Man in Profile

by Thomas Kunkel

  Throughout the first half of the seventies, Joseph and Therese tried to see their expanding family as often as possible—not too difficult in the case of Nora and John, who were only an hour away in New Jersey; more so with Elizabeth and Hal down in Georgia, though their (relative) proximity to Fairmont accommodated “piggyback” visits. At this professionally frustrating time in Mitchell’s life, his daughters and grandchildren were a great comfort to him. At the same time, his counsel and unstinting support would prove equally comforting to his daughters as they navigated the challenges of marriage and inescapable setbacks of child-rearing. When Nora and John hit a difficult patch early in their relationship, for instance, Mitchell tried to be as available to them as possible without being judgmental. “He had strong feelings about it all, of course, and everything that hurt us, hurt him,” Nora wrote. “When he gave advice he gave it in the least obtrusive way. Some of the best he ever gave me (after I was harrumphing and haranguing about some political or social episode) was, ‘Honey, you don’t have to have an opinion about everything.’ ”

  On the other hand, to a writer, grandchildren were a tempting diversion, if the best kind. As Mitchell told Shawn, all sorts of things seemed to be conspiring now to keep him from his typewriter—and Mitchell, frankly, allowed them to do just that.

  Some of the interruptions he could do nothing about, like the slow decline and death of his father. Others appeared unexpectedly. In late 1974, for instance, he was appointed to the advisory council of the South Street Seaport Museum. The museum was established in 1967 near the Fulton Market site, along the East River. Its purpose was to preserve the historic buildings there, threatened at the time by inattention and development, and to serve as an interactive educational facility by reproducing life along the waterfront during the bustling period of the mid-nineteenth century. Joe Cantalupo was one of the museum’s founders and biggest advocates.

  The appointment delighted Mitchell. It brought him full circle to his early days in the city when he discovered the Fulton Fish Market and the characters who would populate his Mr. Flood stories. At a time when New York was in thrall to the wrecking ball, here was an enterprise trying to save and celebrate an important part of its past. Almost from the museum’s inception, Mitchell had done some volunteer work there; no doubt encouraged by Cantalupo, he was already a member of the project’s Local History Committee, which was researching the history of the seaport and building a special collection for scholars and other interested parties—work that dovetailed nicely with Mitchell’s own reporting.

  At first his involvement in the advisory council was strictly in the preservation aspect. In time, though, he came to “believe wholeheartedly in the entire program of the seaport,” Mitchell wrote upon his appointment. “I believe that the things we are doing down there, as foolish as some of them may seem to be at first glance, are beginning to have an effect for the good on the way many citizens feel about the city and about their links to the city…and I believe that this is of enormous importance to the future of the city. If I remember Gibbon correctly, the healthy growth as well as the decline and fall of great empires and great cities are directly related to just such matters.” Though Mitchell would become decidedly less enthusiastic about the eventual commercialization and “malling” of the South Street Seaport area in general, he would stay connected to the Seaport Museum for the rest of his life.

  Given his growing venerability as a New York “elder,” Mitchell would continue to be approached about such worthwhile endeavors—for instance, the essay on his favorite saloon, when someone had the idea to get a “McSorley’s Day” proclaimed in New York for its one hundred twenty-fifth anniversary, in February of 1979. Though apparently not written for publication, the essay, at fifteen hundred words, was one of the more substantial things Mitchell had actually written in a while. The undertaking also made him self-consciously aware of one ironic change: Largely because he had plucked the onetime neighborhood bar from obscurity, it now had a kind of international cachet. Stubbornly disdaining fashion, McSorley’s had become…well, fashionable. As Mitchell wrote:

