THE THREE SIRENS
Irving Wallace
First published by
Simon and Schuster
1963
THE THREE SIRENS
The Americans came to the long-hidden Polynesian islands of The Three Sirens as dispassionate observers. There were ten of them. The world-famous anthropologist, Dr. Maud Hayden. Her son and his beautiful young wife, Claire. A bachelor professor and film censor, attempting to flee his domineering mother. A warm, friendly, but quite unattractive nurse. A liberal-minded photographer and his wife, both of whom are anxious to remove their sixteen-year-old daughter from her fast adolescent crowd. The middle-aged wife of the expedition’s wealthy sponsor. And a female psychoanalyst whose private problems rival those of her patients.
On The Three Sirens, these visitors come face to face with uninhibited behavior—with customs that assault their most civilized defenses. The natives are unhampered by sexual restraint; they have learned to relieve the monotony of marriage, without guilt, to teach their young to love without fear. What this freedom does to the observers from another culture and how they are driven to a self-realization of their own fears and desires is the theme of Irving Wallace’s newest novel, a singular work of fiction that ruthlessly explores the innermost nature of modern man.
“Wallace burned up the bestseller list with The Chapman Report and showed a scholarly research effort in The Twenty-seventh Wife. In The Three Sirens, he combines the two with startling results.”
—MIAMI NEWS
By Irving Wallace
THE THREE SIRENS
THE PRIZE
THE TWENTY-SEVENTH WIFE
THE CHAPMAN REPORT
THE FABULOUS SHOWMAN
THE SINS OF PHILIP FLEMING
THE SQUARE PEGS
THE FABULOUS ORIGINALS
Dedicated to the memory of
my beloved friends
Zachary Gold
(1918-1953)
Jacques Kapralik
(1906-1960)
There is a scale in dissolute sensuality, which these people have ascended, wholly unknown to every other nation whose manners have been recorded from the beginning of the world to the present hour, and which no imagination could possibly conceive.
James Cook
Account of a Voyage
round the World
1773
At last, we are isolated from the outside world. Here, on these coral isles, which I have christened The Three Sirens, I will undertake my experiment…to prove, for once, that marriage as practiced in the West is antagonistic to human nature, whereas my System, blended with the Polynesian System, can produce a radically new form of matrimony infinitely superior to any known on earth. It will work. It must work. Here, far from the bigoted Throne and Censor, far from the accursed Peeping Toms of Coventry…here, amidst naked and unfettered Freedom … and with infinite Blessings of the Lord … my compleat System shall face the Test, at last.
Daniel Wright, Esq.
Journal
Entry June 3, 1796
I
IT WAS THE first of the letters that Maud Hayden had taken from the morning’s pile on her desk blotter. What had attracted her to it, she sheepishly admitted to herself, was the exotic row of stamps across the top of the envelope. They were stamps bearing the reproduction of Gauguin’s “The White Horse,” in green, red, and indigo, and the imprint “Polynésie Française…Poste Aérienne.”
From the summit of her mountain of years, Maud was painfully aware that her pleasures had become less and less visible and distinct with each new autumn. The Great Pleasures remained defiantly clear: her scholarly accomplishments with Adley (still respected); her absorption in work (unflagging); her son, Marc (in his father’s footsteps—somewhat); her recent daughter-in-law, Claire (quiet, lovely, too good to be true). It was the Small Pleasures that were becoming as elusive and invisible as youth. The brisk early morning walk in the California sun, especially when Adley was alive, had been a conscious celebration of each day’s birth. Now, it reminded her only of her arthritis. The view, especially from her upstairs study window, of the soft ribbon of highway leading from Los Angeles to San Francisco, with the Santa Barbara beach and whitecaps of the ocean beyond, had always been esthetically exciting. But now, glancing out of the window and below, she saw only the dots of speeding monster automobiles and her memory smelled the gas fumes and the rotted weeds and kelp of the sea on the other side of the coastal road. Breakfast had always been another of the certain Small Pleasures, the folded newspaper opening to her its daily recital of the follies and wonders of Man, the hearty repast of cereal, eggs, bacon, potatoes, steaming coffee, heavily sugared, stacked toast, heavily buttered. Now, the hosts of breakfast had been decimated by ominous talk about high cholesterol and low-fat diet and all the linguistics (skimmed milk, margarine, broccoli, rice puddings) of the Age of Misery. And then, finally, among the Small Pleasures of each morning, there had been the pile of mail—and this delight, Maud could see, remained a constant delight, uneroded by her mountain of years.
