The Heat of the Sun

by Rain, David

  Aunt Toolie touched my hand. ‘Take care of Benjy, won’t you? Friends like him are rare. In Savannah, as a girl, I paced beside the railroad tracks and wished the train would take me away – away, like your father. Have you ever thought why he travelled so far? Couldn’t stand his ruined Southern family, that’s why. Couldn’t live on a desolate plantation with empty slave shacks rotting out the back. What boy of spirit could? What death-in-life, to know your world is ruined before you’ve had your chance! Oh, if I’d been a boy! But wherever I was going, I’d find a friend. That was it, you see. Not fame, not wealth, but a friend. There’s nothing more important.’

  I agreed there was not, and almost asked her about the man who would have married her, but she tossed aside her cigarette and rose, ready to return to the fray. On the lake’s brink, she turned to me. ‘I say, look at that Japanese boy, all in yellow. Rather fetching, isn’t he?’

  ‘How do you know he’s Japanese?’ I said.

  But of course he was. Again I looked at the boy’s attendants. I had seen them before: Yamadori’s servants. And what connection, I wondered, had this boy with Yamadori?

  Aunt Toolie said, ‘Your father adored the Japs, of course.’

  ‘Did he? He didn’t stay long in Japan.’

  ‘Something happened there. Some scandal, I think. Upsetting, whatever it was,’ she cawed back, and slid away from me. Trouble, in a stately arc, cruised towards her; behind him, threading with insolent aplomb between plaid-jacketed burly youths and red-cheeked laughing girls, I saw the Japanese boy. How graceful they looked, these phantoms of the ice! I loved and envied them. I imagined slipping outside myself, joining my spirit with the circling figures: I was Trouble; I was Aunt Toolie; I was the Japanese boy; I was all of them and none of them, captured in the pattern.

  My eyes flickered shut.

  In my dream I skated, revelling in my prowess. Trees thrust upwards, barren-branched; snow piled in drifts; but between the obstructions ran a web of icy paths where Trouble and Aunt Toolie and the Japanese boy and I careered in enthralling, unending chases. As I whizzed down entangling roads of ice, I felt I might take to the air, vanish into realms above the clouds.

  I skidded into a clearing. Paths branched in all directions. For a moment I thought I had lost the others, but a red deerstalker flashed: Trouble, circling on a frozen lake.

  I called his name. I called again.

  The lake was growing larger. Round and round went Trouble in his revolution of nothing, but I had no power to reach him. Mist hung low over the lake, and the sun glowed red as the ice began to crack, radiating from the centre in a star. I called – ‘Trouble, please! Trouble, no!’ – but he plummeted into the depths. A hand waved up, then was gone, as if the lake had swallowed him, leaving only the deerstalker trembling on the waters.

  I opened my eyes. I felt feverish, shivery. For a moment I failed to recognize what was wrong. Cries came: I thought they were cries of joy, the usual exultations of wheeling skaters. What alarmed me was Aunt Toolie, suddenly beside me, staring wide-eyed over the lake.

  ‘Christ,’ she whimpered. It might have been a prayer.

  As if my dream had been prophecy, a crack had opened in the middle of the ice, shattering the frozen surface. Screaming skaters struggled for the shores. From the depths of the chasm, an arm waved and waved. My palm covered my mouth, as if to hold back sick.

  My dream was real. No: this was not my dream.

  Three little men in black slithered on the ice, desperate to reach their young charge. One skater, a blundering would-be hero, wriggled on his belly towards the crack, calling to his friends for rope, rope. Then came the saviour, in the red deerstalker, swooping forward, plunging fearlessly into oblivion. Aunt Toolie screamed. The splash, on the icy air, sounded like an explosion.

  I thought I would collapse, but I stood, swaying, watching in horrified rapture as Trouble, drenched, his deerstalker lost, flailed back to the ice, tugging the Japanese boy behind him. Aunt Toolie buried her face in my chest, sobbing as if tragedy had destroyed us. But there was no tragedy here. In triumph, Trouble carried the boy in his arms.

  Trouble didn’t seem small. He was a giant.

  Like moons orbiting a planet, the three attendants surrounded him. The boy was spluttering, jerking his limbs. I hung back, holding Aunt Toolie. The boy slid from Trouble’s arms. Only for a moment had he been in the water. He had been in no danger, no danger at all. Grinning, he slapped his saviour’s shoulder before the three attendants hustled him away.

