The Three Sirens (36 page)

She decided that she must make her shame clear to Marc, she owed him that. Then, as she rummaged through her clothes for the white blouse and white tennis shorts, she realized that she was always apologizing to Marc for something, for lesser stupidities, indiscretions of speech, memory lapses, omissions of behavior, and it was not pleasant, it simply was not pleasant, and not fair either, always to be on the defensive. But last night was no small thing, a special failure, and she would apologize more strongly the second that she saw him.

She dressed quickly, and then, somewhat dragging, she made her way to the communal privy. She entered cautiously, and thanked the Lord only Mary Karpowicz, moody and monosyllabic, was there. After that, Claire walked slowly through the hot, marvelous sun to their hut. In the front room she did her toilet, and after making up her lips, she realized that someone, Marc or a native servant, had delivered a great bowl of fruit and cold cooked meat for breakfast, and near the bowl, piled high, their ration of canned foods and drinks. She ate sparingly, leisurely, from the native bowl, and when it was near ten o’clock, she went out into the bright village compound to seek Marc, tender her apology, and join the others in Maud’s office.

Except for children at the stream, the immediate thoroughfare was deserted. There appeared to be some human activity, comings and goings, at the far end of the village, before the Social Aid Hut and school. Then, she saw the two figures before Maud’s hut, and one was Marc. He was deep in conversation with Orville Pence.

Approaching, she wanted Marc to herself briefly, to tender the apology.

“Marc—”

He looked up, and suddenly, his face clouded. He touched Orville’s arm, and he came to her.

“Marc,” she said, “I was just thinking about—”

His hand cut her off”, sweeping downward before her, indicating her entire person. “My God, Claire, where the devil do you think you’re going?”

Taken aback, her knuckles went to her throat. “What—what’s the matter?”

He stood, hands on his hips, surveying her, shaking his head with exaggerated disgust. “Those damn tennis shorts,” he said, “look at them, right up to your crotch. What’s wrong with you? You know better than to wear shorts on a field trip.”

She was too stunned by his criticism to fight back. “But—but Marc, I didn’t know—”

“Of course, you knew. I heard Matty warn you and all the women in Santa Barbara. She’s always quoting old Kroeber—be delicate about the subject of sex, don’t wear shorts, don’t tempt the natives. You don’t listen to anyone, or if you do, you want to defy them. You seem set on breaking all the rules. Yesterday, you took care of sex, today you’re flaunting the shorts—what’s left? Sleeping with a native?”

“Oh, Marc—” she said brokenly, tears welling. “I didn’t—I didn’t know. It seemed sensible in this heat. They cover me. They’re a hundred times more chaste than those grass skirts—”

“You’re not a primitive, you’re a civilized American. That getup not only shows disrespect—the natives expect more of you—but it’s deliberately provocative. Now change, and better make it fast. Everyone’s in the office, waiting.”

She had already turned her back on him, not wanting him to have the satisfaction of seeing her hurt. Without another word, she left for the hut. She walked on legs that felt wooden, despising herself for having intended to apologize and despising him for making every day impossible. Either he was getting worse, she told herself, or she was performing more poorly as his wife. It was one or the other or—no, there was a third possibility that seemed more accurate: the influence of The Three Sirens, from the morning it had entered their lives with the Easterday letter, to this moment in the compound of the village—it was to blame. The sorcery of the islands had acted upon him and upon her, brought out the meanest side of him, every weakness and defect, and brought sharper, ruthless vision to her, so that she saw him, his essential self, unretouched by her own guilts, and she saw herself more clearly, too, and their life, their little life together as it had been, as it was, and as it would be.

Not until she arrived at the door of their hut did she fully defy him. Her shoulders went back, her breasts thrust against her blouse, and she was proud of last night. She hoped the men had looked hard and long. She hoped they had appreciated her. She was tired, tired, tired of being not enough, when she was so much, if only someone on earth would understand …

When Claire returned to Maud’s thatched office fifteen minutes later, in the acceptable anthropological uniform of blouse and cotton plaid skirt, she found all but Maud on hand for the morning’s meeting. They were gathered about the room in clusters, Marc still with Orville Pence near the table desk, and around the benches and seated on them, the rest of the team. Animated conversations were going on.

