Текст книги "The Manchurian Candidate "

Автор книги: Richard Thomas Condon

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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

She started to run her husband for governor as of that day, and the first five or six publicity releases emphasized strongly how this man, whose position as a public servant demanded that he not march off to war but remain home as part of the civilian task force to safeguard Our Liberties, had chosen instead, had volunteered even, to make the same sacrifices which were the privileged lot of his fellow Americans and had therefore enlisted as a buck-private marine. She had only two objectives. One was to make sure Johnny got overseas somewhere near, but not too near, the combat zones. The second was that he be assigned to a safe, healthy, pleasant job.

It was at that point that something got screwed up. It was extremely embarrassing, but fortunately she was able to patch it up so that it looked as if Johnny was even more of a patriotic masochist, but it brought her anger she was careful not to lose, and because of what happened to outrage her, it spelled out her brother’s eventual ruin.

This is what happened. Through her brother, whom she had never hesitated to use, Raymond’s mother had decided to negotiate for a Marine Corps commission for Johnny. She would have preferred it if Johnny had enlisted as a private so that she could arrange for a field commission for him, following some well-publicized action, but Johnny got stubborn at the last minute and said he had agreed to go through all this rigmarole to please her but he wasn’t going to sit out any war as a goddam private when whisky was known to cost only ten cents a shot at all officers’ clubs.

Her brother was sitting on one of the most influential wartime government commissions that spring of 1942, and the son-of-a-bitch looked her right in the eye in his own office in the Pentagon in Washington and told her that Johnny could take his chances just like anybody else and that he didn’t believe in wire-pulling in wartime! That was that. Furthermore, she found out immediately that he wasn’t kidding. She had had to move fast and think up some other angle very quickly but she hung around her brother’s office long enough to explain to him that her turn would come someday and that when it came she was going to break him in two.

She rode back to the Carlton, shocked. She blamed herself. She had underestimated that mealy-mouthed bastard. She should have seen that he had been waiting for years to turn her out like a peasant. She concentrated upon preserving her anger.

Johnny was pretty drunk when she got back to the hotel, but not too bad. She was sweet and amiable, as usual. “What am I, hon?” he asked thickly, “a cappen?” She threw her hat away from her and walked to the small Directoire desk. “A cappency is good enough for me,” he said. She pulled a telephone book out of the desk drawer and began to flip through the pages. “Am I a cappen or ain’t I a cappen?” he asked.

“You ain’t a cappen.” She picked up the phone and gave the operator the number of the Senate Office Building.

“What am I, a major?”

“You’re gonna be a lousy draftee if something doesn’t give,” she said. “He turned us down.”

“He never liked me, honey.”

“What the hell has that got to do with anything. He’s my brother. He won’t lift a finger to help with the Marines and if we don’t get an understanding set in about forty-eight hours you’re going to be a draftee just like any other jerk.”

“Don’t worry, hon. You’ll straighten it out.”

“Shaddup! You hear? Shadd up!” She was pale with sickening bad temper. She spoke into the phone and asked for Senator Banstoffsen’s office, and when she got the office she asked to speak to the senator. “Tell him it’s Ellie Iselin. He’ll know.”

Johnny poured another drink, threw some ice into the glass, put some ginger ale on top of it, then shambled off toward the john, undoing his suspenders as he walked.

Raymond’s mother’s voice had suddenly gotten hot and sweet, although her eyes were bleak. “Ole, honey?” She paused to let those words make her point. “I mean—is this Senator Banstoffsen? Oh, Senator. Please forgive me. It was a slip. I mean, the only way I can explain is to say—is—I guess that’s the way I think of you all the time, I guess.” She rolled her eyes toward the ceiling in disgust and sighed silently. Her voice was all breath and lust. “I’d sure like to see you. Yes. Yes.” She rapped impatiently with the end of a pencil on the top of the desk. “Now. Yes. Now. Do you have a lock on that office door, lover? Yes. Ole. Yes. I’ll be right there.”

Johnny Iselin was sworn in as a captain in the Signal Corps of the Army of the United States on July 20, 1942. Raymond’s mother had made a powerful and interested political ally in her home state, and although he didn’t know it, that was not to be the last favor he would be asked to deliver for her, and sometimes he came to be bewildered by how one simple little sprawl on an office desk could get to be so endlessly, intricately complicated.

