The Manchurian Candidate

All the cameras were strewn about in the grass while everybody waited for the President to arrive. Raymond wondered what would they do if he could find a sidearm some place and shoot her through the face—through that big, toothy, flapping mouth? Look how she held Joh

The airport. O Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. She had got the AP photographer by the fleshy part of his upper right arm and she had got Joh

The lieutenant had pushed him out of the plane and his mother had pushed Joh

Joh

It had taken about seven minutes of posing, reposing, standing, walking toward the cameras, then the photographers broke ranks and Raymond’s mother grabbed Joh

The assistant press secretary from the White House steered Raymond to a car, and the next time Raymond saw his mother she was handing out cigars in the Rose Garden and paying out spurts of false laughter.

Everybody got quiet all of a sudden. Even his mother. They all looked alert as the President came out. He looked magnificent. He was ruddy and tall and he looked so entirely sane that Raymond wanted to put his head on the President’s chest and cry because he hadn’t seen very many sane people since he had left Ben Marco.

He stood at attention, eyes forward.

The President said, “At ease, soldier.” The President leaned forward to pick up Raymond’s right hand from where it dangled at his side and as he shook it warmly he said, “You’re a brave man, Sergeant. I envy you in the best sense of that word because there is no higher honor your country has to give than this medal you will receive today.” Raymond watched his mother edge over. With horror, he saw the jackal look in her eyes and in Joh

The shot was lined up. Raymond’s mother was on the President’s left. Raymond was on the President’s right. Joh

Four

IN 1940, RAYMOND’S MOTHER HAD DIVORCED his father, a somewhat older man, while she was six months pregnant with a second child, to marry Raymond’s father’s law partner, John Yerkes Iselin, who had a raucous laugh and a fleshy nose. There was more than the usual talk in their community that loud, lewd Joh

Raymond had been twelve years old at the time of his mother’s remarriage. He hadn’t particularly liked his father but he disliked his mother so much more that he felt the loss keenly. In later years the second son, Raymond’s brother, could have been said to have favored noisy Joh

The unquestionable fact was that Eleanor Shaw’s marriage to John Iselin was a scandal and the questions that aroused curiosity must have been an insufferable torment in the mind of young Raymond as his awakening consciousness absorbed the details which kept filtering fresh drops of bitterness into his memory.

Raymond’s father had paused with his grief for six years before killing himself. At this disposition, Raymond, if no one else, was inconsolable. In the driving rain, in the presence of so few witnesses, most of whom having been rented through the funeral director, he made a graveside oration. As he spoke he looked only at his mother. He told, in a high-pitched, tight voice, of what an incomparably noble man his father had been and other boyish balderdash like that. To Raymond, from that day in 1940 when he had seen his father’s tears, his mother would always be a morally adulterous woman who had deserted her home and had brought sadness upon her husband’s venerable head.

Iselin, the stepfather, was doubly hateful because he had offended, humiliated, and betrayed a noble man by robbing him of his wife, and because he seemed to make noises with every movement and every part of his body, forsaking silence awake and asleep; belching, bawling, braying, blaspheming; snoring or shouting; talking, always, always, never stopping talking.

Raymond’s father and Joh