The Heat of the Sun (7 page)

McManus II was subdued on the night before the Easter vacation. As I packed my trunk, I thought what a contrast this end of term made with the last: no uproar, no games, no
devil-may-care escape into the night. The headmaster’s interview with Trouble and Scranway had left its mark. Masters had been looking in regularly. There would be no slacking of discipline.
Lights would be extinguished strictly at ten, just when all of us would have gathered in the gym, fervent for the fight of the century.

Trouble knocked on the wall of my partition. He mimed a punch, a swift uppercut.

‘You’re glad really, aren’t you?’ I asked him.

‘What’s to be glad about? Haven’t you heard of David and Goliath?’ He sat, bouncing a little, on my cot. He wore silk pyjamas and a dressing gown that might have been a
smoking jacket. Looking at him, I wondered how much I had really come to know him.

Sometimes I still thought he was a stranger.

‘Hey, Trouble.’ Ralph Rex, Jr passed by.

‘Hey, Rex.’ Slowly, shyly at first, Trouble’s acolytes were drifting back. That night Earl Pritchard had joined us at dinner; lately, the Townsend twins looked wistfully in our
direction. Had Trouble still possessed his phonograph, he could easily have summoned them back to cubicle number thirty: all it would take was Sophie Tucker’s siren songs sounding out
again.

A shout, almost a scream, came from near the door.

‘
Who did this?
’ It was Scranway.

By the time we got there a crowd had formed. Slumped to the floor, almost sobbing, Scranway cradled in his arms the inert form of Hunter.

Voices buzzed all around us.

‘What’s happened? Is Hunter dead?’

‘I saw it all. Scranway was about to take him out for his walk. Hunter couldn’t get up.’

‘Then he was sick.’

‘There’s a steak next to his basket – half chewed!’

‘Someone’s poisoned Hunter? Who’d do that?’

Wildly, Scranway looked about him. Fellows stepped back. Scranway rose. He was still in all his clothes, with an overcoat on top. For once, he was not immaculate; his hair was dishevelled and
his eyes burned. He pushed through the crowd. He pointed at Trouble. ‘You.
You
.’

Trouble looked astonished. ‘No.’

I stepped forward. ‘It’s true. Leave him alone.’

Scranway shoved me aside. My legs buckled beneath me; I thudded to the floor and could only look on, helpless, as he grabbed Trouble, shaking him, slapping him. Trouble stumbled back. He held up
his fists, assumed a boxer’s stance, but Scranway had no time for Queensberry Rules.

They slammed against one partition, then another. Trouble was lithe, fast on his feet, but Scranway, with his superior bulk, grappled him to the floor.

They punched, kicked, pummelled.

I gripped my leg, wincing at the pain, as my gaze ricocheted between the battle on the floor and the onlookers hunkered above. Murderous delight flared in every face. Some bellowed their support
for Scranway – then Trouble – then Scranway.

‘Thrilling, isn’t it? Eddie just loves that dog.’ The voice insinuated itself into my ear. ‘Well,
loved.
’

‘Get away from me, Elmsley.’ He leaned over me like a secret assassin.

‘What, or you’ll beat me with your big stick?’

I glared up at him. ‘You did it, didn’t you?’

He was all innocence. ‘Did what?’

With a cry, Trouble squirmed from beneath Scranway’s weight. He flung off his dressing gown. Again he held up his fists to parry, bounced on his feet. ‘Come on, Scranway! Fight me
cleanly.’

‘I’ll kill you!’ Scranway’s fist swung out.

Trouble danced back, dazzling in his silk pyjamas. ‘Coward! Filthy coward!’ He tossed back his head, flicking hair from his eyes.

Scranway plummeted forward. Trouble darted away, but Scranway grabbed his collar. Silk ripped. Trouble was against the wall, with Scranway’s fist poised to strike, when a voice roared:

‘Boys! What do you think you’re doing?’

Mr Gregg stood in the doorway.

Scranway, trembling, pointed to Hunter. ‘That little bastard killed him.’ His voice, at first a whisper, became a shout: ‘
He killed him!’
And Scranway would have
hurled himself at Trouble again, Mr Gregg or no Mr Gregg.

The pause was fatal. Trouble plunged, punching with the force of a hammer blow.

Scranway crashed to the floor.

Seconds ticked by, and he did not rise.

Wearily, Mr Gregg advanced upon the hefty, supine boy. Trouble doubled over, nursing his knuckles. It was as if he did not yet know what he had done; none of us did. In the end it was Ralph Rex,
Jr who skittered forward, spun Trouble around, and grabbed his hand, raising it above his head in a winner’s stance.

First came one hesitant cry, then another; then cheers, rising up in a joyous surge, ringing against the ceiling, raining down like a benediction upon the benighted McManus II.

