Jocie was nineteen that summer when she came around a turning of the dusty road at the moment the snake had bitten Raymond, as he lay in his wine-colored swimming trunks where he had tripped and fallen in the road, staring from the green snake as it moved slowly through the golden dust toward the other side of the road, to the neat, new wound on his bare leg. She did not speak to him but she saw what he saw and, stopping, stared wordlessly at the two dark red spots against his healthy flesh, then moved quickly to the small plastic kit attached to the back of her bicycle seat, removed a naked razor blade and a bottle of purple fluid, and knelt beside him. She beamed expert reassurance into his eyes from the sweet brownness of her own and cut crosses with the razor blade in each dark, red spot, traversed both of them with a straight cut, then put her mouth to his leg and drew two mouthfuls of blood out of it. Each time after she spit the blood out she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand like a laborer who had just finished a hero sandwich and a bottle of beer. She poured the purple fluid on the cuts, bound Raymond’s leg with two strips of a handkerchief she had ripped in half, then saturated the improvised bandage with more purple liquid, over the wounds.
“I hope I know what I’m doing,” she said in a tremulous voice. “My father is scared tiddly about snakes in this part of the country, which is how I happen to ride around with a razor blade and potassium permanganate solution. Now don’t move. It is very, very important that you don’t move and start anything that might be left from that snake circulating through your system.” She walked to her bicycle as she talked. “I’ll be right back with a car. I won’t be ten minutes. You just stay still, now. You hear?” She pedaled off rapidly around the same turning of the road that had magically produced her. She had vanished many seconds before he realized that he had not spoken to her and that, although he had expected to die when the snake had bitten him, he had not thought about the snake, the snake’s bite, nor his impending death from the instant she had appeared. He looked bemusedly at his crudely bandaged leg below the swimming trunks. Purple ink and red blood trickled idly along his leg in parallel courses and it occurred to him that, if this had been happening to his mother’s leg, she would have claimed the purple mixture as being her blood.
A car returned, it seemed to him almost at once, and Jocie had fetched her father along because it would give him such a good feeling to know that all of those warnings about the snakes in those woods had been just. A man has few enough opportunities like that when he assists in the raising of children, who must be hoisted on the pulley of one’s experience every morning to the top of the pole for a view of life as extensive as that day’s emotional climate would bear, then lowered again at sundown to be folded up and made to rest, and carried into their dreams with reverence.
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.