Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics)

by Joseph Mitchell

  All the time Mr Flood had been preparing the urchins, Mr Cusack had been staring at Mr Bethea. Finally he spoke up. ‘I hope you won’t think I’m prying into your affairs, Mr Bethea,’ he said, ‘but there’s two questions I’d like to ask you.’

  Mr Bethea stopped eating for a moment. ‘It’ll be a privilege to answer them, Mr Cusack,’ he said, ‘if they ain’t too personal.’

  ‘What I was wondering about is your line of work,’ Mr Cusack said. ‘How in the world does a man ever come to take up that particular line of work?’

  ‘Well, I tell you,’ said Mr Bethea, ‘most of the embalmers of my generation started out as something else. Some were barbers and some were carpenters. I was a carpenter myself, a carpenter and cabinetmaker, and back in 1908 I took a job with Cantrell Brothers & Bishop, on Little West Twelfth Street. That was a coffin factory – what we call a casket factory. I built high-quality caskets for a year and a half, and you know how it is – an up-and-coming young man, you want to make something out of yourself. Every casket factory has a staff of embalmers, and I kept my eyes open when our staff was working and I asked questions and naturally I was handy with tools and the upshot was, I became an embalmer. I’m a trade embalmer, a free lance. We’re the aristocrats of the trade – that is, the profession. All the overhead we have is a telephone. There’s a multitude of undertaking parlors, little neighborhood affairs, that don’t get enough cases to employ a steady embalmer. They just have a parlor with a desk and a pot of palms and a statue of an angel and a casket catalogue. Oh, some will have a sample casket or two on the premises. And there’s seven or eight of these parlors, when they get a case, they telephone me. Wherever I go, I have to leave a number where I can be reached. And I get on the subway and I go and attend to the case and I collect my seventeen dollars – we got a union and that’s the union rate – and I go on home. That’s the end of the matter. I don’t have to console the bereaved and I don’t have to listen to the weeping and the wailing and I don’t have to fuss with the floral offerings. Of course, these days, like everybody else, embalmers go to college. I went to college myself some years back, just to brush up on the latest scientific advances. There’s two big colleges, the American Academy of Embalming and Mortuary Research on Lexington Avenue and the New York School of Embalming and Restorative Art on Fourth Avenue. They’re the Harvard and the Yale of the embalming world. The past few years women have been flocking into the profession. You take the American Academy – a third of their students are women. I don’t know. I may be old-timey, but the way I look at it, I just wouldn’t have no confidence in a lady embalmer.’ He paused and glanced at Mrs Treppel. ‘Present company excepted,’ he said.

  Mrs Treppel snorted. ‘If she puts her mind to it and works hard,’ she said, ‘I bet a woman can embalm as good as a man.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to be rude,’ said Mr Bethea. He took the Scotch bottle by the neck and poured a big gollop in his glass. ‘I’m a disappointed man, Mr Cusack,’ he continued. ‘If I had it to do all over again, I don’t know as I’d choose embalming as my life’s work. You don’t get the respect that’s due you. A doctor gets respect, a dentist gets respect, a veterinarian gets respect, but the average man, if he’s introduced to an embalmer, he giggles or he shudders, one or the other. Some of my brother embalmers don’t like to tell their profession to strangers. They’re close-mouthed. They keep to themselves. Not me. Deep down inside, I’m proud of my profession. I carry a kit, a satchel, my professional satchel, and it’s always been my dream to have my name printed on it. I can just see it – “THOMAS FOSTER BETHEA, LICENSED EMBALMER.” But I can’t do it. If I got on the subway, the people would edge away. I’d have the whole car to myself. The public don’t like to be reminded of death. It’s going on all around them – like the fellow said, it looks like it’s here to stay – but they want to keep it hid. We have to work like a thief in the night. I daresay there’s not a one of you that’s ever seen a deceased moved out of a New York apartment house or hotel. No, and you never will. We got ways.’ He smiled. ‘Oh, well,’ he said, ‘no matter how the public feels about embalmers, in the end some embalmer gets them all.’

  ‘You needn’t be so happy about it,’ said Mr Flood. ‘In the end, some embalmer’s going to get you, too.’

