Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics)

by Joseph Mitchell

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘there are days when I hate everybody in the world, fat, lean, and in between, and this started out to be one of those days, but I had a drop to drink, and now I love everybody.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘they told me up at the Hartford you didn’t feel so good this morning.’

  Mr Flood gave me a sharp look. ‘Were you talking to P. J. Mooney?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I was.’

  ‘I thought I could detect the track of his tongue,’ said Mr Flood. ‘What did he tell you?’

  ‘He seemed worried about you.’

  ‘What in hell did he tell you?’

  ‘For one thing,’ I said, ‘he believes those black clams you wrote me about are a delusion. They’re not, are they?’

  ‘Are you trying to insult me? What else did he tell you?’

  ‘He said you were failing fast and that he expects you to drop off any day.’

  Mr Flood snickered. ‘Oh, he does, does he?’ he said. ‘Oh, the fat old fool, the miserable, bilious old pot-gutted fool! He got my back up this morning. That’s why I brought my clams into here. If I took them up to the Hartford, like I planned, I’d be obliged to offer him some. I used to have a high regard for P. J. Mooney; knows quite a bit about striped-bass fishing, but he’s picked up a habit that’s so queer – well, it’s so queer, so ghouly, so disgusting, so low-down nasty that I don’t even like to talk about it. I’ll tell you about it later. Here, my boy, have a cigar.’ He handed me a cigar. It was a Bulldog Avenue, a perfecto cigar hand-rolled in Tampa that costs sixty-five cents apiece; he buys them by the box. He tossed his two loaves on the counter and went into Maggiani’s coldroom, a cubicle in back in which sides of beef are hung to age. In a few moments he came shuffling out with a bushel basket in his arms. The basket was heaped with little pitch-black clams. Grunting, he set it on the counter and tipped it and let about half the contents pour out, cornucopia fashion – an exuberance of clams. The noise awakened Mr Maggiani, who shouted, ‘Stop! Stop! Don’t you mess up my counter. I just laid new oilcloth on that counter.’ ‘Shut up, Tommy,’ said Mr Flood, ‘and go back to sleep.’

  He strewed about two yards of the counter with clams, and then stepped back and looked at them gloatingly. They were so black they glinted, they were so plump they were almost globular, and they were beautiful. The lips of the shells were tightly shut, a sign of health and freshness – a clam out of water stays shut until it begins to die, and then the adductors, the two muscles that hold the shells together, relinquish their grip and the lips gape. In Fulton Market and on the Boston Fish Pier, quahogs are graded in three sizes – Little Necks, cherrystones, and chowders. These black quahogs were Little Necks, about an inch and three quarters from hinge to lip, and they were as uniform as silver dollars. Mr Flood got out a knife he carries in a belt holster, a kind of fish knife known as a gut-blade, and shucked a clam for me. The meat was a rosy yellow, a lovely color, the color of the flesh next to the stone of a freestone peach. Bay quahogs have splotches of yellow in some seasons, but, with the exception of the liver and the siphons, all of this clam was yellow – the foot, the muscles, the gills, the intestines, even the mantle. I ate the clam and found that it was as tender and sweet-meated as a Little Neck out of Great South Bay, the finest bay clam on the whole coast. Then I drank the juice from the cup of the shell. It was rich, invigorating, and free of grit, but, surprisingly, not as briny as the juice of a bay quahog; that was the only fault I could find with the Arctica islandica.

  Mr Maggiani came over with a tray on which he had put three tumblers, a carafe of water, and a fifth of Scotch about half full. ‘Clams don’t agree with me,’ he said, ‘but I think I’ll eat six or seven dozen, just to be sociable.’ ‘Help yourself, Tommy,’ said Mr Flood. ‘That’s what they’re here for.’ Mr Maggiani fixed us each a drink. He poured an extra gollop in Mr Flood’s tumbler and Mr Flood smiled. ‘Old age hasn’t taught me a whole lot,’ he said, ‘but it’s sure taught me the true value of a dollar, a kind word, and a drink of whiskey.’ We had our drinks. Mr Flood took six lemons and six limes from the pockets of his apron and halved them with his gut-blade to squeeze on the clams. Then he began slicing one of the Italian loaves. Mr Flood will not eat factory-made American bread; he calls it gurry, a word applied by fishmongers to the waste that is left after a fish has been dressed. ‘I doubt a hog would eat it,’ he says, ‘unless it was toasted and buttered and marmalade put on it and him about to perish to death.’ Every other morning Mr Flood walks up to Mrs Palumbo’s panetteria italiana, a hole-in-the-wall bakery on Elizabeth Street, and buys a couple of loaves. He takes his meals in restaurants in the fish-market district – Sloppy Louie’s, the Hartford dining room, Sweet’s, and Libby’s – and he always brings his own bread. Like most Sicilian neighborhood bakers, Mrs Palumbo turns out loaves in a multitude of shapes, some of which are symbols that protect against the Evil Eye. The loaves that Mr Flood had this day were long and whole-wheat and S-shaped and decorated with gashes.

