The Three Sirens (64 page)

“Umm, I remember,” she said. “I remember wondering, the very first time I heard about it, why we didn’t have something similar at home. I wondered it aloud, at a party, and I’m afraid I committed social heresy.” Then she added, “In Marc’s eyes, I mean. He believes the Fourth of July, Christmas, Flag Day fill all our needs.” She was unable to modify this with a smile. After a moment, she peered off and could see the brown bodies and the single white one, in the distance, beginning to line up on the cliff’s edge. “The race starts it off, I’m told. How do they race?”

Courtney followed the line of her vision. “The starter will blow a bamboo whistle. They’ll dive off into the water.”

“That’s a terrifying dive.”

“Sixty feet. They swim free-style, no rules, across the lagoon. It’s about one mile across, I think. I timed last year’s swim at twenty-three minutes. When they reach the opposite terraced slope, over there, they go scrambling the fifty feet to the top. First man on top is the winner, king of the hill.”

“What’s in it for the winner?”

“Considerable mana before the young ladies. The whole event is an important symbol of virility and quite appropriate for starting off the festival.”

“I see,” she said. “Now it begins to make sense.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just something private. I was thinking of my husband.”

“I hope he can swim.”

“Oh, he can swim, that’s one thing he can do.” Then, curtly, she said, “Let’s get off our feet.”

They sat down in the trampled grass, Courtney with his long legs folded high before him, encircled by his arms, and Claire with her arms hugging her bare knees.

She studied Courtney’s broken bronze profile, as he looked off at the contestants readying for the event. She said, “Tom—after this—what goes on tonight, every night? That quotation from Frazer keeps sticking in my mind. It conjures up a mighty unruly week.”

“Nothing like that at all. No need for a Saturnalia, Roman style. There is just more freedom, more license, no recriminations. It is the week of the year in which these people open the valve and let off steam, sanctioned and legalized steam. Everyone gets double rations from the communal storehouse, including fowl and pig, double amounts of intoxicants if desired, there are dances, beauty-contests, all sorts of Polynesian games to watch or participate in, and there is the giving and taking of the festival shell—”

Claire thought of Rachel DeJong’s anger—real or feigned? probably real—at receiving a shell from Moreturi. Would she wear it? Participant observation, you know, unquote Maud Hayden. “Why that business of the shell?” she asked Courtney. “They have license all year with the Social Aid Hut.”

“Not quite,” said Courtney. “A native can use the Social Aid only if there is a real reason to use it. If challenged, he has to prove his need of it. During festival week, no one has to prove or explain anything. If a married woman has an eye on someone else’s husband, or some single man, she need only send him a polished shell to arrange an assignation. She can send out as many as she wishes. And the same goes for the men.”

“It sounds pretty dangerous to me.”

“It isn’t, Claire, not really, especially against the background of this culture. It is all discreet fun. If I’ve been married and had a secret crush on you all year, well, today or tomorrow I’d send you a shell. If you wore the necklace I’d made, we’d talk, arrange a meeting outside the village. This doesn’t mean that automatically, you’d sleep with me. It means let’s meet and talk, drink and dance, and see what comes next.”

“What happens next week?”

“Well, my fictional wife wouldn’t be angry with me, and I’d have nothing against her. Life would resume its routine course. Sometimes, not frequently, after this week, there are readjustments. New love affairs burgeon, and then the Hierarchy steps in to mediate.”

“What about nine months later?” asked Claire. “What if an extramarital child is produced by one of these affairs?”

“It rarely happens. Great care is taken. Their precautions are effective. When an offspring does result, the mother has the option of keeping the infant or turning it over to the Hierarchy to dispose of to some barren couple.”

“They think of everything,” said Claire. “Okay, I’m still for it.”

“It wouldn’t work back home,” said Courtney. “I’ve thought about it often, but no. These people have had a couple of centuries of orientation to it. They are prepared by background and from birth. We’re not ready at home. Too bad, too. I think it’s so sad, at home, the way you grow up toward marriage not being able to meet many people you think you might love. I remember once, in Chicago, standing on the corner of State and Madison, and seeing a slender young brunette, so lovely, and for ten seconds I was in love, and I thought, if only I could speak to her, go out with her, see if she was for me, but then the green light changed and she disappeared in the crowd and I went my way and never saw her again. No shell necklace to pass, you see. Instead, I had to confine myself to artificially created and limited social groups and make my choice from these. I sometimes feel I was shortchanged. You know what I mean?”

