Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer

by Steven Millhauser

  Martin had been studying the rows of advertising cards that adorned the inside of every car on the horse railway lines, for he had immediately sensed their tremendous power: people trapped in the slow-moving cars, with nothing to look at except the face of some stranger across the way, let their gaze drift to the advertisements, which attempted to seize their attention with bold lettering and clever pictures calculated to make a sharp, decisive impression. The Jap-a-lac lady in her white apron, painting a window frame and smiling at the viewer over her shoulder, or the man in the ad for Sapolio soap, staring at his face reflected in the shiny back of a pan, were the daily companions of thousands of horsecar riders, who saw the same ads in daily papers and weekly magazines, on cards in shop windows, on posters stuck on hoardings and the walls of El stations, until they were as familiar as the nose on George Washington’s face. One afternoon Martin paid a visit to one of the new downtown ad agencies, which placed ads in newspapers and did business with a dozen different streetcar lines, including the new Broadway cable cars. The art director agreed to prepare some sketches for him.

  Martin envisioned a single, striking image that would draw people to the lunchroom: a bowl of soup with wriggly lines indicating warmth and, just above the bowl, a man’s face with half-closed eyes and a smile of rapture.

  Meanwhile his work at the hotel was going well. Mr. Westerhoven knew the hotel business thoroughly, took pride in the Vanderlyn, and behaved with scrupulous fairness toward every member of the staff, though he proved to have one flaw: he liked his hotel just as it was, and was indecisive over the question of costly innovations. He understood that times were changing, that steam radiators were replacing hot-air vents, that room telephones were bound to replace electric buzzers, but he questioned the necessity of such changes even as he bowed, rather stiffly, to the inevitable. He seemed to enjoy hearing Martin’s view of such things, as if this permitted him to maintain his opposition while passing on to his youthful secretary the responsibility for each disastrous turn to the modern. Martin, who believed that the Vanderlyn was in danger of becoming antiquated, argued that up-to-date improvements weren’t luxuries but necessities of the modern hotel, though he acknowledged that the spirit of a hotel was larger and more complex than technology alone could account for: people liked telephones and the new electric elevators and private toilets and incandescent lights, but at the same time they liked old-world architecture, period furniture, dim suggestions of the very world that was being annihilated by American efficiency and know-how. People needed to be assured that they weren’t missing the latest improvements, while at the same time they wanted to be told that nothing ever changed. Hence the cleverness, the sheer genius, of a little invention like the electric chandelier, with its combination of Mr. Edison and the courts of Europe. To Mr. Westerhoven’s objection that this was a hopeless paradox, Martin answered that that was the point: people wanted the paradoxical, the impossible, and it was the Vanderlyn’s job to provide it. The solution, Martin argued, was to move in both directions at once—to introduce every mechanical improvement without fail, and at the same time to emphasize the past, especially in decor. He had seen the same idea at work in the El trains: miles of iron girders and columns, the whole thing a masterpiece of modern engineering, the cars equipped with up-to-date running gear—but step inside those cars and you saw old-world mahogany paneling on the walls, tapestry curtains on the windows, and Axminster carpets on the floors. He had been told that the old-fashioned curtains were hung on concealed spring rollers.

  At night in his boyhood bed over the cigar store, beside his old chest of drawers on which stood a hand-painted photograph of himself at the age of six, a dark-haired boy with clear serious eyes, Martin thought of iron El trestles winding and stretching across the city, of department store windows and hotel lobbies, of electric elevators and streetcar ads, of the city pressing its way north on both sides of the great park, of dynamos and electric lights, of ten-story hotels, of the old iron tower near the depot at West Brighton with its two steam-driven elevators rising and falling in the sky—and in his blood he felt a surge of restlessness, as if he were a steam train spewing fiery coalsmoke into the black night sky as he roared along a trembling El track, high above the dark storefronts, the gaslit saloons, the red-lit doorways, the cheap beer dives, the dance halls, the gambling joints, the face in the doorway, the sudden cry in the night.

