Her Last Flight(64)
There followed some agonized conferring about ethics, and the publisher himself was called in from some lunch at Delmonico’s, reeking of martinis and cigars and beefsteak. But the conclusion was foregone. Yesterday, Sam and Irene were martyrs, whose memory must remain unsullied, as was decent and necessary to American morale. Today, they were mortals, and the whole world wanted to know what they’d got up to on Howland Island for three weeks, and now the New York Sentinel had the answer, right there in incontestable photographic negative. You could call it muckraking, you could call it scurrilous, but you had to call it news. And once you stopped quibbling about principle, the only thing left to quibble about was price. (Ten thousand dollars for exclusive rights, as it turned out, which set a record for the time.)
Of course, once the formalities were complete, you had to wait a few days, until the public was bored and restless and eager for something new, but hadn’t yet turned its attention elsewhere. So it wasn’t until the first of September that the photographs—five were chosen from the roll—duly appeared on page three of the early edition, because you couldn’t print a thing like that on the front page, over the fold where anybody could see it, and within hours the newsrooms and editorial offices of the world found themselves struggling with what you might call a dilemma.
Keep in mind, even in those days, the New York Sentinel was the kind of paper that staked its profit on the low human greed for other people’s beeswax. You might argue that our Honolulu shutterbug couldn’t have wandered into a more providential newsroom in America on that particular morning, the morning Sam and Irene were resurrected from the dead. The Sentinel had the ethos and the heft and the credibility—just barely—to make those photographs the talk of the town. Newsstand sales set a record that day. So what were all the other dailies and weeklies and monthlies to do? Hold firm to the high ground and watch their readers flock to some other, less persnickety publication?
The solution was obvious. Of course you couldn’t just print those photographs by themselves, as a piece of news! Worse than prurient, they weren’t even news anymore. So you did what every newsman does when he misses the scoop: he writes a story about the story. You know the kind I mean. Honolulu Photos: Has the Sentinel Gone Too Far? and that sort of thing. In doing so, it was of course necessary for these Timeses and Picayunes and Tribunes to publish said photos themselves—quietly paying the Sentinel its royalty fees—so that the reader could decide for himself if the Sentinel had gone too far. You see how this works?
And bang! There you have it. That was how the image of Irene Foster and Sam Mallory embracing on the sands of Waikiki spread right across the world’s newsprint like the Spanish flu in the days following their safe arrival in Sydney, Australia, such that you couldn’t walk outside without catching it.
Needless to say, it was not much longer before some curious reporter turned up at Mrs. Mallory’s door with a copy and asked if she had any comment to make.
At this point, George Morrow might have made a strategic error, depending on your view of the matter. Having proceeded from Melbourne to Canberra and hit it off with the governor and the prime minister, the three of them were invited by the PM—Stanley Bruce, a thoroughgoing Australian sportsman—to join him for a few days of rest and restoration at a sheep station in central Queensland, owned by a friend of his, a Mr. Howard Hounslow. Possibly Morrow thought this expedition could be turned into a publicity advantage of some kind; possibly he was just too flattered by the invitation. In any case, they agreed, and a day later—just as Mrs. Mallory opened her newspaper and saw the photographs of her husband caught in flagrante on the sand with his lithe navigator, clad only in her wet drawers—the party trundled dustily down a hundred miles of unpaved road to a private residence with no switchboards, no security guards, no separate wings, no physical safeguards of any kind against the natural instincts of two people passionately in love with each other.
The house itself had been built in the last century by some hard-bitten ancestor of Mr. Hounslow, and quarters weren’t what you might call luxurious, especially after you’d experienced the pampering of Australia’s grandest hotels. But at this point in the week, privacy was the greatest luxury of all, and Irene couldn’t get enough of it. On the second morning, she woke at half past five, bathed and dressed, went to the kitchen to cadge a mug of coffee from the surprised cook, and marched outside to watch the sun rise, all by herself, under the shelter of a coolibah tree. (Really.)
We already know that Sam Mallory was just as determined an early riser, so it should come as no surprise that he also woke early, bathed and dressed, and while fastening his cuffs happened to look outside his window, just as Irene strode across the grass with her cup of coffee. He found her sitting under the coolibah, almost invisible in the fragile light. He said something about being careful of the snakes.
“Oh, they don’t bother you, so long as you don’t bother them.”
“American snakes, maybe. The Australian ones are a little hungrier, I’ve heard. Where’d you get the coffee?”
“Sweet-talked the cook. Sip?”
He took the coffee and drank and leaned his head back against the trunk of the tree. The sun rose by millimeters above the distant horizon. The ground here was flat, the hills stunted, the land dry. You could breathe deep and taste all the delicate perfumes of the grasslands.
“So the way I figure it,” Sam said, “we’ve got another two weeks of this circus before we board that ship back for California. Three weeks to cross the ocean. I’ll break the news to Bertha right after we get back, I mean there’s no point trying to soften the blow.”