Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics) (71 page)

Although Ellery puts in an appearance at Bindloss’s dock every weekday, usually before dawn, he seldom goes out on the grounds more than three days a week. Last year, he went out only a hundred and thirty days. Nevertheless, he shipped seventeen hundred and twenty-six barrels to Fulton Market, each holding approximately two hundred pounds of fish. There are boats that went out one-third again as many days and did not catch as much. Ellery ships to John Feeney, Inc., in Stall 13. Feeney’s is the company that once employed Alfred E. Smith as a basket boy. Ellery is not the kind of man who will talk about how much he makes. ‘That’s what’s known as
nobody
’s business,’ he says. On a fish dock, everybody knows everybody else’s business, and three of Ellery’s closest friends estimate he cleared six thousand dollars last year, maybe a thousand more, maybe a thousand less. His mate and his third man probably cleared between twenty-five hundred and three thousand each. Like all captain-owners in the Stonington fleet, Ellery works on shares with his crew under the forty-per-cent system; that is, at the end of each week, from the
Eleanor
’s earnings, less operating expenses (gasoline, oil, ice, and barrels), forty per cent is subtracted. This percentage, called the boat’s share, goes to Ellery; out of it, he pays for nets and gear, repairs, drydocking, insurance, taxes, and so on. The balance is split equally among Ellery, Muise, and Brayman.

Young draggermen regard Ellery with awe because of his frugality with gear. He once went a year and seven months without snagging a net. Unlike most draggermen, he doesn’t buy ready-made nets; he buys netting by the yard and makes his own. He gets the netting from George Wilcox, who runs a net loft on his farm in Quiambaug Cove, a crossroads village between Stonington and Mystic. There is a sign in this loft which reads,
‘NO CREDIT EXTENDED IN HERE UNLESS OVER 75 YRS OF AGE & ACCOMPANIED BY GRANDPARENTS.’
‘I’m related to George,’ Ellery says. ‘I guess we’re cousins. My grandmother on Pa’s side was a Wilcox. They’re a long-lived set of people. George is in his eighties and the Wilcoxes don’t hardly consider him full-grown; he’s got two brothers and a sister older than him. There was another brother, but he died some months ago. His name was Jess. Jess was ninety-three years old and getting on close to ninety-four, but he was still able to do a little light work around the farm. A few days before he died, he was breaking up some boulders with a sledge hammer, so he could use them in a stone fence. He had a blood blister on his left thumb he’d got shingling a roof and couldn’t use his left hand at all and he was swinging the sledge hammer with one arm and the boulders were great big ones and the job was taking him twice as long as it ordinarily would and it aggravated him. A pouring-down rain came up and he wouldn’t stop. He worked right through it and he got the pneumonia. The only reason he died, they took him to the hospital. Jess never slept good in a strange bed. Around midnight, he got up in the dark and
put
on his clothes, intending to slip downstairs and strike out for home, but he fell over something and broke his hip. The Wilcoxes used to operate a big fish-scrap factory on the Cove, the Wilcox Fertilizer Company. That’s the reason they’re so long-lived. The factory was just across the yard from the house and the prevailing wind blew the fish-scrap smell right into the house. This smell was so strong it killed all the germs in the air, and it was so rich it nourished you and preserved you. People in poor health for miles around learned about this and used to come in droves and sit all day on the porch, especially people with the asthma and the dropsy. Some days, there’d be so many sitting on the porch, getting the benefit of the smell, that it was quite a struggle for the Wilcoxes to get in and out of the house.’

Ellery is the most skillful and the most respected of the captains in the Stonington fleet, and he is also the least ambitious. His knowledge of the behavior of flounders is so acute that he could double his production without straining himself, but he doesn’t see any point in doing so. There are four reasons for this. First, he has rheumatism. Second, he is a self-taught oil painter. He prefers to paint when it is too stormy or foggy to drag, but if a painting looks as if it might turn out good, he will stay with it for days on end of perfect fishing weather. Third, he is an amateur oceanographer, a kind of unofficial member of the staff of the Bingham Oceanographic Laboratory at Yale University, and this takes up quite a lot of his time. Fourth, he lacks an itch for money. He makes a good living and considers that sufficient. He says he owns a boat, an automobile, a house and lot, seventy-five books, a trumpet, a straight razor, and a Sunday suit, and can’t think of anything else he particularly wants.

