The Manchurian Candidate (13 page)

By an accident, when he was just past twenty-one years old, Raymond met the daughter of a man whom his mother would not, under any condition, have entertained. Her name was Jocelyn Jordan. Her father was a United States senator and a dangerously unhealthy liberal in every sense of that word, though a member of Johnny Iselin’s party. They lived in the East. They happened to be in Raymond’s mother’s state because it was summertime, when schoolteachers and senators not up for re-election are allowed time off to spend their large, accumulated salaries, and they had been invited by Jocie’s roommate to use her family’s summer camp while the family toured in Europe. It is certain that they had no knowledge that they would be keeping calm and cool beside the same blue lake, with its talking bass and balsam collar, as Governor Iselin and his wife or else they would have politely refused the invitation. When they did find out, they were established in the summer camp and had not been shot at so it was too late to do anything about it.

Jocie was nineteen that summer when she came around a turning of the dusty road at the moment the snake had bitten Raymond, as he lay in his wine-colored swimming trunks where he had tripped and fallen in the road, staring from the green snake as it moved slowly through the golden dust toward
the other side of the road, to the neat, new wound on his bare leg. She did not speak to him but she saw what he saw and, stopping, stared wordlessly at the two dark red spots against his healthy flesh, then moved quickly to the small plastic kit attached to the back of her bicycle seat, removed a naked razor blade and a bottle of purple fluid, and knelt beside him. She beamed expert reassurance into his eyes from the sweet brownness of her own and cut crosses with the razor blade in each dark, red spot, traversed both of them with a straight cut, then put her mouth to his leg and drew two mouthfuls of blood out of it. Each time after she spit the blood out she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand like a laborer who had just finished a hero sandwich and a bottle of beer. She poured the purple fluid on the cuts, bound Raymond’s leg with two strips of a handkerchief she had ripped in half, then saturated the improvised bandage with more purple liquid, over the wounds.

“I hope I know what I’m doing,” she said in a tremulous voice. “My father is scared tiddly about snakes in this part of the country, which is how I happen to ride around with a razor blade and potassium permanganate solution. Now don’t move. It is very, very important that you don’t move and start anything that might be left from that snake circulating through your system.” She walked to her bicycle as she talked. “I’ll be right back with a car. I won’t be ten minutes. You just stay still, now. You hear?” She pedaled off rapidly around the same turning of the road that had magically produced her. She had vanished many seconds before he realized that he had not spoken to her and that, although he had expected to die when the snake had bitten him, he had not thought about the snake, the snake’
s bite, nor his impending death from the instant she had appeared. He looked bemusedly at his crudely bandaged leg below the swimming trunks. Purple ink and red blood trickled idly along his leg in parallel courses and it occurred to him that, if this had been happening to his mother’s leg, she would have claimed the purple mixture as being her blood.

A car returned, it seemed to him almost at once, and Jocie had fetched her father along because it would give him such a good feeling to know that all of those warnings about the snakes in those woods had been just. A man has few enough opportunities like that when he assists in the raising of children, who must be hoisted on the pulley of one’s experience every morning to the top of the pole for a view of life as extensive as that day’s emotional climate would bear, then lowered again at sundown to be folded up and made to rest, and carried into their dreams with reverence.

They brought Raymond back to the summer camp, believing him to be in a state of shock because he did not speak. Raymond sat beside Jocie in the back seat with his fanged leg propped up on the back of the front seat. The senator drove and told horrendous snake stories wherein no one bitten ever recovered. The way Raymond looked at Jocie in that back seat told her well that he was in a state of shock but she was, at nineteen, sufficiently versed to be able to differentiate between the mundane and the glorious kinds of shock.

At the camp the senator made his examination of the wound and was thrown into high glee when there seemed to be no swelling on, above, or below the poisoned area. He took Raymond’s temperature and found it normal. He cauterized the wounds with a
carbolic acid solution while Raymond continued to stare respectfully at his daughter. When he had finished, the senator asked the only possible, sensible question.

