The Three Sirens (22 page)

Through the dinner, Maud had the field to herself, and her handling of this victory and her presentation of her new exhibit had been engrossing. Except for salvaging his pride by confirming, one authority to another, some of Maud’s digressive travel observations, Garrity had devoted himself to his food. Two or three times, in an undertone, he had engaged Marc, privately, and Marc had seemed absorbed by him.

It pleased Claire that Garrity was exactly what she had expected, except for being even more pathetic and foolish, and there was no surprise in him. For Claire, the real surprise of the evening had been Lisa Hackfeld. Except for her attire, there had been nothing frivolous about Lisa. She had been easy, nice, unassuming, and curious. She had come prepared to sit at Maud’s feet, and so she had come to Maud without any guard of pretense. She knew little about anthropology, about field work, about Polynesia, and she admitted it, but she wanted to know more, know everything all at once, consume gobs of information. Throughout the dinner she had questioned Maud steadily, especially about The Three Sirens, to Maud’s utter delight and Hackfeld’s relaxed pleasure.

Now, picking at her dessert—she had been too nervous all the evening to eat properly—Claire covertly studied the guests. When she had made out the place cards in the afternoon, Claire had wondered whether or not the arrangement should be female-male-female, but Maud would have none of it. She had wanted the guests seated to the best political advantage. Maud sat at the head of the table, with Cyrus Hackfeld at her right, and Lisa Hackfeld at her left, and at this moment she was prophesying what living conditions would be like in the field when the team settled on The Three Sirens.

Next to Lisa, cutting his cherry tart, sat President Loomis of Raynor, resembling somewhat the ailing President Woodrow Wilson, and across from him, cutting her cherry tart, sat Mrs. Loomis, resembling no one. Once, during the time of the second drink, and again, during the soup, Loomis had tried to set forth his views on the contrast between higher education in America and the U.S.S.R., this apropos of nothing, and he had found that no one except Claire was attentive and had retired into the attitude of wise listener, as did his mate. Now they remained silent, masticating their desserts, two distinguished pillars of salt. Across the table from Garrity, Claire was seated beside President Loomis, and on her other side, at the foot of the table, Marc leaned toward the travel writer, nodding as he heard him out, the words an indistinct hum to Claire.

With everyone occupied, Claire examined Rex Garrity more closely. She had guessed a little about him before this evening, but now she felt that she knew considerably more, perhaps all that there was to know. Watching him, intently bent toward Marc, she could see that he must have once been a beautiful man, like an ancient Greek poet who was also a hero of the Olympics. In his prime, a quarter of a century before, he must have been a graceful, slender young man, with wavy blond hair, a thin and angular face, a curiously effeminate manner overlaid on a strong, wiry body. Time had been his worst enemy, and in more ways than one, Claire suspected. His hair was still blond, still wavy, but it appeared stiff as straw and artificial as a toupee. The face had fought a thousand dietary battles, so that it had probably been fatter and thinner many times, and now it was so ravaged by vanities and drink that the flesh hung loosely and the skin was red-blotched and veiny. As to the body, it was a desperate remnant of the old Yale slenderness, the old bestseller and on-the-heels-of-Hannibal and in-the-footsteps-of-Marco-Polo slenderness, the shoulders wide and hips narrow but the belly oddly protruding, as if it were the only anatomical part of him to surrender to time.

Claire examined him ruthlessly, and estimated to herself that he was between forty-eight and fifty-two. And she understood, as positively as she knew about herself, that these were his bad years. Shortly after his arrival, she had overheard a light bantering between Garrity and Cyrus Hackfeld. It had told her that Garrity had gone to Hackfeld this day to request a grant from the Foundation for some kind of travel stunt, and Hackfeld had turned him down, explaining that the Board would spare no funds for unscientific, carnival endeavors. Claire suspected that the worst of it, for Garrity, was that the world had gone on past him, and he had stood still with his same old repertory, and the world was no longer interested in the performer it had left behind.

