Old Mr. Flood (7 page)

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, half 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 run-down 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.”

I went on back to the rear of the lobby and spoke to Mr. Cusack, but he didn’t look up or answer. He had the stairs blocked or I would have gone on past him. After he got the tack out of his shoe, he stood up and grunted. His face was heavy with worry. We shook hands, and I asked him if he was going to Mr. Flood’s party or coming from it. “Going, God help me,” he said, “and I dread it. I feel like I ought to pay my respects to Hugh, but I dread the stairs. A poor old man in my condition, it’s taking my life in my hands.” The Hartford is five
floors high and it doesn’t have an elevator. Mr. Flood’s room is on the top floor. I stood aside and waited for Mr. Cusack to start up, but he said, “You go ahead. I’m going to take my time. It’ll take me half an hour and when I get to the top I’ll most likely drop dead.”

MR. FLOOD HAS A CORNER ROOM
, overlooking the Slip. The door was open. His room is usually in a mess and he had obviously had it straightened up for the party. There was a freshly ironed counterpane on his brass bed. His library had been neatly arranged on top of his tin, slatbound trunk; it consists of a Bible, a set of Mark Twain, and two thick United States Bureau of Fisheries reference books, “Fishes of the Gulf of Maine” and “Fishes of Chesapeake Bay.” His collection of sea shells and river shells had been laid out on the hearth of the boarded-up fireplace. Ordinarily, his books and shells are scattered all over the floor. On the marble mantelpiece were three small cast-iron statues—a bare-knuckle pug with his fists cocked, a running horse with its mane streaming, and an American eagle. These came off one of the magnificent fire escapes on the Dover
Street side of the old
Police Gazette
building, which is at Dover and Pearl, in the fish-market neighborhood. (Mr. Flood is sentimental about the stone and iron ornaments on many buildings down in the old city, and he thinks they should be preserved. He once wrote the Museum of the City of New York suggesting that the owners of the
Gazette
building be asked to donate the fire-escape ornaments to the Museum. “Suppose this bldg. is torn down,” he wrote. “All that beautiful iron work will disappear into scrap. If the owners do not see fit to donate, I am a retired house-wrecker and I could go there in the dead of night with a monkey-wrench and blow-torch and use my own discretion.”) Above the mantelpiece hung a lithograph of Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Thomas Rowlandson aquatint of some scuffling fishwives in Billingsgate that came off a calendar, and a framed beatitude:
“BLESSED IS THE MAN WHO DOES NOT BELLYACHE—ELBERT HUBBARD.”
In the middle of the room stood an ugly old marble-top table, the kind that has legs shaped like the claws of a dragon, each claw grasping a glass ball. There was a clutter on the table—a bottle of Scotch, a pitcher of water, a bucket of ice, a box of cigars, a
crock of pickled mussels, a jar of marinated herrings, a smoked eel, a wire basket of sea urchins, two loaves of Italian bread, some lemons, and a stack of plates. The sea urchins were wet and dripping.

