Cannibals and Missionaries (2 page)

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.