The Night Inspector (14 page)

“He carried it as a talisman until the end of the War. But wars are nothing, in the end, but stories,” I said. “Who knows which of them is true? Who knows which details, likewise, of the wars themselves?”

“There is the great historical cement that holds the stories together,” M said. “It is the mucilage of the underground dead, do you not think? So many of them, Southern and Northern. The ghastly expense of life in a waste of— I was going to say ‘shame.’ Do you think it shameful, Bill?”

“Which ‘it’?”

“The dying. The killing. Drummer boys and generals, President Lincoln, the bakers and the cooks and the quartermasters.”

“I should like to hear from someone like yourself that the men still breathing, after Grant accepted the Confederate sword, were worthy of concern, much less such tears as you propose we shed.”

“You feel ill-served by such remembrance?”

“No. I share its emotions with you. As to how I feel, with regard to public concern, I am unaware of any to be registered. We are absorbed, as best we can be, into our populace. There are many such as I to be resented for reminding our brothers and sisters at large that such a war took place and that such men had the misfortune to survive it.”

“You are not resented!” the boy said, slapping the table. “You are reverenced.”

“It seems to me,” his father said, “that some of that populace has spoken.”

“I thank you one and all.”

“Such dry wit virtually squeaks,” Elizabeth said. “Perhaps you will allow my husband to moisten it.”

Her grave voice and darting, dark eyes, her ready wit, had me smiling. I gave the gruff male equivalent of a titter so that she might know my appreciation.

In fact, the fellow from Maine had been shot right through his folding tin cup, and he had died with lung blood bubbling on his lips and with the metal of the cup inside his chest.

M, I found, had been staring at my veil, as though to better see my thoughts. His small, weak, expressionless eyes could take on the appearance of prescience I associated with the Egyptian Sphinx, and I found him unsettling. He drank a good deal more of the bitter wine he had served, and we ate mutton that was bathed in something like horseradish and accompanied by very dry, hard greens. I was inspected as I ate by the man who had fallen from close to the sun. I was the object of speculations by the man who had made a book about a whaling voyage sound like the Holy Bible itself. And here he sat, a federal employee of small matter with a son determined to be killed in the Indian wars, and a wife who badgered him first, I felt, before he might badger her.

He nodded, as if he had been addressed, and he set down his forkful of meat with a violent gesture, as if the food offended him. Then he clapped his hands twice and smiled like a great cat at his son.

“Oh,” his wife said, as if about to warn me.

Her husband clapped his mysterious applause once more and said, very loudly, “I
like
this good man!”

“Yes, Pa,” Malcolm said. The boy sipped, as children are required to, from a goblet of water. His father drank down wine.

M said, “He brings into the rooms of our house, the mortgage of which is paid off, I might say, with my wife’s largesse of resource and spirit, a kind of
memento mori
. And even though we break bread and chew and chew and chew at mutton, we are fortunate to be reminded of what I have called the charge through the hauntedness.”

I saw that Elizabeth had hung her head and so had Malcolm. Evidently, they were accustomed to but not reconciled with such an apparent welling of emotion as this.

“We should be grateful,” M said, “and we should be
drinking
. I propose a toast.” He raised his glass, and so did they, then so did I. “To William Bartholomew, soldier, warrior, deliverer of bleak truths. To wit”—I tired of holding my glass aloft, particularly in my own name, and I brought it down; the others, in a strange obedience, held theirs in the air—“the churches are by and large occupied by scoundrels and cowards; the libraries are by and large occupied by frauds, villainies, and the language of spun sugar; the newspapers are filled, by and large, with canards, lies, and self-congratulation.

“But, by damn, I wrong you, Bill. For, as is obvious to a man of education, I have placed in your mouth, as it were, the words I wish to speak. I have, and I pray you forgive me,
written
you. You’re a damned
character
of mine, and for that I must apologize. Though not overly. For I have given you harsh truths to convey. And truth, though with some it makes a wholesome breakfast, proves to all a supper too hearty. Hearty food, taken late, gives bad dreams. Do you say, Lizzie? Mal? Have I heaped upon this good, this finest, fellow a burden of truth too heavy to bear?
Miss Ravenel’s Conversion
, by the undergarments of both Saints Peter and Paul! And Hawthorne in his grave and me in mine.”

