Cannibals and Missionaries

by Mary McCarthy

  Besides, he had taken a liking to Aileen and he now followed her willingly when, on the pretext of locating an ash tray, she set out on her own job of espionage, stalking the first-class passengers who had cornered the two clerics. “I have an idea those women are former parishioners of the Rev’s.” Waving her cigarette as a laisser-passer, she drew Van Vliet forward, bobbing in and out of the small crowd, till they had reached a listening-post. “Did you hear that? ‘Reverend Mr. Barber.’ Not ‘Reverend Barber,’ ‘Reverend Mr. Barber.’ It’s one of the clues those social people drop to let the rest of us know who they are.” Her confederate showed puzzlement; there was some drama afoot, evidently, that he was failing to appreciate.

  Aileen elucidated. St. Matthew’s was a fashionable New York church, right on the edge of a slum, naturally. “And Reverend Barber is a fashionable preacher?” Henk re-examined the “long” dominie with the happy protruding ears and twisted bow tie and concluded that fashion in America must have to wear a democratic disguise. “Well, he was,” said Aileen. “He got to be too fashionable, intellectually, for his Gracie Square flock. He invited a black revolutionary to preach from his pulpit one Sunday, and his front pews left him in a body and went over to St. James’s, on Madison Avenue. These are some of the front pews, I’ll bet.” Van Vliet felt suddenly bored. In Holland, he told her, such “happenings” in churches were commonplace, only there it was the Catholics, following aggiornamento, who staged trendy masses, with guitars and rock music and student hippies and schismatic Marxists mounting to the pulpit to sermonize. “They have ships’ biscuits”—he stifled a yawn—“that they pass in a basket for communion and a chalice of wine that goes from hand to hand. There’s a movement to make it a beer tankard—in Holland, why not?” She nodded. “Sort of love feasts. We have that too. But this black revolutionary at St. Matthew’s demanded reparations from the churches. It was all in the papers. Millions of dollars, just like war reparations. Do you have that in Holland?” Before Van Vliet could answer, she had made a silencing gesture. “Au revoir, dear impetuous Mr. Barber. We shall look for you in Naqsh-i-Rustan. So nice to find you again, and in mufti, after all these years.” “‘Mufti’!” snorted Aileen, as the woman moved off at an unhurried pace. “You see, I was right.” Van Vliet did not understand her interest in following this encounter, nor indeed where her true sympathies lay. He would have liked, though, to know whether the Reverend’s church had paid reparations and, if so, how many guilders. But the plane was boarding.

  It was a 747 this time and less than half full. They would be able to stretch out, after lunch had been served, and sleep or meditate till quarter of five, local time, when they were supposed to arrive in Tel Aviv—their only stop. They had agreed to sit together in the well-named (said the Senator) Salon Rouge, the middle cabin of Economy, where smoking was permitted. That little sacrifice on the part of the non-smokers would enable the group to visit back and forth without disturbing other passengers, and yet each would have a bank of two or three seats to himself. When nap-time came, the Bishop and he could lie head to head, the Reverend pointed out, all a-marvel at the discovery. He had never ridden in a jumbo jet before. Lenz, of course, was the non-conformist. Where the others were spread out within conversational range through the center portion of the cabin, he had elected to be up front beside the movie screen, and found himself next to an Israeli couple with a baby in a swinging bassinet-thing that the hostess fitted into place—an arrangement that was not going to suit Sapphire, he objected, appearing suddenly in the aisle in his long flapping overcoat when he ought to have been strapped into his seat belt.

  His cat, he said, was sensitive to noise, and what was an infant doing in a section reserved for smokers? “Isn’t that the parents’ business?” a voice behind him demanded, and for a moment, as Lenz swung around, it looked as if there might be an incident. He was persuaded to return to his place by the steward’s promise that after take-off he and the cat could move. But he had to be near a door, he stipulated, pausing on his way. “Near a door?” “Because of my claustrophobia.” Someone tittered. “You can go into the Salon Jaune, sir,” calmly said the steward, indicating two seats by an exit door in the front of the cabin behind. That suggestion did not please Lenz either: too close to the serving-pantry, and Sapphire was sensitive to cooking smells. “Well, sir, I cannot help you then. We cannot ask that family to move. They have reserve that place. It is near the toilets. And anyway, sir, they go only as far as Tel Aviv.” “Go back and sit down, Victor,” called the Senator. “We want to take off.”

