“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—”

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 running a subnormal fever for three weeks, collapsed. She had talked through each weakening manifestation of defiance he had made—through his shouts and screams, through his tears and pleadings and whimperings and sobs—and the sure power of her limitless strength slowly and surely overcame his double weakness: both the physical and the psychological, until he was convinced that he would be well rid of Jocie if he could trade her for some silence and some sleep. She made him take four sleeping pills, tucked him into his trundle bed, and he slept until the following afternoon at five forty-five, but was even then too weak to get up. His mother, having put her little boy to beddy-by, took a hot shower followed by a cold shower, ran a comforting amount of morphine into the large vein in her left forearm (which was always covered with those smart, long sleeves) and sat down at the typewriter to compose a little note from Raymond to Jocie. She rewrote it three times to be sure, but when it was done it was done right, and she signed his name and sealed the envelope. She got dressed, popped into the pick-up truck and drove directly to the Jordan camp. Jocie had gone to the post office on an errand for her father, but the senator was there. Raymond’s mother said it would be necessary for them to have a talk so he invited her inside the house. The Jordans packed and left the lake by six o’clock that evening.

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 unnecessary. This suited Raymond so well that he could not believe his own luck, and when he had worked even faster and better than usual and needed to sit and wait until Mr. Gaines would indicate, with a grunt and a push at a pile of papers, what the next job would be, he would sit turned halfway in upon himself, wishing he could turn all the way in and shut everything out and away from himself, but he was afraid Mr. Gaines would decide to talk and he would have to climb and pull himself out of the pit, so he waited and watched and at last came to see that he and Mr. Gaines could not have been more ecstatically suited to one another had one worked days and the other worked nights.

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 dinner (from which Mr. Gaines was automatically excused for, after all, he had actually met Raymond), welcoming a hero to their ranks. When O’Neil first told Raymond about the dinner plan they were standing, just the two of them, in Mr. Gaines’s office, one of the many glass-enclosed cubicles that lined the back wall of the city room, and Raymond hit O’Neil, knocking him across the desk and, as he lay there for an instant, spat on him. O’Neil didn’t ask for an explanation. He got up, a tiny thread of blood hanging from the left corner of his mouth, and beat Raymond systematically and quietly. They were both about the same age and weight, but O’Neil had interest, which is the key to life, on his side. The beating was done well and quickly but it must be seen that Raymond had, if even in the most negative way, made his point. No one else ever knew what had happened and because the dinner was only a week away and O’Neil knew he would need pictures of Raymond posed beside various executives of the paper, he was careful not to hit Raymond in the face where subsequent discolorations might show. When it was over, Raymond agreed that he would not concede the dinner, at any time, to be a good idea, holding it to be “a commonness which merchandised the flag,” but he did agree to attend. O’Neil, in his turn, inquired that if there was anything more a part of our folklore than hustling the flag for an edge, that he would appreciate it if Raymond would point it out to him, and agreed to limit the occasion to one speech which he would make himself and keep it short, and that Raymond would need only to rise in acknowledgment, bow slightly, and speak not at all.