The Three Sirens (54 page)

After conceding to Rachel DeJong sole dominion over Dr. Hermann R. Rorschach’s Swiss inkblots, all intelligence quotient tests, and the use of word association, Orville Pence had left the meeting of the night before as sole proprietor of his own P.P.R.I., with the Thematic Apperception Test to be held in reserve, if there was time for its use.

With considerable anticipation, Orville had awaited the arrival of his volunteers. After a short, lucid briefing, he had, minutes before, unveiled his invention. From the stack of pictures, lying face down beside him, he had removed the topmost, and offered it to the curious scrutiny of his six subjects.

Snapping on his portable tape recorder, he had said to his subjects, who were passing around the reproduction without comment, “That is a picture of one of many wall frescoes, in the Casa del Ristorante, in Pompeii, an ancient city of the country of Italy. These famous frescoes show all methods of sexual mating. The one you see has the nude woman on her knees on the bed, with the man behind—”

The picture had returned to him.

“Well,” he had asked, “how do you feel about it?”

He had waited for the expected babble of comment, but not one of the six spoke or moved.

“Let’s take you each in turn,” he had said, to help them overcome what was undoubtedly nervousness. He pointed to the first person in the semicircle, a middle-aged native woman. “What comes to your mind?”

He had held up the reproduction of the fresco.

“Very beautiful,” she had said.

Orville had nodded to the second, an older man. “And you?”

“Good,” he had said, “much good.”

“And you?”

“Beautiful.”

“And—?”

“Beautiful.”

Orville had halted, bewildered. “Have you no more to say? Aren’t you surprised? Aren’t you shocked? Aren’t you stimulated?”

Orville had waited. The members of the group had looked at one another and shrugged, until on their behalf, the first middle-aged woman had spoken.

“It is ordinary,” she had said.

“You mean it is familiar to all of you?” Orville had demanded.

“Familiar,” she had said, and all the heads had bobbed.

Nonplused, Orville had tried to go on. Unless he could extract some real reaction, he could not examine their stimulus-response pattern. “Does any one of you want to discuss this picture? What would you guess happened before this moment, during it, and can you imagine what will happen next?”

The semicircle had consulted silently, with arched eyebrows and lifted shoulders, as if in agreement that their visitor was a lunatic. One had raised his hand. He was a thin young man of twenty. “I will discuss,” he had announced. “He wants the love, she wants the love, they make the love in the picture. Soon, he is happy, she is happy, they rest. Then they love again if they do not sleep. They are strong. They love many times, I think.”

“Yes, yes,” Orville had said impatiently. “But isn’t there anything else you feel like saying? Does anything about this make you think of yourselves—or bother you—or make you hope—I mean—”

“There is nothing to think,” the young man had said, stolidly. “It is too common. We all do. We all enjoy. Nothing more to say.”

Orville had glanced inquiringly at the other five. Their heads curtsied in unison, agreeing with their neighbor.

Crushed, Orville had held the impotent Pompeii fresco in his lap, staring down at it. The picture evoked an immediate response in him. For one thing, he had never employed the averse position with a female, and the possibility made him wonder. For another, he had never engaged in any position but one, and that with no more females than a few, which made him remorseful. For another, he had never enjoyed the pleasure so evident in the picture, which made him sad. For another, his mind went to Beverly Moore, which made him lonely.

These thoughts, overlaid on the failure of his invincible P.P.R.I. to affect his six subjects, brought him to this moment of utter frustration.

Grimly, he determined to persist, until his subjects capitulated. Tossing the Pompeii fresco aside, he yanked the next picture from the pile. It was the Jean Francois Millet called
Lovers
. It depicted in modern times exactly what the Pompeii fresco had depicted in ancient times. Orville had always regarded the Millet as a find because it startled his friends. Most knew Millet only for the traditional
Angelus
, and could not believe that the same artist had concerned himself with blatant sexuality. Orville passed the reproduction of the painting around. Once again, the stone faces were impassive, and once again, when asked for their reaction, they had nothing to say except that the performance was familiar.

The third and fourth pictures were Rembrandt’s
The Bed
and Picasso’s
Embrace
, both realistically revealing men and women in familiar face to face copulation. To these, the reactions were those of utter boredom and the six subjects were mute. In desperation, Orville reached deep into his pile to extract the reproduction of Pascin’s
The Girl Friends
. The response to the fleshly painting of two nude French lesbians was immediate, loud, unanimous. The six natives laughed with undisguised delight. At once, Orville was hopeful.

“What’s so funny?” Orville wanted to know.

The thin young man of twenty spoke. “We laugh because we all say—what a waste of time!”

“Is this not done here?”

“Never.”

“How do you feel about it?”

“We feel nothing except the waste.”

Orville pushed on, trying to provoke something more. He got nothing more. Pascin had drawn a blank.

With mounting dejection, Orville passed out the sixteenth-century print by Giulio Romano. This represented an unclothed couple with the female in ascendancy. For the first time, the group showed interest. They huddled over the print, discussing it in Polynesian.

Orville’s spirits lifted. “Is that familiar to you?”

The middle-aged woman at the end nodded. “Familiar.”

“Is it popular on the Sirens?”

“Yes.”

“Most interesting,” said Orville. “You see, it is practiced less in my homeland, among my people, than—”

“Your people practice it often,” said the middle-aged woman. She had made a flat statement.

“Not exactly,” said Orville. “According to statistics I have—”

“Uata says your women wonderful this way.”

“Who is Uata?”

“The one who died.”

“Ah, yes,” said Orville. “I’m sorry about him. But with all due respect, he would not have known how we—”

The thin young man interrupted. “He knows. He has loved one of yours.”

Orville hesitated. His ears had deceived him. The constant problem of communication. “How could Uata have known one of our people?”

“You are here among us.”

“You mean—one of us—our women?”

“Of course.”

Orville tried to contain himself. He must not over-react, lest he frighten them into conspiratorial silence. Careful, careful, he told himself. He must handle it casually.

“Interesting, interesting,” he began. “You are being helpful. You can be more so. I’m curious to know the details of Uata and the member of our team—”

In five minutes, he had every detail, every horrifying detail, and in six minutes, he had dismissed them, vaguely requesting a future meeting, when he would resume with the Thematic Apperception Test.

After his hut was emptied, Orville remained shaken, actually-found himself trembling, at the perfidy, the unpatriotic and shameful behavior of their weakest link. There was only one thing to do, to reveal the scandal to Dr. Maud Hayden and have the offender drummed from the island.

Bursting out of his dwelling, Orville went on a gallop past the residence of their Hester Prynne, past the residence of Marc Hayden, and, too distraught to knock, pushed his way unannounced into Maud Hayden’s office.

She was at her desk, writing, and he was before her, face abashed and necktie awry.

“Orville, what is it? You look terribly upset.”

“I am, I am,” he said, trying to control his breathing. “Maud, I hate to be the one to bring this to you—it is too terrible—”

Maud had laid her pen down. “Please, Orville, what is it?”

“Through one of my tests, I just learned from the natives that one of your team, one of the women, has been—has been—has—” He could not bring the word out.

“Fornicating?” said Maud gently. “Yes. I assume you are referring to Harriet Bleaska.”

“You know?”

“Of course, Orville. I’ve known all along. It’s my business to know. Anyway, these things get around very fast in this kind of confined society.”

Orville advanced, crouching lower, until his posture was that of an outraged Quasimodo, searching Maud’s face. “You sound like you approve of this degrading—”

“I don’t disapprove,” said Maud firmly. “I’m neither Harriet’s mother nor her guardian. And she is well past her twenty-first birthday.”

“Maud, where’s your sense of propriety? This can work against all of us, lower us in their eyes. Besides—”

“Quite the contrary, Orville. Harriet’s performance was so superior, in an area where sexual prowess is admired, that she is regarded as royalty, and so are we. She will receive more cooperation, and so will we. In short, Orville, in their eyes we are no longer a strange company of prudes.”

Orville had straightened at this unexpected defense of a bawd, and he almost jigged with anger. “No, no, Maud, you’re all wrong—you’re too scientific—too objective—you can’t see how this looks. For all our sakes, you’ve got to intervene, restrain this nurse from stooping so low—Send her back, that’s what you should do, send her back. Will you speak to her?”

“No.”

“You won’t?”

“No.”

“All right, then, all right,” he sputtered. “If you won’t, I will—for her own sake.”

With outraged dignity, he pulled his tie knot down from where it had worked up onto his shoulder, and stalked out.

Maud sighed audibly. She had thought the Reverend Davidson long dead of a self-inflicted razor wound on the beach of Pago Pago. She was mistaken. She wondered what Orville would do, if anything. She promised herself to keep her eye on him. One missionary, Adley used to say, can destroy in a single minute the work of ten anthropologists in ten years. Satisfied that Adley was on her side in this, she picked up her pen and resumed her notes.

* * *

Rachel DeJong had not known what to expect when her door opened, ten minutes before, to admit Atetou, wife of Moreturi, to her primitive consultation room.

It was surprising that, in a village so small, where the female population circulated in a limited area, she had never set eyes upon Moreturi’s wife during a period when she had seen so much and met so many. She had not realized this when the appointment had been made. Only when she had awaited Atetou, and tried to remember something of her, did Rachel DeJong become aware of the omission. She pondered, then, as to whether the fact that she had not set eyes upon Moreturi’s wife had been an accident or a deliberate avoidance, either on Atetou’s part or on her own.

Now, serving cold sweetened tea in tin cups that the Karpowiczes had brought along, Rachel was able to fix upon a certain knowledge or expectation that she had of Moreturi’s wife. While she had not met her before in person, she had met her daily in Moreturi’s highly colored free associations. She had expected—what? Certainly, an older woman and a woman less physically attractive. She had expected a shrew and a witch, a canker sore festering on Moreturi’s extrovert, lusty person. She had expected Xantippe. An old school memorization from
Taming of the Shrew
floated through her mind: “Be she as foul as was Florentius’ love,/ As old as Sibyl, and as curst and shrewd/ As Socrates’ Xantippe, or a worse,/ She moves me not.”

Yet, here, on first meeting, there was none of this evident, although Rachel suspected there must be some of it beneath. From their opening handshake, Atetou had been composed and an equal. She had come to this appointment with deep reluctance—Moreturi had made that clear—but her presence did not betray this. Rachel guessed that she could not be more than thirty: her diminutive features were smooth, too smooth; her neck was young; her small breasts were high and rigid. She had a disconcerting habit of looking past one, and you were not sure that she was really addressing you or listening to you. Her voice was hushed, so that it was necessary to lean forward to catch what she was saying, thus putting you to a strain and at a disadvantage.

“Here you are,” said Rachel, setting the cold tea in front of her. “I hope you find it refreshing. Have you ever had tea before?”

“Several times. On occasions when Captain Rasmussen brought it in.”

Atetou took up the tin cup and drank impassively. Rachel settled on the matting across from her, and drank her own tea. Rachel felt the chill of her visitor’s hostility. Moreturi had confessed telling his wife of the details of his psychoanalysis. Atetou would naturally resent the meddling by an outsider, would put the outsider in a league with her husband against herself. Atetou was here merely to prove that she was not the misfit her husband claimed her to be to this outsider.

If there was to be an honest exchange between them, Rachel knew the initiative must come from herself. Atetou would initiate nothing, and it was understandable. To make her speak up at all, Rachel would have to taunt her with Moreturi’s disapproval of his domestic state. Rachel deplored the tactic, but it would be necessary. There could be no hope of putting Atetou on the couch, so to speak, of casting her in the role of patient. Atetou would not permit it for a second. She was here as one lady to another, as a maligned neighbor prepared to straighten out one who had been misinformed. She was here for tea and careful talk.

For Rachel, in the last days, Moreturi had proved easier as an analysand. Once the barrier between them had dropped, he had cooperated within his limitations. He treated the sessions as a lark. Stretched out on his back, hands behind his head, he chided his “Miss Doctor,” and spoke wildly and freely. He enjoyed discomfiting Rachel with his amorous experiences. He liked to report his dreams elaborately. He took pleasure in trying to shock. Rachel saw through him at once and steadily. He was not seriously interested in his unconscious motivations. .When his domestic crisis boiled over, there would always be the traditional Hierarchy to look after him. His sole interest, his game, Rachel perceived, was to reduce his analyst to female. He was not unintelligent, but he was not interested in intelligence. To investigate his own mind, to ride introspection into the unexplored jungle of his brain, lured him not at all. His concern, like that of his late friend Uata, was in physical sensation. The compleat hedonist: food, drink, sport, dance, copulation. For a free soul, a born bachelor, the responsibility of a wife was a burden. He did not necessarily want to divorce himself of Atetou, but rather of the unnatural prison of matrimony.