The Heat of the Sun

said I planned to go to Paris.
    The senator smiled. ‘No hurry. Think about it, my boy.’
    ‘Trouble.’ I lowered my book.
    Snow flurried at the window. The afternoon was dark and I had switched on the lamp beside my bed. Often that winter I spent whole days in bed, huddled thickly like a caterpillar in its cocoon.
Trouble, smiling faintly, leaned against the doorjamb. He had crossed his arms over his chest.
    ‘Shall I join you?’ He flung out splayed hands, Nijinsky-like, or that was the intention, and leaped, and landed on my covers. I cried out. ‘Aunt Toolie’s had the most
marvellous idea,’ he said, rolling over and crushing me. ‘The ponds in the park are frozen. A skating party – what do you think?’
    ‘I think you’re heavier than you look, little boy.’ I struggled out from under him. If his intimacy with Aunt Toolie filled me with envy, I did not want him to know it. Hour
after hour she hooted at his jokes, urged him to sing, told him he should go on the stage, and shimmied with him to ‘Tiger Rag’ on the phonograph. That morning I had come across her
sobbing in his arms; quickly I withdrew, but found later, crumpled on the bumpy living-room floor, the letter that had caused her distress: a love letter from her girlhood in which a fellow called
Colby Something, Jr declared he adored her passionately. Would she be his bride? The date was twenty years ago. She had never shown the letter to me.
    Trouble plucked the book from my hands. ‘What’s this rubbish?’
    ‘Tolstoy.’ I plucked it back. It was one of the Graustark books by George Barr McCutcheon. I had loved them as a boy. ‘Trouble, we’ve got to talk. What are you going to do ?’
    ‘Do? What do you mean?’
    ‘You came here just after the holidays. It’s February now.’
    ‘So you’ve got a calendar.’ He bounded up and ranged my room, inspecting books, pictures, knickknacks. The room, mean as it was, was my haven, my retreat. I wanted to tell him
to get out.
    Instead, I said, ‘You’re not going back to Gramercy Park, are you?’
    ‘Aunt Toolie says I can stay here while I work things out.’
    ‘She’s my aunt, not yours.’ My words sounded harsher than I had intended.
    ‘You want to come skating, don’t you?’
    ‘Yes, and cross-country running. Who’s got skates anyway?’
    ‘You rent them, idiot. But Aunt Toolie remembered there are some old ones in the annexe. I said I’d look. Help me.’
    I pushed back the covers. How I longed for warm days! Even in my cocoon I had been wearing my overcoat. With ill grace, I followed Trouble to the back of the apartment. His only concession to
the cold was a scarf, shoplifted (I had seen him do it) from Wedger’s department store. That day he wore a Fair Isle pullover, Oxford bags, and two-tone shoes.
    ‘You look like the Prince of Wales,’ I said.
    In those days, the young David Windsor was an idol in America, the world’s most eligible bachelor. Trouble laughed and I flushed, remembering a drunken Englishman at one of Aunt
Toolie’s parties, who bellowed uproariously the refrain: I’ve tossed off a chap, who’s tossed off a chap, who’s tossed off the Prince of Wales! Trouble thought it
frightfully droll.
    In the annexe the light was a seeping pallor and the cold so bitter that my teeth chattered. Quietly, as if clutter were reason for reverence, we prodded here and there, moving willow-pattern
plates, a family of marionettes, and waterlogged heaps of sheet music: Stephen Foster, Chas. K. Harris. Something dreamy filled the scene, something strange. Trouble tilted a rocking horse,
pressing down its head, but halted it when the rockers squeaked too loudly. A banjo clanged as I knocked it. Why had Aunt Toolie kept all this junk? She must have brought it from the old Sharpless
house in Savannah.
    I wondered why she had never married Colby Something, Jr. Perhaps Trouble could tell me, but I was never at ease with him now. Since my lunch with the senator, I felt I had betrayed him. Yet
what had I done? I had no intention of taking up the offer. For a man determined to be president, a son like Trouble was a liability. Working for the senator, I would be on his side. My job,
nominally, might be speech-writer or researcher; in truth, I would be Trouble’s minder. The idea was monstrous. It also filled me with a certain base excitement.
    A cheval glass shuddered in its frame as we passed.
    ‘Where are these skates?’ I said, as if I cared.
    ‘Aunt