The General’s Women
A Novel
Susan Wittig Albert
Persevero Press
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 by Susan Wittig Albert
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. For information, write to Persevero Press, PO Box 1616, Bertram TX 78605.
www.PerseveroPress.com
First Edition, March 2017
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or, in the case of historical persons, are used fictitiously.
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data
Names: Albert, Susan Wittig, author.
Title: The General’s women: A Novel / by Susan Wittig Albert.
Description: Includes bibliographical references. | Bertram, TX: Persevero Press, 2017.
Identifiers: ISBN 978-0-9892035-8-6 (Hardcover) | 978-0-9892035-9-3 (Trade pbk.) | 978-0-9969040-2-5 (pbk.) | 978-0-9969040-0-1 (ebook) | 978-0-9969040-1-8 (ebook) |
Subjects: LCSH Eisenhower, Dwight D. (Dwight David), 1890-1969--Fiction. | Eisenhower, Mamie Doud, 1896-1979--Fiction. | Morgan, Kay Summersby--Fiction. | Eisenhower, Dwight D. (Dwight David), 1890-1969--Marriage. | World War, 1939-1945--Fiction. | BISAC FICTION / Historical | FICTION / War & Military | FICTION / Romance / Military
Classification: LCC PS3551.L2637 G46 2017 | DDC 813.6--dc23
Leave Kay and Ike alone. She’s helping him win the war.
Major General Everett S. Hughes
You didn’t often see a general kissing his chauffeur.
Chicago Tribune war correspondent Jack Thompson to Lieutenant General “Slim Jim” Gavin
We have no secrets from Kay.
Eisenhower to General George S. Patton
Table of Contents
Epigraph
PART ONE: London and Washington, May–November 1942 CHAPTER ONE: The Driver
CHAPTER TWO: The General
CHAPTER THREE: The General’s Wife
CHAPTER FOUR: The General’s Family
CHAPTER FIVE: The General’s Birthday
CHAPTER SIX: The General’s Family Photograph
PART TWO: North Africa and Washington, November 1942–December 1943 CHAPTER SEVEN: The Strathallan
CHAPTER EIGHT: “We’ve Got a War to Win”
CHAPTER NINE: “Durn Those WACs”
CHAPTER TEN: The End of the Beginning
CHAPTER ELEVEN: Carrying On
CHAPTER TWELVE: Secrets
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Six to the Maximum Power
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: “Things I Could Say”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Things Not Mentioned
PART THREE: Europe and Washington, January 1944–November 1945 CHAPTER SIXTEEN: One and One
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: The Beginning of the End
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: The End, But Not Quite
CHAPTER NINETEEN: “The Woman Who Knows More Secrets of the War . . .”
CHAPTER TWENTY: The Real Story
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: “Dear Kay . . .”
PART FOUR: America, 1974–1979 CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: Past Forgetting
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: The Last Word
A Biographical Epilogue: Kay Summersby, Missing Person
Author’s Note
Cast of Characters
For Further Reading
Discussion Questions
About Susan Wittig Albert
Books by Susan Wittig Albert
PART ONE
London and Washington,
May–November 1942
CHAPTER ONE:
The Driver
London
May 24–26, 1942
Kay Summersby scowled. The luck of the Irish.
“Who did you get?” Nancy asked, adjusting the belt of her brown wool MTC uniform.
Kay blew out an exasperated breath. “A two-star nobody with a German name I can’t even pronounce.”
“Oh, poor Kay,” Margaret purred. “I got a three-star.” She flipped her sleek blonde hair. “General Hap Arnold.”
“So nice for you,” Kay muttered under her breath, crumpling her driver’s ticket. She was the senior driver. She had every right to be assigned to drive the top man in the American military team that was coming to London to sort the war—finally—and get it back on the right track. But the second lieutenant in the War Office had decided that since this assignment was such a plum, the girls would draw straws. And wouldn’t you know it, that was the day she got her hair done, and the hairdresser (who’d been bombed out twice) was late. So she was late.
