Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics)

by Joseph Mitchell

  Bill was big and thick-shouldered, but he did not look strong; he had a shambling walk and a haggard face and always appeared to be convalescing from something. He wore rusty-black suits and black bow ties; his shirts, however, were surprisingly fancy – they were silk, with candy stripes. He was nearsighted, the saloon was always dimly lit, and his most rigid conviction was that drink should not be sold to minors; consequently he would sometimes peer across the bar at a small-sized adult and say, ‘Won’t sell you nothing, bud. Get along home, where you belong.’ Once he stared for a long time at a corner of the saloon and suddenly shouted, ‘Take your foot off that table!’ Evidently he had been staring at a shadow; no one was sitting in the corner. Bill was tyrannical. Reading a newspaper, he would completely disregard a line of customers waiting to be served. If a man became impatient and demanded a drink, Bill would look up angrily and shout obscene remarks at him in a high, nasal voice. Such treatment did not annoy customers but made them snicker; they thought he was funny. In fact, despite Bill’s bad disposition, many customers were fond of him. They had known him since they were young men together and had grown accustomed to his quirks. They even took a wry sort of pride in him, and when they said he was the gloomiest, or the stingiest, man in the Western Hemisphere there was boastfulness in their voices; the more eccentric he became, the more they respected him. Sometimes, for the benefit of a newcomer, one of these customers would show Bill off, shouting, ‘Hey, Bill, lend me fifty dollars!’ or ‘Hey, Bill, there ain’t no pockets in a shroud!’ Such remarks usually provoked an outburst of gamy epithets. Then the customer would turn proudly to the newcomer and say, ‘See?’ When prohibition came, Bill simply disregarded it. He ran wide open. He did not have a peephole door, nor did he pay protection, but McSorley’s was never raided; the fact that it was patronized by a number of Tammany politicians and minor police officials probably gave it immunity.

  Bill never had a fixed closing hour but locked up as soon as he began to feel sleepy, which was usually around ten o’clock. Just before closing he would summon everybody to the bar and buy a round. This had been his father’s custom and he faithfully carried it on, even though it seemed to hurt him to do so. If the customers were slow about finishing the final drink, he would cough fretfully once or twice, then drum on the bar with both fists and say, ‘Now, see here, gents! I’m under no obligoddamnation to stand here all night while you hold on to them drinks.’ Whenever Bill completely lost his temper he would jump up and down and moan piteously. One night in the winter of 1924 a feminist from Greenwich Village put on trousers, a man’s topcoat, and a cap, stuck a cigar in her mouth, and entered McSorley’s. She bought an ale, drank it, removed her cap, and shook her long hair down on her shoulders. Then she called Bill a male chauvinist, yelled something about the equality of the sexes, and ran out. When Bill realized he had sold a drink to a woman, he let out a cross between a moan and a bellow and began to jump up and down. ‘She was a woman!’ he yelled. ‘She was a goddamn woman!’

  Bill was deaf, or pretended to be; even so, ordinary noises seemed to bother him unduly. The method he devised to keep the saloon tranquil was characteristic of him. He bought a fire-alarm gong similar to those used in schools and factories and screwed it to the seven-foot-tall icebox behind the bar. If someone started a song, or if the old men sitting around the stove began to yell at each other, he would shuffle over to the gong and give the rope a series of savage jerks. The gong is there yet and is customarily sounded at a quarter to midnight as a warning that closing time is imminent; the customers grab their ears when it goes off. Bill was consistent in his aversion to noise; he didn’t even like the sound of his own voice. He was able to go for days without speaking, answering all questions with a snort or a grunt. A man who drank in McSorley’s steadily for sixteen years once said that in that time Bill spoke exactly four intelligible words to him. They were ‘Curiosity killed the cat.’ The man had politely asked Bill to tell him the history of a pair of rusty convict shackles on the wall. He learned later that a customer who had fought in the Civil War had brought them back from a Confederate prison in Andersonville, Georgia, and had given them to Old John as a souvenir.

