The Three Sirens

by Irving Wallace

  Harriet’s bewilderment deepened. How could he know? She had told no one except Maud, and that was scant minutes ago. Another thought occurred to her, that Vaiuri had confided to Orville or perhaps to his native friends, who had in turn told Orville the news. “How do you know?” she asked.

  “It’s all over the place, that’s how. Everyone knows.”

  “Well,” she said defensively, “it’s true. I’ve nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, I’m proud of it.”

  “Proud of it?” Orville stretched the words out, his voice quavering, his eyes aghast.

  “Why shouldn’t I be?” Harriet demanded. “He’s one of the most educated and important men in the village. He isn’t a savage. He respects me. Yes, I’d be proud to be his wife.”

  Harriet had never seen a man struck by lightning, but she was sure that if she had, he would look as Orville Pence looked this moment. He shuddered as if a stroke of electricity coursed through him. “Wife?” he repeated in stupefaction. “You’re going to marry one of them?”

  Harriet’s confusion intensified. “Didn’t you know? You said everyone is talking about it. I thought you meant Vaiuri’s proposal. What do you mean?”

  “Vaiuri’s proposal?”

  “Orville, if you don’t stop parroting everything I say I’m leaving you,” she said indignantly. “I wish you could hear yourself. What in the devil did you find out about that was so earth-shaking?”

  “About you and Uata, your affair with the native who died—”

  “Oh, that,” she said with a disgusted wave of her hand.

  He grabbed her arm in mid-air. “Wait a minute! How dare you dismiss it so—so—like it was nothing at all. It’s been the talk of the village. It even got to me, from the natives. I’ve never been so shocked—that one of us, a decently brought-up girl from the United States—letting herself be seduced by a half-breed and—and—primitive—”

  Harriet’s surprise had converted to irritation. “He didn’t seduce me, you fool, I seduced him. And I enjoyed it and he enjoyed it, and I’d do it over again!”

  Orville floundered before her onslaught of words, loosened his grip, and she tore her arm free. His head rattled inside with disbelief, and he leaned against the hut as if it were the Wailing Wall. “You—you don’t—you don’t know what—what you’re saying,” he stuttered. “They—they’ve bewitched you—you don’t know—”

  That moment, she had a perception about the poor bachelor scholar, and she almost pitied him. “Orville, I’m sorry I’ve disappointed you so. I had no idea you were that interested in my purity. Even if I had known—I’m sorry, but I still would have slept with him, because he was dying, and he needed someone. Why should it upset you so much?”

  “I’m thinking of—of—of the team—our dignity, position here—”

  “Well, Maud says I’ve enhanced our position here, so you need have no concern about that.”

  Suddenly, his eyes were fixed upon her face again. “And now,” he said, “if my ears didn’t deceive me, you’re going to marry a native—”

  “I’m considering it. The medical practitioner I work with, and he’s a dear, he proposed, and I must say I’m flattered.”

  “Harriet, no, you can’t. You—you’ll lose your American passport!”

  What he had chosen to say was so comic to Harriet that she had the urge to laugh. The contorted shape of his pear face suffocated the urge. “Look, Orville, I’ll will you my passport. What’s it ever gotten me? Has it gotten me a red-blooded American man? A proposal of marriage? A home and children? Love? Has it gotten me love? Nothing, I’ve gotten nothing out of it except a couple of grand tours with American sexual acrobats who’ve refused to make an honest woman of me. Well, that’s not enough for me. Togetherness is fine, but I don’t want it just at night. I want it day and night. I want to be not only a woman, but a wife and mother—”

  “I’ll marry you!” Orville bellowed.

  Harriet Bleaska swallowed the rest of her sentence, and stood gaping at him, her mouth hanging foolishly open.

  “I mean it,” Orville cried out fervently. “I’ll marry you and give you a home and children.”

  Her pride rose in her throat, and she swallowed that, too. “Why?” she said almost indistinctly. “Do you want to save a soul, rescue a fallen woman?”

  “I’m jealous of them,” he said with vehemence. “I’m jealous of them and I won’t let them have you. I want to take you away, I want you. I—I’ve never been in love—but I’ve never felt like this before—so I guess this is love.”

