The Heat of the Sun

killed him.’ His voice, at first a whisper, became a shout: ‘ He killed him!’ And Scranway would have
hurled himself at Trouble again, Mr Gregg or no Mr Gregg.
    The pause was fatal. Trouble plunged, punching with the force of a hammer blow.
    Scranway crashed to the floor.
    Seconds ticked by, and he did not rise.
    Wearily, Mr Gregg advanced upon the hefty, supine boy. Trouble doubled over, nursing his knuckles. It was as if he did not yet know what he had done; none of us did. In the end it was Ralph Rex,
Jr who skittered forward, spun Trouble around, and grabbed his hand, raising it above his head in a winner’s stance.
    First came one hesitant cry, then another; then cheers, rising up in a joyous surge, ringing against the ceiling, raining down like a benediction upon the benighted McManus II.

 
    ACT TWO
Telemachus, Stay

 
    Fame is not always bestowed fairly. Take my Aunt Toolie: she has never enjoyed the legendary status that should, I think, have been hers. Several times
during my career as a biographer I have tried to write about her, but always it seems she evades my grasp. Years ago, following the success of Auntie Mame , I proposed to my publisher a life
of Tallulah Sharpless, the angle being that here was a real-life Auntie Mame, one quite as formidable as Mr Patrick Dennis’s creation. Aunt Toolie, the one-time Queen of Bohemia, should tell
her story in her own words; my role would be to arrange them. The book, I hoped, might become a classic of sorts: the story of a shy, gawky Southern girl who parlayed the small legacy that enabled
her to live independently into a position as grande dame of Greenwich Village, something between landlady, hostess, procuress, and matchmaker for all manner of Village types: writers, artists,
actors; drunks, derelicts, dope-fiends. Sometimes brilliant, sometimes absurd, Aunt Toolie fostered, even created, the career of more than one celebrity. She deserved to be more than a
behind-the-scenes figure, a bit player in the biographies of others. My editor was enthusiastic; alas, Aunt Toolie was not. By then, her Village days were far behind her. Why dwell on the past?
There is only the future.
    Such perpetual anticipation is, of course, typical of Aunt Toolie.
    So it is left to me to recall who she was in those ramshackle days when I struggled to make my way as a writer in New York. Then (as now) my aunt is at all times onstage: a clattering assemblage
of earrings, brooches, and bangles, in myriad shapes of brass, glass, and celluloid, and long swinging ropes of faux pearls. Stabbing the air with a cigarette holder that juts up at forty-five
degrees, she flaunts flowing gowns of purple, orange, emerald, or gold, wrapped in stoles (often moth-eaten) of sable, mink, or ermine. Her lipstick is bright red, her powder corpse-pale; somewhat
above where her eyebrows used to be she has pencilled surprised semicircles, and a spangly band holds back her hennaed, bobbed hair.
    Her age? Thirty? Forty? Fifty? Impossible to guess.
    Her talk is all of young friends. She calls them her protégés and each, she insists, is bound for fame: Misses Maisie and Daisy Mountjoy, the Songbird Sisters – golden-haired
Maisie, copper-haired Daisy – who one day will fill Carnegie Hall (in fact, to my aunt’s delight, they fill many a burlesque theatre); Miss Inez La Rue, the choreographer, Doyenne (so
she calls herself) of Modern Dance; Mr Danvers Hill, her principal dancer (who decamps, disappointingly, to Tripoli, in pursuit of an Arab sailor); Mr Copley Wedger, a rich boy going through a
Bohemian phase, whose talents remain unknown but undoubtedly will be prodigious, or so Aunt Toolie assures us; rumour has it that he is prodigious in other ways.
    Of Aunt Toolie’s circle, some were failures, some successes, but she loved them equally: Miranda Cast, the sculptor; Jackson Daunt, the songwriter; Benson Roth, acid-tongued critic (in
later years, a New Yorker legend); Zola May Hudson, leading light in the Harlem Renaissance.
    In those days, I regarded myself as a poet. More truly, I was a jobbing hack, a filler writer and book reviewer, though I might (with more accuracy still) have been called Aunt Toolie’s
secretary. Day after day I lit her cigarettes, mixed her cocktails, answered her letters, received her guests, and tramped the streets with piles of her invitations, which she inscribed on little
silver-edged cards embossed with what she insisted was the Sharpless