“I know.”

“And after marriage, well, the anthropologists know this, there’s no extramarital freedom at home, both sexes chafe along on the same rails toward old age, scenery ignored, side trips not allowed. Church and State are kept happy. It is unrealistic, and if you stay on the rails, it’s a strain, and if you don’t, if you sneak in a few detours, it’s also a strain. I’ve been there, Claire, I know. Remember, I was a divorce attorney.”

“Yes,” said Claire. “I guess a number of us have had the same feelings, brought on by the purpose behind the festival. We just haven’t been able to articulate it, or maybe don’t want to. Although, come to think of it, Harriet Bleaska did tell me that when we first came here, Lisa Hackfeld mentioned to her an awareness of some of the same shortcomings at home, the confinement of being single or married, that you’ve been talking about.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” said Courtney. “My own years in the Midwest seem incredible to me since I’ve lived here—”

A piercing, reedy whistle sliced through Courtney’s sentence, and an immediate powerful chorus of cheering from off to the left ended his reflections completely. Courtney and Claire swiveled their heads in unison and they saw the faraway line of contestants plunge free of the earth and plummet through space. Some arched gracefully and some spun crazily, flopping through the ozone like so many Raggedy Andys. The bodies all seemed brown, and then, near the water, Claire saw the one that was white and hairy, arms forward like an arrowhead, body rigid as a plank of wood.

Marc was among the vanguard of a half-dozen to hit the water.

Of them all, Marc alone did not actually hit the water, spatter it, but appeared to knife into it, cleanly, beautifully, and disappear from sight. Around him were splashes and geysers, and then heads bobbing afloat. And then, Marc slithered out of the water, five or ten yards ahead of his nearest competitor. Employing the Australian crawl, his white arms began to revolve, pulling at the water, head pillowed against the hospitable sea, legs opening and closing like scissors, leaving a trail of foam, as he sped ahead.

“Your husband’s got the early lead,” Courtney said, above the steady din of the spectators. “That’s Moreturi behind him, and right behind him Huatoro.”

Claire’s eyes shifted from Marc to the two brown figures thrashing in pursuit of him. Their swimming was choppier than Marc’s, more primitive and explosive. Both Moreturi and Huatoro were beating the water harder with their hands, rolling farther onto their sides to suck for air, kicking their legs more visibly. Minutes were passing, and yards behind the three leaders the other brown faces, brown shoulders, brown arms were beginning to string out.

Claire watched without emotion, quite detached here high and above, as if viewing the spectacle of small windup toys pitted against one another in a tub of water.

She became aware of Courtney’s watch, his finger touching the crystal. “Fifteen minutes and they’re at the half-mile,” he was saying. “Very good time. You were right. Your man can swim.”

My man, she thought, thinking at last, letting my man my man my man echo and reverberate in her brain chamber.

“Look at him open up that lead,” Courtney was saying.

She had been looking, but had not seen, so now she put mind’s sight into her eyes. It was true. There was open sea between Marc and the native pair, maybe a full twenty yards. She stared down at the white one, the great white lover, superior man, superior race, putting on his symbolic show of virility. Here again the persistently nagging questions: Do manly manners and manly feats make a manly man? Is Marc a man? Unless I know, how am I to know if I am a woman?

“You must be so very proud!” It was a thrilled young female voice addressing her, and Claire realized that the beautiful Tehura had come to kneel between Courtney and herself. The native girl’s eyes glistened and her white teeth shone.

Claire gave some kind of dumb nodding assent, and Courtney said teasingly to the girl, “Your friend Huatoro is not used to looking at another’s feet.”

“I have no favorite,” said Tehura primly. “Huatoro is my friend, but Moreturi is my cousin, and Marc Hayden is my—” She hesitated, groping in her limited word cupboard, and then concluding, “—he is my mentor from far away.” She pointed below. “Look, Tom, Huatoro is passing poor Moreturi!”

