Old Mr. Flood

by Joseph Mitchell

  OLD MR. FLOOD

  BY

  JOSEPH MITCHELL

  WITH A FORWARD BY

  CHARLES MCGRATH

  ebook ISBN: 978-1-59692-979-1

  M P Publishing Limited

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  Copyright © 2005 by Joseph Mitchell

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Mitchell, Joseph, 1908-1996

  Old Mr. Flood / by Joseph Mitchell.

  Three short stories

  ISBN 1-59692-114-5 (alk. paper)

  1. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. 2. Older men—Fiction.

  3. Retirees—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3525.I9714O43 2005

  MPP 2010

  Book and jacket design by Dorothy Carico Smith, cover and author photograph by James Hamilton

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  For Jack and Sandra Mitchell

  Contents

  Foreword by Charles McGrath

  Author’s Note

  Chapter 1 - Old Mr. Flood

  Chapter 2 - The Black Clams

  Chapter 3 - Mr. Flood’s Party

  FOREWORD

  BY CHARLES MCGRATH

  BACK IN THE 1970’S, when all of Joseph Mitchell was out of print, you could with a little luck still come across a used copy of “McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon” or “The Bottom of the Harbor.” At one point I owned copies of both, but then foolishly lent them to friends, who are presumably still hoarding them, just like whoever it was who walked off with the New York Public Library’s sole copy of “Old Mr. Flood,” which today is still listed as “missing.” This present edition is the first I’ve ever set eyes on.

  The original “Mr. Flood” is the rarest of rarities, sort of like the mysterious black clams that Mr. Flood, who knows his seafood, is so high on-shellfish so unusual that few people have ever seen them, let alone eaten one. And to extend the analogy in a way that Mitchell, the least metaphorical of writers, never would, the book also resembles the black clam, the Arctica islandica, in being the best and most intense of its kind. This shortest of Mitchell’s books, barely over a hundred pages, is also the most Mitchellian, the one that in distilled and concentrated form sums up all the others. If your library were to contain only one Mitchell book, this should be it, and you should probably chain it down.

  I first read “Old Mr. Flood” the way most of us lucky enough to work at The New Yorker in the 70’s and 80’s did—in the original three magazine installments, which came out in 1944 and 1945. If you were a young person at the magazine then, reading “Mr. Flood” was a sort of rite of passage. Eventually, if you were lucky enough, some senior figure—Calvin Trillin, perhaps, or Philip Hamburger or William Maxwell—would decide that you weren’t completely hopeless, and suggest that you might want to look at some Mitchell.

  His work, like that of everyone else who had ever written for The New Yorker, was collected in a big black scrapbook, the original magazine columns cut out and pasted, family-album style, on large manila sheets that decades later still smelled of rubber cement. The scrapbooks were shelved alphabetically in the magazine’s library, the spines hand-lettered in white ink, and except perhaps for “Salinger, J. D.”, I doubt that any was more carefully pored over than “Mitchell, Joseph.” The pieces collected there were recognizably New Yorker-ish, in that they were stylish, meticulous, often surprising and offbeat, but they were also unlike anything else in that entire library. They were in a voice, at once classical and vernacular, that seemed to come out of nowhere (or maybe the part of nowhere that Twain also sprang from) and that none of Mitchell’s many admirers have ever come close to imitating. If Mitchell wasn’t the single best writer who ever appeared in The New Yorker, then it was a tie between him and E. B. White.

  What added to the mystery and allure of those scrapbooked Mitchell pieces, and especially of the “stories of fish-eating, whiskey, death, and rebirth” that make up “Old Mr. Flood,” was that the author himself, though he had famously not published for years, came into The New Yorker, where he had an office, all the time. A Mitchell sighting was a regular occasion but an exciting one all the same. Joe was formal and courtly: he wore a suit every day-—beautiful worsteds in fall and winter; seersucker when the weather was warm-and either a fedora or a straw hat. He was also shy and a little bit secretive. He once began a conversation with me by saying, “Don’t tell anyone, but I read something interesting in The Times today…”

  He was a famously good listener, who would nod his head repeatedly at no matter what you told him and say in his soft Tarheel accent, “Ah know, Ah know.” But if he felt comfortable and you got him on the right subject, he was also a brilliant and tireless talker. While blotting his head on a hot summer day in a New Yorker men’s room, he once astonished me by reeling off from memory entire poems by Elizabeth Bishop. On another occasion he explained to me the doctrinal differences between North Carolina Baptists and Methodists with all the zeal of a Zwingli or a Melancthon. This conversation also took place in the men’s room, and I was gone so long somebody came in to look for me. But in my experience his favorite subjects were his beloved “J.J.”—James Joyce, that is, whose work he read over and over—and the Fulton Fish Market, the setting, as it happens, of “Old Mr. Flood,” and the place where for some reason Joseph Mitchell, the son of a North Carolina tobacco farmer, may have felt most at home.

