The Night Inspector

by Frederick Busch

  TUESDAY, SEPT 10: Thought back to the day when she claimed I lifted my hand to her—Aberration in the process of observing and comprehending—It was on the back stairs, Lizzie, not the front—Strong drink not involved—I, declaiming with the righteousness that weakens my writing as well as my speech—Lizzie prodding with her surprising, infrequently manifested temper—A foul father, she cries, a fallow father, a man of vast uselessness to his sons and daughters who employs them as whipping posts for his temper—Not so, cries the tyrannical husband and father, I have never laid hand upon a one of them—Think you not that words, or mocking laughter, or a blank and inattentive face may not cause wounds?—She cries out and out, I at the stairway top and she partway down on the narrow step with a hamper of laundry in hand—Disappeared, then, into the coppery nimbus, bright and dull at once, but she with no face, great spots in my vision and pain in the temple so vast that to have been shot there, as dear Malcolm was, would have been to sustain barely any pain—True, then, that my hand was upraised, as whose might not be in such a moment of despair—The body does know when to rescue the man from his mind—Hence blindness of the eye as a type of blindness in the brain—The spots before me like giant holes into which I might plunge to escape—Such a violence of feature to present, I think!—And so she, forgetting her place—Do I dare jest here?!—Lizzie stepping back upon the air and falling in place of her desperate, despairing husband, who would have fallen an instant later from the pain her mockery had given him—

  WEDNESDAY, SEPT 11: Recalled with awful honesty the time I struck her as she stood before me at the landing of the front steps—I in from work and she with a kind of desperation rarely seen by me—Crying, wailing, as if a dervish in a feverish land—Anent the terrible pallor of Stanny and his silences and Mal’s determination to use the Guard as a way to the West and then a way to find combat—Thinking, never saying, how the boy so lacking in discipline or energy would surely find a way, in warfare, to die—And why did I not speak to my daughters with more than a mocking smile nor do else but chastise my boys—Crying back to her, Not so!—The soles of my feet afire from the hot stones of the hellfire city where heat poured down from the sun and out from manufactories and up from furnaces and engines and the moisture hung in the air like a stench made visible—Clambering upon the cargo vessels, prying into packages and crates, thumping barrels and squinting with sore eyes the manifests of crooked owners and their crooked masters and their crooked bosuns and their mercantile accomplices lined, like great herring gulls, along the wharf—Scrawling in the government notebook with a government pencil—Pinning into the cloth of my lapel the inches of heavy, dull badge—Inspector U.S. Revenue, as if I am equally the government’s property, along with my notebook and my federal locks—To lock in what? To lock what away?—And, true, I had gone by myself to Delmonico’s, so close to home—The growling of garrulous men—Smoke of cigars and sweet, heavy shag I did smoke to contribute to the clouds of manhood in the dark, interior air—A chop as heavy as a chunk of ballast, and a wine from the Rioja spilling from its decanter into the table’s candlelight a river of promise—Before me on the table, from August Brentano’s newsstand, The Reminiscences of Rufus Choate—He knew the city as it once had been, to those of somewhat noble lineage, born to reign, but some only rained upon—And, no, Lizzie, I am not stupid with drink—Stupid, rather, with fatigue, and with regret at having spent such pleasant hours when she awaited me—As if I had forgot I had a wife and family and house and debts for the acquisition of each—The Choate, for example, purchased with an allowance for books made possible by Lizzie’s decision that I’m a man of the book and thus must own books—To so chastise me for bookishness when it was she who once regarded that as no wound upon the family’s opportunities, but a triumph of which to boast!—Did I, then, strike her in the face and send her backward, limbs flying gracelessly and dangerously against the banister and steps until she rested, still and still and still at the foot, in the foyer? TUESDAY, SEPT 10: Malcolm home late—Lizzie at door—Three A.M., and Lizzie still awake, thus at the door to admit our boy—Pleasant of expression and filled, like a younger child, with powerful regret—No odor of strong drink, nor expressions from Lizzie of anything but her fatigue and disappointment—Slinging his arm around his mother’s neck and kissing her good night, his skin clear, his expression open to inspection, and his words those of a boy en route to manhood—So to bed—For she never declaimed an anger or resentment, eh?—And I was abed, not having warned him of aught but duty, never a threat—So, twirling the pistol at the edge of the bed, or even seated, lest, he might have thought, he would be required by his duties as soldier to one day defend himself while seated, say at a cookfire or in a mess tent—Silly but understandable, and barely 18 years of age, a precious boy—