  The red deerstalker bobbed on the water.

  Nothing was the same after Trouble’s valiant act. The New York Times – on the front page, no less – took up the story: HERO OF THE ICE: SENATOR’S SON RESCUES PRINCE’S NEPHEW. Senator Pinkerton, quoted copiously, said that his son’s bravery was only what he expected. Benjamin (a Pinkerton through and through) was that kind of boy! A Pinkerton presidency, he seemed to imply, would bring about a world in which such boys were commonplace.

  A prominent picture of Trouble accompanied the story. The Times photographer captured him at the height of his youthful beauty: that hair! those eyes! that dazzling smile! To my knowledge, that photograph is the best ever taken of him. ‘Oh, Benjy! They’ll want you for the movies,’ Aunt Toolie cried admiringly, as the three of us huddled over the paper in her cold kitchen the next morning.

  Trouble was glum. What he was wanted for, he knew already, was not the movies; it was Senator Pinkerton’s presidential campaign.

  Rapping came at the door, and Aunt Toolie laughed. ‘The movies?’

  Trouble went to answer it. Only after some moments did I sense that something was wrong. The voices drifting back from the drawing room were strange. And strangely quiet.

  I hauled myself out of the kitchen and went to see.

  Inside the door stood three of Yamadori’s servants – the same three, I assumed, from Central Park. Trouble, hearing the thud of my ashplant, turned back to me, a curious wonderment playing in his face. When I asked him if anything were wrong, he shook his head.

  He said no more. He packed a bag and left with his visitors.

  That was the last we saw of him at Wobblewood.

  Perhaps a week passed. One chill afternoon, the telephone bell jangled, and, answering it, I heard Kate Pinkerton’s voice. She came to her point directly. Would I accompany her to the Blood Red Ball?

  ‘Prince Yamadori’s ball?’ I was bewildered. ‘But surely—’

  ‘You realize everyone in New York will be there? Quite an opportunity for a young man on the make.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ On the make? Was I on the make?

  That Kate Pinkerton should telephone me was startling enough. Here I was, in a filthy dive in the Village, with spongy crumbling floorboards and spreading cracks down the walls; there she was in Gramercy Park, dark ancestral portraits arrayed behind her displaying secretaries of this or that, of war or treasury, of commerce or state, under president after president since the founding of our nation.

  Her voice dropped, assuming that persuasive timbre I had come to dread. ‘The ball, you realize, is two nights away. You know what this means? Trouble needs you. I need you, Woodley.’

  Woodley? She had never called me that before.

  ‘On hand, as it were.’

  ‘For what?’ I said, though I feared I knew.

  ‘Perhaps we might... well, we might bring him home.’

  How weary the world has grown of Yamadori’s parties! Turn to any memoir of the haut monde, recalling those riotous years before the Crash, and Yamadori is there: in Hollywood, in Rome, in Rio, in decadent Berlin, or on the Côte d’Azur, presiding like a puppet master over the revels. Through many a season, the world’s elite descended upon his latest lair. Imagine New York that night of the Blood Red Ball: the limousines rolling down Park Avenue towards that great tower topped with his palazzo! What cargoes they disgorge: gentlemen in top hats and vampiric capes; girls with spindly arms and swinging beads; Rubenesque women
in boas and feathery hats, all of them in red, all of them masked. Behind those masks hide many famous faces, the titled, the rich, the merely notorious, mingling promiscuously: Mr Cole Porter, the Aga Khan, Miss Elsa Maxwell, Miss Greta Garbo, the Duke of Verdura, Mr Duke Ellington, Mayor Jimmy Walker, Miss Nancy Cunard, Mr Al Capone, Mr Al Jolson, Mr Newton Orchid, the Chester Beckers and the Ripley Snells, Mr Theodore Dreiser, Prince Frederick Leopold.

  Gliding in a limousine with Kate Pinkerton, as if towards my destiny, I shivered once, though the car was warm.

  ‘I trust,’ she said airily, ‘you’ve been developing your craft.’

  ‘I’ve given up poetry,’ I replied. ‘I’m writing a novel.’