  Much has been made in recent years of the fact that “Old Mr. Flood” is partly fictional—that, as he wrote in the introduction to the book, “Mr. Flood is not one man” and that these stories, though “solidly based on facts,” are “truthful rather than factual.” In retrospect, it’s hard to understand why people at the time were so surprised. Nowadays, the title and the main character’s name are often taken, wrongly, to be an allusion to Edward Arlington Robinson’s famous poem “Mr. Flood’s Party.” (Mitchell later said that at the time of writing he had never read the poem, which makes it one of very few gaps in his literary knowledge.) But Flood is clearly a watery pseudonym nonetheless, and he shares a birthday—July 27—with the author himself. Flood is a composite, Mitchell says, but he is also an alter ego, who has countless things in common with his creator: love for the fish market, fondness for a drink every now and then, a habit of collecting stone and iron ornaments from old buildings, a ready ear for a good story, and, most of all, what Mitchell called a “graveyard sense of humor.”

  Flood, it’s not too much to say, is Mitchell as he sometimes imagined himself, truthfully if not altogether factually, and the world of the book is a kind of alternate universe—it’s the real, recognizable New York but enhanced a little, so that, for one thing, if you stick, like Mr. Flood, to a sensible diet of whiskey and fish, you really can hope to be a hundred and fifteen years old. The book ends, we should remember, under a full moon, when people, especially “the Irish and the Scandinavians and the people who come up here from the South,” get a little larky and delusional. The dream in this case is an almost Shakespearean one, in which life is transformed by the spell of storytelling.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  THESE STORIES OF FISH-EATING, whiskey, death, and rebirth first appeared in The Ne
w Yorker. Mr. Flood is not one man; combined in him are aspects of several old men who work or hang out in Fulton Fish Market, or who did in the past. I wanted these stories to be truthful rather than factual, but they are solidly based on facts. I am obliged to half the people in the market for helping me get these facts. I am much obliged to the following:

  Mrs. James Donald, proprietor; James Donald, head bartender; and Gus Trein, manager, of the Hartford House, 309 Pearl Street.

  Louis Morino, proprietor of Sloppy Louie’s Restaurant, 92 South Street.

  Drew Radel, president of the Andrew Radel Oyster Company, South Norwalk, Connecticut.

  The late Amos Chesebro, one of the founders of Chesebro Brothers, Robbins & Graham, Stalls 1, 2, and 3, Fulton Fish Market, and the late Matthew J. Graham, of the same firm. Mr. Chesebro died in December, 1946, lacking a few weeks of reaching the age of ninety-three.

  Joe Cantalupo, president of the Cantalupo Carting Company, 140 Beckman Street. Mr. Cantalupo is an antiquarian; he collects prints and photographs of old buildings in the fish-market district and environs. His company, which was founded by his father, Pasquale Cantalupo, sweeps and hoses down the market and carts the market trash—broken barrels and boxes, gurry, and discarded fish—to the city incinerators. His trucks are decorated with this sign:

  “A LOAD ON THIS TRUCK

  IS A LOAD OFF YOUR MIND.”

  F. Nelson Blount, president of the Narragansett Bay Packing Company, Warren, Rhode Island. Mr. Blount dredges black clams.

  OLD MR. FLOOD

  A TOUGH SCOTCH-IRISHMAN I KNOW, Mr. Hugh G. Flood, a retired house-wrecking contractor, aged ninety-three, often tells people that he is dead set and determined to live until the afternoon of July 27, 1965, when he will be a hundred and fifteen years old. “I don’t ask much here below,” he says. “I just want to hit a hundred and fifteen. That’ll hold me.” Mr. Flood is small and wizened. His eyes are watchful and icy-blue, and his face is red, bony, and clean-shaven. He is old-fashioned in appearance. As a rule, he wears a high, stiff collar, a candy-striped shirt, a serge suit, and a derby. A silver watch-chain hangs across his vest. He keeps a flower in his lapel. When I am in the Fulton Fish Market neighborhood, I always drop into the Hartford House, a drowsy waterfront hotel at 309 Pearl Street, where he has a room, to see if he is still alive.

