The Three Sirens

by Irving Wallace

  Claire squeezed his hand. “You are a darling. But I’m sure it won’t be as bad as you expect. After all, I’ll have you and Maud—”

  “We may be very busy.”

  “I’ll see that I’m very busy, too. I just want the whole experi—

  “Don’t say you weren’t warned.”

  Claire withdrew her hand, picked up her fork, and poked at her fried eggs thoughtfully. Knowing Marc as she did, she began to wonder if he was really concerned about her welfare, or just projecting his own private fears of an undertaking new and strange. Was Marc, like so many males, two separate men, constantly embattled, each determined to win his kind of peace? Did he secretly chafe at dull routine, yet all the while find his security in it? He was as steady, in his movements through a day, as the hands of a flawless clock. At the same time, despite the comfort of this treadmill existence, he might want to escape it. Behind his surface adjustment, Claire felt, could lurk another Marc, one who went off on journeys she would never share, voyages to secret Monte Cristos that temporarily freed him from budget prisons and nonentity dungeons. For him, perhaps, The Three Sirens offered no personal advance, only an uncomfortable tagging along. And so he would transform his dislike of his own uprooting into a worry about the one closest him. Claire could not be sure, of course, but this was her guess.

  Finishing her fried eggs, Claire looked up and watched her husband as he ate. No person should ever watch another person eat, she told herself. People do not look their best when they eat. They look foolish, distorted, and they look self-indulgent. She separated Marc from his food. He always seems shorter than he is, she told herself. He is five feet ten, but there is something inside him, some perverse and uncertain hormone, that shrinks him. Yet she found him physically attractive. His features and physique were right, regular, balanced. The crewcut seemed an anachronism on a face so rigid and so often brooding, although it belonged to him when he smiled or teased or was pleased and hopeful. The eyes, opaque gray, were deep but set well apart. The nose was aquiline. The lips thin. But the general aspect was handsome, sincere, sometimes amiable, one of rugged scholarship. He had the compact, overmuscular body of an athlete who always came in second. He wore his suits loose, smart, and well. If looks were only everything, she told herself, he would be happier and she would reflect his happiness. But his inner self, she knew, too often wore different clothes, and resented their poor fit. She did not mean to sigh aloud, but she did.

  Marc looked up inquiringly.

  She must say something. She said, “I’m a little nervous about the dinner party tonight.”

  “What’s there to be nervous about? Hackfeld has already agreed to a grant.”

  “You know Maud says we need more. How can Hackfeld insist on such a big team, and then be so stingy?”

  “That’s why he’s rich. Anyway, he’s got a lot of other irons in the fire.”

  “I wonder how Maud’ll bring it up?” said Claire.

  “You leave it to her. That’s her specialty.”

  Claire’s eyes followed Suzu to the stove. “Suzu, what’s it going to be tonight?”

  “Chicken Teriyaki.”

  “The way to a man’s purse is through his stomach. Brilliant, Suzu.”

  “You bet,” said Suzu, grinning.

  “Whose purse? Whose stomach?” It was Maud Hayden in the dining room doorway. Her gray hair was indescribably tangled, apparently from the wind. Her wide old face was outdoor red. Her squat, stout body was shapeless in muffler, pea jacket, navy blue flannel skirt, and therapeutically customed, cloddish shoes. She waved her gnarled walking stick, a product of Ecuador and Jivaro country. “Who were you discussing?” she demanded to know.

  “Cyrus Hackfeld, keeper of our money,” said Claire. “Did you have breakfast?”

  “Hours ago,” said Maud, unwinding her muffler. “Brrr. Cold out. Sun and palm trees and still you nearly freeze to death.”

  “What do you expect in March?” said Marc.

  “I expect California weather, my son.” She smiled at Claire. “Anyway, in not so many weeks we’ll have all the tropical weather we can stand.”

  Marc stood up and handed his mother the folder. “The rest of the research just came in. Not a word on the Sirens. There was a Daniel Wright in London. And, until recently, there was a Thomas Courtney practicing law in Chicago.”

