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    Cannibals and Missionaries: A Novel
    Cannibals and Missionaries: A Novel
    Cannibals and Missionaries: A Novel
    Ebook478 pages8 hours

    Cannibals and Missionaries: A Novel

    By Mary McCarthy

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    About this ebook

    A riveting and unconventional thriller about a motley group of airplane passengers taken hostage by militant hijackers
    En route to Iran, a plane is captured by Middle Eastern terrorists intent on holding hostage the committee of politicians, religious leaders, and activists on a mission to investigate alleged human rights violations by the shah. But the kidnappers soon discover that there is a greater treasure onboard. Among the passengers are prominent art collectors with access to some of the world’s most valuable paintings—priceless works that could fund global terrorist activities for decades.
    After the captured plane sets down in a remote Dutch farming collective by the sea, events go rapidly and frighteningly awry. As negotiations with government agencies stall, concerns over rare artwork threaten to trump the regard for human life, and both captors and captives will face bitter truths about their conflicting values, manners, and ideologies as the ticking clock races inexorably toward an explosive endgame.
    Mary McCarthy’s masterful Cannibals and Missionaries is a remarkable novel of events and ideas that sheds light on the tragic foibles of human nature while exploring the terrorist psychology with supreme intelligence and insight.
    This ebook features an illustrated biography of Mary McCarthy including rare images from the author’s estate.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateAug 6, 2013
    ISBN9781480438316
    Cannibals and Missionaries: A Novel
    Author

    Mary McCarthy

    MARY MCCARTHY (1912–1989) was a short-story writer, bestselling novelist, essayist, and critic. She was the author of The Stones of Florence and Birds of America, among other books.

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      Book preview

      Cannibals and Missionaries - 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, fasting, 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.

      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! But 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 chair 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.

      "We must also try to distinguish—and this is particularly true for us in holy orders—a secular call from a spiritual call. Both may be valid but they are not the same. The Bible has taught us that the spiritual has precedence; a secular need, however great, must yield to it. This indeed is a prominent article of Jesus’ teaching, though not always of His practice. We see Him, as you know, in the company of the underdog, the underprivileged. But does His sympathy for these lowly ones reach out only to their spiritual part? No. Do not let yourself be deceived. The transcendent Jesus is also a warm human being. He is present at the Marriage of Cana, where there is not enough wine to go around, and, instead of accepting this unfairness of distribution as inevitable and foreordained, He makes wine. When He preaches to a hungry multitude, He makes loaves and fishes. Even more

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