Her Last Flight(62)
Over on the armchair, Sandy lifted her head and licked a paw. Irene set down the hem she’d been picking and smoothed it over the bump of her knee.
“No,” she said. “I’ve got nothing to tell you about Sam and me.”
Morrow held her gaze for a second or two, just to see if she’d back down, she thought. So she didn’t. He turned away and stubbed out his cigar in the ashtray. “All right, then. I can see you’re tired. Get yourself some rest. We’ll discuss all this in the morning over breakfast.”
“You and me and Sam.”
“Of course.”
Morrow’s jacket lay over the back of the armchair. He rose and hooked it with his finger. As he picked up his hat, he looked Irene’s way and smiled.
“I like the new hairdo, Miss Foster. It suits you.”
The hairdo, of course, was to become iconic: a symbol of the age and the women who peopled it, of this daring new generation of females. To millions of admirers, those short curls meant freedom and courage. Certainly they attracted attention. In the many photographs that survive from the press conference after the Centauri’s miraculous arrival in Sydney, Irene Foster’s hair seizes the camera’s fascination: a riotous gold mop glimmering under the lights like some kind of beacon for the brave new world.
Naturally, the reporters wanted to know how and when and why she had cut her hair. And Irene—who was still exhausted, remember, who had napped only briefly before Morrow knocked again on the door of her hotel suite to summon her to her public—let down her guard for a single sentence, the only sentence. She glanced at Sam, who sat at her side; Sam glanced at her, and they shared a smile. “Sam cut it for me, on our third day on Howland,” she said. “Long hair just gets in the way of everything, doesn’t it?”
The photographers present that day were not stupid. A cavalcade of flashbulbs and camera shutters captured that shared smile, which was reproduced on millions of sheets of newsprint within twenty-four hours, was thrown up on thousands of newsreel screens within a week, was printed in countless magazines and books over the years, was later expanded to gigantic proportions for museum exhibits and popular art. It became, in the collective imagination, a visual shorthand for two separate though related aspects of twentieth century life: for the unique and private connection that exists between two people deeply in love and for a moment in history when an equal standing between man and woman—the possibility for adventure shared, for genuine partnership—became possible.
Humans being as they are, of course, the fact that both Sam and Irene married other people only made it all the more intriguing.
Following the press conference, there was a gala dinner, then a tour of the city the next day in the company of the mayor, in which Sam and Irene (accompanied by George Morrow) appear to have met at least half the civil servants in the entire province. There was a luncheon with the Sydney Ladies Auxiliary, a military ball given by the Australian Flying Corps, a private lunch at the new Government House in Canberra with Lord Stonehaven, the governor-general of Australia, followed by a formal dinner with the prime minister and senior members of government, along with their wives. Various additional public appearances filled in the gaps of this bruising schedule.
To Irene it all passed in a blur, or rather a jumble. She felt like a doll, dressed up—Morrow had ordered an entire wardrobe for her—and paraded about at event after event, saying the same things to an endless receiving line of people, giving variants of the same speech, more or less, she had delivered to the panjandrums of Honolulu. What she did not experience was time to herself. Each day, Morrow left her at her hotel suite at midnight and rapped on her door at half past seven, so that she had neither time nor energy to do anything else except stumble to bed and sleep deeply, dreamlessly, for the hours allotted. Not only was she never left alone with Sam, they had no opportunity to arrange a private meeting. It was Morrow, Morrow, Morrow, all day long.
On their fifth night in Australia, Irene rang up the switchboard and asked to be connected to Sam, but the operator told her she was unable to put through any calls to that suite without permission. Irene explained that this was Miss Foster, room 205. The operator apologized and said it was still impossible. The next morning, when Morrow’s attention was momentarily distracted, Irene told Sam. “I tried the same thing,” he said. “With the same result. I’d have marched right down the hall to see you, but Morrow’s got guards posted outside my door and yours.”
“That’s for protection from the public,” said Irene.
“Sure it is,” said Sam.
When Morrow returned to the breakfast table a moment later, Sam said, “What gives with the telephone lines? I can’t get a call in to Irene.”
“Of course not,” said Morrow. “Because any operator on that switchboard could listen in to your conversation, and every word would appear verbatim in the next morning’s papers.”
“Baloney,” said Irene.
Morrow shrugged. “An operator could earn a year’s pay selling that story.”
“Couldn’t you sue the newspaper?”
“Maybe. But the story’d be out by then.” Morrow reached for his coffee. “And I don’t think either of you would appreciate your private intercourse being made public.”
“That’s an interesting choice of words,” said Sam.