The Heat of the Sun (9 page)

Kate Pinkerton asked if I considered myself a good friend of Trouble’s. I said I hoped I was, and she nodded. My last question, I decided, must have been too forward; she had skimmed over
it as if I had never said it at all.

‘But, Mr Sharpless, what can I tell you that you don’t already know? You’ve divined my son’s history. Plumbed it to its depths. Witnessed some of it. Which of his schools
was it you attended – Blaze? I had high hopes for him at Blaze. Visions of glory. The headmaster was discreet. Still – oh, the disgrace!’

‘Disgrace!’ I said, too hotly. ‘Trouble was a hero. He fought the school bully, a fellow twice his size, and won. It wasn’t his fault the bully’s father headed up
the Board of Trustees.’

‘So an injustice was done? The world is full of those. Alas, we cannot right the wrongs of the past. But is it not incumbent upon us to prevent the wrongs of the future? Tell me, Mr
Sharpless’ – and here her voice became a purr – ‘do you think you might dedicate yourself to my cause?

‘This country of ours,’ she swept on, ‘lies in a parlous state. I know, I know – you look at the prosperity all around us, the automobiles thronging the streets, the
glittering towers that jut the sky, and think we’re on top of the world. The years since the war have been a remarkable time for America – and for the world, since America is in the
world. But has our ship a secure hand at the tiller? Coolidge rides triumphant on a following wind that seems likely never to end. But – swiftly enough – winds turn or slacken and fair
days turn to foul.

‘Meanwhile, from other lands come ominous tidings. They called the Great War the war to end war. I fear it is only the beginning of a new and more terrible chain of wars. We shan’t
escape them. Daddy’s world is dead. Foreign entanglements are our destiny. You see what I’m saying, don’t you? What is to become of this country? What is to become of the world?
The next election is crucial. The right man must win. But all too easily the right man may be swept aside. People will talk, Mr Sharpless – talk, I mean, unkindly. What they say, in the
scheme of things, may be trivia, the merest tittle-tattle. But tittle-tattle can do grave damage. We can’t stop them talking. Therefore, we must give them nothing to talk about.’

Kate Pinkerton’s rhetorical skills impressed me, but as she warmed to her theme my attention slipped; her words became only sound, divorced from meaning, breaking on far shores of my
awareness. Abashed, I wondered what she could want from me.

Her next words were disquieting. This ship of state could turn in an instant. ‘But I’m told you’re a poet.’

She urged me to recite one of my efforts. For a moment, I almost believed she wanted to hear it.

‘Indulge an old woman, Mr Sharpless.’ That year, Kate Pinkerton would have been forty-five years old; her face was barely lined; yet, sitting before me in the soft light, she might
have been the embodiment of an ancient femininity, goddess of a vanished, immemorial race.

An urge to use the bathroom came upon me. I would have liked to fling myself from the room, rush from the house, and not come back. Instead, I lowered my teacup and recited, almost in a
whisper:

Kindly laughter tinkled over the teacups. My soul sank, but I had known it would. ‘Aren’t you a little young, Mr Sharpless, to be bowed down by mutability? And how much love
have
you left?’

‘I know it’s not good,’ I said, my face burning.

What had I done? I had given myself away, delivered myself wholly into her power.

‘Not good? On the contrary,’ she said, ‘most amusing. But not, I dare say, in the contemporary idiom. You realize, Mr Sharpless’ – and again she smiled –
‘that my son’s nickname has more than one meaning? Trouble is trouble. And troubled too. Never forget that.’

She leaned towards me, and my knee jumped as she touched it – briefly, lightly – with long, cool fingers. And at once I knew where she had been leading me and all that it entailed.
She was taking me into her service, reposing in me a fearful trust.

‘I’m glad Trouble has a friend,’ she said in a soft voice. ‘You’ll take good care of him, won’t you?’

Wildly I gazed at her and struggled not to cry.

Of course Trouble was troubled. I tried to see his fecklessness as charm, and such a view was possible – but only to restless eyes: to the boon companions of bathtub
gin, to the whores with hearts of gold, to the flapper girls who shrieked as he accelerated, long after midnight, down a dark upstate road. What risks he took! He drove like a man escaping demons.
He drank until he was comatose. He mingled with crooks and low life and revelled in their company. He neglected his work at his father’s office. Often the senator was absent in Washington,
and Trouble placated his father’s deputies with excuse after excuse: a sudden cold that confined him to bed; papers he must look up in the public library (his father, he said, had telephoned
him); electoral business that took him away for days.

