The Heat of the Sun

formalities in a shabby timber office when a fellow in a chauffeur’s uniform slipped towards us, grinned and bowed, took our luggage, and ushered us in the
direction of a stately Lincoln sedan. Deep wrinkles seamed his face and his teeth were yellow, waggling pegs.
    I said to Le Vol, ‘A step up from our usual welcome. Good hotel?’
    ‘Let’s just say I’ve exceeded myself.’
    The Lincoln – brown and gleaming like shoe leather, inside and out – swept up hilly, winding roads above the harbour. Cherry blossoms burgeoned in a fleshy, pink riot as we turned
smoothly this way and that.
    It had been some years after the Blood Red Ball when I ran into Le Vol again at a diner in New York. Then, as now, he was the shabby fellow he had always been, red-haired and gangly, only a
little more weather-beaten and wrinkled about the eyes, as if he spent too much time squinting into the sun.
    ‘Still taking snaps?’ I had asked him, and he had looked at me almost pityingly and informed me that he was in town for the opening of his new exhibition. He was ebullient. The Crash
(to most, a calamitous end) seemed to him an exciting beginning, the final crisis of capitalism that preceded a new order. Bemused, I listened to his analysis for a good half-hour before he
realized he had asked me nothing about myself and demanded to know what I had been doing.
    I hesitated to tell my story. What had I become but an ageing journalist, hustling for freelance work, living in a single shabby room in Greenwich Village? Wobblewood was no more. The Queen of
Bohemia, surprising all her circle, had found her ideal friend at last in the form of Grover Grayson III, the radio millionaire. Following a lavish wedding at the Plaza, the couple decamped to
California, where Mr Grayson was building up his interests in the movies. I could have gone with them; Aunt Toolie insisted, but I demurred. It was time I made my own life. Yet what was my life to
be? I had left Paris too late. The Crash seemed only to confirm that an era had ended. Boatloads of Bohemians made reverse Atlantic crossings. The Lost Generation was finding itself again. I knew I
would never write Telemachus, Stay .
    Le Vol, a little hesitantly, asked me what had become of Trouble. I tried to explain what had happened at the Blood Red Ball.
    ‘How his father must hate him!’ Le Vol drew on his pipe.
    ‘He said he loves him.’
    ‘But the cat landed on his feet. He’s all right?’
    ‘Depends what you mean by all right .’
    Trouble’s fall had left him with a concussion, fractures of his right hip and thigh, and extensive bruising. For six weeks he lay in a hospital bed; Kate Pinkerton visited him every day,
and so did I. The senator’s contrition was piteous, but his son refused to see him: not clamorously, but coolly, calmly.
    One day I came upon Kate Pinkerton sobbing. Trouble’s bed was empty. Seeing me, she sprang up and left, not speaking, and I burned with shame, as if I had assisted his escape.
    Le Vol said, ‘So he walked out into the night?’
    ‘And hasn’t been seen since. Do you ever imagine just walking out on everything and starting a new life?’
    ‘I’ve got one, in case you haven’t noticed.’
    ‘Maybe I need one too.’
    ‘Oh? I’m heading west again,’ Le Vol began, and, lighting his pipe, he informed me that a writer he had worked with for the last three years had just defected to Hollywood.
‘The fool! He’ll be sorry. It’s a new world. There’ll be no burying our heads in the sand any more.’
    ‘I suppose you think I’ve been doing that,’ I ventured.
    ‘We’re heading into a key period of history. Someone needs to document it. We’d make a good team: Le Vol, the man who does the pictures; Sharpless, the man who does the
words.’
    Destiny, it seemed, was calling me again, and this time I answered. In those years of Depression and New Deal, Le Vol and I crisscrossed America. We sought out breadlines and soup kitchens. We
stood in fields where the soil had blown away. We travelled with hoboes in boxcars. For the Public Works Administration, the Works Progress Administration, the American Federation of Labor and the
Tennessee Valley Authority, we chronicled the construction of dams, roads, and railroads. Several of Le Vol’s pictures became iconic images: young men in the Civilian Conservation Corps
digging mud in a field in North Dakota, like Russian peasants, anonymous and enduring; oil raining from a gusher in