Personal History (29 page)

Phil sympathized with my two years of pretty constant pregnancy and suggested that “in 10 or 15 years it’ll all be over and there’ll stand the 8 or 12 grinning little bastards tearing up the furniture, spilling our liquor,
drooling on your new dress, yowling too early in the morning, and generally proclaiming the solidarity of the home”—an old-fashioned view of life, which we shared completely.

Whether we had miscalculated or whether the baby was just late, we waited restlessly for four weeks, by the end of which Mary, whom I’d quite worn out, had to leave. Bis was getting married to Pare and my family were all at Mount Kisco. I asked a friend from Washington, Rosamund Burling, to come and wait with me for what would be the final few days.

I was lucky to have not only Rosamund in the fathers’ waiting room but a friend who was a pediatrician, Mary Goodwin. She was the one who lay the baby across my stomach and said, “It’s a girl, and she’s fine.”

Elizabeth Morris Graham had finally arrived on July 3, safe and sound. I remember my father’s coming to see me and his new grandchild. My mother was at Mount Kisco, but she didn’t seem to enter the picture much. Fortunately, Phil’s class had graduated in Ephrata and he himself arrived back east on the very day Elizabeth was born, so he was in on the excitement and was there to bring us home. Needless to say, I was terribly happy to have the baby safely here—after the nine long months and after my earlier losses—and to be together with Phil as well.

I had looked for a nurse to help for the first few weeks, but had decided that I wouldn’t—as my mother had done—keep a nurse permanently. My intention was to do it all myself—a resolve that broke down almost immediately. During the first week, while still in the hospital, I struggled to nurse the baby. After a futile effort, which set both me and the baby on edge, I abandoned the attempt and put her on a formula, and everything went better.

The new baby nurse, Mary Bishop—a Scots lady of great warmth, good humor, and devotion—came to help us temporarily, but, just like Powelly with us Meyer children, Mamie, as we came to call her, stayed, becoming part of all our lives, a real friend. The whole arrangement with her worked so smoothly that she didn’t leave us until the fourth young Graham outgrew her and she retired to Scotland.

Having a nurse to take care of a baby, except for its visits to its mother twice a day, was not, at the time, so odd an arrangement as it would seem today. But the presence of Miss Bishop undoubtedly impeded my learning how to cope. Gradually I took more care of Elizabeth, but I never learned to be truly at ease with small babies, although I got better with each one.

I
N RESPONSE TO
an air-force memo stating a need for combat intelligence, Phil switched from communications and was accepted at the Air Intelligence School in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, which is why he was able to be with me after the baby’s birth. After life in the shadows of lethargy at
Ephrata, he was cheered by what he found in Harrisburg, a pervasive competence that lifted him back onto a plane of enthusiasm.

After my six-week checkup, I visited Phil in Harrisburg for his last week there. Again, he was high up in his class at graduation and was asked to stay on to teach. He decided to stay, and for the first time in six months we would be together again.

We set up housekeeping in Harrisburg, taking things from our 37th Street house (which we had sublet to the Steichens). Luckily, we inherited a beautiful apartment from San Francisco friends, Gay and Jack Bradley, who in turn had succeeded Jock and Betsey Whitney. For two months, we led an ideal and spoiling life—fairly normal hours and luxurious living. While Phil taught, I went to work as a volunteer at the Ration Board. Mamie took care of the baby, and Mattie took care of all of us. But at the end of these two glorious months, the owner reclaimed the apartment, and we met the cold breeze of reality when I started looking for another place to live. All we could find was a small apartment in a recently (and badly) built housing complex with paper-thin walls and an electric stove with the maddening habit of dying right in the middle of a roast.

The day we actually moved, Phil was recovering from a farewell party we’d hosted, so I packed up everything—the last object being an inert Phil—and got us to the new apartment. I didn’t think much about it at the time, but this was the beginning of a pattern that I can see now was quite unhealthy: I was expected to perform all the pulling and hauling; Phil gave directions and put the fun in my life and the children’s. Gradually I became the drudge and, what’s more, accepted my role as a kind of second-class citizen. I think this definition of roles deepened as time went on and I became increasingly unsure of myself.

