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, Jocie 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 she 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 capital 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.