Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics)

by Joseph Mitchell

  ‘Mr Still called his help together and inquired did anybody know who put the oysters in Sam’s feed bag. Finally one of the oyster shuckers confessed he did it. Said he just wanted to see what would happen. Said he’d been slipping them in for about a month. Said he’d go out on the pier, where Sam was hitched between hauls, and he’d make believe he was petting Sam, and he’d slip the oysters into Sam’s feed bag. Said he started with one oyster a day and worked up to where he was giving him four and five dozen a day. Mr Still was put out; at the same time, somehow, he was proud of Sam. He decided to fire the shucker and send Sam to hell and gone to New Jersey, but he changed his mind. What he did, he cut Sam down to one dozen oysters a day. That worked out all right. It wasn’t too few, it wasn’t too many. It was just enough to keep Sam brisk and frisky, but it wasn’t enough to make him cut up and do ugly. People would come from all over the market just to see Sam get his one dozen oysters. Everything was just fine until Christmas Eve. You know how it is on Christmas Eve; people get high-spirited. And you can just imagine how high-spirited they get around an oyster barge on Christmas Eve. When it came time to feed Sam, the fellows got generous and gave him six or seven dozen oysters, compliments of the season. And that night Woodrow was driving Sam back to the stable and Sam caught sight of a mare about three blocks up and he took out after her and there was ice on the street and he slipped and broke a leg and God knows they hated to do it, but they had to shoot him.’

  A glint came into Mr Bethea’s eyes. ‘Hugh,’ he said, ‘I was just thinking. Suppose you took and fed a race horse on oysters! I bet you could make a lot of money that way.’

  Mr Flood snickered. ‘Tom,’ he said, ‘there’s a certain race horse on the New York tracks right now that’s an oyster eater. He’s owned by an oysterman here in the market, but the way I understand it, just to throw people off that might possibly get thoughts in their head, he’s registered in the name of a distant cousin of this oysterman’s wife. He’s not much of a horse – no looks, no style; he only cost eleven hundred dollars – but he wins every race they want him to win. They don’t let him win every race he runs; that’d look peculiar.’

  I watched Mr Flood’s face. It was impassive.

  ‘They pick a day,’ he continued, ‘and two days in advance they start feeding him raw oysters or raw clams, according to season. They experimented and found he runs about as fast on clams as he does on oysters. They give him five dozen the first day, eight dozen the second day, and one dozen the morning of the race. He always comes through; you just get a bet down and think no more about it. I don’t know how many are in on it. I do know that this oysterman and all his friends are rolling in money. He was nice enough to let me and Birdy in on it. Whenever the horse is ready to run an oyster-fed race, we get notified, and naturally we’ve picked up a dollar or two ourselves.’

  ‘Hugh Griffin Flood!’ said Mrs Treppel. ‘I’m shocked and surprised at you. You were told about that horse in the strictest confidence. It’s a highly confidential matter, and you know you shouldn’t talk about it. Suppose it gets out. They’ll be stuffing all the race horses full of oysters, and then where’ll we be?’

  ‘I know, Birdy, I know,’ said Mr Flood. ‘I’m sorry. Anyhow, I didn’t tell the name of the horse.’

  ‘You keep your big mouth shut from now on,’ said Mrs Treppel.

  ‘Speaking of the old days,’ said Mr Bethea, ‘it seems to me businessmen were different in the old days. They had the milk of human kindness in them. Like George Still. Like the way he gave his dray horses a vacation.’

  ‘It’s the truth, Tom,’ said Mr Flood. ‘They weren’t always and eternally thinking of the almighty dollar.’

  ‘I was doing business in the old days,’ said Mrs Treppel, ‘and that’s something I never noticed.’

  ‘You always remember the bad, Birdy,’ said Mr Flood. ‘You never remember the good.’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ said Mrs Treppel. ‘Take for example, were you acquainted with A. C. Lowry that they called the finnan-haddie king?’

  ‘I was,’ said Mr Flood. ‘Old Gus Lowry.’ He nodded his head. ‘Gus was a fine man,’ he said, ‘a fine man.’

  ‘He was like hell,’ said Mrs Treppel. ‘He was the meanest man ever did business in this market. He was the lowest of the low.’

  ‘He was,’ said Mr Flood, reversing his judgment without batting an eye. ‘He was indeed.’

  ‘What form did his meanness take?’ asked Mr Bethea.

