He was elected governor of his state in the elections of 1944 and re-elected in 1948. As he entered his second term he was forty-one years old; Raymond’s mother was thirty-eight. Raymond was twenty-one and was working as a district man for the Journal, having graduated from the state university at the head of his class.
At forty-one, Governor Iselin was a plain, aggressively humble man, five feet eight inches tall in specially shod elevator shoes. There was a fleshiness of the nose to mark him for the memory. His hair was thin and, under certain lighting, appeared to have been painted in fine, single lines across his scalp over rosettes and cabbages of two-dimensional liver spots. His clothes, from a time shortly after his marriage to Raymond’s mother, were of homespun material but they had been run up by the hands of a terribly good and quite wealthy tailor in New York. Raymond’s mother had Johnny’s valet shine only the lower half of his high black shoes so that it would seem, to people who thought about those things, that he managed to shine his own shoes between visits of the Strawberry Lobby and the refusal of pardons to the condemned. An abiding mark of the degree of Johnny’s elemental friendliness shone from the fact that he could look no one in the eye and that when he talked he would switch syntax in seeming horror of what he had almost said to his listener. The governor never shaved from Friday night to Monday morning, no matter what function might be scheduled, as though he were a part-time Sikh. He would explain that this gave his skin a rest. Raymond’s mother had invented that one, as she had invented very nearly everything else about him excepting his digestive system (and if she had invented that it would have functioned a great deal better), because not shaving “made him like some slob, like a farm hand or some Hunky factory worker.” It is certain that over a weekend, when Big John was generating noise out of every body orifice, switching syntax, darting his eyes about, and flashing that meaty nose in his unshaven face, he was the commonest kind of common man forty ways to the ace. However, he had been custom-made by Raymond’s mother. She had developed Johnny (as José Raoul Capablanca had developed his chess play; as Marie Antoine Carême had folded herbs into a sauce for Talleyrand) into the model governor, on paper that is, of all the states of the United States, and in some of those other states the constituents read more about Jolly Johnny than about their own men. She had riveted into the public memory these immutable facts: John Yerkes Iselin was a formidable administrator; a conserver who could dare; an honest, courageous, conscience-thrilled, God-fearing public servant; a jolly, jovial, generous, gentling, humorous, amiable, good-natured, witty big brother; a wow of a husband and a true-blue pal of a father; a fussin’, fumin’, fightin’ soldier boy, all heart; a simple country judge with the savvy of Solomon; and an American, which was the most fortuitous circumstance of all.
Raymond’s mother hardly showed one flicker of chagrin when General Eisenhower was persuaded to make the stroll for the nomination in 1952, the one unexpected accident that could have blocked her John from the White House. She broke a few little things at the Mansion when she heard the news: mirrors, lamps, vases, and other replaceable bric-a-brac. She was entitled to a flash of violence, one little demonstration that she could feel passion, and it harmed no one because Johnny was dead drunk and Raymond had marched off to the Korean War.
In the autumn of 1952, two weeks before Raymond’s return from Korea to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor, almost two months before the end of Big John’s statutory final term as governor, U.S. Senator Ole Banstoffsen, the grand old man who had represented his state in Washington for six consecutive terms, succumbed to a heart attack almost immediately after a small dinner with his oldest and dearest friends, Governor and Mrs. John Iselin, and died in the governor’s arms in the manner of a dinner guest of the Empress Livia’s some time before in ancient Rome. The exchange of last words made their bid to become part of American history, for through them Big John found his life’s mission and the words are set down herewith to complete the record.
S
ENATOR
B
ANSTOFFSEN
John—Johnny, boy—are you there?
G
OVERNOR
I
SELIN
Ole! Ole, old friend. Don’t try to speak! Eleanor!
Where is that doctor!
S
ENATOR
B
ANSTOFFSEN
(his last words)
Johnny—you must—carry on. Please, please, Johnny, swear to me as I lay dying that you will fight to save Our Country—from the Communist peril.
G
OVENOR
I
SELIN
(greatly moved)
I pledge to you, with my soul, that I will fight to keep Communists from dominating our institutions to the last breath of my life, dear friend.
(Senator Banstoffsen slumps into death, made happy.)
G
OVENOR
I
SELIN
He’s gone! Oh, Eleanor, he’s gone. A great fighter has gone on to his rest.
The verbatim record must have been set down by Raymond’s mother, as she was the only other person present at the senator’s death, and she undoubtedly found time to make notes while they waited for the doctor and while the words were still so fresh in her mind, but Johnny did not use them for almost three years, during which time they had undoubtedly been carefully filed for their value as Americana and as a source of inspiration to others.
Governor Iselin appointed himself to succeed Senator Banstoffsen, to fight the good fight, and his re-election followed. He was sworn in on March 18, 1953, by Justice Krushen, after his wife had insisted that he take The Cure for two and a half months at a reliable, discreet, and medically sound ranch for alcoholics and drug addicts in sun-drenched New Mexico, following the booze-drenched Christmas holidays of 1952.
Five
WHAT IS THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF GUILT BUT THE arena floor rushing up to meet the falling trapeze artist? Without it, a bullet becomes a tourist flying without responsibility through the air. The consciousness of guilt gives a scent to humanity, a threat of putrefaction, the ultimate cosmetic. Without the consciousness of guilt, existence had become so bland in Paradise that Eve welcomed the pungency of Original Sin. Raymond’s consciousness of guilt, that rouged lip print of original sin, had been wiped off. He had been made unique. He had been shriven into eternity, exculpated of the consciousness of guilt.
Out of his saddened childhood, Raymond had grown to the age for love. Because he was mired down within an aloof, timid, and skeptical temperament he was a man who, if he was to be permitted to love at all, was suited to find the solution of his needs only in reassuring monogamy. He had no ability to make friends. As he had grown up he was dependent upon the children of friends of the people who were his mother’s garden: mostly politicians and their lackeys, and other people who could be used by politicians: newspaper types, press agents, labor types, commerce and industry edges, hustlers of veterans and hustlers of minorities, patriots and suborners, confused women and the self-seeking clergy.
By an accident, when he was just past twenty-one years old, Raymond met the daughter of a man whom his mother would not, under any condition, have entertained. Her name was Jocelyn Jordan. Her father was a United States senator and a dangerously unhealthy liberal in every sense of that word, though a member of Johnny Iselin’s party. They lived in the East. They happened to be in Raymond’s mother’s state because it was summertime, when schoolteachers and senators not up for re-election are allowed time off to spend their large, accumulated salaries, and they had been invited by Jocie’s roommate to use her family’s summer camp while the family toured in Europe. It is certain that they had no knowledge that they would be keeping calm and cool beside the same blue lake, with its talking bass and balsam collar, as Governor Iselin and his wife or else they would have politely refused the invitation. When they did find out, they were established in the summer camp and had not been shot at so it was too late to do anything about it.