The Three Sirens

by Irving Wallace

  Sam began to shake his head. He shook his head for ten seconds before speech was restored to him. “I can’t believe it,” he said.

  “Now you can believe it,” said Estelle. “She’s sixteen, which is one thing and they are all half-here, half-there, capable of anything sometimes. And besides sixteen, she’s angry you let her down—her darling father, the one she can turn to—he let her down. So she is getting even.”

  “So what do we do about it?” said Sam angrily. “Just stand here and gab?”

  “Yes, that’s what we do, Sam. Where are we going to look? We don’t know the place. We’ll only get in the way, or get lost and they’ll have to send a searching party for us. Besides, I promised everyone we’d be here—if there is some word—”

  “What got into her?” interrupted Sam. He began to march up and down the room, “Running away from home, my God—”

  “About the running-away part I’m not so worried,” said Estelle. “This isn’t America. It’s a small island. Where can she run to?”

  “But she—she can get hurt—fall in a hole—bump into an animal, a wild pig, a mad dog—starve to death—”

  “It could happen. Still, I’m not worried about her. The natives know every inch of their island. They’ll find her.”

  “What if they don’t?”

  “They’ll find her,” Estelle reiterated, firmly. “Right now I’m less worried about Mary than her father.

  He stopped. “What does that mean?”

  “It means, God willing, they’ll find her sooner or later, and she’ll be safe and sound. But will she? What happens when they bring her back to us, and we bring her back to Albuquerque and her fast crowd? Now we’ve got a rebel who wants to fight us, show us, and will keep on doing so, unless some sense is knocked into her father’s head.”

  “Suddenly, it’s me who’s all to blame?”

  “I don’t say you are all to blame. Up to now we shared the good and bad our daughter is, we did our best, and we took credit equally for the good, and for the rest we made the small failures together. But since coming here, Sam, since last week, it’s you, it’s you and our Mary. You have got to straighten yourself out, Sam, and then we can straighten out Mary.”

  Sam slammed a fist into a palm. “I still say I did right in the classroom! How could a father act differently? Estelle, again, I swear, if you’d been there—”

  Estelle held up a majestic hand, to halt him as Mark Antony had stayed the multitude in the Forum at Julius Caesar’s funeral. Hypnotized by the classic gesture, Sam was still.

  With controlled intensity, Estelle addressed her husband again. “Sam, give me the floor for once, let me speak, you listen, and what comes after that, let it come.” She paused, then went on. “Sam, examine yourself, look deep in your heart. For years you are enlightened, progressive, a liberal. You are so convincing, you have made me be like you, and I am proud we are both this way. We read all magazines, books, nothing banned from our house. We see all movies, all television, go to all lectures, invite over people of every kind. On politics, on sex, on religion, we are liberals. Right? Good. Suddenly, overnight, we are dropped down in a country where it’s not talk or books, where it’s for real, where a man named Wright, God knows how long ago, said let’s practice instead of preach. So here, right or wrong, they do things, community living, early sex education, cooperative children-raising, that for us was always theory. Maybe this is wrong. Maybe theories should stay theories, because when you try them out maybe it’s not so good. So here we are, and many things you have always believed, read about, talked about, they do, they try to do. And suddenly, for you, overnight, aha, it’s no good. Suddenly, when it comes to sex, and education, and your darling daughter, suddenly, it’s not so liberal with you and you’re acting like a bigoted prude, like Orville Pence. About him, we joke. Are you so different? Still, I can’t believe you are behaving like you really are, like the man I married, spent my whole life with. Sam, I remind you, when we were kids in the Village, you were wanting me to sleep with you before we were married—”

  His face darkened, and he protested. “Estelle, that was absolutely different and you know it. We knew we would be married. It was just a question of my finishing with school and—”

  “Aha, too close to home, eh? The shoe pinches. Sam, we slept together for a year without being married, and what if something went wrong and we didn’t marry? So, gone is my virginity, gone is my husband who was not my husband, and me, Estelle Myer, I was somebody’s daughter, my papa’s daughter, and one time my papa’s sixteen-year-old daughter.”

