Cannibals and Missionaries (7 page)

He was an old man, nearly as old as the Bishop but extremely well preserved, like a thin dried haddock. The raven hair was his own but certainly dyed, and his face was powdered with talcum. He wore a suit of coffee-colored silk, with many flaps and pockets, that looked as if it had been made for a planter in Java before the First War, an elegant soft shirt, and a beige waistcoat; on his feet were black silk socks and long shoes the color of old-time stove blacking. He fitted a cigarette into an ivory holder, and his jewelry consisted of monogrammed gold cufflinks, a plain heavy gold ring, like a man’s wedding band but worn on the right hand, an antique ring with an intaglio cut in some pale gem, and the latest thing in costly wrist-watches. And he was on his way to Teheran.

“On a
tour.
Can you imagine it? I’m part of a first-class
package.
” The Bishop’s response, inaudible, could be inferred by anybody who was curious. “You too, dear boy? Isn’t that glorious? I shall certainly play hookey.” Charles’s tour was tremendous value, Economy class heard: first-category hotels, chauffeured limousines, archaeologists serving as guides, delicious food (they
said),
all included with the air fare, for less than it would cost Charles to dine out for a week in New York. Aileen was aware of a general stir in the public that perhaps represented envy. Nobody was paying attention to the hostess in the aisle demonstrating the inflation of the life jacket. “Trust the rich to find a bargain. I had no
idea.
In my poky way, I thought package tours were what my plumber takes. But I shall pay the price in socializing. My millionaires are up there drinking alcohol already. Full of Republican sound and fury. You should have seen the faces when I spoke to Senator Carey. Charming man. You would think, wouldn’t you, that collectors would be more civilized. That living with beautiful things would rub off on them. A total fallacy. By the bye, have you talked to the Senator? There in the front row; magnificent head. I suppose he’s bound for Paris to attend one of those ‘meetings’ politicians today go in for. I found him rather taciturn, I must say. You know he lost his wife.”

Charles remained oblivious of the commotion in the aisle caused by the news he had just disseminated, which was sending autograph-hunters forward with menus to be signed. “Such a joy to see you, my dear. And how splendid to know that we shall be together on the plane tomorrow. Sensible of you to go tourist class. The rich are only tolerable in their own settings. Those dreadfully named Bloody Marys they’re engorging. So menstrual, I always tell them. Well, as a good Democrat, I shall have a split of champagne with my lunch.”

The Bishop must have warned him that others were listening. Disappointingly, for a time nothing further could be heard. Aileen had resigned herself to yesterday’s
Figaro
and was scanning the Classifieds for items of interest when Charles again became audible, expressing concern for the Bishop’s health. “You’re dressed much too warmly, dear fellow. These carriers are always overheated. You’ll catch cold, and that will be tiresome for you. Light-weight summer suits, I find, are best for plane travel, in this natural color. It shows the dirt less than the dyed silks, despite what people tell one. Then I always travel with a shawl or two as well as a light overcoat. And you must be careful about the sun, even in winter out there. We shall have to find you a proper broad-brimmed hat. Felt, not a Panama, mind you. The tomb-towers, as you’ll see, can be damp.”

He had no suspicion, evidently, of the Bishop’s mission “out there.” The thought that any motive other than site-seeing could be operative had not crossed his mind. Aileen wondered how those two could ever have come to know each other; maybe ADA, she speculated. But if “Charles” was such a Democrat, why was he traveling with a group of rich Republicans? “Collectors,” he had said. She got up to go to the ladies’ room, edging past Miss Weil and giving a little wave, as she went, to the Bishop.

When she came back, with her hair fluffed out under her turban and fresh mascara, the Bishop was waiting to introduce them. “President Simmons, my old friend Charles Tennant. Won’t you join us, Miss Simmons?” “Well, just for a minute.” She took the vacant place between the two ancient men. Against the wall, near the serving-pantry, the Reverend was talking happily with a hostess, who was getting the drinks cart ready. “Charles is bound for Iran too,” the Bishop explained. “So I gathered,” said Aileen. “Did I hear you say something about collectors, Mr. Tennant? Is it a tour of
art
collectors you’re with?”

