Cannibals and Missionaries

by Mary McCarthy

  Yet where was the common factor between Miss Meloney and Sophie? Perhaps it was just her time of life and having a silent female body so close to her in a confined space. But there had been other signs of a growing divergence between her behavior and her feelings, which she found quite upsetting, especially as there could be no question of altering one to match the other: she could not change her feelings, and if she stopped sending Miss Meloney’s mother presents or struck Miss Weil, it might make her a whole person but not a person she would like better. Her best hope was that actions might occasionally prompt the appropriate emotions: a hug could sometimes make her feel warm. She would try to remember that with Sophie.

  The No Smoking sign went on. The plane was starting its descent. “Paree!” she called to the Bishop, who was peering out the window. Then, distinctly, they heard a hostess scream. Aileen closed her eyes tight. They were being hijacked, she supposed. She heard someone running down the aisle. A hostess raced past. A male voice was shouting angrily. Aileen peeked through her fingers. The pilot, or the co-pilot, was standing in front of the curtain that shut off first class. She could not see a hijacker. Then, toward the front, someone laughed. A word was passing along. “Le chat!” “It’s a cat.” “Sapphire,” needlessly explained the Reverend. “Keep your seats, please!” the officer ordered. “Everyone be seated. Attachez vos ceintures.” The hostesses and the steward were chasing the cat up and down the aisle.

  Aileen rose half out of her seat to see what was happening. It looked as if the animal might have escaped into first class. “But why did he let it out of its cage, Reverend? Mr. Lenz! How could you do such a wicked, dangerous thing?” “Asseyez-vous, madame! Et vous, monsieur, retournez à votre siège!” Paying no heed, Lenz was creeping down the aisle, making coaxing sounds. The cat was hiding, as they did when they were frightened. “Regagnez votre siège,” repeated the steward, not adding “monsieur” this time. “Dépê chez-vous.” A hostess came by, looking under the seats. “Minou, minou,” she wheedled. “Here, kitty, kitty,” essayed the Reverend. “I guess it doesn’t understand French,” he added to the hostess with a foolish laugh. “Oh, sir,” she replied, “you do not imagine the trouble that gentleman has made. He have taken minou from her box and hold her on his knees. I tell him he must not do that; it is forbidden. But he say the cat is crying. I have to call the steward. Then when no one is looking, he take her out again.” “Totally irresponsible!” Aileen declared. “You are right,” said the hostess. “And en plus he smoked in the toilet.” Aileen clapped her hand to her head.

  Sophie’s boot was exploring the floor. Her long arm reached down. “Why, it’s Sapphire; hello, Sapphire.” She scooped up the blue Persian and set her on her lap, rubbing her cheek against the long fur. “We must find you some catnip.” The passengers applauded as the hostess came to retrieve the now purring animal. The crew took their places against the wall. There was a bump, and the flight was over.

  On the bulletin board, after they had cleared immigration, the Reverend discovered a message addressed to Senator James Carey et al. LOOKING FORWARD TO MEETING YOU AT HOTEL EIGHT A.M. BREAKFAST. VAN VLIET DE JONGE CAMERON. The Senator held up the missive. “Does anybody have a guess as to how many persons that is?” It could be three or two or just one. He was laughing. “Come on, et al.’” Nobody knew. As they waited for their baggage he took Aileen’s arm. “Kind of a funny committee, isn’t it?” he murmured. Her eyes flew up alarmed and met his. Was he thinking of quitting? But no; he was just sharing his amusement with her. He would be a set-up for anything that tickled him, as she ought to have known.

  Outside, a long black car from the Embassy was waiting for him. He conferred with the chauffeur. “Bishop, ladies, step in.” He clapped the Reverend on the shoulder. “You go up in front, Rector. Sapphire and I will hop a taxi with Professor Lenz.” “Victor, please, Senator.” “OK, Victor, so long as you keep calling me Senator.” His deep soft laugh was still audible as the chauffeur closed the doors of the limousine and they drove off into the night. “A charmer, eh, Frankie?” commented the Bishop. Aileen glanced at Sophie Weil’s profile, trying to read the expression there. That he should have chosen a cat in preference to either or both of them to ride into Paris with showed how elusive of commitment he would be. She sighed. “A dreamboat. As we used to say down our way, Bishop Gus, remember? Tell us, what was his wife like?” The Bishop obliged.