He shook his head slowly back and forth as it drooped toward the table. Elizabeth excused herself, gestured to Malcolm, and they began to clear.

“May I help, ma’am?” I asked her. But she affected not to have heard.

Her husband had. He said, “But you
have
helped, good fellow. We have spoken together of whales and cabbages and kings. Of Dutchmen and their papers, of poor Poe buried and remembered, and other scriveners buried and forgot.” His voice had grown softer, and he spoke now as though he had a sore throat. “You know, Bill, I am not unaccustomed to the minstrations of Dr. Charles Eliot Norton himself. He has called me mad. Poor fellow! I am but weary. I might sleep.”

Malcolm, returning to his place, said, “My father cannot always manage his wine.”

The father’s reddened eyes grew wide. His chin came up as if the end of his beard were a gunsight. He squinted down his face at Mal. “And you, sir,” he told him, “seem to know too much about such management. Or, anyway, to profess too much acquaintance with it.”

Mal held his stare, and I was astonished to watch his large, pale face seem to swell, as if it were a flower that opened before me. The boy’s lips, of a sudden, seemed thicker, and his nostrils more flared. Even the bones beneath his white cheeks gave the impression of broadening. Lizzie stood before her place at the table, gripping her napkin as if it were fastened to the solidity to which she needed, for safety’s sake, to hold. Her sad, sweet features seemed the face of a woman about to faint. The glow of perspiration I saw on Malcolm’s upper lip I also saw on his mother’s. His smile became a sneer, and I worried that father and son might fall upon one another.

I could imagine the boy as he strode through an Indian encampment, shooting the sick old men and terrified women. I could see him firing a rifle from the seat of a lurching wagon in some Western province, picking off an Indian rider not because they fought each other, but because the man was passing on a horse and made for a difficult shot
placement and thus provided the boy with sport. And I saw him, of course, in Mrs. Hess’s parlor, too drunk to remember the fellow with the store-bought face, all but poisoned with the excess of his pleasures.

M’s red eyes narrowed, and he wiped at them as if the sight he had seen were too exhausting for the very tissue of his flesh. “I did not raise my son to be a lout. Nor to demonstrate my failures in fatherhood before a stranger at our board.”

“Sir,” Malcolm said, his face seeming to shrink.

“Whom do you address, boy?” his father whispered.

“Sir,” Malcolm said to me, “I am heartily sorry. And sir”—he had turned to his father—“I regret my impulsive words. I respect no man as you, sir.”

M’s eyelids were fluttering, and he seemed not to hear.

“None,” Malcolm said, as if he were dismissing a servant who proffered food.

And M lay his large head, as if it weighed fifty pounds and the muscles of his neck had given in, upon his cutlery, and he closed his eyes.

Again, Elizabeth said, “Oh.”

“I have stayed too long and exhausted him,” I said. I placed the mask beneath my arm and rose. “I brought brandy,” I said. “It might remain in the pocket of his coat.”

“He will doubtless find it,” she said. “You were good to sell us the gun.”

“It is a gift, ma’am. You will tell your husband the Colt is a gift of a former soldier and a grateful reader. Will you say that to him?”

“Exactly, I think you wish, as you have said it to me.”

I affected a little bow. It was a botch because the veil began to slide forward and I had to mash my hand, already burdened with my hat, upon the top of my head to keep the veil in place.

She said, “I have watched him, grinning like a great, pale cat, pat the trees in Madison Square and thank them for growing. I have heard him, on the other hand, look as if into stormy winds and say nothing for a
week at a time. He … ebbs and flows. With or without liquor, in the drinking of which he overindulges. His mother was a woman of appetites. His father was said to be a man of such swings of spirit, and I know for a fact it was an affliction of his brother. Sometimes I fear I see it in you, Mal. Oh, Mr. Bartholomew, it is as he said! We burden you. Forgive us.”

Mal stood behind his chair, staring at her with dark eyes in a white face. He might have wished her dead, for all the affection I saw in his features.

“I would serve you, ma’am,” I said, and I said it again at the door.

Someone, at any rate, would be served.

