The Manchurian Candidate

“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 Joh

“What you’re doing to Joh

“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 Joh

“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—”

That was the gist of it. Raymond’s mother began her filibuster at approximately three o’clock in the morning and she kept at him, walking beside him wherever he went in the house, standing next to him talking shrilly of the American Dream and its meaning in the present, pulling stops out bearing the invisible labels left over from Fourth of July speeches and old Hearst editorials such as “The Red Menace,” “Liberty, Freedom, and America as We Know It,” “Thought Police and The American Way,” until ten minutes to eleven o’clock the following morning, when Raymond, who had lost so much weight that summer and who had been ru

Jocie, who had fallen as deeply in love with Raymond as he with her, and more than that because she was healthy and normal, never really understood quite why it was all over. Her father told her that Raymond had enlisted in the Army that morning, had telephoned only to say that he could not see Jocie again and good-by. Her father, having read the terrible letter, had shuddered with nausea and burned it. Raymond’s mother had explained to him that despite their own personal differences she had come to say to him that his daughter was far too fine a girl to be hurt or twisted by her son, that Raymond was a homosexual and in other ways degenerate, and that he would be far, far better forgotten by this sweet, fine child.

Six

IN FEBRUARY, 1953, JUST A LITTLE MORE THAN two months after his discharge from the Army, Raymond got a job as a researcher-legman-confidant for, and as janitor of the ivory tower of, Holborn Gaines, the distinguished international political columnist of The Daily Press, in New York; this on the strength of (1) a telephone call from the managing editor of the Journal to Joe Downey, managing editor of The Daily Press, (2) his relationship to Mrs. John Yerkes Iselin, whom Mr. Gaines admired and loathed as one of the best political minds in the country, and (3) the Medal of Honor.

Mr. Gaines was a man of sixty-eight or seventy years who wore a silk handkerchief inside his shirt collar whenever he was indoors, no matter what the season of the year, and drank steady quantities of Holland beer but never seemed to grow either plump or drowsy from it, and found very nearly everything that had ever happened in politics from Caesar’s ascension to Sherman Adams’ downfall to be among the most amusing manifestations of his civilization. Mr. Gaines would pore over those detailed never-to-be-published-in-that-form reports from one or another of the paper’s bureau chiefs around the world, which provided the intimate background data of all real or imagined political maneuvering, and sip at the lip of a beer bottle, chuckling as though the entire profile of that day’s world disaster had been written by Mark Twain. He was a kind man who took the trouble to explain to Raymond on the first day of his employment that he did not much enjoy talking and fulsomely underscored how happy they would be, both of them, if they could train each other into one another’s jobs so that conversation would become u

The promotion manager of The Daily Press was a young man named O’Neil. He arranged that the members of the editorial staff give Raymond a testimonial di