Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer

by Steven Millhauser

  “Never,” he said, “underestimate the power of good penmanship.”

  Martin looked hard at him, and Mr. Westerhoven, placing the tips of his fingers together, looked hard at the ceiling. Still looking up, he offered Martin the position of personal secretary to the manager at double his present salary. Martin’s secretarial duties would be confined largely to Mr. Westerhoven’s far-reaching correspondence, although they would include miscellaneous duties as well, such as the reading of the assistant manager’s daily reports concerning problems that required prompt attention, the preparation of memoranda for staff use, and the reading and summarizing of each day’s correspondence. His new hours would be seven to six Monday through Friday, with a half day from seven to noon on Saturday, and Sunday off.

  At first Martin missed the noise and bustle of the desk, the double view of the street through the doors and of the lobby stretching away, the weight of room keys in the palm, the smart uniform buttoned to his chin, the ring of the electric buzzer and the leaping up of bellboys, the snatches of talk, the sheer splendid sound of things—shuffle of suitcases, clank of keys, swish of dress trains, rattle of cab wheels through the suddenly opened doors—from his post behind the polished mahogany counter, but Martin, wearing a new cutaway coat over a shiny vest with a watch chain looped across the front, threw himself into his new duties with helpless zest. If, out at the desk, he had seemed to be in the lively center of things, it was true only in a special and limited sense, for in fact he had been a minor employee in one department of a vast and complex organization that he had scarcely bothered to imagine. Sitting in Mr. Westerhoven’s quiet office, reading through piles of correspondence, or taking dictation from Mr. Westerhoven, who liked to walk up and down in the small space between his broad desk and Martin’s narrow one with a thumb hooked in his vest pocket and the other hand tugging at his chin, Martin, bewildered but deeply curious, exasperated by his ignorance, vowing to sort things out, to bring disparate details into relation, gradually began to see his way. One thing he saw was that the work of running the hotel was divided far more carefully and precisely than he had imagined, all the way down to the seamstresses and linen-room attendants of the housekeeping department. The bellboys, the day and night clerks, the doorman, and the elevator operators constituted the front office, and were directly under the supervision of the assistant manager, but the maintenance and smooth operation of the elevators was the direct responsibility of the assistant to the chief engineer. The engineering department also looked after the plumbing, the electric push-button buzzers, the gas lighting fixtures, and the new incandescent lights in the public rooms. Martin, wanting to see for himself, needing to arrange it all in a pattern, went with the chief engineer, Walter Dundee, to look at the new electrical plant in the basement that powered the incandescent lamps in the lobby and main dining room. Standing before the big 120-horsepower dynamo that Dundee said could light up a whole city block, Martin listened carefully to the engineer’s prediction that the old push-button buzzers would be driven out by telephones within ten years. Dundee, a lean vigorous man with a gray mustache, and a carpenter’s folding rule weighing down the side of his coat pocket, liked to explain things in detail, in a slow serious voice, and Martin liked to listen. The voice reminded Martin of his father explaining to him as a child how to roll a cigar without tearing the wrapper or how the back-and-forth motion of the piston in a steam engine became the circular motion of the flywheel. Martin warmed to the intelligent engineer, who in turn seemed to take an interest in Martin, and asked precise questions of his own about the management of the cigar stand.

  But Dundee was only the most likable member of a large hotel staff. Martin visited the poorly ventilated staff dining room, spoke with the headwaiters, the steward, and the managing chef, listened to the complaints of the Irish chambermaids, visited the chief accountant and arranged to take lessons in the elements of bookkeeping. The details interested him, from the operation of the old steam elevators with their winding drums to the washing of the knives and forks, but they had no meaning until they were connected to the larger design. Then he grasped them, then he held them in place and felt a deep and almost physical satisfaction—and in his mind, in his chest, in the veins of his arms, he felt a secret exhilaration, as when in his childhood he had gone shopping with his mother and had realized not only that all the toy fire engines and diamond necklaces and leather gloves were different parts of one big department store, but that the store itself was part of a block of buildings, and all the blocks went repeating themselves, rectangle by rectangle, in every direction, until they formed a city.