  ‘Oh?’ She sounded curious, but asked no more. I was glad and disappointed. My novel was called Telemachus, Stay. It would be nothing if not contemporary. The action, set in Manhattan over one Fourth of July, was to begin with a lengthy prologue (‘Overture’, I liked to say), which I imagined weaving like a sinuous jazz tune through streets of squalor and splendour, from Park Avenue penthouses to Harlem dives, Garment District sweatshops to Woolworth Building offices, alternating between hard, ‘objective’ presentation of the city and sudden vertiginous descents into the consciousness of this or that character, most of them the merest passers-by. What followed, in so far as I had worked it out, was to be an account of a dissolute young man called Eugene Telemachus and the various pointless things he did to fill up his day. I saw the book as a commentary on the post-war world. It would be nine hundred pages long, with each chapter written in a different experimental style.

  I studied Kate Pinkerton. She had explained no more about the purpose of the evening, but there was no more to explain. Trouble would be here. And we were here to save him.

  Floodlights lit the vast apartment block. Under the canopied entranceway braziers burned on either side of a broad vermilion carpet. A servant, materializing from behind the flames, assisted us from the car; Yamadori’s men wore black, but had hidden their faces behind maroon lacquered masks. Snow had fallen earlier, and the slushy sidewalk gleamed with reflected fire. Kate Pinkerton took my arm, and with a surge of pride I led her into the marble lobby. Her costume was an eighteenth-century gown with enormous hoopskirts; mine, which she had sent to me, the chequered garb of a harlequin. Our masks: a jewelled shield for the lady’s eyes; for me, a shell of skull-like porcelain that fitted with eerie precision over the top half of my face. Skywards we swept in an art nouveau elevator. Kate Pinkerton’s breasts, powdered whitely, swelled out from her beaded bodice. I loved her.

  As we entered the palazzo, the swooning tones of a full orchestra, reeling its way through a Strauss waltz, encircled us in silky skeins. Like a dazzled page by his lady’s side, I entered the first of many salons where robed and furred nobility once bowed in stately conference. Within gilded walls emblazoned with frescoes, against mighty canvases by Titian and Veronese, guests garbed in every variety of red clustered in elegant groups or revolved, with many a whirl of tailcoat and gown, in the roseate twilight of red-globed chandeliers. Through an archway I glimpsed the broad imperial staircase I had seen before, stately in its thrust of marble and gold: a stairway to the stars.

  ‘Tell Prince Yamadori’ – Kate Pinkerton clutched a servant’s sleeve – ‘that the senator’s wife has arrived.’

  Masked revellers surrounded us. To my left stood a group of long-legged girls, each in burgundy high heels, damask stockings and a skirt the colour of cherries, stretched across her thighs; one sported a ruby cigarette-holder, into which she had fixed a strawberry-coloured cocktail cigarette. To my right a squat elderly gentleman, cheeks alarmingly rouged, squired a carrot-haired young man in obscenely tight shorts, cerise in shade; there were carmine leotards, carnelian capes, a fuchsia bridal gown complete with veil; I saw lapdogs, doves, and leaping, chattering monkeys magicked into myriad flaming shades as I guided Kate Pinkerton to a beet-red leather sofa. Glasses floated towards us, borne on trays by the masked servants; I plucked one free and proffered it to her, but she waved it away. I wished she would speak to me. What was she feeling? What was she thinking? Did she really expect that Yamadori would come to her? Quaffing pink champagne, I wondered how, in any case, the prince would find us in this bedizened sea.

  The waltz ended; there was applause; then, just as I was becoming annoyed with a party of young bucks who stood in front of us, flicking ash with a cosmopolitan air, a fellow dressed as Charles II (a Charles II dipped, wig and all, in cranberry juice) bowed extravagantly to Kate Pinkerton and asked if the lady would care to dance. I thought she would rebuff him; instead, she rose and took his hand. Could this be Yamadori? And where was Trouble? I tried to keep Kate Pinkerton in sight, but soon she was lost to me in closing ranks of red.

  Slipping away from the young bucks, I searched for another of the floating trays. Somebody, not a servant, handed me a raspberry-coloured cocktail cigarette, but made no offer to light it.

  Voices came from close by.

  ‘Weird!’ said a woman. ‘So this guy, the Jap, could be anywhere?’

  ‘Mingling,’ said a man. ‘Must be. Like a spy.’

  ‘Japs, ugh!’ said another. ‘There’s something evil about a Jap.’