The fun of the mail, for Maud Hayden, was that it gave her Christmas every morning, or so it seemed. She was a prolific correspondent. Her anthropology colleagues and disciples, afar, were tireless letter writers. And then, too, she was a minor oracle, to whom many came with their enigmas, hopes, and inquiries. No week’s grab bag of letters was without some distant curiosity—the one from a graduate student on his first field trip to India, reporting how the Baiga tribe nailed down the turf again after every earthquake; the one from an eminent French anthropologist in Japan, who had found that the Ainu people did not consider a bride truly married until she had delivered a child, and who had asked if it was exactly this that Maud had discovered among the Siamese; the one from a New York television network, offering Maud a meager fee if she would verify the information, to be used in a New Britain travelogue, that a native suitor purchased his bride from her uncle, and that when the couple produced an offspring, the infant was held over a bonfire to assure its future growth.
At first look, this morning’s mail, with its glued-in secrets, had appeared less promising. Going through the various envelopes, Maud had found the postmarks were from New York City, London, Kansas City, Houston, and similar unwonderful places, until her hand had been stayed by the envelope featuring the stamps with the Gauguin painting and the imprint of “Polynésie Française.”
She realized that she still held the elongated, thick, battered envelope between her stubby fingers, and then she realized that more often, in these last few years, her habit of direct action had been bogged down in musings and mind-wanderings clouded by a vague self-pity.
Annoyed with herself, Maud Hayden turned the long envelope over, and on the pasted backflap she found the name and return address of the sender, spelled out in a swirling, old-fashioned European calligraphy. It read: “A. Easterday, Hotel Temehami, Rue du Commandant Destremau, Papeete, Tahiti.”
She tried to match the name “A. Easterday” to a face. In the present, none. In the past—the efficient file of her mind flipped backwards—so many, so many … until the face captioned by the name was found. The impression was faded and foxed. She closed her eyes, and concentrated hard, and by degrees the impression became more definable.
Alexander Easterday. Papeete, yes. They were strolling on the shady side of the street toward his shop at 147, Rue Jeanne d’Arc. He was short, and as pudgy as if he had been mechanically compressed, and he had been born in Memel or Danzig or some port quickly erased by the storm troopers—and he had had many names and passports—and en route, the long way to America as a refugee, he had come to a standstill, and finally a residence and business, in Tahiti. He claimed to have been an archeologist in
other years, accompanying several German expeditions in happier days, and had modeled himself after Heinrich Schliemann, testy and eccentric excavator of Troy. Easterday was too soft and grubby, too anxious to please, too unsuccessful, to play Schliemann, she had thought then. Alexander Easterday, yes. She could see him better: ridiculously perched linen hat, bow tie (in the South Seas), wrinkled gray tropical suit stretched by a potbelly. And yet better: pince-nez high on a long nose, an inch of mustache, cold dribbling pipe, and warped pockets bulging with knickknacks, notes, calling cards.
It was coming back fully now. She had spent the afternoon poking through his shop cluttered with Polynesian artifacts, all reasonably priced, and had come away with a pair of Balinese bamboo clappers, a carved Marquesan war club, a Samoan tapa cloth skirt, an Ellice Island mat, and an ancient Tonga wooden feast bowl that now graced the sideboard of her living room downstairs. Before their departure, she recalled, she and Adley—for she had wanted Adley to meet him—had entertained Easterday at the rooftop restaurant of the Grand Hotel. Their guest had proved an encyclopedia of information—tidbits illuminating the lesser puzzles of their half-year in Melanesia—and that had been eight years ago, closer to nine, when Marc had been in his last year at the university (and being contrary about Alfred Kroeber’s influence there simply, she had been sure, because she and Adley worshiped Kroeber).
