The Three Sirens

by Irving Wallace

  By the time the table was cleared, Maud’s anecdotes had taken on a more serious theme, beneath their whimsical packaging. She had reminded them all of the teasing wickedness many primitive societies possessed. There had been the instance of Labillardiere, on his visit to the South Seas, trying to compile the native words for numerals. He had made his inquiries among chosen informants, and written down the words, and only after publication had he learned that the word they had given him for one million really meant not one million in their tongue but nonsense, and that the word they had given him for a half-million had not been that at all but fornicate.

  “John Lubbock told the story first,” Maud had explained, “because he believed that field workers should keep this sort of disaster in mind when working with native informants. You must check and double check, to know whether you are getting facts or having your leg pulled.” Everyone had enjoyed the story, and had got the point. In the final weeks, all of them would be more careful, more wary, in short, more scientific.

  During this, Claire had been tempted to add an anecdote of her own. Her bruised lower lip, painted deep carmine, reminded her of her own anthropologist and her exchange with him hours ago. He had said, “I’m sick to the gut of you.” Now there was the perceptive, balanced scientific approach demanded by the obese conveyor of anecdotes at the head of the table. What if Claire repeated this. Would it also regale them? She felt weak with disgust of him.

  Knowing the relief of deliverance, Claire saw that the others were beginning to rise from the bench-table. She realized that Aimata had disappeared with the last of Maud’s tin plates and plastic cups. The horrid luncheon was over, or nearly over, for Sam Karpowicz was calling out, “Would any of you care to see my last week of photographs? I’ve just printed them.”

  There was a chorus of assents. Claire found herself standing upright, somewhat removed from the others, between the door and the desk. She watched Sam Karpowicz explaining something to Maud, Orville, and Courtney. Then he came to the desk, opened a manila envelope, and extracted two parcels of photographs, glossy black and whites, five by seven inches, eight by ten inches, and began to remove the rubber bands that bound them. Something about the top picture troubled him, and he laid it aside, then hastily riffling through the others, he laid two more aside, and quickly slipped all three back into the envelope. Aware that Claire had observed him, Sam grinned foolishly. “Diplomacy,” he murmured. “I’d taken some of Harriet at the festival dance, you know, the bare-breasted ones—and I think a certain party here whose initials are Orville Pence might take a dim view of them now.”

  Claire nodded. “Very wise,” she said.

  Sam weighed his pile of photographs lovingly. “Some really good stuff here. I shot everything, even went a little corny on layouts and picture stories. You know—a typical day in the life of the Chief’s son; the development of a festival dance; the home of an average Sirens inhabitant; the eloquent history of the Sacred Hut—everything. Would you like to see some of it?”

  “I’d love to,” said Claire politely.

  He took a fistful of photographs and handed them to Claire. “Here, have a look. I’ll pass the others around.”

  Across the room, Sam gave the rest of his photographs to Maud, who in turn relayed them to the guests grouped around her.

  Claire remained where she was, isolated from the others, disinterestedly glancing at each photograph in her stack, and placing it beneath the others. She had finished with the series of posed and candid shots of the Hierarchy in solemn session, and she found herself gazing at a full-length shot of Tehura standing before the open door of her hut. Attired only in her provocative grass skirt, Tehura looked like Everyman’s dream of Polynesia. Claire could see that both Maud and Sam would do sensationally well with this set back home.

  Claire continued to pick through the photographic layout of Tehura. The home of an average Sirens inhabitant, Sam had labeled this collection. Here was Tehura kneeling beside the massive stone fertility idol in the corner of her front room next to the door. Here was Tehura bent over the earth oven. Here was Tehura posing as if in slumber on the mats of her back room. Here was Tehura laying out three of her grass skirts and two of her tapa-cloth pareus. Here was Tehura proudly pointing at her jewelry and ornaments from suitors. Here was a close-up picture of the jewelry and ornaments laid out in a neat row on the pandanus mat.

