The world seemed to stop. She stared at him for a moment, then heard herself ask, with astonishing calmness, “How? How did it happen? There’s no enemy action in the area, is there?”
“No. It was an accident, a week ago—just a few days after he got out there.” He dropped his hand, but his eyes were on her face, his own face somber. “General Truscott sent a wire immediately, but it got lost in the message center. Somebody there happened to mention it to Tex, assuming he knew, and Butch tracked it down quick as he could. Dick and another officer were clearing a German mine field. One of them hit a trip wire, and a Teller mine exploded. The other officer survived, but Dick was killed instantly.” His mouth tightened. “I am so sorry, Kay. So very sorry.”
She closed her eyes tight and stood for a moment, willing herself not to cry. She could feel her heart beating through her skin, echoing with the words in her ears. Dead, dead. Dick is dead. So very sorry Dick is dead.
And then the reality of it hit her like a punch in the belly and the room went dark. She heard her glass shatter on the floor as her knees gave way and she sagged. Ike’s arm went around her, steadying her as he half-led, half-carried her to the sofa and made her sit down. He sat beside her, holding her as she began to weep, holding her tenderly, as if she were a child.
“Just cry,” he whispered against her hair. “I know it hurts, Kay. Just cry. Just cry.”
She cried for what seemed hours, as the storm broke around them, thunder crashing against the house and the rain coming down in torrents outside the window. After a while, Ike went to the kitchen and came back with a mug of hot sweet tea. He put it into her shaking hand and made her drink it.
Very quietly, he said, “You’re not going to get over this for a while. It’s too hard.” He handed her a handkerchief. “I want you to go out to the farm for a few days.”
“I can’t.” She blew her nose. “General de Gaulle is coming and you need—”
“Forget about de Gaulle,” he said roughly. “We’ll manage. Nobody’s staying at the farm, and you can be alone out there. Go riding. Go walking. Activity helps.” His voice softened and he put his hand on her hair, smoothing it. “Losing someone you love cuts deep. I know—I lost my own little boy. It takes time to deal with it. Take as much time as you need.”
That evening, Butch, deeply sympathetic, drove her out to the farmhouse. The rain had stopped and she went out on the terrace to watch the lightning play across the sea as the storm retreated into the distance. At last she went to bed—the narrow bed in the small bedroom where she and Dick had made love—but not to sleep. The window was open to the fresh sea breeze and she lay very still, letting the cool air brush over her, feeling the penetrating loneliness. The man she’d planned to marry was dead, and she was left alone to mourn the empty years ahead, mourn the life they would no longer have together, mourn the unlived-in house in Florida, the unborn children, the unfilled days. But now that the immediate shock had passed, she found that she couldn’t cry. She couldn’t sleep, either, and when morning came, she was still lying awake, listening to the gulls call as they rode the wind, watching the sun climb the white-washed wall.
She hadn’t eaten the night before, so she got up and went into the empty kitchen, where she found eggs and bacon in the refrigerator and coffee and a coffee pot and fresh oranges. And then, sitting at the table by the window, thinking of the lonely, empty beds and unshared breakfasts that stretched out across the days and years ahead, she was quite suddenly angry at herself—an anger that had the startling force of a swift, hard slap in the face.
Why was she doing this? She was alive and comfortable, here with coffee and orange juice and eggs and bacon, in the fresh, bright sunshine of an Algerian morning. It was Dick who was dead. He was the one who had lost all future mornings, lost all the future, lost his chance to have children, to live in a world that was no longer at war, to find work that satisfied, to lead a productive life. She stared down at her plate. How could she be so self-centered? It wasn’t her empty future she should be mourning. She should be mourning his. She should be crying for him.
