Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics) (6 page)

There are two cluttered shelves on one wall of her cage. On the bottom shelf are a glass jar of ‘jawbreakers,’ a kind of hard candy which she passes out to children, a clamshell that serves as an ashtray, a hind leg of a rabbit, a stack of paper towels, and a box of soap. When a bum with an exceptionally grimy face steps up to buy a ticket, Mazie places a couple of paper towels and a cake of soap before him and says, ‘Look, buddy, I’ll make a bargain with you. If you’ll take this and go in the gents’ room and wash your face, I’ll let you in free.’ Few bums are offended
by
this offer; most of them accept willingly. Occasionally she gives one fifteen cents and sends him to a barber college on Chatham Square for a shave and a haircut. If she is in a good humor, Mazie will admit a bum free without much argument. However, she says she can tell a bum by the look in his eyes, and ordinary citizens who have heard of her generosity and try to get passed in outrage her. ‘If you haven’t got any money,’ she tells such people, ‘go steal a watch.’

On Mazie’s top shelf is a pile of paper-backed books, which includes ‘Old Gipsy Nan’s Fortune Teller and Dream Book,’ ‘Prince Ali Five Star Dream Book,’ and ‘Madame Fu Futtam’s Spiritual Magical Dream Book.’ Mazie is deeply interested in dreams, although at times she seems a little ashamed of it. ‘A dream just means you et something that didn’t agree with you,’ she sometimes says, rather defiantly. Nevertheless, she makes a practice of remembering them and spends hours hunting through her books for satisfactory interpretations. Also on her top shelf are a rosary, some back numbers of a religious periodical called the
Messenger of the Sacred Heart
, and a worn copy of ‘Spiritual Reflections for Sisters,’ by the Reverend Charles J. Mullaly, S. J., which she borrowed from an Italian nun, one of the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians, who conduct a school in Chinatown. Lately Mazie has been reading a page of this book every day. She says that she understands hardly any of it but that reading it makes her feel good. Mazie is not a Catholic; she is Jewish, but she has been entranced by Roman Catholicism for many years. One of her oldest friends in the neighborhood is Monsignor William E. Cashin, rector of St Andrew’s, the little church back of the Municipal Building. She frequently shows up for the Night Workers’ Mass, which is said every Sunday at 2:30
A.M.
in St Andrew’s by Monsignor Cashin. She sits in a middle pew with her head bowed. Surrounded by policemen, firemen, scrubwomen, telephone girls, nurses, printers, and similar night workers who regularly attend the mass, she feels at home. On the way out she always slips a dollar bill into the poor box. Now and then she calls on the Monsignor and has a long talk with him, and whenever he takes a walk on the Bowery he pauses at her cage and passes the time of day.

Mazie also knows two mothers superior quite well. The rosary she keeps in her cage is a present from the Sisters of Our Lady of Christian Doctrine, who run Madonna House, a settlement on Cherry Street. Sister Margaret, the superior there, has known Mazie for years and has made an attempt to understand her. ‘On the Bowery it’s probably an asset to have a reputation for toughness,’ Sister Margaret once told a friend, ‘and I’m afraid Mazie tries to give people the worst possible impression of herself, just for self-protection. She isn’t really tough. At heart, she’s good and kind. We can always count on her for help. A few weeks ago there was a fire in an Italian tenement near here. One of the families in it had a new baby. It was late at night and we didn’t know exactly how to help them. Two of the sisters went to Mazie, and she came right down and found the family a new flat and gave the mother some money.’ Mazie’s favorite saint is St John Bosco. There is a statue of him in a niche in the steeple of the weatherbeaten Church of the Transfiguration in Chinatown. At night the saint can be clearly seen by the light of the galaxy of neon signs on the chop-suey joints which surround the church. When she passes through Mott Street, Mazie looks up at the saint and crosses herself. ‘I asked a sister once if it was O.K. for me to give myself a cross, and she told me it was,’ Mazie says.

Mazie became interested in Catholicism in the winter of 1920. A drug addict on Mulberry Street, a prostitute with two small daughters, came to her cage one night and asked for help. The woman said her children were starving. ‘I knew this babe was a junky,’ Mazie says, ‘and I followed her home just to see was she lying about her kids. She had two kids all right, and they were starving in this crummy little room. I tried to get everybody to do something – the cops, the Welfare, the so-called missions on the Bowery that the Methodists run or whatever to hell they are. But all these people said the girl was a junky. That excused them from lifting a hand. So I seen two nuns on the street, and they went up there with me. Between us, we got the woman straightened out. I liked the nuns. They seemed real human. Ever since then I been interested in the Cat’lic Church.’