During the decade of the thirties, there had been an audience for Garrity. It was a time between big wars, and there was still some hangover from the crazy twenties, and there was the Great Depression from which men wanted to escape by assuming other identities. Garrity had provided them with a romantic identity for just such an escape. He had embodied, in his person, all dreams and yearnings for faraway places and exotic adventures. He followed the trails of legendary heroes, avoiding death, saving damsels in distress, discovering hidden ruins, scaling lofty mountains, musing in the shadows and moonlight of the earth’s Taj Mahals, and he wrote about these juvenile escapades and he lectured about then v and millions paid to leave their skulls and skins and vicariously gel away from it all with him.

It was the forties that had damaged Garrity, and the fifties that had destroyed him. In the forties, the sons of his audience had been forced to leave their insular existence and go out into the world, to the aged cities of France and Italy and Germany, to the sands of Africa, to the jungles of the Pacific, and they had seen these places with the hard cynical eyes of reality. They had been where Garrity had been, and they knew his romantic adventures were lies. They knew more than he did about the faraway places and the truth of them, and they had no patience with Garrity, despite the permanent credulity of their parents who did not know better. By the fifties, the old audience was slipping away and the new audience was not his own. The new audience, and its heirs, had no inclination to read about adventures, presuming there were any left, when in the time it took to read a Garrity book they could visit, in person, via jet transportation, the ruins of Angkor and the Isle of Rhodes and the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The world was suddenly too small, all of it too accessible, for interest in secondhand travel romance. When you could see for yourself inside the magician’s box, as he sawed the girl in half, there was no more wonder in seeing the magician. An international war and the turbo jet were Garrity’s graveyard.

Claire’s musings gave her almost a sense of pity for this relic. He still published, but almost no one bought. He continued to lecture, but too few came to hear. He still traded on his name, but not many under fifty remembered or cared. The matinee idol had been forsaken, but would not believe it. He carried his past with him every waking minute, and kept it alive with liquor and fanciful projects. He was gesturing now, as he whispered to Marc, and these gestures were even more effeminate than earlier. In a sudden revelation, Claire saw what had been concealed so long but was now, from uncontrollable anxiety over failure, exposed often. He was a homosexual, had always been one, but before this, his virile paper romances had provided camouflage. Tonight, without this camouflage, the truth could be seen nakedly.

Promptly, Claire sorted her own judgments of Garrity-as-homosexual. Claire had no negative feelings about deviates. The few that she had encountered, in her short life, she had found wittier, more clever and sensitive, than normal males. Also, she supposed, she felt easier with them because they were nonthreatening. No, definitely, it was not Garrity’s obvious deviation that was making Claire relinquish distaste for him and replace it with pity. It was his pretense that made her want to commiserate with him.

Observing him across the table once more, she abandoned understanding for her original emotion of disapproval. She sat back, touching her napkin to her lips, wondering again how Marc could be so absorbed in this bluff half-man, held erect by no more than yellowed press notices and remembered compliments.

She turned her head and looked up the table as the dessert plates were being removed, and she caught Maud’s eye. Almost imperceptibly, Maud nodded to her, and Claire dipped her head in acknowledgment.

“Well,” Maud called out, “I think we’d all be much more comfortable in the living room. Claire, would—”

Claire, with a fumbling gesture of assistance from President Loomis, had already risen. “Yes, I think that’s a good idea. Mrs. Hackfeld—Mrs. Loomis—and Marc, forgive me, Marc, I hate to interrupt, but if you’d get the liqueurs … ?”

There had been a general rising of all guests. Like a social director in the Adirondacks, Claire was at the archway, herding the Loomises into the living room, and then Garrity and Marc. As she took Lisa Hackfeld’s arm, she saw, over her shoulder, that Cyrus Hackfeld was about to start for the living room, too. But Maud, who had been addressing him, added something more, and Hackfeld eyed her questioningly, nodded, and moved with her to the far dining room window. The moment of truth, Claire thought, and she crossed mental fingers, and went with Lisa Hackfeld into the living room to play diversion.

While Marc doled out slivers of apricot liqueur and of Cointreau, and droplets of Armagnac and of Benedictine and Brandy, the guests aligned themselves uncertainly around the broad living room. It was, Claire told herself, so much like the opening of a play before the main actors appear, when the telephone rings and the maid answers it, and the supporting players, marking time, cross the stage with their banalities. Desperately, one wanted the stars to generate excitement. Nevertheless, Claire had her duty and was determined to perform.