Sorting the dead years now, Maud recollected that her last contact with Easterday had been a year or two after their meeting in Tahiti. It was at the time their study of the people of Bau, in Fiji, had been published, and Adley had reminded her to send Easterday an inscribed copy. She had done so, and months later Easterday had acknowledged their gift in a brief letter of formal appreciation mingled with genuine delight at being remembered at all by such august acquaintances—he had used the word “august,” and then she had possessed fewer doubts that he had been schooled at the University of Göttingen.
That was the last that Maud had heard of “A. Easterday”—the thank-you note of six or seven years ago—until this moment. She considered Easterday’s return address. What could that dim, half-forgotten face want of her now, across so many leagues: money? recommendation? data? She weighed the envelope in her palm. No, it was too heavy for a request. More likely, it was an offering. The man inside the envelope, she decided, had something to get off his chest.
She took the Ashanti dagger—a souvenir of the African field trip in those pre-Ghana days between the World Wars—from her desk, and in a single practiced stroke she slit the envelope open.
She unfolded the fragile airmail sheets. The letter was neatly typed on a defective ancient machine, so that many of the words were marred by holes—instead of an e or an o there was most often a puncture—but still all neatly, laboriously, efficiently single-spaced. She riffled through the rice-paper pages, counting twenty-two. They would take time. There was the other mail, and certain lecture notes to be reviewed before her late-morning class. Still, she felt the curious and old familiar nagging from the second self, the unintellectual and nonobjective second Maud Hayden, who dwelt hidden inside her and was kept hidden for being her unscientific, intuitive, and female self. Now this second self nudged, reminded her of mysteries and excitements that had often, in the past, come from faraway lands. Her second self only rarely asked to be heard, but when it did, she could not ignore it. Her best moments had come from such obedience.
Brushing aside good sense, and the pressure of time, she succumbed. She settled back heavily, disregarding the metallic protest of the swivel chair, held the letter high and close to her eyes, and slowly, she began to read to herself from what she hoped might be the best of the day’s Small Pleasures:
PROFESSOR ALEXANDER EASTERDAY
HOTEL TEMEHAMI
PAPEETE, TAHITI
Dr. Maud Hayden
Chairman, Department of Anthropology
Social Science Building, Room 309
Raynor College
Santa Barbara, California
U.S.A.
Dear Dr. Hayden:
I am sure this letter will be a surprise to you, and I can only hope that you will be kind enough to remember my name. I had the great honor of meeting you and your illustrious husband ten years ago, when you stopped over in Papeete several days, en route from the Fiji Islands to California. I trust you will recall that you visited my Polynesian shop in the Rue Jeanne d’Arc and were generous enough to compliment me on my collection of primitive archeological pieces. Also, it was a memorable moment of my life to be the guest of your husband and yourself to dinner.
Although I am out of the main track of life, I have managed to keep in touch with the outside world by subscribing to several archeology and anthropology journals as well as Der Spiegel of Hamburg. As such, I have read of your activities from time to time, and not without pride, I must admit, for having encountered you once. Also, through the recent years, I have acquired some of your earlier books in the more accessible paperbound editions, and I have read them with burning interest. Truly, I believe, and not I alone, that your brilliant husband and yourself have made the greatest of contributions to modern-day ethnology.
Therefore, it was with shock and dismay that I read—it was three or four years ago, I believe—in our local weekly, Les Debats, of your husband’s decease. I was too moved and awkward to write to you at the time, but now that the years have passed I tender my sincerest condolences. I can only hope that you have withstood the loss, and are now recovered and in strong health, and teaching, writing, and traveling again.
