shaky. She didn’t like to be critical of Butch—she understood how much Ike relied on him for support and friendship right now, when he was so far from home and lonely and carrying so many responsibilities. But from what she had seen in the years she and Ike had known the Butchers, Ruth was the one who had given the most to the marriage, managing a big house and raising their daughter. Butch, on the other hand, liked to hang around with journalists—he managed Washington’s radio station WJSV—which meant late nights out with the boys. Unfortunately, there were too many husbands like Butch. Mamie pitied their wives and was glad Ike wasn’t like that. Apart from that unsettling year when Ike was all by his lonesome in the Philippines, she had always known where his heart lay. She found that reassuring, especially since she was about to turn forty-six. She did all she could to ward off the wrinkles, but she knew they were creeping up on her.

  To answer Ruth’s question, Mamie scanned the article again. “No, it doesn’t say when.” She frowned. “How frustrating.”

  Ruth waved her hands impatiently, drying the bright-red nail enamel. “You’d think Butch or Ike could have written to tell us. Or called.”

  “It must have been a sudden decision.” Mamie folded the newspaper. “I got a letter from Ike yesterday, and he didn’t say a word about it.” She pulled her brows together. “Gee, I hope everything is okay.”

  Ike had written that he was pleased at being elected to Honorary Membership in the Abilene Rotary Club and that he’d been smoking too much and had gotten Mickey to ration his cigarettes for him—he was down to three packs of Camels a day. He had added, in a reassuring way, that she was the only one he was in love with. “I’ve never been in love with anyone else and don’t want any other wife.”

  That unusual assertion had jumped out at her, since he had never written anything remotely like it before, ever. It had made her feel good, of course—what wife of twenty-six years wouldn’t want to hear her husband say she was still his one-and-only? But she had puzzled over it, since it was so unlikely. Now, though, it occurred to her that maybe he was already looking forward to seeing her on this trip to Washington and the idea had filled him with an eager pleasure—so eager that it just bubbled over. Ike was his own best censor. He occasionally wrote about the people who worked for him. He’d said that his driver, a man named Gilbey, was called “Lord” Gilbey by the staff because he had an aristocratic British manner, and he sometimes mentioned Mickey and Butch or Beetle. But he never told her what he was doing or where he had been. He never wrote anything the enemy might want to read.

  Ruth examined her nail polish. “You are a silly-dilly worrywart, Mamie. Of course everything is okay. Other than the war, I mean.” She uncapped the bottle again and began to repair a smudge. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  Mamie frowned, thinking of all the reasons Ike might have been ordered back to Washington. “Because that’s the way they do things in the army,” she said, beginning now to feel anxious. “If you’re head of a command, they leave yo
u pretty much alone until you do something they don’t like. Then they bring you home and call you on the carpet.”

  She hoped to high heaven that wasn’t what was going on. From everything she read in the papers and heard on the radio, Ike’s situation over there in London had to be terribly touchy. Of course, he’d never complain about that to her. He’d always said that the home front was her job and he didn’t want to trouble her pretty little head with the problems on his desk.

  But from what she read in the newspapers, he had to satisfy not only President Roosevelt and General Marshall, but Prime Minister Churchill (who seemed to be as bad as FDR about stirring the pot) and half a dozen jealous British generals, as well as the French, who were letting those doggone Germans run all over them and were never satisfied with anything. It would probably be a surprise if poor Ike hadn’t gotten crosswise with somebody.

  “I sure do hope he’s not in trouble,” she said, half under her breath.

  “Now, Mamie.” There was a touch of impatience in Ruth’s voice. “You’ve got to stop thinking like that. From everything I read, Ike is doing a good job in a difficult situation. Nobody’s going to reprimand him, for pity’s sake.”

  “I sincerely hope not,” Mamie said, jumping up off the sofa. “But now that I know he’s coming, I’d better get busy. I need to get my hair done, and Chloe is always so booked up.”

  “You might ask her to experiment a little,” Ruth suggested. “You’ve been wearing those bangs ever since I’ve known you. Maybe something . . . a little different?”

  It wasn’t the first time Ruth had made the suggestion, but Mamie always brushed the advice aside. She liked her bangs—they made her look just like Claudette Colbert. “Oh, and I saw a lovely little pink dress on Garfinkle’s sale page this morning,” she said. “Five dollars off. Come with me, Ruth, and we’ll have tea in the Greenbrier Garden—you know, that new tearoom on the fifth floor.”

  It wasn’t that she actually needed a new dress—her closet was absolutely stuffed and she had a lot of clothes in storage. But it would make her feel better. And really, she had been losing so much weight, ten pounds in the three months Ike had been gone. Most of her clothes just hung on her. She needed something feminine and flowery, with lots of little ruffles and flounces to help disguise how bony she was. She was afraid that Ike would scold her for not eating enough, which was unfortunately true. She slept so late in the morning that she usually just combined breakfast with lunch and then ate dinner half-heartedly, when she ate at all. But sleeping late—until noon if you could—was good for your skin. One of her doctors had told her so, and she had taken his advice ever since. She knew it annoyed Ruth, who was an early riser, but that couldn’t be helped.

  “Sure, I’ll go shopping with you,” Ruth said, standing up and brushing off her skirt. “You’ve been cooped up here for too long. I’m glad you’re getting out.”

  Mamie frowned. She liked Ruth, but she didn’t appreciate her nagging. She didn’t go out much these days because, with Ike gone, nothing held much pleasure, and because she didn’t like to be recognized, even though most people—except for the newspaper reporters—were usually well-meaning, like the soldiers in the restaurant, the day she ate out with Cookie.

  But the reporters were the worst. They had been after her nonstop, lurking in the Wardman’s downstairs lobby, even crowding onto the elevator or tagging along after her when she went out. She had started using the freight elevator at the back of the building for just that reason and went out only when she had to.