She sat across from Lisa Hackfeld. “Mrs. Hackfeld, did I overhear you ask my mother-in-law about the festival on The Three Sirens?”

“Yes,” said Lisa. “It sounds absolutely fascinating, like a celebration we should have over here.”

Marc paused in his serving of drinks. “We have holidays, we have the Fourth of July,” he said wryly. And then, because Lisa Hackfeld appeared bewildered, Marc hastily explained with a forced grin, “I’m only kidding, of course. But seriously, within the confines of our civilized state, we have countless means of celebration. For better or worse, we have places to—to relax with a drink, places to buy happy pills, places to seek diversion of every sort—”

“It’s not the same, Marc,” Claire said. “It’s all sort of artificial and unnatural. You were joking about our holidays, like the Fourth of July, but that’s a great example of what separates us from the Sirens. We celebrate with firecrackers—on the Sirens they become firecrackers.”

Lisa Hackfeld beamed at Claire. “Exactly, Mrs. Hayden! We have nothing like that at all—”

“Because, as Dr. Hayden indicated, we’re civilized,” interrupted Garrity. His blotched face had assumed the solemnity of a cardinal reading a papal decree. “I’ve been around those islands, and they all have festivals as an excuse to revert to their old animal ways. It is their way of getting around the missionaries and governors, to indulge themselves in base passions. I have no patience with the eggheads and ethnologists who give all those holiday games and dances, those lewd pelvic displays, high and fancy esthetic interpretations. Civilization has put a stopper on their indecent behavior, and they use any excuse to pull the stopper.”

Claire felt annoyed. “Is that bad?”

Quickly, Marc intervened. “Really, Claire, you sound—”

Claire beat him to it. “Uncivilized? Sometimes I wish I were, but I’m not.” She turned to Lisa Hackfeld, who had been listening, wide-eyed. “I think you’ll understand me, Mrs. Hackfeld. We’re all so kind of stepped on, squashed, pushed down, emotionally. It’s not natural. I think laws and rules and inhibitions are fine, but once in a while there should be license to shout and romp and let go. We’d all be better off.”

“You took the words right out of my mouth,” said Lisa Hackfeld, happily. “I couldn’t agree with you more.”

“Well, it’s all in the point of view,” Marc said, studiously. His manner had become all deliberation. “Mr. Garrity may not be far from the mark. Recent studies have indicated that the islanders most often use custom to disguise eroticism. Take the Fijians. They have this holiday game called
veisolo
. The idea is that young women invade the homes of young men to steal and hoard their food. But both sexes know the real object of the game. It is, unquestionably, an excuse to—to have intercourse. Basil Thomson wrote about such a game in 1908. A strapping Fiji girl entered a male hut to steal food, and found herself outnumbered by the male occupants. ‘Then followed a scene,’ said Thomson, ‘which suggests that there is a sexual significance in the custom, for the girl was stripped and cruelly assaulted in a manner not to be described.’ Now, as an anthropologist I find this very interesting. And I have no judgment to pass on it, except one—” He had turned fully toward his wife and Airs. Hackfeld. “Surely, Claire, you would not suggest this is fun or a practice desirable for—for all of us in this country?”

Claire knew him now, knew he was repressing irritation, from the slight tipping edge to his voice, from the bunching between his eyes that did not match the half-smile on his lips, and she realized that she must handle this. “Marc, you should understand me better than that—I was joking—I wouldn’t seriously suggest such a thing.” She could hear Lisa Hackfeld’s exhalation, a disappointment, as if Lisa felt she had lost an ally. While mollifying her husband, Claire fought to hold Lisa’s faith in her. “But to go back to that festival on The Three Sirens, it must be good for them since they’ve practiced it for so long. Of course, we can’t truly judge, because no one knows much about them.” She smiled at Lisa Hackfeld, and winked at her. “I promise you a full report next August.”

After that, the conversation was less spirited, more contrived and sluggish. Lisa Hackfeld made a few tentative inquiries about Polynesian customs in music and dancing, and Marc replied pedantically by quoting from published studies. President Loomis brought up the subject of Kabuki, but Garrity overrode him to relate an adventure he had once had with a harem of hula dancers at Waikiki.