  “Wonderful!” exclaimed Maud, removing her pea jacket with Marc’s help. “Courtney is the one I’m depending upon. You have no idea what a timesaver he can be.” She was addressing herself to Claire now. “Any decent field trip should take half a year or a year, even two years. Why, the shortest one I’ve ever been on took three months. But here we have a ridiculous six weeks. Sometimes it takes that long to locate your key informant, a person in the village who is relatively reliable, knowledgeable of the legends and history, willing to talk. You just can’t find him in a week, and then establish rapport overnight. You have to play a waiting game, let them all get used to you, learn to trust you, eventually come to you. Then you find the right man, and often he puts the whole village into perspective for you. Well, here we have great luck. We have Courtney. If he is what Easterday says he is, he is the perfect go-between. He has prepared the Sirens people for us. He understands them and their problems and, being one of us also, he understands us and our needs. He should be a mine of information. And he should get us to our informants at once. Believe me—” She had turned back to Marc. “—I’m terribly pleased we have independent evidence this Courtney exists.” She wagged the folder. “I’m going up to the study to look into this right now.”

  Claire rose. “I’ll be with you in a minute.”

  After Maud had gone, and Marc had taken the morning newspaper into the living room, Claire cleared the kitchen table. Despite Suzu’s protestations, Claire began to wash the dishes.

  “It’s no work at all,” she told Suzu. “You have your hands full doing all the cooking for tonight.”

  “Only four come tonight besides us,” said Suzu.

  “Except that Mr. Hackfeld eats for eight, so that makes it a big dinner.”

  Suzu giggled, and returned to her basting.

  When Claire had finished the dishes, and dried her hands, she clucked her admiration over Suzu’s chicken and then she went upstairs to learn what she could do for her mother-in-law.

  She found Maud, swivel chair turned away from the desk, rocking gently as she pored over the researchers’ notes. Accepting Maud’s acknowledging nod, Claire went to the coffee table to take a cigarette from the ever-present pack and light it. Then, purling contentedly, she wandered about the familiar room. She gazed at the sepia and white tapa cloth hanging on the wall, at the framed, signed photographs of Franz Boas, Bronislaw Malinowski, Alfred Kroeber nearby, at the electric typewriter beside her own small desk, then she came to a halt before the bookshelves. She studied the bound copies of Culture, mouthpiece of the American Anthropological League, and Ma?i, the publication of the Royal Anthropology Institute, and the American Journal of Physical Sciences.

  “Fine, fine,” she heard Maud say. “I wish I had had all of this when I prepared the project statement and expenditures for Hackfeld. No matter, I’ll feed him some of the supplementary material tonight.”

  Claire moved to the large desk and sat down across from Maud. “Will there be any more research?” Claire asked.

  Maud smiled. “It never ceases. In fact, yesterday I was up past midnight trying to trace some of the practices Easterday reported on the Sirens. Many are carry-overs from other islands. The old civilization on Easter Island despised virginity as much as the Sirens now do. And the rite where all male wedding guests enjoy the pleasure of the bride—Easterday is correct—that is also practiced in Samoa and the Marquesas Islands. As to the mysterious Social Aid Hut, I located something similar, a pleasure house or are popi, in Peter Buck’s study of Mangareva. But some of the practices on the Sirens seem absolutely original. For one thing, Easterday’s comments about a Hi
erarchy investigating divorce. I tell you, Claire, I can’t wait to look into all this, get there and see for myself.”

  Claire felt that this was the moment to speak of what had been on her mind earlier, after her bath.

  “I can’t wait either,” Claire said. She ground out the stub of her cigarette. “Except, I will confess, I’m a little apprehensive—”

  “There’s nothing to be apprehensive about.”

  “I mean—I’ve never been on anything like this—how am I supposed to behave?”

