The Heat of the Sun

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