The General's Women

by Susan Wittig Albert

  “Perhaps. But do be careful, won’t you?” Her mother folded her hands in her lap and fell silent again. “I’m sorry, Kathleen,” she said finally. “I shouldn’t have spoken. Forget I said anything, will you?”

  “Of course,” Kay said. “It’s forgotten already.”

  But it wasn’t. Later that night, as she lay in her bed in her silent flat, she could still feel Eisenhower’s fingers, tightening on her hand. Years later, she would remember the warning and know that her mother was right.

  • • •

  In the office the next morning, Ike had forgotten his momentary confusion. What he remembered was the pleasant evening, relaxed and entirely comfortable. He would like to do more of that sort of thing, but the Dorchester was a hotel, it was a goddamned goldfish bowl, like the office. There were always people around, coming and going. What he needed—what the whole office family needed, really—was a cottage in the country, a hideout, where they could get away from the distractions of London, play bridge and poker, have a few drinks, and enjoy some good old-fashioned home cooking, real food, not the room service crap he’d had last night.

  “Kay!” He raised his voice. “Hey, Kay, get in here. I’ve got a job for you.”

  • • •

  Kay found the cottage with the help of a lieutenant from the British billeting office. A century before, it had been a station on the telegraph line that linked London and Portsmouth, hence its name: Telegraph Cottage. Located just thirty minutes from Grosvenor Square and another ten from Allied headquarters in Norfolk House, it was an unpretentious Tudor-style slate-roofed house that, to Kay, looked like it belonged on a Christmas card. It stood at the end of a long, winding drive, barricaded behind high hedges. There was a tidy green lawn in back, a vegetable garden, a tall fence, and a path bordered by rhododendrons that led into the woods, through a wicket gate, and onto the thirteenth hole of the Little Coombe golf course—ideal for the General, who liked to play golf. He liked to ride, too, and Richmond Park was not far away.

  The reviews were mixed. Eisenhower thought the cottage was ideal, although the rent (thirty-two American dollars a week) was “pretty damned steep.” The British generals, accustomed to the grand estates they saw as their wartime entitlements, were collectively appalled that the Commander in Chief was going to ground in a “rabbit hole,” as General Sir Alan Brooke put it. The Prime Minister thought the cottage was a good idea, but insisted on having a bomb shelter dug in the garden before the General moved in.

  The cottage itself was comfortable, cozy, and relatively warm, with a fireplace in the living room and a coal-burning range in the kitchen. Mickey would manage the place, with two colored orderlies, Moaney and Hunt, to do to the cooking and housekeeping. In the dining room, a round oak table seated six for a comfortable meal (ten if they were chummy and minded their elbows), and a sideboard doubled as a bar. French doors led out onto a flagstone terrace and the rose garden, and a steep, narrow stair led up to five tiny bedrooms and one closet-sized bathroom with a shower. The only telephone was in the Boss’s bedroom, a direct line to headquarters, installed by the Signal Corps.

  From the beginning, the Boss made it clear that he wanted everyone in the office to feel that Telegraph Cottage was their home. The first time she drove him out there to spend the night, he said, “Stay and have supper with me, Kay.” Without waiting for her answer, he shouted to Mickey, “Hey, Mick, we’re home and we’re hungry. Light the fire and rustle us up something to eat. Hot dogs, maybe, with mustard and plenty of onions. Fried potatoes?”

  We’re home and we’re hungry, she heard with surprise. She would always remember the bubble of laughter that rose in her throat and the General’s blue eyes laughing down at her. In a moment, the fire was blazing and two overstuffed chairs were drawn up close to its warmth. Ike poured each of them a Scotch and water and Mickey brought the Boss an old woolly brown cardigan and a pair of worn straw slippers—“from Manila,” the General said. Kay loosened her uniform tie and they put their feet up on the brass fireplace fender and sat with their drinks and a bowl of salted peanuts for a companionable hour, smoking and talking about the house, the garden, her life as a girl in Ireland, his as a boy in Kansas, about anything except the war. And then Mickey brought in their supper trays and two cold mugs of beer—to Kay’s delight, because American beer was impossible to get these days.

