Cannibals and Missionaries
Cannibals and Missionaries
A Novel
Mary McCarthy
To Rowland
and to the memory of
Will Scarlett
Dîtes donc, ma belle,
Où est votre ami?
II est à la Hollande,
Les hollandais l’ont pris.
Contents
One
“B
LESS, O LORD, THY
gifts to our use and us to thy service; for Christ’s sake. Amen.” Excited as a kid on the day of his confirmation, the Reverend Frank Barber raced through the grace and drank his orange juice. His gaze embraced his family, whose sleepy heads had slowly returned to an upright position. One chair at the long table was vacant. His eldest, he saw, had already finished his breakfast and taken his plate, cup, and saucer to the pantry. A crumpled embossed yellow paper napkin and an empty orange juice glass marked his place. “He’s gone to get the car,” said young Helen. Among his manifold blessings, the rector of St. Matthew’s, in lovely Gracie Square, was able to count garage privileges, extended as a courtesy to the church, over on York Avenue—a brisk seven-minute walk, great for chasing the cobwebs. He twirled the Lazy Susan in the center of the table and chose a medium-boiled egg from the basket. The eggs wore snug felt hats in the shape of roosters—a wonderful idea, he always thought: they kept the eggs warm and guided your selection, dark blue for medium, yellow for soft.
He was elated that his fledglings had all got up and dressed themselves—though it was Saturday; no school—to see him off on his mission. “Gosh, it’s so darned early, it’s practically dark out,” he marveled. On the table candles burned in two silver candelabra, a gift from the vestry for his and “old” Helen’s twentieth anniversary last July. On the sideboard stood four more candles, in saucers, that the youngsters had brought in from their rooms; they were pitching in to conserve electricity, on account of the energy crisis. In the fireplace a wood fire was lit (Frank, Jr., had brought the logs down in a U-Haul from the Dutchess County wood lot of a parishioner), and when the rector had arrived in the dining-room, “old” Helen had been bent over it in her wrapper, toasting English muffins on two forks, her face pink and her hair, pinned up in a knot with a single blond bone hairpin, starting to escape.
“I made the orange juice,” announced young Helen, who had a round face and long fair silky hair like her mother’s, “while my cruel brothers watched. Well, to be scrupulously fair, they set the table last night.” “She
counts
,” protested Matthew, the youngest, who was fourteen. There was a cell of women’s libbers in the sixth form at her school; in her brothers’ judgment, they were making a convert of her. Young Helen tossed her hair. “Matthew knows perfectly well that I’m doing a serious study of the woman-hours expended in this family. It’s a social science assignment.” John, aged sixteen, raised a finger for silence. “Members of the congregation, peace! Just think, tomorrow the Reverend Frank will be in Persia. And none of us, except Mother, has even been to Europe.” “Iran,” corrected his brother. “And it’ll be the day after tomorrow, for Father,” added young Helen. “Remember the time difference.” “I like to think of it as Persia still,” John said.
“But
they
don’t, John,” the rector interposed. “We have to respect their feelings. It’s their country. Like ‘black.’” He shook his head, recollecting. “We’ve all learned our lesson on that.” “Did you really call black people ‘Negroes,’ Father?” Matthew wanted to know. “Everybody did, Matthew. Except the ones that called them ‘niggers.’ You’re too young to remember.” He himself could remember “colored”—what a coon’s age ago that seemed! He gave a rueful chuckle and emended the worn old phrase to “raccoon’s age”: with oppressed minorities, he guessed, you kept
re
learning your lesson.
“But if it’s their country,” said John, “why are you going there to butt in, like a missionary?” “That’s a good question, John. But I don’t know that I can answer it now. Time’s a-flying. Or, rather, I’m a-flying.” His wife and children groaned. “Don’t try to slide out of it with one of your puns, Father,” said John. “If the Shah is torturing and executing people, that’s an old custom in his country. If the opposition got power, they’d do the same to him. I mean, isn’t this ‘ad hoc’ committee of yours just trying to be a salesman for Western democratic merchandise? And why pick on Persia, particularly? Why don’t you look into Ethiopia and Uganda too while you’re at it?”
Frank observed that his wife was waiting for his answer. She stood watching her brood and her challenged mate from her sentry post at the sideboard, the coffee-pot in her hand and her head to one side, like an alerted bird. He was on trial, he reckoned. She took the young ones’ questions more to heart than they did: out of the mouth of babes. But he knew that John was only probing, testing out his father’s ideas. The boy, who was the only dark one and wore big glasses, was his father’s favorite and his mother’s too maybe. They said you should love them all equally, yet even Our Lord had sinned in preferring
His
John, the Beloved Disciple, to the other eleven, who, unless human nature had been different then, must have been jealous of seeing him like that with his head in the Saviour’s bosom—had that been Judas’s problem?
Removing his mind from Judas, whose problems he often sought to understand, Frank tried to sum up succinctly why he
was
going to Persia—oh, shoot, Iran! Certainly not for a joy ride. “After all,” continued John, “the Shah is basically on
our
side. If you want my opinion, that’s why you’re going, really. I mean, you’re so darned liberal that you’re sort of perverse.” Frank’s face lightened. He jumped up and hugged the boy. “You’re right, John! You’re right! I’m perverse. I never thought of it that way. But isn’t that being a Christian? Jesus was perverse. Everybody thought so, even His disciples.” He threw back his head and laughed in delight while his family looked on with forbearing smiles. Then he went around the table, giving them each a hug and saving a special squeeze for “old” Helen, who was four months pregnant—they were still keeping it from the children, who were likely to ask what had happened to his strong position on planned parenthood and the population explosion.