But with this thought came another, even more startling. She couldn’t mourn him, she couldn’t cry for him, because she didn’t really know the man she was grieving. Oh, yes. She could remember Dick’s physical presence, remember the feel of his lean, hard body against hers, the urgency of his desire—but theirs had been a wartime romance. They had met and fallen in love and within a month of their meeting they were planning to marry. But days, weeks, even months passed when they were apart, and when they did manage to meet, they had only a few rushed hours. She knew nothing about his family or his life back in America, and he had met her mother and sister only once. She had never seen him dressed in anything but his uniform and Butch’s borrowed swim trunks. She knew he was a good dancer, but she didn’t know what he liked to read or whether he played bridge or snored or preferred his steaks rare. She didn’t know him. She had spent more time with Beetle and Butch and Tex and Eisenhower—with Eisenhower especially—than she had with Dick. And Eisenhower knew her better and had seen more of her family than Dick ever had.
She washed her few dishes and went out to the stable. The bright morning sky had turned gray and there was the scent of rain in the air, but she didn’t care. She saddled one of the stallions and rode—fast and hard, testing herself and the horse—until she was exhausted. But she couldn’t outrace the fierce, hard grief that pounded behind her like a demon. She ached for Dick, for herself, for the loss of their lovely dream, for all the sweet years they would not have together.
At last, she dismounted on the secluded beach where she and Dick had lain together and made love on that last, beautiful day. Now, the clouds and water were the same dull gray and the sea was whipped to a foamy froth by the stiff onshore breeze that flung salt spray against her face. High in the sky, one single gray gull hung, hovering, on the wet wind. Two gray ships, like toy boats, moved along the distant horizon.
She thought of the moment the Strathallan had been torpedoed, of the fiery bombs that had rained on London, of the hundreds of corpses she had ferried in her makeshift ambulance during the Blitz. She thought of the war dead—so many, many of them, now and in all the days and nights until Hitler would at last be beaten—and the death of one, just one, seemed to shrink into a terrible insignificance.
And at last she began to cry, but now she was crying, not just for one but for all who had already died, were dying today, would die tomorrow and next month and next year. And for the millions of mothers and wives and daughters and sisters—and fathers and sons and brothers and friends—who were waiting for those who would never come home. And only then could she cry for Dick, for him, for the man she had not really known.
And that, she realized now, was her greatest sorrow. She had not known the man she thought she loved. She couldn’t cling to a memory that was little more than a pale mirage in the desert, seductively hopeful, lovely—but an illusion, a fantasy.
And now she would never know the reality of him, of them, of the truth they might have been, together.
CHAPTER ELEVEN:
Carrying On
Washington, D.C.
May–June 1943
It had been a cruel spring. Just twelve months before, Mamie had been excited and happy, moving with Ike into that grand house on Generals’ Row and delighted no end when he got that second star so quickly—all because of the war, of course. The war was awful, yes, certainly. But it was also responsible for the good things that were happening to Ike. His third and fourth stars, which made her very proud.
Still, the war, and the fame it brought her husband, was responsible for the bad things that were happening to her—especially that Kay Summersby business. The first photo in Life magazine’s November issue had been bad enough: the photo of Ike’s official family, including his “pretty Irish driver.” But then, just three months later, came the second photo, revealing that Kay Summersby had been on her way to join Ike in A
lgiers when her ship was torpedoed. The first photograph had worried Mamie but had prompted only a few calls from her closest friends. The second prompted a tidal wave.
Most of the people who called were longtime friends, army wives whose husbands were serving in North Africa. They were all so sweetly affectionate, so sympathetic, and not at all subtle. One of them might say, with a delicate hesitation: “Mamie, dear, I thought you ought to know—I heard that the two of them go on long trips through the desert together.” Or resolutely: “Of course, everybody agrees that the General himself is above reproach, but my husband says it’s a scandal, what people over there are saying about that woman!” And impulsively, with feeling: “Mamie, dear, I wish there was something I could do to help. You must be just sick about it.”
Mamie had never considered herself a distrustful person, but she found herself feeling skeptical about almost everybody. She knew that the women who called were jealous because her husband had four stars and their husbands had just one or two. She didn’t distrust Ike, of course. She knew he loved her and would never even think of betraying her for another woman. When she wrote to him about the second Life magazine photo and asked him why a British civilian was working for him in Algiers, he replied that she had come to North Africa to be near her fiancé.