  She moved closer to him, hollow with compassion. “Orville, do you realize what you are saying?”

  “I want to marry you,” he insisted, doggedly.

  She touched his shirt sleeve, and felt the shiver of his bony arm beneath it. “Orville, we don’t even know each other.”

  “I know enough. I know I won’t let you waste yourself on—whatever his name is—the medicine man—and not come back with me. I deserve you more. I can make you happier.”

  “You want to take me back to—where is it?—yes, Denver. You want to marry me?”

  “I’ve never proposed to any girl before. Almost, but never actually, because of my—my mother—”

  “Your mother, family, what would they say?”

  “I don’t care. That’s the point, also. Being away from them, and here, it’s made me think. Harriet, I won’t let you give yourself to that native, just because he—”

  “Wait, stop, Orville. Everything is going too fast. For a quarter of a century I’m a candidate for old-maidhood, and zing, overnight I’m weighing proposals.” She considered him, and in the shimmering heat a curious alchemy occurred, and his face looked like the face of someone’s mother-in-law. She held her breath, and so many other representations crowded her mind—her role as wife of Vaiuri on the Sirens, her role as Mrs. Pence in Denver—that she felt unstrung. “Orville,” she said, and she began to lead him out of the shade and toward her door, “before I can even think of you—we’d better sit down—I’ll make some tea and we’ll talk—you and I had better talk, a little.”

  * * *

  Usually, when he worked with his three pans, developing negatives, printing them, rinsing them, Sam Karpowicz was oblivious to the outer world’s conventions. For him, the darkrooms in his life, be they rude shacks in the Fijis or Mexico, or the more elaborate one behind his home in Albuquerque, or this Iron Maiden in which he was toiling this minute on The Three Sirens, were isolated capsules where Time had been suspended. In his darkrooms, absorbed in the images that he had snatched from God’s world, where all was fluid and aging, and pinned to paper in his own world, where all was immobile and immortal, Sam escaped from the urgencies and amenities of survival. In his darkrooms, there were no appointments, social graces, competitions, no groomings, voidings, eatings.

  It was therefore unusual, Sam thought, as he ran the contact prints through the clear-water rinse and put them up to dry, that he felt a hunger pang. When he lifted his watch closer to the yellow safety light of the battery-operated lamp, the hour and minute hands confirmed the reminder of his hunger pang. It was already a half-hour after the noon hour, which meant that Estelle was waiting with lunch, and he wanted lunch because, except for the fruit juice he had gulped down as his entire breakfast, he had not had a bite to eat in over fifteen hours.

  He had awakened at daybreak, and been unable to fall asleep again, and had left Estelle in her damp slumber, and his troubled Mary behind the continuously closed door of the second rear bedroom, and walked into the hills above the village. He had intended to start taking his plant cuttings, before settling down to the work in the darkroom. But botany tempted him not at all this morning. Instead, alone, he had roamed through the bush, recriminating against the Fates that had sent him to this foul place.

  Ever since his eruption in the schoolroom, his daughter had not spoken a word to him, or, at least, not a civil word. And she had spoken to her mother little more. She had kept
to her room, to herself, refusing to eat with her parents, refusing to go out with them, appearing only a few times a day to attend the lavatory. Her flimsy door she had kept shut, but behind it, sometimes, Sam could hear her phonograph playing and the pages of a book rustling. If brooding had a sound, Sam was sure that he might have heard that, too.

  So confident was he in his Tightness that he had poured out justification of his action to Estelle. She had refused to ally herself fully with him. At the same time, in the hope of attaining future family harmony, she had refused to defend Mary’s cause, either. Rather, she had represented herself as some kind of neutral institution, ready to accept the two differing camps without judging them, so that they might have a place to reconcile differences. Sam guessed this about Estelle, but he had also guessed that secretly, she might be less neutral than she pretended. From little, quiet comments, interjections she made, while Sam inveighed against the educational system on the Sirens, the problems of adolescent girls, his enforced role as paterfamilias, Sam suspected that she had more sympathy for their daughter’s hurt than her husband’s outrage. Still, he could not be positive about Estelle’s feelings, for she had not really given voice to her feelings, nor had he truly invited her to do so.