The buzzer from downstairs sounded. Frank, Jr., must be getting impatient. Outside the dining-room windows it was morning now, and the January daylight filtering through the marquisette curtains made the candlelight look pale and trembly. The six cocky egg hats lay in disorder around the table. It was time to go. Frank blew the candles out, not waiting for Matthew, who as the youngest had the right to go around with the snuffer.
Taking a last look around the cosy room, the bright focus of his family life, he strode to the dark vestibule, where his big gray suitcase, his briefcase, and his light overcoat were waiting. At this season, it would be fairly cold (median, 38°) and dry in Teheran, according to their “bible”—the 1913
Encyclopaedia Britannica,
in which the boys had done research for him on the trip. So much of the article was out of date (the
Columbia Encyclopedia,
in one volume, which the children used for their homework, was current, thank the Lord), but he assumed that
Climate
had not changed greatly. When it came to
Fauna
and
Flora,
he was less easy in his mind: “…about four hundred known species of birds” had floored Matthew, the family ornithologist, and he had insisted on lending his father his field glasses. The rector hoped the boy was not in for a disappointment. The only oil mentioned in the entry came from “the castor-oil plant, sesame, linseed, and olive.” They had all had a good laugh over that, not stopping to think that the oil wells of modern Iran might have done something to the 1913 bird population. It was Frank, Jr., too readily a kill-joy for his brothers, who had pointed that out.
The
Britannica,
which had come down from the Canon, Helen’s father, was getting to be a bone of contention in the family. Frank, Jr., wanted them to buy the new, University of Chicago one—the clerical discount would bring the price down—and Frank, Sr., was beginning to agree, for reasons that this
flora
and
fauna
doubt had brought home to him: the other three, like Helen, Sr., loved reading aloud from the old set, but it was giving them a false picture of the world. They were still dreaming, on his behalf, of the country described by “Ed. M.”: “The Anglican mission has its work among the Nestorians of Azerbaijan.” “The flamingo comes up from the south as far north as the region of Teheran; the stork abounds.” “It is a strange custom with the Persian ladies to dress little girls as boys, and little boys as girls, till they reach the age of seven or eight years; this is often done for fun, or on account of some vow—oftener to avert the evil eye.” It was the same problem he faced over the new prayer book, which Helen and the children still rebelled against, preferring the hallowed old words. But prejudice, to Frank’s mind, was the greatest affliction you could pass on to your children, and a prejudice in favor of the past, though it looked innocent, could lead them to reject the good in modern society, along with the bad, which of course existed too.
He had been wondering whether, once he got home, he could arrange to have the
Britannica
have an accident—not a fire, because of the history of intolerance linked to book-burning, but a little flood, say, from a leaky radiator—when Helen had gone to the hospital for her lying-in. Such criminal temptations, in a good cause, were familiar to him. Back in ’68, he would not have objected to having a draft-card burned in his church, before the altar, though in deference to the vestry he might have offered the sacristy as an alternative.
It was quarter of eight. In the vestibule, the children, suddenly childish, surrounded him. “Your plane isn’t till ten. Why do you have to go so soon?” Young Helen wound her arms around his neck. He understood. The Barbers were not used to air travel—they were too numerous—and at the children’s age you could not keep news stories of plane accidents and hijackings from them. Maybe John, with his questions just now, had been begging his Dad not to go. Frank’s conscience, normally good, all at once misgave him. It pictured Helen to him as a widow with four dependent youngsters and another on the way. As the statesman-philosopher wrote, he that has wife and children has given hostages to fortune. There was a lot to be said, in the end, for a celibate clergy. Because, as a man of God, he
had
to go, darn it; he could not let his family ties stand in his way now. Helen, his tall mainstay, sent him a signal over the heads of the children: be off.
Frank cleared his throat, in which a lump was rising. “We have to stop for Gus first—didn’t Frankie tell you?—at the Commodore.” The name Gus seemed to act on them like a tranquillizer; the retired Bishop of Missouri, a stout old man in his eighties, was their summer neighbor in the Adirondacks—they had hiked the Indian trails with him and sailed with him on Lake Champlain. He was Frank, Jr.’s godfather and he had christened young Helen. “Oh, well. You’d better hurry then, Father. The Bishop will be on the sidewalk—do you want to bet?—with his watch in his hand.” They giggled. How volatile young creatures were!
John took his father’s suitcase, and the three rode down with him in the elevator. Helen, in her pink tailored wool wrapper, remained behind. The wife of the pastor of the venerable old Gracie Square church had to be careful. Pewholders lived in the building, and if she went down with him to the lobby as she was, the next thing you heard she would have been on the street “undressed.” Scandal-mongering was one of the little crosses of the profession, and the Episcopalians, for all their “worldliness,” were as bad as the Baptists.
For travel, under his spring overcoat, he wore a gray tweed jacket, flannels, white shirt, and a big maroon-and-white polka-dot bow tie that Helen had tied for him this morning. He never used a vest, too buttoned-up and reminiscent of the cassock; on vacations he sometimes put on a chamois waistcoat that had come down, like the
Britannica,
from the Canon. In his suitcase were some pre-tied bow ties in loud colors and energetic designs that the younger boys teased him about, two changes of suit (one dark), several changes of socks and underwear, a pair of black shoes, his slippers, tartan bathrobe, and pajamas, and his clerical dickey and collar. In his briefcase were light reading-matter, an extra bridge consisting of two upper left bicuspids and a molar, extra eyeglasses, Matthew’s field glasses, two heavy folders of documentation on “Torture and Illegality in Iran,” a shaving and toilet kit, the
Book of Common Prayer,
and his old pocket Bible—in a Moslem country, he did not think he could count on the Gideon Society.