Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer

by Steven Millhauser

  West Brighton

  ALTHOUGH MARTIN’S FATHER KEPT THE STORE open fourteen hours a day, six days a week, once a year during the hottest part of the summer he put up a sign in the window and took his family to West Brighton for three days. Almost to the moment of departure his father gave no hint that anything extraordinary was about to happen, but at closing time on the evening before the holiday he put up his sign in the window, and that night there was a great scraping of drawers and clicking of luggage locks. The next morning Martin would wake eager to crank down the dark green awning and roll out old Tecumseh into the shade, and as the knowledge of the holiday entered him he felt for a moment a little burst of disappointment, before excitement seized him.

  Martin liked the sound of the reins slapping the cabhorse, the thump of baggage on the roof over his head, the shaking bouncing seat and the shaking bouncing window from which he looked out at buildings that bounced and shook in the rattle of high wheels and the bang of horsefeet. At the ferryhouse there was a smell of tar and fish. Masts stuck up over the roof. The fat tower of the almost completed bridge rose into the sky like a gigantic hotel. On the other side of the ferryhouse he looked down through spaces in the planking at the green-black water under his feet. Gulls lazed in the sky on motionless outspread wings. Gulls floated on the gleaming dark water like wooden shooting-gallery ducks. Suddenly the ferry lurched backward. Martin stood at the side rail feeling the spray on his face and taking in the bright red ferries, the sun sparkling on the black coalheaps of the barges, the thick cottony smoke-puffs from the tugs, the trawlers at the fishmarket, the sand scows, the high three-masters thick with rigging like floating telegraph poles. A man held a red lunchpail that grew smaller and smaller. When Martin turned his head he saw the ferryhouse on the other side getting bigger and bigger. A bell banged. There was a jolt as the engine reversed, chains rattled—and no sooner had Martin stepped onto the planks of the wharf than the loading gates of the ferryhouse swung open and men and women rushed from the waiting room toward the ferry. In the street on the other side of the ferryhouse there were snorting cabhorses and horsecars on tracks and two-wheel pushcarts heaped with bananas and hats and apples under big umbrellas. The tower of the great bridge rose over the top of the ferryhouse. In a horsecar with screeching wheels and a clanging bell they rushed along the streets of the other city, the one that was always unaccountably there, on the wrong side of the river. It was too much, too much—the whole world was trembling—at any moment it would crack apart—but already they were climbing into a steam train, already they were hurtling along in the Prospect Park & Coney Island Railroad, soon the land would flatten out and he would smell a change in the air. For they were going down to the ocean.

  As Martin came down the big iron steps of the train he heard band music, as if he were stepping into a parade. The depot opened onto a plaza where the band was playing, and straight ahead rose a high iron tower, where you could ride to the top in a steam elevator—he saw one elevator rising and one falling, high up in the blue sky. As they walked along a big street with their bags, Martin took it all in: the lobster and hot corn vendors, the crayon artists, the peanut stands and chowder pots, a man selling little bottles of beach sand, the towered bathing pavilions, the flag-topped cupolas of the big hotels on the beach. Their parlor and bedroom was in a small hotel on a side street that had a shooting gallery and a fortune teller’s tent with a sign showing a hand divided into zones. As Martin walked with his mother and father from the hotel across a wide avenue to the beach, he seemed to feel the shaking flow of the train and see the trees rushing by the window and taste the coalsmoke on his tongue and hear the roar of the engine, or the rushing world—or was it the sound of the surf? In the two-story bathing pavilion on the beach he changed into a heavy dark-blue flannel suit with itchy straps over his shoulders. The ocean was warm on his feet. Farther out he could see people standing up to their knees, while lines of surf broke in different places, and far out in the water he saw people up to their chests. An iron pier came out over the water. There were shops and booths on the pier and the roof had towers with flags. He stood a little apart from his father and mother, and tried again to take it all in as the water rose and fell against his stomach: the great pier rising high above their heads, the fancy beach hotels like palaces in the distance, the white-headed gray-winged gulls skimming the waves, his mother suddenly laughing in the water, the salt-and-mud smell of ocean mixed with wafts of chowder cooking on the pier, the iron tower at the railroad depot looking down at the little people in the ocean. Here at the end of the line, here at the world’s end, the world didn’t end: iron piers stretched out over the ocean, iron towers pierced the sky, somewhere under the water a great telegraph cable longer than the longest train stretched past sunken ships and octopuses all the way to England—and Martin had the odd sensation, as he stood quietly in the lifting and falling waves, that the world, immense and extravagant, was rushing away in every direction: behind him the fields were rolling into Brooklyn and Brooklyn was rushing into the river, before him the waves repeated themselves all the way to the hazy shimmer of the horizon, in the river between the two cities the bridge piers went down through the water to the river bottom and down through the river bottom halfway to China, while up in the sky the steam-driven elevators rose higher and higher until they became invisible in the hot blue summer haze.