  “I still say—”

  “Say what you want, we were big liberals, not prudes like Orville Pence, and we didn’t just talk, we did. So was I so different from our daughter? But here the issue is not even the same. My papa, let him rest in peace, if he found out I was going to a school to be exposed to sex organs and positions yet, he would have pulled me out by the ear, spanked me, punched the principal in the nose, and sued the school system. But if he found out I was in the Village, a virgin, a child, his daughter, letting a young man named Sam Karpowicz, who he never knew, come in my bed all night, and seduce me, he would have killed you and killed me, both of us. I don’t say he would have been right. He was old-fashioned, narrow, a little ignorant except for the Old Testament and World Almanac, and we are a generation ahead, and liberal, and should show some improvement. So how does the new papa act to his daughter, not for sleeping with someone, but for going to a school to learn about anatomy and sex and being too bashful to tell him? He humiliates her in front of everyone. He shows her no tolerance. He practically drives her from the house. This is liberal?”

  “You’re making me out an awful monster—”

  “Like my father,” Estelle interrupted.

  “—when I’m not at all,” insisted Sam. ‘Tm still the things I’ve tried to be. Despite what happened, I’m broad-minded, progressive, thinking of what’s good for everyone—”

  “Not with your daughter, Sam. That’s where common sense ends and jealousy begins. That’s the beginning and the end of it, Sam, and I’ll bet Dr. DeJong would back me with every word. You’re possessive and you’re jealous of our Mary. Think, Sam. Remember way back, not so way back, even, when our Mary was six, maybe seven, always you wanting to hug her, hold her, keep her near you, a kiss for this and a kiss for that. And then for a while she was always slipping away from you, like a little eel, and when you told Dr. Brinley about this and the bed-wetting, he told you off good. Remember? He said she is not running away from you, but from her own feelings toward you, she couldn’t trust her own baby sexual feelings, and it made her escape your too much warmth, and it helped make her nervous, and maybe contributed to the bed-wetting.”

  “Estelle, that’s not here or there—”

  “It’s here and it’s now, Sam. She’s sixteen, half child, half grownup, and me she treats like a stupid stick of wood. If anybody can talk to her, if there’s anybody on earth she’ll listen to, she trusts, it’s her darling father, you. But still she is growing, and sixteen is not six, but you treat her like you did at six and seven and eight because you won’t let her go. You’re jealous to lose her, have her independent, have her learn about growing up, and what happened here proves it.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “Nonsense you say? Truth, I say! It’s clear to me now. As long as your self was not at stake, you could be the big, generous liberal. Everything was in our house. Companionate marriage. New Masses. Emma Goldman. Sacco-Vanzetti. Henry George. Veblen. Eugene Debs. John Reed. Lincoln Steffens. Bob La Follette. Populists. Spanish Loyalists. New Deal. Kinsey. The whole mishmash. And always I agreed it was good. Make the head broader, the world better. But always around the coffee table, it was liberal. Never did I ask myself what it would be like for real, if there was a test. Every penny you have invested in our house. What would you do if Negroes and Puerto Ricans moved into the neighborhood or tried to? Your whole heart you have invested in you
r daughter. What if in Albuquerque she started going steady with a Mexican or Indian boy? Would you say that you did not mind about the Negroes, yet maybe exclude them because you know they would be happier elsewhere? Would you say you did not mind about the Mexican boy but he better leave Mary alone for his own sake, because it would not work in the real world? Would you—”

  “Cut it out, Estelle!” Sam’s face was livid. “What are you trying to make of me anyway? You know how I fought at the university for the ex-Communist who applied. You know I supported the petition to get colored instructors on the staff. And that petition when—”