  Mr Maggiani, watching Mr Flood slice, said, ‘Hugh, do you know the name of that loaf?’

  ‘I heard it once,’ Mr Flood said, ‘but it’s slipped my mind.’

  ‘It’s called a cosa minuta a zighizaghi, a small thing with zigzags,’ Mr Maggiani said. ‘The S stands for sapienza – wisdom.’

  Mr Flood grunted, ‘Whatever to hell it’s called,’ he said, ‘it’s good. Mrs Palumbo knows what she’s doing. She don’t take ads in the papers to tell big black lies about her vitamins, she don’t have a radio program rooting and tooting about her enriched bread, she don’t wrap in cellophane, she don’t even have a telephone. She just goes ahead and bakes the way her great-great-granddaddy baked. Consequently, by God, lo and behold, her bread is fit to eat. I’m not against vitamins, whatever to hell they are, but God took care of that matter away back there in the hitherto – God and nature, and not some big scientist or other. Years back, bread was the staff of life. It looked good, it smelled good, it tasted good, and it had all the vitamins in it a man could stand. Then the bakers fiddled and fooled and improved their methods and got things down to such a fine point that a loaf of bread didn’t have any more nourishment in it than a brickbat. Now they’re putting the vitamins back in by scientific means – the way God did it don’t suit them; it ain’t complicated enough – and they’ve got the brass to get on the radio and brag about it; they should hide their heads in shame.’

  Mr Maggiani hadn’t been paying much attention to Mr Flood’s remarks; he only half listens to him. Now he pursed his lips and nodded his head a couple of times. ‘Science is a great thing,’ he said piously. ‘It’s wonderful what they can do.’ Mr Flood stared at him for a moment and then let the matter drop. We had another round of Scotch. Mr Maggiani found a knife for me and one for himself, and the three of us got down to work on the clams.

  ‘The bed this basket of clams came out of is called Bed Number Two,’ said Mr Flood. He is one of those who can talk and eat at once. ‘It’s located two and an eighth miles east-southeast of the whistling buoy off Point Judith, Rhode Island. The water out there is eighty to a hundred and twenty feet deep. That’s why it took so long to find the blackies. The bottom of Number Two is muddy, what the Coast and Geodetic charts call sticky, and it’s just about solid with clams. They’re as thick as germs. Bay clams come from much shallower water. To give you an idea, the water over most of the quahog beds in Great South Bay is only twelve feet deep. The Rhode Island clammers are working the ocean beds with the same kind of dredge boats that oystermen use, except the cables are longer. They lower a dredge on a steel cable and drag it over the bottom. The dredge plows up the mud and the clams are thrown into a big chain-metal bag that’s hung on the tail of the dredge. They drag for fifteen minutes, and then they haul up and unload the bag on the deck. The ocean clammers are making a ton of money. They’re getting a dollar to a dollar and a half a bushel.’

  ‘That don’t sound so good,’ said Mr Maggiani. ‘The
last I heard, bay clammers were getting two and a half to three.’

