The Three Sirens (11 page)

After coming out of the washroom, she made up her face, tugged on her coat, and left her office. Passing through the reception room, she saw her morning’s mail on the lamp table. There were half a dozen letters. She stuffed them into her pocket, locked the office door, and took the elevator down to the lobby of the building.

Outside, the air was chilly and the day as somber and weighted as her heart. She had intended to get her convertible, drive into Beverly Hills, have a drink and a quiet meal at one of the better restaurants, and hurry to catch the panel by one o’clock. Now she was too preoccupied for either a drink or a real lunch, and so she turned up Wilshire Boulevard and made her way, by foot, to the snack shop on the corner.

The counter was almost filled, but there were still two booths empty. She took her place in the nearer, for she wanted privacy. After ordering a bowl of bean soup, a cheeseburger medium well, and coffee, she sat, hands folded on the table, trying to construct something out of the wreckage of recent months.

She could not blame Joe for the date with the starlet, or for further dates in the future, that was clear. He had his life, too, and he had to live it. His date did not necessarily mean he was becoming emotionally involved elsewhere. It probably had no more depth than fornication. Joe had last said he wanted to marry her, and it was up to her. Well, dammit, she wanted to marry him, and it was up to her. The sensible thing, she saw, would be to go to him and simply lay it on the line, bare herself, expose the degree of her inhibition. He was psychiatrically oriented. He would understand. With his understanding and support, she would return to her training analyst, and work it out. At last, she would be able to marry Joe.

To her psychiatrist self, this was simple and the only procedure. Yet, her female self—her utter female self—dissented. She did not want to reveal to him her basic problem. It spoiled things a little, very little. The bride has a problem; she cannot shed her veil. This was foolishness, sick foolishness, but it was there. She was confused again, and what had been briefly simple now knelt to encompassing complexity.

The lunchroom was steamy, stifling, and as she began to remove her coat, she felt her morning’s mail. She folded the coat and put it on the seat next to her, and took her mail from the pocket.

Spooning her soup, she sorted the mail. None of it interested her until she reached the last envelope. The return address read: “Dr. Maud Hayden, Raynor College, Santa Barbara, California.” This was surprising. While Rachel knew Maud Hayden fairly well, she considered Maud as no more than an acquaintance-friend, whom one always met professionally. She had never been to Maud Hay-den’s house, nor had Maud ever visited her apartment. Never before had either of them written the other. She could not imagine why Maud Hayden would write to her, but her admiration for the elderly woman whom she considered among the peers of anthropology was so great that she quickly ripped open the envelope. The letter lay before her, and the next moment she entered the distant world of The Three Sirens.

Finishing her soup, slowly munching her cheeseburger and sipping her coffee, Rachel DeJong read on. As she read one page, then two, and went eagerly to the extracts from the Easterday report, her private world—so filled with her problem self, with Joseph Morgen, with Miss Mitchell—was populated by Alexander Easterday, Captain Rasmussen, Thomas Courtney, a Polynesian named Moreturi, and his father and Chief, Paoti Wright.

The impact of Maud Hayden’s letter and enclosure jolted her into space and landed her, vibrating, on a serene, foundationless, weird planet, a blend of Malinowski’s
Boyawa
, Tully’s South Sea dreamland in
A Bird of Paradise
, and D. H. Lawrence’s
Wragby Hall
. She tried to project herself into the picture of The Three Sirens, and found her sensible self fascinated by the culture but repelled by the evident eroticism of that culture. At an earlier time, when her nerves had been less raw and repressions comfortably buried, she would have been interested, she knew, and she would have telephoned Maud Hayden instantly.

Rachel remembered, as Maud reminded her in the letter, that a year ago, she had volunteered for a field trip under a director and mentor capable of teaching her so much. She had been interested in the mores of marriage, extremely interested. That was at another time, when her mind and her work and her social life (she had just started going out with Joe then) were organized and controlled. Today, such a trip would be folly. A study of uninhibited sexual play and successful marriage would be unbearably painful. She no longer had the objectivity or poise for it. Besides, how could she leave her relationship with Joe unresolved? How could she leave Miss Mitchell and thirty other patients for six weeks? Of course, several times in the past she had left her patients for protracted periods, and there was no indication that her remaining here would resolve anything with Joe. Still, at a time like this The Three Sirens was pure fantasy, impossible self-indulgence, and she must forget it.

