The Night Inspector (24 page)
The shadows at the end of their room moved and, coming first into the mirror and then into my view, I saw a black woman wearing what appeared to be leather underpants from which a long white object protruded, a carved kind of penis, I saw. As the black child ministered to the white man, the black woman seized her and spread her legs from behind. The child labored at the man, but drew her legs beneath her so that she might be mounted as she worked. The black woman seemed about to enter her, and I could look no further. M stepped to the aperture and watched for a few seconds, then stepped back in revulsion.
“I have been with dusky women in the Marquesas,” he whispered. His sibilants hissed and coiled in the darkened room in that house of such darkness. “I have known, you could say, some dusky women. I have seen my share of sights, but never such a sight as that. It calls down fire from the heavens. No god could exist who would permit those children—”
Adam walked to the door and leaned his head against the jamb.
“We might leave,” I said, “if you have seen enough.”
And downstairs, on the dark and momentarily silent street, he said, “I must away. Lizzie will worry. And it was a long day of scampering through vessels even before this Dantean excursion was begun. Now, Mr. Mordecai.”
“Sir.” And Sam stood to attention as I had seen him do in the War.
“You and I have bones to pick. You have invaded my life, and my dear Mal’s death, to write down your version of each.”
“Sir.”
“We may speak further on it. We may not. Mal would forgive you, for he was a fond and trusting child who never gave a fellow creature a difficult
moment, and who bore no grudge. He’d have told you, ‘God bless you, Mr. Mordecai.’ ”
Sam’s head hung, and I could see no face, only the twisty, springy dark hair.
“So I tell you, on my dear boy’s behalf, and for myself as well, in that spirit of forgiveness that transcends dying, ‘God bless you, Mr. Mordecai.’ We’ll be friends.”
He put out his broad hand and Sam reached for it with both of his as if he were drowning and he knew he’d be pulled up.
“Billy,” M said. “I will speak with you further. I salute your gallant cause.”
On the edge of the Loin of New York, then, and in the darkness pierced by the lanterns of cabriolets, and by the flicker of street lamps, M walked toward East Twenty-sixth Street while Adam lingered like a man at the scene of a railroad accident who has seen the bodies carted off but who is locked into place by emotions, not practical need, staring dully at the twisted metal and the bits of bloody cloth.
I put money in his hand and he let it fall. I retrieved it, and I placed it in his hand again.
“You have done me a service,” I said.
“What did I sell you?”
“Energy. Expertise. Safety, perhaps. You were my courier—my guide.”
“I showed you a look at bad behavior and sorrow. Like it was minstrels kicking and strumming just for you.”
Sam slowly pulled his notebook out and opened it, then turned his back toward us and started to write.
Adam didn’t notice. He said, “I beg your pardon.” He held my hand and opened it out and deposited the money therein, then closed my fingers on it. “Excuse me,” he said. It was like being touched with chilly wood. Then he said, “Mist Bartelmy, good night. If you are in trouble, you can ax for me. But I don’t want to do this anymore.”
“I will. And you won’t. I thank you, Adam, and I wish you Godspeed.”
Sam had turned to watch us, and he was drawn so tall in observation, I thought he might throw a military salute, but he inclined his head and waved. Adam did not respond. He walked east, back into the Loin, and he disappeared into one of its alleys, and was gone.
“I would gargle with a bottle of something flame-y,” Sam said.
“Flame-y? Indeed! You
are
inventive, Sam.”
“I’ll show you some of my notes. It’s been a remarkable night.”
“No need for the notes, though I thank you. After all, I was there. What can you have written down that I didn’t witness with my own eyes?”
He smiled in his fondness, and then he shook his head. He put his notebook in his inside breast pocket. He said, “Then let’s go someplace where all the whores are career officers and all the customers enlisted men. And where children are neither dead by suicide nor butt-shagged with scrimshaw.”
“Was it
really
scrimshaw, Sam?”
He made a face of impish wisdom, and he tapped at his coat, over the place where the notebook lay. Then, as if he were the man of New York, and I the New England cousin, he led us out of the Loin, and east and south, and he bought us glasses of port in the saloon bar of the Astor, where, in the rosiness of its lamps and on the buttoned plush of our banquette, beneath a murky painting of a fox in flight from what I suppose were meant to be hounds but which looked to me like Shetland ponies gone carnivorous, Sam finished off a note and pushed the notebook over to me. Its cover was a heavy black leather binding, and the shiny pages sewn into it, five inches or so high, were ruled in black, with gold-tipped edges.
His handwriting ran across the page, leaning forward like a boy in flight, sprawling almost flat at times, as if the boy had fallen. I could sense the racing of his hand, as if it sought to keep pace with his scoutings-out
and insights. How athletic, it seemed to me, of a sudden, must be the mind of such a willing and nimble observer.
I turned back a few sheets, as though searching for a single entry in particular, because I thought it would please him to see such concern. I already knew, from M, with what tender feelings an author might proffer his work. Sam had offered me his account of our night in the dark nation so alien, yet so much our own, but my fingers and my eyes, as if they were directed there, lighted upon the terrible dates when Malcolm, so late and so adrift, had returned to East Twenty-sixth Street as if in search of True North.
