It was incredible to her that they had lived and worked on the islands of The Three Sirens for five weeks and six days, and that this was their last night before departure in the morning.
Claire Hayden, barefooted but still in her thin cotton dress, legs under her, back turned to the dangling lamp for the best light, sat in the front room of her hut and tried to resume reading her portable edition of Hakluyt’s Voyages.
It was no use. Her eyes and mind strayed. An anthology of sixteenth-century English travel and exploration was too far removed from her needs this night. She had picked up the volume less for self-improvement than for sleep inducement, but it was not working. Her mind preferred to make its own contemporary voyage, over this day, and this week, and the almost three weeks since Marc’s death. She was not drowsy, and she lowered the little book to her lap.
Lighting her cigarette, Claire wondered if she had not been mistaken in refusing, several hours earlier, to dine and spend her last evening on the Sirens with her mother-in-law. Her excuse to Maud had been that she needed every moment to pack her belongings. Captain Ollie Rasmussen and Richard Hapai would be arriving in the compound sometime between seven and eight in the morning. All members of the team had been ordered to have their luggage ready for the natives, who would carry it to the far beach. Actually, Claire had declined her mother-in-law’s invitation not because of the packing, but because she preferred the independence and comfort of being alone this final evening.
Her colleagues and friends, she knew, had enjoyed a community dinner together. It was as if they were closing ranks, preparing for one front, before returning to the United States. Claire had cooked her own meal, some light native fare, and she had eaten alone, and she had not packed a thing, not yet.
There was little to pack, really, so that task had not bothered her. Several days after Marc’s death, she and Maud, both determinedly dry-eyed, had gone through his effects, the shirts, trousers, shorts, socks, shoes, books, cigars, whiskey, ties, and all the rest of the standard issue of civilized man. Maud had wanted to keep several items, the Phi Beta Kappa key, the wafer-thin gold dress watch, the annotated copy of Malinowski’s Crime and Custom in Savage Society, to remind her that she and Adley had once had a son. Claire had granted her every request, and for herself she had kept nothing, knowing that she had never had a husband. The occasion had been sad only because Claire had tried to understand how the older woman felt and how much of an ordeal this sorting out must be.
When the picking through of Marc’s ephemeral estate had been completed, the most poignant moment, for Claire, was the observing of her mother-in-law’s wrinkled surprise when she had muttered, “But his work, where is his work?”
There was none of Marc’s work in his luggage, and it was evident to both of them, from every blank pad and notebook, that there never had been any. Not only had his luggage and garments produced no single jotting or record made during his stay on The Three Sirens, but the knapsack Courtney had returned produced nothing, either. Even the bundle that Moreturi had carried back to them, once the prints and film had been restored to Sam Karpowicz, offered no evidence of the field anthropologist, save the batch of carbon copies of Maud’s own work notes, which Claire had saved to file and which Marc had stolen from her. Except for Rex Garrity’s letters to Marc, which had indicated that Marc had written to him, there was no other evidence extant that Marc had done a single thing on the Sirens besides plotting its overthrow. It was this awesome lack of work, of a mind disintegrating, that had pained Maud most deeply, and had made Claire suffer to see her hurt. That was the worst of it. The belongings of her son that Maud had not kept had been efficiently bound together with hemp and turned over to Captain Rasmussen on his next visit. With Claire’s permission, the Captain had been requested to sell the last of Marc’s portable possessions in Tahiti, and with the money to purchase some cooking utensils for Tehura’s kin and medical supplies for Vaiuri’s infirmary.
Tonight, that inventory seemed to have been made so very long ago, to be so dim and unrelated to the present. Claire’s wrist watch told her that it was fifteen minutes after ten. Maud and the others would have finished their farewell dinner by now, and gone back to their packing, filled with the kind of happiness and sorrow all travelers experience the night before they leave an alien place to return to their more comfortable familiar homes and disquieting rutted lives. Claire examined her own feelings about leaving. She felt neither happiness nor sorrow. She was in some airless limbo. No emotion moved her.