  Before she left that evening, Ike said, very seriously, “Everybody in our office is working like the devil getting ready for Torch. We need this place, and we need to use it just as often as we can get away. I’m putting you in charge of recreation, Kay. Set up bridge games here for the nights we’ve got free. Shanghai some players for us—Wayne Clark and Al Gruenther, Tex, Butch, whoever plays a decent game. Dig up a badminton net for the yard and some paddles. A football, golf clubs, anything else you can think of to keep us moving around, get some exercise, blow off steam. I’m told there are horses at Richmond Park, and I’d like to go riding. Make some time for that.”

  “Riding!” she exclaimed, feeling a flash of exhilaration at the thought of it. “Oh, jolly good fun!”

  He cocked an eyebrow. “You’re a rider?”

  “My father put me on a horse before I could walk,” she replied proudly.

  “Then get a horse for yourself, too. I don’t like to ride alone, and Butch and Tex are both city boys—no point in asking them.” He grinned at her, that wide, wonderful grin that made her feel she had known this man for all of her life. “Oh, and tell your mum she’s invited for dinner and another of our history lessons. As I remember, she asked about Lee at Gettysburg. I’ve been thinking about how to explain it to her.”

  “She’ll love it,” Kay said, knowing it was true.

  “And one last thing,” he went on. “When I can work it out, I’ll be sleeping over here at the cottage and going to the office after breakfast. It’s silly for you to drive back to London at night and out here again early the next morning, so I’ve asked Beetle to requisition a billet for you at Bushy Park, where General Spaatz’s WACs will be billeted when they get here. It can’t be more than a ten-minute drive. You can stay there whenever I have an overnight here. Will that be okay?”

  “Yes, indeed,” she said, thinking how kind he was to consider her convenience, with all the other things he had to think about. “Thank you, General.” She smiled and saluted smartly, as Tex had coached her, but the General didn’t return her smile, and her heart dropped. Her salute wasn’t right yet?

  He was shaking his head at her, but her salute apparently wasn’t what he had in mind. “When we’re here at the cottage, we’re off the job. The war is off-limits. I don’t want to hear any shop talk.” He paused. “You’re Kay and I’m Ike. Got that?”

  “Got it,” she said, and dropped her voice. “Ike,” she said, carefully, quietly, savoring it.

  He nodded, smiling. “Atta girl. See you in the morning, Kay.”

  She hummed to herself as she drove back to the flat in Kensington Close. And only once remembered her mother’s warning. Dangerous.

  CHAPTER FIVE:

  The General’s Birthday

  London

  October 1942

  “The Old Man has named Irish our official recreation director,” Tex Lee announced at the staff meeting the next day. “If any of you have suggestions for ways to cut loose and have fun, let her know. But keep it clean.” He aimed a pointed frown at Butch. “No naked dancing girls.”

  “Hell’s bells,” Butch grumbled, with a grin. Tex and Beetle might treat Kay’s appointment as a joke, but he was all in favor. This was wartime, damn it, and sometimes the war news was nothing but bad. There were days when the morale in the office was so low you had to scrape it off the floor, Beetle was impossibly surly, and Ike was feeling meaner—as he put it—than fifty-two rattlesnakes.

  For the past ten years, Harry Butcher had been a vice president of CBS Radio and station manager at WTOP, with studios on the top floor of the Earle Building in downtown Wash
ington. As an experienced press, radio, and public relations man, he knew that morale was important. Important, hell. It was crucial. Butch—who had coined the term “fireside chat” for FDR’s heartening radio talks and had lured folksy, friendly Arthur Godfrey to CBS from NBC—understood the importance, when times were tough, of putting on an engaging smile and an air of cheerful optimism. It was the sunny image that counted, and in Butch’s business, image counted a very great deal.

  As far as Butch was concerned, Kay was exactly what the doctor ordered. Her bright, enthusiastic, let’s-have-fun-while-we-get-it-done attitude gave everybody a shot in the arm—especially Eisenhower, who was dealing with problems from all sides—the British, the French, the Russians, the Americans. He was increasingly impatient, tired, and short-tempered. He smoked as many as four packs of Camels a day, drank a gallon of coffee, and suffered from insomnia and high blood pressure. No surprise, of course, given the headaches he had to contend with.

