Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics)

by Joseph Mitchell

  ‘The way I look at it,’ said Mr Maggiani, ‘those questions Mr Mooney asks you, they’re personal questions. I wouldn’t stand for it.’

  ‘I’m not going to stand for it any longer,’ said Mr Flood. ‘I’m going to put my foot down. All I want in this world is a little peace and quiet, and he gets me all raced up. Here a while back I heard a preacher talking on the radio about the peacefulness of the old, and I thought to myself, “You ignorant man!” I’m ninety-four years old and I never yet had any peace, to speak of. My mind is just a turmoil of regrets. It’s not what I did I regret, it’s what I didn’t do. Except for the bottle, I always walked the straight and narrow; a family man, a good provider, never cut up, never did ugly, and I regret it. In the summer of 1902 I came real close to getting in serious trouble with a married woman, but I had a fight with my conscience and my conscience won, and what’s the result? I had two wives, good, Christian women, and I can’t hardly remember what either of them looked like, but I can remember the face on that woman so clear it hurts, and there’s never a day passes I don’t think about her, and there’s never a day passes I don’t curse myself. “What kind of a timid, dried-up, weevily fellow were you?” I say to myself. “You should’ve said to hell with what’s right and what’s wrong, the devil take the hindmost. You’d have something to remember, you’d be happier now.” She’s out in Woodlawn, six feet under, and she’s been there twenty-two years, God rest her, and here I am, just an old, old man with nothing left but a belly and a brain and a dollar or two.’

  ‘Life is sad,’ said Mr Maggiani.

  ‘And the older I get,’ continued Mr Flood, ‘the more impatient I get. I got no time to waste on fools. There’s a young Southern fellow drops into the Hartford barroom every night before he gets on the ‘L’; comes from Alabama; works in one of those cotton offices on Hanover Square. Seemed to be a likable young fellow. I got in the habit of having a whiskey with him. He’d buy a round, I’d buy a round. Night before last, when he dropped in, I was sitting at a table with a colored man. When I was in the house-wrecking business, this colored man was my boss foreman. He was in my employ for thirty-six years; practically ran the business; one of the finest men I’ve ever known; raised eight children; one’s a doctor. In the old days, when my second wife was still alive, he and his wife came to our house for dinner, and me and my wife went to his house for dinner; played cards, told stories, listened to the phonograph. When I sold the business, I gave him a pension, an annuity. He bought a little farm on Long Island, and whenever he’s in town he pays me a visit and we talk about the days gone by. Tommy, you remember Peter Stetson. He’s been in here with me.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Mr Maggiani. ‘Fellow that runs the duck farm.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Mr Flood. ‘Well, Pete and I finished our talk, and I walked to the door with him, and we shook hands, and he left. And I went over to the bar to have a drink with this young Southern fellow, and he says, “That was a nigger you were sitting down with, wasn’t it?” And I said, “That was an old, old friend of mine.” And he began to talk some ugly talk about the colored people, and I shut him right up. “I’m an old-time New Yorker,” I said to him, “the melting-pot type, the Tammany type before Tammany went to seed, all for one, one for all, a man’s race and color is his own business, and I be damned if I’ll listen to that kind of talk.” And he says, “You’re a trouble-maker. What race do you belong to, anyhow?” “The human race,” I said. “I come from the womb and I’m bound for the tomb, the same as you, the same as King George the Six, the same as Johnny Squat. And furthermore,” I said, “I’ll never take another drink with you. It would be beneath me to do so.” Now that’s a heathen kind of thing to happen in New York City. I’m going over and talk to the Mayor one of these days, tell him about a plan I have. I got a plan for a parade. The population is all split up; they don’t even parade with each other. The Italians parade on Columbus Day, the Poles parade on Pulaski Day, the Irish parade on St Patrick’s Day, and all like that. My plan is to have a citywide Human Race Parade, an all-day, all-night parade up Fifth Avenue. The only qualification you’ll need to march in this parade, you have to belong to the human race. The cops even, they won’t stand and watch, they’ll get right in and march. Tommy, how about you, would you march in the Human Race Parade?’

  ‘It would depend on the weather,’ said Mr Maggiani.

  Mr Flood sighed and tossed his gut-blade on the counter. ‘I’m full,’ he said. ‘I’ve had my bait of clams.’

  ‘Me, too,’ said Mr Maggiani. ‘There’s no law says we got to make pigs of ourselves.’

