Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer

by Steven Millhauser

  Bill Baer fell in happily with a secret plan of Martin’s, and one Sunday a few weeks before the cigar stand was to change hands, the two men took the Second Avenue El down to the old neighborhood, getting off at Canal and walking east toward the river. The old neighborhood was changing. Poles and Bohemians stood in doorways and leaned out of windows, ragged children sat on the curbs, and everywhere you looked you saw the black-eyed Ostjuden, dark and curly-bearded, gabbling their harsh tongue, crowding the streets, filling the tenements—forcing the Germans north, Bill Baer told Martin, into the quiet German streets around Tompkins Square, which the old people still called Der Weisse Garten. On a cobbled lane lined with furniture shops and clothing stores they came to a narrow alley. Baer led Martin along the alley to a small courtyard of workshops, where over an open doorway hung a wooden griffin with faded red wings and a blue tongue. Inside the dusky shop there was a sharp smell of fresh wood and varnish. Pallid sunlight swirling with sawdust penetrated partway into the gloom. They walked along a twisting path that led among shadowy life-sized figures, leaning wooden signs, upside-down barrels heaped with pawnbrokers’ balls, a wooden lion with open jaws—and always the stern Indians, standing erect, eyes glaring out their defiance. Martin heard scraping sounds. They came to an open door that led into a small workroom. A short, thick-chested old man in a leather apron stood planing a rough figure beside a workbench. Another man stood in a corner, applying paint to the face of an Indian. On the bench lay an ax, a spokeshave, scattered chisels, a mallet, piles of sandpaper of different roughnesses. The woodcarver, Asmus Friedländer, spoke only German. Bill Baer questioned him and led Martin back into the shop.

  “He says we can pick any one we like, except the fellows over there by the windows, with the tickets around their necks. They’re sold. Or he can knock one out for us. Any style.”

  “If we can’t find the right one. But I have a feeling—” Together they walked among the wooden Indians, who in the half dark stared at them with a kind of melancholy fierceness. Some stood stiffly with their arms close to their sides, some leaned forward on one foot and shaded their eyes like old Tecumseh, some held an arm straight out, but however they posed, they clutched in one fist a bundle of wooden cigars. Bill explained that all the Indians were made of white pine; the logs came from the waterfront spar yards. Martin imagined a barge loaded with white pine logs floating down the East River to a loading dock, where they were piled onto a delivery wagon and drawn clattering over cobbles by a team of big-hoofed truck horses to the workshop of Asmus Friedländer. There were stern chiefs and brave young scouts and bosomy squaws, and here and there a different sort of figure who also held out a bundle of cigars: a Blackamoor with a brilliant red turban, a Highlander in a kilt, a fashionable lady wearing boots. Martin was surprised to see a Chinaman in a pigtail holding a large box in both hands; Bill explained that it was destined for a tea store. After a while Martin stopped before a figure and stood looking at it with his chin in his hand and his head tilted slightly. The Indian was a chief, a little smaller than life-sized. Both elbows were pressed close to the sides and both forearms extended: one hand held a tomahawk, the other a bundle of cigars.

  “What do you think of this noble warrior?” he asked Bill.

  “Oh, he’ll bring ’em in. He’ll do just fine. With a little more color in his feathers—”

  “Exactly what I was thinking,” Martin said, and placed his hand on the Indian’s shoulder. “Old fellow, you’re about to move uptown.”

  One week later the new Indian, with his brightly painted headdress and his emerald-green tunic, stood before the cigar stand in the lobby of the Vanderlyn Hotel, holding out in one hand a bundle of pinewood cigars. To the handle of the upright tomahawk was attached a white sign that announced in large red letters: GRAND OPENING. The washed and sparkling display case was filled with an entirely new selection of expensive and medium-priced cigars. Before each open box rested a small card advertising the virtues of the tobacco (“smooth, rich flavor for the discriminating smoker”). In an attempt to attract the patronage of female guests, the display included half a dozen packages of the newly fashionable little cigars called cigarettes, which Otto Dressler refused to carry. Beside the new cash register stood several arrangements of cigars bound in ribbons and suggested as gifts for a beloved husband or friend. On the wall behind the display case hung a framed painting of a band of Plains Indians riding across a desert.

