The Manchurian Candidate (32 page)

He snapped the suitcase shut. He carried it to the bedroom door, worrying about what the hell Jocie would think of him when she saw those idiot newspapers at the airport. He flung open the door then began a tug of war over the suitcase with Chunjin as he dragged both of them toward the square, tiled foyer.

“For, cris
sake,
Chunjin!” It made him even angrier for having spoken to this pushy little type at all and a loud discussion started.

Chunjin did not want him to take the Long
Island Railroad to his mother’s house. Opposing it bitterly, he maintained that it was not sound for a rich man to wrestle with a large bag in a crowded railroad car. Raymond said he certainly was not going to put up with this kind of insubordination and if it continued for just about two more sentences Chunjin could go in and pack his own cardboard suitcase and get the hell out for good. He felt foolish as soon as he had said it because he remembered suddenly that Chunjin did not sleep in and, of course, had no suitcase on the premises.

Chunjin said loudly that he had taken the liberty of renting an automobile and the correct, dark uniform of a proper chauffeur, the jacket of which Mr. Shaw could look upon as he was even now wearing it. Chunjin said he would drive Mr. Shaw to his mother’s house in comfort and at a level with Mr. Shaw’s dignity and position in the world.

To Raymond, all of this was an utterly new conception, perhaps as television would have been to the inventor of the wheel. Raymond had loved automobiles all his life, although he could not drive one, but he had never thought of renting one. He was transformed, enchanted.

“You
rented
a car?”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Shaw.”

“What kind?”

“Cadillac.”

“Well! Marvelous! What color?”

“West Point Gray. French blue seats. Leather. Genuine. Rear seat radio.”

“Wonderful!”

“Tax deductible also.”

“Is that so? How?”

“You will read the booklet in the ca
r, Mr. Shaw.” Chunjin put on his dark chauffeur’s cap. He took the suitcase away from Raymond without a struggle. “We go now, Mr. Shaw? Seven o’clock. Two hours to drive.”

“I don’t know this house, you know. It’s a rented house. I don’t know about a place for you to stay.”

“My job find place. You not think. Ride and read reports from newspaper. Think about condition of world.”

Dressed as a costumer’s conception of a gaucho, Raymond came down his mother’s rented, winding stairs, railed in English copper, stainless steel, and Lucite, and into an entrance hall that might have been hewn by a cast of Grimm Brothers’ gnomes out of a marble mountain. It was studded with bronze zodiacal designs and purred with concealed neon light in an arrangement that pulled Raymond toward the great drawing room on the threshold of which Senator and Mrs. Iselin were receiving their guests. The older guests who shook hands with the Iselins that night had been followers of Father Coughlin; the group just younger than them had rallied around Gerald L. K. Smith; and the rest, still younger, were fringe lice who saw Johnny’s significance in a clear, white light. The clan had turned out from ten thousand yesterdays in the Middle West and neolithic Texas, and patriotism was far from being their last refuge. It was a group for anthropologists, and it seemed like very bad manners or very bad judgment on Raymond’s mother’s part to have invited Senator Jordan to walk among the likes of these.

Johnny and Ellie (as Raymond’s mother was called by most of the guests) were costumed as honest dairy-farm folk would look if honest dairy fa
rmers had had their work clothes built by Balenciaga. Raymond’s mother had figured that the press photographs of these costumes would be viewed with great favor in the Iselin home state, where building foundations were made of butter; voters would be told that Big John never forgot where he came from. As she embraced Raymond in their mutually distasteful greeting, she whispered that Jocie’s plane had run late out of San Juan but that she was now in the house next door and she had telephoned to say that she would be over no later than midnight and had asked anxiously if Raymond would be there. He felt, for an instant, that he might faint.

“Anxiously? Why anxiously? Did she sound as though she were fearful that I might be here?”

“Oh, don’t be such a jerk, Raymond! If you weren’t here do you think for a moment that the Jordans would come here?”

“Don’t call me a jerk, Mother.”

“Go have a drink or a tranquilizer or something.” She turned to her husband. “Raymond can certainly be a pain in the ass,” she said with asperity.