  ‘That’s the truth,’ said Mr Bethea. He sighed. ‘It’s a peculiar thing. I’m a veteran in my line. If you took all the deceased I’ve attended to and stood them shoulder to shoulder, they’d make a picket fence from here to Pittsburgh, both sides of the road. With all that in back of me, you’d think I wouldn’t mind death. Oh, but I do! Every time I think about it in connection with myself, I tremble all over. What was that other question you wanted to ask, Mr Cusack?’

  ‘I wanted to ask, do you believe in a reward beyond the grave,’ said Mr Cusack. ‘By that, I mean heaven or hell.’

  ‘No, sir,’ said Mr Bethea, ‘I can’t say that I do.’

  ‘Well, then,’ said Mr Flood, ‘what makes you go to church so steady? You’re there every Sunday in the year, Sunday school and sermon.’

  ‘Hugh,’ said Mr Bethea, ‘it don’t pay to be too cock-sure.’

  The turn of the conversation made me restless and I went over and sat on the window sill, with my plate in my lap, and looked out over the rooftops of the market. It was a full-moon night. There was a wind from the harbor and it blew the heady, blood-quickening, sensual smell of the market into the room. The Fulton Market smell is a commingling of smells. I tried to take it apart. I could distinguish the reek of the ancient fish and oyster houses, and the exhalations of the harbor. And I could distinguish the smell of tar, a smell that came from an attic on South Street, the net loft of a fishing-boat supply house, where trawler nets that have been dipped in tar vats are hung beside open windows to drain and dry. And I could distinguish the oakwoody smell of smoke from the stack of a loft on Beekman Street in which finnan haddies are cured; the furnace of this loft burns white-oak and hickory shavings and sawdust. And tangled in these smells were still other smells – the acrid smoke from the stacks of the row of coffee-roasting plants on Front Street, and the pungent smoke from the stack of the Purity Spice Mill on Dover Street, and the smell of rawhides from The Swamp, the tannery district, which adjoins the market on the north. Mr Cusack came over and took a look out the window. He returned immediately to his chair.

  ‘I’m thankful to God I’m not an officer walking the streets tonight,’ he said.

  ‘Why’s that, Matty?’ asked Mr Flood.

  ‘It’s a full-moon night,’ said Mr Cusack. ‘There’ll be peculiar things happening all over town. It’s well known in the Police Department that a full-moon night stirs up trouble. It stirs up people’s blood and brings out all the meanness and craziness in them, and it creates all manner of problems for policemen. A man or woman who’s ordinarily twenty-five per cent batty, when the moon is full they’re one hundred per cent batty. A full moon has a pull to it. Look at the tide; the tide is highest on a full moon. The moon pulls people this way and that way. With some, it’s a feeble pull; they don’t hardly notice it. Others just can’t resist; they don’t know what’s got hold of them. They act peculiar. They act like bashi-bazouks. They pick on their wives and they get drunk and they insult people twice their size and they do their best to get into serious trouble. They look at black and say it’s white, and if you don’t agree it’s white they hit you on the head. In the Department, we call such people full-mooners. It’s been my experience that they’re particularly numerous among the Irish and the Scandinavians and the people who come up here from the South. On a full-moon night the saloons are like magnets. The full-mooners try to walk past them and they get drawn right in.’

  ‘That explains a lot to me,’ said Mr Flood. ‘I must be a full-mooner. I’ve started home many a night with no intention in the world of stopping off. It was the last thing in my mind. And four A.M. would come, and there I’d be, holding on to some bar, and I wouldn’t half know how I got there
.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Mr Cusack. ‘Some full-mooners get drunk and some get delusions. The Department is well aware of this. There’s a glassed-in booth down in the lobby of Headquarters, the information booth. They have a calendar hanging in there, and they always have a red circle drawn around the date of the full moon. That’s to remind the officer on duty what’s ahead of him. I had an accident when I was in the Department, broke my leg, and I was a year and a half convalescing, and most of that time they had me on night duty in the information booth. And every full-moon night, I had visitors from all over. The full-mooners’d come trooping in. They’d step up and ask to see the Commissioner; nobody else would do. There was one who always came at midnight; he never missed. He’d ask for the Commissioner and I’d say, ‘Lean over, sir, and whisper it to me. You can trust me.’ And he’d lean over and whisper, ‘They’re after me!’ And I’d get out my pad and pencil and ask for the details. And he’d talk on and on and on, and I’d take it all down. And I’d tell him, ‘Rest assured the proper steps will be taken.’ That’d satisfy him. He’d go away and I’d tear up whatever it was I took down and I’d throw it in the wastebasket.’ Mr Cusack laughed. ‘Next full moon, he’d be back again.’

