Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics)

by Joseph Mitchell

  ‘What you got?’ Captain Clock asked him.

  ‘Nothing to speak of,’ he said. ‘Just a mess of clams. I been scratch-raking off Grass Island. I got two bushels of cherries, a bushel of necks, and two bushels of chowders.’ Gripping the bags by their ears, he passed them to Bollinger. Captain Clock took a five and two ones out of his cashbox and handed them to the clammer, who carefully placed them in an old-fashioned snap purse. Then he picked up two conches from the bottom of his boat and tossed them to Bollinger.

  ‘I was about to forget your konks,’ he said. He threw aside the ropes, pushed off, and started his engine.

  ‘Be good,’ yelled Captain Clock.

  ‘I’m getting so old,’ the clammer said, ‘I can’t be anything else.’

  Bollinger deposited the conches in a rusty wire basket. ‘Konks are my racket,’ he said. ‘They get caught in the tongs and the boys save them for me instead of throwing them back. One of the truck-drivers takes them in and sells them to Italian clam stands in downtown New York and we divvy up. It’s just cigarette money. The Italians boil the konks and make something called scungili.’

  We drank some more tea, and then another clammer, a gloomy-eyed, sunburned young man, pulled alongside. He was in a catboat that had been patched with tin in a dozen places.

  ‘Hello, Tarzan,’ said Bollinger. ‘Didn’t that old eelpot sink yet? How many clams you got?’

  ‘I been croshaying the mud for six hours and I barely took enough to bait a hook,’ the young man said. ‘They was thin where I was tonging.’

  ‘Quit bellyaching,’ said Bollinger. ‘If it was to rain clams, you wouldn’t be satisfied.’ The young man passed over a bushel of necks, two bushels of cherries, a scanty peck of chowders, and three conches. Captain Clock handed him five ones and twenty cents. He folded the bills into a wad and stuffed it in his watch pocket. ‘Another day, another dollar,’ he said. ‘My back feels like it was run over by a load of bricks.’ He cranked his engine and moved off, heading for Babylon. ‘He’ll get drunk tonight,’ Captain Clock said. ‘I can tell by the way he was talking.’ The Captain bent over a bag of cherries. He scooped a double handful out of the mouth of the bag and spread them on the deck. ‘Beauties,’ he said. ‘Uniform as peas in a pod. The shells are blue now, but they’ll turn gray or white before we get them to town.’ He opened a cherry and balanced it on his palm. He looked at it admiringly. ‘A spawner,’ he said. ‘Now, that’s the beauty of a clam. He doesn’t make a bit of fuss about spawning. An oyster’s just the opposite. He spawns from May through August – the months without an ‘r’ in them – and he gets so milky you can’t eat him on the half shell. You can fry him, but you can’t eat him raw. A clam is better behaved. He never gets milky enough to notice and he’s just as good in the midsummer months, when he’s spawning, as he is on the coldest day of the winter.’

  Captain Clock said that once a year the town of Islip buys a couple of truckloads of hardshells from Massachusetts or New Jersey to scatter on its beds. ‘Foreign clams put new life in the natives,’ he said. ‘They improve the breed. The spawn mixes and we get a better set. Hey, Charlie, hand me a knife. I’m going to try some of these chowders.’ The Captain opened a dozen chowders and arranged them in a semicircle on the hatch. We were eating them when Bollinger suddenly shouted, ‘Here come the cops!’ He pointed in the direction of Babylon, and I saw a launch flying a green flag. In a minute it cut the water just off our bow, heading for the fleet. The clammers stopped work and commenced yelling. ‘They’re warning each other,’ Bollinger said. ‘That’s the police boat from Babylon. The cops go through the beds every day or so. You never know when they’ll show up. If they spy an Islip man in Babylon water, they give him a ticket and he has to go to court and get fined.’ The clammers leaned on their tong and rake handles while the police boat slowly picked its way through the fleet. It did not halt; evidently the clammers were behaving themselves.

