The Heat of the Sun (8 page)

I was about to venture a remark on Arnold Blitzstein, and whether Miss Day thought he was the saviour of Western music, when a voice startled me: ‘Sharpless! It
is
you, isn’t
it?’

At the end of the balcony, hunched over the balustrade, was a small man in evening dress with long, pale hair. A cigarette glowed in his hand. He had turned to me, and his eyes glittered.

Of course, I knew him at once.

Not since the night he knocked out Eddie Scranway had I seen Trouble. That victory had seemed at the time a new start, a marvellous beginning. In truth, it was an end. Next term, Trouble was
gone from Blaze. Scranway’s father, the head of the Board of Trustees, had taken up the matter, demanding expulsion. Trouble was sent to a day school on Long Island.
It’s ever so
progressive
, he wrote to me.
Boys and girls are mixed, and we have swimming lessons in the nude.
For a few months we exchanged letters, but, as is the way with prep school boys, neither
of us kept it up. But I thought of Trouble often and wondered what had become of him.

Eagerly, I moved forward to shake his hand. How diminutive he was! He had barely grown since Blaze. Next to him I felt lumbering, absurd. When he asked me why I was at this party, I explained
that the hostess was my aunt. ‘Don’t tell me you know Aunt Toolie too.’

‘Oh, I came up with some fellows from the place downstairs. Not sure where they’ve gone. That apparition’s your aunt? Quite a legend, it seems.’

‘I didn’t know you were in New York,’ I said.

‘I’ve been abroad. I’ve been all over. I’m just back from Europe.’

Only after some moments did I realize that Agnes Day had gone. She must have slipped back inside while Trouble and I were talking.

Our old intimacy might never have been broken. He suggested we needed a drink. That night, in an apartment swirling with smoke and chatter and squawking jazz, huddled on one of my aunt’s
shabby sofas, we learned about our lives since we had last seen each other. Swiftly, I passed over my days at Yale – my scholarly career had been less than glorious – and announced,
with a firmness that surprised me, my ambitions as a poet. Did I reveal, that night, that it had been Trouble, and the strange magic he created around him at Blaze, that first had stirred me to
write? I suppose not. I was more interested in him: in the many schools and several colleges from which he had been ejected; in the weeks with a singing teacher in Vienna, which ended his ambitions
for an operatic career; in the months on a ranch in Montana, where the senator had hoped that his son would learn at last to be a man; in the career as a travelling salesman, Trouble’s bid
for independence, which had ended with his return home after only two weeks on the road. His latest travels – he grimaced – had been with an elderly professor from Columbia, an old
friend of his mother’s. The professor sought to introduce his pupil to the art treasures of Europe; the pupil (so he claimed) took it upon himself to explore more worldly matters.

Trouble narrated all this with delightful drollery, and I was longing to hear more when he glanced at his watch, sprang up, and said, ‘Christ! I’m taking Mama to church in the
morning.’

I thought he was joking, but he pushed his way through the crowd, calling back to me above the clamour: ‘Come to tea one afternoon! At Mama’s. She likes to meet my
friends.’

Trouble had sent me an address in Gramercy Park. The sky gleamed softly there, a yellowish haze above barren trees, as I stood fearfully before great double doors. Brass
glowed against black. Gas, like a captive star, flared in a cage above my head. I stepped into the hall, and, as the butler helped me out of my coat, my eyes darted, almost suspiciously, over the
chequerboard floor, the gesturing palm fronds, the broad red-carpeted staircase cascading around mahogany bends of banister. Teacups tinkled in a chamber close by.

When we meet those who are to be important in our lives, first impressions often carry no clue of what will come. With each of the Pinkertons, on the contrary, I recognized at once that
something fundamental, an epoch in my life, had begun. Kate Pinkerton was not a large woman, but as she presided over the tea things, stiff-backed beneath metallic heapings of hair, she had about
her something as immemorial as the grand house that enclosed her like a shell. She was the daughter of a great political family. A Manville had been Attorney General under James K. Polk; Secretary
of War under Ulysses S. Grant; Secretary of State under Grover Cleveland.

Graciously, barely moving, Kate Pinkerton inclined her head towards me. Her gown, of a green so dark it was almost black, was a fussy, Edwardian affair of trailing skirts, lacy ruffs and a
bodice upholstered in ridged, scalloped patterns. Fixed at her neck was a dark brooch that flashed a reddish gleam.