  ‘Mr Cusack,’ said Mr Bethea, ‘I recall a talk I had some years ago with an old gentlemen who works for one of the big cemeteries in Brooklyn, a foreman gravedigger. He said that a grave dug around the time of the new moon, the dirt that comes out of it won’t fill it up. It’ll have a sunk-in look. Whereas, a grave dug around the time of the full moon, there’ll be plenty of dirt left over; you can make a nice mound on top. Another fact he told me, he said that women’s bosoms get bigger during the time of the full moon. Did you know that?’

  ‘No, I didn’t, Mr Bethea,’ said Mr Cusack. ‘I’m glad you brought it up. While we’re on the subject, I recall a case I was personally mixed-up in that might be of considerable interest to a man in your line.’

  ‘What was that?’ asked Mr Bethea.

  ‘It happened in 1932, the year before I retired from the Department,’ said Mr Cusack. ‘At that time I was attached to the First Precinct. One morning around four A.M. I was patrolling on South Street, proceeding east, and a radio car pulled up and the driver-officer informed me they were looking for two lads that stole an empty hearse. It seems this big black hearse had been parked in front of a garage on Third Avenue in the Sixties, the Nineteenth Precinct. The lads stole it and proceeded south on Third. Just ahead of them was a Daily News truck, delivering bundles of Daily Newses to newsstands. You know the way they operate; they pull up to a corner where there’s a stand and heave a bundle out on the sidewalk. At that hour a good many stands haven’t opened, and the bundle lies there until the man that runs the stand comes to work. The lads in the hearse conceived the idea of collecting these bundles. The hearse would pull up and one lad would leap out, grab a bundle, and heave it in the hearse. They went from stand to stand, doing this. Headquarters was soon getting calls from all over, people that saw them, and it was put on the police radio. The hearse was last seen on lower Broadway, heading for the Battery. I told the driver-officer I hadn’t observed no hearse, but I got on the running board and went along to help search the South Street docks. We hadn’t gone three blocks before we ran into them. They had the hearse backed up to the river, right beside the Porto Rico Line dock, and they were heaving the bundles of Daily Newses in the water.’

  ‘That was the right place for them,’ said Mr Flood.

  At this moment, Mr Trein, the manager of the Hartford, began to shout up the stairwell. ‘Is Mr T. F. Bethea up there?’ he shouted.

  Mr Bethea went to the door. ‘That’s me,’ he said.

  ‘You’re wanted on the telephone,’ said Mr Trein.

  ‘I’ll be right down,’ said Mr Bethea. Then he turned to Mr Cusack. ‘Please go right ahead, Mr Cusack,’ he said. ‘They’ll hold on.’

  ‘I jumped off the running board of the radio car,’ continued Mr Cusack, ‘and began to interrogate the lads. “What are you lads doing?” I asked. One of them, the littlest, heaved another bundle in the drink, and he said to me, “We’re having some fun. What’s it to you?” I asked them didn’t they like newspapers, and they said they liked them all right. So I asked them what in hell was they heaving them bundles in the water for. They said they be damned if they knew. I asked was they drunk, and they said they wasn’t. Maybe a beer or two. I asked was they narcotic addicts, and they said they wasn’t. So I turned to the driver-officer, and I said, “It looks to me they’re Reds, or I.W.W.s, or Black Hands. All those radicals,” I said, “are opposed to newspapers, the free press, and all like that.” And the driver-officer said to me, “You sure are a thick one.” He jerked his thumb upwards, and I looked up and there was a full moon up there. It was as round as a basketball, and it was so full it was brimming over. It was very embarrassing. I just wasn’t thinking. I should’ve known all along that those lads were fullmooners.’