In her immediate life, everything had changed since coming here, yet nothing had changed. Obviously, she should be feeling like a widow, however widows felt, which probably meant that some important part of her being had been removed, plucked away, taken back, to leave her crippled. Others felt that way about her, but she did not feel that way about herself. She had accepted condolences mechanically, to satisfy those who offered their understandings of grief, but she had felt a pretender and hoax, because she had felt nothing. Maud knew, of course, and possibly Courtney knew, although he may not have believed her. But had she not told Courtney, at the very time Marc was walking out on her, that she was the ex-Mrs. Hayden?
She had always been the ex-Mrs. Hayden, from the honeymoon night to the end. If she had been asked to write intimately of the late Marc Hayden, her page would have had to be as blank as Marc’s own work pads. She had not known his inner person, except the festering part of him that was too ill to accept intimacy. Marc had been unable to give of himself to another. There had been no link between them forged of love or hate. Even the obvious part of their union, the corporeal part, had been a sham. Several weeks ago, attempting to sleep, she had played a witless game in her head. She had tried to recollect and count their copulations in two years. She had added eighteen times when she had run out of memory. Perhaps there had been more times, but she could not remember them or his body. Her mind’s biography would always have to be that of the oppressive guest in the house.
What would the others say, not Maud or Courtney, or even Rachel with her psychoanalyst’s perceptions, but the others here and at home, if they knew the stark truth? What would anyone say if they knew that she was glad he was finally out of her life?
Uprooting this feeling, even letting it be seen by herself, shocked that part of her raised to conform with sentiment and convention. Oh, she had not wanted Marc to go out of her life in this horrible way. God knows, she could not wish him or any person on earth dead. But the fact of his being gone, ignoring the means, was a relief. The sadism he had imposed upon her the weeks before his death had been almost unbearable. With this remembrance, she could justify her coldheartedness. He had taunted her, insulted her, played vicious games with her weaknesses and fears. And all the tawdry rest of it, the plotting with that pig Garrity, the plotting with Tehura, the readying to run off and leave her a stranded, pitied fool, these she would not forget. Because he had killed himself, instead of escaping, because he was dead, this was by her society’s rules enough to exonerate him for all his hideous terrorizing. By the accident of death, he had purged himself, and this impaled her upon widowhood. The devil with convention, she thought, no wound was healed, no years of life salvaged. His one death had not repaired her hundred deaths. To the devil with false conventions, and good-by, good riddance, Marc, you poor sick bastard.
These last weeks on the Sirens, she had wanted to be alone, and her wish had been respected, but for the wrong reasons. Everyone, perhaps even Tom Courtney, who should have known better, thought that she required her period of mourning. She had wanted to be alone only because she had wanted time to ease off the tensions that Marc had brought into her life. The Hadean ordeal was over, and she needed the vacation.
In a desultory way, she had continued working with Maud. Even after Marc had gone to his watery grave, Claire had been strong enough to take Maud’s dictation of the flowery obituary notices to the popular press and to anthropological journals. There had been a dozen letters, also, to the faculty at Raynor College and to Maud’s professional friends around the country. Everyone important had been notified of Marc’s accidental and fatal fall “in the midst of his most valuable effort in the field.” What had interested Claire was how all of the formal obituaries and informal letters were somehow focused on what Maud was secretly doing in the field right now and what Maud and Adley had done in the past. How bitter Marc would have been to share even his death with his overshadowing collaborators.
Rasmussen had taken the news out, and had brought back the condolence cables and press notices. And, in one article datelined Papeete, there was a quotation from the renowned adventurer, Rex Garrity, grieving the untimely loss of the most promising young anthropologist in America, who was his close friend. In the same article, Garrity went on to announce that, after his brief vacation in Tahiti, he was off to Trinidad, and from there to the small isle of Tobago in the British West Indies, where tradition had shipwrecked Robinson Crusoe. Garrity had been commissioned by the Busch Artist and Lyceum Bureau to emulate Crusoe’s twenty-eight years of isolation in twenty-eight days, and Garrity pledged his vast following that he would play castaway honestly, with no more than the food, rum, carpenter’s chest, pistols, and gunpowder that Crusoe had possessed.