Ignoring Marc and Orville, Claire crossed the mat-covered floor to the group formed by the Karpowiczes and Harriet Bleaska. They were discussing the feast they had attended the night before, given by the native woman, Oviri, a close kin of Paoti, who was in charge of the forthcoming festival week. They were engrossed in recreating a historical pantomime they had witnessed, and Claire slid away and sat down beside Rachel DeJong and Lisa Hackfeld on the far bench.

So distraught was Lisa that she hardly greeted Claire, although Rachel winked at her pleasantly. Claire tried to pick up the thread of Lisa’s aggravation.

“—know how upset I am, how much it really bothers me,” Lisa was saying. “I had personally packed the full six-week supply of those precious bottles, wound them round with cotton batting—”

“What bottles?” inquired Claire. “Scotch?”

“Much more important,” said Rachel DeJong, making a good-natured grimace at Claire. “Poor Mrs. Hackfeld brought along a supply of peroxide and blond rinse, and when she went through the crate this morning, she found every bottle smashed.”

“Gone, all of it gone,” groaned Lisa. “And no one has anything suitable to loan me. I could weep. I don’t know, Claire—may I call you Claire?—maybe you have something—”

“I wish I did, Lisa,” said Claire, “but I haven’t a dram of anything.”

Lisa Hackfeld wrung her hands. “Ever since I’ve—since I’ve grown up—I’ve used hair coloring. I’ve never been a week without it. Now what’s going to happen to me? In a couple of weeks, it’ll all be natural. I’ve never seen myself that way—Jesus, suppose I have some gray hairs?”

“Mrs. Hackfeld, there are worse fates,” said Rachel with reassurance. “Many women think it smart to prematurely gray their hair.”

“You can do it when you don’t have to,” said Lisa, “but when maybe you have to, that’s another thing.” She caught her breath. “I’m not an ingenue any more,” she said. “I’m forty.”

“I can’t believe it,” said Claire.

Lisa stared at her with startled gratefulness. “You can’t?” Then she remembered, and said bitterly, “You’ll believe it in a week or two.”

“Mrs. Hackfeld,” said Rachel, “in a week or two you’ll be too occupied to think about it. You’ll—” She halted abruptly, and pointed off”. “There’s Dr. Hayden coming in now. She should have a good deal of news. I’m sure we all can’t wait to get started.”

* * *

Everyone was seated, either on the benches or on the floor matting, except Maud Hayden, who stood beside her desk waiting for the last private conversation to cease. Despite her ludicrous attire—she wore a wide-brimmed straw hat, locks of her gray hair straggling out from under it, no make-up on her puffy sunburned face, several strands of colored beads around her neck, a sleeveless print dress from which her jelly arms protruded, khaki scout stockings that came to below her knees, square contour shoes that seemed Martian—she appeared more professional and zestful than any other person in the room.

When her colleagues were quiet, Maud Hayden began to address them in a manner that vacillated from the brisk scientific to the conversational maternal.

“I imagine most of you have been wondering what is going to happen next,” she said, “and I’ve called this first meeting to tell you. I’ve spent the morning since daybreak with Chief Paoti Wright and his wife Hutia Wright, both charming and friendly human beings. While Hutia has some fear of us, and consequently some reservations about what we should be allowed to see and do, Chief Paoti has overruled her on every count. Since we are here, he is determined that we shall see and do everything that we wish. He depends much—he was clear about this—on Mr. Courtney’s word that we will respect their customs, their way of life, their dignity, their tabus, and report what we shall observe and learn honestly and scientifically, while maintaining our pledged secrecy about the general location of their islands.

