The Three Sirens

by Irving Wallace

“There must be some evidence, a grave, a tombstone, something?” persisted Claire.

  “No,” said Courtney. “As you will learn, their funeral rites require absolute and total cremation of a corpse and the burning of all his possessions.” Courtney turned, and addressed himself to Orville Pence. “During the Second World War, a Japanese bomber made a forced landing on the plateau, but it exploded and burned. There were no survivors. Late in the war, an American transport, lost in the night, hit the side of the peak. Again, no survivors. Aside from those instances, your group is, as far as I know, the first—and I hope the last—from the outside to visit The Three Sirens.”

  Maud had been studying the village beneath them. “Mr. Courtney, do all the tribesmen live in that one village?”

  “They all live there,” said Courtney. “There are several huts scattered about the island, overnight shelters for those who are away farming, hunting, fishing, and near the peak there are some stone colonnades, the remains of an ancient sacred marae, but this is the only actual community. It is a small island, and all the advantages are centered in this one hamlet. At last count, there were two hundred and twenty natives. There are about fifty or sixty huts down there. In the last month, four new huts have been built, and two vacated, to accommodate the ten of you.”

  Mary Karpowicz, who had been absorbed in the village, suddenly called out, “What are they made of—the huts? They look like a breeze could blow them down.”

  “You’ll find them much sturdier than that,” said Courtney, with a smile. “There are no walls as you would think of them, but the framework of each hut is solid timber, influenced by eighteenth-century English architecture, and the roofs are of native thatch, pandanus leaf over cane or bamboo, and the walls are similar, but more heavily reinforced with cane. Most of the huts have two rooms, some have three.”

  “Mr. Courtney.” Maud was pointing toward the groves at the end of the village. “Those larger buildings—”

  “Ah, yes. One might say the municipal part of the community. In fact, you can’t see all of them from here. Among those trees you’ll find the Sacred Hut—a sort of museum, really, and for some a place of worship—and there are several connected larger huts that represent the school. The food storehouse is near there, also. Two important buildings are in the very center of the village. One is the medical dispensary. The other is Chief Paoti’s hut, rather grand and spacious, many rooms for his kin, for meetings, for feasts. You can’t see it well from here.”

  “But the biggest and longest at the end, the one with the thatched-dome top?” asked Maud.

  Courtney studied it a moment, and then said gravely, “That is the Social Aid Hut that Professor Easterday wrote you about.”

  “The brothel,” said Marc with a grin.

  His mother turned upon him angrily, and snapped, “For heaven’s sake, Marc, you know better than that.”

  “I’m just kidding,” said Marc, but his smile had become uncertain, and finally apologetic.

  “You’ll only confuse the others,” said Maud. She turned to Courtney. “As anthropologists, we’ve a broad knowledge of the pleasure houses of Polynesia. On Mangareva, it is called are popi, and on Easter Island it was known as hare nui. I assume this hut may have a similar function?”

  “Only somewhat,” said Courtney, hesitantly. “To my knowledge, there’s nothing quite like it anywhere in the world. In fact, there are many other things down there utterly unknown to the outside world. To me, for the most, they represent a—an ideal way of life—in the matters of love, at least—that we of the West should one day hope to achieve.” He glanced down at the village with an expression that was, in itself, an act of love. “You’ll see and learn soon enough. Until then, it’s useless for me to prattle on. Let me take you to your assigned huts. There’s a steep path over there, but it’s safe. We’ll be down in ten minutes.”

  He descended the slope of the ridge, and disappeared around a stone ledge. One by one the others followed. Claire turned to go, and saw her husband passing Orville Pence. Marc snickered at Orville, the way men do at a stag, Claire supposed, and he said, “I still say brothel.”

  He was gone, and Orville with him, and at that second Claire did not want to walk with either of them.

  She was furious with Marc, and his unfortunate attempt at levity, and in her heart she knew that Dr. Adley R. Hayden would have been furious, too, and would have liked her more.

