The Three Sirens (32 page)

Claire was about to call out for her mother-in-law when Maud materialized, briskly, through the rear passageway, her arms laden with large bound notebooks.

“Oh, Claire, I was about to look in on you.”

“I’ve been loafing. All this unpacking—you make me feel guilty.”

“Nonsense.” She dumped the notebooks on her table. “My own neurotic sense of orderliness. You’re behaving correctly. One should take it easy, at least during the day, on a tropical island.” She waved a plump hand at the desk, and continued the gesture to include the entire room. “What do you think? Mr. Courtney tells me this is real luxury on The Three Sirens. Chief Paoti insisted, weeks ago, that since I am a Chief like himself, I must be pampered as one. According to Mr. Courtney, the Chief has the only Western furnishings on the island—a chair like this one, for his throne, and a huge feast table. Now I have a chair, a more practical table for a desk, thanks to Mr. Courtney, and benches for my subjects.” She grimaced. “Maybe I should not have accepted all of this. Not only might it create jealousy among the team, but it removes me, a trifle, from living as a native, from being a participant. But, I must confess, it will make my work easier.”

“I’m for a wealthy class,” said Claire. “It gives the rest of us something more to strive for.”

“I told Mr. Courtney we’d want a little table for your typewriter. He’s having one built tomorrow.”

“Will you put it in here, Maud? I’d prefer that. I want to keep our two rooms as they are, absolutely authentic native. I’ve become positively enchanted with our hut, and I like it open, airy, with nothing in it but ourselves. Incidentally, Maud, speaking of Mr. Courtney—”

Then Claire spoke of him, of the incident outside the door between Lisa Hackfeld and Courtney, and of Courtney’s digression on the value of coeducational lavatories specifically and of the public water closet as the great human leveler in general.

Maud was amused. “Poor Mrs. Hackfeld. Well, she—and not only she but all of us—have bigger surprises in store, I would expect. Yes, I remember years ago, in the field, when Adley and I first encountered the mixed public lavatory. Our Mr. Courtney is right, you know. There’s much to be said for the custom. He’s also right, only slightly inaccurate, about his memory of history. It was in seventeenth-century England that a lady might leave her carriage, guests, and retainers, to perform her needs at the wayside in full view of everyone. It was in seventeenth-century France that an aristocratic lady would sit side by side in a lavatory with male friends, conversing. This was in the Restoration period, after Richard Cromwell had been removed from power. It was a period that rebelled against false modesty. Women wore provocative artificial breasts of wax over their real breasts, and they wore no drawers. I never forget the story of Casanova’s meeting with Madame Fel, the singer. It is so representative of the upper-class morals. Casanova saw three young boys playing about Madame Fel’s skirts. He was surprised that there was no resemblance among them. ‘Of course not,’ said Madame Fel. ‘The eldest is the son of the Duc d’Annecy, the second of Comte Egmont, and the third is the son of Comte Maisonrouge.’ Casanova apologized. ‘Forgive me, Madame,’ he said, ‘I had thought they were all your children.’ Madame smiled. ‘So they are,’ she said.”

Claire did not hide her delight. “Wonderful!” she exclaimed.

“What is wonderful, Claire, is the two of us standing here beneath a thatched roof, in the middle of the Pacific, recollecting the easy morals of civilized France and England more than three hundred years ago—and finding they nearly correspond with some of the morals of a half-Polynesian tribe. At least, in the matter of privies.”

Somewhere in Claire’s mind the lank figure of Courtney lounged. Casually, she brought him forth. “Anyway, Thomas Courtney started this way-out—or, I should say, way-back—discussion. I was surprised to see him leaving here so late. Was he with you all the while?”

“Yes, before the furniture came in, we sat on the pandanus mats and talked. He’s an engaging fellow, widely read, widely lived, extremely liberated in all matters. He gave me an immediate briefing on the tabus, what is and isn’t, on what is mana or prestige-making and holy in the community. He explained a little of the routine and behavior we would have to understand. Very enlightening. I’m going to make some notes and have a meeting for all of us early tomorrow. I think everyone should know what he can do and cannot do and what, in a general way, he must expect. Mr. Courtney was exceedingly articulate. He will be of inestimable help to us here.”

“Did he—did he tell you anything about himself?”

“Not a word. He ventured nothing and skirted around the personal. He did ask me about you and Marc. You seem to have made a favorable impression upon him.”