  Caroline and Emmeline Vernon

  THE METROPOLITAN LUNCHROOM AND BILLIARD Parlor opened on a Saturday in mid-October of 1894, six weeks after Martin’s twenty-second birthday. The facade had been painted a cheerful shade of blue, with yellow trim, and on the sidewalk near the door stood a wooden Pilgrim in breeches and buckle shoes, holding a horn of plenty. The success of the first weekend wasn’t surprising to Martin, who said to Dundee that people were curious and would try anything once; the trick was to get ’em to stick. When they stuck he refused to celebrate, arguing that it was too soon to be sure, though customers were praising the lunch special: corned beef hash served with German browned potatoes fried in butter, with a slice of hot apple pie for dessert. The pies, ordered fresh each morning from a nearby bakery, were three inches thick and flavored with cinnamon. A dip in the fourth week’s revenue convinced Dundee that Martin had been right all along, but Martin gave a shrug and said it was nothing. The same thing had happened with the cigar stand and would happen again. By the end of the sixth week Martin was willing to sit down to a celebratory steak dinner with Dundee, but even as he raised his stein of beer he argued that it would be a serious mistake to stop advertising simply because they were having an early success: now that ads were everywhere you looked, people were starting to feel that the very fact of repeated ads was a sign of success. When Dundee appeared doubtful, Martin proposed that they prepare a questionnaire for customers, asking how they had first heard of the Metropolitan Lunchroom and how many times they had patronized it.

  Martin himself had begun to study the classified pages of three daily papers and to make occasional trips north on the Sixth Avenue El, and one day he made up his mind. Without telling anyone he rented a parlor-and-bedroom suite in a new apartment hotel in the West End that seemed to have sprung up overnight on a vacant side street with a view of the Hudson. He had searched the streets and lanes all through the 60s but kept moving north through the 70s until he had found what he wanted: an impossible building set down in the middle of nowhere by an enterprising developer inspired by the example of the Dakota but with his eye on a middle-class clientele. The nine-story hotel, with its medieval turrets and oriel windows and its modern hydraulic elevators, faced a stretch of weedgrown lots where goats roamed behind ramshackle fences. Martin felt he had moved to another city, one younger and more rural, a world he had glimpsed from the El road as he rushed north on his voyages of exploration.

  Everything seemed new: the smell of the river through his half-open bedroom window, the runny bright-yellow yolks of poached eggs in the hotel dining room, the wintry early-morning walk over to the El station on Columbus Avenue. He still thought of it as Ninth. Up here, in the wilderness, even the names changed: the northern extension of Broadway was the Boulevard, a wide avenue of hard-packed dirt. From the high platform of the Eighty-first Street station he could see to the west the half-iced Hudson and the red-brown Palisades, to the east the thin dark river and the bluish-brown hills of Brooklyn. Below the Park the train swung east, the track split into the Ninth Avenue and Sixth Avenue lines, already he could hear the bang of his heels down the iron steps of the station and feel steam heat on his cold cheeks as he entered the Vanderlyn. They all thought he was mad, banishing himself like that to the remote north. You’d have thought he had moved to the land of igloos and polar bears. But even as he bent over his desk in a corner of the manager’s office, even as he entered the old Paradise Musée and saw with approval the men standing shoulder to shoulder at the polished oak counter of the Metropolitan Lunchroom, Martin looked forward to the night ride into h
is untamed neighborhood. Row houses were rising on graded side streets, but here and there a decaying farmhouse sat in a field of pricker bushes and Queen Anne’s lace.

  Sometimes, when he walked over to the cigar store on his lunch hour, he felt, as he stepped inside, a sudden impatience, as if the brown dusk, the tulip-shaped globes of the cigar lighter, the jars of sweet-smelling tobacco were part of a world he had left long ago, a world of red horsecars carpeted with straw, of short pants and bedtime stories, of his mother’s hand as they walked up Broadway past big windows and clattering omnibuses. And he longed for Saturday afternoon, for Sunday, when he could walk for hours along the six avenues of his new West End world, under the brown bare elms of the Boulevard or up along the wilder reaches of the Central Park, where tarpaper shanties sprouted in the scrub; when he could walk wherever he liked, turning at a whim to explore the cross streets, many of them muddy lanes, or weedgrown paths between cliffs of rock.