  As he threw himself into his new duties, which took him away from the life of the lobby but placed him close to the inner workings of the hotel, he sometimes had the sense that he was being led by friendly powers toward a destination they had marked out for him. The management, in the person first of Mr. Henning and then of Mr. Westerhoven, had shown him unusual favor, had singled him out and raised him up from the lowly rank of bellboy to his present position as personal secretary to the manager, all in the space of a few years. There had been rumors from time to time of Mr. Westerhoven’s retirement, of Mr. Henning’s promotion to manager, of the creation of a new position above assistant manager and below general manager, and Martin, who disliked rumors, which struck him as the exasperating equivalent of speculations about what would have happened if Lee had won the war, or if Booth had been a bad shot—Martin sometimes found himself wondering whether there might be something in the rumors after all, whether the friendly powers might be moving him in a direction. Then the dream-feeling would come over him, as if his real life were not here, where it seemed to be, but over there, a little off to one side, just over there.

  Meanwhile the cigar stand was turning a nice little profit. Martin increased the amount of display space for cigarettes and added gift items that proved popular: alligator cigarette cases lined with satin, porcelain figurines of humorous pipe-smoking farmers, cast-iron clown faces that blew streams of little smoke rings. He and Bill Baer discussed ways of drawing women into this mostly male domain: on the cigarette counter they placed a chromo of a well-dressed woman smoking a cigarette, and alongside brightly lacquered boxes of specially selected cigars they set advertising cards directed at a woman in search of the perfect gift for the man in her life. Purchases by women had tripled over the last three months; and Martin added a new line of silver ashtrays, with the hotel insignia, a tiny Vanderlyn, engraved in black and red.

  Martin had money now, more than ever before, even after his monthly rent for the cigar stand, his monthly contribution to his father’s store, his dinners with Bill Baer, and his visits to the house of rattling windows. In his free hours on the weekends he walked the streets of the city or rode the four Elevated lines, emerging at random from El stations to descend the graceful iron stairways with their peaked roofs, their slender columns ornamented at the top with lacy ironwork. He walked everywhere, alone or with Bill Baer—on sun-striped shadowy avenues under the El tracks, out on East River wharves, past fire escapes hung with blankets and joined by washlines, along new uptown row houses facing weedgrown bushy lots. As he walked, looking about, taking it all in, feeling a pleasant tension in his calves and thighs, he felt a surge of energy, a kind of serene restlessness, a desire to do something, to test himself, to become, in some way, larger than he was. He wasn’t sure what it was, this thing he wanted to be, but one day not long after his twentieth birthday he had a little idea that began to occupy his deepest attention.

  The Paradise Musee

  HE HAD LEARNED FROM HIS FATHER THAT THE old Paradise Musée was going to shut down. It stood at the other end of the block, on the other side of the street, where he never walked as a child except when his mother took him to see the exhibits. Moved by memory and curiosity, Martin paid a visit during his lunch hour to the gloomy old building with its dark rooms full of melancholy wax figures and its third-floor hall of dungeons and prisons. The mu
seum was deserted except for a single heavyset man in a silk hat who walked slowly about with his hands behind his back. On the shadowy second-floor landing, beneath an arched window thick with dust, Martin passed a guard in a dark green uniform who stood leaning an elbow on the window embrasure. The guard stared at him with an expression of hostility and rudely ignored Martin’s question. Martin, feeling a burst of anger in his neck, began to ask the question again sharply, before he saw that the guard was made of wax. A small spiderweb hung over his mustache. The real guard sat dozing in a chair on the second floor not far from a hooded executioner holding an ax. Downstairs the elderly ticket seller knew only that the lease was up in a few months and that the museum’s proprietor, Mr. Toft, was not planning to renew. He had already sold the whole lot of wax figures to an establishment in Coney Island off Surf Avenue. No one knew the landlord’s plans, but Martin could ask for himself: Mr. Toft was somewhere in the museum at that very moment, a big man in a silk hat.