  ‘Well, to begin with,’ Mrs Treppel said, ‘you couldn’t trust him. You couldn’t trust his weights or his invoices or the condition of his fish, not that that was so highly unusual down here and not that people necessarily looked down on him for that. After all, this isn’t the New York Stock Exchange, where everybody is upright and honest and trustworthy, or so I have been told – this is the Fulton Fish Market. No, it wasn’t his crookedness, it was the way he conducted himself in general that turned people against him. He was stingy. He believed everybody was stealing from him. He treated his help in such a way they didn’t know if they were going or coming. And he grumbled about this and he complained about that from morning to night; everything he et disagreed with him. I worked for him once – he had a fresh-water branch on the Slip around 1916 and I had charge of it. I worked for him a year and a half and it aged me before my time; when I took that job I was just a girl and when I gave it up I was an old, old woman. Gus was into everything. He did a general salt-water business. He owned a trawler. He handled Staten Island oysters and guaranteed they came from Norfolk, Virginia. And he had the biggest smoking loft in the market – eels, haddies, kippers, and bloaters. He was an old bachelor. He had a nephew keeping books for him, Charlie Titus, his sister’s son, and everybody was sorry for Charlie. It was understood that Charlie was to inherit the business, and God knows it was a good sound business, but the beating he took, we wondered if it was worth it. Charlie was real polite, Uncle this and Uncle that, but it didn’t do no good. Three or four times a year, at least, Gus would get it in his head that Charlie was falsifying the books. He’d see something in Charlie’s figures that didn’t look just right and it’d make him happy. “I’ve caught you now!” he’d say. “I’ve caught you now!” Then he’d grab the telephone and call in a firm of certified public accountants. Those damned C.P.A.s were in and out of the office all the time. They’d go over Charlie’s books and they’d try their best, but they couldn’t ever find anything wrong, and it’d make Gus so mad he’d put his head down on the desk and cry. “You low-down thief,” he’d say to Charlie, “you’re stealing from me, and I know you are. You got some secret way of doing it. My own flesh and blood, and you’re stealing every cent I got.” Charlie would say, “Now, Uncle Gus, that’s just not so,” and Gus would say, “Shut up!” And Charlie would shut up. I remember one morning Gus was having his coffee at the round table in Sweet’s, and there was a crowd of us sitting there, four or five fishmongers and some of the shellfish gang, and Charlie came running up the stairs and asked Gus a question about a bill of lading, and Gus hauled off and shied a plate at him. “Get out of here, you embezzler!” he said. “When I want you,” he said, “I’ll send for you.” Right before everybody.

  ‘Another thing about Gus, he tried to look poor. He tried to look like he didn’t have a dime to his name. There’s an old notion in Fulton Market: if you want to know a fishmonger’s financial standing, don’t bother Dun & Bradstreet, just look at him – if he looks like he’s been rolling around in some gutter, his credit is good; if he’s all dolled up, stay away from him. Gus Lowry carried that to an extreme. As soon as he got to his office in the morning, he’d hang his good suit in a locker and he’d put on a greasy old raggedy suit that was out at the elbow and patched in the seat and a coupla sizes too small for him to begin with, and he used a piece of rope he’d picked up somewhere for a belt, and he’d put on a pair of knee boots that always had fish scales sticking to them, and he’d slap on a hat that was so dirt
y you wouldn’t carry bait in it. He wouldn’t wear a necktie; some days he wouldn’t even wear a shirt. He’d light a cigar, one of those cheap Italian cigars that they call rattails. He’d spit on the floor. Then he’d sit down at his desk, looking like something the cat dragged in, the King of the Bums, and he’d be ready for business.

  ‘And if you had to do business with him, you just took it for granted you’d be skinned. He’d skin you alive and then he’d shake your hand and inquire about your family. Up on his office wall he had a sign which said, “KEEP SMILING,” but he never smiled. And he had a sign which said, “All that I am or hope to be I owe to my angel mother.” And he had poems about the flag stuck up there and friendship and only God can make a tree and let me live in a house by the side of the road and be a friend to man. He’d recite you one of those poems – you couldn’t stop him – and he’d begin to cry. Gus liked to cry. He really enjoyed it. Next to doing something mean to somebody, he liked to cry. I went in his office many a time and found him sitting there with tears in his eyes. People said it was second childhood, but when it come to a dollar he wasn’t in his second childhood. The strangest thing, when he was close to eighty he started going to see a woman that lived in a hotel up on Union Square, and everybody hoped and prayed she’d get him into a lot of trouble. She was an old busted-down actress of some kind, a singer. She’d sing and he’d cry; that was his idea of a high old time. He took me up there with him once to call on her. He wanted me to look her over and tell him what I thought of her, about like he’d ask my opinion on a consignment of jack shad. We hadn’t hardly got in the door before she commenced to bang on the piano and sing. Oh, she was a noisy one. Gus asked her to sing “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen,” and by the time she got to “the ocean wild and wide” he was crying. He hung around her a year or more and then he quit. I guess maybe the poor old thing tried to borrow a dollar and seventy-five cents off him and it broke his heart.