  Suddenly, Claire had stopped turning over the pictures. Incredulously, she brought the last one closer to her eyes. There could be no mistake, no mistake at all. There it was.

  Helplessly, she cast around the room for Courtney, saw him. “Tom,” she summoned him.

  He came to her, searching her face in an attempt to understand its agitation. “Yes, Claire, what is it?”

  “I—I’ve found my missing necklace, the diamond pendant.”

  “You have?”

  “Here it is.” She handed him the two photographs. “Tehura has it.”

  For a long time, it seemed, he studied the photographs. Frowning, he looked up. “It’s a diamond pendant all right, nothing native. You’re positive this is the one?”

  “Could there be any other?”

  “Claire, she couldn’t have stolen it. I know Tehura. She wouldn’t in a million years.”

  “Maybe she didn’t have to.”

  Courtney’s head jerked toward her, his long face troubled.

  “I think I’d better go over and see her,” Claire said.

  “I’ll go with you.”

  “No,” said Claire firmly. “There are some things a woman has to do alone.”

  * * *

  All the afternoon, she was tensely poised for her showdown with Tehura, and all the afternoon, she was thwarted, because Tehura was not there. Three times, in the clammy heat of the afternoon, Claire had made her way across the endless compound, from her hut to Tehura’s hut, and three times Tehura’s hut had been empty.

  Blindly, in the frustration of waiting between each visit, she had returned to her own quarters, and kept herself occupied with cleaning and laundering. She would not permit herself to anticipate confirmation of the means by which her favorite piece of jewelry had been transported from her luggage to Tehura’s possession. She knew, but she would not dwell upon it. She must have the evidence from the native girl’s lips.

  Now it was after five o’clock, and for the fourth time, Claire was making her way to the hateful hut. If Tehura was still not home, Claire determined to post herself before the door and wait. If she was home, Claire would not waste words. There and then she would finish the last of her unfinished business with Marc.

  She reached the hut that had become a dominant site in her life, and when she lifted her fist to knock, she intuitively knew that there would be a response.

  She knocked.

  The response was instantaneous. “Eaha?”

  Claire shoved the door, and stepped from the outside heat into the shaded, cooler interior of the front room. Tehura was curled comfortably against the far wall, a bowl of vegetables beside her thigh, and she was in the midst of cutting the vegetables for cooking.

  At the sight of Claire, Tehura showed not her customary pleasure but an immediate uneasiness. She did not display her quick smile. She did not offer to rise in the practiced gesture of hospitality. She sat unmoving, in an attitude of watchful waiting.

  “I had to speak to you, Tehura,” Claire said, still standing.

  “Is it so important? I must serve a dinner tonight. Can it not wait until tomorrow?”

  Claire stood her ground against the rebuff. “No, Tehura.”

  The native girl shrugged, and dropped both vegetables and paring bone into the bowl. “Very well,” she said with a pout, “you tell me what is so important.”

  Claire hesitated. Whenever she was in the presence of one of these native women, she felt at a disadvantage. Several weeks ago, she had thought it was because of their superiority in sexual activity. When you are in the company of a woman who has kno
wn many men, and you have known but one or perhaps none, you feel inferior. But now, Claire understood that it was much more superficial than that. It was exactly what she had perceived her first afternoon in the village, when she had felt like a missionary’s wife. It was a matter of clothing, or lack of clothing. There was the native girl, without a stitch on except for the brief grass skirt drawn so high as to almost reveal her private parts. There she was, so female, flaunting every magnificent curve of her tawny brown body. And by contrast, here stood Claire in two binding layers of clothing, announcing in this place her shame of femininity. It gave her the feeling of being constricted, and inhibited. Then, she thought of what she had seen in Sam’s photographs, and she forgot her disadvantage.

  Claire dropped to her knees, directly before the native girl. She would have to struggle to keep her voice from quavering. “Tehura,” she said, “how did you get my diamond necklace?”