It was an archaeological tour got up by a band of “proud possessors” who were discovering Iran as it threatened to make itself scarce. The energy crisis was responsible for bringing them together on a common carrier; normally they would have chartered a plane or flown in a baby jet belonging to one of their companies—two of the men in the party were company directors. The poor dears saw this as their “very last opportunity” to tour the famous ruins, visit the museums, and explore some of the new digs before the Shah raised the price of oil again. There was a curator from the Fine Arts Museum with them, who was hoping to interest them in financing new excavations—an unlikely eventuality, Charles considered. “You mean the
Boston
Museum,” Aileen decided. “But why? Are you all from Boston?” She ought to have remembered that the museum was renowned for its oriental section. “Dear me, no,” said Charles. “We’re from New York and Pittsburgh and Cincinnati and Hartford and Worcester—the dark satanic mills.” “Charles lives on Mount Vernon Street,” put in the Bishop. “He has a crackerjack oriental collection.” “Almost nothing from Iran, alas. A few Khabur bits and pieces I picked up fifty years ago. No, our little curator is the only knowledgeable member of our party. Like some of the ladies, I’ve been ‘cramming’ for the journey.”

He turned to Aileen. “You must come to tea one day if porcelains interest you.” Then he gave a screech. “But you have some lovely Chinese work in your museum!” “You
know
our little museum?” Better than she did, she perceived, as he named a “hare’s fur cup” and some “priceless
blanc de Chine
” that she could not picture to herself—ages ago, in her predecessor’s time, an alumna had left Lucy Skinner a lot of
chinoiserie.
“Those people with you, are they important collectors?” she said.

“
Je regrette, monsieur…
” The steward was telling the gentleman that he would have to return to his own class; the hostesses were about to serve drinks and needed the aisle clear. The Reverend was waiting to reoccupy his seat. “Well, that was nice!” Aileen declared, when Charles had gone. “Bishop, do you know what a hare’s fur cup is?”

Back in her place, she had slowly grown pensive. The wine at lunch, probably, had done it. True to his promise, the Senator had come by, on his way back from the men’s room, for a short chat. But Miss Weil had chosen that moment to sit up and take notice (she had seemed utterly deaf to Charles’s incursion), so that the conversation, inevitably, was three-cornered. The Senator reported that Sapphire had lunched on salmon from the hors d’oeuvres course cut up and heated by the hostess and had declined a bowl of milk. The professor and the cat had the bank of seats opposite him, which appeared to amuse the Senator. Aileen did not dare ask him whether Lenz was continuing to drink; Miss Weil, she could not forget, was a journalist…. And when Aileen returned his visit, just before the film-showing, Lenz himself, shaved at last, was very much in evidence, with the caged animal beside him and a blonde hostess bending over murmuring “
Minette, minette.
” The Senator was calling him “Victor” and dispensing a fund of cat stories. Then came the turbulence announcement, and she had to climb over Miss Weil again and wearily strap herself into her corner.

It had been a strategic error not to elect to sit by herself. She had wanted to take the young woman’s measure, and the New York-Paris leg of the journey, she had estimated, would provide an early occasion. But almost the reverse had happened. She knew no more about Miss Weil and her intentions than when she had boarded, and the journalist, if she had cared to listen, had quite a lot of “material” on Aileen. It was sensing that girl beside her, like a silent criticism, that was inducing her to feel defensive about herself. Though she was not at all what they called “a calculating person”—much too outgoing and open to sudden impulse—she would not like a stranger to see, sometimes, the little reckonings that were going on in her head. And they showed sometimes, she feared, giving those who did not know her a bizarre impression. For instance, before lunch just now she had asked Charles too many questions—perhaps even the Bishop had noticed—which did not sound totally idle. But when she heard that there was a group of art collectors bound for Teheran up in first class and then in the next breath Lucy Skinner’s art gallery was mentioned, she could not help making a connection. Now her brain was considering how she could get at them and find out
what
they collected, which was natural in somebody who had to be concerned with gifts and bequests, while a contrary thought chain was leading her to wonder how she could avoid them if they turned up at Zoroaster’s Cube or the wall tombs of Naqsh-i-Rustan when she was with Senator Carey. She could not stop herself from
thinking,
any more than the average person, on being shown 2 and 2, could avoid making 4.