  Maud seemed surprised. “Behave? Absolutely as you’ve always behaved, Claire. Be yourself—friendly, modest, courteous, interested—be your natural self.” She reflected on this a moment, and added, “As a matter of fact, I suppose there are a few pointers someone inexperienced in field life might keep in mind. You can’t ever be squeamish, aloof, or condescending. You’ve got to adapt yourself to the environment in the field and the new social situation. You’ve got to appear to enjoy yourself. You have to have respect for the so-called natives—and, before them, show that you respect your husband. Very probably, you are going into a patriarchal society. In this situation the Polynesian woman always defers to a man in public, however much she may lay down the law at home and in private. Whenever possible, if you are invited to participate in a feast or work or play, you do so, you try to be one of them. It’s all a matter of degree. Ordinarily, the things to avoid as a woman are getting drunk and foolish in public, being overaggressive, and, as a married woman, cohabiting with the Polynesian men.”

  Claire blushed, and then saw that Maud had been joking about cohabitation. Claire smiled. “I think I can manage to be faithful,” she said.

  “Yes,” said Maud, and she added seriously, “Of course, there’s no absolute right or wrong about that, either. Often it depends on the nature of the tribe you work with. There have been many instances where natives appreciated an anthropologist cohabiting with one of their own. They considered it an expression of acceptance. A woman in the field—if she had no outside attachments—might easily enter into a relationship with a male native, and be applauded since, as an outsider, she is surrounded with an aura of wealth, power, prestige.”

  “Well, you needn’t discuss it seriously,” said Claire.

  “The important thing for you to recognize,” said Maud, “is that those people on the Sirens—let us say they are predominately Polynesian—are not low primitives. You know, old man K—” Claire understood her to mean Kroeber, “—used to say that ants have a society, but no culture—culture meaning, in this context, not refinement but rather verbally derived customs, techniques, traditional beliefs to which they subscribe. Well, Polynesians are neither ants nor primitives. They have many solid and old cultures. When I hear laymen speak of primitives, I know they mean people who are nonliterate brutes of undeveloped mentality. And, of course, in sections of Africa or Ecuador or Brazil, in Australia, too, you can meet such people. Real aborigines. Don’t expect that on the Sirens, especially since they are Polynesians crossed with Caucasians. Those people probably have a time depth as great as we have. They may not have a complex material culture, but they will have a complex social structure. They may be primitives only in the technological sense. You can be sure that socially they will be extremely advanced.”

  This was the exact moment, Claire knew, to bring it up. “It’s hard to think of them as being civilized when the men run around all day wearing less than athletic supporters and the women are naked except for twelve inches of grass below.”

  “I’m sure they dress quite sensibly for their climate and their attitudes toward one another,” said Maud, placidly.

  “Will we be expected to go native?” asked Claire.

  Maud seemed startled. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean—will you and I have to take off our clothes and—”

  “Heavens, no, Claire. Picture me in a grass skirt, with all my flab and authority at the mercy of the breeze. Heavens, has that been on your mind? You’ll dress just as you’d dress here in California. The usual summer clothes, but of a lighter weight, and plenty of drip-drys. In fact, we must both do some shopping soon. The one tabu would be to wear blue jeans or slacks. To the natives you’d look like a man, and that might confuse and upset them. Rather than jeans or slacks, it would be better to go stark naked. They’d pay less attention. No, you can stay with comfortable blouses and skirts, or sleeveless prints. That will be acceptable. The main thing will be to show interest in those people, to show empathy. None of us can behave like the aristocratic young English anthropologist that Robert Lowie used to tell about. This English anthropologist went out among the natives, and returned with the following report, no more, no less—‘Customs scarce, manners vile, morals lacking’!”

  Claire laughed with her mother-in-law, and felt better. As she went to the coffee table for the cigarettes, she saw Maud take a sheaf of papers from a desk drawer.

  “Are these the carbons of the letters to our potential team members?” Maud asked.

  Claire looked over her shoulder, nodded, and returned to her seat. “I typed four of them. I excerpted the parts of Easterday’s letter you suggested and enclosed them. I signed your name.”

  “When did they go out?”

  “Yesterday afternoon, in time to catch the pickup. They were all airmail, except the one to Dr. Rachel DeJong since her address was in Los Angeles.”