“She is head over heels in love with a young American colonel,” he wrote. “They’re planning a June wedding—if they’re both still alive.” In response to her charge that he never wrote about what he was doing, he went on, “I’d bore you to death if I told you every little thing that goes on around here.” And if anybody hinted to her that her “old duffer” was “fooling around” with a nurse or a driver, she would know how utterly idiotic that was. The war was turning him into an old man.
Of course she trusted him. Just looking at him, you knew it wasn’t in him to be deceptive. If nothing else, he was surely too busy with his important duties to fool around. What’s more, he had no privacy. He lived in a goldfish bowl, with Butch and Beetle watching every move and faithful Mickey reporting to her every two weeks, although of course Ike didn’t know that. And as far as sex was concerned, well, he hadn’t bothered her about it for a very long time, so she knew he wasn’t interested in that. After all, he was, as he said, an “old duffer.”
But while she didn’t honestly believe he was up to anything, she was deeply annoyed by the fact that he had brought that woman to North Africa. Couldn’t he understand how she—his wife—might feel about it? Couldn’t he see how it looked to everybody else? Of course he wasn’t involved with Kay Summersby, but the appearance of the thing was embarrassing and deeply, deeply humiliating. Her parents and grandparents had always set great store by what other people thought of them. When she was growing up, her mother had warned her and her sisters to wear only clean underwear and stockings without holes, for fear of what the nurses might think if they were run over by a car. And of course in the army, appearances were everything—you dressed by a code, you lived by the rules, your life had to pass inspection. The malicious gossip about Ike and his driver, added to the ceaseless whispers about her drinking, made Mamie feel that she was wearing dirty underwear and everyone could see it.
Finally, Mamie felt she was going to snap like a stretched rubber band under the strain of pretending. She packed her suitcases, closed up the Wardman Park apartment, and took the train to San Antonio to stay with her sister Mike. The poor thing had four young children, one of them still a baby, and was overwhelmed by life on her own, now that her husband had been sent overseas. Her sister’s difficulties went a long way toward taking Mamie’s mind off her own troubles. Mike lived only a few blocks from Fort Sam, where she and Ike had been so happy when they were first married—and very far from Washington. If anybody had heard the ridiculous gossip about Ike and Kay Summersby, they didn’t mention it.
And of course, there was the pleasure of being a four-star wife. Mamie wasn’t especially fond of the caste system that prevailed on army bases, but she had to admit she liked being treated as if she were somebody special. Everyone seemed thrilled to see her and there were quite a few private parties and dinner invitations. And since San Antonio wasn’t Washington and Fort Sam was closed to reporters, she felt free to go out and enjoy herself.
Her health improved while she was there, too, perhaps because she had such a good time playing auntie to Mike’s sweet children. She made them marshmallow fudge—the only thing in the world she could cook, really—and loved to watch them devour it. She found herself thinking often of her lost little Icky and the things she would do differently now. She remembered when they were at Camp Meade and she put him to bed with his shoes on, the laces tied together, to keep him from wandering in the night. She would never do that again. She would be more attentive to her precious boy and more watchful, for she still blamed herself for hiring the nursemaid, the girl who had given him scarlet fever. She wondered if Ike still blamed her too, as he had done at that awful time, for not paying enough attention to their darling. Looking at Mike’s dear little family, Mamie sometimes wished she’d had more children, especially a daughter or even two. She would be less alone—and she and Ike might feel more connected to one another. Children created a bond after other bonds were gone.
Now, truth be told, she felt terribly cut off from him, remote and out of touch, in spite of his assurances, repeated in every letter, that he loved her. He was leading a very different life in an alien world quite beyond anything she had experienced or could imagine, and there was so much he would not or could not tell her. “Everything I do, or see, or hear, or even think, is secret,” he wrote, which would certainly have worried her if she had imagined that he was capable of carrying on a secret affair. But the idea of the multitude and scale of the secrets he carried—some of them surely world-altering—made her feel even more keenly that he had grown away from her, that he was far beyond her reach. He no longer belonged just to her and she felt this keenly. What was worse, Miss Summersby lived in his world.