  “Petitions, Sam, petitions are good, a little brave, but not enough. On this island you are faced with the facts of life and yourself, and in the first test, you behave not like a liberal. I don’t say I approve of the sex education here, or exposing a sixteen-year-old girl, who has not been prepared for it, to such new things, such radical things, so soon. Of course, it might hurt her a little, confuse, or maybe it would not. We don’t know. But you have hurt her more, confused her more, this week, than that school could—by not supporting her or backing her, by changing in practice the standards you set for her in theory and big talk. She depended on the Sam Karpowicz she knew, and without warning there was another Sam Karpowicz she did not know. It’s not Mary’s running away from us that bothers me the worst. It’s your running away from us, Sam. That’s what I have to say.”

  He nodded, protesting no more, his face so ashen that she wanted to hold it in her hands and kiss him and beg his forgiveness, but she did not.

  At last, he shrugged, and started for the door.

  “Where are you going, Sam?”

  “To search,” he said.

  After he had left, she wondered if he had gone to search for Mary—or for Sam Karpowicz, Liberal.

  * * *

  In the twenty minutes before three o’clock in the afternoon, when she would have her last appointment of the day, Rachel DeJong sat in the vacant hut that she used for her office, beside the pile of pandanus mats that served her as psychoanalytical couch, and transcribed her clinical notes on Marama, the woodcutter, and Teupa, the dissatisfied wife. This task completed, she considered the impending arrival of her third patient.

  Putting aside the looseleaf notebook confined to professional aspects of her visit to the Sirens, Rachel took up the oblong ledger in which she irregularly confided the personal aspects of her life. Moreturi had been entirely transferred from the first notebook to the second, because his relationship to her (and her thoughts about him) were not for publication.

  Opening her diary, Rachel found her last entry, six days old. It was terse, cryptic, and would mean nothing on earth to anyone besides herself. It read:

  “First day festival. After daily two sessions, attended swimming meet. Thrilling. One of our team, Marc H., was entry. Performed well until end when performed badly, but in keeping with his personality pattern. In evening went to outdoor dance, in which both Harriet and Lisa participated. Afterwards, late, agreed to accompany a native friend, Moreturi, by canoe to nearby atoll. Romantic like Carmel seashore. We went for swim. I almost drowned. Afterwards rested on sand. Memorable evening.”

  She examined the passage. What might another, say Joe Morgen, make of it? Nothing, she decided with satisfaction. Not even a Champollion would be able to decipher it. The true history of people was written only in their heads, and went safely, privately, underground with their mortal remains. Everything on paper was only one-tenth of truth. But then, remembering her reading, the cleverness of her predecessors, she was less certain. How little Sigmund Freud needed of Leonardo da Vinci’s life, from what was left on paper, to interpret the truth of that life. And Marie Bonaparte, how little she required to know of Poe to dissect his addled psyche. Still, her own passage committed to paper was bland, offhand, unrevealing, except, perhaps, for the riddle of “Memorable evening.” Someone might ask—why memorable? But an evening, especially one in a foreign climate, could be memorable because of the scenery or a mood. Who in the world would ever learn that it had been memorable to its author because it had been the occasion of the first orgasm in her life?

  With pleasurable fearlessness, Rachel put her pen to the ledger and began to write:

  “Speaking of this native friend, I have seen him but once since our visit to the neighboring atoll. Since I had dismissed him from analysis (see Clinical Notes), I had no reason to receive him at work. Several times, however, he extended social invitations, offering to show me other parts of the main island, and, in fact, the third atoll. These verbal invitations came by messenger, but I had to decline. There has been very little time, what with my patients, my studies of the Social Aid Hut, my investigations of the Hierarchy as an institution of mental help, and my observation of all the festival activity.

