The Night Inspector

by Frederick Busch

  He read that night from his David Copperfield—“It is the story of a writer,” Sam whispered joyfully—which at first seemed persuasive when he spoke of a childhood visit to someplace called Yarmouth Sands, but then a sentimental notion of a sailor or shore-dwelling man spoke in an indecipherable accent and with overmuch servility about a person called Em’ly, whose importance to the story I discerned only with some difficulty. I could not help but compare this sailor to those created by M, who seemed to bear a greater dimension and a more philosophical heft.

  A person called Micawber, also part of the Copperfield story, was very entertaining, and Mr. Dickens came into his own as he chirped and twittered and then dropped his voice to moan like a walrus, all the while both telling about this Micawber fellow and, apparently, emulating him. As the audience laughed, Mr. Dickens himself laughed the harder, and went to greater extremes of vocal dexterity, and flashings of the eye, and winks and grimaces, to bind the audience to himself in a mutual affection that I found remarkable.

  At times, when the extremes of emotion and humor were unavailable to Mr. Dickens, and he was compelled to read out considerable lengths of narrative, for the sake of the listeners’ acquiring certain information, his voice lagged and he even mumbled, and a restiveness went over the spectators. “He ought to quicken the pace,” Sam told me with a tone conveying much experience. Embarrassed for the author, and for my friend beside me, and concerned for my investment, I swept my glass along the faces of those in attendance. There I saw Lizzie and, beside her, M, whom I had not seen since our journey up the river and, sorrowing, back down. He did not sit still. He rubbed at his sore eyes, then leaned to whisper at Lizzie, and then sat back, and then, soon enough, he pulled at his collar and straightened the coat of his simple black suit—no evening dress for him—and he made faces when Mr. Dickens did, though M’s were effected in neither emulation nor approval. At one point, as Mr. Dickens cried out something about a Poor Pilgrim, M shook his head and slumped, like a middle-aged boy, in his seat.

  There was a good deal more of Copperfield, with bodies drifting onto shore from a wreck, and M sat up straighter at that, and so did I. How not to recall the tuns as they spun in the contradictory pull of current and tide? How not to think of those children, and of Jessie? The newspapers called it “Massacre on the Hudson,” and it was laid by some at the feet of escaped convicts, and blamed by others on the Irish Rabbits gang from the Bandits’ Roost alleys, who were contesting with the remnants of an Africa gang for control of the waterfront. Sam muttered to himself. And then the applause came in as Mr. Dickens, behind his reading table, set down his book, poured water from his carafe—I saw through my telescope that his hands trembled—and he stood in the sounds of his auditors’ approval. How fortunate he was, I thought, to be reminded publicly of the esteem in which he was held and, in addition, to receive considerable payment; I knew precisely how much.

  Mr. Dickens announced then that in the spirit of the season just concluding, as the year swung round in its infancy, he would read from his A Christmas Carol.

  Marley, he pronounced in a sepulchral voice, was dead: to begin with. Sam grunted. I watched as M leaned back his head in the shadowed hall and opened his grinning mouth, and gulped the darkness into it, then slowly leaned forward to listen once more as Mr. Dickens told us that every cask in the wine merchant’s cellars, downstairs from Scrooge’s dwelling, appeared to have a separate peal of echoes of its own. Sam let his breath whistle out from in between his teeth. I saw them roll in the waters of the river, Jessie and Delgado and the little boys, then the casks that were sealed upon the contraband within, spinning, bobbing, drifting, turning in the dark waters upon which we rowed.

