Old Mr. Flood

by Joseph Mitchell

  “It would depend on the weather,” said Mr. Maggiani.

  Mr. Flood sighed and tossed his gut-blade on the counter. “I’m full,” he said. “I’ve had my bait of clams.”

  “Me, too,” said Mr. Maggiani. “There’s no law says we got to make pigs of ourselves.”

  Mr. Flood got a rag and a pan of water and cleaned off the oilcloth counter, and I gathered up the empty shells and put them in a trash bucket. Mr. Maggiani carried what was left of the basket of blackies back to the coldroom. Then the three of us sat down by the stove. Mr. Maggiani put a pot of coffee on the hob. We heard steps in the hall, the door opened, and in came a friend of Mr. Flood’s, a grim old Yankee named Jack Murchison, who is a waiter in Libby’s Oyster House. Libby’s is one of the few New England restaurants in the city. It was established on Fulton Street in 1840 by Captain Oliver Libby of Wellfleet, Cape Cod. It is unpretentious, its chefs and waiters are despotic and opinionated but highly skilled, it broils or boils or poaches ninety-nine fish orders for every one it fries, it has Daniel Webster fish chowder on Wednesdays and Fridays, and it has New England clam chowder every day. On its menu is a statement of policy: “OPEN TO 8 P.M. NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR PERSONAL PROPERTY. NO MANHATTAN CLAM CHOWDER SERVED IN HERE.”

  “Been down to the river for a breath of air,” Mr. Murchison said. “Sat on the stringpiece for fifteen minutes and I’m cold to the bone.”

  “Draw up a chair, Jack,” said Mr. Flood, “and take the weight off your feet.”

  Mr. Murchison lifted the tails of his overcoat and stood with his back to the stove for a few minutes. Then he sat down and sighed with satisfaction. “Hugh,” he said to Mr. Flood, “got something I want to show you.” He took his wallet from a hip pocket, drew out a newspaper clipping, and gave it to me to pass over to Mr. Flood, who was sitting on the other side of the stove. It was a clipping of Lucius Beebe’s column, “This New York,” in the Herald Tribune.

  Mr. Flood glanced at it and said, “Oh, God, what’s this? Is he one of those ignorant fellows writes about restaurants in the papers, ohs and ahs about everything they put before him? Every paper nowadays has a fellow writing about restaurants, an expert giving his opinion, a fellow that if he was out of a job and went to a restaurant to get one, this expert on cooking, this Mr. Know-it-all, the practical knowledge he has, why, they wouldn’t trust him to peel the potatoes for a stew.”

  “This gentleman is a goormy,” said Mr. Murchison. “Go ahead and read what he says.”

  Mr. Flood read a paragraph or two. Then he groaned and handed the clipping to me. “God defend us, son,” he said. “Read this.”

  In the column, Mr. Beebe described a dinner that had been “run up” for him and a friend by Edmond Berger, the chef de cuisine of the Colony Restaurant. He gave the menu in full. One item, the fish course, was “Fillet de Sole en Bateau Beebe.” “The sole, courteously created in the name of this department by Chef Berger for the occasion,” Mr. Beebe wrote, “was a delicate fillet superimposed on a half baked banana and a trick worth remembering.”

  “Good God A’mighty !” said Mr. Flood.

  “Sounds nice, don’t it?” asked Mr. Murchison. “A half baked bananny with a delicate piece of flounder superimposed on the top of it. While he was at it, why didn’t he tie a red ribbon around it?”

  “Next they’ll be putting a cherry on boiled codfish,” said Mr. Flood. “How would that be, a delicate piece of codfish with a cherry superimposed on the top of it?”

  The two old men cackled.

  “Tell me the truth, Hugh,” said Mr. Murchison, “what in the world do you think of a thing like that?”

  “I tell you what I think,” said Mr. Flood. “I got my money in the Corn Exchange Bank. And if I was to go into some restaurant and see the president of the Corn Exchange Bank eating a thing like that, why, I would turn right around and walk out of there, and I’d hightail it over to the Corn Exchange Bank and draw out every red cent. It would destroy my confidence.”

  “President, hell,” said Mr. Murchison. “If I was to see the janitor of the Corn Exchange Bank eating a thing like that, I’d draw my money out.”

  “Of course,” said Mr. Flood, “you got to take into consideration this fellow is a gourmet. A thing like that is just messy enough to suit a gourmet. They got bellies like schoolgirls; they can eat anything, just so it’s messy.”