The way Ellery disposes of the lobsters he picks up in his net exemplifies his attitude toward money. There are lobsters in all the grounds dragged by the Stonington fleet. They are thickest in the Hell Hole, where swarms of them live in, under, and around the old shipwrecks that lie there. In the summer and fall, a few are caught in every drag. Now and then, a couple of bushels come up in a single haul, in among the fish. They bring high prices. The majority
wind
up in New York seafood restaurants as choice Maine lobsters; in these restaurants all lobsters, even those from Sheepshead Bay, come from Maine. All the captains except Ellery ship the young, combative, bronzy blue-green ones to Fulton Market and keep the culls and jumbos for their own tables. (The culls are those that have recently molted and whose new shells have not yet hardened, and those with one or both claws snapped off in fights or while mating. The jumbos are the sluggish, barnacle-incrusted, stringy-meated giants – old ones, who can be captured only in nets, since they have grown too big to go through the mouths of traps; the record for the fleet is a cock lobster that weighted twenty-two pounds and was fit only for salads and Newburgs.) Ellery does just the opposite. He selects the finest he catches and sets them aside for himself and his crew and ships the rest. ‘Let the rich eat the culls,’ he says. The third man in a three-handed fishing crew is supposed to do the cooking, but Ellery attends to most of it on the
Eleanor
; he is one of those who believe that to get a thing done right you have to do it yourself. He is a matchless lobster chef. He boils and he broils and he makes lobster chowder, but most often he boils. He puts a tub of fresh sea water on the little coal stove in the cabin and heats it until it spits. He wraps his lobsters in seaweed and drops them in, half a dozen in a batch, and times them with a rusty alarm clock that hangs from a cup hook on the underside of a shelf above the stove; after exactly fifteen minutes, he dips them out. He lets them cool slowly, so that the meat won’t shrink and become flavorless and rubbery, the common condition of cold boiled lobsters in restaurants, and then he heaps them on the cracked ice in the ice bin in the forward fish hold. He and his crew – Frank, the mate, and Charlie, the third man – reach in and get a lobster any time they feel like it. They eat them standing on deck. They smack them against the rail to crack the shells, pluck out the tail and claw meat, and chuck the rest overboard. One fall day, out on the Hell Hole, the three of them ate fourteen in between meals.

Ellery began to paint in the winter of 1930. At that time, he was sleeping aboard the
Eleanor
, at Bindloss’s dock in Stonington, going
home
to New London to see his mother only on Sundays. In school, in her teens, Mrs Thompson went to an art class, and several prim paintings of flowers she did still hang in her parlor. That winter, because she complained about being by herself so much, Ellery tried to reawaken this interest. In Brater’s, a small art-supplies store in New London, he bought some stretched canvases and a set of paints and brushes. ‘Ma tried, but she couldn’t somehow seem to pick up where she’d left off,’ Ellery says. ‘Her hands were too stiff. I had all that art gear laying around, and one Sunday afternoon I took a notion I’d paint me a picture. Ma gave me some directions and told me to start out with a rose, but I started out with the
Titanic
hitting the iceberg. I worked on it four Sundays. I didn’t have much trouble with the
Titanic
or the iceberg, but the poor souls bobbing around in the water like to drove me crazy.’ He called the painting ‘Nearer My God to Thee.’ His mother admired it; she had it framed and hung it in the parlor between two of hers and called the neighbors in. ‘To tell the truth,’ Ellery says, ‘that made me proud.’ He took the art gear to Stonington and began to spend off hours scrutinizing objects around the dock, getting the look of them in his head, and then doing paintings of them – a battered tin bucket, a clam rake, a scallop dredge with fragments of scallop shells sticking to it, a capstan, an anchor. A lobster buoy is a block of wood, most often two feet long, which is attached by a tarred rope to a lobster trap and which floats above it, marking its position. Buoys are painstakingly and sometimes beautifully whittled into a variety of shapes and are brightly painted, usually in stripes in three colors; each lobsterman has a different set of colors; like racing silks, they denote ownership. Some discarded and barnacle-speckled buoys heaped any old way on the dock caught Ellery’s eye and he did a painting of them. He did three paintings of animals – two fish-house cats hatefully eying each other at the mouth of an overturned bait barrel, a cormorant of a kind known locally as the black shag roosting on a mooring stake, a herd of rats scampering single file along the ridge of a breakwater in the moonlight. The breakwater rats are notorious around Stonington, and Ellery did a series of pencil sketches as well as the painting of them. They are wharf rats that migrated to
the
outer breakwater in Stonington harbor, where they nest in the riprap and grow enormous on dead fish washed up by the tide. Some draggermen keep a supply of rocks and brickbats aboard and, passing the breakwater on their way to and from the grounds, amuse themselves by harassing the rats. Presently, Ellery began using the
Eleanor
as his subject. He painted her in rough water with her net down, and he painted her with a haul of flounders dumped on her deck and a flock of gulls hovering above, and he painted her at Bindloss’s dock with her net drying in the wind and a red sun going down behind her. He worked meticulously, putting in every detail he could find room for. One of the pilothouse windows has a zigzag crack across it; he always put this crack in, with the identical zigs and zags. ‘I like to show everything,’ he says. ‘If I had my way, I’d show the nailheads in the planks and the knots in the ropes and the stitches in the flag, but Ma thinks that makes a picture look tacky.’ In about a year, he did sixteen paintings of the
Eleanor
.

