The Heat of the Sun

motel, I wondered if the military police might be on my trail; I thought of them pounding on the door, ripping me from my bed, and was not afraid. But what crime had I
committed worse than the explosion called Trinity? I dreamed of it: sometimes all I did was close my eyes and the memory rushed upon me. Again I felt that shuddering through the ground, that
rolling heat; on and on went the express-train roar, on and on the searing brightness. What thoughts possessed the senator in that last moment I would never know; I imagined that his
self-immolation revealed a longing to be redeemed.
    Two days passed before I reached the coast. On a bright afternoon, a Wednesday, I pulled into the drive at Wobblewood West. The house was quiet and the blinds were drawn, but I found the door
unlocked.
    ‘Aunt Toolie?’ I entered the flagstoned hall; I passed through the broad, open rooms. How empty this house seemed! Low chairs on spindly legs, flowers in brushed-steel vases, and
bright abstract paintings loomed out at me, but none of it had anything to do with me, or the world, or what might happen next. Everyday life was the merest façade, a brittle shell that a
shout could crack. I peeled back slats in a blind and peered out at the sunlit terrace. How long had it been since that evening of Antigone ? I climbed the stairs.
    ‘Aunt Toolie?’ I longed to see her; she might have been the last link that tethered me to the world. In the upstairs corridor I heard a radio playing low. Caressingly, a song curled
towards me – the one about taking a sentimental journey, the one about putting your heart at ease – and I crept forward to meet it. At the end of the corridor, a door stood ajar, and I
pushed it open to find a room in shadow. There, marooned on a sea of soft carpet, was a big bed with Aunt Toolie sitting by it. She turned towards me, unsurprised, as I entered.
    Again I said her name, fearful now as I saw the inert figure in the bed, the head deep in the pillows, the hand in Aunt Toolie’s hand. Her tongue moved over her lips, moistening them as if
after a long silence. There was sadness in her eyes, but a strange happiness too.
    In the bed, skeleton-thin, was Le Vol.
    ‘Tallulah, I’m back!’
    Hours might have passed, though perhaps it was only minutes, before the automobile pulled up in the drive. When I went to greet Uncle Grover, he shook my hand with what might have been relief
and I asked him when Le Vol had arrived at Wobblewood West.
    ‘Three days ago, four. We tried to call you, but that base of yours said you were off somewhere.’ He clattered about the kitchen, putting groceries in cupboards. ‘Your friend
collapsed on the doorstep. To think, they’d let him out of a military hospital! Well, that’s military hospitals for you.’
    ‘But what was he doing here?’
    ‘Why, looking for you, Woodley! That was all he could think to do, to come looking for you.’
    Le Vol, after all these years! ‘It’s like a ghost coming back.’
    ‘No ghost.’ Uncle Grover held up cans of Campbell’s soup: one cream of chicken, one pea and ham. ‘He sleeps, but that’s not all he does. We’ll have that young
fellow on roast beef and mashed potatoes, apple pie and ice cream before the week’s out, mark my words.’
    ‘But missing so long! Has he said where he’s been?’
    ‘They picked him up in the Pacific, that’s all we know. Some nasty foreign island, Okin-something – is that what they call it? God knows what those Jap monsters have done to
him.’
    ‘He’s said no more – nothing?’
    ‘He will, Woodley. He’s been waiting for you.’
    Earnestly I joined the vigil at Le Vol’s bedside, delighted when he stirred, offered desultory words, or sipped from spoons we held to his lips. What sufferings he had endured we dared not
imagine; his eyes were haunted and his skin was yellow, clinging like parchment to his hollowed face. The doctor said he was undernourished, that was all, and would rally soon. Only one thing was
certain: when Le Vol smiled at me, grasped my hand, and said he was glad to see me, I knew it was true.
    After some days he was well enough to sit up. He said he missed the sun, so we took him down to the terrace, where he reclined on a wicker chaise longue and I read him stories by Somerset
Maugham. Whether he listened I could not be sure, but perhaps the lulling, elegant words were enough; the words and the wash of the sea and the summer laving the cliffs and the blue