The appearance of the waitress with the bill brought her out of never-never land. She consulted her watch. Eighteen minutes to one. She would have to speed to make the panel.

Hurrying out of the snack shop to her car, and then in her car to Beverly Hills High School, she arrived backstage just as the moderator was putting in a call for her. The audience was waiting, a filled auditorium, and presently—all activity had a detached, somnambulant quality for her this afternoon—she found herself behind the table, between Dr. Samuelson and Dr. Lynd, participating in a lively discussion of teen-age marriages.

The minutes fled, and she knew that she was playing a passive role in the debate, allowing Dr. Samuelson and Dr. Lynd to dominate the floor, hold the strong exchanges, and speaking herself only when spoken to. Usually, she did well in these public polemics. This afternoon, she knew, she was doing poorly—jargon, banalities, quotations by rote—and she didn’t give a damn.

Rachel was dimly aware that the panel discussion had ended, and questions from the floor were being flung at the three of them. She was the target of two, and her colleagues the other dozen or more. The wall clock told her that the ordeal was almost over. She settled back, considering a possible showdown with Joe.

Suddenly, she heard her name, which meant a question was being directed at her. She stiffened in her wooden chair, and tried to comprehend it fully.

After the question mark, her countenance assumed the expression of thoughtfulness—Joe would have seen through this—and she began to reply.

“Yes, I understand, Madam,” she said. “I have not read this popular piece of his you mention. But if the content is what you say, I can honestly state that I would not touch that popular penis of his for anything—”

Her voice halted, bewildered. Puncturing the hush of the audience had come a squeal, followed by giggles, and now a low breaker of tittering and voices buzzing.

Rachel hesitated, lost, and concluded lamely, “—well, I’m sure you get the point I’m making.”

Unaccountably, the entire audience broke into a roar of laughter.

In the hubbub, Rachel turned helplessly to Dr. Lynd, whose cheeks were flushed, and who was staring straight ahead, as if he had to pretend not to have overheard a scene of indiscretion. Rachel whirled toward Dr. Samuelson, whose lips were curled in a smile, he too looking directly at the audience.

“What’s got into them?” Rachel whispered against the noise. “Why are they laughing?” She tried to remember what she had said, something about not touching that magazine article for anything—for anything—that article—that popular piece—piece—thing—Suddenly, she gasped, and whispered to Dr. Samuelson, “Did I—?”

And he, gaze still directed ahead of him, replied from the corner of his mouth in a cheerful undertone, “I’m afraid, Dr. DeJong, your Freudian slip is showing.”

“Oh, God,” Rachel groaned, “you mean I did.”

The moderator rapped his gavel, and quickly order was restored, so that the slip was soon lost in the questions and answers that followed. Rachel trusted herself to speak no more. It was a test of character to brazen it out, to sit there on exhibit, wooden and unsmiling. As the words built their fence about her, her mind went back to her student days and her reading on “speech-blunders” in Sigmund Freud’s
Psychopathology of Everyday Life
: “A lady once expressed herself in society—the very words show that they were uttered with fervor and under the pressure of a great many secret emotions: ‘Yes, a woman must be pretty if she is to please men. A man is much better off. As long as he has five straight limbs, he needs no more!’…In the psychotherapeutic procedure which I employ in the solution and removal of neurotic symptoms, I am often confronted with the task of discovering from the accidental utterances and fancies of the patient the thought contents, which, though striving for concealment, nevertheless unintentionally betray themselves.”

Rachel had been dwelling on this, and her own “speech-blunder,” for some seconds, when she realized that the discussion was over and that the meeting had been adjourned. Rising and walking off the stage, slightly apart from the others, she knew that she would be writing two letters tonight. One would be to Joseph Morgen, confiding in him the truth of her problem and letting him decide if he was willing to wait until she worked it out, for better or for worse. The other would be to Maud Hayden, informing her that Rachel DeJong would have her affairs in order and be ready to accompany a team to The Three Sirens for six weeks in June and July.