  “We get a lot of goormies in Libby’s,” said Mr. Murchison. “I can spot a goormy right off. Moment he sits down he wants to know do we have any boolybooze.”

  “Bouillabaisse,” said Mr. Flood.

  “Yes,” said Mr. Murchison, “and I tell him, ‘Quit showing off! We don’t carry no boolybooze. Never did. There’s a time and a place for everything. If you was to go into a restaurant in France,’ I ask him, ‘would you call for some Daniel Webster fish chowder?’ I love a hearty eater, but I do despise a goormy. All they know is boolybooze and pompano and something that’s out of season, nothing else will do. And when they get through eating they don’t settle their check and go on about their business. No, they sit there and deliver you a lecture on what they et, how good it was, how it was almost as good as a piece of fish they had in the Caffy dee lah Pooty-doo in Paris, France, on January 16, 1928; they remember every meal they ever et, or make out they do. And every goormy I ever saw is an expert on herbs. Herbs, herbs, herbs! If you let one get started on the subject of herbs he’ll talk you deef, dumb, and blind. Way I feel about herbs, on any fish I ever saw, pepper and salt and a spoon of melted butter is herbs aplenty.”

  “Let’s see that clipping again,” Mr. Flood said. He took the Beebe column and read it slowly from start to finish. Then he handed it back to me. “Burn a rag,” he said.

  Mr. Maggiani lifted the pot of coffee off the hob and poured us each a mug. Then he stepped over to the counter and got his Scotch bottle. There was an ounce or two left in it, and he poured this into Mr. Murchison’s coffee.

  “Much obliged, Tommy,” said Mr. Murchison. “It was cold out.”

  “I know it,” said Mr. Maggiani. “I heard the wind whistling.” Mr. Maggiani turned to Mr. Flood. “Hugh,” he said, “there’s something I was going to ask you. You’ve got enough money put away you could live high if you wanted to. Why in God’s name do you live in a little box of a room in a backstreet hotel and hang out in the fish market when you could go down to Miami, Florida, and sit in the sun?”

  Mr. Flood bit the end off one of his sixty-five-cent cigars and spat it into the scuttle. He held a splinter in the stove until it caught fire, and then he lit the cigar. “Tommy, my boy,” he said, “I don’t know. Nobody knows why they do anything. I could give you one dozen reasons why I prefer the Fulton Fish Market to Miami, Florida, and most likely none would be the right one. The right reason is something obscure and way off and I probably don’t even know it myself. It’s like the old farmer who wouldn’t tell the drummer the time of day.”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Mr. Maggiani.

  “It’s an old, old story,” Mr. Flood said. “I’ve heard it told sixteen different ways. I even heard a muxed-up version one night years ago in a vaudeville show. I’ll tell it the way my daddy used to tell it. There was an old farmer lived beside a little branch-line railroad in south Jersey, and every so often he’d get on the train and go over to Trenton and buy himself a crock of applejack. He’d buy it right at the distillery door, the old Bossert & Stockton Apple Brandy Distillery, and save himself a penny or two. One morning he went to Trenton and bought his crock, and that afternoon he got on the train for the trip home. Just as the train pulled out, he took his watch from his vest pocket, a fine gold watch in a fancy hunting case, and he looked at it, and then he snapped it shut and put it back in his pocket. And there was a drummer sitting across the aisle. This drummer leaned over and said, ‘Friend, what time is it?’ The farmer took a look at him and said, ‘Won’t tell you.’ The drummer thought he was hard of hearing and spoke louder. ‘Friend,’ he shouted out
, ‘what time is it?’ ‘Won’t tell you,’ said the farmer. The drummer thought a moment and then he said, ‘Friend, all I asked was the time of day. It don’t cost anything to tell the time of day.’ ‘Won’t tell you,’ said the farmer. ‘Well, look here, for the Lord’s sake,’ said the drummer, ‘why won’t you tell me the time of day?’ ‘If I was to tell you the time of day,’ the farmer said, ‘we’d get into a conversation, and I got a crock of spirits down on the floor between my feet, and in a minute I’m going to take a drink, and if we were having a conversation I’d ask you to take a drink with me, and you would, and presently I’d take another, and I’d ask you to do the same, and you would, and we’d get to drinking, and by and by the train’d pull up to the stop where I get off, and I’d ask you why don’t you get off and spend the afternoon with me, and you would, and we’d walk up to my house and sit on the front porch and drink and sing, and along about dark my old lady would come out and ask you to take supper with us, and you would, and after supper I’d ask if you’d care to drink some more, and you would, and it’d get to be real late and I’d ask you to spend the night in the spare room, and you would, and along about two o’clock in the morning I’d get up to go to the pump, and I’d pass my daughter’s room, and there you’d be, in there with my daughter, and I’d have to turn the bureau upside down and get out my pistol, and my old lady would have to get dressed and hitch up the horse and go down the road and get the preacher, and I don’t want no God-damned son-in-law who don’t own a watch.’” —(1944)

