On the morning of the ninth day at Swardon, less than two days before he murdered Mr. Gaines, Raymond awoke as from a deep sleep, surprised to find himself in a strange bed and in traction, but even more shocked to find himself staring directly into, and on a level with, the grief-ravaged face of his mother. Raymond had never seen his mother’s face as being anything but smoothly held, enforced, carefully supported, arranged, and used to help her get what she wanted as a Cadillac was used to get her where she wanted to go. The skin on his mother’s face had always been flawless; the eyes were exquisitely placed and entirely clear, the whites unflecked by tiny blood vessels, merely suggesting, malevolence and insane impatience. Her mouth had always been held well in, as the mouths of city saddle horses, and the perfect blond hair had always framed all of this and had always softened it.

To open his eyes and find himself looking into a wracked caricature of that other vision made Raymond cry out, and made his mother aware that he was conscious. Her hair was ragged and awry. Her eyes were rabbit-red from weeping. Her cheeks shone with wet, washing away the cosmetic that always masked the wrinkles. Her mouth was twisted in ugly self-pity, while she sobbed noisily and blew her nose into too small a handkerchief. She drew back instantly at his sound and attempted to compose her face, but it could not be done convincingly on such short order, and unconsciously she wanted to gain a credit for the fear she knew would be unbelievable to him: her tears because of him.

“Raymond, oh, my Raymond.”

“Whassa matter?”

“Oh—”

“Is Johnny dead?”

“What?”

“What the hell is the matter with you?”

“I came here as soon as I could. I flew here the instant I was able to leave.”

“Where? Pardon the cliché, but where am I?”

“The Swardon Sanitarium.”

“The Swardon Sanitarium where?”

“New York. You were hit by a hit-and-run driver. Oh, I was so frightened. I came as soon as I could.”

“When? How long have I been here?”

“Eight days. Nine days. I don’t know.”

“And you just got here?”

“Do you hate me, Raymond?”

“No, Mother.”

“Do you love me?”

“Yes, Mother.” He looked at her with genuine anxiety. Had she run out of arm sauce? Had she broken the arm-banging machine? Or was she just a very clever impersonator sent over to play the mother while my true mommy tries to sober up the Great Statesman?

“My little boy. My darling, little boy.” She went into a paroxysm of silent weeping, working her shoulders up and down in a horrible manner and shaking the chair she sat in. There was nothing faked about this, he knew. She must have hit some real trouble along the line. It simply could not possibly be that she was weeping over him being stretched out in a hospital. Mucus slid from the tiny handkerchief and rested on her left cheekbone. Raymond closed his eyes for a moment, but he would not tell her what had happened and felt a deep satisfaction that ultimately she would look in some mirror after she had left him and see this mess on her face.

“You are such a fraud, Mother. My God, I feel as well as I have ever felt and I know that you have been all over this with whatever doctors there are out there on the telephone days ago, and now you’re at the hospital because there is probably a sale at Bloomingdale’s or you’re having a few radio actors blacklisted and you make a production out of it like I was involved somehow in your life.” His voice was bitter. His eyes were hard and dry.

“I have to be a fraud,” she said, straightening her back and slipping several lengths of steel into her voice like whalebone into a corset. “And I have to be the truth, too. And a shield and the courage for all the men I have ever known, yourself included, excepting my father. There is so much fraud in this world and it needs to be turned away with fraud, the way steel is turned with steel and the way a soft answer does not turneth away wrath.” She had emerged, dripping with acid, from her grief. Her face was a mass of ravaged colors and textures, her hair was like an old lamp shade fringe and that glob of mucus still rested on her left cheekbone disgustingly, but she was herself again, and Raymond felt greatly relieved.

“How’s Johnny?”

“Fine. He’d be here, but that committee just finished working him over—ah, wait until that one is up for re-election.” She sniffed noisily. “So I told him he must stay there and stare them down. You have no use for him anyway so I don’t know why you bother to ask for him unless you feel guilt about something.”

“I do feel guilt about something.”

“About what?” She leaned forward slightly because information is the prime increment of power.

“About Jocie.”

“Who’s Jocie?”

“Jocie Jordan. The senator’s daughter.”

“Oh. Yes. Why do you feel guilt?” his mother asked.

“Why? Because she thinks I deserted her.”

“Raymond! Why do you dramatize everything so? You were babies!”

“I thought that since we’re having our first meeting since I got the medal, since I got back from Korea, and I was in Korea for two years, I thought since you’ve been pretending to be two other people—you know, honest and maternal and wistfully remorseful about how we had let our lives go along—coldly and separately—and I thought that before we got any more honest and hated ourselves in the morning, that we might just pay Jocie the respect of asking for her—you know, mentioning her name in passing the way they do about the dead?” His voice was choked. His eyes were not dry.

As though he had reminded her of what had triggered her in the first place, she began unexpectedly to weep. The lemon sunlight was reflected from the bright white blank wall outside the window at her back and it lingered like St. Elmo’s fire around the ridiculously small green hat she was wearing, a suspicion of a hat that had been assembled for seventy dollars by an aesthetic leader for whom millinery signified the foundation stone of culture.

“What is the matter with you, Mother?”

She sobbed.”

“You aren’t crying about me?”

She sobbed and nodded.

“But, I’m all right. I don’t have a pain or an ache. I am absolutely fine.”

“Oh, Raymond, what can I say to you? There has been so much to get done. We have so far to go. Johnny is going to lead the people of our country to the heights of their history. But I have to lead Johnny, Raymond. You know that. I know you know that. I have given my life and many, many significant things for all of this. My life. Simply that and I can see that if I were to ransack my strength—remembered strength or future strength—I could not give more to this holy crusade than I have given. Now I have come face to face with my life where it has failed to cross your own. I can’t tell you how a mother feels about that, because you wouldn’t understand. It made me weep for a little bit. That’s all. What’s that? Anybody and everybody recovers from tears, but I’m not sad and I don’t have regrets because I know that what I did and what I do is for the greatest possible good for all of us.” Raymond watched her, then made the small despising gesture with his right hand, brushing her world out of his way as it came too close to him.

“I don’t understand one word of what you are saying,” he told her.

“I am saying this. Some terrible, terrible changes are going to come to this country.”

He flicked at the air with his hand violently, unaware of the movement, and he closed his eyes.

“This country is going to go through a fire like it has never seen,” she said in a low and earnest voice. “And I know what I am saying because the signs are there to read and I understand politics, which is the art of reading them. Time is going to roar and flash lightning in the streets, Raymond. Blood will gush behind the noise and stones will fall and fools and mockers will be brought down. The smugness and complacency of this country will be dragged through the blood and the noise in the streets until it becomes a country purged and purified back to original purity, which it once possessed so long ago when the founding fathers of this republic—the blessed, blessed fathers—brought it into life. And when that day comes—and we have been cleansed of the slime of oblivion and saved from the wasteful, wrong, sinful, criminal, selfish, rottenness which Johnny, and only Johnny is going to save us from, you will kneel beside me and thank me and kiss my hands and my skirt and give only me your love as will the rest of the great people of this confused and blinded land.”