The Three Sirens (27 page)

Claire and Maud stood rooted in awe as they sped over the tight pongee sheen of the Pacific, and the top of the yellow disc of sun expanded and enlarged, circularly framing the main island, a torn and unpolished piece of jade immobile in the tropical calm.

They were almost upon it, sliding across it and bending around it, and Claire could distinctly see what Easterday had seen: steep terraced black cliffs sculptured by erosion, rain, time; a luxuriant verdigris carpet of plateau; a broken mountain rising high and proud as the ruin of an ancient castle; splashes of purple lagoons; ravines scooped out by Loti’s “patient hand of ages”; slopes of trees and crystal brooks and creases of green valleys. Yet, Claire thought, all delicately detailed in miniature as if from a Polynesian Breughel’s brush.

They had dipped past the two adjoining atolls and were heading back toward a gash in the rocky perimeter. Claire could make out the strings of coconut palms, their fronds tiny bursts of celebration in the sky. Beyond lay the cobalt ocean, greening brightly as it neared a strip of sea beach, where the narrow run of sand sparkled back to the sun. All lay inanimate, except for the bubbling white foam against the cliffs gathered about the small extent of beach, all still except for these tentative breakers and signs of movement far below on the sand.

Claire’s heart leaped. “Aren’t those people down there on the beach?”

Rasmussen grunted. “Yeh, probably Courtney to make you welcome an’ some of the villagers to carry your baggage.” But now Rasmussen was busy at the controls. “We’re goin’ in. Better wake up your people an’ then sit down. Sometimes the water’s a cushion an’ sometimes it’s like a rutted road.”

Maud was the first to turn away, and Claire was reluctant to follow her. One more moment, her eyes feasted on the primitive place, the rainbow of color beneath the wing, and then she murmured, to herself alone, “
Iaorana
.” She tore her gaze free from what was deflowering her senses, and went back to the reasonable security of mate and companions.

When Claire reached her seat, she saw that Marc and the others were awake, and she waved vaguely, still seduced, and sat just as the seaplane slumped forward. She held tightly, staring at the boarded portholes, and descended with the fat, brown Polynesian bird, felt it contact the water, bouncing and slithering, until the engines coughed their last spasms and were still, and they roosted wonderingly on the calm waters off the sand beach of The Three Sirens.

The egg of Creation has been dropped, Claire thought. She waited for the shell to break and free her, so that life could begin, at last …

* * *

It was still early morning, although they had waited on the sand of the beach for over an hour while Rasmussen and Hapai assisted nine young males of the Sirens in moving the crated supplies, and now their baggage, from the rolling seaplane to the shore.

The sun was a full blazing orb by this time, and the rays of heat it sent toward them could almost be seen. The air about was still and incandescent, faintly moist with the consistency of steam, boiling ever so slowly. It was a heat unusual to find in this part of Oceania.

Claire stood, sweater over her arm, enjoying the heat on her face and neck, and the warmth of the grains of sand covering her sandals. Beside her, Rachel DeJong and Lisa Hackfeld were less comfortable. Rachel appeared wretched in her black wool suit, and she began to remove her jacket. Inspired by this informality, Lisa Hackfeld also started to shed her white jacket.

“It must be the humidity,” Lisa said apologetically. “It’s smothering.”

“We’ll have to learn to dress properly,” said Rachel DeJong.

Claire watched a tall young native, the color of maple wood, darker than his friends, as he bent forward, hands on his knees, ready to receive the oncoming long canoe. From behind, the native appeared naked. His sloping shoulders, ridge of spine, long flanks and thin buttocks were entirely exposed. Only his waist held the string which supported the pubic bag.

When first she had been helped down into the canoe, and met these natives, their masculinity accented rather than hidden by the bags, Claire had averted her eyes with embarrassment. She had dreaded reaching the beach, where she knew that the white man, Tom Courtney, would be waiting with Maud, who had gone earlier in the first canoe crossing. On the natives, the brevity of attire, if embarrassing, was at least acceptable. They were, after all, of another race, another people and place. You did not equate them with yourself, did not identify or imagine. But for one of her own to be similarly revealed would be unsettling.

With dread, Claire had endured the gliding passage to the beach, no longer aware of either the scenery or her oarsman. She had stood on the sand as Maud introduced her to Mr. Thomas Courtney, and to her wild relief he was not flesh and codpiece but civilized decency itself.

