One year after they had arranged for all of this bliss, the nation entered World War II, elating Raymond’s mother because she saw the occasion as an acceleration of opportunity which would pull her John up the ladder of politics. She lost no time getting him set, in cartouche, against that martial background.
Raymond’s mother’s brother, the clot, had become a nonpolitical federal commissioner of such exalted station that it often brought her to the point of retching nausea when she encountered its passing mention in a news story. She had despised this son-of-a-bitch of a sibling ever since the far-off summer afternoon when her beloved, wonderful, magnetic, pleasing, exciting, generous, kind, loving, and gifted father had died sitting upright in the wooden glider-swing with a history of Scandinavia in his lap and this fool they said was her brother had announced that he was head of the family. This foolish, insensitive, ignorant, beastly nothing of a boy who had felt that he could in any way, in any shocking, fractional way, take the place of a magnificent man of men. Then he had beaten her with a hockey stick because he had objected to her nailing the paw of a beige cocker spaniel to the floor because the dog was stubborn and refused to understand the most elemental instructions to remain still when she had called out the command to do so. Could she have called out and made her wondrous father stay with her when he was dying?
She had loved her father with a bond so secret, so deep, and so thrilling that it surpassed into eternity the drab feelings of the other people, all other people, particularly the feelings of her brother and her clot of a mother. She had had woman’s breasts from the time she had been ten years old, and she had felt a woman’s yearnings as she had lain in the high, dark attic of her father’s great house, only on rainy nights, only when the others slept. She would lie in the darkness and hear the rain, then hear her father’s soft, soft step rising on the stairs after he had slipped the bolt into the lock of the attic door, and she would slip out of her long woolen night dress and wait for the warmth of him and the wonder of him.
Then he had died. Then he had died.
Every compulsively brutal blow from that hockey stick in the hands of that young man who wanted so badly to be understood by his sister but who could not begin to reach her understanding or her feeling had beaten a deep distaste and contempt for all men since her father into her projective mind, and, right then, when she was fourteen years old, she entered her driving, never-to-be-acknowledged life competition with her only brother to show him which of them was the heir of that father and which of them had the right to say that he should stand in that father’s shoes and place and memory. She vowed and resolved, dedicated and consecrated, that she would beat him into humiliation at whatsoever he chose to undertake, and it was to the eternal shame of their country that he chose politics and government and that she needed therefore to plunge in after him.
Her clot of a brother had absorbed the native clottishness of her mother, a clot’s clot. How could her father have loved this woman? How could such a shining and thrilling and valiant knight have lain down with this great cow? Everyone who knew them said that Raymond’s mother was the image of her mother.
After her beating with the hockey stick she had given her family no rest until she had been sent away to a girls’ boarding school of her own choice in the Middle West. It was chosen as her natural base of operations in politics because it was the heart of the Scandinavian immigrant country; at the chosen time the outstanding Norse nature of her father’s name and his heroic origins could be turned into blocs of votes.
At sixteen, because she had taught herself to believe that she knew exactly what she wanted, no matter what she got, she escaped from the school every weekend, dressed herself to look older, and arranged to place herself in locations where she could use herself as bait. She seduced four men between the ages of thirty and forty-six, got no pleasure from it nor expected any, had definitely lost two of the contests after a gluttonous testing period, could have turned either of the remaining two in any direction she chose, decided on Raymond’s father because the man had a good, open face for politics and hair that was already gray although he was only thirty-six years old. She married him and bore him Raymond as soon as the gestation cycle allowed.
Generalities, specifics, domestic manifestations, or her youth never made Raymond’s mother’s thinking fuzzy or got in the way of her plan. She knew, like a mousetrap knows the back of a mousie’s neck, that she was far too immature to be accepted publicly as the bride of a man seeking public office. She knew that it was possible that her husband might even get slightly tarred because of her age, so she had set her own late twenties as the time when she would have Raymond’s father make his move. Her reasoning was sound: by that time, when it was reported during a campaign that Raymond’s father had taken a child bride of sixteen some twelve faithful, productive years before, it would have become a romantic asset and Raymond’s father would be seen by women voters as a suggestively virile candidate. Meanwhile, she had accomplished her primary objection of escaping the authority of her mother, her brother, and the school. She had her share of her father’s substantial estate. She had started a family unit that, with few modern exceptions, was essential to success in American politics.