  WEDNESDAY, SEPT 11: Pain at the shoulder and rib and elbow and thigh from flinging myself against the latched, heavy door—Panting behind me of Lizzie and Bessie, while Fanny wailed and Stanwix, alone among us as always, from where the corridor curved, stood in his silence and the nighttime of his solitude—In the door, then, and in myself with Lizzie and Bess behind—The poor boy so pale, paler than the bedclothes, and his fine face stained with the startling boldness of his blood, and so much of it—The weapon of his own destruction in his square, strong hand—Then Fanny crowding in, and the cries as of seabirds in a frenzy on the water far from home—The silence I felt, I felt it, from Stanwix Melville, the only remaining male in our small family who might one day sire a son—And no stern words behind us, like a pennant on a scuttled vessel’s mast—All had done their best—All had done their all—Lord in whom I would believe and fear I may not—How little he has done to deserve this dying—Why might you not have taken me?—I wished to say this to Lizzie—Could not—Lips sealed—Silences among us broader than the oceans of unspoken words in the past—My children blighted—Household boiling in silences of fever—Gall for dinner—Bile for tea—Great emptiness abounding in our rooms—

  TUESDAY, SEPT 10: The boy returns—It is Lizzie who receives him—Their exchange—Dulcet tones, assuredly—And off to bed—

  WEDNESDAY, SEPT 11: And nothing of the money needed and the money spent?—And no recriminations—Loving kiss from child to mother, and to bed—

  TUESDAY, SEPT 10: The world revolving in the boy, perhaps—His feeling he is guilty of the sins against the house—Wastrel, roaring-boy, drunkard, pretender—The having done an awful deed for which there is no recompense—Yet we did not hear of such, we do not, will not—He was a boy on the verge of man—He died in purity, though surely he was tempted—I have been tempted—Flesh, drink, vanity, language—

  WEDNESDAY, SEPT 11: Truly, I did belabor him for acquiring hurtful habits—Truly, I did threaten him with exile from the house—A boy alone in the grinding city—Only the Guard, sent on duty, would have given him a home—To be banished, nearly banished, from the rooms he had known—

  TUESDAY, SEPT 10: Did she threaten him with me?—Was it the danger posed by his sometimes silent, sometimes cruel, sometimes angry father?—But why hast Thou forsaken me, so the Jewish stripling cried to his Father—People of The Law, they stood between a Father and His Son—Bitter truth, cruel salts of truth, ashes and gall, the unmoving lips of the Father, aloof—

  WEDNESDAY, SEPT 11: Child, it is The Law compels and mangles me—Even Jehovah might lament—

  TUESDAY, SEPT 10: His mother, awake and alone at three of the morning—Sitting in the darkness of her solitude—Taking refuge in another room—But what deep-diving men are easy in a life, a household, its empty, echoing rooms?

  WEDNESDAY, SEPT 11: The batterer father, like wrath incarnate—Bursting through—And was it then the shot was fired?—Only then?—And Stanny, fearful at the pursuit, willing himself away from the world of such sounds?

  TUESDAY, SEPT 10: I did not see him with my eyes—I did not sniff like a dog at his breath—Nor did I hear the timbre and tone of his mother’s voice—What a sailor does not see he does
not know—It is why some cruel god of the navigators invented heavy fog—The fear of the woman and her daughters through the ultimate day—