  I did not know this story of Mr. Scrooge, although Sam had insisted it was justly famous, but Scrooge was clearly indicted by it for his avarice and for the chilly manner in which he treated those who lectured him on charity and love. A ghost, of this Marley who at the beginning was dead, appeared to him in his rooms. I wished to applaud Scrooge’s bravery in suggesting to the apparition that it might be merely an undigested bit of beef, a fragment of an underdone potato, but that display of courage went unremarked by the audience, and so I held my peace. I savored, too, the moment when, the phantom unwinding the bandage that he wore around his head, his lower jaw dropped open to lie upon his breast. Once again, my fellow spectators did not celebrate those words. I leaned back, and I watched M as he affected to display the degree of his being unmoved by either the prose of the piece or its performance by the sometimes-grave and sometimes-grinning Mr. Dickens, who spoke his characters as if he brought his children to the front of the stage and introduced them, every one. Sam had spoken of his having to support, even now, all nine of them. I could not begin to imagine how the reception of this material, and the manner of its presentation, must have been galling to M, forgotten by this audience who once, I thought, had read with gratitude the words he wrote. For Sam, I knew, it was all a goad; he wished to emulate—to replace, I suspected—Mr. Dickens with his audience.

  At last the small child did not die, the hungry did not starve, the stony heart of Scrooge was said to laugh. A joke was made about spirits and abstinence, and it was always said of him that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. The audience cheered and cried out Bravo! and they clapped and clapped long after M, sitting beside his Lizzie in silence, had clasped his hands in his lap.

  Sam gently pounded his fist against the arm of his chair. He slowly shook his head while smiling wistfully. I knew that he yearned to write language so powerful as to cause a crowd of strangers to thank him with their applause for his efforts.

  But as for me, I could not believe that such a tattered spirit, even with his author’s fervently wishing it, might be so swiftly, so seamlessly repaired.

  CHAPTER 9

  WE HAD BECOME KNOWN, SEPARATELY BUT ALSO together, in the Five Points. We walked, one early morning in February, on Pearl Street, near Cross. Chun Ho was dressed in a coat I had bought her as a gift. It buttoned snugly at the neck and she could raise the collar to cover her ears. It was long and heavy, and I was content that she could ply her trade in the cold city protected from its winds, which howled down the streets, some days, as if they were canyons of ice. Pages of newspaper blew past us, and the dogs investigating mounds of household garbage steamed at the muzzle, as did the horses’ flanks before their heavy wagons in the street. A knife grinder worked the pedal of his wheel and the metal screeched as we passed him, Chun Ho moving her hands in and out of her pockets, enjoying the weight of wool and the luxury of warmth, I supposed, while I worked—it still was far from simple for me—to balance the bamboo pole, and its two heavy baskets filled with clothing and bed sheets, as we made our way.

  Two men came abreast of us, laboring fellows, one in an unsavory-looking suit worn over a knitted vest that seemed to afford him little warmth, the other in a coat, dyed green and looking like lichen on a tree, that I recognized as an officer’s greatcoat from the War. They stood to the side to permit us to pass, but I suspected that they wished to study us, and I was right. The man in the uniform coat was silent, but the other one sniggered as we went on our way.

  I stopped, and Chun Ho did as well. I wondered what they made of what they saw: a tea-colored woman with an oval, impassive face, and a man beside her whose face was a mask of another sort. In silence, these masks, then, which were turned toward them, permitted those who wore them to be regarded in the light of the bystanders’ curiosity and, quite probably, their scorn. As they stood and stared, the masks turned simultaneously to move off along the noisy, littered street, and to bob at last out of sight among the ragged and the hungry and forlorn of the Points.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Frederick Busch’s most recent best-selling book, Girls, was a New York Times Notable Book for 1997 and a Publishers Weekly 1997 Best Book. His sixth short-story collection, The Children in the Woods, was a finalist for the 1995 Pen/Fau
lkner Award. He has received the Pen/Malamud Award for achievement in short fiction, as well as an award for fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has won the National Jewish Book Award and has held Woodrow Wilson, National Endowment for the Arts, James Merrill, and Guggenheim fellowships. He has been acting director of the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. He is the Edgar Fairchild Professor of Literature at Colgate University, where he teaches creative writing and fiction and also teaches the Living Writers course. He and his wife, Judy, the parents of two grown sons, live in upstate New York.