At McSorley's, Dusty Bones Conjure Ghosts
By DAN BARRY (NYT) 801 words
Published: February 18, 2004
CONSIDER the wishbones as you drink from your mug. As you sit at a wooden table with cheese and onions fresh on your breath. As you stand at the bar, jostled by college students in baseball caps who are old enough to vote, old enough to die in war, and now, at 21, finally old enough to drink.
As all around you, stories spill onto the sawdust floors of McSorley's Old Ale House, just as they have for 150 years this week. Stories about Lincoln and about Dempsey, about ghosts who stroke the house cats and about that mounted fluke behind the bar, blackened by decades of smoke and steam. Most stories last no longer than the day's sawdust; some linger a while in the beer-pungent air; a few get better with age.
So consider the wishbones, about two dozen of them, dangling upon an old gas lamp at the far end of this Bowery bar, all but one of them covered with dust so thick and dark that it looks like moss.
They appear out of place at McSorley's, where there are so many artifacts adorning the walls that the distinct beauty of each item dulls in the frequent retelling of the bar's history. The wanted poster for ''the Murderer,'' John Wilkes Booth. The tribute to another assassinated president, William McKinley. The handcuffs of Harry Houdini. In such company the wishbones seem insignificant, even grotesque.
But the wishbones do belong, including that one without dust. Hovering as if in suspended animation, they have invited generations of patrons to ponder their meaning. Are they just remnants of dinners long since digested, or do they represent something else, like wishes never granted?
Here is one story, as recorded by the writer Joseph Mitchell more than 60 years ago. The founder, John McSorley, had a ''remarkable passion for memorabilia,'' and he saved the wishbones of holiday turkeys. The ''dusty bones,'' Mitchell wrote back in 1940, ''are invariably the first thing a new customer gets inquisitive about.''
Mitchell, a fine man, knew some things but not everything, says the current owner, Matthew Maher, who began working at McSorley's nearly 40 years ago. The wishbones actually date to World War I, he says, when departing doughboys enjoyed one last meal, then hung the bones above the bar to symbolize their hope -- their wish -- that they would make it back home.
The men who returned from France would take down their small trophies, then drink to those now represented only by poultry bones dangling from above. There the bones have stayed, he says, through all the wars since the war that was to end war, their significance lost to most.
It is a poignant story, but is it true? Or are we in the territory of invented tradition, myth -- what the Roman historian Sallust was referring to when, roughly translated, he wrote: ''Now these things never happened, but always are.''
The question is asked of Geoffrey Bartholomew, barman and bard. In his collection, ''The McSorley Poems'' (Charlton Street Press, 2001), the first poem, ''The Wishbones,'' suggests that either story could be ''the bone truth.''
In the requisite shirt of white, Mr. Bartholomew leans across the ale-wet counter to acknowledge that he did not know for certain the provenance of those bones that have been part of his workplace for more than 30 years. Still, he says, John Smith, the bartender who trained him, is the one who shared the doughboy story, and John Smith -- ''His picture's on the wall here somewhere'' -- began working at McSorley's sometime around the Great Depression.
''And John didn't say much,'' Mr. Bartholomew says, as if to distinguish his mentor from the common spinners of barroom blather.
What Mr. Bartholomew does know is that the wishbones are sacred. Every so often a beery patron will reach up and -- ''and I'll grab his wrist and say, 'Don't touch,''' he says. ''We get very territorial about it.''
EVEN so, last fall a patron managed to knock a wishbone into a sink, washing away nearly a century's worth of cobwebs. The bartenders returned the bone to the gas lamp, where it dangles in alabaster distinction from its dusty mates.
Perhaps this cleaned but ancient wishbone will come to be a bar's odd tribute to another generation of soldiers who never returned. Ours, in Iraq, some 540 so far, including several from New York City. Riayan Tejeda from Washington Heights, for example, and Rasheed Sahib, from Brooklyn. And Linda Jimenez. And others.
Consider the wishbones as you drink from your mug. Consider too the last line of Mr. Bartholomew's wishbone poem: godspeed to all ghosts.