“Too bad, Kay,” the lieutenant had said, handing her the ticket. “A major general. He’s the only one left.”
The luck of the Irish. But it was appropriate—wasn’t it?—for a woman who had been born Kathleen MacCarthy-Morrogh on a neglected estate on an island in County Cork and was still as poor as an Irish church mouse—unlike Nancy and the other civilian women drivers in the Mechanised Transport Corps. All of them were volunteers, but they came from wealthy families and didn’t mind laying out fifty quid for their smart uniforms, while Kay was still in hock to her mother for hers. The two pounds ten she got every week from the MTC barely covered her half of the flat in Kensington Close that she shared with her younger sister Evie, let alone paid the hairdresser and bought lipstick and silk stockings, a villainous eight shillings a pair on the black market.
The luck of the Irish, she thought darkly. And the drawing, as it turned out, was only the beginning.
• • •
On Monday morning, Kay dragged herself out of bed at five a.m., gulped tea and toast, and parked her olive-drab Packard with the other four staff cars in front of the American Embassy at 20 Grosvenor Square. The stately square with its park of graceful trees and spring-green grass wore a slightly startled look, for the mannered and genteel buildings were sandbagged, and armed soldiers stood guard at the embassy’s entrance. Kay and the other drivers were waiting to pick up the military VIPs they were supposed to ferry around London for the next week. The Americans, like the British, organized everything by rank. Her general wore just two stars, so her car was at the end of the row.
But the brass, grounded at Prestwick by an infamous Scottish peasouper, didn’t show up on Monday. Or on Tuesday. No use to grumble, Kay knew. Waiting for the Americans had been the lot of the Brits since the war began back in September 1939. As the Luftwaffe’s bombs blitzed London, Prime Minister Churchill went begging to President Roosevelt, desperate for help. But the isolationists over there—led by that wretched Charles Lindbergh and the pro-appeasement American ambassador, Joseph Kennedy—had dug in their heels, and Roosevelt had driven a hard bargain: a few dozen antique destroyers in exchange for rent-free bases on British land in the Caribbean and Newfoundland.
Until Pearl Harbor, five months before. The Yanks were in, and the lot Kay and the other drivers were waiting for were meant to shoulder their share of the load. It was about time. The Prime Minister, dear old Winnie, was doing his best to placate Roosevelt, but even he was short on patience these days. He was rumored to have growled, “You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing—after they’ve tried everything else.”
Not that Kay disliked Americans. She certainly preferred the friendly and open American men to the stuffy, hidebound British, whose notions of class—and attitudes toward the Irish—were positively petrified. And she loved one American in particular: Captain Richard Arnold, of the Special Army Observers Group. Dick, tall and dark, a wickedly handsome West Pointer with an outrageous sense of humor. Dick, whom she was eagerly waiting to marry, when they were both free, which coul
d be as long as another year. Her husband Gordon was willing (he had his eye on a new wife), but Kay was learning that divorce in America was more difficult to get than divorce in England and just as humiliating. And of course the war slowed everything down. Patience was alien to Kay’s passionate Irish nature. But war, she had learned, was as much about waiting patiently as it was about cleaning up after the bombs. The war had brought her American to England, and waiting to marry Dick was just another part of her war.
So she waited for her two-star. However, when he finally arrived—on Wednesday, at Paddington Station, three hours late—Kay’s Irish luck did her in again. The fellow ignored her car, climbed into the limousine that belonged to the new U.S. Ambassador Winant, and drove off to spend the rest of the morning closeted at the embassy. There was nothing for Kay to do but drive back to Grosvenor Square, empty, and wait at the curb out front.
And wait and wait, as the other generals came out of the building and were driven off. Her breakfast toast and tea had become a distant dream and Kay was getting hungrier by the minute. Finally, in desperation, an hour past lunchtime, she risked a half-block dash to the fish-and-chips shop in North Audley Street, where she could keep an eye on the embassy—paying first, as she had learned to do in the Blitz, when meals were forever being interrupted by bombs. She was halfway through her Spam sandwich (another dubious American import) when she spotted two officers, one tall and slim, the other tall and broad-shouldered, coming out of the embassy and walking toward her Packard, the only car left.