“Are you a mute?” he said.

“No, sir.”

“Ah.”

“Thank you very much,” Raymond said. “Miss—Miss—”

“Miss Jocelyn Jordan,” the senator said. “And considering that you two are practically related by blood, it is probably time you met.”

“How do you do?” Raymond said.

“And now, under the quaint local custom, it is your turn to tell your name,” the senator explained gravely.

“I am Raymond Shaw, sir.”

“How do you do, Raymond?” the senator said, and shook hands with him.

“I have save your life,” Jocie said with a heavy vaudeville Hungarian accent, “and now I may do with it what I will.”

“I would like to ask your permission to marry Jocelyn, sir.” Raymond was deadly serious, as always. The Jordans exploded with laughter, believing Raymond was working to amuse them, but when they looked back to him to acknowledge his sally, and saw the confused and nearly hurt expression on his face, they became embarrassed. Senator Jordan coughed violently. Jocelyn murmured something about gallantry not being dead after all, that it was time she made some coffee, and went off hastily toward what must have been the kitchen. Raymond stared after her. To cover up, although for the life of him he could not have explained or understood what he was covering
up, the senator sat down on a wicker chair beside Raymond. “Is your place near here?” he asked.

“Yes, sir. It’s that red house directly across the lake.”

“The Iselin house?” Jordan was startled. His expression became less friendly.

“My house,” Raymond said succinctly. “It was my father’s house but my father is dead and he left it to me.”

“Forgive me. I had been told that it was the summer camp of Johnny Iselin, and of all places in this world for me to spend a summer this—”

“Johnny stays there sometimes, sir, when he gets too drunk for my mother to allow him to stay around the Capitol.”

“Your mother is—uh—Mrs. Iselin?”

“That’s right, sir.”

“I once found it necessary to sue your mother for defamation of character and slander. My name is Thomas Jordan.”

“How do you do, sir?”

“It cost her sixty-five thousand dollars and costs. What hurt her much more than the payment of that money was that I donated all of it to the organization called the American Civil Liberties Union.”

“Oh.” Raymond remembered the color of his mother’s words, the objects she had broken, the noises she had made, and the picture she had painted of this man.

Jordan smiled at him grimly. “Your mother and I are, have been, and will always be divergent in our views, not to say inimical of one another’s interests, and I tell you that after long study of the matter and of the uses of expediences by all of us in politics.”

Raymond smiled back at him, but not grimly, and he looked amazingly handsome and vitally attractive, Joci
e thought from far across the room as she entered, carrying a tray. He had such even white teeth against such a long, tanned face, and he offered them the yellow-green eyes of a lion. “If you weren’t sure of that, sir,” Raymond said, “you couldn’t be sure of anything, because that is the absolute truth.” They both laughed, unexpectedly and heartily, and were friends of a sort. Jocie came up to them with the cups and the coffee and a bottle of rye whisky, and Raymond began to feel the beginnings of what was to be a constant, summer-long nausea as he tried to equate the daughter of Senator Jordan with the ancient, carbonized prejudice of his mother.

That summer was the only happy time, excepting one, the only fully joyous, concentrically transforming time in Raymond’s life. Two pure and cooling fountains were all Raymond ever found in all that aridness of time allotted to him. Two brief episodes in his entire life in which he awoke each morning looking forward in joy to more joy and found it. Only twice was there a time when he did not maintain the full and automatic three-hundred-and-sixty-degree horizon of raw sensibilities over which swept the three searing beams of suspicion, fear, and resentment flashing from the loneliness of the tall lighthouse of his soul.

Jocie showed him how she felt. She told him how she felt. She presented him, with the pomp of new love, a thousand small and radiant gifts each day. She behaved as though she had been waiting an eternity for him to catch up with her in the time continuum, and now that he had arrived with his body to occupy a predestined place in space beside her, she knew she must wait still longer while he tried desperately to mature, all at once, out of infancy until he could understand that s
he only wanted to give to him, asking nothing but his awareness in return. She behaved as though she loved him, a condition that could swing in suspension to fix his concentration but which, when he could understand, would need to blend with his love, matching it exactly.

