Sue Wiley’s reaction was all ingenuous surprise. ‘I thought most people in psychiatry like to talk about it. That’s a signpost of improvement, isn’t it? What are you ashamed of, Mr. Garrett?’
‘There’s nothing I’m ashamed of,’ he said animatedly. ‘First of all, it’s private, my own business and no one else’s on earth. Secondly, it might be misunderstood. The public isn’t oriented. They think anyone on the couch-and I’m not on the couch, by the way-anyone like that-is, well, more or less unbalanced, sick.’
The wide eyes. ‘But aren’t you?’
‘Of course not! I needed some-some advice-that’s all. But if you blow this whole thing out of proportion-’ He was at a loss for words.
She had the words. ‘Readers might think you were a screwball? Maybe not to be trusted with that heart transplant routine? Less worthy of sharing a Nobel Prize with Dr. Farelli?’
‘All right, something like that, and it’s not fair, and you know it. As for Farelli, no one thinks I’m less worthy to share the award than he is. In fact, in many circles, it’s believed I should have won the prize myself.’
As she listened, Sue Wiley’s eyes were more gleaming than before. She smelt something far better, and she wanted to pursue it as quickly as possible. Hastily, she donned a new guise of personality. This one was softer, understanding, all co-operation. ‘Look, Mr.-Dr. Garrett-what do you think I am, Madame Defarge or something? I’m not out to hurt a great man like you or anyone else. Certainly, I won’t mention your private medical history, if you don’t wish me to. I only threw it at you to-I guess to show you how thorough we are in our work. If you don’t want me to write about your therapy, I won’t.’
Garrett wanted to kiss this suddenly lovely young lady. ‘I’d be obliged if you’d forget it.’
‘Righto. Forgotten. Okay?’
‘Thank you.’
‘I only hoped for a few minutes of your time, to make my stories more accurate.’
‘I’d be glad to help you in any way, that is, if you don’t tattle on me to the Nobel Foundation.’
‘I told you-we respect our sources.’
‘Well,’ said Garrett expansively, relieved, ‘what kind of stories are you going to write?’
For a fraction of a second, she was tempted to tell him. She was bursting to tell someone. She was proud of the idea, her own, but some inner signal, which she usually ignored, warned her to slow down, take care, and this time she observed it. The success of her series might depend on this crop of Nobel winners. A mistake with one of them, Garrett for instance, might turn them against her, and then her assignment might all be uphill. If she handled the first of them right, it might be her calling card to all the rest.
Her instincts about an assignment, almost infallibly correct, told her that this was the crucial one of her career. But before she could reply to his question about it, she realized that Garrett was on his feet, being introduced by a hostess to two Swedish gentlemen, fellow physicians, who were eager to have the laureate meet their wives. With an apologetic gesture to Sue Wiley, Garrett asked her leave for a moment, and followed the Swedes down the aisle.
Precious as was their remaining time, Sue Wiley did not resent the interruption. The importance of her new assignment had turned her mind inwards, and now she welcomed the interlude to review the circumstances-the triumphal procession through recent years-that had brought her to this turning point.
Sue Wiley, born and raised in that doubtful oasis called Cheyenne, Wyoming, had been the product of loveless parents and their hate-filled marriage. She had grown to adolescence in an atmosphere that was niggardly and penurious. At home she had been unwanted, and at school she had been ignored. Not until her senior year at school, when she had revealed a gift for composition and journalism, had she known praise and attention. In that period, also, perhaps not by chance, she had read the life of Nellie Bly. Like herself, Nellie Bly had been the product of a small town and had embarked upon a career as a means of self-support. She had exposed the horrible sweatshops of Pittsburgh, had pretended insanity to enter and write about the insane asylum on Blackwell’s Island, had found notoriety and $25,000 a year, attired in ghillie cap and plaid ulster, by making a 24,899-mile journey around the world (in the footsteps of Phileas Fogg) in seventy-two days for The New York World. For Sue Wiley, encouraged by the success of her high-school compositions, Nellie Bly became her mother, her father, her Deity. For Sue Wiley, the die was cast.