After the publicity circus, Claire had continued to take dictation of Maud’s notes on the Sirens, and Maud’s voluminous reports to Walter Scott Macintosh and Cyrus Hackfeld. The dull stenographic work had consumed the days. Aside from long walks, only once had Claire ventured outside Maud’s office or her own hut. She had attended Tehura’s funeral pyre, and found herself weeping beside Tehura’s kin, for this was the authentic tragedy. No illness of mind had brought the end to this young thing, only a corruption from the outside, like the old plagues visited upon the islanders by early French explorers.
Claire had seen Tom Courtney almost daily, but always, it seemed to her, in public. Vividly contrasted with memory of Marc’s dark illness was Courtney’s apparent strength and kindness. She could not explain to herself how she really felt toward Courtney, but only that his presence, no matter how brief, made her feel reassured and worth while. Always, she had felt abandoned when he took leave of her company. This was curious because, since Marc’s death, while Courtney had been friendly enough, he had come to seem more impersonal in his relations with her. She could not engage him, his opinion, his attention, as she had been able to earlier. And she could never find herself alone with him.
She wondered what had made him more remote. Was he conforming to the tiresome shibboleth of respect for the widow? Had his interest in her as a woman waned? Or was it that now, when she was unattached, he was afraid of her need for someone?
All of this week the enigma of Courtney had concerned her. Several times, she had determined to go to him, go straight to his bachelor hut, and sit across from him, and remind him of her feelings about Marc and their marriage, about herself and how she was and what was ahead, about false conventions. They would talk, and there would be a finish to this fakery. Yet, she could not bring herself to do this. She knew women who could go to men, who could telephone them, take them aside, even call upon them. For Claire, such aggressive action was unthinkable, except that she thought about it.
She realized, sitting here before the bright lamp, the book in her lap, three cigarettes stubbed out, that almost an hour had passed in idle reflection. She must be practical and think ahead. Tomorrow she would be in Tahiti. The day after tomorrow she would be in California. There was no immediate problem about money. Marc had little life insurance because he had little interest in any life outside his own, but he had been too embarrassed not to have a policy at all. There was one. And so there was enough money to keep her alive for one year.
Maud, with growing confidence in the results her paper on the Sirens would bring, had invited Claire to live with her in Washington, D.C., if that came through. Claire had been appreciative and vague, but was determined in her heart that she had no wish to remain Maud’s secretary and ward. For the time, Claire decided, she would return to the Santa Barbara house, plan nothing, see what would happen for a while, see what life did to her. Eventually, she would take an apartment in Los Angeles, and find a job (there were many friends), and she would have to go through all that other young thing again, the learning to live as a single woman, the joining of this and that, the deciding about dates, ad infinitum, dammit.
The other day, in a different mood, she had considered remaining behind on The Three Sirens to see how that would work. If it did not work, there would always be Rasmussen to rescue her. But it made no sense, absolutely no sense. It was too dramatic for prosaic she, and she had not the bravery for such a change. Oh, if Tom Courtney had suggested it, she fancied that she might have said yes, whatever he meant, whatever she meant, and stayed on to see what would come of it. He had not suggested it, and so she had put the fancy out of her mind.
One more cigarette, she told herself. Then, drawing smoke from it, she drew also from various memories of her life on The Three Sirens. Bred as she had been, raised in a culture so different, there was little that she could take home with her from this island that would be of advantage. What she had appreciated most was utterly unacceptable among those she had grown up with. Yet, these people here, their customs, had reinforced certain secret beliefs that she had held, and that was good. Their behavior had given her more probing insights into herself, and into the life she had lived and to which she must return. Except for the one blight, it had been a good time.