‘I want to go back to Europe,’ he said one afternoon when he should have been at the office. ‘Or somewhere. Anywhere.’

We stood on the boardwalk at Coney Island. Muffled in scarves and overcoats, we faced the heaving Atlantic like explorers at the prow of a ship. Cotton candy, on long sticks, jutted up in our
hands. We had been on the Wonder Wheel and the carousel, and Trouble had had his fortune told. Behind us, a calliope played ‘After the Ball’, and the melody dipped and soared, buffeted
by the wind. Trouble wore no hat. Bright hair flicked about his forehead.

‘But what will you do?’ I said. ‘Don’t you have an ambition?’

‘I’m looking for my way. Someday I’ll find it. You’re a poet, Sharpless. You don’t know how easy you have it, seeing your way clear like that.’

‘Clear?’ Nothing was clear. Kate Pinkerton, laughing over her teacup, had shown me the truth: my poetry was a sham. I was a journalist, and that was all. Not even a good one.

Trouble said he had to get away, to escape.

‘From what – from your family?’

‘I hate my father. I wish I had no father.’

Sugary pink clouds dissolved on my tongue. ‘You don’t know what you’re saying. My father fell down in the street and died. Don’t you think I’ve wished he were alive
again every day since then?’

‘What do you want me to do, feel grateful? Bless my good luck?’ In the chill wind my own face, I knew, was reddened; Trouble’s remained smoothly pale, like a mask. ‘Look
at the senator, and look at me. I’m nothing
like
him, am I? Mama must have had an affair. The senator married her to cover the evidence. Why else would a Manville throw herself away on
a naval lieutenant? That’s all he was, you know. Lieutenant Pinkerton, a nobody. His father ran some fleabag hotel in Atlantic City.’

I gripped the boardwalk rail. My cotton candy reeled away on the wind and I dropped the stick through a gap between the planks. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t see your mother having an
affair.’

‘You can’t see her at all. I’ve always known that something was wrong, as if somewhere there were a hidden key, and all I had to do was turn it and everything would make sense.
Sometimes I remember another life, a different life, and imagine I was stolen from it when I was young. A smell, a texture, a rustle of fabric, something sets me off and I’m back there just
for a moment. It happened in Paris, in the Louvre. It happened in a tailor’s on the Upper East Side. It happened’ – he paused – ‘back there, in the
fortune-teller’s booth.’

The Atlantic swelled towards us, consequential as time. Gulls screamed in the sky. Trouble, I knew, was possessed by strange, deep-set moods that came upon him like an overspreading cloud. One
evening, on a jape, we had found ourselves at a college production of
The Mikado
. It was bad, but bad enough to be funny; only Trouble, sitting beside me, seemed unamused. He twisted his
hands. During ‘Three Little Maids from School’ he bolted from his seat. I found him in an alley outside, pale and shaking, but when I asked him if he were sick he shook his head almost
angrily and demanded that we find a drink, another drink.

Ships – two of them, far apart – laboured blackly against the grey horizon. To my relief, Trouble brightened. ‘Guess what the fortune-teller said? I’ll become a gentleman
of great importance and marry an exotic beauty. That would have to be Louise Brooks, wouldn’t it?’

That evening I was meeting ’Gustus Le Vol at Benedict’s, a Village diner much favoured among Aunt Toolie’s crowd. I had been surprised to hear from Le Vol;
since leaving Blaze he had been out west and had written to me seldom. I wondered if we still had anything in common.

It was a Friday, and Benedict’s – ‘Eggs’, as we called it – was crowded: the usual mixture of college students, writers, artists, and general riffraff, eager for
their steak or eggs or goulash washed down with bitter coffee, before they jangled out into the night, ready for pleasures of a less innocent kind.

A hand waved to me from a rickety table. Le Vol was hemmed in on all sides. The editorial committee from a magazine called
Explosion!
was meeting close by, arguing over its latest
manifesto; at the next table, a bushy-bearded mesmerist leaned forward lasciviously, caressing the hand of a fey-looking girl; behind them, a party of tarts caroused so loudly that one suspected
their coffee had been supplemented with the contents of an illicit flask.