  WEDNESDAY, SEPT 11: The shot—

  TUESDAY, SEPT 10: It seems, now, such a small matter—Lizzie in the kitchen and the washing up undone because the girl was no longer retained—Money being once more an issue with us—With our creditors!—I upstairs in my little room, squinting against the glare of the spirit lamp—Gaslight too bright at night for my aching eyes—Mal in the small corridor swinging the pistol about, crying “Hey!” and “Ho!” and “Surrender your arms!”—The children shouting for fear, mock fear, I think—And I, emerging from the room to terrify them to silence with my visage and my thoughts, written upon my forehead, I suspect, like Cain’s own brand, of such violence—Lizzie up from her chores to see—True mother, wary of the silence and not the former clattering and chattering—My roaring at them all to see to the dishes—Failure to respect their mother, etc.—Fanny weeping and Stanny struck dumb—Mal’s scowl a mirror to my own, I think—Lizzie silent and suddenly pale—The moment of stillness like the failure of a heart to beat—Our little house suspended in the silence—The swing of my arm as if self-motivated, with not a consideration from my brain—Mal’s pistol, which could have discharged at any or all, spilling from his fingers—His hand at his mouth, a fearful small boy, no man in the Guard with a sword at his belt and a pistol in hand—Fearful small boy—Are you such a poor shabby fellow? Are you a good, honorable one or good-for-nothing? Now you must announce it to me!—Monstrous man to hulk over them and bellow, glower, blink his weak, infernal eyes—

  WEDNESDAY, SEPT 11: Lizzie tumbling slowly down the back staircase—Her white, loose thighs exposed—Not recently this naked to my eyes—Her thin cry of surprise, and then the fall—My sense that I had struck her—Probably not—It is not what I would seek to do—My arm upraised, perhaps, would startle her, as happens with horses and dogs—While true that I have spoken harshly to them all—My sense of despair mounting, my need to sleep and sleep not unlike Malcolm’s, I think—The restlessness of the spirit in the Melvilles—My fury at small provocations, the sign of larger motivations to rage yet unannounced but present in the household and in my heart—Yet no harsh words to Mal upon his late arrival at home—No dire warnings beforehand, nor cruel greetings on the night—The door stove in, the bloody bedclothes and the bled, wounded boy—My girls and Lizzie in their sorrows, I in my own and separate sorrows, and my Stanwix, son, so silent and immense-eyed—The sword on the sash at Malcolm’s side—

  The waiter brought us more port. “It’s very good,” Sam said.

  “Yes. It is, though—”

  “I meant the fortified wine,” Sam said. “However, I would admit to some confidence in what you have just read. What do you think?” His face demonstrated a carefully managed blankness, as if he feared to be accused of requiring me to express an approval. While I read, he had set down half a dozen brown stubs of pencil, of various lengths, and he had littered his side of the banquette table with cedar shavings. “If anything, of course,” he said.

  “Sam, did he tell you these thoughts?”

  “Of course not, Billy. I wrote them. I created them.”

  “And you are certain of these insights, then? That he— Sam, how can you know this?”

  He opened his mouth as if to speak, then seemed to think better of it, and he laid a finger upon his lips, and he smiled with a gentle, knowing humor. Finally he did speak, but to say only this: “Invention also speaks a certain truth, Billy. Have you not recounted your adventures in battle? And subtly altered what another might term fact?”

  I did not reply. I found that I could not. And so I pressed on. “And why would he think—he so formerly famed for his abilities to recall and construct scenes of vividness and drama—why would he think so illogically? So repetitively? The dates repeated as if only they, of all the thirty in the month, had meaning. These thoughts are so contradictory and so unverifiable. So speculative, that is to say, Sam. Hysterical! You think of him as crazed?”

  He no longer struck me as pleased. A frown had imposed itself upon his mouth, and I saw a kind of boy’s pouting in his expression, as if I had failed him, and perhaps of a purpose. He worked at a pencil’s sharp point as if to perfect it, and of course he pressed too far and was required to begin again. He scraped rather than whittled, and the sound of the pocket knife’s blade against the pencil was a nervous scratching. I thought of damp dogs working with their claws against their ears.

  “I am sorry,” I said. “You know that I have only affection for you, and the best of hopes for your career. I do seek to comprehend. But, Sam, where is the truth of it, if one entry for September tenth is so different from that which follows soon after, but which is also labeled the tenth of September? Not, of course, that I know anything of authorship. Clearly, since you have thus done it, thus it is achieved. I apologize for my outburst. I am baffled and, when I am in that state, I become almost frightened—perhaps too aggressive, let us say, in my posing of questions, Sam.”