  Bill would sometimes take an inexplicable liking to a customer. Around 1911 a number of painters began hanging out in McSorley’s. Among them were John Sloan, George Luks, Glenn O. Coleman, and Stuart Davis. They were all good painters, they didn’t put on airs, and the workingmen in the saloon accepted them as equals. One night, Hippolyte Havel, the anarchist, came in with the painters. Havel was a long-haired, myopic, gentle-mannered Czech whose speeches often got him in trouble with the police. Even Bill was curious about him. ‘What’s that crazy-looking fellow do for a living?’ he asked one of the painters. Playing safe, the painter said Havel was a politician, more or less. Havel liked the place and became a steady customer. Most nights after making a fiery speech in Union Square, he would hurry down to McSorley’s. To the amazement of the old-timers, a strong friendship grew up between him and Bill, who was a Tammany Democrat and an utter reactionary; no one was ever able to figure out the basis of the friendship. Bill called the anarchist Hippo and would let him have credit up to two dollars; other customers were not allowed to charge so much as a nickel cigar. Bill had an extremely vague idea about Havel’s politics. Charles Francis Murphy, the Tammany boss, occasionally dropped in, and once Bill told Havel he was going to speak a good word to the boss for him. ‘Maybe he’ll put you in line for something,’ Bill said. The anarchist, who thought no man was as foul as a Tammany boss, smiled and thanked him. A police captain once took it upon himself to warn Bill against Havel. ‘You better keep your eyes on that long-haired nut,’ he said. ‘Why?’ asked Bill. The question annoyed the police captain. ‘Hell fire, man,’ he said, ‘Havel’s an anarchist! He’s in favor of blowing up every bank in the country.’ ‘So am I,’ said Bill. Bill’s friendship for Havel was extraordinary in every way. As a rule, he reserved his kindness for cats. He owned as many as eighteen at once and they had the run of the saloon. He fed them on bull livers put through a sausage grinder and they became enormous. When it came time to feed them, he would leave the bar, no matter how brisk business was, and bang on the bottom of a tin pan; the fat cats would come loping up, like leopards, from all corners of the saloon.

  Bill had been married but was childless, and he used to say, ‘When I go, this place goes with me.’ In March, 1936, however, he changed his mind – why, no one knows – and, to the surprise of the veteran customers, sold both saloon and tenement to Daniel O’Connell, an old policeman, who, since 1900, had spent most of his leisure at a table in the back room. O’Connell retired from the Department two days before he purchased the saloon. He was the kind of man of whom people say, ‘If he can’t speak a good word about you, he won’t speak a bad one.’ He was almost as proud of the saloon’s traditions as Bill and willingly promised he would make no changes; that was one of the conditions of the sale. Almost from the day Bill sold out, his health began to fail. He took a room in the house of a relative in Queens. Sometimes, in the afternoon, if the weather was good, he would shuffle into the bar, a sallow, disenchanted old man, and sit in the Peter Cooper chair with his knotty hands limp in his lap. For hours he would sit and stare at the painting of Old John. The customers were sure he was getting ready to die, but when he came in they would say, ‘You looking chipper today, Billy boy,’ or something like that. He seemed grateful for such remarks. He rarely spoke, but once he turned to a man he had known for forty years and said, ‘Times have changed, McNally.’ ‘You said it, Bill,’ McNally replied. Then, as if afraid he had been sentimental, Bill coughed, spat, and said, irrelevantly, ‘The bread you get these days, it ain’t fit to feed a dog.’ On the night of September 21, 1938, barely thirty-one months after he quit drawing ale, he died in his sleep. As close as his friends could figure it, his age was seventy-six.