Mazie does not spend much time at home, so she encourages people to visit her while she is working. Her visitors stand around
in
the lobby at the rear door of her cage. She frequently gets so interested in a caller that she swings completely around in her swivel chair and presents her back to customers, who have to shout and rap on the window before she will turn and sell them tickets. In the morning, practically all of her visitors are bums with hangovers who come to her, scratching themselves and twitching, and ask for money with which to get their first drinks of the day. She passes out dimes regularly to about twenty-five of these men. Because of this, she is disliked by many of the hard-shell evangelists who hold hymn-singings in the gutters of the Bowery every evening. One of them, a grim, elderly woman, came to the cage not long ago and shook a finger at Mazie. ‘We sacrifice our nights to come down here and encourage these unfortunates to turn over a new leaf,’ she said. ‘Then you give them money and they begin using intoxicants all over again.’ When Mazie is faced with such a situation, she makes irrelevant or vulgar remarks until the complainant leaves. On this occasion she leaned forward and said, ‘Par’n me, Madam, but it sounds like your guts are growling. What you need is a beer.’

Few of the men to whom Mazie gives money for eye-openers are companionable. They take her dimes with quivering fingers, mutter a word of thanks, and hurry off. Two of them, however, invariably linger a while. They have become close friends of Mazie’s. One is a courtly old Irishman named Pop, and the other is an addled, sardonic little man who says he is a poet and whom Mazie calls Eddie Guest. She says she likes Pop because he is so cheerful and Eddie Guest because he is so sad. ‘I come from a devout family of teetotallers,’ Pop once said. ‘They was thirteen in the family, and they called me the weakling because I got drunk on Saturday nights. Well, they’re all under the sod. Woodrow Wilson was President when the last one died, and I’m still here drinking good liquor and winking at the pretty girls.’ ‘That’s right, Pop,’ Mazie said. Pop works bus stops. He approaches people waiting on corners for a bus and asks for a nickel with which to get uptown or downtown, as the case may be. When he gets a nickel, he touches his hat and hurries off to the next bus stop. At night he sings ballads in Irish gin mills on Third Avenue. Mazie thinks he has a
beautiful
baritone, and every morning, in return for her dime, he favors her with two or three ballads. Her favorites – she hums them – are ‘Whiskey, You’re the Divil,’ ‘The Garden Where the Praties Grow,’ ‘Tiddly-Aye-Aye for the One-Eyed Reilly,’ and ‘The Widow McGinnis’s Pig.’ Sometimes Pop dances a jig on the tiled floor of the lobby. ‘Pop’s a better show than I got inside,’ Mazie says on these occasions.

Eddie Guest is a gloomy, defeated, ex-Greenwich Village poet who has been around the Bowery off and on for eight or nine years. He mutters poetry to himself constantly and is taken to Bellevue for observation about once a year. He carries all his possessions in a greasy beach bag and sleeps in flophouses, never staying in one two nights in succession, because, he says, he doesn’t want his enemies to know where he is. During the day he wanders in and out of various downtown branches of the Public Library. At the Venice one night he saw ‘The River,’ the moving picture in which the names of the tributaries of the Mississippi were made into a poem. When he came out, he stopped at Mazie’s cage, spread his arms, and recited the names of many of the walk-up hotels on the Bowery. ‘The Alabama Hotel, the Comet, and the Uncle Sam House,’ he said, in a declamatory voice, ‘the Dandy, the Defender, the Niagara, the Owl, the Victoria House and the Grand Windsor Hotel, the Houston, the Mascot, the Palace, the Progress, the Palma House and the White House Hotel, the Newport, the Crystal, the Lion and the Marathon. All flophouses. All on the Bowery. Each and all my home, sweet home.’ For some reason, Mazie thought this was extraordinarily funny. Now, each morning, in order to get a dime, Eddie Guest is obliged to recite this chant for her. It always causes her to slap her right thigh, throw her head back, and guffaw. Both Eddie Guest and Mazie can be grimly and rather pointlessly amused by the signs over flophouse entrances and by the bills of fare lettered in white on the windows of pig-snout restaurants. When Mazie passes the Victoria House and sees its sign,
‘ROOMS WITH ELECTRIC LIGHTS,
30
C,’
or when she looks at the window of the Greek’s on Chatham Square,
‘SNOUTS WITH FRENCH FRY POTS & COFFEE, T, OR BUTTERMILK,
10
C,’
she always snickers. Mazie has considerable respect for Eddie Guest but thinks he is kidding when
he
calls himself a poet. Once he read to her part of a completely unintelligible poem about civilization in the United States, on which he says he has been working for twenty years and which he calls ‘No Rags, No Bones, No Bottles Today.’ ‘If that’s a poem,’ Mazie said when he had finished, ‘I’m the Queen of Sweden.’

