Cannibals and Missionaries

by Mary McCarthy

  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

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Envoi

  Acknowledgments

  A Biography of Mary McCarthy

  One

  “BLESS, 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 relearning 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.

  He was a tall man, with a large loose-limbed frame, pale skin, gray widely spaced eyes behind big loose-fitting hornrimmed glasses, and gray-blond springy hair cut in a style conciliating a crew cut with a pompadour. In his college days, he might have been a footballer, though his movements now were somewhat awkward and flailing. His clothes, his glasses, his necktie, arms, and legs hung on him at a variety of angles, as though unsettled by a wind of change. At his waistline he had to fight the battle of the bulge: the priestly calling, though not exactly sedentary, gave a busy rector little regular exercise beyond genuflection and marching down the aisle at a measured pace behind the teetering cross while trying to keep step with the choir and the servers.

  His eager boyish features, as if to compensate, were extremely active. They wore, for everyday (excluding funerals and sick calls), several galvanic changes of expression racing from inquiry to bewilderment to joyful comprehension, marked by increasingly vigorous nods. A receptive person, the Reverend Frank, a listener rather than a talker. His ear was perpetually stretching to catch messages from the outer world, which often gave him the air of a deaf person, though his hearing was good. He was also a great waver, a sender-out of greetings, as from a large craft to smaller vessels sighted in the distance. This morning, despite his preoccupation, he had already, from under the canopy of his building, perceived a neighboring janitor, a delivery boy, the stationer from around the corner, and his arm, flung up, had flagged them, transmitting salutes.

  “Come on, Father,” interceded Frank, Jr., from the wheel of the car. “This is a No-Standing zone.” He was nineteen and destined for the ministry. His deep voice had a nasal honking sound not well suited to the pulpit or the intoning of the liturgy; unfortunately the defect had only become evident when his voice changed, and by that time his life-decision had been made. He was small and narrow-featured, with a long probing nose—different from his brothers and sister, who were tall and favored their parents. This morning, to take his father to the airport, he wore a blazer with his old school shield, blue button-down shirt, necktie, and flannels; his straight yellow hair was cut short and its cowlick subdued by water. Only his feet, in high sneakers and long for his general size, betrayed a kinship with the other three, now grouped on the sidewalk, the boys with sweetly tousled locks and slightly stooping, which gave them an air of benevolence, and all of them dressed in jeans and several layers of frayed sweaters.

  As a new pewholder had exclaimed to Helen, the Barbers were an “ideal family”: “Your children are straight without being square. You must give us your recipe.” In his parents’ eyes, that was not quite true of Frank, Jr., who was indeed what they called square nowadays but slightly off plumb. Though he was a wonderful son and a fine human being, he was at present his father’s chief worry, because of that voice and some tense aggressive mannerisms that, again, raised a doubt as to whether he really had a pastoral vocation. Given his sincere religious feelings, which abided no questioning, he might have been better off as a monk, the rector sometimes thought. A conventual discipline of early rising, fastin
g, prayer, and penance was an option that the Episcopal communion, perhaps short-sightedly, was ceasing to offer as an alternative to missions and parish work; it would distress but not surprise his father if one day the boy were to go over to Rome.

  On the other hand, the rector surmised, not for the first time, studying his son’s gaunt profile as the car headed down Park, he could be worrying about masturbation—a natural habit at his age, but he might feel it was a barrier to holy orders. Frank had had many good talks on the subject with troubled acolytes who did not dare open their hearts to their parents. At home, though, he was a parent himself in his children’s eyes, he guessed, despite his efforts to make them look on him as an older, understanding friend. The other morning at breakfast, finding just the three boys at table, he had tried to start a discussion on what Jesus would have said if a disciple had come to Him with Onan’s problem (“‘Let him who is without sin cast the first stone’” had been John’s amused response), but instead of turning into the good free-wheeling exchange he had hoped for, the conversation had died in its tracks. The two younger boys had had a giggling fit, and Frank, Jr., giving them a searing look, had asked to be excused. That was a mistake the rector was not going to make again: offering reassurance, as he ought to know, could look like prying to a kid who was already in doubt about himself. Helen thought that Frank, Jr.’s trouble, if he had one, would clear up, like his occasional acne, as soon as he found a nice girl to get engaged to. And as for the voice (women, bless them, were so down to earth), she thought maybe an adenoids operation…

  She and Frank had agreed, in last night’s pillow talk, that he ought to discuss Frank, Jr., and his vocation with the Bishop. The good old man had a lot of human wisdom, and Frank was looking forward to the long plane trip as a chance to draw him out on all sorts of matters that had been on his mind—the reforestation of the ministry, for example, the big issue that was facing the Church today and of which the question of Frank, Jr.’s vocation was only a tiny facet. Where was the Church going to find young men with deep spiritual convictions who at the same time were not mixed up and withdrawn or, to put it mildly—which was Frank, Jr.’s case—not able to deal with people on an ordinary parish level? And this raised the question of the Church’s real mission in modern society.