One Sunday morning in August, 1931, Ellery put his most recent paintings in his automobile to take home and show his mother. He stopped at a filling station near Groton on U.S. 1A for a tank of gas, and the proprietor, an old acquaintance, saw them on the back seat and looked them over and asked if he could put one in his window. ‘“Why, hell yes,” I told him,’ Ellery says. ‘He picked one out, the biggest, and he figured there ought to be a price on it, make it look professional, so we cracked some jokes about that, and finally he stuck a sticker on it reading one hundred dollars. He laughed and I laughed. It wasn’t more than an hour and a half later he phoned me there was a party down there wanted to buy it, a man from New York who was building a summer home at Groton Long Point. He was planning a marine room and wanted some boat pictures for it. He took my address and drove to the house – he surprised me; didn’t look odd at all – and inquired did I have any others for sale. “Why, hell yes,” I said, and hauled them out. He took five, including the one that was in the window – three big and two small – and wrote me out a check for four hundred dollars.’

This windfall had a bad effect on Ellery. When he started his
next
painting, he found that he couldn’t get anything to look right. Halfway through, he gave it up and started another. ‘I know now what was wrong,’ he says. ‘Instead of painting a picture for the fun of it, just something to show to Ma and the fellows on the dock, I was trying to paint a picture worth one hundred dollars.’ After a number of false starts, he lost his confidence. He wrapped his art gear in a blanket and stowed it in the
Eleanor
’s spare bunk and didn’t paint any more for three years. In the summer of 1934, a Stonington captain bought a new dragger and asked Ellery to paint a picture of it. ‘What’ll you give me?’ Ellery asked. The captain offered a box of cigars. ‘Make it a quart of Scotch and throw in the cost of the canvas,’ Ellery told him, ‘and I’ll see what I can do.’ The captain agreed. Ellery got out a stretched canvas and propped it against a lobster trap on the dock and sat on another trap and went to work. ‘I was real fumbly at first,’ he says, ‘but I soon got my nerve back. Everybody around the dock dropped what they were doing and came and stood in back of me and told me how to do it, but I finished it that afternoon and it turned out good. The dragger was fresh off the ways, hadn’t even been shook down, but I put her out on the high seas, fighting a storm. That tickled the captain. When I got through, two other captains made arrangements with me to paint their boats.’

Since then, Ellery has painted between fifty and sixty draggers, trawlers, mackerel seiners, and lobster boats, and his price has advanced from a quart of Scotch to thirty-five dollars if the client is a Stonington man or seventy-five if he is a stranger. ‘I’m proud of my painting,’ Ellery says. ‘On the other hand, I’m sorry I ever started it. It’s hard to satisfy a fishing captain and it gets harder and harder. You not only have to paint his boat as accurate as a blueprint, you have to put it in a storm, a terrible storm. They all insist on that. Like a captain said the other day, “It’s a good painting, Ellery, only I wish you’d put in a bolt of lightning striking the mast.” Each wants a worse storm than the others. It’s got so if I was to paint a boat that looked as if there was a remote possibility it might make port, the captain would take offense.’ Except for his own work, Ellery doesn’t have much interest in painting. Once, when the
Eleanor
was laid up in Newport by engine trouble, he
and
Frank and Charlie spent an afternoon in Providence and visited the museum at the Rhode Island School of Design. They had on their fishing clothes and felt ill at ease and stayed only a few minutes. ‘We couldn’t get out of there fast enough,’ Ellery says. He sometimes seems to feel that his success as a painter is a joke he has played on the world. ‘Nearly about every fishing captain from Point Jude to New London has one of my paintings hung up in his home,’ Ellery says, ‘and every now and then, when I’m driving past those homes at night, I can’t help saying to myself, “Good God A’mighty! What have I done?”’ Other paintings by Ellery hang in net lofts, chandleries, dock offices, and dockside saloons in eastern Connecticut fishing ports. Most of these are of the
Eleanor
. Bindloss, the dock proprietor, owns six. There is a Thompson in Fulton Market. It is owned by Jim Coyne, general manager of John Feeney, Inc., the firm to which Ellery ships his fish, and it hangs in the Feeney stall in the old Fishmongers Association shed. Every summer, people from New York City, on vacation in and around Stonington, buy some of Ellery’s work. They never fail to inform him that he is a primitive. This word used to anger him. He now understands its significance in relation to painting, but he pretends that he doesn’t. Last summer, a woman from New York told him that she knew dozens of painters but he was the first primitive she’d ever met. ‘I’m not as primitive as I have been,’ Ellery said. ‘Nowheres near. Back before I got the rheumatism, I was without a doubt the most primitive man in eastern Connecticut.’