To my embarrassment, I had been the last to arrive. Trouble, immaculate as ever, sat close to his mother’s sofa in a spindly Georgian chair. Catching my eye, he winked at me and smirked.
Four others took tea with us that afternoon: an ancient lady with a wattled neck, who represented a charity for unwed mothers; a little balding gentleman from the Audubon Society, who pecked his
teacake like one of the less compelling common or garden birds and straightened, too often, the creases of his trousers; an artistic lady, whose views on a new production of
Manon Lescaut
would be sought with assiduity by her hostess; and a shabby, sack-like old fellow who was, I learned, the professor who had endeavoured to show Trouble the art treasures of Europe. As I took my
place the professor was speaking in a low, rumbling baritone about some dreary academic controversy at Columbia. I could not envy Trouble such a companion.

I was sitting uncertainly, resenting the frail tea things, when Kate Pinkerton asked me, ‘You’re a college man, Mr...
Sharpless
?’ She pronounced my name with a curious
precision, as if she thought it odd.

Trouble leaped in: ‘Woodley’s frightfully clever, Mama. He’s a writer. He’ll win the Pulitzer one day, mark my words.’

The great lady eyed me appraisingly. ‘I trust you shall be a good influence on Trouble. You know we call him Trouble? Our little jest.’ She went on, ‘I’m afraid the poor
boy’s not forgiven us for summoning him back from the Old World.’

‘Might he not resent such barbarism?’ The professor, it seemed, was fond of being contrary. ‘Why, we should have chirruped our way across the world like cicadas, restlessly in
quest of new aesthetic pleasures. But lo! Shades of the prison-house close upon the growing boy.’

Kate Pinkerton said, ‘You refer, I take it, to my husband’s office?’

Trouble twisted his mouth as I learned of his new engagement: a position on the senator’s staff. This, I supposed, like the ranch in Montana, represented an attempt to tame the feckless
son; yet each time Kate Pinkerton looked at him, her breast swelled and something softened in her eyes.

Talk turned to the Administration of President Coolidge. Kate Pinkerton held forth without interruption, and though I understood little, I did not repine; I wanted not so much to listen to her
as to bathe, indeed luxuriate, in her patrician waters. A remarkable woman!

I had not expected the senator to appear that afternoon, but just as the tea party was breaking up, there was a commotion in the hall and a round of cursing: ‘Gad! Gad!’

Alarmed, I glanced at Kate Pinkerton, but – as if with equilibrium born of much experience – she rose smoothly in her long, rustling gown and made her way to the hall. Her calm tones
could be heard assuring her husband that no inducement to rage, no, not the worst that smug little shopkeeper (she meant Calvin Coolidge) could do, was worth this fuss.

The elderly lady pursed her lips; the Audubon Society gentleman trilled that, alas, he really had to go; the artistic lady tittered; and the professor smiled for the first time that
afternoon.

The emergency was brief. Kate Pinkerton, bearing her husband like a trophy won in war, floated back towards us over seas of Turkey carpet. The great man, pince-nez glinting, acknowledged his
guests. His head, I observed, seemed too large for his body. From his centre parting, thinning hair splayed in grey grooves, plastered to a pinkish skull; his waistcoat, hung with a fob, strained
across his belly like a sausage skin with buttons.

‘And this,’ declaimed Kate Pinkerton, propelling him towards me, ‘is Mr...
Sharpless
.’

Something passed across the senator’s face: a look that for an instant I thought was fear. He exchanged glances with his wife. I could not imagine what blunder I had committed. I was about
to stammer out some apology when the cloud, all at once, was gone, and he gripped my hand, twinkled behind his pince-nez, and boomed, with the politician’s practised bonhomie: ‘Mr
Sharpless! Pleased to meet you, young fellow!’

Gratefully, I fell back into Trouble’s orbit. That year, as fall turned to winter, I lived for his invitations. How I relished the jangle of the telephone; the postcards
with their cryptic clues; his grinning face appearing above the desk where, escaping Wobblewood, I read in the New York Public Library.

Often our expeditions were disreputable. With Trouble I found myself in Negro haunts in Harlem, thrilling to the shriek of brassy horns; in speakeasies with mobsters; in brothels, where even the
most hardened ladies exclaimed over his charms. Many a time we reeled down dark roads with a couple of girls in his rattling jalopy. Many were the mornings when I woke, head pounding, uncertain
where I might be. At a stranger’s house? Wobblewood? Sharing Trouble’s bed at Gramercy Park? Sometimes our pleasures were calmer: at movie houses, where Trouble gazed worshipfully at
Louise Brooks (he liked to say she was the girl for him); in the bleachers at the Polo Grounds; in the YMCA gym on Seventh Avenue where again I was his second, loyally on hand as he pounded at a
punching bag, stripped to the waist in shimmery flapping shorts.