Claire was instantly alert. “About me and Marc? Like what?”

“How long you two had been married—if you had children—where and how you lived—what Marc did—what you did—that sort of thing.”

“And you told him?”

“Only a very little to be polite. I didn’t think it was for me to reveal anything of you.”

“Thank you, Maud. You were right. Did—did he inquire about the others, also?”

“A little. He had to know about each of our specialties, what we’re after, so that he can make arrangements for our investigation. But nothing personal about the others, only you and Marc.”

Claire nibbled her lower lip thoughtfully. “How extraordinary he is—his being here—and he’s—I don’t know, unusual in so many ways. I wish I could find out more about him.”

Maud moved the chair to her table. “You’ll have a chance tonight,” she said, and sat down and began to arrange her notebooks. “Chief Paoti is giving us a big feast of welcome in his hut. Highly ceremonious and important. The Chief will be there with his wife, Hutia, and his son, Moreturi, and daughter-in-law, Atetou, and a niece who is now in his family—uh—Tehura, her name is Tehura. Then I am invited with my immediate family, namely you and Marc. Mr. Courtney will be the—the intermediary—to bring us together.”

“What’s a feast like?” Claire wanted to know. “What do we wear and—?”

“You’ll wear your best and simplest dress. It’ll be warm there. As for the feast, Mr. Courtney spoke of a speech or two, and music and endless eating—native food, also native drinks—and entertainment and a rite of friendship. After that, we will possess official mana and be able to circulate freely in the village and be considered a part of the tribe. The dinner begins at nightfall. Be sure to tell Marc to be ready on time. You, too. We can expect Mr. Courtney to call for us about eight. It’ll be fun, Claire, and a new experience, I promise you.”

* * *

At some time between ten and eleven o’clock in the evening—in her present condition she could not make out the exact hour on the diminutive dial of her gold wrist watch—Claire remembered Maud’s earlier prediction and acknowledged (to herself) its accuracy. Every exotic second at Chief Paoti’s festive board had been fun; every singular minute beneath the thatched dome of his immense yellow bamboo hut had been a new experience.

She was not herself, she knew, that is, not her recent self, and the latest arrangement of herself, which was surprising, added to her pleasure.

After failing to make out the exact hour, her neck seemed to shoot upwards—“Now I’m opening out like the largest telescope that ever was!” Alice had cried out in Wonderland long ago, when she had become more than nine feet tall—and like Alice’s head, Claire’s own almost touched the ceiling, but then floated free, high, high above, an almost independent planet with signs of human life. From above, her elongated person looked down upon the receding contours of her evening world. There was the rubbed stone floor and the smoking earth oven and in the center, between the oven and platform, the low-slung rectangle of the royal table still heaped with the remnants of the roasted suckling pig, the marinated pahua, the hot taro dumplings and coconut cream, the cooked breadfruit, the yams, the red bananas. Around the table, seated cross-legged on mats (except for Chief Paoti Wright at the head of the table, on his squat chair, its four legs each one foot high), were the nine of them, including the one which was the body that belonged to this soaring head.

Her head was the all-seeing eye, but her body was the flesh sponge that soaked in the rise and fall of spoken words in English and Polynesian, the chants and clapping of the male singers, the erotic rhythm of the flutes and bamboo percussion instruments from an adjacent room, the fragrance of the multicolored flower petals dancing on the large wooden basins of water, the rustling of the native servants and diners in their tapa cloth raiment.

It was the combination of the two drinks, Claire knew, that had sent her head kiting off above the table. First, there had been the elaborate ceremony of the kava preparation and serving. The green kava, roots of pepper shrubs, had been brought to the Chief in a huge container. At a signal, five young men, toothy, bare-chested, had entered, kneeled about the container, and quickly brandished bone knives to scrape the rind off the kava and slice the roots into small pieces. Then, to music, they had all taken pieces of kava in their mouths, chewed industriously, and placed the masticated lumps in a clay bowl. Afterwards, water had been added to the bowl, and someone had mixed and stirred the concoction, and finally, through a strainer made of the fiber of hibiscus bark, the green fluid had been pressed free. The milky kava had been presented to each of them in an ornamented coconut cup.