  MR. FLOOD’S PARTY

  MR. FLOOD WAS NINETY-FIVE YEARS OLD on the twenty-seventh of July, 1945. Three evenings beforehand, on the twenty-fourth, he gave a birthday party in his room at the Hartford House. “I don’t believe in birthday parties never did but some do and I will have one this time to suit myself if it kills me,” he wrote on a penny postal, inviting me. “Will be obliged to have it on the 24th as I promised my daughter Louise in South Norwalk I would be with her and my grandchildren and great grandchildren on my birthday itself. Couldn’t get out of it. And due to I can’t seem to find any pure Scotch whiskey any more it has got so it takes me two or three days to get over a toot. Louise is deadset against whiskey talk talk talk and I know better than to show up in South Norwalk with a katzenjammer. I will expect you. It will not be a big party just a few windbags from the fish market. Also Tom Bethea. He is an old, old friend of my family. He is an undertaker. The party will start around six and it is immaterial to me when it stops. I am well and trust you are the same.”

  I walked up Peck Slip around six-thirty on the evening of the twenty-fourth, and the peace and mystery of midnight was already over everything; work begins long before daybreak in the fish market and ends in the middle of the afternoon. There wasn’t a human being in sight, or an automobile. The old pink-brick fish houses on both sides of the Slip had been shuttered and locked, the sidewalks had been flushed, and there were easily two hundred gulls from the harbor walking around in the gutters, hunting for fish scraps. The gulls came right up to the Hartford’s stoop. They were big gulls and they were hungry and anxious and as dirty as buzzards. Also, in the quiet street, they were spooky. I stood on the stoop and watched them for a few minutes, and then I went into the hotel’s combined lobby and barroom. Gus Trein, the manager, was back of the bar. There were no customers and he was working on his books; he had two ledgers and a spindle of bills before him. I asked if Mr. Flood was upstairs. “He is,” said Mr. Trein, “what’s left of him. Are you going to his party?” I said I was. “In that case,” he said, “hold your hat. He was in and out all afternoon, toting things up to his room, and he had three bottles of whiskey one trip. The last time he came in, half an hour ago, Birdy Treppel was with him—the old fishwife from the Slip. He had a smoked eel about a yard long in one hand and a box of cigars in the other, and he was singing ‘Down, Down Among the Dead Men,’ and Birdy had him by the elbow, helping him up the stairs.”