  Mr Flood got a rag and a pan of water and cleaned off the oilcloth counter, and I gathered up the empty shells and put them in a trash bucket. Mr Maggiani carried what was left of the basket of blackies back to the coldroom. Then the three of us sat down by the stove. Mr Maggiani put a pot of coffee on the hob. We heard steps in the hall, the door opened, and in came a friend of Mr Flood’s, a grim old Yankee named Jack Murchison, who is a waiter in Libby’s Oyster House. Libby’s is one of the few New England restaurants in the city. It was established on Fulton Street in 1840 by Captain Oliver Libby of Wellfleet, Cape Cod. It is unpretentious, its chefs and waiters are despotic and opinionated but highly skilled, it broils or boils or poaches ninety-nine fish orders for every one it fries, it has Daniel Webster fish chowder on Wednesdays and Fridays, and it has New England clam chowder every day. On its menu is a statement of policy: ‘OPEN TO 8 P.M. NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR PERSONAL PROPERTY. NO MANHATTAN CLAM CHOWDER SERVED IN HERE.’

  ‘Been down to the river for a breath of air,’ Mr Murchison said. ‘Sat on the stringpiece for fifteen minutes and I’m cold to the bone.’

  ‘Draw up a chair, Jack,’ said Mr Flood, ‘and take the weight off your feet.’

  Mr Murchison lifted the tails of his overcoat and stood with his back to the stove for a few minutes. Then he sat down and sighed with satisfaction. ‘Hugh,’ he said to Mr Flood, ‘got something I want to show you.’ He took his wallet from a hip pocket, drew out a newspaper clipping, and gave it to me to pass over to Mr Flood, who was sitting on the other side of the stove. It was a clipping of Lucius Beebe’s column, ‘This New York,’ in the Herald Tribune.

  Mr Flood glanced at it and said, ‘Oh, God, what’s this? Is he one of those ignorant fellows writes about restaurants in the papers, ohs and ahs about everything they put before him? Every paper nowadays has a fellow writing about restaurants, an expert giving his opinion, a fellow that if he was out of a job and went to a restaurant to get one, this expert on cooking, this Mr Know-it-all, the practical knowledge he has, why, they wouldn’t trust him to peel the potatoes for a stew.’

  ‘This gentleman is a goormy,’ said Mr Murchison. ‘Go ahead and read what he says.’

  Mr Flood read a paragraph or two. Then he groaned and handed the clipping to me. ‘God defend us, son,’ he said. ‘Read this.’

  In the column, Mr Beebe described a dinner that had been ‘run up’ for him and a friend by Edmond Berger, the chef de cuisine of the Colony Restaurant. He gave the menu in full. One item, the fish course, was ‘Fillet de Sole en Bateau Beebe.’ ‘The sole, courteously created in the name of this department by Chef Berger for the occasion,’ Mr Beebe wrote, ‘was a delicate fillet superimposed on a half baked banana and a trick worth remembering.’

  ‘Good God A’mighty!’ said Mr Flood.

  ‘Sounds nice, don’t it?’ asked Mr Murchison. ‘A half baked bananny with a delicate piece of flounder superimposed on the top of it. While he was at it, why didn’t he tie a red ribbon around it?’

  ‘Next they’ll be putting a cherry on boiled codfish,’ said Mr Flood. ‘How would that be, a delicate piece of codfish with a cherry superimposed on the top of it?’

  The two old men cackled.

  ‘Tell me the truth, Hugh,’ said Mr Murchsion, ‘what in the world do you think of a thing like that?’

  ‘I tell you what I think,’ said Mr Flood. ‘I
got my money in the Corn Exchange Bank. And if I was to go into some restaurant and see the president of the Corn Exchange Bank eating a thing like that, why, I would turn right around and walk out of there, and I’d hightail it over to the Corn Exchange Bank and draw out every red cent. It would destroy my confidence.’

  ‘President, hell,’ said Mr Murchison. ‘If I was to see the janitor of the Corn Exchange Bank eating a thing like that, I’d draw my money out.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Mr Flood, ‘you got to take into consideration this fellow is a gourmet. A thing like that is just messy enough to suit a gourmet. They got bellies like schoolgirls; they can eat anything, just so it’s messy.’

  ‘We get a lot of goormies in Libby’s,’ said Mr Murchison. ‘I can spot a goormy right off. Moment he sits down he wants to know do we have any boolybooze.’

  ‘Bouillabaisse,’ said Mr Flood.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mr Murchison, ‘and I tell him, “Quit showing off! We don’t carry no boolybooze. Never did. There’s a time and a place for everything. If you was to go into a restaurant in France,” I ask him, “would you call for some Daniel Webster fish chowder?” I love a hearty eater, but I do despise a goormy. All they know is boolybooze and pompano and something that’s out of season, nothing else will do. And when they get through eating they don’t settle their check and go on about their business. No, they sit there and deliver you a lecture on what they et, how good it was, how it was almost as good as a piece of fish they had in the Caffy dee lah Pooty-doo in Paris, France, on January 16, 1928; they remember every meal they ever et, or make out they do. And every goormy I ever saw is an expert on herbs. Herbs, herbs, herbs! If you let one get started on the subject of herbs he’ll talk you deef, dumb, and blind. Way I feel about herbs, on any fish I ever saw, pepper and salt and a spoon of melted butter is herbs aplenty.’