“Now, everything is not being offered us on a silver platter, so to speak. We shall be guided by others at the outset, offered every bit of information, introduction, cooperation that we require. After that, it is understood, we will largely be on our own. Every effort will be made to integrate us with the village and its daily life. I pleaded for this. I don’t want any special considerations. I don’t want concessions and changes made for us. I don’t want them to consider us as visitors to a zoo. And I don’t want any of you to regard them as a zoo. The understanding is that, as much as possible, we are here as fellow tribesmen from the other side of the island. Being realistic, I know it can never work that ideal way, but Paoti has promised to do his best for us, and I have, on behalf of all of you, promised that this will be our own attitude. In short, we are not here as mere outside observers, but as participant observers, trying, when we can, to eat, labor, fish, farm, frolic with them, and take part in their rites, such as their games, sports, festival. This is, to my mind, the only approach to take in finding their real cultural pattern. The degree to which we succeed will determine, for each of us, what contribution we make to anthropology, and our respective fields, with this study of The Three Sirens.

“Few of you have been in the field before. The Karpowiczes—Sam, Estelle, Mary—have been in the field several times, Marc made one trip some years ago, and Orville—I think, from this moment on, we should get on a first-name basis with one another—Orville has made a number of these field trips. However, Claire is new to this, and so are Rachel, Harriet, and Airs.—and Lisa. And so, though I may be covering old ground for the experienced ones, I want them to bear with me while I address mainly the ones to whom this is unfamiliar. In certain specifics, of course, there will be some valuable information for the veterans among you, too. So, I repeat, bear with me briefly, all of you, and when I am done, I think you will understand better your role here, what is expected of you, preliminarily what you can and cannot do, and what lies ahead for all of us.

“Now, social anthropology and study in the field may be older than you think. Among the first to leave his home—in his case Oneida, New York—and go out and scientifically observe another society was a young scholar named Henry Schoolcraft. He went among the Chippewa Indians, he made notes—good notes, recording numerous fascinating customs—for example, that when a Chippewa woman touched an object, it was automatically tainted and thereafter shunned by males of the tribe.

“However, many regard Edward Tyler, an English Quaker, as the man who made social anthropology into a science. In his long life, he went on many trips into the field, one of the most notable to Mexico. He gave us two important doctrines—that of recurrence, meaning you go out and find a similar custom or bit of folklore in Canada and Peru and Egypt and Samoa, and this gives you a lead to reconstructing prehistory—and the doctrine of survival, meaning that certain seemingly pointless behaviors that have survived the past probably had real purpose at one time. These pioneers gave greater motive to future work in the field.

“I can see from some of your faces that you fear old Maud might be winding up for a long lecture. You need not worry. This is not the time or the place for teaching anthropology. I’m just trying to make you understand the historic impetus that sent you catapulting across a great ocean to this strange place. One or two more references to history and then I promise you, no more, and we’ll delve into practical matters. The first team, a team like our own, to go out into the field and make a scientific study of a culture was one led by Alfred C. Haddon around 1898. Years before, Haddon had visited volcanic Murray Island, off New Guinea, and lived among the Papuans. The second time, he went back with a team of experts—two psychologists, a photographer, a musicologist, a linguist, a doctor, and himself, as anthropologist. The psychologists gave the natives tests in drawing and sense perception—they pioneered what Rachel and Orville will be doing here—and Haddon and the others, since the island had been somewhat corrupted by missionaries and white magistrates, toiled at reviving the rites and ceremonies of the past, when the Papuan men went naked and the women wore no more than split-leaf skirts. The team worked eight months in the field, and when they brought their findings back to Cambridge, they had proved the value of using a team of experts and had opened a new approach for future anthropologists.

“I could go on for hours speaking to you of the great anthropologists and field workers who are indirectly responsible for our being here this morning. I wish I had the time to tell you about that German genius, Franz Boas, who taught me—who taught Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Alfred Kroeber, as well—so much about collecting, tirelessly collecting, raw data. Do you know, once Boas became interested in the graying of human hair, and he went about the barber shops of New York until he had collected and classified more than one million strands of hair. I suspect that he disliked living in the field, but he was determined to verify every theory through firsthand inquiry. He was constantly in the field, from the time of his initial trip to the Arctic to live among Eskimos when he was twenty-five to his last trip among Indians when he was seventy. How much you might learn from knowing Boas, and of the other giants in anthropology—Durkheim, Crawley, Malinowski, Lowie, Benedict, Linton, Mead, and my own beloved husband, Adley Hayden—but it is enough to know that we are their heirs, and that because of what we have learned from them, we can study the Sirens’ society here with some effort at scientific precision.