  Ahead, the young orthodox couple (cute as two pins, it was decided; the husband wore a beard in ringlets and a black hat) seemed impervious, luckily, to the controversy; the bassinet placidly rocked. “You must excuse our friend,” the Reverend told the steward, when Victor was finally out of earshot. “Do you have this type of problem often?” “Very often, sir. Especially with gentlemen. They do not wish to sit near a baby.” The Bishop nodded. “‘Suffer the little children.’ We humans are funny animals, aren’t we? Why, bless me, if the plane had been full, our Victor would be feeling no call to be choosy. But with all these empty seats to pick from, he’ll never find one that suits him. There’s a moral there, surely.” “Explicate that, Gus,” begged the Reverend, but the old man’s rumbling tones were lost like the Sibyl’s utterance in the sudden roar of the engines.

  When the No Smoking sign went off, Van Vliet lit a Batavia twist. With a careful turn of his head, he established that the two dark men he had wondered about were directly behind him, on the aisle. After a moment’s reflection, he unfastened his seat belt and moved across to join Aileen. If he did not join her, he considered, she was likely to come over to him—an invitation to eavesdroppers if there ever was one. In the middle bank of seats, the Senator, just ahead of her, had already stretched out, in his shirt sleeves, with his arms folded behind his head on two pillows and did not look ready for company. Cameron, a difficult conversationalist, was puffing on his pipe by a window on the Senator’s left. The Bishop and the Reverend, in front of the Senator, were minding the Lord’s store, reciting the service for the day—the first Sunday after Epiphany—with the Bishop taking the responses. Van Vliet recognized the Anglican rite, which the Americans called Episcopalian. The droning of voices took him back to his school days with the monks in Brabant.

  In choosing Aileen, Van Vliet was obeying his good angel. While the plane was gaining altitude, he had made up his mind to pair off with President Simmons, since there was bound to be pairing in a group of this kind. He did not enjoy being unfaithful to his wife, but it happened on trips if he did not take precautions. The Weil girl—actually a woman; he estimated her age at thirty-four—was the occasion of sin to be avoided. His aversion to bright young women journalists (one of the Dutch lot had pursued him from Schiphol to Athens, with the full backing of her editor, at that time, but no longer, his friend) might fail him, he feared, in her case. She had a tense, brave way of talking, in short, breathless spurts, and an arresting face, like a Byzantine icon—Cameron had produced the comparison this morning, watching her come in with the cake. At present, she was sitting alone, in the row ahead of Cameron, by the window. As he stood up to take the lay of the land, he had picked out the curly black head leaning against the seat back’s bright red antimacassar. She put up a hand to cover a yawn, and he admired the long spatulate fingers and the stretch of the long olive neck.

  He set his jaw. If he left her alone, she would gravitate to the Senator or vice versa. The lines of force were predictable in these situations. He was vain of being a good-looking, well-setup male and did not envy the American his two meters—a tall Dutchman was a gross error of Nature. In age he had the advantage of fifteen to twenty years. In mother-wit, they were about equal, he reckoned, and he suspected he was a truer poet. But in power—irresistible to some women—the leader of a minority fraction in Her Majesty’s Staten-generaal was Thumbling by comparison, which would make a contest interesting
to the permanent spectator in himself. He pushed away the thought: the challenge to his virility represented by a formidable U.S. lawmaker was temptation in its most infantile form. Besides, he had no doubt as to who would win; as in a fairy-tale, he had only to wish it.

  He heard the rector beginning on the lesson for the day. “I beseech you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice…. And be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.” The shoe seemed to fit. Making a wry face, Henk crossed the aisle like a Rubicon and left the field to Carey. The die was cast. Aileen would help divert him from the other while posing no danger herself. On that score, as a male, he felt confidence. He had no sexual interest (it was cruel, but he could not help it) in women who had passed the age of child-bearing—which no doubt made him a “sexist,” as somebody like Sophie, if he bedded her, would be quick to tell him.