  “My one consequent encounter with Moreturi occurred early this morning, when I went to call upon his mother, who heads the Hierarchy (see Clinical Notes). He was waiting for me before her door and requested a formal analytical interview. He said my previous work with him had apparently borne some fruit, given him some sort of new insight into himself, and he was bursting to tell me of what I had helped him to accomplish. Naturally, as a psychoanalyst, I found this irresistible, and so I promised him one final session at three o’clock in the afternoon. I cannot imagine what it is he has to reveal to me.”

  Her watch told her that he would be here in seven minutes. She capped her pen, closed her ledger, and laid both aside. She extracted the hand mirror from her purse, observed herself in it, and then combed her hair and ran a light border of lipstick across her mouth.

  She was, she was pleased to see, a young woman, after all. Why had she attempted to be more? What had directed her into becoming a young woman psychoanalyst? Briefly, she concentrated on answering these questions more honestly than she had answered them in her own analysis. In the university, she guessed, she had not wanted to join teeming life. If you went into life as a plain woman, no more, you were defenseless and subjected to too much pain. Your female feelings were buffeted and bruised. You were sometimes laughed at or scorned or humiliated, even emotionally dirtied, and you could not fight back. Of course, as plain woman, you sometimes knew pleasure, even ecstasy, were admired, desired, wanted, but Rachel had set those advantages aside. The dangers of going into life as woman unadorned were too many.

  And so, perhaps, as an insurance, a means of self-protection against being humbled or neglected or committed, she had taken on the armor of career. By earning her M.D., becoming a psycho-analvst, she was no longer exposed to the quandaries of being merely mortal. In a way, she was above people, a synthetic goddess sitting on a throne apart from the appalling mainstream of life. The sick and the ailing come to her, the emotional beggars and cripples, and she was their deliverer. There was, too, the other aspect of it. From her high position, behind the magic one-way glass, she lived a hundred lives, enjoyed and suffered a thousand experiences vicariously. Yet, she was above and safe from this erratic life. She could touch it, but it could not touch her. And always, to salve any ache about her noncommitment to life, there was the flag of good purpose that she flew: you led the lame and the blind, you helped, and earned a merit badge from the Creator.

  Rachel DeJong returned her compact to her purse. Fine, she thought, so it worked, except when she grew older and wanted it not to work. Joe Morgen could not reach her in her high position, and she no longer had the limbs to come down from it. Marriage meant giving up, for better or worse, that fearful flesh and emotion that she had kept to herself. The question had always been: could she step down, be at eye-level with everyone like her, be jostled in the crowd or bed, be one more member of the people, a woman plain, not a woman psychoanalyst?

  But she had stepped down! Six nights ago, on the hospitable sands of a foreign and isolated beach, she had waived the role of voyeur and remote bystander. She had surrendered the part of Deliverer for Deliverance. She had opened herself to an animal
man, of another skin and two breeds, and questionable literacy and sensitivity. There had been no immunity. She had been taken as a plain woman, nothing more, and she had given satisfactorily, and she had proved to a man and to herself that she was capable in the role of female.

  Yet, even as she glowed with self-congratulation, she was not positive that the major step had been made. There had been too many extenuating circumstances. Moreturi had provoked her into accompanying him by a ridicule and challenge that could only come from a primitive mind. She had responded to his invitation to visit the atoll, to swim in the semi-nude, because she had been drunk. Not her own free will, but an accident in the water had divested her of garments and resistance. She had not deliberately joined Moreturi in love. She had submitted to his love because she had been too helpless to resist him. In fact, as best she could recall, during the act she had sobered sufficiently to try to resist him. She had resisted him. It was his overpowering masculinity, the christening water washing over them, that had aroused her. Her response had been physical, not mental. There had been no free choice in the act. Therefore, little had been solved. She recognized that she had been afraid to see Moreturi again, curious as her body was (not she, but her body), not out of mortification, but purely because she was still not convinced that she could perform as an ordinary woman. If she was still unsure about herself, she was still unsure about herself and Joe. She would return to California as she had left it—a woman psychoanalyst, with her inner conflicts still unresolved behind her stoical calm.