The Heat of the Sun

Nagasaki. The posting was the first of many. Whether he was determined to proceed ever westwards, perpetually in flight from his origins, I
cannot say, but by the time I was eight years old I found myself in Paris. There was much I could barely remember: not Japan, where I had lived in the obliviousness of infancy; not Indochine, where
Mama had died, sinking beneath a feverish burden while I lay in my little bed, unknowing, and the tin roofs drummed with monsoonal rains. There was Ceylon: what was Ceylon? Green, interminable
terraced hills watched from the window of a climbing train. Turkey: what was Turkey? A man in a fez, a bubbling pipe, the weird high wailings of Mohammedan calls to prayer.
    Only France flamed out with the vividness of life. Fondly, I recalled my father on honey-coloured boulevards, a portly figure in a frock coat, with moustache neatly waxed and the cane that he
liked to carry, spinning it sometimes in a white-gloved hand. He referred to this gentlemanly affectation as his ‘ashplant’: a knobbly sapling of iron-tough wood, lacquered darkly
black. How settled he seemed, how magnificently middle-aged! He kept a mistress in the Latin Quarter, a buxom, high-coloured girl from Dieppe with a delightful kindly laugh.
    In Paris, I barely thought of myself as American. America was a dream: America was photographs, sepia images in a crackly-backed book. What had they to do with me, this tumbledown house in a
place called Georgia, this beautiful unremembered Mama, this Addison Sharpless from another life, strangely slender, in a straw boater by a boardwalk rail? Slipped between leaves was a postcard of
San Francisco; visible in the picture, indicated by an arrow, was the low, long apartment house, glaring white as a monastery, where Woodley Addison Sharpless made his entrance into the world. His
American life had been brief. Days later, we left the white apartment house for the ship that waited to bear us away, across the blue Pacific and out into the world.
    My misfortune, which for many years would outweigh my sense of good fortune, happened in Paris, one afternoon on the Pont Saint Michel. My father was taking me to tea with his mistress when
suddenly he collapsed. His ashplant clattered into the gutter; his trilby rolled across the cobblestones and he clutched his heart, convulsing. A woman screamed, and I cried out and kicked as
strangers, milling forward, shouldered me aside, bearing me away from my dying father. Two days later, on the Champs-Elysées, I ran into traffic and almost died. How could I know where I was
going? Tears blinded me.
    I had tried before, and failed, to write about this in my journal. I tried again now and had barely begun my entry when noises in the dormitory interrupted me. I was alarmed. If I were sick, I
should have gone to the infirmary; to be in dorms in daytime was forbidden. First came a footstep. Then a shuffle. Next, a creak, followed to my amazement by raucous music, horns squealing with
brassy impertinence. I peered down the aisle. Billy Billicay’s cubicle lay at the far end: number thirty. It had been empty since he died. The sounds, I felt certain, were from there.
    Riding over the music came a brazen, mocking voice – whether male or female, it was hard to tell – that first chanted some nonsensical recitative about sweethearts, love, and love
lost, before bellowing out how you’d miss me, honey, miss my huggin’, miss my kissin’, some of these days when I was far away.
    At Billy Billicay’s cubicle, the curtain was open, and inside, busying himself with unpacking, was a new fellow. The first thing I remarked was his thick, unusually blond hair. He wore it
a little long but not at all raggedly; it shone out even in the dusky gloom. Fellows at Blaze, Scranway aside, were shabby; this fellow was neat. His uniform, as he moved, seemed barely to crumple,
as if made of a special fabric denied to the rest of us. A ring flashed on a finger. Bending down, averted from me, he retrieved a rolled-up sock from the floor.
    Only after he stood again did the fellow see me watching him. He smiled. His mouth was wide, full-lipped, the teeth white and regular. Playfully he tapped me on the arm with the sock and said,
‘I just adore Sophie, don’t you?’
    He had to raise his voice above the music.
    ‘Sophie Tucker.’ He indicated the phonograph; frilly-horned, it perched perilously on the cabinet beside the cot.
    The fellow’s eyes were