“Welcome to the Sirens, Mrs. Hayden,” he had said.

As she had taken his hand, avoiding looking up at his face, she could see that he wore a thin cotton gym shirt already blotched with perspiration, wrinkled light-blue dungarees rolled up at the ankles, and his bare feet were caught in leather thonged sandals. Only later, when he was occupied elsewhere, had she matched his face with the image her mind had created from Easterday’s letter. She had expected him to have sandy hair, but it was a darker brown, as were his eyes, and it was thick and tangled. His face was longer, more sensitive and amused than Easterday had reported, and it was wonderfully seamed at the smile lines by the outdoors, the weather, the years of early middle-age. He was rangy, probably strong, but he moved about them on the beach in long strides that were awkward, as if he were too tall and too shy. He possessed when he was still, Claire had noted, the gift of repose, of letting go, of seeming deceptively indolent—a contrast to her own Marc, who was always coiled tight and taut.

Now, beside Rachel DeJong and Lisa Hackfeld, as she watched the rear of the native at the water’s edge, Claire had a feeling that he and the other natives were sensible about their attire and that she and the team were not. She had a momentary feeling that, as much as she enjoyed the morning heat, she wanted to rid herself of her blouse and skirt and fling them away and know the entire pleasure of the sun and air and water.

Lisa had complained of smothering, and Rachel of having to learn to dress properly, and now Claire said lightly, “Well, Dr. DeJong, maybe we’ll have to learn to undress—imitate the natives.”

Rachel offered only her lips in a smile. “I doubt it, Mrs. Hayden. I’m afraid we’re in the position of the Malayan Englishman, in Empire days, who dressed for dinner in the jungle.”

“Thank God for people like him,” said Lisa Hackfeld. “How can they run around like that?”

“They don’t usually have company,” said Claire.

Rachel DeJong nodded off. “This should be our personal luggage now. I hope they’re careful.”

They all looked at the sharp pointed prow of the oncoming canoe being steadily paddled by eight of the husky young natives. The canoe was piled high, in the center, with the luggage of the team.

“I can’t get over how they look,” said Lisa. “I expected them to be darker, more native.”

“They’re both English and Polynesian,” Claire reminded her.

“I know, but anyway …” Lisa said. “Why, the American—Mr. Courtney over there—he’s more darkly colored than they are. I hope I can get a tan like his. I’ll be the envy of everyone back home.”

Rachel DeJong had been concentrating on the approaching canoe. “Their complexions may be fair,” she observed, “but I believe their features have a definite Polynesian cast. They are all big and muscular, black hair, broad noses, rather full lips, yet there is some kind of effeminate air about them, I suppose their grace of movement.”

“I think they’re definitely masculine,” said Claire, and for a second glanced about to be sure Marc had not overheard her.

“They leave no doubt,” said Rachel dryly.

The thirty-foot canoe hit the shore, and the paddlers spilled out into the shallow water to push it up on the sand as their waiting tribesman, at the prow, pulled with all his strength.

“I want to see if my things are there,” Lisa said. She started through the sand toward the canoe.

“I’d better check, too,” said Rachel DeJong, and she went after Lisa.

Claire had no interest in her luggage for the moment. Her eyes followed Rachel and Lisa to the canoe, and then she wheeled about to see what everyone else was doing. In the shade of a boulder, Maud, Marc, and Orville Pence were absorbed in a discussion. Nearby, Courtney crouched with Hapai, going over a list of some kind, while Rasmussen stood listening, mopping his forehead. Some distance off, at the water line, Mary Karpowicz was wading, while her father and mother observed her with parental pride.

Briefly, Claire considered joining her husband, but decided that she wanted this time to herself. Turning her back on the others, she lifted her shoulder purse from the sand, and, lazily swinging it, she strolled past the canoe which was being unloaded. She made her way toward a group of curving coconut trees, and when she reached the first, she lowered herself to the sand, plucked a cigarette from her package and lighted it, and then leaned back against the base of the tree and dreamily soaked in the landscape before and above her. It was easy to depopulate the scene, to return it to its virginal state, for it had a magnificent grandeur that overwhelmed all its temporary habitation.