  Three

  IN FACT, VAN VLIET de Jonge Cameron was two persons. They rose from a round table in the hotel dining-room to greet the Americans. Cameron had been drinking tea for his breakfast, which went some way to prove that the Oxford don promised by Sadegh had actually been delivered and stood holding a chair for Miss Simmons. He was a small, out-at-elbows, taciturn Scot, somewhere in his late forties—“painfully shy” was the diagnosis. “Had a good night?” he shot out and, unable to face the Yankee return fire, beat a retreat into silence, which he only broke of his own free will to ask permission to light up a pipe. Van Vliet de Jonge had been drinking café au lait and lit a cheroot. He was a handsome, strong-jawed, hazel-eyed, high-colored, talkative Dutchman, dressed in a whipcord suit of eccentric tailoring, with a long, well-cut, flaring jacket that had an unusual number of pocket flaps and sleeve buttons; for a tie, he wore a pale scarf folded like a stock in some ancestral portrait of a magistrate or town councilor. It was his birthday, he announced, in a cheerful voice with the sound of a tenor horn in it, and he offered a round of schnapps: he was thirty-eight years old and had already been twice a deputy in Parliament, had a Javanese wife who was a lawyer, like himself, and three children.

  While the waiter waited, the majority reached a consensus of Too-early-in-the-day. The Bishop surprised them by accepting a calvados: his doctor recommended an eye-opener for dilating the arteries and, as a matter of fact, it was his birthday too this morning. The conjunction of birthdays could not fail to be felt as significant—a favorable auspice for their journey. Cameron relented, taking a small whiskey; the Senator followed; the rest raised their coffee-cups, and a toast was drunk. “We must get you a cake!” Aileen said with determination. “How many candles, Bishop Gus?” Eighty-three, the old man admitted, shaking his round white head. “And one to grow on,” the Reverend added, bringing a pair of tears into the Bishop’s eyes, which caused the others to look away sympathetically: did he doubt, poor man, that he would live out the year?

  “How old is Sapphire, I wonder?” mused the Senator, creating a welcome diversion. “In human terms, I mean.” “Sapphire?” Van Vliet’s cigar paused alertly in mid-air; his comprehension of English was good. It was a relief too to have someone on the mission who had an ear cocked for detail. “A cat,” Miss Simmons told him. “She and Professor Lenz—the other member of our delegation—must be having breakfast in their room.” “A scrumptious blue Persian,” declared Miss Weil, abruptly rising. She was dressed this morning in a brown turtle-neck jersey, a long string of beads, and a skirt. They watched her cross the lobby, pick up her suede coat from on top of her suitcase, and vanish into the street.

  There were six left at table—a quorum. The small dining-room was empty except for themselves. “Should the meeting come to order?” inquired Miss Simmons. “Do we have any business to transact?” The rector cleared his throat. There was the business—he hated to remind them—of Monsignor Lopez de Mayo: where was he? A long story, answered Van Vliet de Jonge, but the short of it was not to expect him. “Mohammed should be here soon. He may explain. There seems to have been a misunderstanding.” The Americans nodded. “Well, I can live without a monsignor!” declared Aileen. “Can’t you, Bishop? Can’t you, Senator Jim?” The Senator grinned. “It’s our friend the rector who feels the need. But from what I gather—excuse me, Reverend—if we poke around the cathouses in the neighborhood, we can probably raise a cardinal.” Aileen gave a shriek of accord. The hotel, as they could hardly avoid noticing the night before, was on the edge of the red-light district. The only excuse that she could
find, in all charity, for having been put here—stained tablecloth at breakfast, dust under the beds—was that it was convenient for getting to and from the airport, being close to Châtelet, or—as the indulgent Bishop put it—from his window, by stretching, you could see the spire of Sainte-Chapelle.

  “Oh, what the heck,” said Frank recklessly. “I sign off on the monsignor. We’re having such a wonderful time without him. Isn’t this café au lait great?” As he helped himself to sugar, a cloud the size of a man’s hand passed across the beaming expanse of his features. He had remembered torture and illegality.