I pray this letter reaches you, for I have only your old card with this address, but if you have gone elsewhere, I am sure that the postal authorities will locate one of your renown. The reason I say that “I pray this letter reaches you” is because I feel that the subsequent contents may interest you deeply, and may have a profound effect on the course of your work.
Before I inform you of the remarkable curiosity that has come to my attention, I must refresh your memory—if it is necessary—on a portion of our conversation ten years ago. It was after the dinner in Papeete, when we were having our liqueurs, that you and your beloved husband thanked me for the minor anecdotes and histories I was able to relate. We drank in silence for some minutes, and then you spoke to me the following, and I base my remembrance of your words not on faulty memory but on passages of a journal I have faithfully kept for years. You said:
“Professor Easterday, our field trip to Fiji, our side trips throughout the Melanesia area, and now our brief visits to Tonga, the Cooks, the Marquesas, and here to Tahiti, have been so productive and stimulating, that my husband and I feel we must return. We want to come back to Polynesia, specifically Polynesia, in the near future. However, there must be a reason, a purpose, for such a visit. This is where you come in, Professor Easterday. We make this request of you: if ever you learn of a Polynesian people, on an unknown atoll, whose culture remains uncontaminated by outside contact and has not been subjected to scientific scrutiny, I want you to be certain to let us know of this discovery at once. If the people and their atoll are worthy of a study in the field, if they can teach us something about human behavior, we would undertake an investigation. For your part, you would be amply rewarded.”
When I heard this, Dr. Hayden, I was moved by your faith in me. At the same time, if you recollect, I had to admit that I doubted if I could be of any help to you. I told you that, to the best of my knowledge, there were no important islands—that is, populated islands—that were not already known, charted, visited, investigated. I told you, frankly, that the explorers, missionaries, whalers, traders—and since then the militarists, tourists, beachcombers, anthropologists—had seen all there was to be seen in these parts, and it was unlikely that there was anything new or virginal left.
Despite my firm statement, if I recollect accurately, you were undiscouraged. I have since learned that this was typical of you, that your perceptions, optimism, persistence are some of the characteristics of yo
ur fame. And so, at the time, you were able to say tome:
“Professor Easterday, while you know Oceania better than we ever shall, I must tell you that our experience in many places has taught us that all is not discovered, all is not known, and nature has its way of withholding its little surprises. As a matter of fact, I have personally met several anthropologists who served in the Pacific during World War II and who confessed to me that they had come across at least a half-dozen obscure islands, inhabited by primitive tribes, that were not on any existing maps. These anthropologists are being very secretive about their previously undiscovered islands—are not mentioning their location to anyone—for fear that they might be placed on public maps and charts. These anthropologists are hoarding their little atolls against the day when they have time and funds to make their exclusive studies. As you surely understand, exclusivity—that is, new ground to be covered—often counts for much in the social sciences. Now, I have a feeling that, among the more than ten thousand atolls, coral islands, volcanic islands in Oceania, there must be some so-called lost islands worthy of study in depth. I repeat, Professor, if ever you should hear of one such island, with a people whose customs are yet unknown to the outside world, please remember the Haydens and their deep interest. Do not forget what I speak of tonight, Professor Easterday. Do not forget. I promise, you will not regret your trouble.”
I have never forgotten what you spoke of that night, Dr. Hay-den. You may have long forgotten, after these many years, but I have not. Your request was always in the back part of my mind. True, in recent years, especially as Western jet civilization encroached more and more upon the South Pacific, I thought your hope, and my quest on your behalf, an impossible chimera. We are both aware that the world map still displays unexplored areas—the interior of Dutch New Guinea, portions of the China-Burma-India range, the upper part of the Amazon River Basin—with tribes never seen by outside eyes. But your dream of a previously un-visited, populated island in Oceania? I confess that I had finally almost abandoned listening to any rumor or gossip that might substantiate your dream. Then, suddenly, last week, by accident, when I had all but given up thinking about the matter, your old request bore fruit.
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