  The day before, Martin had placed in every hotel mailbox a printed circular announcing the grand opening, advertising an improved and expanded line of outstanding but moderately priced cigars, and introducing the new sales clerk, William Baer, expert tobacconist.

  Opening day was a modest success; Martin, who had hoped for a spectacular showing, was disappointed. But the new cigar stand with its handsome Indian and its alert, cheerful young salesman continued to attract customers, and by the end of the second week it was clear that the stand was making an impression. Bill was doing a brisk business in cigarettes, for which orders had tripled, and at the request of hotel guests he began to stock a variety of smoking tobaccos and a selection of sundries: embossed leather cigar cases, ebony tobacco boxes, briar and meerschaum cigar holders with amber mouthpieces, nickel-plated match safes with spring covers. Martin watched the busy stand from his post at the front desk and spent part of his lunch hour going over accounts with Bill, who liked to bring in lunch from a delicatessen and eat on the stool behind the cigar stand; and once a week they had dinner at a restaurant on Sixth Avenue. The stand had caught on, there was no doubt about it. Martin raised Bill’s salary, and they made plans to add a small wing to the display case and put in wall shelves.

  Little Alice Bell

  NOT LONG AFTER THE CIGAR STAND HAD BEGUN to flourish in its lobby alcove, Martin became aware that a Mrs. Margaret Bell, from Boston, who had arrived at the hotel with a great deal of luggage and a ten-year-old daughter in a black straw hat, had taken to lingering at the front desk several times a day. There she would inquire after mail, ask directions to various points of interest, question Martin about the weather, and engage him, with many flutterings of her long and beautifully curved eyelashes, in bouts of light conversation. Mrs. Margaret Bell was a handsome woman in her early thirties. She liked lavish hats trimmed with bunches of cherries, strode decisively through the lobby with her daughter in tow, and seemed always to have an appointment in a different part of town. Martin had the sense that she wanted to ask him something, and one morning she did: she said that she had to be out for two hours, that she would return absolutely no later than eleven o’clock, and that she wondered whether Martin might do her the favor, the really tremendous and prodigious favor, for which she would be eternally grateful, of keeping an eye on her daughter, who would do nothing but sit in the lobby in his direct line of sight and keep out of his way until Mrs. Bell returned. Martin, who liked the little girl with the blond ringlets and the blue serious eyes, agreed to watch her from his post at the front desk, while secretly disapproving of the request. Carefully he explained that he was required to remain behind the desk and couldn’t leave to follow Alice if she wandered from view, nor could he promise that he would be able to watch her at every moment. “Oh, Alice is very good at sitting in chairs,” replied Mrs. Bell. “She knows how to take care of herself. You won’t have anything to do but glance over at her from time to time. I do appreciate it. It’s so hard, sometimes, with a child.”

  That was the beginning; and now every day, and sometimes twice a day, Mrs. Bell asked Martin to keep an eye on little Alice, who sat with her legs dangling from a big red-plush chair or took little walks about the lobby, glancing obediently over her shoulder to make certain she didn’t wander out of Martin’s sight. Sometimes she came over near the front desk and stood watching Martin as he turned the leather-bound register toward a new guest, or lifted a big key from its hook, or called orders to the bellboys. Martin, turning back from the mailboxes, would catch sight of the serious b
lue eyes of Alice Bell staring up at him from beside a potted plant, and sometimes he would invite her to sit on a high stool behind the desk off to one side and watch him while he worked. The slightest sign of attention seemed to touch her deeply; and one day she handed Martin a small package, wrapped in pink tissue paper, which contained a slightly melted piece of chocolate wrapped in gold foil.