  Mr. Toft seemed sunk in some private grief and turned to Martin a pair of gloomy dark eyes over folds of tired flesh like melted candlewax. He changed immediately when he learned who Martin was—he remembered buying cigars from him when Martin was a mere slip of a boy. And how was Otto? And his fine mother? In a small restaurant off Third Avenue he listened to Martin’s proposal, burst into a sudden sharp laugh, then narrowed his eyes and agreed to lease the building to Martin if Martin could come up with a rent check before the end of the month. He named a large sum that Martin at first thought was a joke. Mr. Toft wiped his mustache with a napkin, removed his watch from his vest pocket and slipped it back in, and asked to be remembered to Martin’s father and mother.

  Martin watched Mr. Toft’s broad back retreating down the street and tried to recall him from the old days, but saw only the present Mr. Toft with his melancholy eyes, bushy mustache, and candlewax eye-pouches. He gave up the idea of the lease as a stupid mistake, then changed his mind and paid a visit to his bank, where he was well known. In a small neat room with a big dark desk that reminded Martin of a great slab of chocolate, the banker explained that under the circumstances a loan would have to be guaranteed by a co-signer.

  “But I can guarantee it myself,” said Martin. “Down to the last nickel.”

  “Not in the way we mean,” replied the banker patiently, with a slight smile.

  Martin, who was determined to act without his father’s help, angrily abandoned his crackpot scheme. So that was how it was! Despite his success at the Vanderlyn, in the eyes of the world he was nothing at all. It occurred to him that the world was of course right. All very well and good to be the private secretary to the manager of the Vanderlyn Hotel, and to put a little vim into a dead cigar stand, but measured against his own confused desires, these were the accomplishments of a boy. Mr. Toft’s sharp laugh came back to him, and the patient dry tone of the banker, and he wondered what kind of young dummkopf they supposed he was. In his boyhood bed over the cigar store he slept badly for two nights, and at noon the next day he had lunch with Walter Dundee.

  He laid out his plan carefully before the chief engineer, whose good will he had felt from the beginning and whose clear hard sense of how things worked was never dry or dreary. Martin described his interview with the banker and presented the plan in its entirety: a lunchroom on the first floor and a billiard parlor on the second and third floors. Dundee listened thoughtfully, then put down his fork and asked detailed questions that soon revealed flaws in Martin’s thinking. It would take much more money than he had imagined to build the ground-floor lunchroom, which couldn’t simply be inserted into the existing structure but would require the knocking down of interior walls. And the building was an old one, fitted for gas. It would have to be wired for electricity—had he thought of that? Martin, who had wanted advice about securing a loan and had secretly hoped that Dundee himself, after hearing the scheme, might be willing to serve as guarantor, now felt irritable and idiotic. He scraped back his chair and was about to rise when Dundee began scribbling figures on a piece of paper, tapping the pencil eraser against his upper lip, and scribbling again. He slid the paper across to Martin. “This is a rough estimate—very rough, since I haven’t been inside the place in ten years. You never know about those old buildings. What I propose is this. I’ll put up the money myself in return for a partnership: fifty-fifty. Even Steven. Goes without saying I’ll have to check the place first.”

  Martin, who was still irritable and whose first impulse was to refuse the offer, accepted in confusion, and that night in bed he tried to understand his odd impulse of refusal and the slight disappointment he continued to feel in the center of his exhilaration. What irked him was the idea of the partnership itself, for he had wanted to do something on his own steam. He felt a kind of inner straining at the leash, an almost physical desire to pour out his energy without constraint. This secret ingratitude, which in one sense disturbed him, in another pleased him immensely, for wasn’t it the sign of his high desire? And from somewhere in the region of his stomach came a burst of gratitude to Walter Dundee, for permitting him to know his desire.