  One of Mr. Flood’s closest friends, Matthew T. Cusack, was sitting on the bottom of the stairs in the rear of the lobby. He had one shoe off and was prizing a tack out of it with his pocketknife. Mr. Cusack is a portly, white-haired old Irish-American, a retired New York City policeman. He is a watchman for the Fulton Market Fishmongers Association; he sits all night in a sprung swivel chair beside a window in a shack on the fish pier. In the last six or seven months, Mr. Cusack’s personality has undergone an extraordinary change. He was once a hearty man. He laughed a lot and he was a big eater and straight-whiskey drinker. He had a habit of remarking to bartenders that he didn’t see any sense in mixing whiskey with water, since the whiskey was already wet. At a clambake for marketmen and their families in East Islip, in the summer of 1944, he ate three hundred and sixty-six Great South Bay quahogs, one for every day in the year (it was a leap year), and put four rock-broiled lobsters on top of them. He has a deep chest and a good baritone, and at market gatherings he always stood up and sang “The Broken Home,” “Frivolous Sal,” and “Just Fill Me One Glass More.” In recent months, however, he has been gloomy and irritable and pious; he is worried about his health and believes that he may have a heart attack at any moment and drop dead. He was in vigorous health until last Christmas, when the Fishery Council, the market’s chamber of commerce, gave him a present, a radio for his shack. Aside from listening in barrooms to broadcasts of championship prizefights, Mr. Cusack had never before paid any attention to the radio, but he soon got to be a fan. He got so he would keep his radio on all night. A program he especially likes is sponsored by a company that sells a medicine for the acid indigestion. Around the middle of February, he developed the acid indigestion and began to take this medicine. Then, one morning in March, on his way home from the market, he was troubled by what he describes as “a general run-down feeling.” At first he took it for granted that this was caused by the acid indigestion, but that night, while listening to a radio health chat, he came to the conclusion that he had a heart condition. He is fascinated by health chats; they make him uneasy, but he dials them in from stations all over the country. He got over the run-down feeling but continued to brood about his heart. He went to a specialist, who made a series of cardiograms and told him that he was in good shape for a man of his age and weight. He is still apprehensive. He says he suspects he has a rare condition that can’t be detected by the cardiograph. He never smiles, he has a frightened stare, and his face is set and gray. He walks slowly, inching along with an almost effortless shuffle, to avoid straining his heart muscles. When he is not at work, he spends most of the time lying flat on his back in bed with his feet propped up higher than his head. He takes vitamin tablets, a kind that is activated and mineralized. Also, twice a day, he takes a medicine that is guaranteed to alkalize the system. The officials of the Council are sorry they gave him the radio. Edmond Irwin, the executive secretary, ran into him on the pier a while back and told him so. “Why, what in the world are you talking about?” Mr. Cusack asked. “That radio probably saved my life. If it wasn’t for that radio, I might’ve dropped dead already. I didn’t start taking care of myself until those health chats woke me up to the danger I was in.”

  I went on back to the rear of the lobby and spoke to Mr. Cusack, but he didn’t look up or answer. He had the stairs blocked or I would have gone on past him. After he got the tack out of his shoe, he stood up and grunted. His face was heavy with worry. We shook hands, and I asked him if he was going to Mr. Flood’s party or coming from it. “Going, God help me,” he said, “and I dread it. I feel like I ought to pay my respects to Hugh, but I dread the stairs. A poor old man in my condition, it’s taking my life in my hands.” The Hartford is five floors high and it doesn’t have an elevator. Mr. Flood’s room is on the top floor. I stood aside and waited for Mr. Cusack to start up, but he said, “You go ahead. I’m going to take my time. It’ll take me half an hour and when I get to the top I’ll most likely drop dead.”

  MR. FLOOD HAS A CORNER ROOM, overlooking the Slip. The do
or was open. His room is usually in a mess and he had obviously had it straightened up for the party. There was a freshly ironed counterpane on his brass bed. His library had been neatly arranged on top of his tin, slatbound trunk; it consists of a Bible, a set of Mark Twain, and two thick United States Bureau of Fisheries reference books, “Fishes of the Gulf of Maine” and “Fishes of Chesapeake Bay.” His collection of sea shells and river shells had been laid out on the hearth of the boarded-up fireplace. Ordinarily, his books and shells are scattered all over the floor. On the marble mantelpiece were three small cast-iron statues—a bare-knuckle pug with his fists cocked, a running horse with its mane streaming, and an American eagle. These came off one of the magnificent fire escapes on the Dover Street side of the old Police Gazette building, which is at Dover and Pearl, in the fish-market neighborhood. (Mr. Flood is sentimental about the stone and iron ornaments on many buildings down in the old city, and he thinks they should be preserved. He once wrote the Museum of the City of New York suggesting that the owners of the Gazette building be asked to donate the fire-escape ornaments to the Museum. “Suppose this bldg. is torn down,” he wrote. “All that beautiful iron work will disappear into scrap. If the owners do not see fit to donate, I am a retired house-wrecker and I could go there in the dead of night with a monkey-wrench and blow-torch and use my own discretion.”) Above the mantelpiece hung a lithograph of Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Thomas Rowlandson aquatint of some scuffling fishwives in Billingsgate that came off a calendar, and a framed beatitude: “BLESSED IS THE MAN WHO DOES NOT BELLYACHE—ELBERT HUBBARD.” In the middle of the room stood an ugly old marble-top table, the kind that has legs shaped like the claws of a dragon, each claw grasping a glass ball. There was a clutter on the table—a bottle of Scotch, a pitcher of water, a bucket of ice, a box of cigars, a crock of pickled mussels, a jar of marinated herrings, a smoked eel, a wire basket of sea urchins, two loaves of Italian bread, some lemons, and a stack of plates. The sea urchins were wet and dripping.