“Oh, bugger,” she muttered. Abandoning her sandwich, she grabbed her bag and dashed for the door and down the street.
“General Eisenhower?” She slapped a sloppy half-salute at tall-and-slim.
Tall-and-broad-shouldered was annoyed. “I’m Eisenhower. He’s Clark.”
“Summersby,” she said, adding hurriedly, “Sorry to be late, sir. Waited through lunch, you see.” She opened the rear door. The men got in and she slid into the driver’s seat and started the car. “Where are we off to, sir?”
“Claridge’s,” Eisenhower said. To Clark, he added, “Don’t know about you, Wayne, but after that morning, I’m ready for a drink.”
“Hell, Ike,” Clark said. “I’m ready for the whole damned bottle.”
Kay looked in the rearview mirror and saw Eisenhower’s face relax into a wide grin that some women might have called “charming.” But she was not charmed. Gritting her teeth, she put the Packard in gear. She had gotten up at five in the morning for three days in a row to drive a two-star Yank two short blocks down Brook Street.
At Claridge’s, she opened the rear door and the men got out. “Nine tomorrow morning,” Eisenhower said. He looked at her, and she saw that his eyes were an icy blue. “Sharp,” he added brusquely. “I don’t like to wait.”
“Yes, sir. Nine, sharp, sir.” Under her breath, she muttered, “Don’t get your knickers in a twist.”
He blinked. “What did you say?”
She shut the car door. “Nothing, sir,” she said. “Nine sharp sir. In the morning.”
• • •
That evening, Kay went round to her mother’s flat in Kensington—the Warwick Court flat they’d shared had been bombed out. Evie was already there, the sleeves of her white blouse rolled up and her delicate face ruddy from stirring a pot of mutton stew on the kitchen range. It wouldn’t be the best mutton, either, but what the butcher had left on offer by the time their mother, Vera (called Kul by her family and friends), got to the top of the waiting queue.
“Look what I’ve brought!” Kay spilled the contents of her bag on the table. “From Dick.”
“Apples!” Delighted, Evie picked one up and held it to her nose. “Wonderful, Kay! I got lucky and found some Stilton—we’ll have cheese and apples for dessert. What a treat!”
For three years, German submarines had prowled like jackals along the shipping lanes, torpedoing the merchant ships that brought food and supplies to the British Isles. The first casualty of the war had been petrol, which was immediately rationed. Bacon, butter, and sugar were next, followed by meat, tea, jam, biscuits, cheese, eggs, lard, milk, and canned and dried fruit. Chocolate wasn’t rationed—yet—but everybody saved it for the children.
Fresh fruit wasn’t rationed, either, but it cost the earth, when you were lucky enough to find it. Dick, whose work often took him back to Washington, had brought tonight’s ripe, rosy Baldwin apples from America, which seemed to Kay to hover beyond the western horizon like a golden mirage of unimaginable abundance. When the war was over, she would go to America with Dick and have all the apples and strawberries and chocolate and nylons she wanted, and an automobile and the petrol to drive it anywhere. She would go to America, where the future was always just around the corner—unlike England, which clung with a willful stubbornness to its past.
Kay’s mother looked up from setting the table. “Did your general finally get here?” she asked, and laughed when Kay told them about the two-block drive to Claridge’s. “Well, just remember that the Americans are here to help us out of a tight corner,” she said. “Do your best by the fellow. And do be on time.”
Kul was Welsh, convent-schooled in France and as bright and quick and vivacious as her daughters. As a young woman (too young, she said regretfully), she had married Kay’s father—a retired lieutenant colonel in the Royal Munster Fusiliers—and gone to live with him on Inish Beg, a tiny island dropped like an emerald into the sparkling estuary of the River Ilen, near the old harbor town of Skibbereen. The family had once been wealthy but their fortunes had changed for the worse, and by the time the two were married, the old manor house on Inish Beg had fallen into disrepair.
