But MacArthur survived causing his men in the field to be openly contemptuous over his leaving them with an Air Force without planes, a Navy without ships and an Army without weapons, food or medicine. They reviled his having come only once on January 15, 1942, to inspect their dire conditions on Bataan, and his having abandoned the hoarded food on Corregidor to the enemy. No longer did anyone believe his continual proclamation, “Help is on the way. Thousands of troops and hundreds of planes are being dispatched. The exact time of arrival of the reinforcements is unknown…. No further retreat is possible. If we fight, we will win; if we retreat, we will be destroyed.”
A month later President Franklin Roosevelt awarded MacArthur the Medal of Honor, reinstating his status of hero in spite of his inaction and failure to defend the Philippines, not to mention the open contempt of his men.
Newly promoted Lieutenant General Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright IV became the Allied Commander of the Philippines with orders from MacArthur never to capitulate to the enemy. But in order to save lives and stave off starvation and disease, on April 9, Wainwright surrendered his surviving 70,000 troops in Bataan to the Japanese, finally acknowledging that the promised reinforcements and supplies would never arrive.
The Japanese had succeeded. The Empire had over-run the entire Pacific in six months.
By June 1942, the entire 320,000 combined Allied Forces were completely surrendered and all but the Filipinos taken prisoner by an enemy unprepared to take any burdensome prisoners. However, Jonathan M. Wainwright, trusting his soldiers would be fed and the Geneva Convention honored, turned himself over as the highest-ranking American POW ever taken prisoner. During his brutal captivity he remained angst-ridden over what he considered his sole responsibility: the decision to surrender his men to the Japanese. So wearing a conical coolie hat and herding goats he worked alongside the other prisoners in the fields until 1945, when Russians liberated him with the other POWs from a prison camp in Manchuria.
During Wainwright’s imprisonment, MacArthur wrote a slanderous and cruel memorandum to Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall insisting that Wainwright be denied a Medal of Honor, calling him a coward and an alcoholic. He was not alone in this opinion, but MacArthur himself was a questionable hero, still widely scorned for abandoning the Philippines. His own Medal of Honor was considered fraudulent because, unlike General Wainwright, he was never near the front lines. He was, in fact by the time of his award, comfortably celebrated as the Hero of Australia while his starving men were abandoned and brutalized.
1
Florida, February, 1944
Phyllis slowly pulled herself free from the same damp sheets she had passed out on a few hours before. Her head was heavy, her mouth like sand but the time had arrived. She took a long breath and dropped her hand over the black receiver, anticipating the ring. This whole ordeal had taken long enough.
But her nightmare had been exact, and now was the time.
For several nights running she’d been overwhelmed by visions of the crash. Blood red and violent with the sounds of snapping, cracking bones. She had heard the hollow reverberating thunder of high-speed metal striking metal. She could smell the explosion from the motorcycle’s gasoline and see how the smoke hung heavy in the air, illuminated by flames flickering like snakes’ tongues searing the acrid paint and exploding the tires. She could also taste the chemical cinders, the very soot and its biting sting.
“Are you certain it’s Russell?” she asked.
“We have notified his wife. She gave us your number.” Dispassionate voice.
“Wife?” Phyllis’ bile rose.
“She agreed to allow you to identify the body.”
“The divorce is almost final,” Phyllis protested, knowing all concern was absurd now. The time for divorce was past.
Phyllis replaced the receiver on the hook. She had forgotten to ask where the collision had taken place. It did not matter. If she took her time he would have been scrupulously gathered up (if not reassembled) before she steered the Lincoln Zephyr down the winding road along the bluff toward Lake Worth. No doubt he had been hurled free of the flames, unconscious and beyond suffering. Still, it was hideous; she needed to be spared the small details.
It was a shame that Russell’s lame-duck wife Anissa had been brought into it. She was clinically crazy—coo-coo. She lived with a cult in New Mexico where they truly believed that a ten-foot tall Saint Germain was close to ending this war with Germany simply by brandishing his blazing purple sword. It was altogether too apparent that, in spite of her militant certainty, the War expanded to cover both hemispheres, annihilating everything in its wake. No power on earth had been able to end it.
Anissa should have been locked up years ago.
Had she been as calm as she appeared, Phyllis would have been able to return to her dreaming-sleep for more information. But more than information, she’d dream of leave-taking and farewells, of his final torn embrace, where she in turn would promise to cherish his memory and ask him if he had suffered very much. She would have smothered his face with kisses, allowing him one more chance to tell her how he adored her before he faded to black, a movie trick announcing an important scene shift.
Instead, because she knew he expected her to, she rose and peeled off the wrinkled sheets and the clothes she’d slept in last night, to dress herself for the role of the bereaved. As she checked her face in the bathroom mirror, she took pleasure from her green eyes and thick Rita Hayworth shoulder-length red hair; steadying herself now, she labored a deep breath for the dance ahead, beginning with the police questioning.
Fumbling, she spit on the mascara brush in its mirrored box and applied coal black to her lashes, purposely smudging under both eyes for effect. Next, she dabbed pancake makeup over her freckles, while the realization flitted over her that this death brought both grief and a giddy income.
She applied lipstick to mask her thin-ish lips. Grasping that she was an heiress jerked her heart alive. She was both confused and gratified when Russell’s crash was confirmed. Death’s croupier had now pushed the chips to her corner. Forget that women were always whispering about her, heaping nouns on her: whore, a piece of baggage, chippy, trollop, slut, doxie.
Now they’d have to add, “residual beneficiary.”
On stage without a script, she contemplated how she wanted to be seen. Repeated nights of bloody dreams had prepared her role, put her beyond shock. Except for a small tremble in her right hand, she was composed.
She was the main attraction and he could not be legally dead without her witnessing signature. So said his wife; so said the officer. Everyone would have to wait patiently. So flipping on another light in the bathroom, she peered into the mirror taking her time. There was no rush, either at the precinct or at the morgue.
The force of his death would come to pound her a day or so after she had returned home from the morgue. And in the disorientation that is either caused by or is—in fact—mourning, Phyllis would make a bewildering choice.
Afterward. Not before.
Now, in the early dawn of his death-day, she took her time, conscious that Russell’s spirit stalked the house, watching her, proud of the only woman he’d ever loved, proud of her youth. She moved through the new sun’s pink light to his favorite chair in the library and there she took repeated deep breaths with her eyes closed in order to see him more
