Cannibals and Missionaries

by Mary McCarthy

  Making another survey of the set profile beside him, Frank decided to transfer to the back seat when they reached the Commodore; that would give the Bishop a chance to get “re-acquainted” with his godson on the way to Kennedy. Last summer Gus had been complaining that he had hardly had a glimpse of “young Frankie,” who had gone off to work in a wilderness camp in Maine and had come back just before Labor Day with a home-made haircut, a nose ulcerated from sunburn, a cold, and what looked like a severe case of malnutrition. The youngsters had lived on wild berries, clams, seaweed, tree mushrooms, a few fish they had managed to trap, and—they were practicing survival techniques—roast slugs. The Bishop had been shocked to hear of that, till loyally reminded by the Barbers in chorus of the Baptist’s diet of locusts.

  There the good soul was, as predicted, on Vanderbilt Avenue, at the entrance to the Commodore, standing in the street, red-faced and with his gold watch open in his palm. An old leather suitcase with foreign hotel stickers stood beside him. Frank waved and leapt out of the car. “Gus, dear friend!” “Frankie, my boy! And young Frankie!” Behind him waited a hotel porter holding the familiar black umbrella with the cherry-wood handle and a big book bag made of needlework. It had been stitched by Rachel, the Bishop’s beautiful wife, whom the children did not remember because she had died of cancer when she was only fifty, the year young Frankie was born. But they knew her from her pictures, which were all over the Bishop’s house, in wood and silver frames, and John had guessed that she was the reason for Gus’s unshakable faith in the hereafter—a place that he often talked about, as though it were Burlington, where he usually went for the winter.

  This morning he was dressed in a thick three-piece tweed suit and, over that, a Burberry. Gus was something of an Anglophile, and most of his gear went back to the trips he used to make with Rachel in the British Isles after his retirement more than twenty years ago. They had bought that house in the Adirondacks and fixed it up, and then, just like that, a month after Frank, Jr.’s christening, she had died—a photo on “her” piano in Gus’s parlor showed her holding the baby in her arms in his christening robe; she was wearing a long-sleeved light-colored dress almost like a wedding gown.

  Frank saw to stowing Gus and his precious bag and umbrella comfortably in the front seat, with a lap robe over his chunky knees. He was moved, between tears and chuckles, as always happened when he saw the Bishop after an interval. Gus had ordained him, out in Missouri (which the old man still called “Missoura”), when he got out of Harvard Divinity School; he had made a liberal of him, and now it was the name Augustus Hurlbut high on the list of the “Committee of Inquiry into Iranian Justice” that had caused him to add his own when approached by the young Iranian, Sadegh, one Sunday after Holy Communion. It was the first Sunday in Advent, a day of promise for Christians, and he had been preaching on the ordination of women—a cause Gus too supported, bless him—with a text from, of all people, St. Paul. Romans, xvi, 1: “I commend unto you Phebe our sister.” Obviously, with that good fight behind him, he had been in a receptive mood when the slight dark velvet-eyed young man—whom he had noticed, thanks to his new bifocals, from the pulpit—came up to him as he stood in his freshly starched surplice shaking hands and receiving congratulations at the church door: “An inspiring sermon, Rector.” “Thank you for your courage, Rector.” “Frank, you were cute to take St. Paul.” Gus’s spirit had been very much with him while he prepared the sermon, and the old man’s doughty name, materializing on Sadegh’s list, seemed a sign from the Lord. The irony of it was that Gus at that stage, as it turned out, had not even been contacted, and when the Iranians did get to him they used Frank’s name.

  Confronted with this circumstance, Sadegh had theorized that a first letter had been lost in the mails, which was possible, since the Bishop was not always prompt about having his letters forwarded when he closed up his house at Thanksgiving. He postponed making out a change-of-address card, just as he postponed having his pipes drained, hating to take definite leave of what the children called “Rachel’s shrine.” But even if that were so, it did not explain everything: Sadegh and his friends were still not out of the woods.