  Aileen looked up with a smile. “Mynheer Van Vliet! So you’ve come to talk to me!” She snatched up the long scarf she had unwound from her coppery hair and patted the seat beside her. On her lap was an archaeological guide to Persia, which the Bishop had passed back to her. “‘I’m too old, my dear, for ancient history, and we have other work to do in that unfertile soil.’ That was his presentation speech. Isn’t he dear?” Van Vliet took up the book, which was the property, it seemed, of “Mr. Charles.” On second thought, he set it aside and went to retrieve his briefcase, reminded of the blue folder he had put in it with the list of names and addresses in Teheran. He could not leave that lying about. It occurred to him, moreover, that in view of a possible search at the airport, he would do well to commit the contents to memory and flush it down a toilet in Tel Aviv. There was also Elle with the horoscope, which he ought to consult soon, if only to repay Sophie for her trouble. “Oh, dear, do we have to work?” Aileen lamented on seeing the briefcase. He made a silencing motion. He had heard Dutch being spoken.

  Behind Aileen were a tow-headed young man and woman. He directed her attention to them. “Dutch!” he whispered. Aileen turned around. “What about it?” Van Vliet drew a hand across his eyes. No foreigner would understand. It always struck him as droll, almost uncanny, to find Dutch people outside of Holland, where they properly belonged—as though they were toy people who had stepped out of the tiny see-through box they lived in with their Queen and their princesses and Prince Bernhard and Klaus and the tulips. In a poem he had tried to express the idea of Holland as an imaginary country, invented by a travel author or satirist-turned-children’s-storyteller, in which he himself, poor Henk, was fated to be born and sit in a scale-model parliament and write despairing verses which nobody but another Dutchman could pronounce or understand. Being Dutch was a comical predicament, more grotesque even than being Swiss. They had watches and weather clocks and cheese with absurd holes, in the place of dikes and windmills and outlandish pipes, but at least they had Alps as a trademark instead of a flat country like the medieval picture of the world, which had not had scientific credibility since Columbus and the navigators.

  No rational mind in this century could believe in Holland as a real place—where but in animal farmland could the Prime Minister be a Mr. Owl?—and finding Dutch people outside, in the real world, was a threat to any Dutchman’s sanity. Besides, on practical as well as ontological grounds, Van Vliet did not care to be picked out like a straw from a heap by unknown sharp-eyed compatriots who had the advantage of knowing him. “Van Vliet de Jonge! Did you see him?” the pair behind him would be telling each other. In a small country like Holland, where the main verticals were television aerials, it was too easy to be a celebrity. As leader of a new, left-of-center grouping, he was unavoidable in most living-rooms, including his own. Behind the famous uncurtained window panes, as he drove home in the black night, he met himself seriatim in brilliant Philips color, a gesturing household dummy, framed in the box. In his real body, he could not stop at a gin shop for a glass of genever or eat a herring from a street stall without causing a mild stir of recognition. In the extended family of the Netherlands, with its characteristic long memory, that was only to be expected; before he had been the deputy, he had been the scion of his father and his grandfather.

  But abroad he was nobody, which was also to be expected. A few years ago, a Dutch company had taken a poll in France and Britain and found to its own surprise that the vast majority of newspaper readers could not identify the Prime Minister of Holland, the aforesaid Mr. Owl’s predecessor. Tested on other figures, older people remembered Queen Wilhelmina and, if politically conscious, Spaak—a Belgian. To be somebody and yet nobody was a typical Dutch irony, which Van Vliet when abroad preferred to relish alone and unrecognized over a dish of tripe or an andouillette in a bistro, pondering the sayings “a fish out of water” and “a big fish in a small pond,” with a melancholy flare, typically Dutch also, of the long nostrils, in his case, by luck, finely cut.

  He had studied the Netherlands countenance and its register of expressions like Narcissus staring into a pool and decided that that widening of the nostrils, amounting to a sniff often in women, expressed a deep humor, in both senses, of the national soul but probably could be traced—half of him was a materialist—to the once widespread habit of snuff-taking and to the watery atmosphere that had been irritating the sinuses for centuries. You would not find it in Germans, even those nearby ones of the Rhineland. The nose and nasal passages were the seat of Dutch mental life, and the slow peristaltic intake of the nose-holes, as of a pensive digestive tract, had doubtless been a factor in developing the cheerful horn-blare of the Dutch voice, distinct from German gutturals, rasped from the throat, just as the Dutch language was distinct from German and not, as some fools insisted, a humble country cousin on the order of Schwyzer-dütsch.