Her wrist watch ticked persistently, and she was nearer to tomorrow. The exactness and inevitability of tomorrow made her feel restless for the first time this evening. She hated leaving the isolated comfort and freedom of this island. Almost overnight, she would be plunged into the strain of counterfeit behavior, the horrid widow pose, while here there was less necessity for that. How terrible to leave a place that had become more home than the home to which she must return. Yet, what was it that she would miss of the Sirens, really, but really, above and beyond the need for no pretense? She had not been close to any of the natives. Then what was it? In her isolation in this room, no one around, no prying, no peering at her, in this privacy, she could be herself and be truthful. So finally she could admit that all she would miss would be one, the one who was Tom Courtney.
This attachment to him, which she knew, and which he did not, made her nervous. She ground out her cigarette, stood up stiffly, flexed her shoulder muscles, and went into the rear room to change for bed, before packing.
Slowly undressing, she found him entering her thoughts again, and she forgave him. What was there about Tom Courtney that made her reluctant to leave him? How could she miss someone who, from his recent behavior, had given no sign that he would miss her the second after she had departed? The last question lingered as she slipped the pleated white nylon nightgown down over her body. If only he would answer the last question for her this last night. Then she could leave without reservations. If only she was not she, and had the nerve …
The timid knocking on his cane door, in the stillness between the dark and the daylight, seemed to reverberate in the air.
The door came open almost immediately, and there they stood, he in his doorway, she outside it, and they were both surprised. She had never seen him this way before. He was like a white native, attired only in the pubic bag, and she realized that he must be this way in the privacy of his rooms, and that the shirt and trousers he wore outside were a concession to civilization’s team. She drew her loose pink robe more tightly across her nightgown, and she stood there, not sure how she had done this or why or what she must say.
“Claire,” he said.
“Did I wake you, Tom? I’m sorry. This is crazy. It must be a million hours after midnight.”
“I wasn’t sleeping,” he said. “I was lying in the dark thinking about—well, yes, about you—”
“You were?”
“Come in, come in,” he said, and then quickly, realizing the state of his undress, he said, “Hey, wait, let me change—”
“Don’t be a child,” she said, “because I’m not one, either.” She crossed before him into his room.
He closed the door and strode to the bamboo rod of candlenuts. “Let me get some light.”
“No, Tom, don’t. Leave it this way. It’s easier to talk to you. There’s enough moonlight from the windows.”
She had lowered herself to the pandanus matting. He approached her, his head lost high in the upper darkness, before he came down into sight, and sat a few feet from her.
“I’ve never called on a man before,” she said. “I should have sent you one of those festival shells first. This is The Three Sirens, isn’t it?”
“I’m glad you came,” he said. “I was going to call on you a dozen times last night, tonight. It’s harder for a man.”
“Why, Tom? That’s the reason I had the courage to—to come here. I couldn’t leave tomorrow, just disappear, without finding out about you. We were so friendly for a while. It was important to me. You have no idea how important. And suddenly, after Marc’s death, you weren’t there. Why? Respect for the widow?”
“Yes and no. Not for the reasons you seem to think. I was afraid to be alone with you. That’s it, really.”
“Afraid? Why?”
“Because overnight you were possible. Before, you were not, and all at once you were, and I was afraid of what I might say to you or do. I had strong feelings about you, from the day you arrived, but I had to hide them. Then, all at once, I realized I could express them. And at the same time, I realized that I had no idea how you would feel about my feelings. I’m talking like an idiot, but I mean—before, guarded by a husband, you could afford to show interest in me. Without protection, you might not have the same interest. And if I came in—”
“Tom,” she said softly, “thank you.”
“For what?”
“For making it possible for me to be here with you without having to blush about it for years after.”
“Claire, I’m not saying all of this to—to make you comfortable. I’m speaking to a woman in a way I would not have been able to speak four or five years ago. The fact is, I’m the one who must thank you. Do you want to know why?”
“Yes.”