  Having discovered a birthday in common, they began, as strangers do when thrown together in a novel circumstance, to seek other matching data in their life histories, like players at gin rummy seeking to fill out a run or three of a kind. Senator Carey and the Dutchman were both lawyers; in addition, they had both been at school with monks—the Senator’s Benedictine and the Dutchman’s Dominican—and both held elective office. The Senator was still a Catholic, but Van Vliet de Jonge had disposed of his faith back at Catholic University in Nijmegen. The Bishop and the rector and Aileen had Protestant upbringings as a trait d’union with Cameron, who had been Church of Scotland, in other words a Presbyterian, which led Van Vliet to dilate entertainingly on the politics of Calvinism in Holland. Sophie Weil and Lenz, had they been present, might have found that they shared the Jewish faith, though with a name like Lenz you could not tell: he might equally well have been born a Catholic or a Lutheran. Van Vliet had served with the Council of Europe in Strasbourg and knew the street where Aileen had lived as a graduate student. Strasbourg brought up the subject of storks, which reminded Van Vliet of the herons’ nests in the tree-tops of his garden in a suburb of Amsterdam. Reverting to the stork, Senator Carey wondered how it had displaced the cabbage-leaf as the explanation of where babies came from: was it a German carryover? He had had a German grandfather by the name of August on his mother’s side, which was Bishop Hurlbut’s case as well.

  The rector had been wearing a look of deepening perplexity. “Excuse me, Professor Cameron, but aren’t you a lawyer too? That would make three.” “A lawyer? Dear me, no.” Frank persisted, sensing a semantic obstacle. “But you’re a professor of jurisprudence. With us, a professor of law is a lawyer. Isn’t that right, Senator?” “With us too, I believe,” Cameron said. “But I’m not a professor of jurisprudence, you see.”

  The rector fell back in his chair. He stared despondently at the Bishop and shook his head as if it had grown too heavy. “We’ve been misled again, Gus.” “Sorry,” said Cameron, swallowing. “Awfully sorry to disappoint you if you were expecting a jurisprudence man. I can drop out if you like.” Apparently they had all been eyeing the poor fellow accusingly, as if he were an impostor. “Don’t think of that,” hastily begged the rector. “We’re all in this together.” He took counsel with himself and sighed. “Maybe we should have a vote on whether to go ahead or just throw in the sponge. Which I’d certainly hate to do. But these young Iranians—let’s be honest with ourselves—don’t seem to have our Western conception of the truth. I won’t bore you with the details, Mr. Cameron and Mr. De Jonge—well, there was a rabbi they promised us who never showed up, and now the monsignor….” “And Sophie,” prompted Aileen, but on getting a quizzing look from the Senator she let the Reverend continue. “The kindest interpretation we can put on it is that they’ve tended to take shots in the dark, and the question is, do we want to proceed with what may be, darn it, a wild goose chase.”

  The Bishop leaned forward. “Easy, Frankie.” He turned to Cameron. “And what are you, then, sir? What is your field of work?” “I’m a simple historian, I’m afraid.” He was the author of a textbook on Pakistan after the Raj. Problems of de-colonialization were his special interest. But he had done some recent work on Iran, touching mainly on the Shah’s “white revolution” and his offensive against the mullahs and the bazaar. The whiskey seemed to have finally loosened Cameron’s tongue. “To be sure, I know some law. Local law, that is. The historian has to, just as he has to have some acquaintance with the languages.” “You know Persian?” The rector was visibly cheering up. “New Persian. And some of the dialects, in a sketchy sort of way. I’ve had Indo-Iranian languages as a hobby ever since I was a laddie. And I did a stint in Afghanistan before I was called to Oxford.” “So you are at Oxford, then,” Aileen summed up, nodding her approval. “That part was right.” “Oh, yes. But you mustn’t think I’m a professor. With us, that implies a chair. I’m just a humble lecturer.” “So what do we call you?” “Dr. Cameron, if you want to be formal. But my name is Archibald—Archie.” The rector chortled. “I guess we can pardon you, Archie, if your arch-sin is not being a lawyer.” “There are some legal niceties in what I’ve published,” said Cameron thoughtfully. “I can see how a confusion arose.” There was no further question of disbanding. “Why, he’s an expert, Reverend,” marveled Aileen. “We’re so lucky to have him with us.”

