Old Mr. Flood (10 page)

Mrs. Treppel snorted. “If she puts her mind to it and works hard,” she said, “I bet a woman can embalm as good as a man.”

“I didn’t mean to be rude,” said Mr. Bethea. He
took the Scotch bottle by the neck and poured a big gollop in his glass. “I’m a disappointed man, Mr. Cusack,” he continued. “If I had it to do all over again, I don’t know as I’d choose embalming as my life’s work. You don’t get the respect that’s due you. A doctor gets respect, a dentist gets respect, a veterinarian gets respect, but the average man, if he’s introduced to an embalmer, he giggles or he shudders, one or the other. Some of my brother embalmers don’t like to tell their profession to strangers. They’re close-mouthed. They keep to themselves. Not me. Deep down inside, I’m proud of my profession. I carry a kit, a satchel, my professional satchel, and it’s always been my dream to have my name printed on it. I can just see it—‘
THOMAS FOSTER BETHEA, LICENSED EMBALMER.
’ But I can’t do it. If I got on the subway, the people would edge away. I’d have the whole car to myself. The public don’t like to be reminded of death. It’s going on all around them—like the fellow said, it looks like it’s here to stay—but they want to keep it hid. We have to work like a thief in the night. I daresay there’s not a one of you that’s ever seen a deceased moved out of a New York
apartment house or hotel. No, and you never will. We got ways.” He smiled. “Oh, well,” he said, “no matter how the public feels about embalmers, in the end some embalmer gets them all.”

“You needn’t be so happy about it,” said Mr. Flood. “In the end, some embalmer’s going to get you, too.”

“That’s the truth,” said Mr. Bethea. He sighed. “It’s a peculiar thing. I’m a veteran in my line. If you took all the deceased I’ve attended to and stood them shoulder to shoulder, they’d make a picket fence from here to Pittsburgh, both sides of the road. With all that in back of me, you’d think I wouldn’t mind death. Oh, but I do! Every time I think about it in connection with myself, I tremble all over. What was that other question you wanted to ask, Mr. Cusack?”

“I wanted to ask, do you believe in a reward beyond the grave,” said Mr. Cusack. “By that, I mean heaven or hell.”

“No, sir,” said Mr. Bethea, “I can’t say that I do.”

“Well, then,” said Mr. Flood, “what makes you go to church so steady? You’re there every Sunday in the year, Sunday school
and
sermon.”

“Hugh,” said Mr. Bethea, “it don’t pay to be too cock-sure.”

THE TURN OF THE CONVERSATION
made me restless and I went over and sat on the window sill, with my plate in my lap, and looked out over the rooftops of the market. It was a full-moon night. There was a wind from the harbor and it blew the heady, blood-quickening, sensual smell of the market into the room. The Fulton Market smell is a commingling of smells. I tried to take it apart. I could distinguish the reek of the ancient fish and oyster houses, and the exhalations of the harbor. And I could distinguish the smell of tar, a smell that came from an attic on South Street, the net loft of a fishing-boat supply house, where trawler nets that have been dipped in tar vats are hung beside open windows to drain and dry. And I could distinguish the oakwoody smell of smoke from the stack of a loft on Beekman Street in which finnan haddies are cured; the furnace of this loft burns white-oak and hickory shavings and sawdust. And tangled in these smells were still other smells—the acrid
smoke from the stacks of the row of coffee-roasting plants on Front Street, and the pungent smoke from the stack of the Purity Spice Mill on Dover Street, and the smell of rawhides from The Swamp, the tannery district, which adjoins the market on the north. Mr. Cusack came over and took a look out the window. He returned immediately to his chair.

“I’m thankful to God I’m not an officer walking the streets tonight,” he said.

“Why’s that, Matty?” asked Mr. Flood.

“It’s a full-moon night,” said Mr. Cusack. “There’ll be peculiar things happening all over town. It’s well known in the Police Department that a full-moon night stirs up trouble. It stirs up people’s blood and brings out all the meanness and craziness in them, and it creates all manner of problems for policemen. A man or woman who’s ordinarily twenty-five per cent batty, when the moon is full they’re one hundred per cent batty. A full moon has a pull to it. Look at the tide; the tide is highest on a full moon. The moon pulls people this way and that way. With some, it’s a feeble pull; they don’t hardly notice it. Others just can’t resist; they don’t know what’s got hold of them. They act
peculiar. They act like bashi-bazouks. They pick on their wives and they get drunk and they insult people twice their size and they do their best to get into serious trouble. They look at black and say it’s white, and if you don’t agree it’s white they hit you on the head. In the Department, we call such people full-mooners. It’s been my experience that they’re particularly numerous among the Irish and the Scandinavians and the people who come up here from the South. On a full-moon night the saloons are like magnets. The full-mooners try to walk past them and they get drawn right in.”