  Presently another clammer called it a day and came alongside. He was a gaunt, stooped man, who silently handed over four bushels of necks, three bushels of cherries, and a bushel and a peck of chowders. He collected thirteen dollars and seventy-five cents, bit a chew of tobacco off a plug he took from his hip pocket, mumbled ‘Good night, Cap,’ and pushed off. ‘He’s one of the best clammers on Long Island,’ said Captain Clock. ‘I bet he’s got ten thousand dollars in the bank, and he’s so saving he gets his wife to cut his hair.’ The gaunt clammer’s departure from the beds appeared to be a signal to the others. Soon after he left, they began moving toward the buy-boat in twos and threes. In twenty minutes the Jennie Tucker was surrounded by loaded boats, waiting their turns to come alongside. ‘They all have to come at once,’ Bollinger said indignantly. Captain Clock stood at the stern, hunched over his ledger, which he had placed on the cabin roof. Bollinger helped the clammers heft their bags over the rail. He piled the chowders aft, the cherries on the hatch, and the necks forward. When a boat finished unloading he would call out the number of bushels, and the Captain would make a notation in his ledger and then pay off the clammer.

  To get out of Bollinger’s way, I went to the bow and sat on a bale of empty bags. Standing in their boats, the waiting clammers smoked cigarettes and shouted insults at each other. I couldn’t tell if the insults were good-natured or genuine. ‘If I was you, I’d take that old cement-mixer home and set fire to it,’ one yelled at his neighbor. ‘I wouldn’t be caught dead in that dirty old boat.’ ‘Well, it’s paid for,’ said the master of the cement-mixer, ‘and that’s more’n you can say.’ ‘Paid for!’ screamed the first man. ‘You mean you stole it off the beach. Nothing’s safe when you’re around. Why, by God, you’d steal a tick off a widow’s belly!’ Most of the clammers seemed to be irritable. ‘Hello, Pop,’ a young clammer said to the man in an adjoining boat, a sullen old man in wet overalls, ‘how’s your hammer hanging?’ ‘Shut up!’ said the old man. The young clammer snickered and said, ‘Didn’t get your share of clams today, did you, Pop?’ ‘Shut up!’ said the old man. ‘Why, hell,’ said the young clammer, ‘I was just passing the time of day.’ ‘Shut up!’ said the old man.

  At a quarter after four the last clammer finished unloading, cast off, and made for home. The Captain snapped his cashbox shut and we sat down and drained the iced tea in the thermos jug. Then Bollinger hoisted the anchor, started the motor, and pointed the Jennie Tucker for her wharf. The decks were piled high. ‘A regular floating clam mountain,’ said Bollinger. The Captain rearranged some bags on the hatch, clearing away a space to sit. He lit his pipe and added up the row of figures in his ledger.

  ‘We took a hundred and forty-five bushels,’ he said. ‘One day I took two hundred bushels. I emptied my cashbox for that load. The stern was awash on the trip in.’ He pointed toward Oak Island. ‘See those boats over there? Some of the boys are still out, but they don’t sell over the rail like the others. They have bigger boats and they stay out until late in the afternoon and bring their loads right to our shed. We buy every clam that’s offered, no matter if there’s a glut in New York or a big demand. Some days we buy more clams than we can get rid of, and we take the surplus out to some lots of water we lease from the town of Islip and shovel them overboard. In the last five weeks we’ve planted thirteen hundred bushels of cherries and five hundred bushels of necks in those lots. When we need them, we go out and tong them up. No waste that way. In the old days, when clams were very dear, we used to have clam pirates. They would steal up at night and tong our lots, but not any more. We keep a watchman, just in case.’

  At five o’clock, the Jennie Tucker puttered up to her wharf. Mr Still, the senior partner of the firm, was standing in the back doorway of the shed, waiting. He looks after the office end of the business. He is a shellfish expert and belongs to the family which once ran Still’s, a renowned sea-food restaurant and hangout for Tammany gluttons on Third Avenue, and which still runs a thriving oyster business in a scow anchored in Pike Slip, beneath Manhattan Bridge. When the
Jennie Tucker scraped against the wharf, Mr Still shouted, ‘Here she is,’ and four men came out of the shed. The moment the buy-boat was tied up, two of these men leaped aboard and began lifting the bags to the wharf. The others placed them on handtrucks and wheeled them into the culling room. This was a long, cool room, which smelled like a clean cellar. There the clams were poured in great heaps on tables built against the walls. The tables and the cement floor had recently been hosed down and they were wet and immaculate. Captain Clock, Mr Still, and Bollinger took places at the tables and culled the clams, tossing aside those with broken shells or gapped-open lips.

