The Three Sirens (49 page)

Claire had suffered this, before Courtney, but she could stand no more. “Marc, I know all about it. Mr. Courtney has been kind enough to brief me.”

Marc’s jaw went slack, and his head swung slowly from Claire to Courtney. He considered the enemy a brief moment, his jaw closing and stiffening, and then he said with a tremor, “And I suppose you also tried to convince my wife all of this is civilization.”

Courtney remained uncoiled against the wall. “Yes, I did,” he said quietly.

“We’re a team of experts in many sciences,” said Marc, “and we have experience in studying many societies. I assure you this one is low down on the scale of progress. I’ve seen—”

Claire’s hand half-reached toward her husband. “Marc, please, let’s not—”

“If you don’t mind, Claire, I’d like to finish my statement,” said Marc firmly. He returned to Courtney. “I was trying to say, I’ve been here two days, and I doubt that I will learn more in forty-two days. What do we have on this piece of backward real estate? A handful of illiterate half-castes going about in grass skirts and athletic supporters, worshiping stone idols, their minds filled only with superstitions and fornication. And you have the nerve to call that civilization?”

“Yes,” said Courtney.

Marc regarded him with exaggerated pity. “Mister, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—you’ve been away from the United States too long.”

“Have I?” said Courtney. “You consider the United States a Utopia?”

“Compared to this island, yes, you’re damn right I do. Whatever our minor faults, we’ve progressed, become enlightened, refined, whereas here—”

“One minute, Dr. Hayden.” Courtney had straightened to his full height.

“I just don’t like you confusing my wife’s values—” Marc went on, trying to contain the momentum of his anger.

“One minute,” Courtney insisted. “Let me have my day in court. You’ve come here with an anthropology team and denounced this society in the strongest terms and proclaimed that it is backward and uncivilized compared to the progressive society you’ve left behind.”

“That’s right, Mr. Courtney. It’s my privilege as a man, if not as an anthropologist.”

“All right,” said Courtney evenly. “Let’s play turnabout. Let’s suppose something. Let’s suppose the Sirens society was in your shoes, and you in theirs. Let’s suppose a team of experts from The Three Sirens got into a sailboat and went of! across the Pacific to make a study of an unusual society they had heard about, the tribe composed of a native known as
homo Americanus
. What would their final paper be?”

Marc sat rigid, drumming his fingers on the table top. Orville Pence showed interest. Claire, miserable and ashamed of her husband’s outbursts, clasping and unclasping her hands, fixed her eyes on the floor matting.

“The Polynesian anthropologists would report the American tribe as one that lived in many cities and villages, the cities suffocating mausoleums of concrete, steel, glass, the air of the cities putrid with smoke, gas vapors, food smells, body sweat. In these airless, sunless, clanging, pushing cities, the American tribesmen worked long hours in confined, artificially lighted rooms, toiling in constant dread of those above them and in fear of the ones below them.

“Occasionally, these tribesmen were diverted from their routines by senseless wars. The men, who had been taught on Sundays to love their neighbors and turn the other cheek, would go forth with explosive weapons to annihilate, mutilate, enslave their brothers. If a man slaughtered many men, he was honored with a piece of metal hung from the chest of an outer garment.

“Life proved difficult for
homo Americanus
, so difficult that to survive it he drugged himself a portion of every day, either with bitter alcohols taken internally that made him take leave of his senses or with medical capsules that calmed him unnaturally or gave him temporary oblivion.

The tribe was composed of a great variety of males and females. There were females, in black garb, pledged to eternal chastity and wedded to a deity of another age, and there were young women devoted to giving their bodies for various sums of money to any man who telephoned, and there were older women who belonged to special bands called clubs who spent their time helping others to the neglect of their own families and huts. There were men, also pledged to chastity, who sat unseen as their fellows poured out confessions of sin to them, and others, not pledged to chastity, who sat quite visible, listening to suffering patients rattle forth chaotic memories and feelings. There were men with years of education that taught them how to gain a murderer freedom or how to swindle money from their governing body. There were men who painted pictures similar to those children painted naturally, and became millionaires, and men who wrote down words in books that could not be understood, and became living idols. There were men selected to rule all others, not for their wisdom, but for their ability to speak or a talent for connivery or a resemblance to a universal father image.