  Claire had the satisfaction of seeing the girl lose her composure. Tehura flattened against the wall, in the posture of a small house pet at bay. Her slow, vacuous little mind was groping, Claire perceived. In an instant, she would make up some stupid lie.

  Claire spoke again. “Don’t bother to deny it and embarrass us both. I know you have my necklace. Our photographer took pictures of you—remember? He took pictures of all your possessions. I saw the pictures. And there was my necklace. Tell me how you got it. I’m determined to find out.”

  Claire waited, and she could see that Tehura was going to brazen it out.

  “Ask your husband,” Tehura said suddenly. “He gave it to me.”

  So, thought Claire, that part of it is confirmed. “Yes,” she said quietly. “I expected it was Marc.”

  “A gift,” said Tehura quickly, “he gave it to me as a gift for being his informant. He said he would buy you another.”

  “I don’t want another,” said Claire, “and I don’t want this one back. I only want the truth about what’s been going on between you and Marc.”

  “What truth?” Tehura demanded.

  “You know very well what I mean. Let’s not play little-girl games. You’re grown up and so am I. Marc gave you my most expensive and most sentimental possession, took it from me and gave it to a stranger. I insist on knowing why. For simply being an informant?”

  Technically, Tehura could afford to be righteous, and so there was pious righteousness in her voice. “For being what else? What else could there be?” Then, with a thrust of cruelty, she added, “He is your husband, he is not mine.”

  “He is not mine, either,” said Claire.

  “That is your business as a woman, not my business,” said Tehura.

  She is actually being insolent to me, Claire thought, and it is not mere defensiveness, it is from an actual feeling of superiority. There could only be one reason for this, and Claire made up her mind to ferret out an admission.

  For seconds, Claire studied the native girl, appalled at how she had changed in these weeks. From her first encounter with Tehura in Paoti’s hut, before and during the rite of friendship, she had liked and admired Tehura. The young brown girl had been, to Claire, the perfect symbol of a free soul, gay, amusing, unspoiled. The High Spirit’s simple Eve. All that had vanished now. Tehura was as complex, secretive, covetous, inhibited, nervous as any Western woman. When and how had the metamorphosis taken place? Who had put upon her the cankers of outside civilization? What had been the infecting agent? Again, Claire was certain she had the answers, but she had to hear them from Tehura’s lips, just as Rachel DeJong always knew the answers, but had to hear them from her patients’ lips so that they would come to know, too.

  “Tehura, I’m going to ignore your obvious contempt for me,” Claire said, slowly. “I’m going to have a short talk with you, I’m going to speak to you honestly, as sincerely as I can, and then you may say what you wish, and after that I’m going to leave you.”

  “Say whatever you want to say,” said Tehura peevishly.

  “You’ve changed, you’ve changed almost before my eyes. You are not the same young woman I met when I came here. I thought this society was impervious to outside influence. I thought you had progressed far beyond us, in certain ways, and could absorb our visit and throw us off, back to where we came from, without suffering any ill effects. But I see some of you on the Sirens are fallible human beings too, and there must always be one or two in any group who are more susceptible than the rest, more sensitive to outside influences. Something nasty has been at work on you, and that something has warped you. You were a nice person, almost perfect, but you’ve become something else, too much like many of us outsiders, something imperfect. You’ve been constantly exposed to only one of us in these last weeks—and so I must suspect him, because I know him so well. Marc has done this to you.”

  Tehura leaned forward, and there was wrath in her voice. “Marc has done nothing to me—except good. Marc is a good man. You do not appreciate him, that is all. You are the one who is spoiled, and you try to spoil him.”

  “I see,” said Claire. “What do you know about my husband? How do you know he is such a good man?”

  “I have been with him every day for weeks in our work. He cannot speak to you, so he speaks to me. I know him well.”

  “How well, Tehura?”

  “Not what you think with your mind.”

  “I simply asked how well you know him?”