“She’s kiddin’ yuh,” Johnny said. “You sure look great, kid. What are you supposed to be, one of those Dutch skaters?”

“What else?” Raymond answered. He walked through the crowds acknowledging greetings forbiddingly and feeling his heart beating as though it were trying to splinter a way out through his ribs. He walked among, but shunned contact with, the crowds on the broad lawns behind the house, all of which, excepting one section, were brilliantly illuminated with non-Communist Japanese lanterns and filled with striped tents. The dark section pulled Raymond to it. It faced the Jorda
n house. It was a walled-off piece of ground, as isolated as a private deck on an ocean liner. He stood there beside the wall staring across at the Jordan house without the reward of being able to observe any movement there. Frustrated, and more than usually resentful, he wandered back to the Iselin house through crowds of stout, blond Carmens and Kansas Borgias, unhorsed Godivas, unfrocked Richelieus, and many businessmen dressed as pirates. Many of the costumes were quaint American Legion uniforms so like those of the
squadristi
of former days in Italy, encasing various sizes of fleshy prejudice which exchanged opinions they rented that week from Mr. Sokolsky, Mr. Lawrence, Mr. Pegler, and that fascinating younger fellow who had written about men and God at Yale. The three orchestras tried to avoid playing at the same time. The Iselins had provided very nearly everything but balalaikas in the way of music. There was a “society” orchestra, a three cha combo, and an inundation of gallant White Russian fiddlers who migrated across the grounds and in and out of the house en masse, sawing like locusts, and not only did they accept tips but they very nearly frisked the guests to get them. Raymond stopped at one of the four bars and drank a half glass of champagne. He refused offers to dance with three young women of different sizes. His mother found him later, far in a corner of the large salon, behind a pastel sofa, under two threats of Salvador Dalí, a Catalan.

“My God, you look as though your head will come to a point any minute,” she told him. “Raymond, will you
please
take a tranquilizer?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“I have a revulsion for drugs.”

“You look absolutely miserable. Never mind. A half-hour more and she’ll be here. My feet hurt. Why don’t we just sneak away for a few minutes until Jocie and her father arrive. We can sit in the library and sip cold wine.”

Raymond looked right at her and, for the first time in many, many years, actually smiled at her, and she thought he looked positively beautiful. Why—why he looks like Poppa! Raymond, her own Raymond, looked exactly like her darling, darling Poppa! She clutched his hand as she led him out of the salon and along the two corridors to the library, causing one woman guest to tell another woman guest that they looked as though they were rushing off to get a little of you-know-what, Mrs. Iselin trailing a delicious scent of Jolie Madame because she had read that Lollobrigida wore it and she had always wished she could be short like that, and stopping only to get a bottle of wine and to tell the butler where they would be.

The library was a small, pleasant room and the books were real. The fourth wall was transparent glass and faced that walled deck of land and Jocie’s house. Raymond stood rubbing his hands together, so very tall and so preposterously handsome in the short, shining boots, the ballooning trousers, and the wide expanse of white silk shirt. “Do you
know
they got in from the airport?” he asked as he poured the lemon-yellow wine into two sherbet glasses.

“I
told
you,” his mother said. “She telephoned me. From that house.”

“How did she sound?”

“Like a girl.”

“Thanks.”

She leaned forward tensely in the raspberry-colored chair, splendid in pink chiffon. “Raymond?”

“What?” He handed her one of the filled glasses. She took it with her bandaged left hand. “What did you do to your hand?” he asked, seeing the bandage for the first time.

“I got careless in Washington this afternoon and got it caught in the door of a taxi.” He grunted involuntarily. “Raymond,” she said, transferring the wine to her right hand and lifting it shakily. “Why don’t you pass the time by playing a little solitaire?”

Twenty-One

MARCO SQUEEZED THE INSIDE OF EUGÉNIE
Rose’s splendid thigh, not at all sexually—well, perhaps just a little bit sexually—but mostly out of the greatest of good spirits because, after all this time of sick fear, the work seemed to be leading to the conclusion which they had dreaded they would never be able to find.

“Hey!” Eugénie Rose said.

“What?”

“Don’t stop.”