Another development seems to have surfaced way back then—Phil’s increasing ill-health and drinking. He was extremely vulnerable to afflictions, which affected him powerfully. I was constitutionally much stronger. If he got a cold, he went to bed. If we both ate bad seafood, it affected him twice as much as it did me. Often he seemed to have some incapacitating kind of “flu.”

Shortly after we moved to the new place, Mattie got ill and had to be hospitalized. This is when I was forced to learn some semblance of cooking, but I had no idea how to organize a meal. Phil’s admonitions to “keep it simple” were wise but only succeeded in irritating me and making me more desperate as I struggled with
Fanny Farmer
, not to mention my new stove’s penchant for suddenly expiring. I always tried to do too much, ending up with frequent failures and several notable disasters. Mamie was as helpless in the kitchen as she was helpful with the baby, having lived all her working life in large, wealthy households with lots of servants who took care of such things as meals.

On Mamie’s days off she usually returned to Washington, so I also had the baby to care for. On these days, there was twice as much work as necessary because of darling Mamie’s old-fashioned notions of things like hand-squeezed orange juice and beef juice as necessities. My own extreme nervousness, born of my inexperience, seemed to result in instant tears and screaming from the baby. Naps were few and far between, except when I pushed her in the baby carriage for miles up and down the streets of Harrisburg.

Army life, too, was a series of ups and downs—living together followed by another painful parting, living luxuriously and then in relatively difficult circumstances. Relief from the downside of Harrisburg arrived in late January 1944. Phil had maneuvered to jump over to a more exciting and challenging milieu in the Special Branch. So, after another month-long school program on intelligence training, he was transferred to Washington to go into the Special Branch, a super-secret part of Intelligence, run by an ex–Cravath, Swaine & Moore lawyer, Colonel Al McCormick, who had commandeered many of our friends, as well as many others who were to become friends. I never knew, and probably none of the spouses knew, what Phil and the other men did. Only much later, when we learned that early in the war the secret codes used by Germany and Japan had been broken, did we understand that Special Branch had been engaged in reading messages being sent back and forth from the field.

When we returned to Washington, we reclaimed our little row house on 37th Street from the Steichens and resumed a somewhat normal Washington life. Many of our friends were scattered around the world in various parts of the armed services, but still there were old friends like Prich and the Frankfurters, as well as my family. Then, in October 1944, after almost nine months of back-to-normal married life, Phil, as expected, was assigned to the Pacific and had to leave suddenly. The rush of departure again had been so great that the familiar low feelings that always accompanied these leavetakings only hit us after we were separated. Letters between us flew back and forth every day, more or less, for the whole year that he was gone—so many that most of mine were destroyed by him, because their bulk was too great for him to carry around. Phil’s are almost all preserved. He left for the Pacific by way of San Francisco, Hawaii, and New Guinea, winding up in the Philippines with the Far East Air Forces. Having just been promoted at the end of September, he was finally beginning to look around when someone yelled “Captain.”

P
HIL WAS TO
spend most of the rest of the war in the Philippines in an important job. He started off reporting to his own boss in Special Branch and also to the regular intelligence officer under General George Kenney,
commander of the Allied Air Forces in the Southwest Pacific. Kenney was essentially MacArthur’s air commander. Eventually, Phil again rose to the top and worked closely with General Kenney himself. When Kenney later wrote a memoir, entitled
General Kenney Reports
, he inscribed a copy to Phil with the note: “To Phil Graham, the only really intelligent intelligence officer I had …”

From the beginning of his overseas duty, Phil talked in excited terms of what was going on out there and the fine team of people he was assembling. He spoke movingly about all those with whom he worked, describing them in detail and bringing them to life. He constantly praised the enlisted people—how hard they worked, how much he counted on them, and how much he appreciated what they did: “Every day one of them rocks me back on my heels by turning up with some complicated job they have dreamed up on their own initiative and done beautifully. They are all terribly eager, in a decent non-bucking sort of way, and they love us and we them.…”

I always wondered where Phil’s natural affinity for people in all walks of life came from. Perhaps it was growing up on the farm, or dropping out of college to drive the milk truck and relating to his customers as well as to the people on the farm. Wherever it came from, his ability to cut through formalities and talk to both men and women almost immediately in an intimate and connected way was an invaluable asset throughout his life. I learned a lot from him in this respect, but never developed that almost political connection he had with most people.