  In 1970, James Cameron, the veteran English foreign correspondent, did a survey of the world’s most famous bars for the Sunday Magazine of the London Times, and he put McSorley’s high up on the list, along with such places as the downstairs bar at the Ritz Hotel in London, the Crillon Bar in Paris, Harry’s Bar in Venice, the Excelsior Bar in Rome, the Regina Bar in Munich, and the Cosmopolitan Bar in Cairo. The owners of McSorley’s and its bartenders have never been able to make up their minds how they feel about this sort of thing—whether, that is, they would prefer the place to be obscure and peaceful or famous and jumping. “Some nights there’s only a dozen or so old-timers in McSorley’s and they sit against the walls and read newspapers and doze and watch the stove get red hot, and I like it in here on those nights,” one of the bartenders once said, “but I have to admit that I also like it on nights when it seems that every ale drinker in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut and his brother had decided to drop into McSorley’s for a couple of mugs of ale and all of a sudden there’s standing room only and not much of that and we have to send a pot-boy to stand in the door and block the way and keep repeating over and over that nobody outside can come in until somebody inside goes out.

  —

  Though the death of his father still left Mitchell feeling bereft, in another sense it was a release. For the first time he really could imagine himself not just parachuting in and out of North Carolina but actually living much of his life there. Indeed, Fairmont became yet another impediment between Mitchell and his writing during this period, as he took on a more active role in the family business. His brother Jack had assumed the responsibilities A.N. once handled, and he looked out for his older brother’s financial interests. But Joseph’s personal involvement was keener than ever. He consulted on what stands to timber out from the large swaths of the farm that were forested, as well as on how best to reforest those same areas. Ditches had to be dug and kept clear for proper drainage and irrigation. Innumerable fire lanes were cut. Then there was the planting side of the operation. With the declining demand for cotton and with tobacco being notoriously hard on soil, the family experimented with year-round rotations, growing winter wheat and, in the spring, corn and soybeans. Mitchell threw himself into all this activity with such enthusiasm that one of his sisters took to teasing him, “Why don’t you give up farming and take up writing?”

  On the farm, Mitchell was in his element in a way that was no longer true in New York. Like many children of the land, he had a visceral connection to property and it could be rekindled by the simplest task, be it clearing brush or slathering skinned trees with gummy black paint to inhibit insects. Mitchell readily rediscovered the joy of his childhood here—living in the past, but in the best sense—and it was a place where he could channel his energies into things that were about growth, not decline. He confided to people that he and Therese were looking forward to the day—not far off now—when they could live half the year in New York and half in Fairmont. Mitchell cautiously allowed himself to dream.

  Credit 14.4

  Mitchell and daughter Nora inspect a family warehouse in Fairmont.

  Then, late in the evening of April 3, 1979, Therese suffered a stroke in their Greenwich Village apartment. Mitchell was also home and got an ambulance there quickly, but Therese suffered considerable loss of movement on her left side. After a month in the hospital and several additional months of rehabilitative therapy, she would largely recover her mobility, though she walked with a cane and had some slurring of speech. In an effort to avoid a recurrence, doctors also operated to clear fatty deposits from her carotid arteries.

  Just as Therese’s life was returning to some semblance of normalcy, it took an even more dire turn. In January of 1980, she began to experience severe pains accompanied by bleeding. Several weeks of increasingly targeted tests finally resulted in a diagnosis of renal cancer. Her lef
t kidney was removed, but in so doing the surgeons saw that the cancer had metastasized to other organs, including the lungs. Further surgery was deemed pointless.

  Over the next months, as Therese steadily weakened, her husband was her primary caregiver. He tended to her every need in the apartment, monitored her pain medication, scheduled her doctor’s appointments, and got her there and back. Eventually he would carry her from one room to another when it was necessary. As this essentially became Mitchell’s full-time job, all other activity—in New York or North Carolina—was suspended indefinitely.