  The retired policeman made a gentle saloonkeeper. Unlike Bill, he would never throw a quarrelsome d
runk into the street but would try to sober him up with coffee or soup. ‘If a man gets crazy on stuff I sold him, I can’t kick him out,’ he said one day. ‘That would be evading my responsibility.’ He was proprietor for less than four years. He died in December, 1939, and left the property to a daughter, Mrs Dorothy O’Connell Kirwan. A young woman with respect for tradition, Mrs Kirwan has chosen to remain in the background. At first customers feared that she would renovate the place, but they now realize that this fear was groundless. ‘I know exactly how my father felt about McSorley’s,’ Mrs Kirwan said, ‘and so long as I am owner, no changes will be made. I won’t even change the rule against women customers.’ She herself visits the saloon only on Sunday nights after hours. Even so, early in her ownership, she made a mistake in judgment that brought about a crisis in McSorley’s. She had a hard time getting over this mistake, but she now looks back on it as a blessing in disguise and regards the crisis as a kind of inevitable demarcation between McSorley’s past under Old John and Old Bill and her father and McSorley’s present under her. She enjoys telling about this.

  ‘For some months after my father’s death,’ she says, ‘I let things drift in McSorley’s. I left everything in the hands of my father’s two old bartenders, the day bartender and the night bartender, but the responsibility was too much for them and things gradually got out of hand, and I saw I had to find a manager – someone to look after the books and pay the bills and just generally take charge. And the more I thought about it the more I thought that the exact right person for the job was an uncle of mine named Joe Hnida. Well, I grew up in an Irish family that has lived in one of the old Irish neighborhoods on the west side of Greenwich Village for generations, in among the bohemians and the erratical personalities, and I thought I knew quite a lot about human behavior, but I soon found out that I didn’t. Joe Hnida is a Czech, and he’s an uncle of mine by marriage – he’s my father’s sister’s husband. He worked for a limousine service that specializes in weddings and funerals; he was the supervisor of the drivers. Joe’s a kind, decent, hardworking, trustworthy man, and I spoke to him and asked him if he would care to take over the management of McSorley’s. He thought it over and decided he would. Well, Joe started out in McSorley’s on a Monday morning and by the end of the week I was getting telephone calls from some of the real old-timers among the customers, all of them old friends of my father’s, complaining about him. What I hadn’t taken into account is that Joe is a man of few words, a very few – he just doesn’t have any small talk. In addition, he’s unusually self-sufficient. And also in addition, and I think he himself would agree, if he has any sense of humor at all it’s a Czech sense of humor – it certainly isn’t an Irish sense of humor. Anyway, it seemed that some of the old men who sit in those chairs along the wall in McSorley’s all day long and do a lot of talking and arguing back and forth among themselves would try to start conversations with Joe and Joe just wouldn’t participate. As one of them told me, “He’ll go so far as to say ‘Good morning’ or ‘How do you do?’ and he’ll answer you yes or no, but that’s about the full extent and sum total of what he has to say. He won’t even comment on the weather.” “If he’s behind the bar,” another one told me, “he’ll draw an ale for a customer and take his money and give him his change, and that’s the end of it. He just will not speak a single unnecessary word.” A few of the old men developed a liking for Joe, but they were ones who never had much to say themselves. And before long, little by little, most of the old men convinced themselves that Joe considered them to be just a bunch of old bores and windbags and they also convinced themselves that he looked down on them, and to get back at him they began to mock him behind his back and call him “that stuck-up Czechoslovakian hearse-driver.” When the old men telephoned me I tried to explain Joe to them and stand up for him and smooth things over. “After all,” I said, “Bill McSorley didn’t exactly knock himself out talking. According to my father, there were days you couldn’t get a word out of him.” But that didn’t do any good. Bill McSorley was different – he owned the place and he had earned the right to do as he pleased, and he might not necessarily care if you lived or died but he didn’t give you the impression that he looked down on you. This new man comes in here out of nowhere and he won’t even be polite. It went on and on like that. Weeks went by and months went by and things didn’t get any better. And then one day the oldest of the