Cannibals and Missionaries by Mary McCarthy Page B

in a fifth taxi, for which Sophie had succeeded in reimbursing him. At the head of the moving staircase, the Senator was surrounded by young admirers bound for Moscow, whom he had introduced to Sophie; a joint autographing session was in progress. Everyone was present or accounted for.
    Yet Van Vliet, studying the scene from a solitary banquette where Aileen had left him, felt puzzled, like a new boy in class observing a network of relationships to which he has no clue. The old gloved party leaning on an ivory-headed stick and the mink-draped ladies—could they possibly be members of a committee of inquiry? The briefings given by the Iranian youths had left many questions unanswered. He had sensed a possible mystery in the group’s financing; although he was paying his own way, he was entitled as a lawyer to wonder whether outside funds were not being supplied. Could the expensive-looking trio be what the Americans called “angels”? Van Vliet did not like it. He signaled to Aileen, who detached herself and came hurrying to his side. “Those people—are they with us too?” She laughed and patted his arm. “After this morning, you can believe anything, can’t you?” But he was not to worry; they were just millionaire art collectors—part of a tour—on their way to visit archaeological sites in Iran. There was no connection, except that “Mr. Charles” was an old friend of the Bishop’s. “You wouldn’t guess he was an American, would you?”
    Van Vliet would not have. His visual ideas about Americans were derived mainly from the movies. Though he knew England and the English well, he had not met many live Americans before this morning. He discounted the NATO generals he had shaken hands with while inspecting maneuvers; the military, like the armies of tourists who came to view the tulips, offered an unreliable index to a country’s national character. In the taxi he had confessed his ignorance. Senator Carey of course was familiar to him from Dutch television as a leading dove in the Senate and he was a type, like Adlai Stevenson in the previous generation, that Europeans thought they understood. But the rest of the American delegation were novelties to a Dutchman, he admitted. If the pastor brought back memories of Harold Lloyd in The Freshman, no contemporary analogy for him in movieland presented itself. And there were no Old World equivalents that Van Vliet could find for these curious American liberals. The exception was the young woman, the journalist, whom he felt he knew. “Our Sophie!” Aileen cried. “Why, she’s the ‘new journalism’—the latest American thing.” “We have many of her in Holland, believe me,” Van Vliet assured her. “Dozens of Sophies, dear me!” She gave a sharp tinkle of a laugh. “Then we don’t have to warn you that she’ll be making all of us characters in the piece she’s writing.”
    Van Vliet nodded; he had taken account of that prospect at breakfast. “Well, of course, you’re a political man. But the sweet old Bishop and the rector don’t seem to have grasped the implications at all.” “What implications?” Van Vliet said blandly. “Why, of having her along with us. They can be devastating. ” The Senator threw back his silver head and laughed, savoring his amusement as if it were a rich morsel of private food for thought. “You’re used to ‘exposure,’ Senator,” Aileen insisted. “But it’s hurting, for the rest of us, to see our little foibles and mannerisms faithfully reproduced on the printed page. Like all our ‘new’ journalists, Mr. Van Vliet, Sophie Weil has a phonographic ear. That’s the way they’re trained nowadays. I don’t mean it against her personally. Just to give you an example, there was a young man from one of the news magazines who spent five days on our campus. I had him to breakfast and dinner and I don’t know what all. Then I found spread out in the magazine word for word all these things I’d told him,