  For his own impetuous signature, Frank took some of the blame on himself. On that Sabbath morning, he recollected, as his eye had traveled down the list—which included a leading Jesuit, a rabbi, a senator, a representative, all good names—in the back of his mind he had wondered that Gus, at his age, had agreed to go. But instead of being alerted by the anomaly to at least call Gus in his winter quarters in Burlington, he had let it dictate his own decision: if Gus could do it, so should he.

  Now he felt no resentment. He had spent enough years in committee work to know that a pious hook needed to be baited before being lowered into the small reservoir of men of good will. To get any kind of group together to fly at its own expense to some remote corner of the earth to do the Lord’s business was never an easy undertaking, he imagined, and Iran was a long way from being a Biafra or a Pretoria. Though Sadegh’s briefcase contained a fair number of clippings, they were mostly not current and mostly in French. The mimeographed statement accompanying them spoke of “a total news blackout,” which was no great exaggeration, as Frank’s own example demonstrated. The whole Barber family took a keen interest in current events, particularly those concerning human rights and oppressed minorities, yet until Sadegh had come up that morning after divine service Frank had had no awareness that the Shah was doing anything worse than giving big wasteful parties for the international jet set while his people lacked food and housing. “No more idea than the man in the moon!” he had emphasized at lunch afterwards, as Helen stood carving the roast. “Did you know, John? Did you, Helen?” And the whole family had shaken their heads. That showed what these young Iranians were up against, and he reminded himself of it whenever in his dealings with them he found himself lacking in patience.

  He understood, too, that men who worked on behalf of such causes were men of passion rather than strict principle. They were also, in this case, he gathered, young and inexperienced men. Maybe some group back in Iran was directing them, but he sometimes suspected that they were acting pretty much on their own, living on modest allowances from their families, who had sent them here to study. They did not even have the wherewithal to pay a printshop for a proper letterhead. He could never learn where they lived or how many of them there were. The telephone number Sadegh gave him kept changing, which probably meant he could not pay his room rent. Yet he was always neat and well dressed. It was all a brand-new experience for the rector, and this morning, with his air ticket (Return “OPEN”) and his virgin passport in his inner breast pocket, he forgave in advance any further corner-cutting he might encounter in the organization of the trip.

  Sadegh’s list, as Frank had reluctantly come to realize, was protean in the extreme. Each time Frank asked to see it, it had undergone an unexplained metamorphosis. Father Hesburgh had dropped from sight and turned into a woman college president; a former Solicitor General had appeared and disappeared; the congressman had gone; there was still a senator, though not the same senator; in Paris, a Spanish monsignor and other European “personalities” would join them. As for the rabbi, Frank simply could not make it out. “Is Rabbi Weill coming? Is it definite, Sadegh?” “Oh, yes, possible.” “No, not possible. Sure.” “Yes, surely possible. Definite.” He had tried to impress on Sadegh and his shadowy friends the importance of having the group be truly representative, and it still disappointed him that they had been unable to see the urgency of including a black—Julian Bond or one of the young ministers in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. But in any case a rabbi was vital. If he had known Rabbi Weill personally, he would have put in a call to him; his temple (Reformed) was in Denver. When he had thought of calling him anyway, Helen had counseled against it. “You mustn’t let these young men use you, Frank. You’re such a born organizer. But let them manage their committee.” If only, Frank reflected, they knew how! Bu
t about the rabbi, she was right, probably; these inter-faith things could be tricky.

  Yet he liked Sadegh and the other young man, Asad, who sometimes came with him, and so he could not help trying to steer them out of what he sensed might be heavier water than they counted on. Last week, for instance, he had proposed, with some forcefulness, that the group meet in New York ahead of time, to get to know each other and discuss the program of action. Sadegh and Asad had agreed, with corresponding enthusiasm, yet somehow it had never come about. Now there was nothing to do but wait for whatever surprises the airport was going to produce. If the American wing of the International Committee turned out to consist of the Right Reverend Hurlbut and the Reverend Barber, it would not be the greatest of surprises.