  After they had been culled, the clams were poured into woven-wire baskets and dipped in a tank of tap water in which an antiseptic solution had been poured. Then some were emptied into great, three-bushel barrels and others into tubs holding three pecks. Soon the room was crowded with loaded barrels, and Mr Still got a hammer out of the roll-top desk in the little office adjoining the culling room. He tacked tags on the heads of the barrels, addressing them to various restaurants and Fulton Market dealers. Then they were wheeled into one of the company’s three trucks. At seven o’clock, this truck contained sixty-five barrels and twenty-two tubs. ‘She’s ready to roll,’ said Mr Still. ‘If you’re a mind to, you can ride into the city with this load.’ He introduced me to Paul Boice, the driver, and I climbed into the cab of the truck. It was one of those massive, aluminum-painted trucks.

  We took the Sunrise Highway. At Valley Stream, we stopped at a diner for hamburgers and coffee. The counterman knew Boice. ‘Care for some clams tonight, Paul?’ he asked, grinning. ‘How about a dozen nice clams for supper?’ The driver laughed perfunctorily. Evidently it was an old joke. ‘When I want clams for supper,’ he said, ‘I’ll notify you. Fix me a hamburger.’ We did not tarry long in the diner. In Brooklyn the driver deftly guided the heavy truck through a maze of side streets. ‘I’ve been hauling clams over this route eight years and I know every short cut there is,’ he said. ‘Clams are nowhere near as perishable as oysters, but I don’t like to dawdle.’ When we rolled off Manhattan Bridge he glanced at his watch. ‘Took less than two hours,’ he said. ‘That’s good time.’

  He made his first delivery at Vincent’s Clam Bar, at Mott and Hester streets, unloading three clam tubs and the basket of scungili conches Bollinger had gathered during the day. The proprietor brought Boice a goblet of red wine. ‘I get a drink on the house every time I hit this place,’ he said. He drove down Mott Street, passing slowly through Chinatown. Entering South Street, he had to climb out of the cab and drag a sleeping drunk out of the road. ‘Truck-drivers have to slow-poke through here just because of drunks,’ he said. ‘I drag one out of my way at least once a week.’ The Fulton Market sheds were dark, deserted, and locked up when we arrived. ‘I make four deliveries in the Market,’ Boice said, ‘and then I head uptown and make stops at big restaurants in the theatrical district.’ He backed the truck up to the door of a shellfish wholesaler and we climbed out of the cab. We looked up and down the street and did not see a soul. ‘There’s a night watchman down here who helps me unload,’ Boice said, ‘and I always have to wait for him to show up.’ We sat down on the steps of the wholesale house and lit cigarettes. Across the street, on top of a pile of broken lobster barrels, three overfed fishhouse cats were screeching at each other. We sat for fifteen minutes, watching the cats screech and fight, and then I said goodbye. ‘If you order clams or chowder tomorrow,’ Boice said, peering up the dark street for the night watchman, ‘like as not you’ll eat some of the ones we hauled in tonight.’

  (1939)

  The Same as Monkey Glands

  RETURNING FROM A late vacation, I stopped off in Savannah, Georgia, and made a pilgrimage to Mr Will Barbee’s diamondback-terrapin farm on the Isle of Hope, a small, lush island nine miles below Savannah. I was there on the first day of autumn, when he starts shipping live terrapin to Northern hotels, clubs, seafood dealers, and luxury restaurants, and was in time to see his Negro foreman barrel up three dozen nine-year-old cows, or females; this, the first shipment of the season, was dispatched to a dealer in Fulton Fish Market. The diamondback is a handsome reptile, whose meat, when properly stewed, is tender and gelatinous. Gastronomically, it is by far the finest of the North American turtles, and terrapin stew is our costliest native delicacy. Three styles of stew – Philadelphia, Maryland, and Southern – are made in bulk by a man in Fulton Market and sold to families and clubs; what he calls Maryland style, in which dry sherry and thick cream are used, costs $10 a quart. In Manhattan hotels the price is never less than $3.50 a plate. A live terrapin in New York City brings from $3.50 to $7 retail, according to the length of its belly shell. For the last decade, under the protection of conservation laws, the diamondback has been slowly increasing in numbers in brackish sloughs all along the Eastern seaboard, but it still is scarce enough to make the fecundity of Mr Barbee’s farm of the utmost importance to chefs in New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Washington, and New Orleans, the cities in which the stew is most respected. Mr Barbee is the country’s largest shipper; in one year he shipped three hundred dozen live terrapin at an average price of $30 a dozen. He also put up four thousand cans of stew meat. In addition, on the porch of a rustic dance pavilion which he operates as a sideline, he sold terrapin dinners to hundreds of Yankee yachtsmen who stopped at the farm on their way to Florida through the Inland Waterway, which skirts the Isle of Hope. His wife, Rose, who looks after the cooking, is revered by yachtsmen, and her terrapin stew, Southern style, is famous from Cape Cod to Key West.

