Cannibals and Missionaries

by Mary McCarthy

  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.

  It would not have surprised Aileen if her Mamma had married again; she had gentlemen friends who sat on the porch or in the “den” with her and took her out riding on Sundays. At seventy-six, she did not feel too old for sex, apparently: she had had it with Aileen’s father right up to the end, she confided, and still “missed him that way.” But you did not need to get married for that, fortunately. There was always somebody who wanted to sleep with you, Aileen had found. That was
one of the surprises of middle age—she would never have imagined when she was young that if you put some perfume on and left your room door on the latch in the Statler Hilton during the MLA meeting, a distinguished Russian specialist would come gliding to your bed. It had happened just this Christmas.

  As Aileen saw it, sex gave a woman only two problems. Contraception was no longer a worry, thanks to the menopause, which she had completed, with gratitude, last summer, but, as that problem had receded, the other—taking care with whom you did it and where—had become more acute. Permissiveness did not extend to older females—even Mamma was criticized if she pulled the shades when entertaining—still less to older heads of female institutions. Most married men could be relied on for discretion; they had their own motives for concealment. Nevertheless she had made it a rule not to be tempted by a member of the faculty, no matter how attractive, and in the case of a visiting lecturer to respect the prohibition laid down for students—not on college property. Her classicist had been an exception. The first time, it had happened in her house, and the next morning, before the maid came, she had had to wash the sheet and iron it by hand—taking it to the laundromat would have been too risky. After that they had met in Boston hotels.

  In general nowadays she kept sex for vacations and the professional conferences that figured more and more on her calendar. Some of her nicest memories were of “stolen” interludes during forums and panels with interesting men whom she never expected to see again. And if sometimes their paths did cross a second time, at another round table, there was seldom any further question of sex. Yet she remembered and, meeting their eyes in the course of some boring presentation, she knew they remembered too.

  Thanks to her mother, she did not have to feel tied to Lucy Skinner. Mamma had made a home for her. She had her room, with her familiar things; her old trunks were stored in the cellar; in the den were her photograph albums. There were files of her correspondence in the attic, her doctoral thesis, programs of seminars she had attended, with the papers that had been read. Her summer dresses were waiting for her, hung up in bags, with lavender. But that was another thing: her mother was getting on. When she went, Aileen would be alone, with no center to her life. A room at one of her sisters’ with full-grown children under foot would not be the same at all. It was Mamma’s fault that she had never been domestic. She had mastered a few French and Mexican recipes for entertaining, and her sisters had taught her to iron. But housekeeping was Mamma’s sphere, so that Aileen had not been able to develop her own touch and style, except in clothes. The President’s house at Lucy Skinner bore few marks of her occupancy beyond some gay pillows she had scattered about, for students to sit on the floor on, some old prints of French cities, and her record collection. Buildings and Grounds supplied flowers twice a week and arranged them—she did not have Mamma’s “hand” with bouquets—and the china and glassware she used reflected the taste of old Miss Smith, her predecessor. Even if Aileen had known how, she would not have tried to make the impersonal house homey.

  She spent most of her time in her office, surrounded by the clacketing of typewriters and the ringing of telephones in the anteroom. At night, when she was not invited out to dinner or entertaining officially, she would eat in one of the student dining-halls or sit down at a table in the college snack bar, where a group would immediately join her. She dropped in on classes, films, exhibitions, lectures, and could usually be counted on to rise in the audience, wrapped in a bright shawl, and ask the first question. After college events, she would have students and faculty in for drinks. These habits had made her popular; Miss Smith, a shy academic woman, had been almost a recluse.

  No one would have guessed—she thought—that underneath her liveliness was an awful fear of loneliness. Though she had been living by herself for nearly thirty years, she was seldom, in practice, alone. If she had to be alone for a whole evening, she poured herself a bourbon, listened to the news, telephoned, played the phonograph. She had lost the feeling she had had as a girl that a book could be a companion, which meant that she read less and less. She hated silence and sitting still and when she sank into meditation (as now perforce, on the plane), her thoughts were a kind of noise she kept going in her head. But she was getting a bit cracked, she feared. After a few drinks recently, playing Carmen one night, she had danced all by herself, clicking a pair of castanets she had brought back years ago from Mexico and stamping her heels, forgetful of how grotesque she would have looked if anyone had peeked in. Fortunately, the President’s house was in an isolated position, on a hillock.