During the intensive training in Virginia necessary for the absorption of vital technical and military information, Johnny and Raymond’s mother lived in a darling little cottage just outside Wellville in Nottoway County, where she had found a solid connection for black-market booze and gasoline and a contact for counterfeit red points to keep those old steaks coming in. Johnny moved out of the staging area and sailed with his outfit for Greenland in December, 1942, and Raymond’s mother went back home to handle the PR work for her man. The recurring theme she chose for the first year of propaganda was hammered out along the basic lines of “Blessed is he who serves who is not called: blessed is he who sacrifices self to bring about the downfall of tyrants that others may prosper in Liberty.” It was solid stuff.

She got herself a women’s radio show and a women’s-interest newspaper column in the Journal, the biggest paper in the state and one of the best in the country. There were a lot of specialized jobs going for the asking. Mainly she read or reprinted all of Johnny’s letters on every conceivable variety of subject, whether he sent her any letters or not.

The official records show that Johnny was an intelligence officer in the Army, but his campaign literature, when Raymond’s mother ran him for governor, revealed that he had been “a northern Greenland combat commander.” About ten years after the war was over, well after Johnny’s second term as governor, the Journal did a surprising amount of careful research on Johnny’s record, at considerable expense. They dug up documents, and men who had served with Johnny, and they virtually reconstructed a most careful, pertinent, and accurate history of his somewhat distorted past. A public relations officer who had been attached to Iselin’s unit, a Lieutenant Jack Ramen, now of San Mateo, California, told the Journal in 1955 on a transcribed, long-distance-telephone tape recording, which was monitored by the Journal’s city editor, Fred Goldberg, and witnessed by a principal clergyman and a leading physician of the state, of the lonely incident that had lent credence to the popular belief that Johnny had seen combat while in service.

“Yeah,” Ramen said. “I remember the day we were both at a tiny Eskimo settlement above Etah there on Smith Sound and Johnny was looking to make some kind of good trades on furs with the natives when a supply ship the name of Midshipman Bennet Reyes came in, covered all over with ice. They were having propeller trouble and they were due in at Etah to unload groceries and while they were standing by for repairs the skipper told them to test the guns, all the guns, everything. We find out about it when Johnny and I go aboard; we were off duty, and Johnny always operates under orders from his wife to make friends no matter where. He actually brought the skipper of that ship the stiffest piece of seal-skin you ever saw and made such a big thing out of it that the guy probably even kept it. He give Johnny a half gallon of pure grain alcohol to show his appreciation, and we needed it. Man, was it cold. I can never ever explain to anybody how cold it was all the time I was in the Army and, for what reason please don’t ask me, the cold absolutely does not ever seem to bother Johnny. He used to say it was because his nose was radioactive. Actually, he was always so full of antifreeze that he couldn’t feel much of anything. Anyway, Johnny hears these Navy guys cursing about having to test all the guns and he asks them if they will mind if he fires a few rounds because he has always wanted to shoot a gun of some kind, any kind. They look at each other quick, then say sure, he can fire every single gun on the ship if he likes. So he did. And he took some pretty rugged chances because if the Martians had attacked or he had slipped on the deck he could have hurt himself. Anyway, I had a job to do which was called public relations, so I wrote a little routine story about the ‘one-man battleship’ which in a certain way was strictly true. It had a certain Army flavor, and after all they weren’t paying me to do public relations for the Navy, you know what I mean? I slugged it ‘From an arctic outpost of the U.S. Army,’ and I wrote how one lone Army officer had fired all the guns of a fighting ship on top of the world where all the forgotten battles are fought and where the Navy fighting men had been put out of action by the crudest enemy of all, the desperate, bitter cold of the arctic night, and how when the last gun had been stilled not an enemy form or an enemy plane could be seen moving on the ancient ice cap, tomb of thousands of unknown fallen. You know. It was filler copy. Not strictly a lie, you understand. Every fact was strictly factual all by itself but—well, it was what they always said was very, very good for morale on the home front, you know what I mean? Anyway, I forgot about the whole thing until Johnny came around with a fistful of clippings and a letter from his wife which said my story was worth fifty thousand votes and he was supposed to buy me all the gin I could hold. I liked gin at the time,” Ramen concluded.