  ‘They say he ran away from something in Jap-land. Something big. I heard he killed a man.’

  ‘I heard he killed a woman.’

  ‘I heard he betrayed the emperor.’

  ‘I heard he was sentenced to hara-kiri. But wouldn’t do it.’

  A hand gripped my arm.

  ‘Darling, there you are! It is you, isn’t it, Woodley?’

  I held up my ashplant. ‘The deductive powers of a Holmes! Enjoying yourself, Aunt Toolie?’

  ‘Ecstatically. Thank goodness Benjy sent me an invitation.’

  ‘So he’s getting on well with this Japanese prince. That’s where he is, isn’t he? With Prince Yamadori.’

  Aunt Toolie might have been hurt, insulted by Trouble’s behaviour. But if she were, she would not let on. ‘Have you heard about the fireworks? Come midnight, the sky bursts into flame. They say it’ll be the most spectacular display Manhattan’s ever seen. Do you like my costume?’

  ‘Milkmaid, caught in Mafia bloodbath?’

  ‘Marie Antoinette – after the guillotine. See this ribbon around my neck? But darling, hide me. There’s a man over there.’

  ‘What man?’ I was in no mood for games.

  Aunt Toolie slipped behind my back, but extended one garnet-coloured fingernail over my shoulder, pointing towards a portly fellow in a madeira toga who stood some distance away, looking lost. His bald head, crowned in russet laurels, glistened under the twilight chandeliers as he turned this way and that, blinking with a worried air through goggle-like spectacles.

  ‘Didn’t you see me dance with him last time we were here?’ said Aunt Toolie. ‘He’s a tiger. A hound on the scent. Won’t take no for an answer. I declare, he positively ravished me with his eyes.’

  ‘The cad! Shall I challenge him to a duel?’

  ‘Certainly not. That’s Grover Grayson the Third, the radio millionaire.’ And with a flourish, like Isadora Duncan making an entrance, Aunt Toolie stepped out from behind me. ‘Yoo-hoo!’

  At once, Grover Grayson III spotted her. Approaching, beaming broadly, he looked like a chipmunk.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘I need a drink.’

  What I really needed was air. Whether that was possible in this magic kingdom I could not be sure. I pushed my way through the crowd. Between fluted columns a doorway stood open. I slipped through it and found myself in a stairwell. Ascending, I came to a garden in the sky.

  How glad I was to escape a world of red! Here the noise from the ball was muffled. Here was solitude. Here was peace. Here also was a garden deep in winter. Snow lay in pale patches over bleak parterres and lawns. Weeds had pushed through the paving. Like the chambers below, the garden appeared to have been imported, in one piece, from some ancient estate. Manhattan stretched
beyond the garden’s high walls, glittering like stars. I could have been floating far out in space, perched on a fragment of an exploded earth.

  I sat on a bench in a dark glade. Branches clotted above my head. Cold pressed through my costume and I shivered. In front of the bench was a pond. Ice crusted half its surface; the exposed water looked black and viscous as oil. The cigarette, unlit, still drooped between my fingers.

  Something splashed me. I swivelled around. The branches, I thought, were trembling. Was there fruit on that tree? Or was this garden enchanted?

  A second splash: a stone. And this time, laughter.

  ‘Who’s there?’ I demanded.

  The laughter came again, a branch creaked above, and a young man slipped down beside me.

  He bowed, bending from the waist.

  ‘My greetings.’ The accent was foreign, precise, and the figure boyishly slight, dressed in the dark uniform and mask of Yamadori’s servants. The fellow’s impudence startled me. He sat beside me, lit my cigarette, then produced one of his own and lit that too.

  His lighter was a rich man’s, golden and weighty.

  ‘Given up on the ball, then?’ I said.

  ‘Is dull now. I come here. I like come here.’

  ‘And sit in your tree? And splash the prince’s guests?’

  ‘You funny, sir. You look and look, wondering who there. You a clown, clown in circus?’

  ‘Almost. Harlequin.’ I held out my hand.

  A smile appeared beneath the mask: generous, brilliantly white. We sat in silence, smoking. Cold as I was, I had no wish to return inside yet. Something sickened me, even horrified me, in the Blood Red Ball, as if Yamadori’s guests were victims of a plague, carousing and cavorting in a vain attempt to escape the fate that would destroy them.