ACT TWO

Fame is not always bestowed fairly. Take my Aunt Toolie: she has never enjoyed the legendary status that should, I think, have been hers. Several times
during my career as a biographer I have tried to write about her, but always it seems she evades my grasp. Years ago, following the success of
Auntie Mame
, I proposed to my publisher a life
of Tallulah Sharpless, the angle being that here was a real-life Auntie Mame, one quite as formidable as Mr Patrick Dennis’s creation. Aunt Toolie, the one-time Queen of Bohemia, should tell
her story in her own words; my role would be to arrange them. The book, I hoped, might become a classic of sorts: the story of a shy, gawky Southern girl who parlayed the small legacy that enabled
her to live independently into a position as grande dame of Greenwich Village, something between landlady, hostess, procuress, and matchmaker for all manner of Village types: writers, artists,
actors; drunks, derelicts, dope-fiends. Sometimes brilliant, sometimes absurd, Aunt Toolie fostered, even created, the career of more than one celebrity. She deserved to be more than a
behind-the-scenes figure, a bit player in the biographies of others. My editor was enthusiastic; alas, Aunt Toolie was not. By then, her Village days were far behind her. Why dwell on the past?
There is only the future.

Such perpetual anticipation is, of course, typical of Aunt Toolie.

So it is left to me to recall who she was in those ramshackle days when I struggled to make my way as a writer in New York. Then (as now) my aunt is at all times onstage: a clattering assemblage
of earrings, brooches, and bangles, in myriad shapes of brass, glass, and celluloid, and long swinging ropes of faux pearls. Stabbing the air with a cigarette holder that juts up at forty-five
degrees, she flaunts flowing gowns of purple, orange, emerald, or gold, wrapped in stoles (often moth-eaten) of sable, mink, or ermine. Her lipstick is bright red, her powder corpse-pale; somewhat
above where her eyebrows used to be she has pencilled surprised semicircles, and a spangly band holds back her hennaed, bobbed hair.

Her age? Thirty? Forty? Fifty? Impossible to guess.

Her talk is all of young friends. She calls them her protégés and each, she insists, is bound for fame: Misses Maisie and Daisy Mountjoy, the Songbird Sisters – golden-haired
Maisie, copper-haired Daisy – who one day will fill Carnegie Hall (in fact, to my aunt’s delight, they fill many a burlesque theatre); Miss Inez La Rue, the choreographer, Doyenne (so
she calls herself) of Modern Dance; Mr Danvers Hill, her principal dancer (who decamps, disappointingly, to Tripoli, in pursuit of an Arab sailor); Mr Copley Wedger, a rich boy going through a
Bohemian phase, whose talents remain unknown but undoubtedly will be prodigious, or so Aunt Toolie assures us; rumour has it that he is prodigious in other ways.

Of Aunt Toolie’s circle, some were failures, some successes, but she loved them equally: Miranda Cast, the sculptor; Jackson Daunt, the songwriter; Benson Roth, acid-tongued critic (in
later years, a
New Yorker
legend); Zola May Hudson, leading light in the Harlem Renaissance.

In those days, I regarded myself as a poet. More truly, I was a jobbing hack, a filler writer and book reviewer, though I might (with more accuracy still) have been called Aunt Toolie’s
secretary. Day after day I lit her cigarettes, mixed her cocktails, answered her letters, received her guests, and tramped the streets with piles of her invitations, which she inscribed on little
silver-edged cards embossed with what she insisted was the Sharpless crest. The century was in its twenties, and so was I. Naturally, on leaving Yale, I had headed back to the place I called home
since my days in France: Aunt Toolie’s huge shabby apartment above a speakeasy in an alley off Christopher Street. When my father died on the Pont Saint Michel, Aunt Toolie became all the
family I had.

Wobblewood, as her apartment was known, took its nickname from its treacherous floorboards. Half of them had buckled with damp or in places rotted through, and supplementary planks, sheets of
cardboard, old doors, a legless table, several prone bookcases, and an antique Russian chessboard did their best to supply the lack, with ratty carpets flung on top. At Wobblewood, the energies of
Greenwich Village gathered to a point. There, I wrote the poems that I imagined would make me famous. There, I first grew drunk on bathtub gin, and woke up for the first time with a stranger in my
bed. And there, one blustery November evening in 1926, I met again the boy – the man – whom I would always call Trouble.

