Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics) by Joseph Mitchell

a week for years suddenly realized recently that he did not know whether she was Miss or Mrs Gordon. ‘You ever been married, Mazie?’ he asked. ‘That’s for me to know, you to find out,’ she said sharply. A moment later she added, ‘I’ll ask you this. Do I look and act like a girl that never had a date?’ People around Chatham Square believe, among other things, that she was a belly dancer in the Hurtig & Seamon burlesque houses when she was a young woman, which isn’t true. They claim, with not much relevance, that she gives her spare money to bums because she was once disappointed in a love affair. Furthermore, they believe she was born in Chinatown. Actually, she is a native of Boston, a fact which gives her a lot of satisfaction. Every winter she takes a week off and spends it in Boston, just walking around. She believes the people of Boston are superior to the people elsewhere. One night a blind-drunk bum stumbled into an ‘L’ pillar in front of the Venice, skinning his nose, and she rushed out and dragged him into her lobby. Then she went into a nearby saloon and yelled, ‘Gimme some hot water and a clean rag!’ ‘You want to take a bath, Mazie?’ asked the bartender. This remark enraged her. ‘Don’t you talk like that to me, you yellow-bellied jerk,’ she said. ‘I come from Boston, and I’m a lady.’
    Mazie says her real name is Mazie Phillips, but she will not tell anything about her parents. Her intimates say that around 1903, when she was a schoolgirl in Boston, her older sister, Rosie, came to New York and married Louis Gordon, an East Side gambler and promoter. They established a home on Grand Street, and a few years later Mazie and her younger sister, Jeanie, came to live with them. The family of Belle Baker, the vaudeville singer, lived nearby on Chrystie Street. Irving Becker, Belle’s brother, now the manager of a road company of ‘Tobacco Road,’ once had a job loading rifles in a shooting gallery Gordon operated at Grand Street and the Bowery. ‘We and the Gordons were great friends,’ Becker said recently. ‘Louie Gordon was as fine a gambler as the East Side ever produced. He was a big, stately gentleman and he gave to the poor, and the bankroll he carried a billy goat couldn’t swallow it. He hung around race tracks, but he would gamble on anything. He made a lot of money on horses and invested it in Coney Island. He and his brother, Leo, helped back the original Luna Park, which opened in 1903. He was one of those silent gamblers. He never said nothing about himself. He gave everybody a fair shake, and he didn’t have a thing to hide, but he just never said nothing about himself. All the Gordons were that way.’
    In 1914, Gordon opened a moving-picture theatre in a building he owned on Park Row, naming it the Venice, after an Italian restaurant in Coney Island whose spaghetti he liked. After operating it four years, he found that it kept him away from the tracks and he gave it to Rosie, who had been working in the ticket cage. The next year he sold his Bowery shooting gallery, in which, for several months, Mazie had been running a candy-and-root-beer concession. Rosie did not like selling tickets, so Mazie took her job. Around this time, Mazie began calling herself Mazie Gordon. She will not explain why she took her brother-in-law’s name. ‘That’s my business,’ she says. The Gordons left Grand Street in the early twenties, moving to a house on Surf Avenue in Coney. Mazie continued to live with them. Louis was away much of the time, following the horses. Mazie says that once, after a good season in Saratoga, he gave her a Stutz which, with accessories, cost $5,000. She used to ride down to Coney in the Stutz every night after work; one of the ushers at the Venice was her chauffeur. In October, 1932, Louis fell dead of a heart attack at the Empire City race track. Mazie and her sisters left Coney Island a few years later and returned to the East Side, eventually