  And she never went to a party, although her name seemed to pop up on a great many invitation lists these days. Of course, she was pleased, because the invitations showed that people understood how important Ike was, now that he was a three-star general and got his name in the newspaper almost every day. But while she longed to go to the parties, she just didn’t dare. She couldn’t say yes to one invitation without saying yes to all of them, and that would be utterly impossible. Wartime Washington was awash in parties. She didn’t want to risk being criticized for picking favorites, because that might cast a bad light on Ike. Worse yet, she might find herself seated with somebody who wasn’t on the right side of some political issue she didn’t understand. Mamie had never cared two hoots about politics, and she knew she wasn’t at all astute, politically speaking. A photograph of her with the wrong person might damage Ike’s reputation.

  And of course there were the people who’d say that she shouldn’t be going to parties at all. Not when all those flag-draped coffins were being shipped back from overseas every day—so many that General Marshall, Ike’s boss, had had to stop writing condolences to all the families of soldiers killed in battle and send Western Union telegrams instead. One newspaper columnist had testily criticized a party that priced out at an exorbitant forty dollars a plate, “which would provide 1,180 cartridges for Marine rifles in the jungles of Guadalcanal.”

  One reason for the plethora of parties was that wartime Washington was an extremely complex social world. There were the old-money cave-dwellers, mostly elderly ladies and gentlemen who could trace their families back to the days when Georgetown was a busy little port city and Washington was nothing but a dreary swamp. There were the rich manufacturing magnates who had come to the city to take dollar-a-year jobs in the government and whose ambitious wives gave the very biggest and best parties with the most star-studded guest lists, based on the calculation that the best way to become a celebrity was to seat one at your dining table.

  As well, there was the Congress, with its attention to social rank and etiquette; the Roosevelt White House, with its orbiting luminaries (its luster somewhat dimmed by the fact that it served the worst food in town); and the diplomatic community, where each embassy had its own nation’s protocols and practices, which sometimes intersected but more often collided with those of other embassies. No wonder the Daily News quoted a popular fellow-about-Washington as saying that he had never, in forty years in the city “seen anything like the parties going on now. Do you know, my dear, I’ve dined out for ten nights straight, and at least two cocktail parties every night for the last month. It’s a scandal.”

  So—since Mamie had been sitting out every party since Ike had been promoted to Allied commander—she was especially glad to put on a nice dress, a hat, gloves, and pumps, and go shopping for a pretty dress to wear when her husband came home. She and Ruth celebrated the occasion with a cup of tea and an egg salad sandwich in the Greenbrier Garden, which was lovely, with potted philodendrons hanging from the ceiling and music piped in. Then they went to the A&P, where they combined their ration points to buy a standing rib roast that Ike and Butch would enjoy. Ruth drove. Gasoline rationing was due to begin the next month, and after that it would be harder to get around. But Mamie, never a confident driver, had given up driving long ago. She had been only too glad when Ike’s first star had qualified him for an orderly—Mickey—who could drive her where she needed to go, and she was always glad when Ruth volunteered to take her somewhere. A driver was a very handy thing to have.

  But Mamie and Ruth didn’t get a chance to serve their husbands that lovely roast. Ruth cleaned the house and Mamie got her hair permed and wore her new pink dress several days running (in case Ike surprised her), but their preparations were in vain. Ruth was annoyed at having canceled the mah-jongg party for nothing, and Mamie was so nervous she could hardly sit still. Finally, she screwed up her courage and called General Marshall’s office to ask whether the newspaper story had been true. Not long after, an aide called to tell her that it was all a big rumor and suggest archly that she shouldn’t believe everything she read.

  “That said,” he added, “you might want to keep an eye on the newspapers or listen to the radio. You may find an important announcement in the next few days.”

  So Ike wasn’t coming, after all. With tears of bitter disappointment, Mamie hung her dress in the closet, next to the old tweed suit of Ike’s that she’d kept when she put the rest
of his clothes in storage. She laid the rough sleeve against her face, breathing in the lingering scent of cigarettes and Old Spice, and cried. Then she took a nap.

  The next day, Ruth cooked the roast and made a deep-dish apple pie, Mamie set the table with flowers, and they invited their friends Cookie Wilson and Cheryl Sullivan, both military “widows,” to dinner and a bridge game afterward. Mamie had only one glass of wine. She felt she could trust Cookie and Cheryl, but she also knew that people loved to gossip, and she had to be very careful.

  For the next day or two, Mamie did as General Marshall’s aide had suggested. She watched the newspapers and listened to the radio, which she was in the habit of doing anyway. With Ike gone, she suffered terribly from insomnia and seldom managed to get to sleep before the wee small hours. She began and ended her day with the morning and evening papers, and she made it a point not to miss any of the radio newscasts. On Sunday nights, she always listened to Walter Winchell, with his staccato delivery of “Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America from border to border and coast to coast and all the ships at sea.” And every night, on the Mutual Broadcasting System, she tuned in to Gabriel Heatter, who comforted her (and everybody else in America) with “Ahh, there’s good news tonight!” When he couldn’t dodge the bad news, he reported it in a funereal, almost mocking voice.

  And then she saw what she was looking for, in Washington’s Evening Star. AMERICANS TAKE ALGIERS! screamed one headline. ALLIES SEIZE 1000 MILES OF NORTH AFRICAN COASTLINE. And on the same page, the Associated Press reported: HIGH STRATEGY PRECEDES U.S. ATTACKS. PLANS LAID MONTHS IN ADVANCE AND ENEMY KEPT GUESSING. The article credited General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Commanding General of the European Theater, with a “monumental secret planning effort” that involved both American and British forces in a major deception designed to conceal the real targets of the invasion: