The Three Sirens

by Irving Wallace

  Harriet remained immobilized in the center of the room, looking fixedly at Walter’s letter. She was not interested in what he had to say to her now. It was like kissing someone after they were dead, like that Hemingway scene in Lausanne when what’s-his-name kissed Catherine Barkley, the nurse, after she was dead, cold and dead.

  After a minute or two, Harriet went back to the chipped sideboard near the kitchenette and poured herself a fresh Scotch. With glass in hand, she kicked off her pumps and wandered aimlessly about the room, sipping whiskey all the while. At her wardrobe, she halted, put aside the glass, and undressed down to her nylon panties. She lifted her terry-cloth robe off the hook and drew it on. For a moment she was undecided about making herself some dinner, a sandwich anyway, and then she thought she would drink a little longer.

  She began to meander around the room once more, pausing finally at the window. It pleased her that the fog below had thickened. At least she would not have to go out in that damp sinus weather. Turning from the window, she became aware of the manila envelope lying on the maple table. Abruptly, she finished her whiskey, and crossed to the envelope and ripped it open. As she did so, she speculated on whether he had dared to send her money. If that was it, she would slap him the next time she saw him. Then she realized this scene could not happen because she would not see him, for now it would be impossible to continue at the hospital.

  What she found inside the envelope was a long letter, on the stationery of Raynor College, addressed to “Dear Walter” and signed “Maud.” Attached to this letter was a small white piece of memorandum paper with the imprint across the top, “From the desk of Walter Zegner, M.D.” On this, a feminine hand had scrawled, “Dear Miss Bleaska. The doctor has asked me to forward this enclosure to you. He thinks it might interest you very much. He is writing to Dr. Hayden on your behalf.” The note was signed, “Miss Snyder for Dr. Zegner.”

  Mystified, Harriet carried both the letter and her empty glass to the big chair, and there she sat down, and for the next fifteen minutes she allowed herself to be transported to the unreal world of The Three Sirens.

  When she was done, she understood Walter’s generosity. He wanted her out of town. For one rebellious second, she was tempted not to leave, but rather to stay on at the hospital and be there as his guilty conscience. Then she knew that even if that would make him unhappy, it would not make her happier.

  She glanced at Maud Hayden’s letter again, and all at once she wanted to leave San Francisco forever. The Three Sirens was a perfect transition to such a change. It would divorce her from the present, now her past, forever. She wanted a new start, an absolutely new start.

  Twenty minutes later, after one more drink, and with a melted cheese sandwich on a plate and a cup of coffee at her elbow, she uncapped her blue ball-point pen, brought her stationery before her, and wrote, “Dear Dr. Hayden …”

  * * *

  Maud Hayden had finished reading the carbon of the letter to Dr. Orville Pence, in Denver, Colorado.

  “Well,” said Maud, “this should make Marc happy.”

  “I’ll never know what Marc sees in him,” said Claire.

  “Oh—you’ve met Pence. I quite forgot.”

  “Last year, when we went through Denver,” said Claire.

  “Of course, of course. I suppose he’s one of those people you have to get to know well—”

  Claire would not agree. “Maybe,” she said. Then she added, “Marc’s more reasonable about people than I am. I react out of immediate instinct. I make up my mind about someone right away, and I’m not able to change. Dr. Pence revolted me the way some of those squishy, bloodless sea creatures do.”

  Maud was amused. “How fanciful, Claire—”

  “I mean it. He has the fussy quality of a spinster, someone who won’t let you smoke in the parlor. And his talk. Sex, sex, sex, and when he’s through you think it is some epidemic that is gradually being quarantined for study. He takes all the idea of pleasure out of it.”

  “I’ve never concerned myself with his attitudes toward it,” said Maud, gently, “but you know, it is his subject, his entire career. The Social Science Research Council and the National Science Foundation don’t support him without good reason. The University of Denver wouldn’t have him on its faculty if he wasn’t highly regarded. Believe me, his studies of comparative sexual behavior have given him a solid reputation.”

  “I just have the feeling he’s setting sex back a century.”

  Maud laughed. Then, sobering, she said, “No, really, Claire, don’t be prejudiced after only one meeting … Anyway, it was Marc who thought Orville Pence might be interested in the Sirens—it’s right up his alley—and his findings could be valuable for my paper.”

  “I still can’t get over that one dreary night. You should have met his mother.”

  “Claire, we’re not inviting her.”

  “You’re inviting him,” said Claire. “It’s exactly the same thing.”

  * * *

  The spacious, drafty classroom of the University of Denver was chilly this hour of the morning, and as Orville Pence fingered his notes on the lectern, he realized that the cold reminded him of high places in his childhood. He remembered being led up the steps of the state capitol, and being shown the fourteenth step, which bore a plaque reading, “One Mile Above Sea Level”; he remembered the cog railway that took him, with his mother, to the summit of Pike’s Peak; he remembered going, with his mother and the Cub Scouts, up Lookout Mountain to Buffalo Bill’s grave. He remembered the numbing cold of it and his mother’s favorite edict on such occasions—“It is good to be high, Orville, so people must always look up to you”—and now, this morning, it seemed that he had always been so high up that he had never come down to earth.

  Yet, the chill of the classroom was not what disturbed him most this morning. What disturbed him most was the girl on the aisle, in the front row of seats, who had the disconcerting habit of constantly crossing her long legs, first the right leg over the left, then the shift and the uncrossing, and then the left leg over the right.

  Orville Pence tried to keep his attention away from her legs as he lectured, but it was a feat of restraint he found impossible. He tried to rationalize the distraction. The act of leg-crossing, by the human female, was universal and natural. In itself, it was not wrong. The only part of it that was wrong was the employment of a faulty (i.e., morally loose or deliberately provocative) technique. If a young lady crossed her legs swiftly, tightly, while shielding the movement by holding down the hem of her skirt, it was decent. If she performed otherwise, it was suspect. He had observed, within the confines of his field, that when certain women crossed their legs, they automatically lifted their skirts or dresses rather high to do so. If, as was the case with the young female student before him, the dress was short, the legs long, the movements slow, an observer could often plainly glimpse the flesh of the inner thigh which began where the sheath of nylon hosiery left off. What kind of person could behave in so unseemly a manner? His eyes moved up the girl, and down again. She was a tall, shapely girl with disheveled rust hair, a soft face of innocence, a lemon-colored cashmere sweater, and a plaid wool skirt that would not fall below her knees when she rose.

  Suddenly, she shifted in the wooden chair, and there was the skirt up and the legs apart and the flash of inner flesh exposed and then blocked out by the crossing. She was deliberately trying to unsettle him, Orville decided. It was a game too many women played. He was above it, in a high cold place, and he would show her and all of them. He lifted his sight to encompass the other young students in the room. Almost forty of them sat there, pens and pencils poised over notebooks, waiting for him to go on.

  He cleared his throat, picked up the glass on the lectern, brought it to his lips, and sucked some water slowly. Next, to recover complete composure, he took out his handkerchief and mopped his brow, and this gave him a twinge, for there was so much brow. His hairline had receded considerably in recent years. One-th
ird of his pinkish pate was prematurely bald. Stuffing the handkerchief back into his pocket, he peered over the shell-rimmed spectacles slipped low on his ferret nose, inspected his class, then, hunched over his notes, his eyes went to the lemon-sweatered, long-legged young girl again.

  She could be no more than nineteen, he judged, and he was an old bachelor of thirty-four, and if he had married at fifteen she could be his oldest child. The distraction was ridiculous and time-consuming. His mind rode a coaster to Beverly Moore, of Boulder, with regret, and to his mother, Crystal, with guilt, and to his sister, Dora, with resentment, and to Marc Hayden and Maud Hayden and Professor Easterday and Chief Paoti, with interest, and finally—she had just uncrossed her legs, lifted her skirt, crossed them—to this, with regret.

  The class was becoming restless, he realized, and this rarely happened. Usually they were intent and hung on his every word, since his subject recently had been the evolution of sexual morality in the last three hundred years. Then he grasped the fact that they were restless only because he had become bemused, as sometimes he did, and had forgotten to resume his lecture. He coughed into his fist, and began to speak.

  “Let me summarize our last few minutes,” he said, “before we continue our discussion of the beginnings of the family unit.”

  As he recapitulated the problems of monogamous marriage from primeval times to ancient Greece, Orville was pleased to observe that he again had their attention. Even the young girl in the lemon sweater was too occupied taking notes to cross her legs. With confidence he continued, but even as he did, his active mind disengaged itself from his vocal communication and careened upon its own way. This ability to speak on one subject, and think about another, was not uniquely Orville’s but was one at which he was uniquely expert. This morning it was easier because the lecture he was delivering was part of the same series he had delivered the summer before, at the University of Colorado, in Boulder, where he had first met Miss Beverly Moore.

  Even now, as he spoke, he could distinctly picture Beverly Moore in his mind. She was a young lady in her middle twenties, with shingled dark hair, a patrician face, and a graceful figure. He had not seen her in a month, but she was as clear in his mind as if she were before him this moment—indeed, right before him, in the front row, seated on the aisle, with those fantastically long legs.

  When he had gone to Boulder to deliver those summer lectures, Beverly, an executive secretary in the Administration Building, had been assigned to guide him and look after his academic needs. Although he had painstakingly, through the years, constructed a fortress of ambition and activity around himself, as a protection against the assaults of aggressive and dangerous young women, somehow he had always managed to leave one bridge down over the moat. Occasionally, he had invited a young lady to cross the bridge. But whenever she had become an unwanted distraction, he saw to it that she was ousted from his fortress. In Boulder, he had encouraged—or permitted, for he was no longer sure which it had been—Beverly to cross this bridge. He had been impressed, from the start, by her seriousness, intellectuality, common sense. Above all, she had seemed to understand him and the importance of his work.

  Their relationship, entirely cerebral, had ripened through the summer, so that finally, he had not wanted to face the summer’s end. By the time he had returned to Denver, he realized that Beverly had become as much, or almost as much, a part of him, a habit of his, as his mother, Crystal, or his sister, Dora. When he had missed her, he found himself doing what he had never done before—disrupting his routine to continue seeing her. Every week he had traveled the thirty miles northwest, into the Rocky Mountains to Boulder, commuting to Beverly. More and more, he had begun to entertain thoughts of what had once seemed impossible—thoughts of marriage to a young lady who would not change his life or upset his program or disturb his work, but rather improve his daily existence.

  Yet, insensibly, three months ago, he had begun to see less and less of her, and one month ago, he had ceased seeing her altogether. She had telephoned, and accepted his excuse of an overload of work, and once more, she had called, and heard out his circumlocutions with less cordiality, and since that time, she had not called again.

  Reviving all of this now, he tried to remember what had happened between them. The fact was, nothing had happened between them. They had not quarreled and their affection for one another had not lessened. But then, Orville did remember one thing. It had occurred to him a week ago, before falling asleep, and again the night before, but on both occasions he had shoved it aside as something he did not wish to believe. The thought was back, and this time, with some courage, he examined it.

  Vaguely, until now, he believed he had decided to see less of Beverly, not become further involved emotionally, because of a defect in her personality. The defect was her superiority as a human being. She was uncomplicated, entirely integrated, self-assured, educated, attractive to men. If he married her, she would gain the ascendency. At present, she needed him, because she was a single woman who wanted to achieve social conformity through a good marriage. Thus, at present, he was the superior person. Once married to him, the close-up view, the intimacy, might bare his weaknesses—everyone had weaknesses. At the same time, her own qualities of independence, made stronger by the confidence that marriage gave a woman and reinforced by the inevitable knowledge of his shortcomings, would develop and make him uneasy and disrupt his life. She would be superior; he would be inferior. In marriage, their positions would change to his disadvantage. In short, she was not right for him. He wanted a mate who was less than he was, and would remain so, forever looking up to him, depending upon him, pinching herself for her luck in having him. Beverly was not such a girl. So, discreetly, he had ousted her and pulled up the last bridge to his fortress.

  This, he had believed, was the reason for the rupture in their relationship. Now he believed something else, even though the new perception did not entirely invalidate his earlier feeling about her. What he saw now was that he had begun withdrawing from Beverly a week after he had introduced her to his mother, sister, and brother-in-law, three months ago.

  He had wanted to make up his mind, and so he had put her to the final test, the obstacle course, as he liked to think of it. Only twice before in his life had he invited young ladies to the test. Beverly had responded with enthusiasm. She had come down from Boulder on the train, and he had been waiting at the Union Station, proud of her bearing and grooming. He had driven her to his mother’s apartment, where Dora and her husband, Vernon Reid, in from Colorado Springs, and his mother, croaking from an arthritic attack and wheezing from her hay fever, had been heroically in attendance. Despite the pressure of the occasion, Beverly had acquitted herself with honors. She had been dignified yet friendly. Perhaps nervousness had made her talk more than usual, but her talk was interesting. The evening had gone smoothly. Later, driving Beverly back to Boulder, Orville felt a greater warmth and possessiveness for her than he had ever felt before.

  The initial response of his relatives at breakfast the next morning had been favorable, as best he could judge. Actually, they had not discussed her much, simply referring to her as “a nice pleasant child” and “rather intelligent.” However, in the week that followed—Orville could see this now as he had not seen it before—they had begun to chip away at Beverly. His mother had discussed not Beverly in particular, but “certain intellectual-type girls” who “lead a man around by the nose.” Dora had referred to Beverly by name as someone “who has a mind of her own, you bet,” the last somewhat darkly. Vernon had spoken of her irreverently as “a looker” and wagered that she’d “been around,” and had been reminded by her of a tall coed he had known who had satisfied an entire fraternity. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, Orville, I’m not inferring anything, only the physical resemblance reminded me of Lydia.”

  Unaccountably, in the days following, Orville had begun to brood about Beverly, wondering about her past, projecting her strength into his future. Somehow, in s
ome subtle way, her perfection had been tarnished. It was as if on instinct, on immediate love rather than investigation, you bought an original sculptured piece, and enjoyed it until friends began to make casual remarks about the dubious quality of its originality, its beauty, its value, so that in the end you were unsure and pure joy was modified and finally dissipated by too much reflection.

  With the sudden clarity born of honesty, a luxury that Orville rarely permitted himself, he saw that he had come to avoid Beverly not for her own defects but for suspicions of defects implanted in his mind by his family. As always, they had successfully brainwashed him. Long ago, he had known the truth about them, but dependence on them had conditioned him to close his eyes to the truth. Never would he allow himself to relate their tactics to his state of bachelorhood.

  His mother had been married four years, and had been delivered first of Dora and then himself, when his father had abandoned her for a younger, a less demanding, a more feminine woman. His mother had blamed the catastrophe on sex, the evil in his father’s nature, the ugly, unclean, warped urge known as lust. Dora, the moment that she was of age, had revolted against excessive maternity, left home, married Vernon, moved to Colorado Springs, and raised children of her own to harass. Orville, without his older sister’s anger to protect him, had been kept close to his mother, a hostage for his erring father. It had taken him a decade after he had come of age to dare to find an apartment that would give him some privacy—but even now, with his own quarters, he spoke to his mother on the telephone twice a day, dined with her three times a week, and drove her to her multitude of physicians and club socials.

  Through the Roentgen rays of this self-examination, Orville could link these people of his blood with his bachelorhood. He could see, plainly, their stake in keeping him single. Had he married Beverly, or any of the others before, his mother would have been deserted by a second husband, left lonely and bereft. Had he married, and undertaken a life of his own, his sister and brother-in-law would have been forced to do their share for his mother. As matters stood, they tolerated his mother for one week each year under their roof in Colorado Springs, and contributed a small monthly sum toward her Denver apartment. They spent money, he thought bitterly, while he spent emotion. They gave up cash, while he gave up freedom. Alone in Denver, he was forced to carry the real burden alone. Dora went her aloof and selfish way. If he were married, Orville realized, he might have an ally in independence, and Dora would have to do her fair part.