The
Post
, or at least clippings from it, which he received somewhat irregularly, provided Phil with a continuing window on the way Washington viewed the war and the world. He also went on writing to my father about his reactions to the
Post
’s coverage and editorials, criticizing this or that, praising something else. In one letter, after complaining about the
Post’s
reaction to Henry Wallace, then vice-president of the United States, and disapproving of an emphasis on trivial stories (like a dog getting a ride on an air-transport plane) when he felt there were more important things to worry about, Phil added: “Those are all really minor matters and as long as you keep sending such cigars as those that have arrived I shall bow to your every decision.…”

Phil worked hard while in the Philippines, and, typically, the harder he worked, the more he seemed to like what he was doing. Meanwhile, life in Washington went along for me fairly routinely and comfortably. By this time, Elizabeth, or Acey, as Phil then called her—she was later called Lally—was over a year old and I was again pregnant. I wanted to work, in part to help fill the hours while Phil was away, but I needed a job that would keep me busy, teach me something, yet not be draining. I went back to the
Post
at a pedestrian and undemanding but instructive job in the circulation
department, responding to complaints. My job fit the bill of keeping me busy without being too exhausting. I caught the bus outside the house and worked regular hours.

We were only a handful of people who answered phones, took down information, and forwarded it to the appropriate office. The department was a mess, riddled with backbiting and intrigue. It was here that I encountered the disagreeableness of seeing things being badly run, with everyone complaining—most of all, the customers—and not being able to do anything about it. The job taught me how to deal with enraged subscribers and how hard it is at times to get a simple situation resolved. One caller said he was a friend of Eugene Meyer’s and would go directly to him if we couldn’t fix the problem. I promised to do our best, then added that I was Eugene Meyer’s daughter and had never had the pleasure of meeting this caller, nor had ever heard his name mentioned by my father. A more important thing I learned was how terrible a confused and poorly managed department is for those who work in it.

Most of the winter went by quietly and quickly for me—I was busy with the routine of working and coming home to Elizabeth. Phil wrote to my mother, saying, “I suppose Kay is still as mother-hennish as ever and bristles when you bust in on the Ace at some crucial time; I love Kay’s bristles.” I recognize myself in Phil’s references to my too-great passion for order and routine—a boring affliction I have carried most of my life, even though Phil did a lot to free me of it. I wish he could have done more.

B
ECAUSE OUR LIVES
had been shaped socially by our New Deal friends and then wartime in Washington, Sioux Falls, and Harrisburg, I had been to dinners such as my family gave or those given by our few older friends, but I myself had never given “a dinner.” I was particularly inept at doing things like that because I had grown up in such a large household, where everything happened on a different, huge scale. What I was used to was having a few friends over to share Mattie’s very good but simple food, which she both cooked and served.

My first attempt at entertaining has stayed indelibly with me for half a century. Jonathan and June Bingham, young friends who had moved back to New York when the war broke out, were visiting for the weekend, and I decided to have a few friends over, including Prich and Isaiah Berlin, a relatively new but close friend who was in Washington at this time as an information officer in the British Embassy. The other couple I invited was Donald and Melinda Maclean. Donald was something like third secretary at the British Embassy, and through Isaiah the Macleans became friends of mine. The two of them seemed like attractive, intelligent, liberal young people—in short, much like our own circle of friends. None of us could
remotely have suspected that Donald would later emerge as a communist spy. Even now it’s hard for me to comprehend that both Donald and Melinda were Soviet agents.