A little before dawn, when I finally slept, I dreamed a dream, and it wakened me. I dreamed, or I speculated upon, as I fell into sleep, or I was haunted by, the chambered drum of the Colt revolving. I could see it and, though it hung before me in this reverie, I could at the same time feel its weight in my hand. The weight was vast, but the drum turned smoothly, immensely, inevitably. It seemed to me that I felt the tremendous turning of the earth itself in the revolving of the drum.

She lived on the ground floor, and even her children helped, at dawn, to carry in the water she would use all day. They stored it in wooden barrels from pickled cucumbers and olives and whiskey I had seen her haul, as big around as she, from the alleys behind the merchants. From the steam above the tub, while Chun Ho poured more water in, as her stove roared and heated the room sufficiently to almost send me to sleep, I said, “The future of the nation is in railroads. I will, surely, invest more heavily. It would be useful to you and your children if I could invest some dollars on your behalf. And I would be pleased to extend you credit. May I do so?”

She had been looking at me. I could tell from the way she turned away as my gaze came up. Her clothing, which resembled a soldier’s
union suit, was soaked from steam and spilled water, and it clung to her child’s limbs and womanly torso. Now it was she, with her immobile face, whose eyes interrupted mine and sent them skittering off.

“The Union Pacific to the West, of course. Mr. Vanderbilt’s New York Central bringing trains across the Hudson. Any number of manufacturies of railroad cars, and steam boilers, and now our own American steel. Soon, Chun Ho, the island of Manhattan will boast an elevated railway from Battery Place up to Thirtieth Street on the western side—near Greenwich Street. Can you imagine? You can be drawn by steam, as I am here parboiled by it, virtually through the air above town. Would your children enjoy an aerial ride?”

She stood beside me, leaning away, looking away, to hand down a heavy bar of brown soap.

“Thank you,” I said. “Where are your children?”

As if exasperated by my mannerliness, she turned toward me her smooth, expressionless face. Her eyes fell, and I felt the fall, as if of cold rain, upon my unmasked face, and then my throat and chest and then the water that covered my lap.

“Children—mother. Mother of Chun Ho.”

“In this district? I mean: here? Near this house?”

She nodded once.

“Is your father here?”

She closed her eyes and I watched her control the composition of her face; it stayed as smooth as a painted picture. She shook her head.

“Your father is dead?”

She nodded once.

“How is it, do you think, that your husband and father did not survive this country, yet your mother and you, if she is like you, are tough as alleyway weeds?”

“Weeds?”

“Strong flowers.”

“Woman is strong flower. Yes. You are some of woman, maybe?”

“Because I survived? Yes, maybe I am. Though I am, as I think you have seen, mostly man.”

“Not see!”

“Oh, no?”

She giggled. She covered her mouth and recomposed herself. “Not see much.”

“You mean there’s not that much to see?”

She shook her head, then waved her palm at me, as if we were friends who played at teasing one another. “Plenty enough,” she said, moving her hands to her mouth, then walking toward the stove.

I closed my eyes and reached up to soap my neck. I felt her fingers take hold of the soap, and I sank back toward her. She poured achingly hot water over my shoulders and I keened.

“Not so strong flower?” she said.

“Strong enough, I hope.”

She scrubbed with a flannel cloth at my shoulders and, when I leaned forward, my back. I leaned against the tub again, waiting to see if she would come around and wash my chest. She did not.

“So may I invest a few dollars for you and the children? I predict no risk.”

“Chun Ho give own some money Gongsi Fang.”

“Who?”

“Oh! Take care of Chinese man, woman, baby. Many help us. Many is
fang
—many Chinese people, one bunch.”

“Group?”

“Group.”

“This
fang
helps people from China?”

“Sure. Rooms to live. Money. Funeral Chun Ho father. All the time. Group.”

I lay back again and closed my eyes. From behind me, she reached to scrub at the underside of my left arm, and then along the elbow and forearm, and then the palm and knuckles; she reached for my right arm and
did the same. The sound of the roaring stove drowned out the crashing of wheels, the shrieking of infants, the barking and howling of dogs—and I felt as a child while this child-sized woman with strong hands and powerful silences rubbed me clean.