  ‘A dredge boat can take fifty bushels of bay clams a day,’ Mr Flood said, ‘if the crew don’t mind rupturing themselves. The same boat can take two hundred and fifty bushels of blackies a day and just coast along. That’s the difference. I heard about one boat that took five hundred and thirty-eight bushels in six hours. Also, most of the beds are outside the three-mile limit and there’s no restrictions on the length of the season and the size of the catch; you can dredge the year round and you can take all you can get. Blackies have one drawback, a merchandising drawback – they aren’t suited for the raw trade, the half-shell trade. You can only eat the young ones on the half shell – that is, the Little Necks, like these here. Young blackies are the finest-flavored clams in the world, in my opinion, but when they grow to cherrystone size they coarsen up. In addition, they don’t stand travel as good as bay clams; they’re more perishable and their shells are brittle. All the clams in the bottom of this basket are probably broken and squashed. Blackies are perfect chowder clams – the old ones and the young ones – and that’s what the Rhode Islanders are selling them for. The clam-packing plants in Warren and Bristol and East Greenwich are buying all that’s brought to their docks, and they’re shucking and canning the entire catch. They’re putting them up in gallon cans and selling them to hotels and restaurants and soup factories. They aren’t going to fool with the half-shell trade. If the general public wants some for half-shell eating, unless they’ve got a friend in the business, I’m afraid they’ll have to go to the docks and buy them off the boats, and that’s a shame. Tommy, quit eating a moment and tell me what you think of these clams.’

  ‘The only thing that’s got them beat in the shellfish line,’ said Mr Maggiani, ‘is bay scallops eaten out of the shell – the whole raw scallop, and not just that scallop muscle that they fry in restaurants.’

  Mr Flood was pleased. ‘I tell you, Tommy,’ he said, ‘it’s been my experience that just about any animal that lives in a shell and comes out of salty water is good eating. Back in 1940 the oyster beds in Great Peconic Bay became infested with millions of gastropod pests called quarterdecks, a kind of limpet, the Crepidula fornicata. These pests fix themselves to oyster shells in great stacks and clusters, one on top of the other, and they smother the oysters to death. Around Christmas that winter I went out on the bay with a friend of mine, Drew Radel, whose family owns the Robbins Island beds. He fattens his stock in the North Race, a swift current of water between Great and Little Peconic, and they’re the biggest, finest oysters in the United States. They’re so big and fine that back before the war Drew used to ship hundreds of barrels by fast ocean liner to Paris, London, and Dublin, the chief oyster-eating cities of Europe. Drew took me to a ruined bed in the Race, a bed that had three thousand bushels of oysters in it, and thirteen thousand bushels of quarterdecks. It was enough to break your heart. I took a quarterdeck in my hand, an animal about an inch and a half long, and I thought to myself, ‘I wonder how you taste.’ I got my knife and I dug the meat out of one and I ate it, and Drew and the dredge-boat captain looked at me like I was an outcast from human society. I ate another, and I kept on eating, and I said to Drew, ‘Drew, my boy,’ I said, ‘it’s a sacrilegious thing to say, and I’m ashamed of myself, but the little buggers taste damned near as good as oysters.’ He broke down and ate a few and he had to agree with me. Said they tasted to him like the tomalley of a lobster. I told him he should give them a French name and bribe the Waldorf-Astoria to put some on the menu at three dollars and a half a dozen. ‘Create a demand for them,’ I said, ‘and you got the problem solved.’ He said he wouldn’t deal in the damned things for any amount of money. Anyhow, next year they vanished, the most of them. They come and go in cycles, like a good many pests.’

  The wind off the river shook Maggiani’s windows. Mr Flood went over to the stove, punched the fire, threw in a shovelful of coal, and returned to the clams. He was quiet for a while, brooding. Then he began to talk again. ‘I promised to tell you about Mr Mooney’s queer habit, didn’t I?’ he said to me.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ I said.

  ‘This is something I got no business telling a young man,’ Mr Flood said, ‘but the pleasantest news to any human being over seventy-five is the news that some other human being around that age just died. That’s provided the deceased ain’t related, and sometimes even if he is. You put on a long face, and you tell everybody how sad and sorrowful it makes you feel, but you think to yourself, “Well, I outlived him. Thank the Lord it was him and not me.” You think to yourself, “One less. More room for me.” I’ve made quite a study of the matter, and I’m yet to find any agy man or any agy woman that don’t feel the same deep down inside. It cheers you up somehow, God forgive me for saying so. I used to be ashamed of myself, but the way I figure, you can’t help yourself, it’s just nature. There’s about a dozen and a half old crocks around seventy-five to eighty-five up at the Hartford, and here a few months back, the way it happens sometimes, they all got blue at once. Everybody had been sour-faced for days and getting sourer by the minute; they were all talked out; they had got on each other’s nerves; a man would order a beer and go away down to the end of the bar by himself and drink it; you would say something to a man and he wouldn’t answer you. It had just about got to the point where they were spitting in each other’s eye. One afternoon around four I walked in and they were all up at the bar, the whole, entire mob, buying each other drinks, whacking each other on the shoulder. Two or three had reached the singing stage. Everybody was friends again. I asked one what happened, and he said to me, “Didn’t you hear the news? Old Dan up the street dropped dead an hour ago, the poor man. In the middle of cutting a customer’s hair he keeled over and passed away.” Old Dan was a barber on Fulton Street; had a two-chair shop down here for fifty years; all the Hartford crowd went to him; a highly dignified man; everybody liked him; not an enemy in the world. I thought to myself, “You heathen monsters! A poor old soul drops dead on the floor and it cheers you up!” But I got to be honest. In a minute I was hanging on the bar with the rest of them, going on about how sad it was, and what a fine man Old Dan had been, and how he’d given me a shave and a shampoo only the day before, and drinking more than I could handle, and feeling the best I had in I don’t know when.