  ‘The summer of 1921, Gus took a trip to Havana, Cuba, doctor’s orders, and one morning there came a cable he was dead. Bright’s disease. As soon as the news got out it put everybody in a good humor. Some tried to act like they were sorry, but they couldn’t keep a straight face, and pretty soon the fellows all over the market were slapping each other on the back and laughing and old Mr Unger that kept the stall next to mine shouted out, “Hooray for the Bright’s disease!” Everybody was so glad for Charlie. Captain Oscar Doxsee had worked for Gus off and on for thirty years – he was captain of Gus’s trawler – and I remember what he said when they told him Gus was dead. “God is good,” he said. It was prohibition, but little Archie Ennis the scallop dealer had a quart of whiskey in his safe, bourbon, and he got it out and him and I and Captain Oscar and several others went over to Charlie’s office to congratulate him. We figured a little celebration was in order. Well, what do you know? Charlie was sitting in there with his head in his hands. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said to us, “this is the saddest day of my life.” Oh, oh, oh, we were disgusted! I’ve seen many and many a disgusting thing in my time, but that took the prize. “Young man,” I thought to myself, “the opinion your uncle had of you, he was right.”’

  Mr Bethea grunted. ‘Blood is thicker than water,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Treppel, ‘I guess that’s one way of looking at it.’

  Mr Cusack came shuffling into the room. He’d finally made it.

  ‘Well, look who’s here,’ said Mrs Treppel. ‘Old Drop-Dead Matty himself. Hello, Matty. Didn’t you drop dead yet?’

  Mr Cusack disregarded her. ‘Happy birthday, Hugh,’ he said.

  ‘Why, thank you, Matty,’ said Mr Flood. ‘Matty, this is Tom Bethea. Tom’s an embalmer.’

  ‘A what?’ asked Mr Cusack.

  ‘I’m an embalmer,’ said Mr Bethea. ‘I’m a trade embalmer.’

  Mr Cusack stared at Mr Bethea for a few moments. ‘How do you do, sir?’ he said respectfully.

  ‘Please to meet you,’ said Mr Bethea. ‘I’ve heard Hugh speak of you. Sing us a song.’

  ‘Oh, no!’ said Mr Cusack. ‘I ain’t in a singing mood.’

  ‘It was good of you to come, Matty,’ said Mr Flood.

  ‘Yes, it was,’ said Mr Cusack. ‘I guess this is the last time I’ll ever come. I can’t stand those stairs no more. I’ve had some bad news. I was to the doctor for a checkup last Thursday and the way he diagnosed it, my heart’s some better but I got the high blood pressure.’

  ‘I got the high blood pressure, too,’ said Mr Fass.

  ‘I got it, too,’ said Mr Bethea. ‘Had it for years.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ said Mrs Treppel. She got to her feet and began to hop about the room. As she hopped, she sang a children’s street song, a rope-skipping song – ‘Oh, I hurt, I hurt, I hurt all over. I got a toothache, a gum boil, a bellyache, a pain in my right side, a pain in my left side, a pimple on my nose.’

  ‘Shut up, Birdy, and behave yourself,’ said Mr Flood. ‘Come over here, Matty, and sit down. What can I get you?’

  ‘You can get me a glass of cold water,’ said Mr Cusack. ‘I asked the doctor what about whiskey and he said it was the better part of wisdom to leave it alone. I haven’t had a drink for six days. All I drink is water.’

  ‘If you was to drink a glass of water, Matty,’ said Mrs Treppel, ‘it’d be weeks and weeks before your stomach got over the shock.’

  ‘Now look here, Birdy,’ Mr Flood said, ‘don’t talk to Matty that way. I won’t have it. The high blood pressure is a serious matter.’ He got up from his wicker rocking chair. ‘Here, Matty,’ he said, ‘take this chair. How do you feel tonight? Do you feel any worse than usual?’