Mazie’s afternoon visitors are far more respectable than the morning ones. The people who stopped by to talk with her between noon and 6
P.M.
one Saturday included Monsignor Cashin, Fannie Hurst, two detectives from the Oak Street station, a flashily dressed young Chinese gambler whom Mazie calls Fu Manchu and who is a power in Tze Far, the Chinatown version of the numbers lottery; two nuns from Madonna House, who wanted to thank her for buying a phonograph for the girls’ club at their settlement; a talkative girl from Atlanta, Georgia, called Bingo, once a hostess in a Broadway taxi-dance hall and now the common-law wife of the chef of a chop-suey restaurant on Mott Street; the bartender of a Chatham Square saloon, who asked her to interpret a dream for him; and the clerk of a flophouse, who came to tell her that a bum named Tex had hanged himself in the washroom the night before. When she was told about Tex, Mazie nodded sagely and said, as she always does when she hears about the death of someone she has known, ‘Well, we all got to go sooner or later. You can’t live forever. When your number’s up, rich or poor, you got to go.’ Most of the visitors on that afternoon happened to be old friends of Mazie’s. Miss Hurst, for example, she has known for eleven years. She calls her Fannie and likes to tell about their first meeting.

‘One night,’ she says, ‘a swell-looking dame came to my cage and said she often took walks on the Bowery and would like to meet me. She said her name was Fannie Hurst. “Pleased to meet you, Fannie,” I said. “My name is Mary Pickford.” It turned out she really was Fannie Hurst. At first I thought she was going to put me in a book, and I didn’t go for her. Since she promised not to write no books about me, we been pals.’ Miss Hurst visits Mazie frequently. Each time she comes, Mazie looks at her dress, fingers the material, asks how much it cost, tells her she got gypped, and advises her to try one of the shops on Division Street. Miss Hurst does not mind this. ‘I admire Mazie,’ she said. ‘She is the most
compassionate
person I’ve ever known. No matter how filthy or drunk or evil-smelling a bum may be, she treats him as an equal.’ Until recently, Miss Hurst occasionally took friends down to meet Mazie. ‘I’m afraid they looked on her as just another Bowery curiosity,’ she says. ‘So I don’t take people down any more. I used to invite Mazie to parties at my house. She always accepted but never came. I think she’s still a little suspicious of me, although I’ve never written a line about her and never intend to. I simply look upon her as a friend.’

From callers like Fu Manchu and Bingo, Mazie hears considerable gossip about the sleazy underworld of Chinatown. She says she never repeats such gossip, not even to her sisters. Detectives know that she has many Chinese friends and sometimes stop at her cage and ask apparently innocent questions about them; she shrugs her shoulders and says, ‘No spik English.’ In general, however, she cooperates with the police. Drunken tourists often come down to Bowery joints to see life, and when she notices them stumbling around Chatham Square she telephones the Oak Street station. ‘Such dopes are always getting rolled by bums,’ she says. ‘I got no sympathy for out-of-towners, but bums are the clumsiest thieves in the world. They always get caught, and it’s best to get temptation out of their way.’ Although her language frequently shocks the Oak Street cops, they admire Mazie. Detective Kain, for instance, says that she has ‘the roughest tongue and the softest heart in the Third Precinct.’ ‘She knows this neighborhood like a farmer knows his farm,’ he says. ‘I believe she’s got the second sight. If anything out of the way is happening anywhere along the Bowery, she senses it.’

Detective Kain has for some time been trying to solve a mystery in which Mazie is involved. Mazie has a telephone in her booth, of course, and in June, 1929, a man whose voice she did not recognize began calling her daily at 5
P. M.,
asking for a date or making cryptic remarks, such as ‘They got the road closed, Mazie. They won’t let nobody through.’ After three months he stopped calling. Then, around Christmas of the following year, he began again. He has been calling intermittently ever since. ‘I won’t hear from him for maybe six months,’ Mazie says. ‘Then, one day around
five
, the phone will ring and this voice will say, “All the clocks have stopped running” or “Mazie, they cut down the big oak tree” or some other dopey remark. He never says more than a few words, and when I say something he hangs right up. One afternoon he gave me the shakes. He called up and said, “Mazie, I got a nephew studying to be an undertaker and he needs somebody to practice on.” Then he hung up. A minute later he called again and said, “You’ll do! You’ll do!” Somehow, I get to feeling he’s across the street in a booth. The worst thing is I suspect every stranger that buys a ticket. I strike up conversations with strangers just to see if I can find one who talks like him. I think he’s trying to drive me crazy.’ Among her friends, Mazie refers to her caller as The Man. If she has visitors around five o’clock and the telephone rings, she says, ‘Pick up the receiver and see what The Man has to say this time.’ Fannie Hurst once listened. ‘It was macabre,’ she said. Detective Kain has listened often, has warned the man, and has tried vainly to trace the calls. Mazie’s number has been changed repeatedly, but that does no good.