  The Vanderlyn Hotel

  IN THE SUMMER OF MARTIN’S FOURTEENTH birthday it happened that the Vanderlyn Hotel was in need of a bellboy. Charley Stratemeyer walked into Dressler’s Cigars and Tobacco with the news. The assistant manager, Mr. George Henning himself, had asked Charley to see whether Martin was interested. They all knew Otto Dressler’s boy, a hard worker who stayed out of trouble, and after bad luck with two bellboys who had loafed on the job and had been careless about their uniforms, the management was inclined to hire someone whose character they could count on. They were looking for a boy to work the six-to-six shift, though in view of Martin’s age Mr. Henning would be willing to consider a half-time six-to-noon arrangement, at least for the time being. The salary itself wasn’t much to write home about, said Charley, though the tips made up for it. But the whole point was that it was a foot in the door—if it was a door you wanted to get your foot in. If they liked you, and Henning already liked Martin, and if you showed you had the stuff, you could work your way up: already the Vanderlyn employed two day clerks and a night clerk, and there was talk of hiring a mail clerk to take some of the pressure off. And there were openings all the time in other hotels, especially the new uptown joints that were springing up as fast as you could blink an eye. Martin ought to think it over.

  Martin didn’t have to think it over, since the idea was as fantastic and crackbrained as the idea of joining a circus, and as he dismissed the offer with a shrug he suddenly imagined himself walking along the red-carpeted corridors of the Vanderlyn, past the high doors, looking up at the brass numbers; and for a moment he saw so vividly the half-open door, and the two feet crossed on the bed, that a confusion came over him, as if he were waking from a dream to find himself in a brown, dusky shop. Charley stood with his hands in his pockets and his head tipped at a jaunty angle. His father’s face was thoughtful. And seeing his father’s thoughtful face, Martin had the sense that he was slipping back into his dream of the dim red corridor, the high doors, the actors and actresses sitting along the walls.

  That night Otto Dressler proposed to Martin that he accept the bellboy job at the Vanderlyn Hotel. Although Martin had all the makings of a first-rate cigar man, and would one day inherit the store, Otto wanted him to have the chance to better himself. Wasn’t America the land of opportunity? And wasn’t the Vanderlyn Hotel a golden opportunity? Sure, the cigar store was doing well enough, but the hours were long and hard and life was an endless battle to pay the lease. And it wasn’t as if Martin would be leaving home, or quitting the store; he’d simply devote his mornings to the Vanderlyn and the rest of his time
to the store. He would then be in a position to choose. To his mother’s objection that the job would mean an end to Martin’s education, which would never go beyond the eighth grade, his father replied that there were other ways to get an education, that he himself had gone to work at the age of twelve, and that in any case Martin could quit his job after a few months or a year and return to school if the job proved disappointing. As for the odd hours: he himself would walk Martin down the block to the hotel at twenty of six each morning. Martin would be home for lunch.

  Two days later Martin began work at the Vanderlyn Hotel.

