The Three Sirens (16 page)

Harriet had read that in some old biography, and had never thought of it or Mary Shelley in all the years since, until now.

“Do you feel better?” It was Dr. Delgado standing over her.

She took one gulp of the whiskey and put the glass down. She had digested everything, and recognized her fate. “At least,” she said, “he could have told me himself.” All that was left to her were petty complaints.

“He couldn’t. You know how sensitive he is. He hates scenes. Besides, he couldn’t bear hurting you.”

“He doesn’t think this will hurt me?”

“Well, coming from an outsider—”

“Yes, I know.”

He settled on the arm of the chair, his hand patting her hair.

“It’s not just that I’m a nurse,” she said straight ahead, to no one in particular, “it’s that I am the way I am. Important doctors marry nurses. Lots of them do. But they don’t marry ones who aren’t pretty or rich or at least something special. I won’t blame Walter. I’m just unlucky in what men put most value upon. I’m not a man’s exterior image of a wife. For a man, a wife represents his good taste, his prestige and station, his judgment, his ego—she is his ambassador making introductions at the cocktail party, or presiding over his dinner table, or on his arm at someone’s house, and I’m no good for anything except bed.”

“Baby, don’t be silly. Walter had only praise for you.”

“For me in bed, nothing else. But he kept seeing me in spite of me. The bed part of me blinded him for—for a while.”

Dr. Delgado gripped her shoulder cheerfully. “I won’t deny he spoke of that, too. If I didn’t know him, I’d think him a liar. I don’t see how a woman can have what he says you have.”

She hardly heard him. She gazed mournfully ahead.

He jostled her slightly. “Look, baby, be sensible. It’s done and over. The King is dead, long live the King. Walter’s gone, and old Herb is here. Why not take advantage of the situation? You look the sensible type. Why not laugh your troubles away? Lots of ladies think I’m mighty eligible. Well, they can’t have me, but you can.”

She had become attentive, and was looking up at him with bewilderment.

“Let’s go to dinner just like you’d planned all along,” Delgado was saying. “Then we can come back here and live it up, and—”

“Come here and do what?”

He stopped. “Live it up, I said.”

“You mean you want to sleep with me?”

“Is that a crime?”

“You want to sleep with me tonight?”

“And every night. Don’t look so insulted. After all, you’re not exactly—”

“Get out.”

He was taken aback. “What?”

Harriet stood up. “Get out, right now.”

Dr. Delgado came slowly off the arm of the chair. “You’re not—Are you serious?”

“You heard me twice.”

“Young lady, get off your high horse. Who are you anyway? I’m trying to give you a break. You’ve had good press notices, so I’m here. You’ve got a great act, it says, but that’s all you’ve got. Retire it and you’ll die for lack of company.”

“For the third and last time, beat it, or I’ll have the landlord throw you out.”

Dr. Delgado’s face took on a disdainful smile. With insolent deliberation, he finished his drink, picked up his topcoat, and walked to the door. He held the knob. “Your funeral,” he said.

He had opened the door, when suddenly, he turned again. “I almost forgot,” he said. He reached inside his suit coat and withdrew a long manila envelope. “Walter said to be sure to give you this. It’s a letter he wants you to read.”

He held it out, but she did not take it. Annoyed, he tossed it on the maple lamp table.

“See you at the hospital, Nurse,” he said, and was gone.

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-third 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.