  She waited until they had gone around the bend, and then she followed. She wanted to enter the village of The Three Sirens alone.

  * * *

  It was midafternoon in the village.

  Claire Hayden, cooler now in a fresh sleeveless gray Dacron dress, leaned in the open doorway of the hut assigned to Marc and herself and absently observed the men of their party—Marc, Orville, Sam, employing tools they had brought along—assist two of the young natives from the beach in opening the last of the wooden crates.

  She found her gaze directed at the two young natives, so strapping and graceful, because there was a certain suspenseful fascination in this. As the native youths moved, bending and rising, she was certain that any moment the single strands about their waists, holding in place the pubic bags, would break and expose them. It was impossible to understand why this did not happen, but so far it had not.

  Suddenly, she was ashamed of the diversion, and she looked off beyond the men and crates toward the heart of the village. Some inhabitants were in the compound now. There were children and women, at last. The younger children, running, jumping, playing, were stark naked. The women were, as Easterday had promised, nude from the waist up and their short skirts precariously concealed their private parts. Only a few of the older women had pendulous breasts, while the younger ones, and even the middle-aged ones, had high, firm, extremely pointed breasts. When they walked—in short, mincing, peculiarly feminine steps, obviously an attempt to keep their grass skirts properly down—their conical breasts jiggled and their grass skirts undulated, occasionally revealing a portion of buttocks. It puzzled Claire how the women could go about this way, so revealed, and, indeed, how their men could pass them constantly without at least being provoked, if not violating them.

  Observing them from afar—they were still too shy, too polite, too correct to come nearer—Claire felt uneasy. Automatically, her hand touched her dress, and for all its thinness, it covered her so completely, just as her brassiere and half-slip and panties covered her, that she felt outlandishly unfeminine. She continued to watch the women of the Sirens, their lustrous raven hair, their tipped bobbing breasts, their seductive hips, their long bare legs, and she was ashamed to be so chastely garmented, like a missionary’s wife.

  She began to turn away from all living reproach, determined to resume her unpacking when she heard Marc.

  “Well, Claire.”

  He came up to the doorway, wiping the back of his hand across his forehead. “What have you been up to?”

  “I was emptying suitcases. I took a break for a few minutes. I was watching the—the people.”

  “So was I,” Marc said. He stared off toward the center of the compound. “Courtney may be off base in a lot of ways, but he was certainly right about these women.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “They make the Tahitian girls look like boys. They’re really something. Ten times better than a Miss America contest. I’ve never seen anything like that at home.” Then, observing her face, he added lightly, “Present company excepted.”

  She still had a residue of the old resentment, and this became overlaid with a new resentment. She wanted to retaliate in kind, to wound him where he was most vulnerable. “That goes for the men, too,” she said. “Have you ever seen any others so athletic and virile-looking?”

  His face darkened, as she knew it would. “What kind of talk is that, anyway?”

  “Your kind of talk,” she said, and she pivoted and started inside with her hateful victory.

  “Hey, Claire, for God’s s
ake,” he called after her, contritely, “I was only speaking as an anthropologist.”

  “All right,” she said. “You’re forgiven.” But she did not rejoin him.

  For a few minutes, blindly, she carried their clothes and toilet articles from the front room to the rear one, until she had simmered down, regained her equilibrium, and was able to push Marc’s insensitivity from her mind. Pausing to rest, she surveyed her quarters. The front room was sizable, at least fifteen by twenty feet, and although warm it was much cooler than outdoors. The cane walls were cozy, and the pandanus mats that covered most of the sanded, gravel floor were springy and soft. There were no large furnishings of any kind, no tables, no chairs, no decorations, but Sam Karpowicz had hung two battery-powered lamps from the ceiling. There was one window facing Maud’s hut, and it was shielded from the sun and heat by a dark-cloth flap that could be fastened.

  Earlier, an adolescent native boy, attired in a short loincloth, had brought in two clay bowls of fresh water, and had explained in halting English that one was for drinking, the other for washing. Next, he had delivered a bundle of strong wide leaves, replying to Claire’s question that they were to be used for plates. This room, Claire decided, was supposed to be their living room, dining room, study.