It was after midnight and it was Marco’s dinner break from the unending games of solitaire, from the examinations of Hungarian Charlie, the bookmaker, and the young, dumpy blonde, from the number systems and symbol systems, and Marco knew the end was in sight.

“This time tomorrow night, oh boy! I’ll have lunch with Raymond tomorrow, then a little solitaire, then a nice long chat about the good old days in Korea and a few Russian and Chinese friends of ours, then a few suggest
ions made to crumble up their systems and mechanisms forever—sort of removing the controls, ripping out the wiring—and, lady, it’s all over. All over. All done with. Done.”

“Finished.”

“Completed.”

“Through.”

“Mission accomplished.”

“Check.”

They were in an all-night restaurant on Fifty-eighth Street, and when he wasn’t clutching her hands, Rosie nibbled on cinnamon toast as daintily as a cartoon mouse. Marco was shoveling in large wedges of gooey creamed chipped beef and humming chorus after chorus of “Here Comes the Bride.”

“That’s a pretty tune you’re humming. What is it?” she asked.

“Our song.”

“Oh, Benny boy. Oh, my dear colonel!”

Twenty-Two

RAYMOND FOUND THE CARDS IN THE DESK
. They were elegant rented cards that had come with the house. They had gold edges and were imprinted with the name and the grotesque crest of a hotel maintained for the expense-account set on the North Side of Chicago. He dealt out the play. The queen of diamonds did not show in the first game. As he placed the cards precisely his mother sat on the edge of her chair with her face buried in her hands. When she heard him squaring up the pack she sat up straight and her face was twisted bitterly. Raymond placed the red queen faceup on top of the deck and studied it noncommittally.

“Raymond, I must talk to you about a problem with Colonel Marco, and I must talk to you, as well, about many other things but there will be no time tonight. It seems that there is never time.” There was a brisk knocking at the door, which she had locked. “Damn!” she said and walked to the door. “Who is it?”

“It’s me, hon. Johnny. Tom Jordan is here. I need you.”

“All right, lover. I’ll be right out.”

“Who the hell are you in there with anyway?”

“Raymond.”

“Oh. Well, hurry it up whatever it is, hon. We have work out here.”

She walked back and stood behind Raymond with her hands on his shoulders. As he watched the red queen she repaired her face as best she could. Then she leaned over him and took the card. “I’ll take this with me, dear,” she said. “It might bring mischief if I leave it here.”

“Yes, Mother.”

“I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“Yes, Mother.”

She left the library, locking the door behind her. As soon as she was gone something rattled at the terrace door. Raymond looked up just as the smiling, beautiful young woman closed the door behind her. She was dressed for the masquerade party, costumed as a playing card. The rich gold and scarlet cowl fell from her crown to her shoulders. Gold incrusted jewels banded the lush black and white ruff at her throat. The kaleidoscopic complex of inlays of metallic oranges, yellows, purples, scarlets, blacks, and whites fell to her bodice and below. From the top of her head, stiffly parallel to her shoulders, then falling at right angles full down the sides of her body, was a white papier-mâché board on which was printed a regal Q, a red diamond standard directly below it at the left corner, while at the right there stared a large red diamond against the shining white background. It was the queen of diamonds, his patron and his destiny. She spoke to him.

“I saw you through my window just before we left the house,” she said huskily. “My heart almost shot out of my body. I had to see you alone. Daddy went around the front way and I slipped through that old iron door in the stone wall.”

“Jocie.” She was Jocie and she was his queen of diamonds. She was the queen of diamonds, his special lady from the stars, and she was Jocie.

“Your letter—oh, my darling.”

He moved across the room and held her by the shoulders, swaying. He looked down at her with such a force of pure love that she shivered and they were together in love forever. He kissed her. It was the first time he had ever kissed her after having possessed her completely in imaginations through nine risings of April and the deaths of eight Decembers. He pulled her down on the couch and his hands fumbled with her royal clothes and royal person while his mouth and his body sought his salvation with the only woman he would ever love, and the only woman who had ever allowed him to love her; the cardboard queen he served, and the lovely girl he had adored from the moment he had come to life beside her near a lake, near a snake, within an expanding dream.