Raymond’s mother was an exceptionally handsome woman who was dressed in France. This was quite shrewd, because money displaces one’s own taste when one chooses to be dressed in France. She was coiffed in New York and her very laundry seemed to have been washed in Joy de Patou. Her hair was straw blond, in the Viking tradition, and it was kept that way, no matter the inconvenience. Her sense of significant birth, her grinding virtue, and her carriage completed her pre-eminence in any group of women, and she assiduously recultivated all three attributes as a fleshy-plant fancier might exalt and extend orchid graftings. What was especially striking in the earlier photographs of Raymond’s mother was the suggestion of a smile on her full lips as they counterfeited sensuality, and in her large ecstatic eyes, which were like those of a sexually ambitious girl. In later likenesses, such as the Time cover in 1959 (and she being of the same political party as Time’s persuasion, its editors therefore made an effort to supervise a most honest likeness) where she was clad as a matron, the supple grace was gone but the perfect features and the whole figure were stamped with the adaptable and inflexible energy that marked her maturity.
One of Big John Iselin’s favorite perorations in campaign oratory after the war, or rather, after Johnny’s interrupted service in the war, was the recollection of what he had seen and done in battle and what he would never be able to forget “up there at the top of the world, alone with God in a great cathedral of ice and snow in the stark loneliness of arctic night where the enemy struck out of nowhere and my boys fell and I cried out piteously, ‘O Lord, they are young, why must they die?’ as I raced forward over ice which was thirty miles deep, pumping my machine rifle, to even the score with those Nazi devils who, in the end, came to have a superstitious fear of me.”
The point Johnny seemed to want to make in this section of this speech, his favorite speech, was never quite clear, but the story carried a powerful emotional impact to those whose lives had been touched by the tragedy of war. “At night while my spent, exhausted buddies slept,” he would croon into the platform microphone, “I would prop my eyes open with matchsticks and write home—to you—to the wives and the sweethearts and the blessed mothers of our gallant dead—night after night as the casualties mounted—to try to do just a little more than my part to ease the heartbreak which Mr. Roosevelt’s war had caused.”
The official records of the Signal Corps of the U.S. Army show that Johnny’s outfit (SCB-52310) had lost all together, during the entire tour outside the continental United States, one chaplain and one enlisted man, the former from a nervous breakdown and the latter from delirium tremens (a vitamin deficiency). The outfit, whose complement was a half-company of men, had been posted in northern Greenland as defenses for the comprehensive meteorological installations t
hat predicted the weather for the military brass lower down on the globe, operating in mobile force far up on the ice cap, mostly between Prudhoe Land and the Lincoln Sea.
The enemy’s weather forecasting installations were mostly based somewhere above king Frederick VIII Land, on the other side of the subcontinent, below Independence Sea. Greenland is the largest island in the world. Both sides, although continually aware of each other, remained strictly aloof and upon those occasions where they found that they were working in sight of each other they would both move out of sight without acknowledgment, as people will act following a painful social misunderstanding. There was no question of shooting. Their work was far too important. It was essential that both sides maintain an unbroken flow of vital weather data, which was an extremely special contribution when compared to the basically uncomplicated work of fighting troops.
It just did not seem likely that even Johnny would send the families of those two casualties a different letter every night, harping on a nervous breakdown and the D.T.’s, and besides the mail pickup happened only once a month when the mail plane was lucky enough to be able to swoop low enough and at the right ground angle to be able to bring up the gibbeted mail sack on a lowered hook. If they missed after three passes they let it go until the next month, but they did bring the mail in, which was far more important, and did maintain a reasonably high average on getting it out, considering the conditions.
No citizen of the United States, including General MacArthur and those who enlisted from the film community of Los Angeles, California, entered World War II with more fanfare from the local press and radio than John Yerkes Iselin. When the jolly judge arrived at the State Capitol on June 6,1942, and announced to the massive communications complex that Raymond’s mother had assembled over a two-day period from all papers throughout the state, from Chicago, and three from Washington, at an incalculable cost in whisky and food, that he had seen his duty to join up as “a private, an officer, or anything else in the United States Marine Corps,” the newspapers and radio foamed with the news and the UP put the story on the main wire as a suggested boxed news feature because of Raymond’s mother’s angle, which had Johnny saying: “They need a judge in the Marines to judge whether they are the finest fighting men in the world, or in the universe.” The Marines naturally had gotten Raymond’s mother’s business because, she told Johnny, they had the biggest and fastest mimeographing machines and earmarked one combat correspondent for every two fighting men.
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.