Aunt Toolie had thrown one of her many parties. Each party had a purpose, or began with one. The goal this time was to premiere that now-celebrated atonal composition (the beginning, critics
said later, of modern American music), Arnold Blitzstein’s
Sonata in No Key
. Blitzstein, a wiry, wild-haired Austrian who, at that time, spoke barely a word of English, was my
aunt’s latest discovery. She had found him sleeping rough one night in Washington Square Park and, upon learning he was a composer, became at once convinced of his genius. ‘It’s
frightfully
moderne
,’ she told her guests, enthusing about the work they were shortly to hear. ‘Oh, the bit where he beats on saucepan lids... a commentary, Arnold says, on the
alienation of the worker from the means of production.’

That night, as on many a night before, while guests mingled against walls hung with avant-garde posters and paintings, I guzzled gin, knowing I would regret it later, and was not sorry to be
drunk by the time Blitzstein bashed out
Sonata in No Key
on the tuneless upright – and the saucepans on top of the piano, ranged in order of size.

I was wondering when it would be safe to slip away when Aunt Toolie appeared beside me and whispered beneath the cacophony, ‘Darling, I need your help. One word: Agnes.’

‘Not again!’ For months my aunt had been in one crisis or another over this runaway Catholic schoolgirl, a would-be actress of no discernible talent who gloried in the stage name of
Agnes Day. Few of our circle had time for Miss Day; Aunt Toolie had all the time in the world.

‘Let me guess,’ I said. ‘Another career debacle? So soon too! Or perhaps it’s love. Is Matterhorn still the one?’

‘If only! Matterhorn’ – Aunt Toolie’s name for a mountain-climber beau of Miss Day’s – ‘has gone, I fear, the way of all flesh.’ (Whether this
meant he had fallen to his death or merely ended his tenure in the lady’s affections, I did not manage to ask.) ‘So many lovers, and all bagatelles – shallow diversions of
restless girlhood! It’s time she was settled. You know what this means, darling? Copley Wedger. They’re both here tonight. I’m relying on you. Lead the horse to water. And this
time, make her drink.’

‘Such confidence in my abilities!’

Wobblewood grew wilder as the evening wore on. By midnight, revellers from the speakeasy downstairs had joined us, presumably without being invited. Where Agnes Day had gone, I had no idea. For
a time I talked to the Songbird Sisters, although this was difficult, as golden-haired Maisie leaped in to answer any remark addressed to Daisy, while copper-haired Daisy seemed always eager to
leave, yet reluctant to do so without her sister. Later I succumbed to the attentions of a Spanish lady said – by Copley Wedger, an expert in such matters – to be a
notorious
prick-tease
. The lady, known popularly as Conquistador, propelled me to the door of my room before turning abruptly, pecking me on the lips, and spiriting herself away. I was disappointed and
relieved.

‘Limehouse Blues’ blared from the phonograph, and couples, trios, and blissful solitaries were stomping recklessly on the hazardous floor by the time Aunt Toolie, sober as always,
demanded of me whether Miss Day had agreed yet to marry Copley Wedger.

‘What I can’t understand,’ I said, ‘is why you’re so keen for her to marry at all. What could be more bourgeois?’

Aunt Toolie pulled my nose and I howled.

Dutifully, I sidled off to look for Miss Day. I ended up in the annexe at the back of the apartment, a sort of boxroom on a grand scale, with paper peeling from the walls in strips and clutter
heaped precariously in cobwebbed piles. My quarry, outlined by the moon through an open window, squatted on the fire escape. Awkwardly, ashplant slipping, I clambered out to join her. No rain fell
any more, but the tiles and chimneys and well-like yard below were black mirrors, sleek with wetness.

I should have liked to sit with Miss Day, but my leg made it impossible. Sadly, I looked down at her. She was beautiful. That night she wore chunky costume jewellery and a yellow beret, beneath
which she had swept up her long black hair. Her face was silvery in the pale light. And what did she see? A prim bookworm with a bad leg. I wore a spotted bow tie, a tweed jacket with
leather-patched elbows, cord trousers, and argyle socks. There were cuts on my neck where my razor had slipped while negotiating the territory around my Adam’s apple.

My position with Miss Day was a peculiar one. We seldom spoke – I was shy around her – but Aunt Toolie had told me so much that I felt I knew her intimately. Her employment disasters
formed a never-ending saga. Miss Day had adopted many careers while awaiting her Broadway break: stenographer, waitress, swimming-pool attendant, factory girl, bakery assistant. Each career ended
ignominiously. The library at Columbia fired her for reading the novels she should have been putting on shelves. St Vincent’s Hospital let her go for talking to patients instead of mopping
out the wards. Her days as an usherette at the Shubert Theatre ended when she was discovered in a compromising position with an audience member in the back row. Defensively, she had pointed out
that the fellow was an old flame. Only yesterday a theatrical booking agency had fired her; it seemed she had got two of the acts mixed up. ‘A children’s pantomime,’ Aunt Toolie
told me, ‘and a burlesque show. Dear Agnes! Was there ever such a girl?’