  Many aged people reconcile themselves to the certainty of death and become tranquil; Mr. Flood is unreconcilable. There are three reasons for this. First, he deeply enjoys living. Second, he comes of a long line of Baptists and has a nagging fear of the hereafter, complicated by the fact that the descriptions of heaven in the Bible are as forbidding to him as those of hell. “I don’t really want to go to either one of those places,” he says. He broods about religion and reads a chapter of the Bible practically every day. Even so, he goes to church only on Easter. On that day he has several drinks of Scotch for breakfast and then gets in a cab and goes to a Baptist church in Chelsea. For at least a week thereafter he is gloomy and silent. “I’m a God-fearing man,” he says, “and I believe in Jesus Christ crucified, risen, and coming again, but one sermon a year is all I can stand.” Third, he is a diet theorist—he calls himself a seafoodetarian—and feels obliged to reach a spectacular age in order to prove his theory. He is convinced that the eating of meat and vegetables shortens life and he maintains that the only sensible food for man, particularly for a man who wants to hit a hundred and fifteen, is fish.

  To Mr. Flood, the flesh of finfish and shellfish is not only good to eat, it is an elixir. “When I get through tearing a lobster apart, or one of those tender West Coast octopuses,” he says, “I feel like I had a drink from the fountain of youth.” He eats with relish every kind of seafood, including sea-urchin eggs, blowfish tails, winkles, ink squids, and barn-door skates. He especially likes an ancient Boston breakfast dish—fried cod tongues, cheeks, and sounds, sounds being the gelatinous air bladders along the cod’s backbone. The more unusual a dish, the better he likes it. It makes him feel superior to eat something that most people would edge away from. He insists, however, on the plainest of cooking. In his opinion, there are only four first-class fish restaurants in the city—Sweet’s and Libby’s on Fulton Street, Gage & Tollner’s in Brooklyn, and Lundy’s in Sheepshead Bay—and even these, he says, are disinclined to let well enough alone. Consequently, he takes most of his meals in Sloppy Louie Morino’s, a busy-bee on South Street frequented almost entirely by wholesale fishmongers from Fulton Market, which is across the street. Customarily, when Mr. Flood is ready for lunch, he goes to the stall of one of the big wholesalers, a friend of his, and browses among the bins for half an hour or so. Finally he picks out a fish, or an eel, or a crab, or the wing of a skate, or whatever looks best that day, buys it, carries it unwrapped to Louie’s, and tells the chef precisely how he wants it cooked. Mr. Flood and the chef, a surly old Genoese, are close friends. “I’ve made quite a study of fish cooks,” Mr. Flood says, “and I’ve decided that old Italians are best. Then comes old colored men, then old mean Yankees, and then old drunk Irishmen. They have to be old; it takes almost a lifetime to learn how to do a thing simply. Even the stove has to be old. If the cook is an awful drunk, so much the better. I don’t think a teetotaler could cook a fish. Oh, if he was a mean old tobacco-chewing teetotaler, he might.”

  Mr. Flood’s attitude toward seafood is not altogether mystical. “Fish,” he says, “is the only grub left that the scientists haven’t been able to get their hands on and improve. The flounder you eat today hasn’t got any more damned vitamins in it than the flounder your great-great-granddaddy ate, and it tastes the same. Everything else has been improved and improved and improved to such an extent that it ain’t fit to eat. Consider the egg. When I was a boy on Staten Island, hens ate grit and grasshoppers and scraps from the table and whatever they could scratch out of the ground, and a platter of scrambled eggs was a delight. Then the scientists developed a special egg-laying mash made of old corncobs and sterilized buttermilk, and nowadays you order scrambled eggs and you get a platter of yellow glue. Consider the apple. Years ago you could enjoy an apple. Then the scientists took hold and invented chemical fertilizers especially for apple trees, and apples got big and red and shiny and beautiful and absolutely tasteless. As for vegetables, vegetables have been improved until they’re downright poisonous. Two-thirds of the population has the stomach jumps, and no wonder.”