Closed in as she was by the reaching cliffs, the raw and uncontained vegetation, she felt for the first time that she was severed from civilization, from all that was familiar and controlled. It was as if she had stepped off the safe world into outer space, and been the first to land on a hot unknown planet. Gone was the pasteurized, sanitary, antibiotic, aluminum, plastic, electrical, automatic, Constitutional world of her entire life past. Here was the primeval first world, unregimented, unchecked, undefeated, uncultivated, untamed, untaught, uncultured, uninhibited. Gone was the way of gentility, sophistication, progress, and here, instead, the way of nature, crude, primordial, pagan.

For the first time since infancy, she was at the mercy of others. How would she exist? Her mind fled to the cocoons of her recent life, their easy silken safeties, the downy soft bed from which she rose, the bathroom with its gadget splendors, the kitchen with its mechanical gluttonies, the living room and study with their fabric and leather and wooden furniture, and records and books and art. At home she was visited by civilized friends who could be understood and who were reassuringly garmented and who were as conscious of the amenities and obedient to the rules as was the Victorian gentry.

The past had been forsaken, and now what did she have in its stead? A volcanic isle, a patch of land and jungle, so lost in a mighty sea that it was not on any map. A people, a culture, so strange that it knew nothing of a policeman, a ballot, an electric lamp, a Ford, a motion picture, a washing machine, an evening gown, a Martini, a supermarket, a Literary Guild, a fire hydrant, a caged zoo, a Christmas carol, an uplift brassiere, a polio shot, a football, a corsage, a hi-fi set, a New York Times, a telephone, an elevator, a Kleenex, a social security card, a Phi Beta Kappa key, a TV dinner, a corn plaster, a Diner’s Club membership, a deodorant, a nuclear bomb, a crayon, a Caesarian section. All these, all this, had vanished from her life, and there was left on the desolate sand, on a speck of Oceania, only the five feet four inches and 112 pounds and twenty-five years of her own oversheltered, overcivilized, underprotected, unprepared self. Not more than thirty-two hours stood between the comfortable gadget paradise of her United States and the rude primitive islands of The Three Sirens. She had bridged the time and distance in body. Could she bridge them in her mind and heart?

Despite the glare of the sun beating upon her head, she shivered. After one more lengthy puff of the cigarette, she buried it in the sand, and pushed herself to her feet. She stared across the beach. The entire group was gathering near the piles of luggage beside the canoe, and she knew that Maud would need her as well as the inventory in her purse. More energetically than before, she waded through the sand, remembering the Chicago lake front of her childhood, and soon she was once more part of the company formed by her mother-in-law, husband, and the members of the team.

While each of the group had been permitted to retain his personal effects, to the limit of forty pounds, in his own suitcase, the scientific supplies had been pooled and packed in wooden crates. After Maud assisted each member in identifying his lightweight luggage, she summoned Claire and asked for the inventory of the supplies.

Claire, list in hand, stood behind Maud, while she examined the outside of the crates. “They seem in good shape,” announced Maud. “Let’s see if they’re all here. You read the list aloud, just enough for me to identify each one.”

“One carton of sleeping bags, lamps, batteries for lamps, and portable tape recorder,” Claire read. “Also—”

“I have it,” said Maud.

“One carton with Dr. Karpowicz’ drying cabinet, plant presses—”

“Check.”

“One carton of Dr. Karpowicz’ photographic equipment—motion picture camera, two still cameras, tripods, portable developing equipment, film—”

“Check.”

“One carton—no, two cartons—of Miss Bleaska’s first-aid kits, other medications, insect repellents—”

“Yes, here they are, Claire.”

“Then six cartons of assorted foods—canned goods, powdered milk—”

“Wait, Claire, I’ve located only two—three of them—hold on—”

Watching Maud kneel and search the crates, Claire remembered how odd she had thought it was to bring their own food along. Maud had explained that, for the most, they would share what the natives on the Sirens ate, but a limited larder of their own food might be useful. For one thing, Maud had said, sometimes you came upon people when they were in the midst of a famine or shortage, and by eating out of your own cans, you did not deprive them. Another reason for importing American staples was that some members of the team might not take well to bizarre native dishes, and prefer to starve rather than eat what revolted them or disagreed with them. Maud had a scarred memory of one field trip with Adley when she had been forced to eat boiled wood rat rather than insult her hosts or, indeed, starve.