  “Yes—let me see—yes, here’s the letter to her. I think I had better glance over these, in case I omitted something. It’ll give me an excuse to follow up. I hope they are all available. Hackfeld was quite impressed. I’d hate to go back to him with substitutes—”

  “They should have their letters sometime today,” said Claire. “I imagine we’ll have answers over the weekend.”

  “Ummm,” murmured Maud, scanning the first letter. “I certainly hope Rachel has the six weeks.”

  “Is that the woman psychoanalyst? I’ve been wondering, Maud. What made you choose her?”

  “I once saw a paper that Rachel wrote—‘The Effects of Courtship and Engagement upon Marriage’—and it was a superior piece of work. I decided that she would do wonderfully on the Sirens. Besides, she’s type-cast for a field trip—absolutely cool, unemotional, thoroughly objective, not maddeningly Freudian, and very poised for a person so young. I have a strong preference for colleagues who are in control of themselves as well as any new situations that may arise. Rachel’s for me. I just hope I’m for her.”

  “She won’t be able to resist,” said Claire with confidence.

  * * *

  It was eleven forty-one in the morning. In the dim psychiatric office high above Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, Dr. Rachel DeJong sat in her chair beside the patient, grinding the pencil between her fingers, and telling herself that if this continued one minute beyond the nine minutes of the session left, she would scream.

  The patient’s voice had trailed off, and Rachel had a moment’s professional panic. Had the patient sensed her own hostility? Uncrossing her legs, Rachel bent toward the couch, observing the patient, and then realized that the patient was staring ahead, lost in thought and oblivious of Rachel’s analytic presence.

  Poised over the couch as she was, Rachel realized another thing. The tableau that she and the patient presented, in these fleeting seconds, resembled an old-fashioned painting that she had once seen—in an advertisement, possibly—of beautiful Narcissus bent over the fountain, mesmerized by his own reflection in the water. The image was accurate as to appearance: she, Rachel DeJong, was Narcissus, and the leather couch was the fountain, and Miss Mitchell, prone, was the very reflection of herself. The image was inaccurate in only one respect: Narcissus pined away from love of his reflection, whereas Rachel disintegrated from hatred of her reflection.

  Considering Miss Mitchell, she tried to analyze the emotional turmoil inside herself. She did not hate Miss Mitchell as a person.

  What she hated was what she saw of herself, so mockingl
y exact, in the problem of Miss Mitchell. Rachel’s hatred, via her patient, was self-hatred.

  In her short, busy years as a practicing analyst, this had never happened to her before, at least not in this manifestation. Until two months ago, when Miss Mitchell had come into her life on a referral, Rachel DeJong had been relatively composed and dispassionate, everything fastidiously balanced. She knew her personal problem was there, had always been there, had survived her own analysis, and that Miss Mitchell had not brought the problem to her. What Miss Mitchell had done was to bring into the open, expose and dramatize Rachel’s problem, identical twin to Miss Mitchell’s problem.

  Rachel settled back in her chair, fingers still angrily working her pencil. She should, she knew, have dismissed the patient after the fourth week, when the patient had been sufficiently liberated to begin to discuss her problem. Instead, Rachel had suffered hearing it, and now heard it over and over, agonizing with it, masochistically absorbing it, and by night examining it and hating herself. She should have gone to Dr. Ernst Beham, her own training analyst, from the beginning. This, she knew, would have been the professional solution, and yet she had failed to do so. It was as if she had wanted to preserve the self-flagellation longer, to endure it, as if to deny weakness, to prove that she was solved and strong. But there was more that restrained her from visiting the training analyst. Rachel realized that he would not have permitted the relationship with Miss Mitchell to continue. Of this, she was positive. And somehow, Rachel wanted it to continue. It was as if, three times a week, for 150 minutes, she was tuning in on a to-be-continued story about herself, and she dared not miss an episode, for she must know the outcome of the miserable plot.

  Today was the worst yet. Perhaps because her own situation, in her private life, was at its worst. Today’s session was unendurable. She cast a sidelong glance at her desk clock. Seven minutes of the fifty remained. They would be terrible. Should she cut it short?