  Arms crossed over her chest, Claire walked slowly to the rear, through the opening into a six-foot corridor. Here, a slit in the roof was visible to serve as an outlet for smoke, and beneath it, next to a strip of matting, was the earth oven, a round hole in the ground ready to be filled with hot stones, and huge leaves nearby to cover it. The end of this passage opened into a smaller room, resembling the front room, with but one window. Here, atop the pandanus mats, she had opened their two sleeping bags, but they appeared cumbersome and thick, and if the evenings were as now, she thought that she would sleep on her bag instead of inside it, or even sleep on the native mats themselves, which were several layers thick in this room and probably meant to serve as beds.

  Home, sweet home, she thought, and felt adventurous about the primitive hut. Marc had complained instantly, upon entering it, of the crudity and barrenness, and even she had worried briefly at the inevitable discomfort, but now she adored it and wanted nothing else.

  She knelt and sorted the clothing, Marc’s in several piles to one side, her own to the other side. Then, tired once more, she fell back from her kneeling position to sit on the mats, legs under her, and extracted the cigarette pack and matches from her dress pocket.

  Once smoking, and at ease—how wonderful to have no telephone, no market lists, no social appointments, no car to drive anywhere—she listened to the rustle of a breeze waltzing with the thatch above. Harmonizing, from a distance, too faint and feminine to be from those outside the door, were tinkles of laughter. These gentle sounds, the outdoorish plant smell that pervaded the room, comforted Claire thoroughly, giving her a feeling of feline languor.

  Presently, she was able to measure her inner emotions against what they had been upon first entering the compound three hours before. Except for Maud, revived by the challenge of the field, and the indefatigable Harriet Bleaska, the group mood had been a mixture of disappointment leavened by interest. Claire’s own mood had been attuned to the group. She understood it better now. No actuality of paradise can be the replica of the dream of paradise. Dreams of paradise are flawless. To leave a dream, you have to come down and down—in fact, down to earth—and the earth had fumbling and knobby fingers and marred what it built from the design of delicate dreams.

  For Claire, it was better now because the most useful, oiled part of the mechanism that was she, was moving all that was around her, to adjust it to her own needs, to make all compatible to her. It was her strength—or perhaps her weakness—this, the talent to abandon so automatically details of a cherished dream and to rearrange cold reality to match what was left of a dream. In others, she would have named it flexibility or compromise or called it meeting life halfway. She was a veteran of many romantic dreams, of endless high hopes, expectations, anticipations, and she was a veteran of countless disappointments, and so, long, long ago, she had armed herself with the machinery of reconciliation. It worked, too—else how could she still smile in the mornings of her marriage?—but recently, ever so often, the machinery responded less noiselessly, creaked and protested. Today it worked, was operating nicely. Paradise somewhat resembled the recurring dream of all the spring.

  Lighting a new cigarette off the old, snuffing out the old in a broken coconut husk she had brought in for an ashtray, she wondered if the others on the team had made an adjustment similar to her own. Recollecting fragments of their initial reactions to the village, as they had come through it behind Courtney, and their words upon entering their lodgings, she had her serious doubts.

  Courtney had pointed out the six huts that were to be their own for the six weeks of their visit. The huts were in a line, under the hoary overhang, directly on the grass compound, rather closer to the entry of the village than to the center where stood Paoti’s impressive hut. The Karpowiczes had been assigned the first quarters, exactly the same exterior and interior as the hut that Claire and Marc had been loaned, except that off the rear room there was a third small room for Mary Karpowicz. Claire and Maud had accompanied Courtney and the Karpowiczes in their first examination of their temporary home. While Sam had been dismayed only by the lack of a darkroom—Courtney had immediately promised to see that he had the materials and help to build one—he and Estelle found the conditions, if not quite up to Saltillo the year before, at least acceptable for so short a stay. Mary, on the other hand, was dismayed by the lack of privacy and the gaping emptiness. “What am I supposed to do here all summer, twiddle my thumbs?” she had asked.

