The Prize (66 page)

He tried to handle the predicament rationally. What did it matter if his group therapy attendance was published? Apparently it had mattered to Sue Wiley and to himself. She had thrown it at him as a threat, a form of blackmail. And he had fielded it as something explosive and destructive. Was it destructive? How would the research staff in Pasadena regard their star, once they knew that he was in group therapy? What would the Nobel Committee think? And the public? Worst of all, what would his arch-enemy, Carlo Farelli, think? Somehow, it gave Farelli the upper hand by disqualifying Garrett’s competence through mental illness—it reduced Garrett’s infallibility—it made him less than genius. Would Paré or Harvey or Lister have been in group therapy along with an errant wife, a half-potent actor, and a suffering homosexual? Unthinkable.

He glanced at his watch. Ten minutes remained before Stockholm. He was craven now, and knew it, and did not care, and he was ready for surrender, if that was the price of discretion. He jumped to his feet, just as Saralee came down the aisle from the washroom.

‘Where are you going, John?’ she asked.

He had no patience for her. ‘There’s a reporter—I promised—I want to talk to her. Sit down and wait.’

He brushed past her, trod up the aisle, oblivious of the other passengers, and found Sue Wiley idly staring out of the window. She was in the last seat, and, not unexpectedly, as if reserved for him, the chair beside her was vacant. He took it, and she met him with the thin, reptilian smile.

‘How sweet of you to come,’ she said.

‘Where did you hear that thing about me?’ Garrett wanted to know.

‘Group therapy? Oh, we have our sources.’

‘But where?’

‘Now, that’s not fair, is it? You know the old adage—newspaper people never reveal the sources of their information. If they couldn’t be trusted by informants, they’d never learn half as much as they do. Matter of fact, Mr. Garrett—Dr. Garrett—I was once a
cause célèbre
in that respect. Right in your fair city. I went to a marijuana party, chock-full of movie stars, and reported it, no names. Your narcotics squad hauled me in and asked for names. I said I’d been invited under the condition no names, and I was sticking to it, and I did. The judge gave me a month, but Consolidated Newspapers and every sheet in the country were up in arms, and I was released after five days. There’s your answer.’

Garrett substituted self-preservation for pride. ‘You’re not going to publish that—that gossip about my therapy—are you?’

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.