Ignoring the race, Claire stared wonderingly at the native girl. She had always regarded her as just one more attractive female of the village, a special female since Tehura had stood beside her at the first night’s rite of acceptance, but still one more member of a tribe being studied. Yet, for the first time, she realized that the girl had a closer relationship to Marc and herself. Marc was her “mentor.” She was Marc’s “informant.” For a good part of two weeks, Marc had spent long hours of days with her. This girl had probably seen more of Marc, in this time, than had Claire. What did she think of Marc, that strange, sullen, almost middle-aged man from California? Did she think of him as a man at all? How could she, who knew so much, think so, if Claire, who knew so little, was not sure? But these questions were fruitless. Tehura did not know Marc at all. She knew an anthropologist asking questions and making notes. She knew a muscular white man swimming ahead of her fellow villagers. She did not know the Puritan Father who had insulted the grass skirt, Tehura’s own, that Claire had worn in love last night.

Claire saw that Courtney and Tehura, and everyone behind them, were absorbed in the contest below. She sighed and leaned forward. Since she had last looked, the design on the green water, formed by the swimmers, had altered. Minutes before, she had thought that they resembled a long rope of foam, with knots strung out along the rope, the knots being the heads and shoulders of the competitors. The foam rope was gone. Instead, the design on the water was that of a tight triangle moving toward the stone shore beneath her. The front point of the triangle was still Marc, his wet, chalky arms moving out of the water and over and stroking down, like paddles of a Mississippi gambling boat. Diagonally behind, to his left, quite near Marc it seemed, was the broad-shouldered one called Huatoro. Diagonally, to the right, further back, was Moreturi. Then, closer than they had been before, the rest of the triangle formed by the other brown swimmers, with their relentless flaying arms, fluttering kicks, rollings, exhalings, inhalings.

She heard Courtney’s voice announcing to Tehura, “They’re closing in on him in the stretch. Look, there’s Huatoro. I didn’t think he’d have that much left—”

“He is strong,” said Tehura.

Claire was conscious of the swelling clamor of the spectators, and then it burst into pandemonium. As if lifted by the detonation of two hundred throats crying out as one stentorian bellow, Courtney and Tehura leaped to their feet.

“Look at them—look at them!” Courtney shouted. He half-turned, “Claire, you must see the finish—”

Unwillingly, Claire responded. The contestants, a portion of the front ones, had been briefly out of her vision, but when she came up next to Courtney and Tehura, she could see them all.

Marc had just touched the foot of the great benched cliff, and he was hauling himself out of the ocean like a soggy albino seal. He was upright, the first on land, and as he shook free of the film of water, he glanced over his shoulder in time to see the broad, powerful frame of Huatoro hoisting itself ashore.

Spurred by the closeness of the other, Marc started up the incline, with a five-yard lead over his rival. The banks of the cliff were craggy and steep. There was no worn path. One did not merely walk up it or march up it. Rather, one snatched it, each indentation above, did a pull-up, and caught one’s breath, climbing when the ladder rungs of stone were closer, but gripping and rising by force when they were separated. In this manner, Marc ascended the terraced slope, with Huatoro steadily behind him, as a swarm of others just touched the rocky shore.

Marc and Huatoro were halfway toward their summit finish, the judges on their knees above, waving, beckoning, encouraging, and then they were two-thirds toward the final height, and then Claire could see that Marc was faltering. As he reached each small bluff, and pulled himself erect, he took an increasingly longer time to propel himself to the next precipice above. Until these seconds, he had been as regular as a machine, but now it was as if the machine had become clogged and was slowing. Marc’s ascent became slow-motion, painful to behold. His pauses were longer and longer, as if the last of his strength had seeped out of him.

Fifteen feet from the top, on a narrow ledge, he stopped, staggering on rubbery legs, whiter than before, almost deformed by-fatigue. And here it was that Huatoro caught him, clambering onto a parallel ledge no more than three feet to one side. For the first time, Claire, who had been concentrating upon her husband, could plainly see his rival. Huatoro came up, side by side with Marc, with the vigor of a young, plunging bull. He hesitated only a split second to look across at his opponent, and then he reached one muscular arm upwards, and the other, and followed his arms with his rippling shoulders and torso.