  In his dark green uniform with maroon trim, he sat on a bench near the check-in desk with three other bellboys and watched the main door. When he was at the end of the row it was his turn to spring up whenever the desk clerk rang a bell, unless the buzzer rang and the bellboy captain ordered him up to a room. Martin, who enjoyed the drama of sliding along the row and wondering what fate had in store for him, was astonished by the immense variety of things people carried: leather Gladstone bags with nickel corner protectors, slim leather dress-suit cases, soft alligator-skin satchels, pebble-leather club bags, English cabinet bags, canvas telescope bags with leather straps, hatboxes, black umbrellas with hook handles, colored silk umbrellas with pearl handles, white silk parasols with ruffles, packages tied with string; and one morning a woman wearing a hat with fruit on it came in with a brass cage containing a monkey. The idea was to offer people immediate relief from their oppressive burdens, while never seeming to insist. But there was more to it than that: Martin saw that after the signing in it was his job not merely to carry the bags, but to lead the way to the elevators—and this meant being careful not to walk too quickly, especially in the case of those who were clearly new to the hotel and seemed a little uncertain, although the opposite error of being overly familiar must also be avoided, while at the same time the bags, however heavy or clumsy, had to be carried without an appearance of struggle. Once in the elevator, it was important to stand in silence beside the bags, to erase oneself behind the dignity of the uniform, while at the same time not seeming cold or indifferent and indeed remaining alert to any sign of helplessness in the traveler. At the door of a room, Martin set down the bags, opened the door with the key, and led the way in, setting the bags down wherever he was requested to do so. After that he checked to see that the shades were raised and the curtains open, tested the faucets in the washstand, and made sure the maid had left clean towels. Then he placed the key in the inside keyhole and hesitated ever so slightly as a reminder that he should be tipped.

  It was also his task to answer the buzzer that sounded when a guest pushed a button in the wall beside the bed: one ring for the bellboy, two for ice water, three for the chambermaid. Guests usually wanted a pitcher of ice water, which Martin fetched from a table outside the kitchen, but they might want anything: a newspaper from the newsstand in the lobby, another hand towel, writing paper and envelopes from one of the writing rooms, help with a stuck shade. Sometimes Martin was sent out of the hotel on short errands: to buy a bottle of cough syrup at a drugstore or a shirt collar at a haberdasher’s, to deliver a shoe with a loose heel to a cobbler, to find a safety pin or a spool of white sewing silk. For all these services he received tips of a dime or a quarter, or even thirty-five cents, so that in the course of a week he found that he made over ten dollars in tips alone.

  As in the cigar store, where Martin sensed that people liked him, so too in the lobbies, the elevators, and the rooms of the Vanderlyn Hotel he moved in an atmosphere that, despite its briskness and even harshness, was one of welcome, of swift smiles and appreciative glances. Among those smiles and glances Martin was aware of the smiles and glances of women: elderly, imperious women in expensive hats who were grateful for polite, flawless attention, young wives beside portly husbands, little girls in straw hats with black ribbons, exasperated matrons with creaking corsets and furious eyes, bored-looking girls of sixteen attended by maiden aunts. At fourteen Martin was tall and broadshouldered, with smooth dark hair and a shadow on his upper lip; in his uniform he carried himself with a certain authority. But if people liked him, if he attracted appreciative glances from women, it wasn’t at all, he decided, because he was striking to look at: his face, for example, was even-featured in an unremarkable way that some would consider handsome but that he, for his part, found irritating. No, if people smiled at him, it was because of something else, some quality of sympathy or curiosity that made him concentrate his deepest attention on them, made him sense their secret moods. People were grateful for such attention, and rewarded Martin with looks and smiles. Sometimes he received a different kind of look, a more penetrating, more ambiguous gaze, flashed out from a pair of coffee-black or smoke-blue eyes that an instant before had glanced at him coolly. Such looks Martin received respectfully, even gratefully, though in themselves they seemed to belong to a different version of himself, a version that hadn’t yet come into being. It was a version of himself that he was willing to wait for, without impatience.