Kul went to the stove, lifted the lid of the pot, and poked a fork into a dumpling. “Hand me that bowl, Kay, and I’ll dish up the dumplings. Thank God we can still get wine—Evie, there’s a bottle of Beaujolais in the sideboard. Open it for us, please.” She pushed back her gray-streaked hair. “Oh, I do wish our Seamus were here. Mutton stew is his favorite.”
Kay handed her mother the bowl. “Sheila will be coming at the weekend, won’t she?” Sheila was working in Brighton.
“Yes. Will you?”
“No,” Kay said, and made a face. “I’m working—for that American general.”
Kay, the eldest, had grown up at Inish Beg with her sisters Evie and Sheila and their brother, Seamus, now with the Royal Engineers. There’d been no money, growing up, but that hadn’t mattered. All four were outdoor children, but Kay had been the most fearless—and the most rebellious—of the lot. Her father, an expert marksman, taught her to shoot and ride and sail. Clad in brown corduroy bloomers and knitted jumpers, she galloped her gray gelding bareback across the open fields and sailed her father’s small skiff down the Ilen to the Celtic Sea and back again. Skimming on the incoming tide with the wind behind her, Kay, an imaginative child, pretended to be one of the wild Nereids, riding on the back of a dolphin. In the meadow, there was a fallen cromlech where, with a ritual of oak and mistletoe, she was an anointed Druid priestess. In the priests’ tunnel under the old house, she was an unrepentant Jesuit who refused to acknowledge the heretic Protestant Anne as Queen of Ireland. And sometimes, in the garret where Nana’s gowns were laid in a chest with camphor, she was Queen Anne. Making believe, in costume.
There was enough money to send Seamus to school in England, but Kay and her sisters suffered painfully under a succession of underpaid and inadequate governesses. Still, the girls were quick and curious and intelligent enough to teach themselves most of what they needed to know, including bridge and poker and chess. They read in their father’s voluminous library, which was especially rich in history and mythology. They created their own secret gardens, played pranks on the few servants who were left, and delighted in riding with the hunt.
But their father, Donal, was plagued by the brooding melancholy that haunts the Irish like a black dog, and his years of military service in West Africa had taught him to prefer
men and horses to women and children. Kul had at last been defeated by her husband’s depressions, the dark, damp, lonely Irish winters, and managing a manor with no help. There was enough money to give the girls a debut, so on the pretext of arranging a season in London for her daughters, she took them and left. She never went back.
Kay, given a choice of a debut or six months in Europe, was quick to choose travel. She went off to visit her mother’s school friends in Helsinki and Oslo, then to Brussels for a month, and after that, Paris, where she was surrounded by beaux. At seventeen, she was beautiful: tall and slender, with dark auburn hair brightened by gold glints, a mobile mouth, and gray-blue eyes set in a diamond-shaped face.
Back in London, Kul reminded her that beauty is what beauty does and that life was about doing something. Under the usual male entail arrangement, Inish Beg would go to Seamus and there was, of course, nothing for the girls. “Better to have a skill you can rely on than a husband you can’t,” Kul said practically.
Following her mother’s advice, Kay enrolled in a six-month training course at the Triangle Secretarial College in South Molton Street in the West End, where she spent mornings learning how to type (not very well), take shorthand (slowly), and manage an office. Following her heart, she enrolled in afternoon classes at the Chelsea College of Art and Design, where she studied fashion. But she was lured from her studies by the offer of a small part in The Miracle, a play retelling the legend of a medieval nun who runs away from her convent with a handsome knight and is eventually accused of witchcraft.
Making believe suited Kay, and she found a job as an extra on a film in production at the Elstree studio, north of London. It was a low-budget quickie, but it was fun and exciting, and she began thinking about a career in the movies. She had just taken another part—a larger one this time—when she was lured away again, this time by Gordon Summersby, the son of a wealthy London publisher. They met at a glittering party in St. James Square, fell in love during the first Strauss waltz, and were engaged by the time they walked out into the misty dawn. But that hadn’t lasted either—and now the war.
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