There had been a handful of dim years, hardly remembered any more, as stringer, reporter, rewrite girl, and feature writer, and there had been the opening on Consolidated Newspapers. Here, Sue Wiley had risen almost overnight. She was still only twenty-eight. Her formula had not been unique, but had represented the perfect outgrowth of her character and of the press of her time. Her formula had been juvenile simple: shock by saying nay when all say aye. It would have bewildered her to know that she was less interested in truth than in sensation.
To Sue Wiley, insensitive to all about her, and with her eye on the main chance, the truth was undependable. If you dug for truth, you would uncover no treasure, but instead have dull hard facts, proving nothing, accomplishing nothing. She had been blind to the value of truth, because its rewards were unpredictable. Readers had seemed not to appreciate truth, had even seemed to be discomforted by it. Illumination was not a virtue in itself. It bored and offended. And in the end, who gave a damn? Yourself? Your subject? Yes, perhaps-but the measuring stick for accomplishment was the obscure mass of readers. They wanted variety, gossip, excitement, no matter how superficial. ‘Make ’em say “Gee whiz.” ’ She had once read the command on the bulletin board in a Hearst editorial room, and that was it really, and the devil take the facts. A sound rumour, an apocryphal anecdote, a distorted quotation, a whispered scandal, even if one-half true, or less, was to be preferred to nothing-but-the-truth, if nothing-but-the-truth was an anaesthetic. The point was to excite, create talk, sell newspapers.
Sue Wiley was not immoral, but amoral. She was too self-absorbed to anticipate hurt inflicted or wonder about it afterwards. She was not inherently ill-intentioned, even though her technique was often harmful. She was the sum of her culture, and her public, which encouraged and rewarded her and warped her by its own mis-shapen values.
Sue Wiley perfected her technique by reading biographies. Previously, she had been little addicted to reading, beyond newspapers, but in biographies she tested herself, underlining and copying out what arrested her attention. Her delight was not in learning of Julius Caesar’s campaigns but in learning that he wore a crown of laurel to hide his increasing baldness. Napoleon’s victories left her cold, but the information that he possessed exceptionally small ‘reproductive organs’ fascinated her. She was not interested in the fact that Francis Scott Key had written ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, but in the fact that he had no ear for music. And one day was made when she learned that Daniel Webster had been sued for not paying his butcher’s bill. In this period, she had also read Dr. William Lyon Phelps’s complaint, ‘Instead of selecting a subject, modern biographers pick a victim. It’s getting so that good men are afraid to die’. Dr. Phelps’s complaint had left her unmoved. She decided that he would have made a poor newspaperman.
Like her idol, Nellie Bly, she had discovered her way-to create news, not wait for it. To electrify the public, and gain its attention. In a thousand editorial rooms, ten thousand reporters, chained to mediocrity and rotting on low salary, bad beer, stale sandwiches, stewed in their daydreams of great beats, and novels, and plays that they would never write. Sue Wiley would not be one of them, and at Consolidated she set out to prove her worth.
The International Red Cross was a sacred cow. Sue Wiley seized upon the one per cent of it that was defective, to condemn the entire organization. The Boy Scouts of America were inviolable. Sue Wiley spanked them. Mother’s Day was a holy institution. Sue Wiley defiled it. Gradually, she convinced Harold Finnegan, managing editor of Consolidated, to let
her expand her target range. On a trip around the world she exposed the lechery aboard luxury cruise vessels, the inadequacy of American embassies, and the graft of numerous customs officials. She also found fault with Tahiti, Israel, Ghana, and Lourdes. On this same trip, she made her best mark. She misused her letters of introduction to Dr. Albert Schweitzer, in Lambaréné, French Equatorial Africa, entirely ignoring the brilliance and selflessness of le Grand Docteur during the two hours she spent with him. When she described him later for Consolidated readers, she revealed him solely as an egotistical Teutonic tyrant who inefficiently conducted an unsanitary jungle hospital.
Her salary was larger now, and her reputation with it. What she wanted was one more enormous international killing that would earn her a contract for a syndicated column of her own. ‘Lowdown on the High-ups’, she would call it. And one day after her trip, filing away her Schweitzer notes, she realized that the ex-Olympian had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957. This set her mind to thinking of the possible frailty of other Nobel winners and the mysterious aura of sanctity surrounding the prizes in general. Here was humanity’s highest reward to its own. The public accepted the judgment of immortality, conferred by a handful of Swedes and Norwegians, without question. The public looked upon the winners themselves as divinities. Yet, had the scalpel of journalism ever been ruthlessly, unsentimentally, applied? Had the judges and the judged ever been thoroughly dissected? Had this hagiolatry ever been defied? What was the truth-Sue Wiley version-behind the Nobel awards?