  ‘Let’s see that clipping again,’ Mr Flood said. He took the Beebe column and read it slowly from start to finish. Then he handed it back to me. ‘Burn a rag,’ he said.

  Mr Maggiani lifted the pot of coffee off the hob and poured us each a mug. Then he stepped over to the counter and got his Scotch bottle. There was an ounce or two left in it, and he poured this into Mr Murchison’s coffee.

  ‘Much obliged, Tommy,’ said Mr Murchison. ‘It was cold out.’

  ‘I know it,’ said Mr Maggiani. ‘I heard the wind whistling.’ Mr Maggiani turned to Mr Flood. ‘Hugh,’ he said, ‘there’s something I was going to ask you. You’ve got enough money put away you could live high if you wanted to. Why in God’s name do you live in a little box of a room in a back-street hotel and hang out in the fish market when you could go down to Miami, Florida, and sit in the sun?’

  Mr Flood bit the end off one of his sixty-five-cent cigars and spat it into the scuttle. He held a splinter in the stove until it caught fire, and then he lit the cigar. ‘Tommy, my boy,’ he said, ‘I don’t know. Nobody knows why they do anything. I could give you one dozen reasons why I prefer the Fulton Fish Market to Miami, Florida, and most likely none would be the right one. The right reason is something obscure and way off and I probably don’t even know it myself. It’s like the old farmer who wouldn’t tell the drummer the time of day.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ asked Mr Maggiani.

  ‘It’s an old, old story,’ Mr Flood said. ‘I’ve heard it told sixteen different ways. I even heard a muxed-up version one night years ago in a vaudeville show. I’ll tell it the way my daddy used to tell it. There was an old farmer lived beside a little branch-line railroad in south Jersey, and every so often he’d get on the train and go over to Trenton and buy himself a crock of applejack. He’d buy it right at the distillery door, the old Bossert & Stockton Apple Brandy Distillery, and save himself a penny or two. One morning he went to Trenton and bought his crock, and that afternoon he got on the train for the trip home. Just as the train pulled out, he took his watch from his vest pocket, a fine gold watch in a fancy hunting case, and he looked at it, and then he snapped it shut and put it back in his pocket. And there was a drummer sitting across the aisle. This drummer leaned over and said, “Friend, what time is it?” The farmer took a look at him and said, “Won’t tell you.” The drummer thought he was hard of hearing and spoke louder. “Friend,” he shouted out, “what time is it?” “Won’t tell you,” said the farmer. The drummer thought a moment and then he said, “Friend, all I asked was the time of day. It don’t cost anything to tell the time of day.” “Won’t tell you,” said the farmer. “Well, look here, for the Lord’s sake,” said the drummer, “why won’t you tell me the time of day?” “If I was to tell you the time of day,” the farmer said, “we’d get into a conversation, and I got a crock of spirits down on the floor between my feet, and in a minute I’m going to take a drink, and if we were having a conversation I’d ask you to take a drink with me, and you would, and presently I’d take another, and I’d ask you to do the same, and you would, and we’d get to drinking, and by and by the train’d pull up to the stop where I get off, and I’d ask you why don’t you get off and spend the afternoon with me, and you would, and we’d walk up to my house and sit on the front porch and drink and sing, and along about dark my old lady would come out and ask you to take supper with us, and you would, and after supper I’d ask if you’d care to drink some more, and you would, and it’d get to be real late and I’d ask you to spend the night in the spare room, and you would, and along about two o’clock in the morning I’d get up to go to the pump, and I’d pass my daughter’s room, and there you’d be, in there with my daughter, and I’d have to turn the bureau upside down and get out my pistol, and my old lady would have to get dressed and hitch up the horse and go down the road and get the preacher, and I don’t want no God-damned son-in-law who don’t own a watch.”’

  (1944)

  Mr Flood’s Party

  MR FLOOD WAS ninety-five years old on the twenty-seventh of July, 1945. Three evenings beforehand, on the twenty-fourth, he gave a birthday party in his room at the Hartford House. ‘I don’t believe in birthday parties never did but some do and I will have one this time to suit myself if it kills me,’ he wrote on a penny postal, inviting me. ‘Will be obliged to have it on the 24th as I promised my daughter Louise in South Norwalk I would be with her and my grandchildren and great grandchildren on my birthday itself. Couldn’t get out of it. And due to I can’t seem to find any pure Scotch whiskey any more it has got so it takes me two or three days to get over a toot. Louise is deadset against whiskey talk talk talk and I know better than to show up in South Norwalk with a katzenjammer. I will expect you. It will not be a big party just a few windbags from the fish market. Also Tom Bethea. He is an old old friend of my family. He is an undertaker. The party will start around six and it is immaterial to me when it stops. I am well and trust you are the same.’