  Except for bread and butter, sauces, onions, and baked potatoes, Mr. Flood himself has rarely eaten anything but seafood since 1885 and he is in sound shape. For a man past ninety who worked hard in the wet and the wind from boyhood until the age of eighty, he is, in fact, a phenomenon; he has his own teeth, he hears all right, he doesn’t wear glasses, his mind seldom wanders, and his appetite is so good that immediately after lunch he begins speculating about what he will have for dinner. He walks cautiously and a little feebly, it is true, but without a stick unless there is snow on the sidewalks. “All I dread is accidents,” he said recently. “A broken bone would most likely wind things up for me. Aside from that, I don’t fret about my health. I’m immune to the average germ; don’t even catch colds; haven’t had a cold since 1912. Only reason I caught that one, I went on a toot and it was a pouring-down rainy night in the dead of winter and my shoes were cracked and they let the damp in and I lost my balance a time or two and sloshed around in the gutter and somewhere along the line I mislaid my hat and I’d just had a haircut and I stood in a draft in one saloon an hour or more and there was a poor fellow next to me sneezing his head off and when I got home I crawled into a bed that was beside an open window like a fool and passed out with my wet clothes on, shoes and all. Also, I’d spent the night before sitting up on a train and hadn’t slept a wink and my resistance was low. If the good Lord can just see His way clear to protect me from accidents, no stumbling on the stairs, no hell-fired automobiles bearing down on me in the dark, no broken bones, I’ll hit a hundred and fifteen easy.”

  Mr.
Flood doesn’t think much of doctors and never goes near one. He passes many evenings in a comfortable old spindle-back chair in the barroom of the Hartford House, drinking Scotch and tap water and arguing, and sometimes late at night he unaccountably switches to brandy and wakes up next morning with an overwhelming hangover—which he calls a katzenjammer. On these occasions he goes over to S. A. Brown’s, at 28 Fulton Street, a highly aromatic little drugstore which was opened during President Thomas Jefferson’s second term and which specializes in outfitting medicine chests for fishing boats, and buys a bottle of Dr. Brown’s Next Morning, a proprietary greatly respected in the fish market. For all other ailments, physical or mental, he eats raw oysters. Once, in the Hartford barroom, a trembly fellow in his seventies, another tenant of the hotel, turned to Mr. Flood and said, “Flood, I had a birthday last week. I’m getting on. I’m not long for this world.”

  Mr. Flood snorted angrily. “Well, by God, I am,” he said. “I just got started.”

  The trembly fellow sighed and said, “I’m all out of whack. I’m going uptown and see my doctor.”

  Mr. Flood snorted again. “Oh, shut up,” he said. “Damn your doctor! I tell you what you do. You get right out of here and go over to Libby’s oyster house and tell the man you want to eat some of his big oysters. Don’t sit down. Stand up at that fine marble bar they got over there, where you can watch the man knife them open. And tell him you intend to drink the oyster liquor; he’ll knife them on the cup shell, so the liquor won’t spill. And be sure you get the big ones. Get them so big you’ll have to rear back to swallow, the size that most restaurants use for fries and stews; God forgive them, they don’t know any better. Ask for Robbins Islands, Mattitucks, Cape Cods, or Saddle Rocks. And don’t put any of that red sauce on them, that cocktail sauce, that mess, that gurry. Ask the man for half a lemon, poke it a time or two to free the juice, and squeeze it over the oysters. And the first one he knifes, pick it up and smell it, the way you’d smell a rose, or a shot of brandy. That briny, seaweedy fragrance will clear your head; it’ll make your blood run faster. And don’t just eat six; take your time and eat a dozen, eat two dozen, eat three dozen, eat four dozen. And then leave the man a generous tip and go buy yourself a fifty-cent cigar and put your hat on the side of your head and take a walk down to Bowling Green. Look at the sky! Isn’t it blue? And look at the girls a-tap-tap-tapping past on their pretty little feet! Aren’t they just the finest girls you ever saw, the bounciest, the rumpiest, the laughingest? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself for even thinking about spending good money on a damned doctor? And along about here, you better be careful. You’re apt to feel so bucked-up you’ll slap strangers on the back, or kick a window in, or fight a cop, or jump on the tailboard of a truck and steal a ride.”