  Being Dutch, he sadly recognized, was turning into a fixed idea with him, to which each and every experience seemed to be referring maniacally, and like any poor madman sensing himself pursued, he could not hope to find comprehension in foreigners. He heard Dutch voices over his shoulder, and “What about it?” this woman said, without sympathy. The Senator, for his part, on hearing American spoken behind him, would reach for his Parker or his Waterman—no complexes there; he was used to finding a landgenoot under every bush. Americans had the snugger delusion of taking their country for the world.

  Now she was quizzing him about the “Dutch elm disease”—some kind of tree plague, he gathered, widespread in England and America but utterly unknown in Holland, which of course she did not believe. “I’m sure it started in Holland. All your lovely elms. Our campus has been decimated.” With a commiserating glance at the expressionless young people behind him, for whom English must be a second language, he abruptly disengaged himself and took a turn in the aisle to regain his equability. He would never convince her that tall healthy specimens of ulmus campestris extended their branches a few meters from his house; she would tell him they were oaks. But she was only trying to show a friendly interest in his country and could not know that to a Dutchman it was irritating to be lumped with tree beetles, “Dutch treats,” “Dutch uncles,” wooden shoes, the royal family, bicycle-pedaling (“Is it true that you’ve all taken to your bicycles to solve the energy crisis?” “No”), and so on. On meeting a French parliamentarian, would she be reminded of frogs’ legs and “French letters”?

  He put his nose into the rear cabin and noted the sparsity of passengers: uneconomic for Air France, he would have thought, to keep these big planes flying during the off-season. In the pantry, he watched the hostesses preparing the drinks cart. Continuing his tour of inspection, he drifted forward to the toilets. Lenz had made his peace with the Jewish baby and was entertaining it with Sapphire’s mouse. All seemed to be well. On his return, he found that Aileen had profited from his absence to move next to the Senator, now sitting upright and reknotting his tie. Sophie was absorbed in the Monde. He took a seat next to Cameron, who declared himself ready for a whiskey. As the
y waited for the cart with its freight of bottles to be wheeled up the aisle, conversation was laborious. Van Vliet regretted the loss of Aileen. He tried Scottish separatism—there were interesting parallels with Holland’s Frisian minority problem—the don puffed and nodded. He mentioned a talk he had given to the Oxford Union on Surinam independence; Cameron was sorry to have missed it. “My line of country, you know.” There was a long pause; he drew on his pipe, evidently expecting his companion to continue unassisted. But Van Vliet’s natural volubility was failing him; this was Sisyphean work. “You were saying?” prompted Cameron. Van Vliet raised a finger. He thought he had heard a scream come from the service area.

  “Oh, drat that cat!” Aileen exclaimed from the bank of seats opposite. “Those poor stewardesses! He’s gone and let her out again.” Cameron stiffened. “What? What? Oh, the cat; I see.” The Bishop leaned back. “We had quite a saga coming over. Professor Lenz allowed his pet out of its cage. They hate the confinement, don’t you know. But she led us a merry chase. Up and down the aisle and under the seats before they could locate her. You never saw such a to-do. And now history repeats itself. Well, we must bear with Clio, an old lady with one foot in the grave, eh, Dr. Cameron?”

  A hostess went forward with a determined step, ignoring the passengers’ questions. “She’s gone to complain to the pilot,” Aileen announced. “The pilot yesterday was furious. You’d think that man would have more consideration. He’s only making it harder for other people to bring their cats into the cabin with them. Most airlines make them travel in the hold. But just because Air France is nice enough to let them ride with their owner, he abuses the privilege. And now the rest of us have to wait for our drinks till they catch that pesky animal.” Understanding that a cat was at large, other passengers in the vicinity were stirring, to peer circumspectly under the seats, but no one was taking action. Lenz, up front, seemed to be sitting tight. “Why doesn’t he do something?” Aileen cried. “And where have those hostesses got to?” With a small screech, she pulled up her legs. “She’s under here somewhere, I know it. Didn’t you feel her slip by then, Senator?” The Senator shook his head. Aileen examined a violet stocking for damage. “Isn’t anybody going to try to catch her?” she demanded. “Are we all afraid of a cat? I know I am. Did you see those claws yesterday? I don’t want her jumping in my lap.” “Here, kitty, kitty,” coaxed the Reverend obediently, patting his own lap. “Here, pretty puss.” There was no response. “I don’t see her,” he apologized. “Old Victor ought to bell her,” comfortably remarked the Senator, declining to be enlisted in a chase.