Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics)

by Joseph Mitchell

  ‘All through the eighties, and all through the nineties, and right on up to around 1910, that’s the way it was in Sandy Ground. Then the water went bad. The oystermen had known for a long time that the water in the Lower Bay was getting dirty, and they used to talk about it, and worry about it, but they didn’t have any idea how bad it was until around 1910, when reports began to circulate that cases of typhoid fever had been traced to the eating of Staten Island oysters. The oyster wholesalers in New York were the unseen powers in the Staten Island oyster business; they advanced the money to build boats and buy Southern seed stock. When the typhoid talk got started, most of them decided they didn’t want to risk their money any more, and the business went into a decline, and then, in 1916, the Department of Health stepped in and condemned the beds, and that was that. The men in Sandy Ground had to scratch around and look for something else to do, and it wasn’t easy. Mr George Ed Henman got a job working on a garbage wagon for the city, and Mr James McCoy became the janitor of a public school, and Mr Jacob Finney went to work as a porter on Ellis Island, and one did this and one did that. A lot of the life went out of the settlement, and a kind of don’t-care attitude set in. The church was especially hard hit. Many of the young men and women moved away, and several whole families, and the membership went down. The men who owned oyster sloops had been the main support of the church, and they began to give dimes where they used to give dollars. Steve Davis died, and it turned out nobody else knew how to roast an ox, so we had to give up the ox roasts. For some years, we put on clambakes instead, and then clams got too dear, and we had to give up the clambakes.

  ‘The way it is now, Sandy Ground is just a ghost of its former self. There’s a disproportionate number of old people. A good many of the big old rambling houses that used to be full of children, there’s only old men and old women living in them now. And you hardly ever see them. People don’t sit on their porches in Sandy Ground as much as they used to, even old people, and they don’t do much visiting. They sit inside, and keep to themselves, and listen to the radio or look at television. Also, in most of the families in Sandy Ground where the husband and wife are young or middle-aged, both of them go off to work. If there’s children, a grandmother or an old aunt or some other relative stays home and looks after them. And they have to travel good long distances to get to their work. The women mainly work in hospitals, such as Sea View, the big t.b. hospital way up in the middle of the island, and I hate to think of the time they put in riding those rattly old Staten Island buses and standing at bus stops in all kinds of weather. The men mainly work in construction, or in factories across the kill in New Jersey. You hear their cars starting up early in the morning, and you hear them coming in late at night. They make eighty, ninety, a hundred a week, and they take all the overtime work they can get; they have to, to pay for those big cars and refrigerators and television sets. Whenever something new comes out, if one family gets one, the others can’t rest until they get one too. And the only thing they pay cash for is candy bars. For all I know, they even buy them on the installment plan. It’ll all end in a mess one of these days. The church has gone way down. People say come Sunday they’re just too tired to stir. Most of the time, only a handful of the old reliables show up for Sunday-morning services, and we’ve completely given up Sunday-evening services. Oh, sometimes a wedding or a funeral will draw a crowd. As far as gardens, nobody in Sandy Ground plants a garden any more beyond some old woman might set out a few tomato plants and half the time she forgets about them and lets them wilt. As far as wild stuff, there’s plenty of huckleberries in the woods around here, high-bush and low-bush, and oceans of blackberries, and I even know where there’s some beach plums, but do you think anybody bothers with them? Oh, no!’

  Mr Hunter stood up. ‘I’ve rested long enough,’ he said. ‘Let’s go on over to the cemetery.’ He went down the back steps, and I followed him. He looked under the porch and brought out a grub hoe and handed it to me. ‘We may need this,’ he said. ‘You take it, if you don’t mind, and go on around to the front of the house. I’ll go back inside and lock up, and I’ll meet you out front in just a minute.’

  I went around to the front, and looked at the roses on the trellised bush beside the porch. They were lush pink roses. It was a hot afternoon, and when Mr Hunter came out, I was surprised to see that he had put on a jacket, and a double-breasted jacket at that. He had also put on a black necktie and a black felt hat. They were undoubtedly his Sunday clothes, and he looked stiff and solemn in them.

  ‘I was admiring your rosebush,’ I said.

  ‘It does all right,’ said Mr Hunter. ‘It’s an old bush. When it was getting a start, I buried bones from the table around the roots of it, the way the old Southern women used to do. Bones are the best fertilizer in the world for rosebushes.’ He took the hoe and put it across his shoulder, and we started up Bloomingdale Road. We walked in the road; there are no sidewalks in Sandy Ground.