  Through the past festival week, as his initial fury at this erotic society had subsided into greater objectivity, Sam Karpowicz had made the decision that the thing would work itself out. Three weeks hence, he told himself, when they departed from the atmosphere of this island, they would find themselves in a saner region and be able to regain their good senses. Mary, he told himself, would have simmered down, come to some realization that her father had acted in her own best interests, and she would become more subservient. He would reason with her. She would talk to him. It would work out as everything did in what Dr. Pangloss reminded Candide was the best of all possible worlds.

  Thus, walking and walking and thinking and thinking through the early morning, Sam Karpowicz had made truce with his unsettled conscience. Once having accomplished this temporary peace of mind, he had come down from the hills into the village, and, to maintain his partially satisfied state, had bypassed his hut and gone directly into the darkroom.

  He had been developing pictures ever since, until his empty stomach reminded him that he was merely mortal. Even then, he might have disregarded his hunger, and stayed on to print a fourth and fifth batch of photographs, had not his stamina begun to crumble under the excessive heat. The darkroom, little larger than a closet, was always hot, hotter than the weather because of the continuously burning lamp kept beneath the storage cabinet containing his pressed plant specimens, but this noon it had become an unbearable oven. Inhaling the steamy air was like swallowing tongues of flame. He had had enough, he decided.

  After hanging the last of the curled prints, he turned off the safety lamp, and went outside into the blinding brightness of the day. He recoiled from the sunlight, searching for his green-tinted glasses, finding them in his trouser pocket, and snapping them on over his rimless spectacles. Now, he could see, and although it was sweltering outside too, at last he could breathe.

  He started down the path from the darkroom, between Lisa Hackfeld’s hut and his own, past Mary’s closed window, heading for the compound and his front door. Suddenly, he was startled by the sight of a chunky native boy, no more than Mary’s age, leaving his hut; or, to Sam, it appeared that he had come out of the Karpowiczes’ front door. Sam jerked off his sunglasses for a better look, and recognized the receding figure as that of Nihau, whom Estelle had told him about and once pointed out—Mary’s classmate at the cesspool school.

  Instantly, Sam Karpowicz was furious. He had commanded Mary to have nothing further to do with that damned school. He had warned Estelle that neither Mary’s instructor nor any of her classmates, let alone Nihau (whose attentions had been definitely corrupting), must ever be permitted to visit Mary or set foot in their household for the remainder of their stay on the Sirens. And here, in flagrant defiance of his edict, Mary or Estelle, or both of them, had slyly conspired to receive the native behind Sam’s back.

  Sam’s initial impulse was to chase after the native intruder, take hold of him, and dress him down good. A tongue-lashing, a verbal no-trespassing, would settle the business of unwanted visitors from now until they were away from this offensive community. Sam controlled his impulse for two reasons: from his position between the huts, he had not seen his front door, and so could not be positive that Nihau had actually emerged from his residence; and, even if Nihau had been inside the Karpowicz hut, Sam could not be certain whether he had been invited or had forced himself upon Mary, or for that matter, if once inside, he had been received with hospitality or hostility. Any confrontation with Nihau, without the proper information in his possession, might weaken Sam’s position, make him out the fool. He had better have the facts. If the facts proved that Nihau had, indeed, intruded upon the sanctity of their home, was trying to lure Mary back to the cesspool school, or press some private suit, Sam would break the young buck’s neck, or initiate charges against the boy before Maud and Paoti Wright. On the other hand, if Mary or Estelle had sought out the boy, arranged some kind of clandestine meeting, Sam would have it out with either or both of them, and right away.

  Aggressively, determined to invoke his authority, Sam entered his hut. His arrival in the room was so impetuous and blind, so physical, that he almost bowled Estelle over, and had to catch her to keep her from falling.

  When she recovered, she said, “I was just going out to look for you. Where have you been, Sam?”

  “In the darkroom,” he said impatiently. “Estelle, I want to—”

  “In the darkroom? I’ve been in there three or four times. You weren’t there.”

  “Quit with the darkroom already. I “was there—no, wait, I forgot, I got up early and took a long hike—but I’ve been there over an hour—”

  “In the last hour I haven’t looked. I’ve been too busy. Sam, listen—”

  “Estelle, you listen,” he said, indignant at being sidetracked by her wifely frivolity. “I know why you’ve been busy the last hour. You’ve had that goddam native boy in here, against my wishes, and don’t deny it. You have, haven’t you?”