* * *

Maud Hayden had taken up the carbon copy of the letter Claire had typed and sent to Dr. Sam Karpowicz, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Before reading it, she turned to Claire.

“I hope this dazzles him,” she said. “We’ve simply got to have Sam. Not only is he an excellent freelance botanist, but he’s a brilliant photographer, one of the few creative ones. The only thing that worries me is—well, Sam’s such a family man, and I pointedly ignored inviting his wife and daughter along. Maybe they’d be no problem, but I’m trying to keep the field team small.”

“What if he insists upon bringing his family?” asked Claire.

“Then I don’t know, I really don’t know. Of course, Sam’s so important to me that I suppose I should accept him under any conditions, even if I had to take along his grandfather, pet poodles, and hothouse… . Well, let’s hold a good thought, and cross that bridge when we come to it. Let’s see what Sam has to say.”

* * *

It was after ten o’clock in the evening when Sam Karpowicz locked the door of his darkroom shed and crossed the few yards of wet green lawn to the flagstone steps, wearily ascending them to the constricted patio. Beside the outdoor wicker lounge he halted, inhaling the cooling, dry night air, and clearing his head of the darkroom fumes. The intake of air was as delicious as any intoxicant. He closed his eyes and inhaled and exhaled several times, then opened his eyes and momentarily enjoyed the distinct rows of street lights and scattered residential lights off toward the Rio Grande. The street lights seemed to shimmer and move, with yellow grandeur, like the torchlights of a nighttime religious procession he had seen last year between Saltillo and Monterey, Mexico.

He stood quietly in the patio, reluctant to give up the pleasures of the place and its scenes. His affection for this suburban neighborhood, for the dusty pueblos of Acoma and San Felipe nearby, the flat grazing land and irrigated chili pepper fields, the blue spruce mountains, was deep and unshakable.

He remembered, with a pang, what had brought him here, so unlikely a place for one who knew nothing but New York’s Bronx from birth to early manhood. During the war—the Hitler war—he had come to know Ernie Pyle very well. Sam had been a press officer and Signal Corps photographer, despite his university degree in botany, and Pyle had been a battle correspondent. In their long hikes together, on three Pacific islands, Sam would discourse on the wonders of Pacific plant ecology, and Pyle, at Sam’s urging, would speak of his passion for the peace of his New Mexico. Some months after Pyle’s death in action, Sam had been sent to California for discharge from the service. He had purchased a beaten-up old car and driven through the Southwest toward New York, determined to have one look at this country before burying himself in the monotony of metropolitan teaching.

His route had taken him through Albuquerque, and once in the city, he knew that he could not leave it without visiting Mrs. Pyle, and Ernie’s cottage, and the neighborhood his late friend had so often discussed with such love. Sam had put up in a four-dollar single at the Alvarado Hotel, next to the Santa Fe station. After cleaning up and dining, and making inquiries at the desk, he had driven through the hot, quiet business district, past the pueblo-styled University, until he had come upon Girard Drive. He had turned right on the paved street, so familiar and friendly after his dead friend’s descriptions, and had cruised onward for a mile, between Spanish adobe homes, until the street became gravel, and after several blocks he had arrived at the corner of Girard Drive and Santa Monica Drive. Ernie Pyle had said that his cottage was at 700 South Girard Drive, a corner house with shrubbery, cement patio, a dog named Cheeta, a green-shingle roofed white house made for peace.

Sam had parked and gone to the house and knocked. The door had been opened by a nurse, and he had identified himself and explained his mission. The nurse had told him that Mrs. Pyle was too ill to see anyone, but suggested that if he was a friend of Ernie’s, he might like to see Ernie’s room, untouched since the day he had left it forever. In his mind’s eye, Sam had seen the room often, and it held no surprises. Somehow, it was more his own room than the one in the apartment in the Bronx where Estelle waited for him. Slowly, he had circled the room—the open dictionary on the stand, the autographed drawing by Low, the two walls of books, the framed photograph of Ernie chatting with Eisenhower and Bradley, the dirty green baseball cap hanging from a peg—and finally, with thanks and regards for Mrs. Pyle, Sam had left.