Le Vol stood and shook my hand. He had barely changed. Le Vol as a man was Le Vol as a boy, only more so: coily red hair coilier and redder, long limbs longer, frayed cuffs more frayed.

He asked me if we couldn’t go somewhere else. ‘I was hoping for a quiet talk.’

‘We will. First, eat! I’m starving, aren’t you?’

‘New York City’s a bit much for me, I suppose. Too big. Too crowded.’

‘Where is it you’ve been – Wisconsin, Wyoming?’

A waiter plunked down dog-eared menus. Le Vol, packing his pipe, barely glanced at his; I knew what I wanted already and he said impatiently that he would have the same. ‘The thing
is’ – he rushed on – ‘I met Morrison Reeves in Cody. Can you believe it?’

I had no idea who he meant.

‘What Reeves taught me, it’s amazing! He’s been working on a big project for years, documenting conditions of life and labour throughout the western states. Men laying
railroads. Men working land. Men building dams. And I was his assistant – me!’ cried Le Vol. ‘What Reeves doesn’t know about pictures, it’s not worth
knowing.’

Reeves? Now I remembered: the socialist photographer. A magazine I wrote for had reviewed one of his exhibitions a few months before. Excitedly Le Vol reached into a satchel, drew out a manila
folder, and fanned gleaming black-and-white eight-by-tens across the table. I glimpsed stubbled, ugly faces, pickaxes swinging, dirt roads fading into long perspectives.

He lit his pipe. ‘How you can live in this rabbit warren, I don’t know. Life out west’s hard, but it’s real.’ He riffled through the pictures, showing me a forest,
a lake, a mountain range. ‘And the space! Wind in your hair. Pastures rolling for ever. The smell of pines, thick and resinous. There’s a world out there, Sharpless. It’s big.
It’s frightening. But beautiful too.’

I praised the pictures, and meant it. ‘Reeves is really something.’

‘Reeves?’ said Le Vol. ‘These are mine.’

His eyes grew bigger and he leaned across the table. ‘Reeves gave me an introduction to his publishers. That’s where I’ve just been. They want me to do my own book, can you
believe it?
The Wild West Today
– oh, it’ll be wonderful, the things to see, the places to go! I’ve an old Model T back in Buffalo. That’ll be my covered wagon.
I’ll set off...’

There was more, much more. The waiter brought our meals: scrambled eggs and sausages with hash browns on the side, but I had lost my appetite. Le Vol had always made me uneasy and I thought I
knew why: I felt as if he were judging me, and I feared his judgement was right. Shovelling back hash browns, he launched again into the wonders of the West.

My attention drifted until a hand gripped on my shoulder and I twisted back to see Trouble. With barely a glance at Le Vol, he slumped into a seat beside me. Stricken-eyed, he seemed on the
verge of tears.

‘I’m done for,’ Trouble declared. ‘I’m done for. It’s the senator. He’s found out I’ve been skipping work.’

‘How? Did somebody rat on you?’

‘He says he’s taking me to Washington. Can you imagine? I’ll never be out of his sight. Mama’s mad, furious. Going on and on about how I’ve let them down
–’

‘Trouble, you’re not a child. You’re twenty-five.’

‘Yes, and it’s too late! Do you know how many things I’ve failed at now? Do you know how many second chances I’ve had? I’ve been chucked out of every school
I’ve ever set foot in. I tried to be a singer – that was for Mama. I tried to be a rancher – that was for the senator. I couldn’t even make it as a brush salesman –
and that was for me! I’m not like other people. I can’t
do
things like other people. Nobody wants me except the senator, and all I can do is let him down because I hate him, and
I’ll keep on hating him until the day I die!’

He was shouting. I was mortified. ‘Calm down.’

‘Don’t tell me to calm down! Why do people tell you to calm down when you’ve every reason to be upset?’

Le Vol, stiff-faced, had bundled his photographs back into his satchel. Whether Trouble remembered Le Vol I could not be certain, but Le Vol remembered Trouble, of course, and didn’t like
what he saw.

‘Still thick as thieves, the pair of you,’ he muttered, in what I took to be a disgusted tone. Sinkingly, I wondered how to tell Trouble that this big shabby fellow across the table
required my attention too, when salvation came in the form of a colourful apparition, flapping towards us across the crowded diner.