With characteristic candor, in his autobiographical sketch in the Congressional Directory of 1955, Johnny claimed “seventeen arctic combat missions,” but when testifying in 1957 in a legal proceeding that was attempting to investigate various amounts of unusual income he had received, both as to amount and source, Johnny said (of himself): “Iselin was on thirty-one combat missions in the arctic, plus liaison missions” and added inexplicably that the nights in the arctic region were six months long. “Iselin saw enough battle action to keep him peaceful and quiet for the rest of his days.” Raymond’s mother had taught Johnny to call himself Iselin whenever testifying or being interviewed, on the principle that it constituted a continuing plug for the name at a time when Johnny was being quoted on land, sea, and in the air, as often and as much as the New York Stock Exchange.

The question of combat would not permit any settlement. When Raymond’s mother had Johnny make formal application for the Silver Star, presumably because no one else had made application for him, in a claim supported by “certain certified copies from my personal military records,” it attracted an apoplectically outraged letter of complaint from a constituent, bitter about the violation of propriety in which Johnny had received a medal at his own request. Raymond’s mother dictated, and Johnny signed, a return letter that contained this brave turn of phrase: “I am bound by the rules which provide how such awards shall be made and as much as I felt distaste there just wasn’t any other way to do it.”

However, as the years carried Big John and Raymond’s mother forward through their national and international duels on behalf of a more perfect America, the most disputed part of Johnny’s record continued to be the “wound” he most blandly claimed to have suffered in military combat. Although he did not receive the Purple Heart and although the former Secretary of the Army who reviewed his personnel file disclaimed any Iselin wound in action, when Big John was asked at a veterans’ rally why he wore built-up shoes (how else the big in Big John?) Governor Iselin said he was wearing the shoes because he had lost most of his heel in arctic combat. There is disagreement among those who heard him at that time as to whether he said “lost most of my foot” or a lesser amount of tissue.

The relentless Journal, in the year of its gallant but futile attempt to discredit Johnny in a meaningful sense, uncovered the personal journal of an officer who had served with Johnny all during the tour, a Francis Winikus, who subsequently made a reputation as an authority on migratory elements of population in Britain and Europe. Under the date of June 22, 1944, the Winikus diary threw a white and revealing light on the circumstances leading to Johnny’s wound by recording: “Johnny Iselin has become possessed by the idea of sex. To get that interested in sex on the top of this ice cap is either suicidal or homosexual, on its surface, but Johnny isn’t either. He is a persistent and determined zealot. There is a new Eskimo camp about three miles across that primordial field of ice under that gale of wind which carries those flying razor blades to cut into the face from the direction of the village. There are women there. Everybody knows that and everybody agreed it was a very good thing until we walked, secretly and one at a time, with ice grippers tied to our shoes, across that shocking three-mile course in cold worse than the icy hell the old German religions called Nifelheim and came up to the igloos down wind and lost all interest in sex for the rest of the war. I was exhausted when I made the run, but I came back faster than I went over, to get away from that smell. It is the special smell of the Eskimo women and there is no smell like it because they wash their hair in stored urine, they live sewed up in those musty skins, and they eat an endless diet of putrescent food like fish heads and whale fat.

“Johnny said he was going to get around these ‘surface disadvantages’ because he had to have a woman or the top of his head would come off. He has been practicing eleven days, making that run over and back every single day. The cold and the wind simply do not seem to exist for him. All he can think of is the women. He comes back here and rests and moans and bleats with this longing, and he says proudly that he is getting used to the stink of the women. He says that if Eskimo men went to Chicago and smelled our women wearing those expensive French perfumes that it would sicken them, too, and that all these things are just a matter of getting used to them.