  As Martin waited for Mrs. Bell and her daughter to return to Boston—a return that was bound to take place any day, he assured himself, as the mother thanked him profusely, fluttered her handsome eyelashes, and hurried out onto Broadway—he began to notice in Alice a number of puzzling looks. She had grown fond of him in the course of their two-week friendship, but in her large, serious, beautiful eyes he sometimes saw, or seemed to see, a look that made him avert his own eyes. It was a look that could only be described as tender or adoring, as if—but it was precisely the “as if” that stopped him short, for he didn’t know how to think about it, though he understood clearly enough that he was the accidental repository of the girl’s baffled affection. She took to wearing handsome ribbons in her hair, and blushing furiously when her mother suggested that it was for Mr. Dressler’s sake; and sometimes he would exchange with Alice Bell, past her mother’s shoulder, a look of mournful understanding.

  One morning she gave him a little flat package wrapped in blue tissue paper. When Martin opened it, he discovered a lock of blond hair. He was on the point of saying something witty when he raised his eyes and saw little Alice Bell staring at him tensely. Without a word he nodded gravely at her, gently wrapped up the curl of hair, and placed it in his pocket.

  A day came when Mrs. Bell failed to return to the hotel at noon. Martin paced in the lobby, trying to suppress his anger, while Alice walked a little bit out of his way, casting at him looks of shame and mortification. He strode over to the cigar stand and talked for a few minutes with Bill Baer, who gave him an apple and half a hard roll, then resigning himself to a ruined hour he sat down in a red-plush lobby chair and watched the guests walking purposefully, striding in and out of parlors, sinking flamboyantly into armchairs and couches. Beside him Alice kneeled by the arm of the chair and seemed to try to see what he was seeing. Martin knew that she felt his irritation and, glancing down at her as she kneeled there, he had a moment of pity for the lobby orphan and of anger at himself. He let his left hand drop over the side of the chair and touched her on the shoulder. Alice grew suddenly tense—turned to him with a startled, almost violent look—her shoulder trembled—and all at once Martin felt something pass over him, his heart beat fast, there was an inner bursting, and the entire lobby was transformed: he became aware of the soft underswish of petticoats, the faint creak of stays, the rub of silk stockings, a dark alluring undersound of silk and lace, a sudden dark flash of glances—and as they strode past or sank sighing into soft couches, the ladies of the lobby began shedding their long dresses, unlacing their tight corsets, flinging up their petticoats like bursts of snow, throwing back their heads and breathing sharply as veins beat in their necks, while Martin, rippling with terror, started to rise and knocked something over that began rolling away and away and away along the wavy pattern of the marble floor.

  Advancement

  THREE DAYS LATER THE BELLS, MOTHER AND daughter, returned to Boston. From Mrs. Bell, Martin received a box of cream-filled chocolates, and from Alice he received—suddenly and secretly, as Mrs. Bell’s back was turned—a small heart-shaped gold locket, still warm from being clutched in a fist. He watched them follow the doorman along the shade of the awning. The locket contained a hand-painted photograph of Alice Bell, with eyes too blue and hair too yellow, staring thoughtfully and a little sadly at the viewer. Martin kept it at the back of his shirt drawer in the bedroom over the cigar store.

  With relief he watched them disappear beyond the glass doors, and also with the conviction that something needed to be done about a part of his life he rarely gave much thought to, and then only in a vague, shadowy way. At dinner he spoke briefly and directly to Bill Baer, and a few nights later he accompanied his friend to a house Bill Baer knew on West Twenty-fifth Street off Sixth Avenue. You had to be careful to choose a good house, Bill said, because some of the houses hired creepers who stole your money through secret panels in the walls. In the gaslit parlor with plush chairs and couches and a yellow-keyed piano, Martin chose a dark-haired girl with heavy shoulders, who reminded him of a younger, coarser, sadder Mrs. Hamilton. He followed her up the nearly dark stairs and had a moment of hesitation as he entered the dim-lit bare-looking room with pink-flowered wallpaper and a drawn yellow shade. Against one wall was a wooden washstand with a zinc basin, beside which stood an enameled white pitcher with a red handle. When she sat down on the bed he walked over quickly. Three things stayed with him: the violent rattle of the window behind the drawn shade as the El train roared past, the girl’s look of fear as he made a sudden gesture with his hand, and the odd feeling of gratitude to Mrs. Hamilton, for teaching him what to do in a brothel.