  The getting-acquainted process went forward in the lobby, where, having paid their bills, they sat surrounded by their suitcases waiting for Van Vliet’s Mohammed, who lived in some student complex in an outlying part of town. Their Air France-UTA plane left at eleven-thirty from Charles de Gaulle; had they only thought of it, they might have checked their main baggage there last night. Although some had counted on the early rising to do a little sightseeing, it was now felt to be too late for even a short stroll. At nine-thirty, they began to be anxious and to consider leaving a message for Mohammed, in case he had overslept—there was no way of checking since he had no telephone, naturally. He could follow them to the airport with Sophie, unless she reappeared soon. Lenz could be summoned from his room; he was getting dressed, the Senator testified, or had been an hour ago.

  Cameron demurred. Mohammed, he pointed out, was bringing them a voucher with their hotel reservations; they had better wait. “We can dispense with that, Frank,” declared the Bishop, who had commenced to pace the floor with his watch out. Old people were fidgety about departures, and Frank, who had seen it in his parishioners, was moved to reflect that the fear of missing a conveyance—a train, a bus, or Elijah’s chariot—played a large part in their thoughts. Seeing the old man’s eagerness to be off, the others exchanged nervous glances; he was red in the face and fuming, as if on the verge of explosion. Senator Carey intervened. “The hotel situation is tight there, Gus. My people from the Embassy were amazed last night to hear that our party had got space. The hotels are packed with munitions salesmen. Same all through the Middle East, they say.” Homeopathic medicine, Van Vliet noted appreciatively: anxiety, in a small dose, applied to anxiety. And in fact the Bishop subsided, sinking into an overstuffed chair.

  At nine-forty Mohammed was there, with a stiff blue folder containing the voucher, further documentation, and a list of names and addresses in Teheran. In every respect, the Americans decided, he might have been Sadegh’s twin brother, except that Sadegh’s folders were green. With characteristic zeal, he had a fleet of taxis ordered; the first was already outside. But there was no hurry, Mohammed said: the driver had made a mistake—they were meant to be here at ten. Meanwhile, the porter could start taking out the baggage. “Tout le monde a son visa, j’espère.”

  Aileen clapped her hand to her cheek. The others were nodding, and of course she had hers, obtained well in advance from the consulate in New York during the Christmas holidays. But Lenz, who still had not come down? And Sophie? There was no reason to be alarmed on her account; her kind of journalist (Senator Carey agreed) knew about visas. Lenz was something else, though. The visa requirement had probably not crossed his mind. And anyway where would he have got one? It would be strange if there were a consulate in Buffalo.

  “You’d better ring his room, Reverend, and ask him,” commanded Aileen. “And tell him to hurry. Tell him the taxi is here.” There might still be time to pass by the Iranian consulate; if the Senator went along with him and used rank, a tourist visa
could be issued in five minutes. “Monsieur Asad—oh, pardon!—Monsieur Mohammed, où se trouve votre consulat?” She might have known. It was in the Sixteenth, on the avenue d’Iéna—back in the other direction. But assuming they left now, and assuming there was not too much traffic, they could allow fifteen minutes, even twenty, for the detour and yet be at the airport by ten-forty. Once they had the visa, all they had to do was get on the périphérique. How fortunate, as it had turned out, that the taxi had come early.

  “Isn’t human nature strange, Bishop Gus? I don’t take to Mr. Lenz one bit—I guess none of us does really—but here I am worrying about how we can get him his visa. When I ought to be grateful to the hand of Providence if it’s stretched out to keep him here. You just know he’s going to drink and make trouble, Mr. Van Vliet. The best thing that could have happened to our committee would have been to have him overlook that little formality. Now that we have wonderful Mr. Cameron, we don’t need another Middle Eastern specialist, who probably doesn’t know ten words of the language anyway. Utterly unreliable, that’s how he is, you’ll see. And yet I want desperately to help him out of the foolish trouble he’s made for himself, don’t you, Senator Carey? Is it just being American and neighborly, do you think? I wonder if there isn’t something more universal at work. As if in these few hours we’ve become an organic community, like a living body, and if one part gets cut off, all the others feel it…?”