“A curious society, this, that rested only every seventh day, that celebrated a holiday for all mothers, a holiday for Cupid, a holiday for labor. A society, this, in which were worshiped a thug named Robin Hood and another named Jesse James and another named Billy the Kid, and which also worshiped women for the size of their mammary development.

“In this medieval tribe, superstitions abounded. Great structures were raised without a floor numbered thirteen. People preferred not to walk under ladders, or see black cats, or knock over salt, or whistle in certain rooms. At a wedding, the groom usually did not see the bride all of the day preceding the ceremony.

“The tribesmen would not permit the killing of a bull in public. But they applauded a sport wherein one man, with leather on his fists, beat down, and maimed or sometimes murdered, another man, and they equally enjoyed a sport wherein twenty-two full-sized males bullied each other over a pigskin ball and knocked each other down, often to their serious physical detriment.

“It was a society of plenty where some went hungry, a society that consumed snails and cows but held a tabu against eating cats and dogs. It was a society which feared and discriminated against those of its members who had black skins, yet whose fairer members considered it reflections of wealth and leisure to lie in the sun and blacken their own skins. It was a society where intelligent leaders were held suspect and named after eggs, where men wanted education but would not give money to support education, where fortunes were spent on medicines to keep men alive and other fortunes were spent to kill men by electricity.

“The sexual mores of the tribe proved the most difficult to understand. In marriage, men swore fidelity, yet concentrated most of their waking hours on thoughts and acts of infidelity, usually committed in secrecy and against the laws of the tribe. It was a society in which men whispered about sex, gossiped about sex, joked about sex, read about sex, but regarded open, public discussions and writings on sex as unclean and revolting. It was a society that did everything possible, in the advertising of its goods and celebrities, to incite passion in males and compliance in females, especially the young, but sternly forbade them the resultant pleasures.

“Despite so much evidence of hypocrisy, so many contradictions and evils, so many barbaric customs, the Polynesian team, if it were objective, would see that this society had produced many marvels. Out of the dungheap had risen and soared Lincoln, Einstein, Santayana, Garrison, Pulitzer, Burbank, Whistler, Fulton, Gershwin, Whitman, Peary, Hawthorne, Thoreau. If the study were a comparative one, the Polynesian team would admit that not one of their own brown people had ever won a Nobel Prize or created a symphony or thrown a human being into orbit. In creative and material terms, Polynesia and the Sirens had given history nothing—except two things, if Western man would only take the time to look. The Sirens had invented and sustained a way of existence that provided peace of mind and joy of life. In his long time on earth, Western man, for all his brilliance and industry, had achieved neither. In that sense, the Polynesian team would decide that their civilization was higher than and superior to the one they had visited.”

Courtney paused. The corners of his mouth went up, an offer of armistice at the end of a battle, and he concluded, “You call the Sirens a brothel. I call it Eden … Yet, that is honestly not the point. I am only trying to say what you insist you already know—that one society is not worse than another simply because it is different. Certainly, your mother’s writings have shown this to be her belief. I know it is mine. I suspect it is your own, behind your antagonism toward what is foreign and bizarre … Forgive me the allegory and editorial, and good day.”

With a fleeting smile toward Claire, he turned and went swiftly out the door.

Claire’s eyes stayed on the door. She could not bear to look at Marc, so humiliated was she. But then, she had to hear him.

“That goddam snotty sonofabitch, with all his big talk,” she heard Marc say. “Who does he think he is, lecturing us?” And then she heard his follow-up plea for allies. “Imagine that know-nothing trying to tell us what’s good or bad about our lives.” And then she heard his rage balled into a grunt. “Maybe we’re the ones who should be doing some missionary work here—eh, Orville?”

* * *

Night had come to The Three Sirens.