  He began visiting the house with rattling windows regularly, once or twice a week, at first choosing only Dora, the dark-haired girl, out of a sense of loyalty. One night when she remained upstairs he chose a big blond girl in a blood-red robe called Gerda the Swede, and in time he made his way through the remaining four girls, though he always chose Dora when he could. Martin looked forward to the night strolls up the sidewalks of Sixth Avenue, past the high columns of the El. Bursts of piano music came from the concert saloons. Rushing trains shook the overhead tracks, spewed out coalsmoke shot through with red flames. It was a world of top-hatted swells and toughs in reefer jackets, of brazen-eyed women standing in doorways, of sawdust smells through swinging saloon doors mingling with the tang of horsedung thrown up by clattering wheels and ironshod hooves—and then the sudden plunge into darkness under the high tracks. One night a man with a black scarf around his neck lurched out at him from behind an El stanchion, holding a knife. Martin, frightened and outraged, swung from the shoulder. He left the man kneeling on all fours, coughing blood onto the dropped knife. In the sudden glare of an arc light Martin saw his split-open knuckle crusting with blood. But for the most part his walks were undisturbed; he welcomed the red streetcorner lamps casting their glow over the fire-alarm boxes, harsh laughter from the saloons, the familiar doorway with its red lantern, the gaslit parlor with its yellow-keyed piano on which stood a pair of double-branched tarnished brass candlesticks containing four white candles, the girls in low-cut robes and half-bare breasts walking in and out or sitting on the chair-arms. It struck him that the parlor and the girls were night versions of the hotel lobby, as if these were the same women who by day walked about in long dresses and wide-brimmed hats heaped with fruit. Sometimes he found himself imagining how, at night, all the hotel ladies loosened their hair and put on blood-red robes and walked back and forth, showing their breasts, leaning close, giving off warmth and a sweetish, sharp smell of liquor and perfume.

  Meanwhile he was working harder than ever at what he called his triple life: day clerk at the Vanderlyn Hotel, lessor of the cigar concession in the hotel lobby, and part-time assistant in his father’s cigar store. From Monday through Friday he clerked full time at the Vanderlyn, from six to six, and on Saturday and Sunday half-time, from noon to six, for a total of seventy-two hours. He worked at the cigar store four nights a week, from seven to nine, and two or three hours on Saturday mornings, for a total of ten or eleven more hours. Three nights a week—Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday—were his own, as well as Sunday mornings and two hours on Saturday mornings when he didn’t work in the store; much of this time he spent with Bill Baer, walking about town, riding the horsecars and the El roads, exploring the city. Martin was fond of taking the Sixth Avenue El all the way up to the 155th Street terminus and emerging in a world of picnic grounds and beer gardens and dance halls, with a flight of steps up to Washington Heights. But what struck him most on such trips was the vast stretch of land between the H
udson River and the Central Park—a strange mix of four-story row houses and weedgrown vacant lots with rocky outcroppings, of isolated châteaux and clusters of squatter’s shacks, of unpaved avenues and tracts of sunken farms like canyons. He had heard a good deal of talk about this wilder and newer part of town; it was said that speculators were holding on to lots in expectation of a boom.

  One day shortly before his eighteenth birthday, two years after he had gone to work as day clerk at the Vanderlyn Hotel, Martin was called into the manager’s office, located off the lobby not far from Mr. Henning’s office. Alexander Westerhoven was a big man with a plump jowly face and a surprisingly sharp profile, as if he had grown thick layers of distorting softness over a sharp hard frame. With a flourish of his right hand he invited Martin to sit in a plumply upholstered oak armchair trimmed with tassels. He began by praising Martin’s service behind the desk, referred obscurely to several testimonials to his loyalty and hard work, and broke off with a wave of the hand to thrust at Martin a sheet of blank white paper.

  “Your name,” he said, pushing toward Martin a bottle of black ink.

  “My name?”

  “Your name, your name. You do know how to write your name, Mr. Dressler?”

  Martin, irked, dipped the pen in the ink and wrote his name boldly across the middle of the paper. Mr. Westerhoven snatched up the paper and held it up to his face. He studied it for a few moments before thrusting it down.