“That explains a lot to me,” said Mr. Flood. “I must be a full-mooner. I’ve started home many a night with no intention in the world of stopping off. It was the last thing in my mind. And four
A.M.
would come, and there I’d be, holding on to some bar, and I wouldn’t half know how I got there.”

“Exactly,” said Mr. Cusack. “Some full-mooners get drunk and some get delusions. The Department is well aware of this. There’s a glassed-in booth down in the lobby of Headquarters, the information booth. They have a calendar hanging in there, and they always have a red circle drawn around the
date of the full moon. That’s to remind the officer on duty what’s ahead of him. I had an accident when I was in the Department, broke my leg, and I was a year and a half convalescing, and most of that time they had me on night duty in the information booth. And every full-moon night, I had visitors from all over. The full-mooners’d come trooping in. They’d step up and ask to see the Commissioner; nobody else would do. There was one who always came at midnight; he never missed. He’d ask for the Commissioner and I’d say, ‘Lean over, sir, and whisper it to me. You can trust me.’ And he’d lean over and whisper, ‘They’re after me!’ And I’d get out my pad and pencil and ask for the details. And he’d talk on and on and on, and I’d take it all down. And I’d tell him, ‘Rest assured the proper steps will be taken.’ That’d satisfy him. He’d go away and I’d tear up whatever it was I took down and I’d throw it in the wastebasket.” Mr. Cusack laughed. “Next full moon, he’d be back again.”

“Mr. Cusack,” said Mr. Bethea, “I recall a talk I had some years ago with an old gentlemen who works for one of the big cemeteries in Brooklyn, a foreman gravedigger. He said that a grave dug
around the time of the new moon, the dirt that comes out of it won’t fill it up. It’ll have a sunk-in look. Whereas, a grave dug around the time of the full moon, there’ll be plenty of dirt left over; you can make a nice mound on top. Another fact he told me, he said that women’s bosoms get bigger during the time of the full moon. Did you know that?”

“No, I didn’t, Mr. Bethea,” said Mr. Cusack. “I’m glad you brought it up. While we’re on the subject, I recall a case I was personally mixed-up in that might be of considerable interest to a man in your line.”

“What was that?” asked Mr. Bethea.

“It happened in 1932, the year before I retired from the Department,” said Mr. Cusack. “At the time I was attached to the First Precinct. One morning around four
A.M.
I was patrolling on South Street, proceeding east, and a radio car pulled up and the driver-officer informed me they were looking for two lads that stole an empty hearse. It seems this big black hearse had been parked in front of a garage on Third Avenue in the Sixties, the Nineteenth Precinct. The lads stole it and proceeded south on Third. Just ahead of them was a
Daily News
truck, delivering bundles of
Daily
News
es to newsstands. You know the way they operate; they pull up to a corner where there’s a stand and heave a bundle out on the sidewalk. At that hour a good many stands haven’t opened, and the bundle lies there until the man that runs the stand comes to work. The lads in the hearse conceived the idea of collecting these bundles. The hearse would pull up and one lad would leap out, grab a bundle, and heave it in the hearse. They went from stand to stand, doing this. Headquarters was soon getting calls from all over, people that saw them, and it was put on the police radio. The hearse was last seen on lower Broadway, heading for the Battery. I told the driver-officer I hadn’t observed no hearse, but I got on the running board and went along to help search the South Street docks. We hadn’t gone three blocks before we ran into them. They had the hearse backed up to the river, right beside the Porto Rico Line dock, and they were heaving the bundles of
Daily News
es in the water.”

“That was the right place for them,” said Mr. Flood.

At this moment, Mr. Trein, the manager of the Hartford, began to shout up the stairwell. “Is Mr. T.
F. Bethea up there?” he shouted.

Mr. Bethea went to the door. “That’s me,” he said.

“You’re wanted on the telephone,” said Mr. Trein.

“I’ll be right down,” said Mr. Bethea. Then he turned to Mr. Cusack. “Please go right ahead, Mr. Cusack,” he said. “They’ll hold on.”

“I jumped off the running board of the radio car,” continued Mr. Cusack, “and began to interrogate the lads. ‘What are you lads doing?’ I asked. One of them, the littlest, heaved another bundle in the drink, and he said to me, ‘We’re having some fun. What’s it to you?’ I asked them didn’t they like newspapers, and they said they liked them all right. So I asked them what in hell was they heaving them bundles in the water for. They said they be damned if they knew. I asked was they drunk, and they said they wasn’t. Maybe a beer or two. I asked was they narcotic addicts, and they said they wasn’t. So I turned to the driver-officer, and I said, ‘It looks to me they’re Reds, or I.W.W.s, or Black Hands. All those radicals,’ I said, ‘are opposed to newspapers, the free press, and all like that.’ And the driver-officer said to me, ‘You sure are a thick one.’ He jerked his thumb upwards, and I looked up and
there was a full moon up there. It was as round as a basketball, and it was so full it was brimming over. It was very embarrassing. I just wasn’t thinking. I should’ve known all along that those lads were full-mooners.”
—(1945)