  A little way up the road, we overtook an old man hobbling along on a cane. He and Mr Hunter spoke to each other, and Mr Hunter introduced me to him. ‘This is Mr William E. Brown,’ Mr Hunter said. ‘He’s one of the old Sandy Ground oystermen. He’s in his eighties, but he’s younger than me. How are you, Mr Brown?’

  ‘I’m just hanging by a thread,’ said Mr Brown.

  ‘Is it as bad as that?’ asked Mr Hunter

  ‘Oh, I’m all right,’ said Mr Brown, ‘only for this numbness in my legs, and I’ve got cataracts and can’t half see, and I had a dentist make me a set of teeth and he says they fit, but they don’t, they slip, and I had double pneumonia last winter and the doctor gave me some drugs that addled me. And I’m still addled.’

  ‘This is the first I’ve seen you in quite a while,’ said Mr Hunter.

  ‘I stay to myself,’ said Mr Brown. ‘I was never one to go to people’s houses. They talk and talk, and you listen, you bound to listen, and half of it ain’t true, and the next time they tell it, they say you said it.’

  ‘Well, nice to see you, Mr Brown,’ said Mr Hunter.

  ‘Nice to see you, Mr Hunter,’ said Mr Brown. ‘Where you going?’

  ‘Just taking a walk over to the cemetery,’ said Mr Hunter.

  ‘Well, you won’t get in any trouble over there,’ said Mr Brown.

  We resumed our walk.

  ‘Mr Brown came to Sandy Ground when he was a boy, the same as I did,’ Mr Hunter said. ‘He was born in Brooklyn, but his people were from the South.’

  ‘Were you born in the South, Mr Hunter?’ I asked.

  ‘No, I wasn’t,’ he said.

  His face became grave, and we walked past three or four houses before he said any more.

  ‘I wasn’t,’ he finally said. ‘My mother was. To tell you the truth, my mother was born in slavery. Her name was Martha, Martha Jennings, and she was born in the year 1849. Jennings was the name of the man who owned her. He was a big farmer in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. He also owned my mother’s mother, but he sold her when my mother was five years old, and my mother never saw or heard of her again. Her name was Hettie. We couldn’t ever get much out of my mother about slavery days. She didn’t like to talk about it, and she didn’t like for us to talk about it. “Let the dead bury the dead,” she used to say. Just before the Civil War, when my mother was eleven or twelve, the wife of the man who owned her went to Alexandria, Virginia, to spend the summer, and she took my mother along to attend to her children. Somehow or other, my mother got in with some people in Alexandria who helped her run away. Some antislavery people. She never said so in so many words, but I guess they put her on the Underground Railroad. Anyway, she wound up in what’s now Ossining, New York, only then it was called the village of Sing Sing, and by and by she married my father. His name was Henry Hunter, and he was a hired man on an apple farm just outside Sing Sing. She had fifteen children by him, but only three – me, my brother William, and a girl named Hettie – lived past the age of fourteen; most of them died when the
y were babies. My father died around 1879, 1880, somewhere in there. A few months after he died, a man named Ephraim Purnell rented a room in our house. Purnell was an oysterman from Sandy Ground. He was a son of old man Littleton Purnell, one of the original men from Snow Hill. He had got into some trouble in Prince’s Bay connected with stealing, and had been sent to Sing Sing Prison. After he served out his sentence, he decided he’d see if he could get a job in Sing Sing village and live there. My mother tried to help him, and ended up marrying him. He couldn’t get a job up there, nobody would have him, so he brought my mother and me and William and Hettie down here to Sandy Ground and he went back to oystering.’

  We turned off Bloomingdale Road and entered Crabtree Avenue, which is a narrow dirt road lined on one side with sassafras trees and on the other with a straggly privet hedge.

  ‘I didn’t like my stepfather,’ Mr Hunter continued. ‘I not only didn’t like him, I despised him. He was a drunkard, a sot, and he mistreated my mother. From the time we landed in Sandy Ground, as small as I was, my main object in life was to support myself. I didn’t want him supporting me. And I didn’t want to go into the oyster business, because he was in it. I worked for a farmer down the road a few years – one of the Sharrotts that Sharrott’s Road is named for. Then I cooked on a fishing boat. Then I became a hod carrier. Then something got into me, and I began to drink. I turned into a sot myself. After I had been drinking several years, I was standing in a grocery store in Rossville one day, and I saw my mother walk past outside on the street. I just caught a glimpse of her face through the store window as she walked past, and she didn’t know anybody was looking at her, and she had a horrible hopeless look on her face. A week or so later, I knocked off work in the middle of the day and bought a bottle of whiskey, the way I sometimes did, and I went out in the woods between Rossville and Sandy Ground and sat down on a rock, and I was about as low in my mind as a man can be; I knew what whiskey was doing to me, and yet I couldn’t stop drinking it. I tore the stamp off the bottle and pulled out the cork, and got ready to take a drink, and then I remembered the look on my mother’s face, and a peculiar thing happened. The best way I can explain it, my gorge rose. I got mad at myself, and I got mad at the world. Instead of taking a drink, I poured the whiskey on the ground and smashed the bottle on the rock, and stood up and walked out of the woods. And I never drank another drop. I wanted to many a time, many and many a time, but I tightened my jaw against myself, and I stood it off. When I look back, I don’t know how I did it, but I stood it off, I stood it off.’