He walked beside her. Once or twice he touched her, but he did not know how to touch her or where to touch her. However, she saw right on the surface of him how greatly he was trying to learn, how he was struggling to lose the past so he could tell her of the glories she made him feel and of how enormously he needed her.

Every morning he waited outside her house, staring as though he could see through the walls, until she came running out to him. They spent all of every day together. They separated late, in the late darkness. They did not speak much but each day she moved him closer to breaking through his barriers and willed him with her love to say more each day, and she was filled with the ambition to make him safe with her love.

The summer was the second-best time in his merely twice-blest living span. The first time was not the equal of the second time because of his fear; the conviction that it would be taken from him the instant he voiced his need for it. Whatever they did together he held himself rigid, awaiting the scream of his mother’s rage, and it cost him thirty pounds of his flesh because he could not keep food down as he battled to hold the thoughts of his mother and Jocie apart. His mother found out about Jocie in time, and who Jocie’s father was, of course, and it was all over.

Johnny said he didn’t want to be around when she told Raymond what had to be. He went back to the capita
l where he had a lot of work to do anyway. Raymond got home late that night. His mother was waiting for him. She was wearing a fantastically beautiful Chinese house coat. It was orange-red. It had a deep black Elizabethan collar that stood up straight behind and around her shining blond head, in the mode of wicked witches, but it made her look very lovely and very kind and she smelled very beautiful and enlightened as Raymond dragged his dread behind him into the room, sickened to find her awake so late.

There she sits like a mail-order goddess, serene as the star on a Christmas tree, as calm as a jury, preening the teeth of her power with the floss of my joy, soiling it, shredding it, and just about ready to throw it away, and she is getting to look more and more like those two-dimensional women who pose for nail polish advertisements, and I have wanted to kill her for all of these years and now it is too late.

“What the hell do you want, Mother?”

“What the hell kind of a greeting is that at three-thirty in the morning?”

“It’s a quarter to three. What do you want?”

“What’s the matter with you?”

“I’m shocked to be in a room alone with you after all these years, I guess.”

“All right, Raymond. So I’m a busy woman. Do you think I work and work and ruin my health for myself? I do it for you. I’m making a place for you.”

“Please don’t do it for me, Mother. Do it for Johnny. Worse I couldn’t wish him.”

“What you’re doing to Johnny is the worst you could wish him.”

“What is it? I’ll double it.”

“I speak of that little Communist tart.”

“Shut up, Mother! Shut up with that!” His voice rose to a squeak.

“Do you know what Jordan is? Are you out to crucify Johnny?”

“I can’t answer you. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m going to bed.”

“Sit down!” He stopped where he was. He was near a chair. He sat down.

“Raymond, they live in New York. How would you see her?”

“I thought of getting a job in New York.”

“You have to do your Army service.”

“Next spring.”

“Well?”

“I might be dead next spring.”

“Oh, Raymond, for Christ’s
sake!”

“No one has given me a written, printed, bonded guarantee that I will live another week. This girl is now. What the hell do I care about her father’s politics any more than I care about your politics? Jocie—Jocie is
all I
care about.”

“Raymond, if we were at war now—”

“Oh, Mother, for Christ’s
sake!”

“—and you were suddenly to become infatuated with the daughter of a Russian agent—wouldn’t you expect me to come to you and object, to beg you to stop the entire thing before it was too late? Well, we
are
at war. It’s a cold war but it will get worse and worse until every man and woman and child in this country will have to stand up and be counted to say whether or not he or she is on the side of right and freedom, or on the side of the Thomas Jordans of this country
. I will go with you to Washington tomorrow, if you like, and I will show you documented proof that this man stands for evil and that he will do anything to win that evil—”