  On Sunday evenings he took to having dinner in the dark-paneled dining room of the Bellingham, at a small table near a window looking out on a vacant lot. Beyond the lot came snow-streaked vegetable gardens and the backs of four-story row houses. At his window Martin would read over reports or settle down with a newspaper before rising from his chair and nodding at clusters of fellow diners. Among them were three women who sat always at the same table, two tables distant from his own. They appeared to be a mother and two grown daughters, whom he never saw at breakfast, although one Saturday, when Mr. Westerhoven dismissed him early and he took lunch at the Bellingham, he saw them entering the dining room as he was rising to leave. What struck him about the picturesque group was that the mother and the older, dark-haired daughter talked easily together, while the pale-haired daughter with the pretty face sat eating in silence, with lowered eyes, which she raised only sometimes to look out the window. And whereas Mrs. Vernon—he had caught the name as a waiter delivered a dish—and the dark-haired daughter had begun to look his way, and to smile when Martin entered or rose to leave, the quiet daughter never looked toward him and, if she did not entirely ignore his greetings, restricted her acknowledgments to brief unsmiling nods, during which her gaze would fall to the left or right of his face.

  One night when Martin returned to his hotel at about ten o’clock, after going over accounts with Walter Dundee and discussing the possibility of opening a second lunchroom farther uptown, he saw in one of the parlors off the main lobby the three Vernon women sitting in armchairs around a small dark table, on which sat three slender glasses filled with amber-colored liquid. As he passed the open doorway on his way to the elevators, he nodded at Mrs. Vernon, who smiled at him in so inviting a way that he hesitated in the doorway as he said “Good evening”—and moments later he found himself seated in an armchair between the mother and the fair-haired daughter, facing the dark-haired daughter. Mrs. Vernon laughingly introduced herself and her daughters: Caroline (fair) and Emmeline (dark). Martin formally introduced himself, felt irked at something stiff in his tone, immediately shook it off, and entered the spirit of Mrs. Vernon and Emmeline, both of whom were quick and intelligent and asked precise questions about his work at the Vanderlyn and his role in the transformation of the old Paradise Musée. Caroline Vernon, on his right, remained silent and apart, in a way that the others seemed not to mind. The dimmed light glowing through dome-shaped porcelain lampshades painted with landscapes, the quietness of the nearby lobby, the dark-red armchairs patterned with wavy gold leaves, the shine of dark wood and of the amber liqueurs in the longstemmed glasses, the quiet laughter of the women, the sense of intimacy about the small table, all this soothed something deep in Martin, who found himself speaking about his life and his plans until he suddenly stopped short with an apology and began asking questions of his own. Mrs. Vernon said that she was from Boston, where both girls had grown up. Mr. Vernon had been an attorney, who two years ago had been transferred to a big New York law firm and whose sudden death had been a devastating blow, though fortunately he had left his little family well enough provided for, though heaven knew you couldn’t be too careful, and on the advice of a family friend she had moved uptown into the wilderness, where the rents were half what they were downtown. Of course things were a bit slow out here, especially when you knew no one and had to watch every penny; and sometimes it seemed as if they were becalmed, simply becalmed, waiting for the wind to pick up and fill their sails. “So you’re a traveler, are you?” Martin asked Mrs. Vernon with a smile. “Oh,” Emmeline answered, “we’ve traveled extensively in the lobby of the Bellingham Hotel”—and she looked at him so playfully, so expectantly, that Martin felt he ought to make a witty reply, but he could think of nothing, and burst out laughing. Suddenly Caroline rose, said she was tired, and walked out of the room.

  There was a moment of awkwardness, which Mrs. Vernon quickly covered with talk; and now that Caroline had left, Martin yielded entirely to the warm friendliness of the little circle in the lamplit parlor. When the evening ended nearly an hour later, with Martin’s discovery that it was practically midnight, he felt that an understanding had been reached: they liked each other, they had begun a friendship. And he had learned one fact that struck him: it was Caroline who was the older daughter, by two years, though she looked five years younger. Perhaps it was her small and almost childish features, especially her little girl’s nose, that made her seem younger than Emmeline, whose strong straight nose and black thick eyebrows gave her a look of masculine energy; her shoulders were broader, her voice deeper and more resonant, than Caroline’s. It struck him too that Emmeline in some sense watched over her sister, filled in gaps left by Caroline’s silence, took upon herself the task of speaking for both of them—while Caroline, with her pale hair pulled tightly back, so that it seemed to pull painfully against the skin of her temples, Caroline, with her delicate pale face and small mouth and large brown eyes looking away, Caroline Vernon, sunk in her dream, seemed the younger sister, protected by mother and older sister from unwelcome disturbances and intrusions.