  Martin now flung himself with full energy into his new scheme, eating quick dinners at the hotel dining room and hurrying over to the Paradise Musée with Walter Dundee. Within a week he confessed to himself that his partner was invaluable. Martin had known exactly what was necessary in a well-run cigar stand, but his sense of a desirable lunchroom, though clear and precise in certain respects, was weakened by small failures of imagination. Dundee, striding up and down the ground floor of the Paradise Musée, pausing to take measurements and make sketches, tackled one technical matter after another: the gas fixtures needed to be replaced by modern incandescent lighting, the walls needed to be knocked down, the window openings enlarged and fitted with sheets of plate glass. One of the marble fireplaces might be retained as a decorative touch, but steam radiators fed by a boiler would provide the heat. Dundee examined the floors and walls, which were solid, prowled in the cellar, noted a loose baluster on the stairway leading to the third floor. The yellowing cold-water washstand in its dank closet was thirty years out of date. Dundee proposed brand-new plumbing, a big new lavatory with marble washstands having two ivory-handled faucets and hot-and-cold running water, and private pull-chain toilets for the use of customers. Martin followed each idea closely, placed it in the general plan, evaluated it in relation to the larger scheme; and though he deferred to the older man’s superior knowledge, Dundee in turn listened to Martin’s sharp, vigorous sense of what customers would find attractive in a lunchroom. Dundee, whose impulse was always in the direction of the practical and efficient, wanted to seat as many customers as the available space permitted; Martin persuaded him to sacrifice a number of seats for the sake of an elusive but crucial principle: the slippery element, created from a combination of many small precise decisions, known as atmosphere. A hungry man would stop anywhere for a bite to eat. What Martin wanted was the kind of lunchroom that would attract a man who wasn’t hungry.

  “You want to lure ’em in, do you?” Dundee said, looking at Martin with amusement.

  “I want more than that,” Martin said. “I want to keep ’em in. I want people to return. I want them to be unhappy when they’re not here.”

  “That’s a tall order,” said Dundee.

  “It’s a tall city,” Martin said quickly.

  One Saturday about a week after workmen began to arrive at the Paradise Musée, Martin took Bill Baer to look at the work. He had spoken to Walter Dundee about his friend, with a view to including him somehow in the project, and as he stepped among workmen’s tools and piles of lumber and old sawhorses he tried to make Baer see the new lunchroom—the gleaming windows, the curve of the polished oak counter, the pedestal tables, the steady glow of electric lights. Later, at dinner, he made his proposal: Bill would give up the cigar stand and come to work on the first of the year for Martin and Dundee. They needed a man to oversee the daily operation of the lunchroom
and billiard parlor, to keep close track of expenses and profits, to be on the premises, to settle problems and keep his eyes open—to serve in short as a kind of managing assistant, at a salary nearly double his present one. Martin, who had expected to see a look of bewildered gratitude on Bill Baer’s face, was puzzled to see him stare down at his plate with a small tense frown. He looked up and said, “It’s not for me.”

  Martin gave an impatient little lift to his shoulders and turned both hands palm up.

  Bill said, “Oh, I could probably learn the ropes well enough, and not shame myself or let anyone down. And God knows I can use the money. But I’d never feel—it would never suit me, Martin. I’d always feel I was in over my head. Cigars are what I know—it’s in my blood. I’m a cigar man, every inch of the way.”

  “You’re any kind of man you damn well want to make yourself,” Martin said, surprised by the sharpness in his voice.

  “Then I damn well want to be a cigar man.”

  “Then what you damn well want—,” Martin began, but gave it up. Bill was explaining how he wanted to have a cigar store of his own one day, maybe down in the old neighborhood; he was saving like crazy. He too broke off and looked sharply at Martin.

  “Look here, Martin. Say someone offered to let you run a carriage factory, or a big city bank. The whole shebang. Would you do it?”

  “Like that,” Martin said, snapping his fingers.

  Bill burst out laughing. “I think you really would.” He shook his head. Martin expected him to say something more but Bill took a long drink of beer, and the next day, as Martin reported the conversation to Walter Dundee, he didn’t know what irked him more: the sharp tone he had taken with his friend, or Bill’s bewildered, slightly sorrowful shake of the head. Dundee, who had had misgivings about hiring an amateur, was visibly relieved, and Martin turned his attention to a part of the business that Dundee had failed to consider at all.