There were four people sitting around the table—Mr. Flood, Mrs. Treppel, a salesman of fishing-boat hardware named Ben Fass, and an old man I had never seen before. Mrs. Treppel had Commodore, the Hartford’s big black cat, on her lap; she had given it the head of the eel. Mrs. Treppel was still in her market clothes. She wore a full-length coat-apron over her dress and she had on knee boots and a man’s stiff straw hat; this is the uniform of the boss fishmonger. The hat was on the side of her head. Mrs. Treppel is stout, red-cheeked, and good-natured. Even so, as a day wears on, she becomes quite quarrelsome; she says she quarrels just to keep her liver regulated. “Quarreling is the only exercise I take,” she says. She is a widow in her late sixties, she has worked in the market since she was a young woman, and she is greatly respected, especially by the old-timers; to them, she is the very embodiment of the primary, basic, fundamental Fulton Fish Market virtue—the ability to look after
Number One. “Birdy Treppel likes to run her mouth, and she sometime sounds a little foolish,” I once heard one old boss fishmonger say to another, “but don’t ever underestimate her. She could buy or sell half the people down here, including me.” Mrs. Treppel owns a couple of the old buildings on Peck Slip, she has money in a cooperage that builds boxes and barrels for the fish trade; she owns a share in a dragger, the
Betty Parker
, which runs out of Stonington, Connecticut; and she keeps a fresh-water stall on the Slip, dealing mainly in carp, whitefish, and pike, the species that are used in gefüllte fish. Mr. Fass is known in the market as Ben the Knifeman. He is slight, edgy, and sad-eyed, a disappointed man, and he blames all his troubles on cellophane. He says that he was ruined by cellophane, and he sometimes startles people by muttering, “Whoever he is, wherever he is, God damn the man that invented cellophane!” He once was a salesman for a sausage-casings broker in Gansevoort Market, selling sheep intestines to manufacturers of frankfurters. He enjoyed this work. Ten years ago many manufacturers began using cellophane instead of intestines for casings,
calling their product “skinless” frankfurters, and in 1937 Mr. Fass was laid off. He became an outside man for a Water Street fishing-boat supply house, which is owned by an uncle of his. Carrying samples in a suitcase, he goes aboard trawlers and draggers at the pier and sits down with the captains and takes orders for knives, honing steels, scalers, bait grinders, swordfish darts, fog bells, and similar hardware.

Mr. Fass and Mr. Flood are good friends, which is puzzling. Mr. Fass has no interest in boats, he dislikes the fish market, and he despises fish. He is outspoken about it; not long ago he lost one of his best customers by remarking that he would rather have one thin cut off a tough rib roast than all the fish God ever made. Mr. Flood, on the other hand, believes that people would be much better off in mind and body if they ate meat on Fridays and fish all the rest of the week. I have known Mr. Flood for nine years, but I found out only recently how he arrived at this conclusion. From 1885 until 1930, when he retired, the offices of his firm, the H. G. Flood Demolition & Salvage Co., Inc., were on Franklin Square, a couple of blocks from the fish
market. In the winter of 1885, soon after moving there, he observed that there was a predominance of elderly and aged men among the fishmongers. “I began to step up to these men and inquire about their ages,” he told me. “There were scores in their eighties and dozens in their nineties and spry old crocks that had hit a hundred weren’t rare at all. One morning I saw a fist fight between two men in their nineties. They slapped each other from one end of the pier to the other, and it was a better fight than many a fight I paid to see. Another morning I saw the fellows shaking hands with a man of eighty-seven and it turned out his wife had just had a baby boy. All these men were tough and happy and full of the old Adam, and all were big fish eaters, and I thought to myself, ‘Flood, no doubt about it, you have hit on a secret.’” Since that winter he has seldom eaten anything but seafood.

When I came into the room, Mr. Flood had just begun a song. He has a bullfrog bass, and he sang loudly and away off key. He had a highball in his left hand and a cigar in his right, and he kept time with the cigar as he sang:

I was quite sure that he would put in more “downs” than the song called for, and I counted them. There were eleven, and each was louder than the one before it:

Mr. Flood’s guests banged on the marble-top with their glasses, and he beamed. He was looking well. His friendly, villainous eyes were bright and his face was so tanned that the liver freckles on his cheeks didn’t show; he carries a blanket down to the pier and lies in the sun an hour or two on good afternoons. He had on a white linen suit and there was a red rosebud in his lapel. I tried to congratulate him on his birthday. He wouldn’t let me. “Thanks, my boy,” he said, “but it’s too early for that. I just got started. Wait’ll I hit a hundred.” He
turned to the stranger at the table. “This is Tom Bethea,” he said. “Tom’s an undertaker up in Chelsea, my old neighborhood. Tom’s wife and my second wife were great friends. We belong to the same Baptist church, only he goes and I don’t.” Mr. Bethea was roly-poly, moon-faced, and bald. His eyes were remarkably distrustful. He wore a blue serge suit that was so tight it made me uncomfortable to look at him. He had a glass about a third full of straight whiskey in one hand. With the other, he was plucking mussels out of the crock and popping them into his mouth as if they were peanuts. He seemed offended by Mr. Flood’s introduction. “I’m
not
an undertaker,” he said. “I’m an embalmer. I’ve told you that time and time again, and I do wish you’d get it straight.”