Bursting with excitement, Sue had bullied the harassed Harold Finnegan into lunching with her in a fashionable bar on Forty-seventh Street. Eyes blinking, words tripping over words, Sue threw out her idea, and Finnegan saw the possibilities at once. He gave her access to Consolidated’s bureau heads throughout the nation-within two weeks their copy on the Nobel winners, past and present, filled her New York desk-and he gave her a large expense account and packed her off to Sweden.
Now, after a diversion in Berlin, she was approaching Stockholm in a soundless jet, sitting beside an actual Nobel winner who quaked in her presence, and now Cheyenne was far away, and her future almost secure. This would be the final rung to fame.
With a start, she realized that Garrett was beside her once more, continuing his apologies, but flushed and pleased by his interlude of attention. She tried to remember: what had he asked her before the interruption? What had ignited her inner exploration? Yes, she recalled it. He had inquired about the kind of Nobel stories that she intended to write.
He was chewing his cigar, rather than smoking it, and she was grateful and decided to handle him tenderly.
‘As I told you, Dr. Garrett, it’s going to be a big series. After all, there is no bigger subject. Everyone wants to know about the machinery of the awards, and the great people who are honoured, and I want to tell it all. It’ll be highly favourable, of course. Why not? We’ve researched in depth on all you winners, because we want to transmit complete portraits of human idols, not empty paragraphs about stone gods. I wouldn’t write a thing about you that you wouldn’t be proud to have your children read.’
Garrett did not hide his pleasure. ‘I’m happy that’s your tone. It can be a useful work. It’ll inspire a lot of potential scientists. What can I tell you? Do you want to know how I came on the discovery?’
‘Another time, perhaps. We can go into it in detail. There was something about a truck driver named-named Henry M.-?’
Garrett leaped at this and, on safe, old ground, began to relate, in sentences smoothed by their frequent repetition, the drama of the historic night. Sue Wiley half listened, poking pencil listlessly at her pad, and surreptitiously following the second hand of her watch. Six minutes and twenty seconds.
The mammalian heart had just been transplanted, and he beamed, and she moved quickly. ‘Very interesting. I’ll want to review all that with you again.’ Then, almost casually, she laid before him the earlier lead that he had inadvertently given her. ‘By the way you and this Italian Farelli, you’re cutting up the medical pie, aren’t you? How come? Is he a collaborator of yours?’
Garrett was sorely tempted, but this was not Dr. Keller’s group. He shook his head. ‘No. We’ve never even met.’
‘Oh, and I thought you worked closely together.’
‘Absolutely not. I made my discovery alone. In fact, some days ahead of his, if I do say so.’
Casually, Sue’s hand hooked the shorthand ciphers to her pad, while her blinking, receptive eyes held his own. ‘Before, you were saying there are people who feel you should have won the prize yourself. Do you think so?’
‘It would be improper for me to say.’ But his prejudice was clear in his face.
‘Of course, you will be seeing Dr. Farelli in Stockholm -’
‘I would presume so. At least on official occasions.’
‘Do you intend to-to work out some sort of future research with him? I mean, since you’re both-’
‘I doubt it,’ Garrett interrupted. ‘I have my work and methods, and he has his. However, I do plan to see others in my field, on this trip. One doctor in particular, at the Caroline Institute, in Stockholm. Dr. Erik Öhman. A marvellous young researcher, who is doing transplantation of hearts, and whose ideas are compatible with my own. In a sense, you might say he’s a disciple of mine. He was attracted by my papers and corresponded with me, voluminously. He has since successfully accomplished seven cardiac transplants-by the “Garrett method”, he likes to tell me-and I was recently advised by him that he has three more cases under observation, I’m eager to see what he has done, first-hand, and to make any suggestions I can. As a matter of fact, if you are hunting for material about me, Dr. Erik Öhman’s your man. I think he can speak, with less inhibition, about my work than I can myself. You understand.’