  “Better than you do. With me he can speak, be free, he is a man. With you, he is made into nothing but air.”

  “Is that what he told you?”

  “It is what I see with my eyes. He cannot live with you.”

  Claire bit her lip. “Do you think he can live with any woman? Do you think he can live with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well,” said Claire, “this is a serious thing. He has really got to you. Let me tell you, Tehura, let me give you a piece of free advice. I don’t know what he’s told you or planned for you. I don’t know if he’s merely trying to sleep with you, or has actually talked you into coming to the United States to be his mistress. Or could it be wife?”

  “You are saying such things, not Marc.”

  “No matter what he has in mind, or you have, you listen to me while you can, Tehura. He’s a word man, nothing more. That’s the cheapest seduction and the worst one, because after the words there is little else, only meanness. Do you understand? Whatever he’s said to you, told you these last weeks, about himself, about me, about our life at home, about our country, has been designed to delude and corrupt you.”

  “No.”

  “I tell you yes,” said Claire forcefully. “We live a dull, monotonous life at home, competing with the Joneses—oh, you don’t know what that means, but try to feel what I say—a nervous, restricted, high-tension life, fighting for jobs, status, fighting edginess, ennui—always wondering how we can escape it, make it better. You already have it better here in a thousand ways. Your vocabulary does not even have the words for tranquilizers, campus politics, ambition, frustration, envy, debts, frigidity, loneliness. But these are a great part of our life in my country. I won’t say our life is all bad, and yours is all good, but I will say—I have no doubt of it—that Marc has not painted a true picture for you.” She caught her breath, and then rushed on. “I will tell you more, Tehura. Marc is not a man for you or for any normal woman. I’ve learned that on the Sirens. What could he give you that your own men could not? He is intelligent, highly educated, not unattractive, and occasionally, he has money for necklaces, that is true, but it is so little, Tehura, so little. He has no strength of tenderness, of understanding, of love. He is stunted, angry, self-centered, too neurotic, sick of mind, to function, behave, as a grown man should behave. He is corroded with envies, hates, self-pity, fantastic prejudices, unrealistic dreams. His values are no more mature than those of a very young boy, less so. I mentioned love. In this place you’ve treated love as love has never been treated in any society before. You have confessed that you have
enjoyed your native men. You will not enjoy an American man in the same way—”

  “Tom Courtney was my lover.”

  “Even Tom, and he’s a million years more mature than Marc, even Tom, you told me, you had to teach to be a man. Marc is not Tom and Marc will not learn, and he is not the men you have known. I haven’t experienced a good lover, but Marc, dammit, I can tell you, Marc is the worst. He has no interest in a real woman. He cannot give of himself. He thinks only of himself. Tehura, for your own sake, not mine, I warn you—”

  Tehura rose to her feet, trying to maintain some pose of dignity. “I do not believe you,” she said.

  Claire stood up. “You do not believe me?”

  “You are a wife who cannot keep her man. You are jealous and afraid.”

  “Tehura,” Claire pleaded, “how can I reach you, the person you’ve become, he’s made you into?” She saw that it was no use. “All right,” she said, “but I hope you will realize it is truly not jealousy. I’m through with Marc. Do as you wish.”

  She started for the door.

  “You can have your necklace,” Tehura called out.

  “Keep it,” Claire said, staring at the door, holding the latch, not turning around. “Keep it, but don’t keep him, if you’ve had that in mind, because if you do, you’ll be as much of a fool as I have been.”

  She went outside, and when she had shut the door behind her, she felt her knees begin to give. As she steadied herself against the hut, she discerned that she was neither tearful nor bitter, only emotionally spent.

  It’s over, thank God, it’s over, she thought. The next time Rasmussen came, she would leave with him. It could not be soon enough.

  As for Marc and Tehura, she did not know if there was anything between them, or if ever there would be. She did not care about Marc. But for one moment she had pity for Tehura.