Claire had found the drink easy to swallow and deceptively bland. She had listened to Courtney explain that kava was not a fermented beverage, it did not make its user drunk. Rather, it was a drug, a mild narcotic that usually stimulated, enlivened the senses, did not affect the head but frequently deadened the limbs. After the kava, Claire had been served a fermented drink—“palm juice,” Moreturi, beside her, had named it—an alcoholic beverage made of the sap of a palm tree, and this liquid had the sting of whiskey or gin. The palm juice, and the serving had been considerable, affected in Claire what the kava had not—her head, her sight, her hearing, her balance. Blended, the effect, for Claire, was that of a cocktail of drugs. Her senses scrambled and separated, some high up, some down low, and she felt irresponsible, pleased, mildly gay. Her sensory faculties had all been heightened. She had completely lost focus—her inability to make out the time, for instance—but she had retained a narrower focus, as if an aperture had been partially closed, so that she saw, heard, smelled, felt less, but what came through to her seemed sharper, deeper, truer.

Attempting, once more, to locate herself in the time of the evening, Claire tried to assemble the sequence of events recently behind her. This was difficult, too, but there was some success. With darkness, Courtney, in a white sport shirt open at the throat and white ducks and white tennis shoes, accompanied by Maud, had called for them, for Marc and herself. Marc was wearing a blue shirt and tie and navy slacks, and she was in her favorite sleeveless low-cut yellow shantung dress and the small diamond pendant, set in fourteen-karat white gold, that Marc had given her on their first wedding anniversary. They had gone together along the compound, their way lighted by the torch stumps beside the stream and the strings of burning candlenuts winking through the cane walls of the dwellings. After a short walk, they had entered into the Chief’s big hut, their hosts waiting, then Courtney’s formal introductions, next all seated, and the Chief’s entrance and head inclined to each as each was announced.

A surprise, but then no surprise, for Courtney had explained earlier. Instead of the pubic bags, the two native men, the Chief and his son, Moreturi, wore ample matted kilts, as did the retainers. And here the women were not bare-breasted, not grass-skirted, but bound around the bosoms and waists in colorful tapa cloth, although shoulders, midriffs, legs, feet were bare. Then, speeches from the Chief and his son. Then music. Then kava, served differently than she had read about, served both men and women, and as part of the feast. Then palm juice. Then endless courses, the roasted pig taken from the earth oven filled with heated stones, and then the rest, the relays of alien foods. Then, eating with fingers, with a leaf to wipe them, and talk and talk, mostly the Chief and Maud, sometimes Courtney, sometimes Marc, the women silent, Moreturi restrained but friendly, amused. And now, more serving. Poi with coconut sauce.

It must now be ten-thirty, Claire decided.

Slowly, her neck contracted and her head came down and settled, and she squeezed her eyes and sobered and looked around the table. They were eating their food, absorbed, enjoying. At the head of the table, to her right, above them on his ridiculous chair, being fed by a kneeling child-girl, was Chief Paoti Wright. In the reflected light of the flickering candlenuts, his wrinkled parchment skin was browner than any other in the room. His face was skeletal, sunken, sunken eyes, sunken cheeks, almost toothless. Yet, the cropped hair, banker-gray, the alertness of the eyes, with white bushy eyebrows, the clipped but unnatural preciseness of his English, sometimes archaic, often colloquial, the importance of him—the scurrying and ducking about him—gave him the dignity of any monarch, an Indian ruler, an English chairman of the board, a Greek billionaire. She judged him to be in his late sixties, and she judged that the benign aspect hid cunning and severity.

To his left sat Maud Hayden, and then Marc, and then herself. And beside her, the boundary for her side of the table, sat Moreturi, the heir. Upon meeting him, Claire had brought forth Easterday’s memory of him: black, wavy hair, broad face with slanted eyes and full lips and tan complexion, powerful and muscular to the hips, and slender. Easterday had said: about thirty, about six feet. Since meeting Moreturi, Claire had tried to revise the portrait she had held of him. There was no single detail that she could correct, except that he was less lean, somewhat stockier than she had expected. Yet, he appeared different from what she had imagined, and now she knew why. She had, in her mind, categorized him as strong and silent. This would be the type. To her surprise, he was neither. Despite the bulge of his muscles, he resembled no athlete that she had ever seen. Because his skin was devoid of hair, without fat or wrinkle, there was a natural smoothness, grace, beauty to his form. As to being the silent partner of strong and silent, she detected from his occasional utterances, above all from his reactions to the talk of others, the air of the amused extrovert. She guessed that, removed from the presence of his father and the solemnity of the feast, he might be foolish fun.