  Now every evening when Martin returned to the Bellingham after late hours at his office in the Vanderlyn, or supper with his parents in the small kitchen over the cigar store, on the familiar old plates with the blue Dutch children on them, or his weekly visit to the brothel on West Twenty-fifth Street, he would glance in at the lamplit parlor off the main lounge. There the Vernon women sat night after night, sipping bright-colored liquids from thin glasses. At a smile from Mrs. Vernon or a wave from Emmeline he would enter the parlor and sink into a waiting armchair, before the dark-gleaming table with its glowing dome-shaded lamp, an ivory-colored lamp with little Nile-green sailboats and a Nile-green island on the translucent porcelain shade and, on the porcelain body, little Nile-green houses on a Nile-green hillside—an admirable lamp, a really first-rate lamp that, he assured the Vernon women, with its removable oil fount and its excellent center-draft burner, was as hopelessly antiquated in the new world of incandescent lighting as the stage coach in a world of steam trains. Had they noticed, incidentally, that the overhead lights in the lobby and dining room were all electric, even the chandeliers? For it was interesting, it was a subject that never ceased to fascinate him, how the two worlds existed together, the world of oil lamps and incandescent lights, of horsecars and steam trains, one world gradually crowding out the other. Mrs. Vernon and Emmeline encouraged him to continue such discussions, Emmeline putting in a sharp, thoughtful question whenever something wasn’t absolutely clear to her, and both continued to question him closely about his work. Martin felt pleased and soothed to recount the minor adventures of his day: the resistance of Mr. Westerhoven to everything new, along with a secret willingness to give way in the face of superior argument; the slackness of the new bellboy, who had been caught smoking a cigarette in a fourth-floor corridor; Dundee’s brilliantly meticulous mind, which foresaw every expense and left nothing to chance, but which resisted anything daring or unusual, such as Martin’s suggestion that one of the tw
o floors of billiard tables be reserved for women. His own father, a tobacco man of the old stamp, they didn’t make them like that any more, his own father still wouldn’t hear of stocking cigarettes—could anyone believe it? And he turned to Caroline, as if he were asking whether she was able to believe it; and Caroline lowered her eyes.

  Caroline Vernon’s quietness had quickly come to seem part of the nature of things, a form of reserve rather than of sullenness. Besides, she was by no means silent, but now and then spoke a few quiet words, to which Martin listened with deep attention, as if a remark such as “I prefer warm weather, but not too warm,” or “It was the Sunday we were walking in the park and there was a sudden shower” were a revelation of her innermost nature. She no longer ignored Martin, but nodded at him when he joined the group or rose to go—a small, not unfriendly nod and a brief brushing of his face with her large, half-closed eyes, which shone vividly in the lamplight and might have seemed startlingly vivid had it not been for the heavy eyelids, which gave her a languorous and almost sleepy air.

  One evening when Martin returned from the Vanderlyn a little later than usual—it was getting on toward eleven, he had been studying the report of expenses provided by the head of housekeeping—he glanced in at the parlor and was surprised to see four empty armchairs about the familiar table. He hesitated, then stepped inside. At the far end of the parlor an elderly woman looked up from a book. Martin, who recognized her from the dining room, nodded and sat down. He unbuttoned his coat and removed from his vest pocket a silver-cased watch. At the touch of a pin the lid opened. It was 10:52; they had often sat until midnight. He closed the watch cover, replaced the watch in his vest pocket, and settled back. A moment later he sprang up and looked into the lobby, where a few guests sat reading newspapers. Martin glanced in at the other parlor and the small library, returned to the first parlor, and at last checked with the night clerk, who said that the Vernons had taken a late supper, gone for a walk, and returned to their rooms a little past nine. They had not come down.