  In the early mornings that grew darker and darker, Martin walked with his father down the half-sleeping block to the well-lit lobby of the Vanderlyn Hotel. Even at quarter to six the world was up and about. Milk wagons clattered over the cobbles, hacks pulled by clopping horses rattled along. In the near distance he could hear the rumble of the Sixth Avenue El. His father left him at the rounded stone entranceway that made him think of a castle. In a basement room he changed into his bellboy uniform, dark green with brass buttons, a maroon stripe running down each trouser leg. He liked to keep his buttons brightly polished and to fit the flat round hat carefully to his head. From his bench in the lobby he would watch the morning grow brighter, hear the world fill with the sounds of day: the jingling bells and grinding wheels of the new Broadway horsecars, the rattle of dishes in the dining room, the clank of a maid’s bucket on the marble stairs. As the day grew brighter and louder Martin felt himself filling with light and sound, so that by noon he was ready to burst with energy. Sometimes, after changing back into his clothes, he sat for a few minutes in a soft chair in the main lobby and took it all in: the people walking about or taking their ease, the shiny mahogany desks in the writing rooms, laughter in the ladies’ parlor, the gilt hexagons on the ceiling, the great marble stairway. The spectacle interested him, interested him deeply, though it came over him that he wasn’t particularly eager for a way of life represented by marble and gilt and feathered hats. No, what seized his innermost attention, what held him there day after day in noon revery, was the sense of a great, elaborate structure, a system of order, a well-planned machine that drew all these people to itself and carried them up and down in iron cages and arranged them in private rooms. He admired the hotel as an invention, an ingenious design, a kind of idea, like a steam boiler or a suspension bridge. But could you say that a bridge or a steam boiler was an idea? In the warm, bright lobby Martin’s thoughts would grow confused, as if he had been falling into a fantastic dream, and with an inner shake of the head he would force himself to stare at a solid table leg, a brass spittoon on the marble floor, an ash-burn on the arm of a chair, an empty glass, clear and hard, sitting beside a folded newspaper.

  In this way Martin passed his fifteenth year.

  Room 411

  THE HAMILTONS, HUSBAND AND WIFE, HAD returned to the Vanderlyn for one of their sudden and prolonged stays, and among the bellboys, the room clerks, the chambermaids, the elevator boys, the waiters, and the cooks, the grumbling grew louder and more insistent. Even the assistant manager, a master of the unruffled countenance, had moments of abruptness, even of snappish ill temper. The trouble wasn’t the husband, an impeccably tailored graying man with plump well-manicured hands and a boyish face, who was always removing his gold watch from his waistcoat pocket, snapping up the lid, staring at it with a slight frown, and holding it to his ear, and who never stayed for more than two days before dashing off on mysterious business trips to Philadelphia or Baltimore. No,
the trouble was the wife, Mrs. Louise Hamilton, a buxom bustling handsome dark-haired lady whose large black eyes were skilled in the expression of disdain, outrage, dissatisfaction, and astonished disbelief that the simplest request had been handled with such ineptitude. She sent back food, discovered dust on the mantel shelf over the parlor hearth, complained to the management about noise in the halls, and rang incessantly for the bellboy—a towel was missing, a drawer refused to open, she needed still another pitcher of ice water in order to endure the terrible stuffy warmth of her wretched rooms. If she was bad when her silent husband was with her, she was worse when he was away, for then she had nothing to distract her from the unsatisfactory state of her surroundings, from the mouse-sized clumps of dust under the bed to the inedible white paste that was set on her plate at dinner under the laughable pretense that it was fresh scrod. The elevator boys made unpleasant jokes about her bursting bodice and plump rump, the bellboys complained about her iron stares and stingy tips; and it was said that her quiet husband with his boyish smile fled her side not for business in Baltimore, but for the brothels off Sixth Avenue near the roar of the El.