  ‘I feel irritable,’ said Mr Cusack. He slapped the pillow in the chair a time or two and sat down. ‘It makes me irritable to see people drinking and enjoying themselves,’ he said. ‘If I can’t drink it, I don’t want nobody to drink it. I wish they’d bring prohibition back and I wish they’d enforce it. I got so I don’t approve of whiskey.’

  Mr Flood fixed himself a drink – half Scotch, half water, no ice – and went over and stood with an elbow on the mantelpiece. ‘I’m the same,’ he said. ‘I love it and I depend on it, but I don’t approve of it. When I think of all the trouble it’s caused me, I feel like I ought to pick some distillery at random and sue it for sixty-five million dollars. Still and all, there’ve been times if it hadn’t been for whiskey, I don’t know what would’ve become of me. It was either get drunk or throw the rope over the rafter. I’ve thought a lot about this matter over the years and I’ve come to the conclusion there’s two ways of looking at whiskey – it gives and it takes away, it lifts you up and it knocks you down, it hurts and it heals, it kills and it resurrects – but whichever way you look at it, I’m glad I’m not the man that invented it. That’s one thing I wouldn’t want on my soul.’ He suddenly snapped his fingers. ‘He’s the one!’ he said. ‘I was lying in bed the other night, couldn’t go to sleep, and I got to thinking about death and sin and hell and God, the way you do, and a question occurred to me, “I wonder what man committed the worst sin in the entire history of the human race.” The man that invented whiskey, he’s the one. When you stop and think of the mess and the monkey business and the fractured skulls and the commotion and the calamity and the stomach distress and the wife beating and the poor little children without any shoes and the howling and the hell raising he’s been responsible for down through the centuries – why, good God A’mighty! Whoever he was, they’ve probably got him put away in a special brimstone pit, the deepest, red-hottest pit in hell, the one the preachers tell about, the one without any bottom.’ He took a long drink. ‘And then again,’ he continued, ‘just as likely, he might’ve gone to heaven.’

  ‘The man that invented cellophane,’ said Mr Fass. ‘He’s the one.’

  Mr Cusack sighed. ‘I got to be careful what I eat, too,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, Matty, Matty,’ said Mrs Treppel, ‘please take a drink and cheer u
p.’

  ‘Leave me alone,’ said Mr Cusack. He glanced at his wristwatch, and then he peered into every corner of the room. ‘Where’s your radio, Hugh?’ he asked. ‘There’s a program coming on in five minutes I don’t want to miss.’

  ‘I got no radio,’ said Mr Flood.

  Mr Cusack looked disappointed. ‘You should get one,’ he said. ‘It’d do you a world of good. It’d be a comfort to you.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be no comfort to me,’ said Mr Flood. ‘I despise the radio. I can’t endure it. All that idiotic talk and noise, it goes right through me; it jars my nerves. Son,’ he said to me, ‘you sit on the bed and let me have your chair. I’ll open up some sea urchins and we’ll have a snack.’

  He got out a fish knife he carries in a holster and began preparing the sea urchins. He had three or four dozen full-grown ones, the biggest of which was about the size of a man’s clenched fist. Urchins are green, hemispherical marine animals. They are echinoderms; they are thickly covered with bristly prickles. They are gathered at low tide off rocky ledges on the southern Maine coast and shipped in bushel baskets. Fulton Market handles two hundred thousand pounds a summer, but they are rarely seen in restaurants. They are eaten in the home by Italians and Chinese; Italians call them rizzi, or sea eggs. Mr Flood cut the tops off ten. He had trouble knifing through the leathery rinds and he muttered to himself as he worked. ‘Sorry damned knife,’ he muttered. ‘Stainless steel. They don’t care if it’s sharp or not, just so it’s stainless, as if anybody gave a hoot about stains on a knife blade. I wish they’d leave knives alone, quit improving them. Look at it. Shiny. Stainless. Plastic handle. Only one thing wrong with it. It won’t cut.’ Each urchin had a pocket of orange roe, from two to five tablespoonfuls. Mr Flood spooned the roe out and spread it on slices of bread. Urchins are inexpensive, around fifty cents a dozen, but in Mr Flood’s opinion their roe is superior to caviar. He sprinkled lemon juice on the roe. Then he fixed six plates. On each he placed three open-faced roe sandwiches, a slice of eel, a herring, and a mound of pickled mussels. Mr Fass refused his plate. ‘Drinking makes me hungry,’ he said, ‘but it don’t make me that hungry.’