  So Butch was glad to see that Kay was taking her new job seriously. She stashed a set of golf clubs in the cubbyhole under the stairs at Telegraph Cottage. Under her direction, Mickey set up a shooting range at the edge of the woods and Moaney and Hunt cleared off a badminton court and a quoits pit in the back garden—quoits, Butch figured out, was the British version of the American game of horseshoes. For evenings at the cottage, she rounded up decks of cards, dominoes, a chess set for Beetle, a phonograph, copies of American magazines, and stacks of the Western pulp magazines Eisenhower loved to read. At the office, she instituted the British ritual of late-afternoon tea and made sure that the General got a cup or two to keep him going, along with a plate of tea-time cookies—biscuits, she called them—delivered with a smile.

  The golf clubs went into immediate use. The path through the woods led to the thirteenth hole, so Ike and Butch went out to play a few holes whenever they could, and Ike usually asked Kay to play along, since she had a pretty good swing. But when it came to riding, Butch said with a laugh that he had never been on a horse and was too old to start now. So when Ike could find a few hours for riding, he invited Kay. He asked her to shoot with him, too, and Butch noticed how pleased he was when she showed off her skill.

  One afternoon when the three of them had spent an hour with the targets, the Boss surprised Butch—and Kay, too—by giving her a Beretta. “It’s wartime,” he said. “Keep it with you. You never know when you might need it.”

  “But this is England,” she said. “The Nazis won’t dare invade us. Especially now that you Yanks are here.”

  Ike nodded shortly. “Damn right. But you may not always be in England.”

  Butch raised an eyebrow, wondering what was in Ike’s mind, and noticed that even Kay looked perplexed. But she only said “Thank you very much, Ike. I’m glad to have it,” and put the gun in her shoulder bag.

  Butch was glad to see that on the days when Ike could play a few holes of golf or go riding in Richmond Park for a couple of hours, he looked a great deal more relaxed and happy and his temper evened out. This was Kay’s doing, Butch knew, and he appreciated her efforts. But he watched the situation with a growing uneasiness, especially when whispers began flying around the office. Butch wasn’t one to make moral judgments—he had never been entirely faithful to Ruth and he didn’t fault Ike for being attracted to Kay. She was a beautiful woman. Still, the idea that the press might hear the whispers made him nervous. He thought about it for a while, because he wasn’t exactly sure what was going on and he didn’t feel comfortable meddling. But if he was going to speak up, better sooner than later.

  So one October morning, he went to the coffee pot in the lounge down the hall and poured two cups of coffee. Back in the office, he took them to Kay’s desk and put one in front of her.

  “Coffee for you, Irish,” he said, thinking that she looked especially pretty this morning, her auburn hair softly waved, her skin glowing, her delicate hands moving swiftly over her work. Those hands that had the strength to wrestle that unwieldy Packard along roads where he wouldn’t want to drive.

  Kay looked up from the morning’s mail. The General had wanted to come in earlier than usual this morning, so she had gotten a start on the job of sorting it, which seemed to get bigger every day. She was surprised to see Butch. He was usually the last one in the office.

  She smiled. “Thanks.” She put down the last envelope and picked up the coffee. She liked Butch, but she had never been quite sure what his job was supposed to be, except for the feeding and care of journalists and maintaining the office diary. And keeping the Boss on an even keel, of course. “What did I do to deserve room service?”

  “Just a great job, that’s all. As recreation director, I mean.” Grinning, he pulled out a chair, turned it backward, and sat down. “I’ve been meaning to tell you that—just somehow never get around to it.”

  She leaned back, glad for his compliment. Tex was always too busy to notice and Beetle never said anything nice to anybody. “Sweet of you, Butch. I appreciate it.”

  Butch shook a Lucky Strike out of a crumpled pack. “You know, Ike and I go back a long way—fifteen years, in fact. He keeps his nose to the grindstone longer than anybody I’ve ever known. But he works best when he can get a break every now and then. And he works with guys all the time, so he likes having a woman around.” He put the package back in his shirt pocket and lit his cigarette. “He misses his wife.”