  My train arrived at Union Station in Savannah at 9:30 the morning of the day I visited the farm, and an unselfish cab-driver I consulted advised me to check my bag and take a streetcar to the Isle of Hope. ‘I could drive you there,’ he said, ‘but if you want to see some old-fashioned yellow-fever country, you better take the street-car.’ I am thankful I followed his advice. The Isle of Hope line is a single-track interurban railroad; in its steam-engine days it bore the stirring title Savannah, Thunderbolt & Isle of Hope Railroad. I recommend a trip on it to lovers of Americana. There were only three passengers on the car I boarded. We rattled through Savannah and its suburbs and plunged into a swampy forest of live oaks whose great limbs dripped with a parasite plant called gray moss. Occasionally we crossed tracks over marshes in which rice was once grown with slave labor, and we passed through a number of small farms whose door-yard bushes were heavy with ripe, crimson pomegranates, the autumn fruit of the South. About five miles out of Savannah, the streetcar rounded a curve and the motorman suddenly put on his brake. A fat milk cow was on the track, grazing on nut grass that grew between the ties. The motorman pulled his whistle cord, but the cow did not budge. Some Gullah Negroes were digging yams in a patch beside the track; one hurried over and kicked the cow and she ambled off. The motorman, who was laughing, stuck his head out and said, ‘I give you fair warning. Next time she gets on my right of way I’m going to climb out and milk her.’ The Negro, also laughing, said, ‘Help yourself, Captain. She’s got enough for the both of us.’

  A short while later we crossed a bridge spanning one of the rice marshes and reached the Isle of Hope. The streetcar line came to an end directly in front of several weatherbeaten frame buildings, on one of which there was a sign: ‘ALEXANDER M. BARBEE’S SON. DANCE PAVILION. OPERATING THE ONLY DIAMONDBACK TERRAPIN FARM IN THE WORLD. OYSTERS, SHRIMP, FANCY CRABMEAT. YOU ARE WELCOME.’ This building extended out over the water on piles, and two battered shrimp sloops were tied to the wharf abutting it; later I learned that this water was the Skidaway, a tidal river. I entered the building and found Mr Barbee behind a counter, opening bottles of Coca-Cola for some shrimp fishermen. I recognized him from a description given by a Northern yachtsman who told me about the farm just before I went on vacation; he said Mr Barbee looked ‘like an easygoing country storekeeper.’ I introduced myself and told him I was from New York and wanted to see his terrapin farm.

  ‘Wel
l, sir,’ he said, ‘I’m glad to see you. I’ll show you the whole works, and I’ll see that you get all the terrapin stew you can hold. We’re going to barrel up a few terrapin for the New York trade today. The season opens up North around the second week of October, and we commence shipping on the first day of autumn. I’ve got forty-five hundred in my fattening pen ready to go and I want you to see them, but first we’ll go up to the breeding farm. It’s up the road a ways.’ He took off his apron and called to his wife, who was upstairs. ‘We keep house on the second floor of the pavilion,’ he told me. His wife came downstairs and he introduced us, saying, ‘Rose, I’ve invited this gentleman to have dinner with us. Make sure he gets a bait of terrapin.’ Mrs Barbee, a pretty, red-cheeked young woman, smiled and said, ‘Mighty glad to have you.’

  I followed Mr Barbee out on the front porch of the pavilion. ‘Right off the bat,’ he said, ‘I better tell you that the most important thing about terrapin meat is its tonic quality. It fills you full of fuss, fight, and gumption. Eat enough of it, it’ll make an old rooster out of you. Why do you think so many rich old men eat terrapin? Well, sir, I’ll tell you why. A terrapin is loaded down with a rich, nourishing jelly, and this jelly makes you feel young again. To be frank, it’s the same as monkey glands. If you were to take and feed terrapin stew to all the people of this country, the birth rate would jump like a flash of lightning. There was a time when the coastal marshes were so full of terrapin they fed the meat to plantation slaves. It was cheaper than sowbelly. Well, I was up to City Hall in Savannah one day and a man there showed me some old papers he had dug out that said the plantation owners of Chatham County were forced to quit feeding terrapin to slaves because it made them breed too much. They wanted them to breed, of course, but they didn’t want them to breed that much. Why, they spent all their time breeding. After all, there’s a limit to everything.’