Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics) (51 page)

‘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, 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 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.’

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 sometimes 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.