“You made me grow up, and you never knew it. My four years on the Sirens made a man of me. My knowledge of you made a mature man of me. Until today, I was going to stay on here indefinitely. The old reasons. This is an easy, permissive, hedonistic life. You go on in an empty-headed way, and you let your body live. And you’re important in this little pool. Going home becomes more and more difficult. If you return, you lose this importance, you become like everyone else. You’ve got to work too hard for new importance. And you’ve got to live with your head, too, not just your body. You’ve got to wear the strait jackets of progress, follow the clock, the law, the conventions like civilized clothes, and what-not. But today I changed my mind. I went to Maud and asked her if I could return to Tahiti and the United States with all of you in the morning. I’m going back with you, Claire.”
Claire sat very still, one hand clasping her robe together at the bosom, her flesh pervaded by a weakness and a running warmth. “Why are you leaving here, Tom?”
“Two reasons. Reason one. I’ve grown up, and I decided that I could come to grips with the outside. Claire, I’ve been hiding out these last years, hiding from life. It was your presence here, the thoughts you induced, that made me realize my exile was illusory happiness, superficial, shallow, pointless compared to what you represented. Seeing you, perhaps some of the others, made me restless and deeply dissatisfied, even ashamed of myself. That was when I knew I had solved nothing, and never would, unless I solved it in your world, which is my world, too.”
He paused, avoiding her eyes, staring down at his hands, and then he looked up at her. “I—I don’t want to make a big dramatic speech about returning to a life that most other men take for granted. I only want you to know how I’ve come to the decision. I fully realize it’s not as easy and idyllic at home as it is here. Existence can be more abrasive and troublesome in the States. But I’ve come to believe that I was set down on this earth, in that place called home, to live my days there and cope with it and do what a man must do. Instead, when the going got rough, I ran. I’m not alone. I’m one of millions. All men have their ways of running. Some run inside themselves. Others act it out, as I did. One bad marriage, one war, one disillusioning job, and I ran for real. I thought the four years here liberated me. They did. Yet, only in small ways. In a big way, I’ve been a coward. The mature man who does not run, who stays on in the workaday world in which he was born and raised, he is the one who shows a kind of heroism. That’s the real unsung heroism, the facing of day-in-and-day-out living, the facing up to conventional work, marriage, procreation, and making of it a good thing. The euphoria of hidden islands and coconut palms and dusky maidens belongs in dreams. If life at home is not up to those dreams, then it is a man’s job to make life at home better, improve it, fight for it in his house, neighborhood, community, country. The main thing is to meet life face to face on your own battleground, and this I am going to try to do. That is why I am going back.”
He paused, and waited, but Claire said nothing.
“Claire,” he said, “you haven’t asked the second reason I am going back.”
She did not speak.
“It is you, Claire. I am in love with you. I have been in love with you from the moment I set eyes upon you. I want to be near you, be where you will be, if you want it or not.”
She could hear herself breathing in the darkness. She was frightened by the thumping of her heart. “Tom—do you—do you mean that?”
“I mean it more than any words I have spoken in my entire life. I am so in love with you that I can’t think or speak properly. I’ve wanted you since you came here, I’ve wanted you tonight, I’ve wanted you for my own for the rest of the days of my life. It’s—it’s all I can say—and what I’ve been afraid to say until now.”
She found that she had covered his hand with her own. “Tom, why do you think I came here tonight?”
“Claire—”
“I want you, too. I need you. I need you tonight and as long as there are nights and the two of us on this earth. I’ve never—I’ve never said such things before, to anyone.” She had come into his arms, and buried her head against his naked chest. “Maybe it’s not right for me to admit these things now.”
“What a human being feels about love is right.”
“Then, that’s what I feel, Tom. Love me always. Love me, and never stop.”
It was eight o’clock in the morning of the last day, and a cooling breeze frolicked with the palm fronds over the village of The Three Sirens.
Through the open front door of her hut, from behind the desk where she sat, Maud Hayden rested from her dictation into the tape recorder and observed the first activity of the morning in the compound. The young native males, the bearers, four or five of them, were carrying the suitcases and crates out to the bank of the stream.