  For an older generation in particular, cancer was considered such a death sentence that it was spoken of in whispers, or code, if at all. Mitchell had some firsthand experience with the affliction. By this time one of his sisters had died of cancer, and another had been diagnosed with it. He himself had had an earlier episode of (benign) melanoma, and Mitchell would always harbor a low dread that a graver cancer would eventually catch up with him. In any case, at a time when a doctor’s complicity still made it possible for a husband to do such things, Mitchell withheld Therese’s true condition from her. To tell her, he felt, would deprive his wife of hope and thus undermine her will to persevere. Instead, he tried to rally her. “I’d be telling her it was going to get better, it was going to get better. Trying to encourage her, you know,” Mitchell would remember near the end of his own life. “And then I guess I got to believing it myself.” According to a nephew, David Crowley—the son of Therese’s only sibling, Maude—Therese at this time “sounded woozy [on the telephone] and told me she didn’t understand what was wrong with her.”

  With great effort, Mitchell arranged for his wife, by that point in a wheelchair, to fly up to Marblehead, Massachusetts, that June to visit Maude. Therese enjoyed the oceanside setting, and she had come here often over the years. Now she stayed for three weeks. Halfway through, she sent Mitchell a postcard saying that she and her sister were going to a seafood restaurant in nearby Salem that night for dinner and that she was looking forward to gaining back some weight. She missed him, she added, and wrote in Norwegian, “I love you, my little parrot.” Therese had used such pet phrases when they were dating and early in their marriage, but as Joseph read the card he realized that she hadn’t done so in years. “When she was in Marblehead she still believed without any doubts (except maybe in the middle of the night) that any day she would start regaining her strength and that after a while everything would be all right again,” Mitchell would recall. “This card,” he said, “broke my heart.”

  Credit 14.5

  Joseph and Therese on the porch in Fairmont, which in time became as much her home as his.

  Of course, Therese wasn’t going to get better, as Mitchell knew—and Therese almost certainly suspected. The family’s agreed-upon fiction was that she was dealing primarily with a heart condition; all the while the cancer was doing its inexorable work. Early in July, with Therese rapidly reaching a point where she wouldn’t be able to travel at all, the Mitchells flew to Fairmont so that Therese could spend her remaining time there, surrounded by extended family and the tranquillity she loved as much as her husband did. Mitchell set her up in the bedroom that had been empty since A.N.’s death four years earlier. There he read to her for hours on end, particularly from a recently published biography of Liebling. It diverted Therese with many memories, both pleasant and piquant. They spoke of their return to New York when she improved.

  But it was in Fairmont that she died, on October 22, 1980. Therese, who for forty-nine years had been such a perfect philosophical match and emotional counterbalance to her husband, quietly slipped away from him. She was seventy years old.

  At some point during his wife’s illness, Mitchell had made a note to himself, apparently when contemplating her epitaph: “She had a loving heart. It saddened her to see anyone in trouble. She wanted everything good for everybody.”

  The depth of this final loss to Mitchell, after their half century of shared life and love, was profound. Therese had brought spontaneity to his orderly compulsion. Her sunny disposition helped offset his bouts of depression. When he railed about how the “goddamned sons of bitches” were ruining pretty much everything there was to ruin, her teasing neutralized his ire. Now that emotional ballast was gone; he was seventy-two years old, and a widower. A week after the funeral, Mitchell’s daughter Elizabeth put him on a plane back to New York. “One of my most haunting memories is of him walking away from me at the Fayetteville airport,” she recalled, “on his way back to the apartment, alone.”

  CHAPTER 15

  A GHOST IN PLAIN VIEW

  In my time, I have known quite a few of the worlds and the worlds within worlds of which New York City is made up, such as the world of the newspapers, the world of the criminal courts, the world of the museums, the world of the racetracks, the world of the tugboat fleets, the world of the old bookstores, the world of the old left-behind churches down in the financial district, the world of the old Irish saloons, the world of the old Staten Island oyster ports, the world of the party-boat piers at Sheepshead Bay, and the worlds of the city’s two great botanical gardens, the Botanical one in the Bronx and the Botanic one in Brooklyn. As a reporter and as a curiosity seeker and as an architecture buff and as a Sunday walker and later on as a member of committees in a variety of Save-this and Save-that and Friends-of-this and Friends-of-that organizations and eventually as one of the commissioners in the Landmarks Preservation Commission, I have known some of these worlds from the inside. Even so, I have never really felt altogether at home in any of them. And I have always felt at home in Fulton Fish Market.

