Frederick Busch - The Night Inspector

I let my head sag further and, from behind, I felt her own head lie upon my neck and shoulder blades as her arm, around me and pressing at my own chest, lay still. She held me thus, and thus she held herself, as we sat in the diminishing steam of the bathwater. We did not have to see each other seeing the other one and so, in a sense, we were safe from ourselves and each other, we were suspended in the restless sounds of the working stove, in the slight stirring of the bathwater, and in the breathing rhythms we slowly composed in simultaneity; were you there, unseeing but attendant to the noises in the room, you might have concluded that only one person drew breath.

Abruptly, she shifted her weight, and I felt her leave. I slumped down under the water as far as I could to lie upon my back. Perhaps she would come and pour more upon me, I thought. But, instead, she came to the tub and it was herself she poured. As I felt her enter the tub, I felt her lie against me and along me. I drew my knees up, and she lay between them, her head near my jaw. I dared to open my eyes in the flickering light of the low-burnt candle, and I saw that her own eyes in her raised head were shut. Then she opened them and looked along my wounds and up my face.

She wept, and I did not know, nor do I now, whether her sorrow was for herself or for my face. I watched lines appear on her visage that never before had appeared to me, for her face had always been a kind of mask in itself, occasionally cracked by a smile or a tender appraisal at the eyes. Now, however, her emotions played and disappeared like shadows thrown against a lantern light. She looked wicked and full of appetite, and then playful, with hungers less dark, and then she was blank and unreadable, and then moist at the eyes with a kind of pity, and then she seemed wise, as I had seen her when one of her children had given her a humorous sort of pleasure. Her nostrils reflected her hunger again, and the weeping went away, banished by what drove her— “Strong flower,” she whispered — to stuff me into her as she moved up and down upon me in the soapy, warm water, and then clasped me to her with both her powerful arms around my waist as she moved us both, back and forth, up and down, water coursing over the edge of the tin tub and onto the tin plating at the floor.

I feared that we would wake her children. I feared that we would stop. We did neither. And then she permitted me to towel her delicate collarbones and sturdy, small chest and her breasts. Then I kneeled upon the slick, sudsy tin at the foot of the tub to rub her stomach and loins, to run the towel the length of her thigh and down to her ankles. She stood facing me then as I pulled her against me and dried her back and buttocks, cupping each and pulling it from her body to explore with the towel and my fingers her crack and cleft and what was cupped within. I stood and rubbed at her hair, tossing down the towel to feel her hair’s silkiness, and then I rubbed with my fingertips at her back again, and buttocks. She leaned against me, her arms at her sides, in a signal to me, I thought.

She took a blanket from a hook and wore it over her shoulders as she made a pot of tea.

“You look much,” she said.

“You, too, watch more than you speak.”

“You think I a whore kind of woman?”

“Did you come to the tub as a whore?”

Her face went absolutely impassive.

“No,” I said, “let me say it this way, please. Will you hear me? I did not think you came to me that way.”

“Whore,” she said.

“I did not think it. I thought — it was a gift. I’m sorry. It was an expression—”

“Confused man.”

“Man whose words are failing him, Chun Ho. It was a beautiful bath. You were beautiful water in the bath.”

Her sudden smile was pleased, and it more than flickered in her face.

“Flower and water. I water flower.”

“Yes, you did.”

“Not whore. Never whore. Only if children die for no food.”

“Never. I will purchase them food if they are hungry.”

“Chun Ho work.”

“Yes. Good. But only at laundry.”

“Sure.” And then she said, “Tell me American?”

“Tell you— Do you mean that you would like me to teach you? Instruct you? Chun Ho: Show you something?”

“Tell me. Ah, teach me. In-ruct me. Sure. ‘This is teapot.’ You say, ‘Ah! Teapot! American say’ ”—and here she mouthed broadly, as if to mimick a teacher of elocution—“ ‘teeee-pote.’ Tell me. Teach me. In-ah-ruct me.”

“Bless your soul. You want to speak English.”

She shook her head. “American.”

“Yes. English is American. It is termed American. Chun Ho, I understand. I understand. Yes. I will teach you Eng— I will teach you American. Words for things in America, that is to say. Am I correct?”

She said, “Cor-rect,” with great difficulty and great dignity, and then she poured us our tea. It was very smoky in odor, and its taste and effect were powerful; I felt it in the back of my head almost as if it were a brandy.

“Green tea,” she said, pushing the r into being with her tongue and her palate and reminding me, of course, of the square-faced, angry, compassionate woman who had nursed me in Washington, contending with my anger and my sorrow and my overmuch attention to my own pain. I looked about for the mask, intending of a sudden to don it again, when Chun Ho, who had seemed to be gazing elsewhere, but of course was looking inside me, said, “You will tell me about American? Teach. In-ah-ruct. In-struct.”

I said, “Yes.”

“And you.”

“Me?”

“Tell me.”

“I will tell you, yes. I will teach you. I promise it.”

“No,” she said, placing the porcelain cup beside the white candle and creating new shades of white and amber with the gold of wavering candlelight, the white of the candle itself, the white of the cups, and the white and amber, combined, of her skin. She pointed, and then with her small finger, which she lay upon my paler arm, she punctuated her wish. “Tell me — teach me —you.”

AND SO WE DREW TOGETHER, AT LAST, UPON THE DOCK between Hubert and Laight Streets, in the darkness of a late autumn night in New York. Lanterns at the Cunard Liverpool Steamship wharf in New Jersey ought to have been visible, but they were not. Nor were the lights of the inspector’s office, nor those, downriver, of the water police. The weather was shutting us in, and so we wished it to. The low, gray ceiling of the sky showed neither cloud nor star, only an absence of what the eye might fasten to, although I thought, as I tried to survey our preparations, that I had discerned, for only an instant, a brilliant golden light, above the darkness, that was the storm; now invisible, it seemed to construct itself by sucking upward the very air at which we gulped.

Sam, at the cargo boom, was to supervise the unloading of the ship upon which the children had been transported in tuns, some, I had been told, the size of a large man and some about half of that. When I tried to imagine the children asleep in the barrels, like cod in salt, I could not — or, rather, did not wish to. It must be attributable to me in some wise, I thought, if the children were injured. Did I not contribute to their misery as I sought to offer — I could think of no other word for it — tribute to Jessie’s desire to free them? Yet what might freedom be worth if a less than terrible price were affixed to it? I sounded to myself like Abe in the worst of his pufferies, and I left such thoughts behind as I sought the three wagons for which I had arranged. The children would be set upon them and covered with tarpaulins before Jessie directed the drivers to the places of refuge for which she had arranged. M would offer the documents I had acquired, and Sam — whom I could not deter from accompanying me — would record for private, not journalistic purposes, the evening’s events. Although I was puzzled at how he might write with his pencil stubs upon paper certain to be soaked by the gathering moisture that, at any instant, would become a storm’s sheeting rain.