  Lisa Hackfeld had been deposited in the next hut, which, out of deference to her husband’s financial support, she was being permitted to have to herself. She had taken one quick look through it, and then had overtaken Maud in the compound. “I can’t find the bathroom,” she had gasped, “there’s no bathroom.” Courtney had overheard this, and had tried to mollify her. “There is a public lavatory some distance behind every ten huts,” he had explained. The nearest one to you is about thirty yards away, behind the hut where Dr. DeJong will be. You can’t miss it. It is standing by itself. It looks like a circular grass hut more than a privy.” Lisa had been horrified at the idea of a public lavatory, but Courtney had told her that she was lucky to have even this. In the decades before Daniel Wright’s coming—the public water closets had been his innovation—the natives had none at all, but merely went out to the bush in the rear. Miserably, Lisa had retreated to her toiletless castle to brood until her luggage came.

  Orville Pence, never having been in Polynesia before, had confessed, upon entering his hut, that somehow he had expected accommodations with real windows—in Denver, being addicted to bronchial congestion, he had always slept with his windows tightly shut—and some office furniture and shelves for his books. They had left him, in the middle of his room, forlorn and immobilized.

  The next hut had been reserved for Rachel DeJong and Harriet Bleaska, who were to share it. Harriet had loved their dwelling, so much more picturesque than the lonely apartments she had known in Nashville, Seattle, and San Francisco. Rachel DeJong had been less impressed. While registering no vocal complaint, and indifferent to the actual living conditions, she had worried about the lack of privacy for her work. “One doesn’t need a couch,” she had said wryly, “but one does need seclusion with a patient—or, in this case, subject.” Eager to oblige, Courtney had promised to find a vacant hut, elsewhere, that she might use for a full-time consulting room.

  After that, Claire and Marc had been shown their residence, and Maud had departed, with Courtney, to her office and living quarters next door. A half-hour later, the supplies had arrived, and since lunch had been overlooked by their hosts, Marc had cracked open the crate containing Spam, and had passed out cans of it with openers at each hut.

  Recalling
some of the complaint and irritation now, a stray phrase, a marvelous cliche, crossed Claire’s mind: the natives are restless. Foolishly, it delighted her. She was here, among them, and the natives weren’t restless at all, not at all. The eggheads are restless, she thought, the poor scrambled eggheads, out of their frying pans into this.

  Maud, she thought, the mighty Maud, alone, would be unruffled, would be as resolute as a granite profile on Mount Rushmore. She had a sudden pointless desire to see Maud, to draw enthusiasm from her. Tiredness had vanished. Claire uncurled and hoisted herself erect. She could hear the men still toiling outside. She went through the hut and into the compound, expecting to find Marc, but while Orville Pence and Sam Karpowicz labored with the young natives, Marc was nowhere to be seen. Where had he gone? She meant to inquire, and then she did not, for she guessed that she knew. He had gone deeper into the village. He had gone to the naked breasts. Goddam them all, she thought; not the breasts but men; not men, either, but men like Marc.

  She had reached her mother-in-law’s hut when the cane door swung open, almost hitting her. She backed off, as Courtney emerged. It surprised her that he had been with Maud all this while.

  “Hello, Mrs. Hayden,” he said. “Did you get some rest?”

  She was suddenly shy and tongue-tied. “Yes, I did.”

  “If there’s anything I can do—?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then—”

  They had just been standing there, awkwardly faced toward each other like unwound dolls, both helpless to move toward one another or away.

  “I—I was going in—” she started to say.

  “Yes, I—”

  A voice was shouting from afar, and now more distinctly, “Oh, Claire—Claire Hayden!” The summons wound them, and they moved apart and spun toward the female clamor behind them. It was Lisa Hackfeld, hobbling toward them in hot disarray.

  She came to them breathless and spilling over with some minor horror and incredulity. So intent was she upon Claire, that she hardly recognized Courtney.