  (1945)

  The Bottom of The Harbor

  Up in the Old Hotel

  EVERY NOW AND then, seeking to rid my mind of thoughts of death and doom, I get up early and go down to Fulton Fish Market. I usually arrive around five-thirty, and take a walk through the two huge open-fronted market sheds, the Old Market and the New Market, whose fronts rest on South Street and whose backs rest on piles in the East River. At that time, a little while before the trading begins, the stands in the sheds are heaped high and spilling over with forty to sixty kinds of finfish and shellfish from the East Coast, the West Coast, the Gulf Coast, and half a dozen foreign countries. The smoky riverbank dawn, the racket the fish-mongers make, the seaweedy smell, and the sight of this plentifulness always give me a feeling of well-being, and sometimes they elate me. I wander among the stands for an hour or so. Then I go into a cheerful market restaurant named Sloppy Louie’s and eat a big, inexpensive, invigorating breakfast – a kippered herring and scrambled eggs, or a shad-roe omelet, or split sea scallops and bacon, or some other breakfast specialty of the place.

  Sloppy Louie’s occupies the ground floor of an old building at 92 South Street, diagonally across the street from the sheds. This building faces the river and looks out on the slip between the Fulton Street fish pier and the Old Porto Rico Line dock. It is six floors high, and it has two windows to the floor. Like the majority of the older buildings in the market district, it is made of hand-molded Hudson River brick, a rosy-pink and relatively narrow kind that used to be turned out in Haverstraw and other kiln towns on the Hudson and sent down to the city in barges. It has an ornamented tin cornice and a slate-covered mansard roof. It is one of those handsome, symmetrical old East River waterfront buildings that have been allowed to dilapidate. The windows of its four upper floors have been boarded over for many years, a rain pipe that runs down the front of it is riddled with rust holes, and there are gaps here and there on its mansard where slates have slipped off. In the afternoons, after two or three, when the trading is over and the stands begin to close, some of the slimy, overfed gulls that scavenge in the market roost along its cornice, hunched up and gazing downward.

  I have been going to Sloppy Louie’s for nine or ten years, and the proprietor and I are old friends. His name is Louis Morino, and he is a contemplative and generous and worldly-wise man in his middle sixties. Louie is a North Italian. He was born in Recco, a fishing and bathing-beach village thirteen miles southeast of Genoa, on the Eastern Riviera. Recco is ancient; it dates back to the third century. Families in Genoa and Milan and Turin own villas in and around it, and go there in the summer. Some seasons, a few English and Americans show up. According to a row of colored-postcard views of it Scotch-taped to a mirror on the wall in back of Louie’s cash register, it is a village of steep streets and tall, square, whitewashed stone houses. The fronts of the houses are decorated with stenciled designs – madonnas, angels, flowers, fruit, and fish. The fish design is believed to protect against the evil eye and appears most often over d
oors and windows. Big, lush fig bushes grow in almost every yard. In the center of the village is an open-air market where fishermen and farmers sell their produce off plank-and-sawhorse counters. Louie’s father was a fisherman. His name was Giuseppe Morino, and he was called, in Genoese dialect, Beppe du Russu, or Joe the Redhead. ‘My family was one of the old fishing families in Recco that the priest used to tell us had been fishing along that coast since Roman times,’ Louie says. ‘We lived on a street named the Vico Saporito that was paved with broken-up sea shells and wound in and out and led down to the water. My father did a kind of fishing that’s called haul-seining over here, and he set lobster traps and jigged for squid and bobbed for octopuses. When the weather was right, he used to row out to an underwater cave he knew about and anchor over it and take a bob consisting of a long line with scraps of raw meat hung from it every foot or so and a stone on the end of it and drop it in the mouth of the cave, and the octopuses would shoot up out of the dark down there and swallow the meat scraps and that would hold them, and then my father would draw the bob up slow and steady and pull the octopuses loose from the meat scraps one by one and toss them in a tub in the boat. He’d bob up enough octopuses in a couple of hours to glut the market in Recco. This cave was full of octopuses; it was choked with them. He had found it, and he had the rights to it. The other fishermen didn’t go near it; they called it Beppe du Russu’s cave. In addition to fishing, he kept a rickety old bathhouse on the beach for the summer people. It stood on stilts, and I judge it had fifty to sixty rooms. We called it the Bagni Margherita. My mother ran a little buffet in connection with it.’