The Bottom of the Harbor Read Online Free PDF Page A

remarks on occasion that had me wondering did I hear right. Everybody liked her, the way she hung on to life; and everybody tried to do things for her. I remember Mr. Sartori one night went out in the rain and got her a cab. ‘She’s such a thin little thing,’ he said when he came back in. ‘There’s nothing to her,’ he said, ‘but six bones and one gut and a set of teeth and a big hat with a bird on it.’ Her peculiarity was she always brought her own silver. It was old family silver. She’d have it wrapped up in a linen napkin in her handbag, and she’d get it out and set her own place. After she finished eating, I’d take it to the kitchen and wash it, and she’d stuff it back in her handbag. She’d always start off with one dozen oysters in winter or one dozen clams in summer, and she’d gobble them down and go on from there. She could get more out of a lobster than anybody I ever saw. You’d think she’d got everything she possibly could, and then she’d pull the little legs off that most people don’t even bother with, and suck the juice out of them. Sometimes, if it was a slow night and I was just standing around, she’d call me over and talk to me while she ate. She’d talk about people and past times, and she knew a lot; she had kept her eyes open while she was going through life.
    â€œMy hours in Joe’s were ten in the morning to nine at night. In the afternoons, I’d take a break from three to four-thirty. I saw so much rich food I usually didn’t want any lunch, the way old waiters get—just a crust of bread, or some fruit. If it was a nice day, I’d step over to Albee Square and go into an old fancy-fruit store named Ecklebe & Guyer’s and pick me out a piece of fruit—an orange or two, or a bunch of grapes, or one of those big red pomegranates that split open when they’re ripe the same as figs and their juice is so strong and red it purifies the blood. Then I’d go over to Schermerhorn Street. Schermerhorn was a block and a half west of Joe’s. There were some trees along Schermerhorn, and some benches under the trees. Young women would sit along there with their babies, and old men would sit along there the whole day through and read papers and play checkers and discuss matters. And I’d sit there the little time I had and rest my feet and eat my fruit and read the
New York Times
—my purpose reading the
New York Times,
I was trying to improve my English. Schermerhorn Street was a peaceful old backwater street, so nice and quiet, and I liked it. It did me good to sit down there and rest. One afternoon the thought occurred to me, ‘Who the hell was Schermerhorn?’ So that night it happened Mrs. Frelinghuysen was in, and I asked her who was Schermerhorn that the street’s named for. She knew, all right. Oh, Jesus, she more than knew. She saw I was interested, and from then on that was one of the main subjects she talked to me about—Old New York street names and neighborhood names; Old New York this, Old New York that. She knew a great many facts and figures and skeletons in the closet that her mother and her grandmother and her aunts had passed on down to her relating to the old New York Dutch families that they call the Knickerbockers—those that dissipated too much and dissipated all their property away and died out and disappeared, and those that are still around. Holland Dutch, not German Dutch, the way I used to think it meant. The Schermerhorns are one of the oldest of the old Dutch families, according to her, and one of the best. They were big landowners in Dutch days, and they still are, and they go back so deep in Old New York that if you went any deeper you wouldn’t find anything but Indians and bones and bears. Mrs. Frelinghuysen was well acquainted with the Schermerhorn family. She had been to Schermerhorn weddings and Schermerhorn funerals. I