Old Mr. Flood by Joseph Mitchell

Author:Joseph Mitchell [Mitchell, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-59692-979-1
Publisher: M P Publishing Limited
Published: 2004-03-29T05:00:00+00:00

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.

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