  —From Joseph Mitchell’s unfinished memoir

  —

  Despite the embrace of Mitchell’s family, the aftermath of Therese’s death was impossibly dark and difficult for him. For Nora this was symbolized in heartbreaking fashion by her mother’s photographic negatives. Years before, as Therese had stopped taking photographs, she had put the negatives into boxes and squirreled them away in various nooks of their apartment that her husband hadn’t already filled with his esoteric collections. Once in a while Nora and Elizabeth would ask to see them, but Mitchell demurred. “After she died…my father was so bereft that he couldn’t bear to look at anything that reminded him of their early life together,” Nora said, “and we eventually stopped asking to see them.”

  Mitchell sought solace where he could. He talked informally about his grief to a psychologist whom he knew as a fellow parishioner at Grace Church in New York. Grace was a historic Episcopal church located a few blocks from his home in the Village—and for good measure, a spectacular example of French Gothic Revival architecture. Mitchell began regularly attending services sometime in the mid- to late seventies. Though never actually Episcopalian, he would spend six years as a vestryman there, which is to say he was one of the parishioners tasked with helping to oversee the church’s administration. Colleague Brendan Gill recalled of Mitchell’s membership at Grace that he held some “unease as a native of his Baptist and Presbyterian Low Country of North Carolina and finding himself in Episcopalian precincts. Joe complained gently that the Episcopals tended to go pretty damned easy on hellfire.”

  As he’d aged, and as he’d endured the mounting personal losses, Mitchell—at heart always a spiritual pilgrim—had resumed a more formal faith life. Then again, in all his years prowling the city he had made a special point of acquainting himself with services of almost every imaginable persuasion—Muslim, Catholic, Lutheran, Jewish, Greek Orthodox, Ukrainian Orthodox, Dutch Reformed. This ecclesiastical adventuring touched his passions for both architecture and anthropology. And churches revealed much of the city’s character. This truth is evident in material he had written several years prior, in the opening chapter of his autobiography—much of which pivots around the churches of New York:

  I am not an Episcopalian…but I sometimes go to Holy Communion in an Episcopal Church. I particularly like to go to communion in one of the be
autiful old Episcopal churches downtown in the financial district or a little farther up, in Greenwich Village or on its outskirts—Trinity or St. Paul’s or Grace or Ascension or St. Mark’s or St. Luke’s. And I especially like to go to one of these churches on a sunny Sunday morning in midsummer when the streets in the neighborhood are practically deserted and everything is peaceful and serene and far more birds than on weekdays it seems are moving around in the trees and bushes and ivy in the churchyard and the stained glass is blazing and the doors have been set ajar and the lower windows have been raised a little and somewhere or other an electric fan is whirring and prayer books and hymnals when opened in the warm air release the vinegary pungence of old books that have been handled a lot and only a sprinkling of people are present, a sprinkling of old reliables, among whom are always a few bony, stiff-backed, self-assured old women with Old New York sticking out all over them.

  Comforting as he found such sacred spaces, Mitchell without Therese was an unsettled man whose spirits continued to ebb. Examples of despondence and a deepening general depression abound throughout this period. In various notes in his journals, Mitchell talks about being suspended in “worlds within worlds”: “The city rooms of three newspapers, the World, the Herald Tribune, the World-Telegram, were worlds within worlds. Even smaller worlds: the match-game players from the HT at Bleeck’s, the early-lunch crowd from the W-T at Nick’s Bar and Grill (those who went to work at 6 or 7 or 8 and were ready for lunch at 11). The regulars at McSorley’s, the regulars in almost any saloon. Of the many who once inhabited some of these worlds within worlds, I am the only one left.” Mitchell began to meet regularly with other former staffers of the defunct Herald Tribune; they gathered to reminisce and provide mutual support. Mitchell enjoyed the klatches well enough, but he found they also provoked a strong melancholy, reminding him of the litany of old pals no longer around to reminisce with.