  I walked up Peck Slip around six-thirty on the evening of the twenty-fourth, and the peace and mystery of midnight was already over everything; work begins long before daybreak in the fish market and ends in the middle of the afternoon. There wasn’t a human being in sight, or an automobile. The old pink-brick fish houses on both sides of the Slip had been shuttered and locked, the sidewalks had been flushed, and there were easily two hundred gulls from the harbor walking around in the gutters, hunting for fish scraps. The gulls came right up to the Hartford’s stoop. They were big gulls and they were hungry and anxious and as dirty as buzzards. Also, in the quiet street, they were spooky. I stood on the stoop and watched them for a few minutes, and then I went into the hotel’s combined lobby and barroom. Gus Trein, the manager, was back of the bar. There were no customers and he was working on his books; he had two ledgers and a spindle of bills before him. I asked if Mr Flood was upstairs. ‘He is,’ said Mr Trein, ‘what’s left of him. Are you going to his party?’ I said I was. ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘hold your hat. He was in and out all afternoon, toting things up to his room, and he had three bottles of whiskey one trip. The last time he came in, hal
f an hour ago, Birdy Treppel was with him – the old fishwife from the Slip. He had a smoked eel about a yard long in one hand and a box of cigars in the other, and he was singing “Down, Down Among the Dead Men,” and Birdy had him by the elbow, helping him up the stairs.’

  One of Mr Flood’s closest friends, Matthew T. Cusack, was sitting on the bottom of the stairs in the rear of the lobby. He had one shoe off and was prizing a tack out of it with his pocketknife. Mr Cusack is a portly, white-haired old Irish-American, a retired New York City policeman. He is a watchman for the Fulton Market Fishmongers Association; he sits all night in a sprung swivel chair beside a window in a shack on the fish pier. In the last six or seven months, Mr Cusack’s personality has undergone an extraordinary change. He was once a hearty man. He laughed a lot and he was a big eater and straight-whiskey drinker. He had a habit of remarking to bartenders that he didn’t see any sense in mixing whiskey with water, since the whiskey was already wet. At a clambake for marketmen and their families in East Islip, in the summer of 1944, he ate three hundred and sixty-six Great South Bay quahogs, one for every day in the year (it was a leap year), and put four rock-broiled lobsters on top of them. He has a deep chest and a good baritone, and at market gatherings he always stood up and sang ‘The Broken Home,’ ‘Frivolous Sal,’ and ‘Just Fill Me One Glass More.’ In recent months, however, he has been gloomy and irritable and pious; he is worried about his health and believes that he may have a heart attack at any moment and drop dead. He was in vigorous health until last Christmas, when the Fishery Council, the market’s chamber of commerce, gave him a present, a radio for his shack. Aside from listening in barrooms to broadcasts of championship prizefights, Mr Cusack had never before paid any attention to the radio, but he soon got to be a fan. He got so he would keep his radio on all night. A program he especially likes is sponsored by a company that sells a medicine for the acid indigestion. Around the middle of February, he developed the acid indigestion and began to take this medicine. Then, one morning in March, on his way home from the market, he was troubled by what he describes as ‘a general run-down feeling.’ At first he took it for granted that this was caused by the acid indigestion, but that night, while listening to a radio health chat, he came to the conclusion that he had a heart condition. He is fascinated by health chats; they make him uneasy, but he dials them in from stations all over the country. He got over the rundown feeling but continued to brood about his heart. He went to a specialist, who made a series of cardiograms and told him that he was in good shape for a man of his age and weight. He is still apprehensive. He says he suspects he has a rare condition that can’t be detected by the cardiograph. He never smiles, he has a frightened stare, and his face is set and gray. He walks slowly, inching along with an almost effortless shuffle, to avoid straining his heart muscles. When he is not at work, he spends most of the time lying flat on his back in bed with his feet propped up higher than his head. He takes vitamin tablets, a kind that is activated and mineralized. Also, twice a day, he takes a medicine that is guaranteed to alkalize the system. The officials of the Council are sorry they gave him the radio. Edmond Irwin, the executive secretary, ran into him on the pier a while back and told him so. ‘Why, what in the world are you talking about?’ Mr Cusack asked. ‘That radio probably saved my life. If it wasn’t for that radio, I might’ve dropped dead already. I didn’t start taking care of myself until those health chats woke me up to the danger I was in.’