T
UESDAY
, S
EPT
10: Boy returned at 3 of the morning—This could therefore count for Wednesday, the 11th—So soon do the actualities dwindle and the uncertainties predominate—A child as sweet as any I knew, who gave us joy and little worry, save for his welfare—Ghastly his welfare now, and ghastly to outlive your son!—So he returned at 3 of the morning, I asleep and Lizzie to the door, and she admitted him and of course did—must needs—reproach him for his inconsideration, for his breaking of his curfew and his vow—No scent nor display of the effects of liquor, swears his mother my wife who nearly departed the house in spite of
her
vow, but that’s for another time or never—It cannot matter now—And so she did not scold, but chided him, and so he went to bed, having kissed her, she claims—Why should he not have? For he was the kindest of boys—And there’s Fanny, in the morning, sent upstairs to waken him while I, at the table, smoked a pipe before work—Nothing but his voice, a single word, the child reports: He said, “Yes”—And in a life of everlasting No, I shall live, now, with his Yes—I can hear it in the inner ear—And so the father assembles the crew and gives the working orders for the day: the boy to sleep, then late into work at the Great
Western Marine, and surely to be scolded (if not fired!) by Lathers, and where shall we find any other source of the $200 per annum?—Discipline’s first, I tell them, and they make as if to obey—From the girls, of course, this intelligence, that Lizzie is up the stairs and down every 30 minutes and less, knocking at his door—No answer—No answer—Is this not the cry of man since Christ cried out to his father and received No Answer, and the weight of his body at the nails on which his cartilage and veins were hung?—No answer—and the breaking down of the door at night—soreness in the shoulder and hip from the collision with immovable wood and soreness in the soul from the sight with which it collided too—The manchild like a baby, curled about his hand and the pistol it held, curled about his wound as now I must curl in my inmost self about the sight I forever carry—And the boy did not drink liquor nor visit prostitutes nor engage in the vices of other boys his age—He did twirl the pistol, we are told—In the office and the street and at the luncheon place they frequented, he did twirl the pistol as if he were a desperado crossing into Mexico—And she had decided, she said, that she would do her duty as a wife and stay with me—She had done her duty before, and she would do it now—It did him no good, she insists, that I was gruff with him, or belittled his engagement in the Guard—Men on ships are cruel with one another—That is the world of men—That is the military world, and he had better be accustomed, I said, after another seizure of snuffling and sulking and her taking his side—Fanny weeping and Lizzie and Stanny with his great, staring eyes—I on the river, slowly spitting my spit into the foam of the green, filthy water at the wharf, foam like slaver of mad dog—Kneeling upon the lowest step of the wharf and dipping into the water and tasting it and carrying all day the bitterness
of it—Bitter is it to be poor and bitter to be reviled, and Oh bitter are these waters of commerce and death, for the bodies of the drowned children do sprawl and swirl at the bottom—Dead animals cast up by the water, and sometimes a desperate woman in her suicide, but never are the children returned by the river and as for the ocean it is only in books that the tiny pip of humanity returns—
W
EDNESDAY
, S
EPT
11: For a man to be accused in his own home of madness is madness redoubled and cruelty heaped upon cruelty—Is it not enough? Is it not enough, I said—I shrieked it, bellowed it, declaimed it in thunder—Is it not enough that a man be exiled from his profession, must he be exiled from his family too?—Lizzie, sitting upon her bed, weeping for an hour into the most absurdly small handkerchief—Live with your father, by all means, for it is with his money that we have lived and with yours we have purchased this house and with his smile of unmeant affection he may send you abroad as he has sent me—I have seen the Village of Lepers built upon a dung heap and I will be the leper, squatting on ordure, while you hasten to your father’s house—You did not berate him, you say, and so he enters and you embrace in a sticky celebration of his abstemiousness and your benefaction, and up he goes, and off, and then to kill himself with a noisy gun while all the day long you hover near his door and yet do not hear the pistol’s report.
T
UESDAY
, S
EPT
10 & W
EDNESDAY
, S
EPT
11: Must it, then, have been the gruffness of the father?—How else to account for a boy who stays out until dawn and is reported to have returned with no liquor upon his breath—The mother, unlatching the door for him, not having uttered any but welcoming
words and, naturally, the mildest of reprovals—“Down, dog, and kennel!” I’d have told him at the door—Must it not have been the wicked father in his old, maritime ways, who behaved toward his boy as if the boy had been a boy—Who else but a boy, a man must wonder, could sleep so many hours of the day—It was the staying up late, certainly, and yet even of a weekend day, say Sunday, spent at home, most of it was spent in bed—But might he not have spun the pistol like someone in a Wild West magazine, instead of sleeping the days away?—Asleep or playing with his pistol, he behaved like a boy and, like a boy, needed the discipline administered by men—I had warned him too severely about his character and habits, according to his mother, my devoted wife—No sane man speaks such treason to himself without he makes a mask from behind which to say his piece and beg for peace—Sane madness—And here the man sits and writes and says what he must or what he may, while his son sleeps and wakes, sleeps and wakes, and then, waking finally, forever sleeps—The night inspector at his occupation—Something further might come of this—
T
UESDAY
, S
EPT
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—
W
EDNESDAY
, S
EPT
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—
W
EDNESDAY
, S
EPT
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—
T
UESDAY
, S
EPT
10: The boy returns—It is
Lizzie
who receives him—Their exchange—Dulcet tones, assuredly—And off to bed—
W
EDNESDAY
, S
EPT
11: And nothing of the money needed and the money spent?—And no recriminations—Loving kiss from child to mother, and to bed—
T
UESDAY
, S
EPT
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—
W
EDNESDAY
, S
EPT
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—
T
UESDAY
, S
EPT
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—
W
EDNESDAY
, S
EPT
11: Child, it is The Law compels and mangles
me
—Even Jehovah might lament—
T
UESDAY
, S
EPT
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?