bartenders, a man I completely trust, telephoned me and said that just about the worst that could happen had happened. “It’s completely ridiculous, Dot,” he said, “but the old men have discovered that Joe doesn’t like ale. He’s done his best to hide this, but it somehow slipped out, and they began right away picking on him about it, whereupon he got his back up and told them that he not only doesn’t like the taste of ale, he doesn’t like the smell of it. In fact, he said that the smell of it sometimes gives him a headache. Well, as I said, it sounds ridiculous, but the old men are acting as if they have found out something about Joe that is shocking beyond belief. And I know them – they’re not going to let this die down. And furthermore, to add to everything else, a number of them have suddenly become very sensitive and touchy – the situation in general has brought back to the surface differences between them that they thought they had buried and forgotten long ago, and they have stopped speaking to each other, only sometimes they can’t exactly remember why they stopped speaking, and they go around avoiding each other and at the same time looking puzzled. It’s a mess.” I saw I had to do something. It was up to me. Now, it so happens that my husband, Harry Kirwan, grew up in an old, old town in Ireland named Ballyragget, down in Kilkenny. Ballyragget is a market town that is noted for its old public houses. Harry’s mother died when he was a child and he lived with his grandmother. And quite early in his schooldays he started working for an old public house called Staunton’s. On his way to school, he would stop off and sweep the place out, and after school he would stop off for the rest of the afternoon and wash glasses and fill the coal box and run errands and generally make himself useful. Harry has a studious nature; he’s always read a lot. He wanted very much to be a professor in Ireland, but he couldn’t afford the education. So when he was around nineteen he came to the United States and got a job in a manufacturing chemist company in the Bronx, and by the time we got married – which as a matter of fact was less than a year before the death of my father – he had worked himself up to where he was head bookkeeper. And so, anyway, when Harry came home that night, I said to him, “Sit down, Harry. I’ve got something very serious I have to discuss with you.” I filled him in on the situation in McSorley’s, and then I said to him, “Harry, I know how much you love your job, and I hate to ask this, but do you think you could possibly find it in your heart to give it up and take over the management of McSorley’s?” “Well, Dot,” he said, and I remember every word he said that night, “first of all, I don’t love my job, I pretend to, but I hate it. And second of all, Dot, why in the name of God did it take so long for this thought to occur to you? You’ve heard me talk a lot about Staunton’s back in Ballyragget, and most of the customers in there were hard-to-get-along-with old men, and I got along with them. I not only got along with them, I enjoyed getting along with them. I enjoyed observing them and I enjoyed listening to them. They were like actors in a play, only the play was real. There were Falstaffs among them – that is, they were just windy old drunks from the back alleys of Ballyragget, but they were Falstaffs to me. And there were Ancient Pistols among them. And there was an old man with a broken-hearted-looking face who used to come in and sit in a chair in the corner with a Guinness at his elbow and stare straight ahead for hours at a time and occasionally mumble a few words to himself, and every time he came in I would say to myself, ‘King Lear.’ There were good old souls among those men, and there were leeches among them, leeches and lepers and Judases, and I imagine the cast of characters down in McSorley’s is about the same. In other words, Dot,” he said, “in answer to your question, yes,
I’m willing to take a chance and go down to McSorley’s and see if I can handle it.” The changeover didn’t take long. Early next morning I went to Joe Hnida’s apartment and had a heart-to-heart talk with him and begged him to forgive me for getting him into all of this, which he did, and he went back to the limousine service. And the very same day Harry gave notice up in the Bronx. And two Mondays later, he started in at McSorley’s. I remember that day so well. I was worried half sick that I might’ve made another big mistake, so in the middle of the afternoon I telephoned McSorley’s and asked to speak to Harry. “Everything’s O.K., Dot,” he said. “I’m amazed at how much I’m enjoying this. I feel like I’m back home again – back home in Ballyragget, back home in Staunton’s.” And when he got home that night and opened the door, the first thing he said was, “I think I have finally found my right and proper place in the world.”’