  Luckily, the good Lord had given him a sense of humor. But something else bothered him that could develop into more than a joke at his and the Bishop’s expense. The fact was, he had no notion of how they were going to gain access to the Shah’s prisons and his law courts. He supposed someone had a plan; in Paris, where they were to stay overnight, they would be met by lawyers, Sadegh promised—a Belgian and a don from Oxford who had a chair of jurisprudence. But had it occurred to anyone that the group might be thrown out of the Shah’s territory or clapped into jail or, worst of all, denied entry when they descended in a body from the plane? When he had put the question to the young Iranians, he had been assured that this could not happen, but he wondered how they knew. He wondered too whether their mystifying vagueness about details was due to a failure in communication: had they understood any of his questions?

  “Hey, Father,” called Frank, Jr., from the front seat. “Is there going to be some guy with you that speaks the language?” This too had been on Frank’s mind, but he dratted his son’s lack of diplomacy. The last thing he wanted was to share these mundane worries with the Bishop: old people were prone to become fearful at the slightest suggestion of uncertainty. Thus he had seen no reason to tell Gus that Sadegh and his friends had borrowed his name without his permission; the main thing was that Gus, when finally approached, had accepted, so where was the sense of exciting him about an understandable peccadillo when they were halfway to Kennedy with Teheran as their agreed destination?

  The Bishop had turned his head, which was round as a pumpkin and partly bald, in order to catch the answer. Frank considered. At one point, Sadegh had talked of a Cambridge don who spoke several of the native dialects, but then no more was said of him, and he seemed to have been replaced by the jurisprudence don from Oxford. “I’m not totally clear on that, young Frank. We can pick up an interpreter there if we need to. No problem.” But there certainly was a problem, as the Bishop was capable of guessing. In a police state any interpreter was almost sure to be a spy, and Iran seemed to qualify as a police state, though any substantial evidence to the contrary would be welcome, at least to Frank. He had an inspiration. “Through the Embassy,” he shouted. The old man nodded. “Or through the Church, Frankie.”

  Frank felt moved again. The Bishop’s serene faith was a rock. And how could he himself have forgotten the Church in his reckonings? Maybe the Anglicans no longer had a mission to the Nestorians of Azerbaijan, but the Church would be there in one or more likely a dozen of its myriad forms—in these oecumenical days it made no great matter which. Of course he had known it, in his soul, if not in his mind. He had brought along his clerical gear to be able to take divine service should the need arise. That was an old habit with him, virtually automatic whenever he packed a bag. But though he never thought about it consciously, it presupposed on his part a profound conviction that wherever a man of God went, there would be Christians and an altar. Unlike Gus, however, who was a seasoned traveler, he had failed to picture the Church as a source of material help.

  A pastor in that largely Moslem community, if he did not speak the language himself, would be bound to have native speakers in his flock, along, Frank supposed, with Exxon and Shell representatives, who were in need of God too. And if the pastor was a true shepherd, he would greet with joy his brothers in Christ come to look into torture, summary executions, and trials that were a mockery of justice, which he could not but know about granted that even a quarter of the tales in Sadegh’s folders were facts. No minister of the gospel, even the most lukewarm, one of Paul’s famous Laodiceans, could be unaware of the abominations suffered in those prisons not just by political hotheads but by dissident Moslems protesting the repression of their faith. In fact, there was no excuse not to know; prison-visiting was a duty laid on the clergy.

  Frank gave an inward start. How strange that he had overlooked that point, when he imposed the duty on himself (Helen was supportive) twice a month throughout the year. Including summers: he was grimly familiar with the inside of every correctional institution in their own and neighboring counties right up to the Canadian border and he had been taking Frank, Jr., along, to instill the habit, ever since the boy had discovered his vocation. Cast your bread upon the waters: he saw himself and the Bishop in their dog-collars being introduced into the Shah’s prisons by a clerical accomplice and experienced a sense of deep and sweet relief, as though a balm had been applied to all the vexations of the journey—those foreseen and those as yet unforeseeable.