The compound was empty, shrouded in stillness, made hospitable only by the erratic lighting of the torches on both sides of the stream. The dinner hour, and the sociability following it, had long passed, and except for the occasional lights of a candlenut burning on its bamboo holder, most of the village had retired.

Only in one cubicle of the infirmary was there any human activity. There, within the circle of illumination given off by her lamps, Harriet Bleaska concluded her thorough examination of Uata.

During the afternoon, Harriet had met briefly with Dr. DeJong to discuss her patient. Later, she had tried to win Maud’s consent to break the tabu which kept Uata isolated from female visitors. Harriet had spoken of Uata’s condition, and his need, his last desire, and her own instinctive wish to find someone to please him. Maud had told Harriet, firmly, that she must not take it upon herself to break the tabu. “I know you wish to act only out of charity, Harriet,” the older woman had said, “but you would be subverting the custom here. It might bring our entire project to grief.”

Some time after, Harriet had dined over simple fare with Rachel DeJong and Orville Pence. While they had devoted their conversation to the rituals of the Social Aid Hut, Harriet, half-listening, had continued to think of poor Uata in the infirmary. Once, knowing full well the answer, she had inquired if the Social Aid Hut extended its services to the infirmary. Orville had replied, as Maud had done before him, that such contact with the ailing was strictly tabu. But, having brought them around to her subject, Harriet had proceeded to review several of the case histories in the infirmary, saving Uata for the last. Casually, she had inquired if a cardiac patient could indulge in coitus. Rachel, who seemed well informed on the subject, had said that it depended upon the nature of the infirmity. She thought that many cardiac patients were permitted to enjoy limited coitus, as long as there was not extended preliminary play and as long as the sideways coital position was maintained. Satisfied, Harriet had allowed the subject to be dropped.

When dinner was finished, she had changed to a multicolored cotton dress, washed her uniform in the stream, and then, a medical bag gripped in one hand, she had made her way at a slow pace to the infirmary. All the way, she had brooded about the problem, and as she arrived at the infirmary door, she arrived at her decision. Humanitarianism outweighed superstition, she had told herself, and she would provide Uata with the woman he wanted the most.

She would conspire with him, in defiance of all tabu, and draw the woman who was to please him into the secret conspiracy.

All that had been more than an hour ago, and now, completing her examination, returning the sphygmomanometer to her bag, her findings made her resolution the stronger. Uata suffered, she believed, a congenital heart defect that had manifested itself only recently. Although outwardly powerful, his inner condition had deteriorated. His cardiovascular-caused death should have taken place weeks ago. There was no doubt that it would occur soon. He was incurable, and for this, and the mortality of all on earth, Harriet mourned.

Throughout the examination, Uata had remained unprotestingly on his back, permitting Harriet to do what she wished, observing her constantly with his liquid eyes. He watched her still, as she put away her instrument and brought forth rubbing alcohol and gauze.

“This will cool you,” she said. “You will sleep in comfort.”

As she applied the alcohol to his chest, he said, “How am I? As before?” Then he added quickly, “No, it is not necessary to answer.”

“I will answer,” said Harriet, stroking the gauze down to his abdomen. “You are ill. To what degree, I cannot say. Tomorrow I will begin a series of injections.”

Kneeling over him, rubbing him with a practiced hand, she had reached his waist. Automatically, she undid his breechclout and removed it, and seeing the state of his excitation, she felt that she could not go on. But then, she reminded herself, she was a nurse, and he was her patient, and so she went on. Quickly, she applied the alcohol to his naked torso and loins, and quickly, she began to speak. “I know you need a woman, Uata. I have decided to find one for you. I will bring her in. Tell me a name.”

“No,” he said, the word emerging from deep in his throat. “No, I can have none. It is tabu.”

“I don’t care—”

“I do not want them,” he said fiercely. “I want you.”

Harriet felt suddenly calm and relieved. A few more strokes and she was done with his thighs. She capped the bottle of alcohol, pushed it into the bag, and shut the bag. She stood up.

His dark eyes were more liquid than ever. “I have offended you,” he said.

“Be still,” she said.