  His face was crimson, and I did not know whether with disappointment in my response, or anger at my myopia, or pleasure in my being all at sea.

  “And—may I ask you another question without risking our friendship?”

  “Never at risk,” he said.

  I turned a page and pointed, moving the notebook over to him.

  He read aloud: “ ‘He is careful not to display tenderness, most especially in regard to himself. Yet I view him as the most stung, the most wounded of men, a tattered spirit in need of much repair.’ ”

  I asked, “Would that be your summary of him? A tattered spirit?”

  “Of someone,” he said, smiling, then restoring the notebook to its place in his coat.

  “And those—forgive me—puzzling notations?”

  “Entries in a log, as one might find in the belongings of a sailor.”

  “A log! So he records the events of his voyage, you say.”

  “On an inner ocean, Billy.”

  “Just so,” I said.

  He laughed a quick hiccup of an unhappy laugh, then shut himself into silence, smiling without pleasure at his port, and then drinking it off.

  Yesterday morning, I dreamed them both and woke often, fearful each time that I would open my eyes to see M, face a blur behind the screening beard, and Sam, his face a banner of friendship, beside my bed, his notebook in hand, awaiting me. Each time I woke, I kept my eyes squeezed shut. Finally I slept through to the forenoon, although I was troubled with dreaming of the huge cylinder of the pistol, slowly and inevitably grinding around. The night had ended at Mrs. Hess’s near dawn, with the clientele asleep upstairs or departed for home. Delgado, in the pantry at the back, had set down Vichy water and Madeira and a small, very heavy round Dutch cheese. While two of the girls lounged and lolled—Rachel in bloomers, undervest, and bright green shoes; Tillie in her gown with the straps down along her arms—Jessie sat beside me, wrapped in her figured blue-and-white robe, with her golden fingers clasped on the table beside her drink. Delgado stood beside the long refectory table and shook his arm in its black broadcloth jacket; a gravity knife slid into his hand, and he shook it once and the sharp, stubby blade emerged. He reached for the cheese, sealed in red wax, and began to peel it like a mango the size of a cannonball. Tillie, who was Rachel’s lover, slowly ground her head with its thick, red hair up and back in the lap of Rachel, who sat, while Tillie sprawled, in a kind of deacon’s bench against the wall.

  Jessie said to Delgado, “Was it a busy night, then?”

  He kept the wax coming in a single strip. “A bit less than crowded. How was the great man’s dinner?”

  She clasped and unclasped her hands, then she shrugged.

  “Did he mind his manners?” Delgado asked.

  “He never had any to mind,” she said. “His idea of elegant dining is to hire a whore to chew his beefsteak and spit it into his mouth.”

  T
illie said, “Yum,” and turned her head to nibble at Rachel, who slapped her, but did not push her face away.

  “You’re lucky,” Delgado said, “if that’s all he requires. So I hear.”

  “So you know. And it was not all that he required. Could I have whiskey, do you think, instead of this ladies’ drink?”

  “Locked it all away, Jessie. Madeira’s not bad. This is a good one.”

  She nodded and drank.

  The pantry grew silent. I listened to the gas hiss behind its pink, bright globe. I listened to the scrape of Delgado’s knife between the rind of the cheese and the strip of red wax; it dropped, and I heard it strike the floor, though Delgado, for all his effort, seemed not to mind. He simply started another strip, and the cheese continued to appear. Tillie yawned and moved her head in Rachel’s lap.

  Jessie said, “I am not going to talk about the dinner, in case anyone is waiting.”

  No one spoke.

  I watched her compress her lips, cause her brow to go flat, her eyes to open wider. When her smooth, glowing features were composed, she turned to me. “I would, if you wanted me to.”

  I said, “I’d just as soon not.”

  She nodded. “I would have, too. Are we any further along in—”

  I put my finger to my ludicrous, artificial mouth and she closed her own. Delgado looked up. Rachel asked, “What are you two hatching?”