Her Last Flight

by Beatriz Williams

  “That’s an interesting choice of words,” said Sam.

  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.)

  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 Mal
lory 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.”

  “You’re sure?” Irene said.

  “Couldn’t be more. It’s you I’m worried about. They’ll call you a home-wrecker and worse, they’ll call you all kinds of things.”

  “Well, I am. I am a home-wrecker.”

  “No, you’re not. Bertha and I, we couldn’t be worse for each other. From the beginning, we made each other miserable. Our marriage has been over since long before I met you. The only fine thing we ever had between us was Pixie.”

  Irene sat up. “But you wouldn’t be divorcing her if it weren’t for me. So that makes me a home-wrecker.”

  Sam set down the coffee cup and reached for her. “Irene, don’t. You’re not doing a thing. It’s not your fault I’m crazy for you, can’t think of anything but you, don’t want to spend a single hour except with you . . .”

  Irene let him pull her back down into the grass. He put an arm around her and drew her right up against his side.

  “But I won’t have them saying a word against you,” he went on. “So we’re going to lie low for a bit. Strictly professional. The divorce might take a year or so, done right.”

  “What about flying?”

  “Why, that’s the best part. We’re a team, aren’t we? We’ll just hold our heads up and fly in every derby, every exhibition, every air show that will pay us. Take the high ground, don’t talk to any damned reporters—”

  “I like the sound of that.”

  “Write a book together, go on a lecture tour. They’ll flock to see us.”

  “Will they? Even after all this dies down?”

  “Sure, they will. They’ll love you. You’re America’s Flying Sweetheart, remember? Between the two of us, we’ll be able to buy our own ship within a year. Buy a nice house somewhere to settle down and shut the damned world out. You wouldn’t mind having Pixie around, would you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Because I can’t let Bertha raise her alone. She’d break that child like she tried to break me. Pixie needs a mother like you. Someone true and brave, someone who knows how to love another person.”

  “I’ll do my best for her. You know that.”

  “We’d teach her to surf, wouldn’t we? Wake up mornings and hit the water first thing.”

  “Yes,” said Irene. She played with the buttons of his woolen waistcoat. It wasn’t cold, but it was still winter, after all, and the morning air was cool on her hands and face. The sky had turned gloriously pink. She was drowsy and happy, listening to Sam’s heartbeat through the wool, listening to his rumbly voice. His hand found hers and wound their fingers together.

  “Maybe one day we could have a kid of our own,” he said. “Raise it with Pixie.”

  “Is that what you want?”

  “More than anything in the world, except you. What do you think?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t really thought about kids.”

  “Well, we’ve got all the time in the world for you to think about it. You just tell me yes or no when you’ve decided.”

  Irene raised herself on one elbow. Her eyes were blurry, but she could see his face, all right, lit up by the sunrise. “Sam Mallory,” she said, kind of raspy, “I have never loved anything on earth so much as I love you.”

  “Not even flying?”

  “Not even flying.”

  “Surfing?”

  “Not by a long shot.”

  He reached for the back of her head and kissed her, and a little while passed before they said anything else. Even then, they didn’t say much.

  They returned separately to the house. Irene felt like the sun, so full of heat and light she couldn’t help shedding it all around her. In the kitchen, she filled her cup back up with coffee and asked the cook if anyone else was up. The cook told her that Mr. Hounslow and Mr. Bruce were out riding, and Mr. Morrow was in the dining room eating breakfast.

  Irene realized she was hungry and went into the dining room, where the breakfast dishes were spread out on the sideboard. She heaped her plate and sat down across from Morrow. He’d already said good morning and was studying the newspaper. Since arriving in Sydney, Irene had been avoiding any kind of newspaper or magazine. She was afraid of seeing herself in it, some photograph that looked like her but was not, some quote attributed to her, some description that matched a person who looked and sounded like Irene but wasn’t really, not the real Irene, Irene as Irene understood her. But now, sitting in the dining room of this fellow Hounslow’s house in the middle of nowhere, skin aglow, mind sharp, Irene felt some curiosity about that newspaper on the table. Not for news of herself! The rest of the world, the real world, business and politics and baseball. So she asked Morrow if she could read this newspaper when he was finished.

  Morrow looked up and smiled. “Do you know what I think? I think you should take a vacation from the news.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s just the same damned thing over and over.”

  “
I don’t know. I’d like to know what’s going on. I don’t even know who’s running for president! Did Al Smith win the nomination after all?”

  “Yes, he did. The Democratic sacrificial lamb. Hasn’t got a chance against Hoover.”

  The door opened. Sam walked in, whistling. “Who? Al Smith?” he said.

  Morrow folded up the newspaper and tucked it under his plate. “They’ve got to field somebody, don’t they? Why not some Irish wet who’ll scare the dickens out of the Southern Baptists and raise the hackles of the do-gooding bluebloods. Say, you ought to try the hash.”

  Sam carried his brimming plate next to Irene and sat down. Under the tablecloth, his leg tangled with hers. “Wouldn’t mind taking a look at that newspaper, if you’re done with it.”

  “I was just telling Irene that it might not be a bad idea to take a little holiday away from the news. As we’re doing now.”

  Sam looked at Morrow; Morrow stared back at him. Irene noticed the pause and looked up, but by the time she realized there was some message passing between the two of them, both men had returned to their breakfast. The new-risen sun tumbled through the window. From somewhere in the house came the sound of human activity, Hounslow and Bruce, probably, returned from their ride. Irene slipped off her shoe and caressed Sam’s ankle with her toe. He choked a little on his hash and reached for the coffee. The door burst open.

  “Morrow! There you are. Some fellow just came in with an express telegram for you.” Hounslow thrust out his hand, which held a familiar yellow envelope. Morrow leaned forward across the table and took it. “Fine weather this morning, isn’t it? How’s breakfast?”

  “Breakfast is terrific,” said Irene, who was watching George Morrow’s face as he read his telegram. “We appreciate the hospitality.”

  “Why, it’s no trouble at all. Bruce here said the two of you were looking a bit peaky with all the fuss. That’s the beauty of this place. Nobody can be troubled to find you here.” Hounslow clapped his hand on Mr. Bruce’s shoulder. “Isn’t that right, Prime Minister?”