  Kay wondered whether he meant something by that remark, but before she could ask, the door opened and a corporal stepped in with a thick folder. He spotted Butch, and came over. “From Captain McIntyre, sir. The British newspaper clips you were asking for. And a print of the staff photo Life magazine is running next month.”

  “Thanks, Corporal,” Butch said, taking the folder and leafing through it rapidly. “Tell the captain to send the American clips as soon as he has them.”

  He misses his wife. Kay took out a cigarette. When the corporal had left, she asked, “What’s Mrs. Eisenhower like?”

  “Charming,” Butch said quickly. “Exactly what Ike needs—the making of him, in fact, if you ask my opinion. A man’s career in the army depends as much on his wife as it does on him, you know, and Ike is no exception. Mamie’s a great army wife, a fine manager, totally devoted to him for twenty-six years and through God only knows how many moves.” Grinning amiably, he flicked his lighter to Kay’s cigarette. “Although she tells Ruth—that’s my wife—that the only way to get along with the guy is to give him exactly what he wants.”

  “I see,” Kay said quietly. She knew she should be glad to hear that the Boss’s home life gave him everything he wanted and that his wife was behind him a hundred percent. But something in her, some part of her that she didn’t understand, felt obscurely—and mutinously—disappointed. Had she been hoping to hear . . . something else?

  Butch leaned back in his chair. “The thing is that the Boss can’t go anywhere without being recognized, and you’re rather . . . well, noticeable, yourself.” He pulled the photo out of the folder and held it up. “See? There you are, right behind Ike. It’ll run in the article Life is doing on him.”

  “Nice photo,” Kay said, remembering how much the General had resented taking the time to sit for it. He’d thought the Life photographer—Margaret Bourke-White—was too pushy. She chuckled. “The Boss looks grim.”

  “Yeah, but grim is good, as far as the public is concerned. War is a serious business. Photos of us having a good time are bad PR. I’m glad Life is running this one.” Butch put the photo back in the folder. “Speaking of being recognized, somebody told me that they saw the two of you riding at Richmond yesterday evening.” He wasn’t looking at her. “I wonder . . .” He let his voice trail off.

  “Wonder what?” Kay asked evenly, regarding Butch through the smoke of their cigarettes.

  “I’m not suggesting anything, mind you, Kay. I’m just thinking about gossip. About the way things look.” He held up the folder of clippings. “You know how the Fleet Stre
et gang is—and the American journalists are even worse. They’d love to jump on the idea that you and the Boss are . . .” Leaving the sentence unfinished, he gave a shrug. “Of course, Ike’s brother Milton pretty much runs the U.S. Office of War Information, which screens all the war reports. He’s not likely to let anything awkward get into American newspapers. But there’s an old military saying. The higher you climb the flagpole, the more of your ass is exposed. And Ike is pretty far up that flagpole right now.”

  Kay regarded him, feeling prickles of apprehension across her shoulders. Yesterday’s ride in Richmond Park had been especially lovely, a quiet and companionable canter through silent woods in the magical hour before sunset. The last sweet light slanted through the trees, gilding the autumn air, and they rode through it as if it were a shower of golden sparks. They scarcely exchanged a word during their time on the trail, but as they rode single-file back to the stable, the General reined in his horse and waited for her to catch up to him.

  “Thank you, Kay,” he said gruffly. “Best evening I’ve had for months.”

  “Best for me, too,” she said, and smiled. “Ike.”

  He nodded and rode on ahead. At the stable a few minutes later, when they had both dismounted, he reached for her reins but instead took her hand and grasped it tightly. He stepped toward her, then stood for a moment, his eyes intent on hers, as if he wanted to speak. Her heart pounding, her throat tight, she held the moment as a child might hold a piece of candy, longing to taste it fully but afraid to lift it to her mouth for fear it might melt—or that it might not taste as sweet as she imagined. But even untasted it was sweet. Nothing, not a word was said, but she could feel the strength of his fingers for moments after he let her go.

  Now, she picked up her coffee cup and looked directly at Butch across the rim. “I’m only following orders, Butch. If the Boss asks me to go riding, I go riding. If you think that’s a bad idea, you’ll have to take it up with him.” She was smiling, but she heard the edge of challenge in her voice. She knew that Butch heard it too.