Sue Wiley was in no mood to be sidetracked by Dr. Öhman. Perhaps this was evasive action on Garrett’s part, although she doubted if he was that clever. Farelli was her boy, and she meant to know more about him, about him and Garrett, or him versus Garrett. ‘Very interesting, very interesting,’ she said. ‘To get back to Farelli, for a moment. He fascinates me as, apparently, he does the rest of the press. How did he get into your act, anyway? As you said, as I think everyone knows, you were the first to make a successful heart transplant. Isn’t it as true in science as in every other field-first come, first served-or, should I put it-first come, first honoured?’
‘One would think so. But I’m sure, with all your research, you’ve read Dr. Farelli’s statements. He’s not given to-to hiding his light.’
‘You mean, he may have influenced the judges?’
He pretended horror at the thought. ‘I wouldn’t even imply that. It’s just that-that his kind of personality-uh-makes itself felt. He’s a very colourful man.’
She decided to goad him. ‘You’re too modest to defend yourself. I can see that. I can also see that, in these times, the quiet, self-effacing, dedicated scientist, doing his job, doing it magnificently, is often not enough. People are apt to overlook a man like that. They are apt to be swayed by another scientist who is self-seeking, vocal, full of histrionics.’ She did not ask him if this was so. Brazenly, she assumed that they were in agreement. ‘It’s a shame-isn’t it?-how often the public is fooled.’
Garrett smiled modestly, warmed by this remarkable young woman’s perception. ‘Yes, it is a shame.’
The tin static of the public-address system intruded. They both looked up. One of the hostesses was speaking. ‘We will arrive in Stockholm in five minutes. Please put out your cigarettes. Please fasten your safety belts.’
There was a rustling among the passengers of the plane. Garrett lifted the palms of his hands helplessly to Sue Wiley. ‘I guess we ran out of time.’
She had what she wanted, and it was enough. In Stockholm, she would learn more, and drive the wedge deeper. ‘I don’t know how to thank you,’ she said. ‘Every little bit helps. This gives me a wonderful start. Your first case, t
hat truck driver, will make wonderful telling.’
‘You’re kind,’ he said.
‘And discreet,’ she added, binding them more closely.
He rose. ‘I’ll see you in Stockholm then.’
‘I should hope so.’
Garrett returned to his seat, and secured his belt. His wife was bewildered at his cheerfulness and good humour.
When the Caravelle touched down on the long runway of Arlanda Airport, braking noisily, a male voice came over the intercom.
‘This is your Captain. We have just landed in Stockholm. The local time is exactly twelve thirty-six.’
The Garretts were almost the last to leave the jet aeroplane. They descended the steps, behind the other passengers, and merged into a swarm of people. They shook hands with Count Bertil Jacobsson, with Ingrid Påhl, with Carl Adolf Krantz, and Saralee was effusive over the bouquet of flowers Miss Påhl handed her. They posed for the photographers, while Jacobsson dealt firmly with the Swedish reporters.
They were about to leave for the limousines, when Jacobsson suddenly realized that someone was missing. ‘Mr. Andrew Craig? Where is he?’ Jacobsson tugged Garrett’s arm. ‘The Nobel laureate in literature was on the same plane. Mr. Craig. Did you meet him?’
Garrett shook his head. He had met no one. He did not mention Sue Wiley.
While Krantz and Påhl led the Garretts through the gate to their limousine, Jacobsson rushed among the other passengers, searching for Craig, without any success. At last, he intercepted the ship’s Captain, and a hostess. They produced the passenger list. With Jacobsson, they went carefully down the list of names. There was no Andrew Craig, and there was no Leah Decker.
Utterly baffled, Jacobsson made his way to the waiting cars. He was an old man who lived by plan. Everyone always said that his organizational ability could not be surpassed. This talent was one of his greatest gratifications. The last report, received hours before, had been that Craig was arriving by Scandinavian Airlines, in Copenhagen, at nine this morning. Flight 912, he remembered. The connection for Stockholm was to have been on this plane leaving Copenhagen at 11.20. Could Flight 912 have been delayed? He was certain that he would have been informed. This was a mystery, indeed. It was the first time, in memory, that he could recall a laureate’s not arriving as scheduled.
The Prize Page 18