The Heat of the Sun

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