Her fault was only an unusual degree of mental activity. The curse of intelligence. Stupid people were unconscious of their slow-moving thought processes. But take Charles’s plain gold ring: a mind like hers could not fail to perceive immediately that it was on the “wrong” hand and be aware of what conclusions to draw. Though he must be nearly eighty and queer in every sense, there he was, a man and unmarried. With a fair share of worldly goods. If he owned a house on Mount Vernon Street and collected porcelains, he could not be, as she had first thought, some kind of gentleman guide. She could not be blamed if in the forefront of her idling mind these facts were turning over, along with the notation that she was fifty this year and single.

For some time now, ever since her
affaire
with the head of the classics department had ended, she had been looking at men from that angle. To her shame, even the Bishop had passed through her head this morning. The deterrent was not the dead wife, so hard to replace, or his age, but the fact that he was too sweet: when he died, she knew she would suffer. She did not
mean
to be sizing up old men; it was almost cruel. But so few men of her own age were available. Most men of her own age were either married or queer. A married man could always turn into a widower, but a queer remained a queer, though an old one, if you had some interests in common, might prove to be your best hope, assuming he was no longer very active sexually—a women’s college would not offer many fleshly temptations. Yet what if she were called upon to be the first woman president of Harvard or Yale? In that event, a homosexual consort would be a liability.

Her bald approach to this topic seemed to distress her friends. “Honey,” her PR man said, “you shouldn’t talk that way in front of me. I’m a
man.
You shouldn’t even talk that way to yourself. You got to leave something to fate.” But Aileen had no trust in fate. She preferred to see this as a problem for study, researching the field of “availables” in the same spirit as she leafed through scholarly publications in the hunt for a candidate with the right qualifications for an expected vacancy in one of the departments. And with luck she might kill two birds with one stone; that was how she had found her classicist, an excellent teacher and a grass widower. But then, when he was settled in, with a nice house and a top salary, his mercenary wife had returned to him. Divorced men were a mirage: they either went back to their wives or married someone much younger, the way they would turn in an old Buick for a new Volkswagen.

She was not the kind married men left their wives for; she had learned that cruel lesson in her thirties. So her choice ought to lie between widowers and bachelors, which was not a bright outlook, given the known facts that most wives outlived their husbands and that most bachelors were disguised halves of a homosexual couple.

She ought to have married when she was young, but then she had not wanted to. She had prized her independence. Making her own way up the academic ladder, she did not fancy adding the burden of a husband to be carried along; the Ph.D. candidates she met in the graduate-school mills and in the cafeterias and faculty dining-rooms of small Southern colleges were far from enticing
partis,
and the deans and department heads had their careers already made and would never forsake tenure as well as their wives and children to follow her north when the call came.

The typical academic married too early; as a student, she had taken note of this classic mistake and made up her mind to learn from it. A woman had the advantage of being able to discard an outgrown spouse without being bled for alimony, but even so, casting off a husband who had become too small for you, like a child’s pair of shoes, was bound to be painful and exhausting. Aileen was careful with her energy, which she kept for her career, her family, and her friendships. From the little experience she had had of it, she wanted no truck with remorse.

If it had not been for her family, she might have married nonetheless—the inevitable childhood sweetheart, who was still in Fayetteville and a doctor. But her family gave her the emotional nourishment and sense of belonging a woman needed. She was close to her brothers and sisters, all settled in Fayetteville, and truly loved her mother, an intelligent woman (even if she had only a high-school diploma) from whom she had got her brains. Once her Papa had died, her Mamma had wonderfully grown and developed, politically as well as culturally—she had been in the local anti-Vietnam-war movement, written regular letters of support and advice to Senator Fulbright, and at the age of seventy-one had got on a bus to Washington to march in a demonstration. Aileen had been helping her family ever since she had left home. In the summers, she insisted on paying her keep, though her mother now was reasonably well fixed, with her father’s life-insurance and the widow’s benefits she drew from the federal government—Papa had been a mailman. Mamma owned the house free and clear, rented rooms to students during the term, and occasionally gave a hand to her former boss, who was now eighty, with the accounts and inventory in the old feed store, which had expanded into a big hardware and housewares business and was mainly run by his daughter.