Maud’s gaze left the compound, and went to the silver microphone in her hand. In the past half-hour, she had recorded what had remained to be recorded of her factual notes on the Sirens. What had been set down this morning, and during six weeks of mornings, was important and unusual, and she knew the uses to which she could put it and the impact it would make on her colleagues and the nation. For the first time since her grief—that awful week after, when she had twice wept uncontrollably and secretly—she felt if not completely recovered, at least purposeful. The blinding puffiness was gone from around her eyes, the knifing arrow of pain gone from her chest, and in her bones she felt the healing strength of her accomplishment. Silently, she thanked them all, Easterday, Rasmussen, Courtney, Paoti, and the distant Daniel Wright, Esq., too, for giving her back her occupation. No longer was work a livelihood and a vanity. It was now her husband, her son, the meaning of her life.
There was hardly any time left. She took in the packings all around the room, and once more her eyes fell on the microphone in her hand. What else was there to record?
A final summary would not be amiss. Her forefinger pushed the recording button on the machine and the spools of tape began to revolve.
In a low, rasping voice, she spoke aloud.
“One more thought. The practice of love and marriage on The Three Sirens, which I have observed firsthand, remains for the most part utterly unlike any other system I have known on earth. For these natives, schooled to it, adjusted to it across so many decades, it appears to be perfect. Yet, I am convinced that this pattern of perfection could not be grafted on our own society in the West. We are heirs of a competitive and restless society, with its advantages and disadvantages, and we must live within our emotional means. What I have seen work out successfully on The Three Sirens would probably not work in the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, or anywhere in the modern world. But this I think, this I think: we can learn from societies like the Sirens; we can learn a little; we cannot live their life but we can learn from it.”
She allowed the tape to run on a few seconds, before she pressed the button marked “Stop.”
Something else was needed, she felt, some justification for all the burrowings of the social anthropologists and their colleagues who participated in these often difficult and unsettling trips into the field. Whenever she required reassurance of the value of their work, what they had gone through to garner their scratchy facts, what they had gone through as individuals, what sacrifices were offered up, she remembered a statement made by one of her own whom she admired. Bending over, she opened her book bag, and examined and returned several titles, until she had located the volume that she wanted. The microphone still in her right hand, she opened Robert Lowie’s Primitive Society to its introduction, and after turning a dozen pages she found it.
For the last time on this trip, she pressed the recording button, watched the tape unwind, and, reading slowly from Lowie, she addressed the microphone.
“‘The knowledge of primitive societies has an educational value that should recommend its study even to those who are not primarily interested in the processes of culture history. All of us are born into a set of traditional institutions and social conventions that are accepted not only as natural but as the only conceivable response to social needs. Departures from our standards in foreigners bear in our biased view the stamp of inferiority. Against this purblind provincialism there is no better antidote than the systematic study of alien civilizations … We see our received set of opinions and customs as merely one of an indefinite number of possible variants; and we are emboldened to hew them into shape in accordance with novel aspirations.’”
A smile had formed itself upon Maud Hayden’s large face. With finality, she hit the button that stopped the tape, and knew that all had been said and done.
After returning the book to the bag, and capping the portable tape recorder with its metal top, she looked out the open doorway. The baggage was piled high now, and the Karpowiczes were there, and Harriet and Orville, and Rachel and Lisa. She could see Claire and Tom Courtney together, crossing the compound toward the others.
Captain Rasmussen and Professor Easterday came into sight, greeting the others, and the gathering natives, and now both Rasmussen and Easterday turned toward her hut and were coming to get her.
It was a good time and a bad time, but it was the time to go.
Pressing her palms to the desk, she lifted her bulk from the chair. She made certain to secure the lid of the tape recorder, and she cast about to see if there were any leftover papers. There were none, and she was ready.
Waiting, she wondered if she would ever return to The Three Sirens or if any of them out there would ever return. Or, she wondered, if they wanted to return, and Rasmussen and Courtney were no more, who on earth would there be to guide them to this unknown place?
The Three Sirens, she told herself, is Man’s eternal dream of Eden Resurrected. When the world heard of it from her, would the world believe it, and, believing it, seek it out? And then she wondered how long it would take the world to find it, if ever, if ever.