  He cautioned himself not to let his natural hopefulness run away with him. SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police, would scarcely have the same sociable attitude as the New York State wardens and guards, who knew him and young Frank and joshed them about searching the hampers of books and magazines they carried: “Any knives or other weapons, Reverend?” But the cloth was the cloth pretty much the world over, and even brutal men, men with something to conceal (who were not entirely lacking in New York State houses of correction), were more inclined to try to deceive it, pull the wool over its eyes, if he could use the figure, than to refuse it entry to the premises. And once you were inside, it was surprising how the prisoners would talk to you, sometimes with the aid of winks and hand gestures if a guard was present. In this age supposed to be irreligious, there was more healthy fear of God and also trust in Him than the laity reckoned.

  A happy torpor came over Frank. His chin sank to his chest; he dozed. A doubt shook him awake. They were nearing Kennedy; Gus and the boy were silent. Misgiving as to his own purposes had gained entry to his mind as he cat-napped and was now demanding his full attention. John’s questions at the breakfast table might have been a time-bomb, he guessed. The point John had been getting at, stripped of youthful trimmings, went to the heart of the matter: did the Church, qua Church, have a role to play in an affair of this kind?

  Frank had pretty well resolved that—he had thought—with himself, in the time available to him, what with the pressures of departure added to normal parish work, the children out of school over the holidays, extra morning and evening services, choir rehearsals, the Girls Friendly pageant, extra sermons to prepare for the Nativity and the Circumcision (Epiphany, blessedly, had fallen on a Sunday), distribution of presents to the needy, and the darned crèche and parish-house tree to set up. But two minds were better than one, and he had been counting on picking Gus’s brains in the plane today over a sherry or a bourbon (Gus’s preferred tipple) on the theology of what they were up to. The subject, as he roughly saw it (he found outlining helpful in his thinking), was really a sub-head under the larger topic of the Church’s task in modern society. Gus, he hoped, would play the devil’s advocate, bringing up arguments against this jaunt they were on and all the other good causes they had crusaded for; then they could change sides, with Gus assuming the defense. Frank had been looking forward to a far-reaching, hard-hitting discussion, like the old midnight bull sessions in Divinity School, that would probably not settle everything but be wonderful mental exercise and maybe useful for a sermon.

  In fact he already had a pertinent sermon in the works—based on a contemporary reading of the Book of Jonah—which he had started composing in his head, from force of habit, during his spare moments. In the barber’s c
hair yesterday and last Saturday while watching a game of touch football played by the St. Matthew’s men’s club against St. George’s. Actually, he would not be needing it until his return (“OPEN”), but it was always well to have a sermon ripening, in prudent reserve. None of it yet was on paper; some bits, though, he knew by heart, and he might try them out on the Bishop if the plane was not too crowded….

  “How many of us here this morning are Jonahs, who, having heard the divine call to betake ourselves to a place far from our homes—or perhaps merely to a less favored part of our city—to prophesy or, as we might say today, to bear witness, disobey the voice of God, which to us is the voice of conscience, and take ship for a different destination?” “No, the parallels are not perfect. The city Jonah was commanded to preach against was a wicked and flourishing city, whereas the call we hear may order us to go, if only in spirit, to very poor and wretched parts of the world, which some of us may feel are less sinful, on the whole, than the part of the world we would leave. Today the voice of God may speak to us from the columns of a newspaper, from an advertisement in a magazine, from an image on our television set….”

  There was no need to belabor that. The congregation would understand that he was talking about Vietnam and Cambodia and South Africa and, closer to home, East Harlem. But now a section was coming that might give them new food for thought. “We may not know, today, how to recognize the call that came to Jonah. It is not always that clear and easy. There are false calls, just as in scripture there were false prophets, and perhaps poor Jonah—let’s give him the benefit of the doubt—took the voice he heard for a false voice.