  ‘Well, Mr P. J. Mooney has an awful, awful case of what I’m talking about, the worst by far I ever saw. He comes downstairs in the morning in a hell of a hurry, and he grabs the Times and opens it up to the obituaries and death notices. The Times has the best death notices, all the details. And he sits there, drinking his coffee, happy, humming a song, reading up on who died since yesterday. And he talks to himself. He says, “Well, my friend,” he says, looking at the picture of some poor deceased or other, “I outlived you. You may have been one of the biggest investment bankers of our time, you may have left a thirty-million estate, you may have been a leader in social and financial circles in New York and Palm Beach, but I outlived you. You’re in the funeral parlor, you old s.o.b., you and your thirty million, and here I am, P. J. Mooney, esquire, eating a fine big plate of ham and eggs, and I’m not going to have two cups of coffee this morning, I’m going to have three.” All that used to tickle me somewhat. I’d come downstairs and I’d say to him, “Any good ones this morning, P. J.?” And he’d answer back, real cheerful, “The president of a big steel company, well along in years, eighty-seven, fell and broke his hip, and a big doctor, a stomach specialist, seventy-three, had a stroke. It’s sad,” he’d say, “real sad.” And he’d sit there and give you all the details, the name of the undertaker that had the job, the name of the cemetery, how long was the final illness, who survived, and the like of that.

  ‘Here lately, the past month or so, in addition to studying the obituaries, P. J. has taken to studying the old men at the Hartford. I caught him several times staring at this one and that one, looking them over, eying them, and I knew for certain what he was do
ing; he was estimating how much longer they had to live. One day I caught him eying me. It gave me a turn. It made me uneasy. It upset me. And he’s taken to inquiring about people’s health; takes a great interest in how you feel. He says, “Did you rest well last night?” And he says, “You sure got the trembles. You can’t drink nowhere near as much as you used to, can you?” And he says, “Mr Flood, it seems to me you’re showing your age this morning. We’re not getting any younger, none of us.” And last night he came out with a mighty upsetting question. “Mr Flood,” he said, “if you were flat on your back with a serious illness and the doctor told you there was no hope left, what would you do?” And I said to him, “Why, P. J., I would put on the God-damnedest exhibition that ever a dying man put on in the history of the human race. I would moan and groan and blubber and boohoo until the bricks came loose in the wall. I wouldn’t remain in bed. I would get up from there and put me on a pair of striped pants and a box-back coat and I would grab the telephone and get in touch with preachers of all descriptions – preachers, priests, rabbis, the Salvation Army, the Mohammedans, Father Divine, any and all that would come, and I’d say to them, ‘Pray, brothers, pray! It can’t do me no harm and it might possibly do me some good.’ And while they prayed I’d sit there and sing the ‘Rock of Ages’ and drink all the liquor that the doctor would allow.” I thought that’d shut him up, but I was just wasting my breath. Next he wanted to know had I made my will, had I given much thought to what I wanted cut on my tombstone, did I have any favorite hymns I wanted sung at my funeral. “Shut up,” I said to him, “for the love of God, shut up!” And this morning I came downstairs, and I had a hangover to begin with, a katzenjammer, and he had that estimating look in his eye, and he said to me, “Good morning, Old Man Flood. How you feeling? You look a bit pale.” And I flew off the handle and danced around and made a holy show of myself. If he inquires about my health one more time, if he so much as says good morning, I’m going to answer him politely, like a gentleman, and I’m going to wait until he looks the other way, and then I’m going to pick up something heavy and lay him out.’