Kate Pinkerton invited me to tea again. On the appointed day, I groomed myself with especial care. My hair sparkled with brilliantine and my suit, fresh from the cleaner’s, creaked like
cardboard as I ascended the tall steps in Gramercy Park one dark afternoon in December.

Through the drawing-room curtains shone a burnished glow.

I was surprised to find no other guests: I had expected Trouble, at least, and I quailed as Kate Pinkerton, like the figurehead of a stately ship, crested up to greet me from her stiff-backed
sofa.

In a voice I had to strain to hear, she said, ‘So kind of you to come, Mr Sharpless, so kind. I do like to keep up with Trouble’s friends’ – then added, as if sensing my
unease, ‘I’m afraid it’s just you and me this afternoon. You don’t mind putting up with an old woman?’

My teacup, when I took it, trembled in my hands. I glanced at the fire, the books, the paintings, lighting seldom on Kate Pinkerton’s face, imperturbable beneath her metallic hair. At her
neck, like a fastener holding her head to her body, glowed the dark brooch.

‘Forgive me, Mr Sharpless, but you don’t sound American.’

I explained that I had grown up in France, and other places besides, with a father who had been in the consular service. When Kate Pinkerton raised an eyebrow questioningly at the past tense, I
told her that my father was dead, and she said that she was sorry, so sorry, and sounded as if she were. She adjusted the brooch, insisted I have some seedcake, and asked me brightly where else my
father had been stationed. Her interest, I assumed, was feigned, mere politeness, but the performance was smooth as any politician’s.

‘Turkey?’ She nodded. ‘Well, well... Ceylon? So
useful
an island.’ She gestured to the teapot. ‘Indochine? Mmm... And Japan? Fascinating. Tell me, what
do
you recall of Japan?’

‘Nothing. I was a baby.’ But an image came to me: a hillside, studded with boxy houses; a harbour, with water blue and glittering; boats, rocking hypnotically; and a sense of sadness
as a large hand led me from my vantage point, drawing me back into a shadowy house. Strange, these deepest recesses of childhood: days we have lived through that leave so little residue –
only shards of feeling and image, such as remain from a dream mostly forgotten.

‘Nothing?’ Kate Pinkerton, smiling, might have been relieved, and I could not think why. ‘I should have liked to travel,’ she mused. ‘Can’t you picture me as
some heroine of Mr James, urbanely conducting romantic negotiations in a stately Parisian ballroom?’

Jamesian heroine? Never! I could see her only as the distinguished political wife, a personification of the ship of state. Clumsily I applied my cake fork to my cake, which was delicious.

‘But we Manvilles were never ones for Europe,’ she went on. ‘Nor anywhere foreign. Daddy’ – the word surprised me, coming from Kate Pinkerton – ‘liked
to say that America was a world unto itself. A continent stretches before us! Its riches, ours to reap! God has given bounty enough in these United States to build heaven on earth! Why look beyond
our shores? Perhaps he was right. Poor Daddy! The outbreak of the Spanish–American War was a blow to him. I think our victory shocked him even more. What, he cried, do we want with Puerto
Rico, with Guam? What do we want with the Philippines? What have we done but acquire an empire, just like the British we rebelled against? My brother died in the Cuban campaign. Daddy never got
over that. James was to have succeeded to Daddy’s senatorial seat – and, we hoped, to become president one day.’

I was about to say I was sorry, when Kate Pinkerton added in a brisk voice that all that was long ago. ‘Time goes,’ she said, ‘time goes on’ – but there in Gramercy
Park, with the curtains closed against the twilight, with the fire, with the soft rustle of her gown as she shifted on her stiff sofa, time seemed arrested, held in a suspension that could never
break.

She poured more tea. Silence extended around us like a spreading pool and, feeling myself obliged to speak, I asked whether Senator Pinkerton would again seek his party’s nomination for
presidential candidate. Though he had lost, as I recalled, in 1920 to James M. Cox, many felt he should have put himself forward in 1924, when John W. Davis proved an unworthy challenger for that
unctuous Republican, Calvin Coolidge. Lately, voices had been raised in the senator’s favour:
The Party Needs Pinkerton! Pinkerton for President!
What the senator stood for I could not
have explained, though his views on foreign entanglements, I gathered, would have disappointed his long-dead father-in-law.