  Late at night often, she would pick up the telephone and call her mother or one of her sisters; with the time difference, they would not be asleep yet. This lifeline to Arkansas, at arm’s reach when all else failed, had made her neglectful of the fact that her youth had gone while she was looking the other way. Of course fifty today was not old. There were examples of women older than herself who got husbands: George Eliot was sixty when she married Mr. Cross. But George Eliot was an exception for whom the laws of probability did not count. Aileen knew herself to be no such awesome phenomenon; lacking fame and a big brain, she was subject to the ordinary hazards of competition: unlike George Eliot, she was not even exceptionally homely, which had probably been some sort of advantage. Men were not afraid of ugly women. On the other hand, she lacked the je ne sais quoi that came from having been a beauty; she was betwixt and between, even though her appearance had benefited from the sharpening that age and wiser make-up had brought to her features, and she had kept her pert figure. In any case, at fifty, whatever you looked like, you could not expect a coup de foudre; time and proximity were necessary. But meanwhile you were being crowded not only by your coevals, entering the market via death or divorce, but by the oncoming generations, who were not looking for marriage necessarily—which made it doubly unfair.

  Sophie Weil, for instance. Calmly deciding to attach herself to their group, she had never given a thought probably to how Aileen as the only woman would feel. Now they were two, and Aileen’s chances of “making time” with the Senator were reduced to a forlorn hope. With a glamorous journalist in her thirties available for a “flirt,” he would not have a minute for a still attractive female of his own age—four whole years younger, actually. Unless he was a very unusual politician, he would soon be eagerly carrying the sullen New Yorker correspondent’s suitcases and deploying his Irish charm. And the meanness, the waste, of it was that the girl had no need of a silver-haired widower for a husband; if she was like most of her kind, she would be opposed to the entire concept of marriage, and it would not cross her mind that she was standing in the way of somebody who felt otherwise. To her, it would be inconceivable that a fifty-year-old educator could be any kind of rival.

  So that made one motive less for the voyage to Teheran. Nevertheless Aileen found herself slowly cheering up. Eliminating the Senator from her computations meant that she would be relieved of the labor of devising strategies to throw herself in his way: maneuvering to sit next to him on tomorrow’s flight, lurking in the hotel lobby to catch him as he alighted from the elevator, arranging to have herself appointed the group’s chairman so that she would have occasion to stop by his room on committee business, leave little notes in his box…. If she could swallow her disappointment now, she would be spared a host of future disappointments and humiliating setbacks. She could enjoy the time in Iran as a working vacation that might even benefit a few of her fellow-men. Not waiting for the movie to end, she opened Asad’s folder and switched on the overhead light. The awful torture-descriptions made her wince as she thoughtfully turned the pages, underlining the paragraphs that seemed most promising for the committee to follow up.

  It was extraordinary how altruism, a decision to focus on others, could put you at peace with yourself. Aileen was accustomed to thinking of herself as a good person (while always resolving to be better) but lately she had been having some doubts. Her quick sympathy with the Shah’s victims reassured
her: cruelty appalled her, and that was the main thing to watch out for in yourself—any tendency to be insensitive to suffering, if it was only a headache. Cruelty, she had read once, was the only sin a modern mind recognized as such, and she went out of her way therefore to be considerate, which was the reason her staff loved her. And want of consideration, when she observed it in someone else, could afflict her like the drilling of a tooth.

  Even in little things, like her neighbor’s lofty rejection of the Air France questionnaire—“Aidez-nous à vous mieux connaître”—which somebody had taken trouble to frame. It had actually hurt her to watch, out of the corner of her eye, as the green-printed card was tossed as if derisively onto the seat between them. She had been indignant for the card, which, like Aileen, was only asking for some innocent information: “Help us to know you better.”

  The pathetic fallacy at work! Cards did not have feelings. In the disdainful gesture she must have sensed a rejection of her middle-class self and her values, among which was the duty to be helpful and do as you were asked when no possible harm was involved. By her offhand act, Miss Weil was scorning Aileen for having filled hers out. But that scarcely explained—or did it?—the positive hatred Aileen had felt well up in her, almost like a physical thing. And now it was rising again as she tried to concentrate on the folder. “Pig,” she said under her breath, using one of their epithets. “Stupid, arrogant pig.”

  It was not the first time this had happened to her recently. In her office, she would watch poor harmless stolid Miss Meloney, who adored her, and catch herself thinking “Bag!” or even “Old bag!” though Miss Meloney was younger than she was and a virtuous spinster, so far as Aileen knew, and the only connection there appeared to be was that the secretary, too broad in the beam already, had the habit of bringing her lunch to her desk and wrapping the unfinished morsels—a half-eaten browning apple or a mustard-oozing sandwich—in one of those plastic tissues called “Baggies,” a package of which stood next to her typewriter. She had come to hate Miss Meloney and did not know why. The sole therapy she knew for that was to hug her a great deal and smile warmly whenever she caught her eye and send thoughtful little things to the poor girl’s mother, who was a shut-in.