  Estelle’s face was pale and drawn. It surprised Sam, in these seconds of truth, how old she looked. “Yes,” she was saying, wearily, “Nihau has been here. He just left. Sam, I—”

  Sam circled her like an avenging rooster, ready to peck her down. “I knew it, I knew it,” he crowed. “The first chance, you were going to wear the pants of the family. You know what’s right, you know what’s best. What’s in the heads of the mothers of our country? Why are they so sure they always know what is best for the children? Like the father doesn’t exist. Like fathers are second-class citizens, the serfs in the fields, to get up dough for this, dough for that, work our fingers to the bone, drag our weary asses back to the house, be permitted a scrap of food and a word or two with our children. I say nuts to that. I say have a vote in this house, and maybe my vote is more important than yours, where Mary comes in. If you could have seen what I saw in that school, that indecency in front of a sixteen-year-old, you’d spit on every one of them from the class, and I mean that Nihau especially; you’d throw him out on his ear, not invite him here to practice on our daughter what they’re preaching. I’m going in and tell Mary, too. I’ve had enough of this soft-pedaling. There’s a time for talk and a time for being tough, and I’ve had enough. I’m going in and I’m going to—”

  “Sam—shut up!”

  Estelle’s order penetrated Sam like a bullet at close range. It stopped him dead in his tracks and left him propped there, wounded and wondering, and about to go down. In the long years of their marriage together, through thick and thin, for better or worse, his Estelle had never used such language or such a disrespectful tone of voice to him. The world was coming to an end, and the disintegration was so awesome, he was left speechless.

  Estelle was spe
aking. “You come in here like a raving maniac, not asking, not civilized, not caring what is what and who is where, but just a raving maniac. What’s got into you, I don’t know. I know only that from the minute you were in that classroom, and saw that your daughter was seeing a man and a woman, decent people, undressed for an anatomy lesson, you’ve parted from your senses. Such a who-ha about what? About what, Sam?”

  He could not reply, because the unexpected rebellion, the coup d’etat, had toppled him unexpectedly. Where was his ammunition?

  Relentlessly, the she-bandit continued to undermine domestic authority. “Sure, Nihau was here. Do you ask why? Sure, I’ve been looking for you. Do you think why? No, only a maniac shouting, like maybe somebody kicked you in the testicles. Maybe they should. Maybe I will. You want to give me hell and go in the back room and give your Mary hell. Do you ask if she’s even there? Now I’ll tell you, you maniac. She’s not in her room. She’s not in your house. She’s gone. Do you hear me straight? She’s gone, run away, just like in the magazine stories, she’s run away from home. Gone! Do you hear?”

  His deeply sunken eyes rolled behind his thick spectacles, and out of his numbness came but one word. “Mary?”

  “Our Mary, your Mary, my Mary, she’s run away.” Estelle’s hand was digging into the front pocket of her cotton housedress. She pulled out a scrap of paper and handed it to Sam. “Look at the fancy farewell note.” He snatched it, while Estelle recited its contents. “‘I’ve had enough. You don’t understand me and never will. I’m going away. Don’t try to find me. I won’t come back. Mary.’”

  Estelle eased the childish note from her husband’s stiff fingers, stuffed it back in her pocket, and glanced at her mate. He still appeared to be in a catatonic state. Nevertheless, she went on, more levelly. “This is what I make of it. She’s a baby like you are a baby. She must do something to punish us, you for your foolishness and me for being loyal to you instead of taking her side. So off she goes, after the week of brooding and sulking. I wake up. The note is next to me. Her room is empty. You are gone. After you got up, she must have waited and then run away. Where—what—I don’t know. The whole morning I try to find you. No good. So I’ve got to think. What is there to do? I go to Maud Hayden. She calls Mr. Courtney. We all go to the Chief. He agrees, a searching party. So the last two hours they’re searching. The native boy who was here, Nihau—we should have such fine young men in Albuquerque, believe me—he comes here to tell me the progress being made, exactly what is going on. There are four groups of men in four directions looking for her, and he, Nihau, he is looking for her, too.”