Her Last Flight(63)
They were sitting in Irene’s suite, where they usually met for breakfast together, since they attracted too much attention when eating in hotel dining rooms. This particular morning that suite was located on the fourth floor of the Hotel Windsor in Melbourne; they were due to leave for the aforementioned visit to Canberra by private rail car in two hours. Outside, the weather was dry and cool, a few clouds skidding across the southern sky. A pair of radiators simmered under the giant windows overlooking Parliament House. At seven thirty precisely, a pair of waiters had knocked on the door and wheeled in this round table, set for three, with coffee, eggs, toast, bacon, sausages, kippers, grilled tomatoes, grapefruit, an entire pitcher of freshly squeezed orange juice, and a dish of cream for Sandy, who was now famous in her own right. The eggs were soft boiled; Morrow ate his from a silver egg cup, knocking off the tops with a spoon, while Irene and Sam both emptied theirs on slices of buttered toast. Sam had already drunk four cups of coffee and smoked three cigarettes. He was in a fighting mood.
Morrow replaced his cup in the saucer. “Of course the nature of your personal friendship is none of my business, or anyone else’s. But you must be aware of the insinuations made by the more scurrilous members of the press. Any evidence, or supposed evidence, that your association is anything other than purely platonic—”
“Is none of anyone’s business, except mine and Irene’s.”
“And your wife’s,” said Morrow. “Let’s not forget about Mrs. Mallory, at home in Oakland with her daily newspaper.”
Irene set down her fork and wiped her fingers on her napkin. She looked at Sam; he was looking at her. Sandy, who had finished her cream and now curled on Sam’s lap, lifted her head and blinked her eyes.
“And your daughter too, of course,” added Morrow.
Sam picked up his cigarette and shifted back to Morrow. “All right. I take your point.”
“On the level, now. I don’t give a damn what happened between the two of you on Howland Island,” Morrow said. “We’re all human. I don’t think there’s a man alive who would blame you for letting nature take its course, in a situation like that. But now you’re back in civilization, and the eyes of the world are watching you both, every second. I advise you not to stick a fork in your chance for fame and fortune with some foolish indiscretion. Are we square?”
Sam’s face was white. He sucked on his cigarette, crushed it out in the ashtray, and poured himself another cup of coffee. “As I said, I take your point.”
Morrow turned to Irene. “Well? Irene?”
“I understand perfectly,” she said.
By then, of course, Morrow’s admonitions were too late. Two weeks ago, the owner of the camera that had opened its shutter on what appeared to be a tender sunrise embrace between Irene Foster and Sam Mallory on the Waikiki beach, arrived by steamship in San Francisco, where he proceeded to the offices of the San Francisco Chronicle and offered to sell the newspaper the entire roll of film on an exclusive basis.
Now, the Chronicle, being the respectable kind of newspaper, none of your scurrilous muckraking yellow journalism sullying its pages, did not deem this particular news fit to print. The subjects, after all, were presently lost at sea, perhaps dead, as far as the frantic world knew. In fact, Sam and Irene were almost certainly dead, heroically so, dead in the sacred cause of human advancement, and you simply had to draw the line of decency somewhere, didn’t you? Even in the face of the kind of stop-the-presses scoop for which most newspapermen waited their whole lives. Sorry, sonny. No can do. Anyway, how do we even know for sure that’s Foster and Mallory on the beach together? Could be any man and woman who bear a passing resemblance.
Nothing daunted, the photographer then proceeded to the offices of the other newspapers in town, and those down the peninsula and across the bay. The San Jose Mercury-News. The Oakland Tribune. Still no takers. He bought a train ticket to Los Angeles and visited the Times, the Orange County Register, and so on down the circulation tables, and still he could not find a single buyer for his sensational photographs. Denver Post? Nope. Chicago Tribune? Don’t waste my time, you goddamn louse. Cleveland Plain Dealer? Go stick your photos where the sun don’t shine, and what kind of American are you, anyway.
You see the pattern. Not until this enterprising fellow reached New York City on the morning of the twenty-fourth of August, to discover a world made delirious with the news that Irene Foster and Sam Mallory had just been rescued intact from some spit of an island smack in the middle of the Pacific, did his luck finally turn. So electric was the atmosphere in the newsroom of the New York Sentinel that the photographer was able to waltz straight past reception and make his proposal to some harried green-shaded copy editor, who happened to be on the last five minutes of a drop-dead deadline. To demonstrate his annoyance he hauled our Peeping Tom straight to the office of the managing editor, threw him in, and yelled, This fellow says he got a snap of Foster and Mallory fucking on some beach in Hawai’i! The managing editor and the five or six reporters crowding his office turned and stared, and it would be fair to say that the hackling of journalistic instinct in that room was thicker than the smoke of the seven or eight cigarettes they were presently smoking. No shit? said the editor, and the photographer said, Got it right here, sir. If it ain’t the real deal, you can kiss my mother. (Except he didn’t say kiss.)