How many of his secrets did she share?
• • •
But the woman wasn’t actually Miss Summersby. Mamie learned this from Cookie Wilson when she returned to Washington toward the end of May. Cookie’s husband Marv (now stationed with Ike in Algiers) had told her that Mrs. Summersby had gotten a divorce from a British fellow—Lieutenant Colonel Gordon Summersby—who was serving in India. The charge? (Here Cookie lowered her voice and leaned closer to Mamie over the card table.) Adultery! And the divorce had been filed by the injured husband, no less, naming an American colonel, Richard Arnold.
There was more, and even more distasteful. It turned out that Pamela Farr (a mah-jongg regular whom Mamie had known since they lived across the street from one another at Fort Leavenworth) was acquainted with the American colonel’s ex-wife. Pamela reported that the Arnolds’ divorce had been “terribly messy,” and that it involved charges of adultery with Mrs. Summersby. The Arnolds had been having marital difficulties for some time, but Mrs. Arnold had believed that things were getting better—until this Irishwoman came along and . . . Well, Pamela wasn’t going to repeat the details. Suffice it to say that it was not a pretty story.
“Luckily, there were no children involved,” Pamela added. She gave Mamie a significant glance. “I wonder if Ike knows about this ugly business. If he did, surely he wouldn’t want that woman on his staff. Mrs. Summersby, I mean. Her reputation is certainly questionable. She sounds to me like a troublemaker.”
“That woman” sounded like a troublemaker to Mamie, too. The minute the girls left, she sat down and shot off a letter right away, reporting what Cookie and Pamela had said.
“Colonel Arnold’s divorce is not a pretty story.” She let her pen dig into the paper with the force of her feeling. Ike needed to know how important this was. “And really, it’s not at all nice to have a scandal—or even the appearance of a scandal—in your office.”
After the letter was in the mail, Mamie had second thoughts. She did
n’t usually tell Ike how to manage his staff, and she was afraid he would think she had been a little too . . . well, shrill. But surely he’d see that she was only looking out for his best interests. People always said that where there was smoke, there was fire. Really, it was all about appearances. A man in his position was vulnerable. He couldn’t be too careful.
Ike’s response arrived not long after. His letter shook her, and her cheeks flushed scarlet as she read it. By one of those uncanny coincidences of war, her letter containing the ugly story about Colonel Arnold and Mrs. Summersby had arrived on her husband’s desk at the very same moment as the report that the colonel had been killed by a German mine.
“Your letter said his story was ‘not a pretty one,’” he wrote sternly.
Until I read it, I had no idea there was any “story” at all. I’ve met Arnold and I liked him. He was thirty-two, commander of a regiment, and scheduled to be married on June 22. Death is a daily event here, and I suppose we are changed by that. But decency, generosity, cooperation, devotion to duty—these things don’t change, and out here, they mean a great deal more to us than the way things “appear.” I don’t know what young Arnold did to deserve your disapproval, and frankly, I don’t care. His colleagues and I considered him a valuable officer and a fine person. I am deeply saddened by his death.
Biting her lip, Mamie put down the letter, feeling as chastened as she had once, long ago. She had been young and immature and willful then, “rotten spoiled,” as she herself admitted, and given to childish fits of temper when she didn’t get her way. Not long after she and Ike were married, she had gotten angry about something—something so trivial that she couldn’t remember now what it was. But she would never forget what happened. She had slapped at her husband’s hand and her ring struck his West Point ring and shattered the amethyst stone. He had drawn back with a cold, distant look and said, “Are you proud of yourself, young lady? For that display of temper you will replace this stone—with your own money.” Of course, he knew she didn’t have any money of her own: it would come from the monthly allowance her father gave his indulged daughter. The reprimand had stung even more because of that.
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