“Yesterday he decided he was ready. He crossed the ice cap again in that blackness, following a compass and watching for the lights, if any. He filled me in on the whole story this morning before they took him out in the sled to Etah, where they will hold him for pickup by relief plane to Godthaab. He was welcomed hospitably, he said, about thirty yards outside a lot of ice mounds which turned out to be igloos. Johnny doesn’t speak their language and they don’t speak Johnny’s but he used his hands so suggestively—well, what he did with his hands when he was telling me how he showed them what he wanted makes me wonder how I will be able to get through the winter. He says they were completely sympathetic and immediately understanding and motioned him to crawl behind them into one of the blocks of ice. Before he entered, he distributed some K-ration and he told me he remembered thinking how easy this was going to be as soon as he could figure out which were the women and which were the men, because they were all wrapped in furs and their faces were as round and flat and shiny as a silver dollar. He made it into the igloo on his hands and knees, then almost fainted from the smell. He had gotten used to the smell of the women in a high arctic wind OUTSIDE the snow houses. The heat was tremendous for one thing: hot bricks, body heat, burning blubber, and smoking dried moss and lichens. Artfully placed around the perimeter were leather buckets of straight aged urine. Johnny said he must have stumbled into the local beauty parlor. His other quick impression was that a considerable amount of last season’s fish had rotted, and, too, there was the smoky, blinding smell of long imprisoned feet. This morning as the infection turned toward fever, every now and then Johnny would say, ‘O my God, those feet!’ There were about fourteen people in the igloo, although he feels that they could have been sitting on a few old ladies. They had slipped out of their clothing and the ripeness of all of them hit him like a stone ax and he says he keeled over although he didn’t pass out. He said they immediately offered him three different people whom he decided must have been women, and some of the fellows there even seemed ready to lift him on. Although he discovered that it was impossible to get used to the congress of smells he was able to concentrate on them just being women and all other considerations in that tiny space actually left his mind. He said it was no question of poontang next year with a girl who smelled like flowers, it was a case of poontang now and he began to get out of his clothes. He was actually getting undressed in front of all of those people and he said he would pause every now and then to give the nearest shape that he assumed was a girl a little pinch or a tiny tickle when all of a sudden one of the Eskimos started to yell at him in German.

“Johnny said he doesn’t speak German but he knows it when he hears it because they speak a lot of it in his home state. Then this Eskimo began to take off his furs in that way a man takes off his coat when he wants to start a fight, yelling all the time in German and pointing at the Eskimo woman Johnny had been diddling and who was now giggling up at Johnny, when Johnny sees that this man is wearing a German officer’s uniform under the skins. As this was the first time Johnny had ever believed that there was any enemy, he said he was absolutely flabbergasted. The Eskimos in the igloo began to yell at the German to shut up, or maybe they felt that he had impugned their hospitality by interrupting Johnny, or maybe they were sore because they liked to watch, and by now the woman had reached up and she had Johnny firmly by the privates and she wasn’t letting go because for whatever crazy reason she liked Johnny. The noise bounced back and forth from ice wall to ice wall, dogs started barking, kids started crying, the German was yelling and weeping through what was obviously a broken heart, and Johnny said he felt very embarrassed. He realized he had been making a pass at this guy’s girl right in front of the guy himself which must have hurt him terribly, and it wasn’t right even if he was the enemy, Johnny felt. He didn’t know what to do so he hit the man and as the man fell he knocked four of the small Eskimos over with him. This turned the tables. The other Eskimos now got sore at Johnny and three of them rushed him waving what Johnny calls ‘Stone Age power tools.’ He swept his arms out in front of him and sent the attackers over backward into the mob, all of this happening, he said, inside an area about as big as Orson Welles’s head, with everybody howling for blood. He decided then that he wasn’t going to score after all and that he’d better get the hell out of there, so he tried to dive through the tunnel which led to the full force arctic hurricane outside, forgetting entirely that the Eskimo woman had him by the family jewels and she had decided to keep those jewels for her very own. Johnny says he never felt anything quite like what he felt then and that he thought he had actually lost his reason for living. Rejecting her both physically and psychologically, he let fly with his left foot, catching her smartly in the face. She sank her overdeveloped teeth into his foot, then she crunched down again, then settled down to a steady munching, and he says if it hadn’t been for her getting hit by someone in that yelling, milling throng behind her in the igloo she might have chewed his foot off. How he got back here in that weather with that foot I will never know. The wound had festered badly by this morning. They took him out of here for Etah about an hour ago. I guess that’s the end of the war for old Johnny.”

In August, 1944, Johnny came limping home to take up his part in the red-hot campaign that “friends” (meaning Raymond’s mother and, to a conclusive extent, even though it seems absolutely impossible in retrospect, the Communist party) had been carrying forward since the day he had gone off to war. All Johnny had to do was to wear his uniform, his crutches, and his bandaged foot and shout out a few hundred topical exaggerations that Raymond’s mother had written up and catalogued over the years to evade any conceivable demand. Because of the clear call from the people of his state, Johnny was permitted to resign from the armed forces on August 11,1944.

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.