  We walked on in silence for a few minutes, and then Mr Hunter sighed and said, ‘Ah, well!’

  ‘From being a hod carrier, I became a bricklayer,’ he continued, ‘but that wasn’t as good as it sounds; bricklayers didn’t make much in those days. And in 1896, when I was twenty-seven, I got married to my first wife. Her name was Celia Ann Finney, and she was the daughter of Mr Jacob Finney, one of the oystermen. She was considered the prettiest girl in Sandy Ground, and the situation I was in, she had turned down a well-to-do young oysterman to marry me, a fellow with a sloop, and I knew everybody thought she had made a big mistake and would live to regret it, and I vowed and determined I was going to give her more than he could’ve given her. I was a good bricklayer, and I was especially good at arching and vaulting, and when a contractor or a boss mason had a cesspool to be built, he usually put me to work on it. We didn’t have sewers down in this part of Staten Island, and still don’t, and there were plenty of cesspools to be built. So, in 1899 I borrrowed some money and went into business for myself, the business of building and cleaning cesspools. I made it my life-work. And I made good money, for around here. I built a good house for my wife, and I dressed her in the latest styles. I went up to New York once and bought her a dress for Easter that cost one hundred and six dollars; the six dollars was for alterations. And one Christmas I bought her a sealskin coat. And I bought pretty hats for her – velvet hats, straw hats, hats with feathers, hats with birds, hats with veils. And she appreciated everything I bought for her. “Oh, George,” she’d say, “you’ve gone too far this time. You’ve got to take it back.” “Take it back, nothing!” I’d say. When Victrolas came out, I bought her the biggest one in the store. And I think I can safely say we set the best table in Sandy Ground. I lived in peace and harmony with her for thirty-two years, and they were the best years of my life. She died in 1928. Cancer. Two years later I married a widow named Mrs Edith S. Cook. She died in 1938. They told me it was tumors, but it was cancer.’

  We came to a break in the privet hedge. Through the break I saw the white shapes of gravestones half-hidden in vines and scrub, and realized that we were at the entrance to the cemetery. ‘Here we are,’ said Mr Hunter. He stopped, and leaned on the handle of the hoe, and continued to talk.

  ‘I had one son by my first wife,’ he said. ‘We named him William Francis Hunter, and we called him Billy. When he grew up, Billy went into the business with me. I never urged him to, but he seemed to want to, it was his decision, and I remember how proud I was the first time I put it in the telephone book – George H. Hunter & Son. Billy did the best he could, I guess, but things never worked out right for him. He got married, but he lived apart from his wife, and he drank. When he first began to drink, I remembered my own troubles along that line, and I tried not to see it. I just looked the other way, and hoped and prayed he’d get hold of himself, but there came a time I couldn’t look the other way any more. I asked him to stop, and I begged him to stop, and I did all I could, went to doctors for advice, tried this, tried that, but he wouldn’t stop. It wasn’t exactly he wouldn’t stop, he couldn’t stop. A few years ago, his stomach began to bother him. He thought he had an ulcer, and he started drinking more than ever – said whiskey dulled the pain. I finally got him to go to the hospital, and it wasn’t any ulcer, it was cancer.’

  Mr Hunter took a wallet from his hip pocket. It was a large, old-fashioned wallet, the kind that fastens with a strap slipped through a loop. He opened it and brought out a folded white silk ribbon.

  ‘Billy died last summer,’ he continued. ‘After I had made the funeral arrangements, I went to the florist in Tottenville and ordered a floral wreath and picked out a nice wreath-ribbon to go on it. The florist knew me, and he knew Billy, and he made a very pretty wreath. The Sunday after Billy was buried, I walked over here to the cemetery to look at his grave, and the flowers on the wreath were all wilted and dead, but the ribbon was as pretty as ever, and I couldn’t bear to let it lay out in the rain and rot, so I took it off and saved it.’ He unfolded the ribbon and held it up. Across it, in gold letters, were two words. ‘BELOVED SON,’ they said.