The Night Inspector (38 page)
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.
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/Faulkner 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.