Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer

by Steven Millhauser

  Of such things he spoke to the Vernons in the evenings, in the soft armchair in the quiet parlor, by the dark table with its dome-shaded porcelain lamp hand-painted with Nile-green sailboats, its gleam of slender glasses holding amber and emerald and ruby liquids. At times he wondered a little what they made of it all. Margaret Vernon listened with a dutiful and effortful attention, interrupted by fits of distraction during which she followed someone moving through the lobby, while Caroline listened without impatience but without any expression on her face. Only Emmeline asked questions. They were sharp, good questions, the questions of someone who knew what Martin was talking about and wanted to know more. It was she who grasped quickly the advantages of linked stores, the crucial role of managers, the need for strong central control. “If you sent out letters to your managers,” she said, leaning forward with a frown of concentration and one hand clenched in a fist on her knee, “say every month or so, stating your policy and making suggestions—some kind of monthly statement or letter, a reminder—then it seems to me—” and he saw it clearly, saw that it could be made to work. And he felt a flow of gratitude toward this energetic woman with the plain features and the too-thick eyebrows, a flow of brotherly affection, as if he had been married for some time to silent Caroline and had formed, with his sister-in-law, an intellectual friendship. Sometimes, when he tried to imagine his future life, a life in which he was the husband of Caroline, he saw himself seated in an armchair in the high-ceilinged bedroom of a grand hotel, talking pleasantly to Emmeline in the chair beside him, while a few feet away, on the edge of the polished brass bed, wearing a green silk dress, her pale hair pulled back tight, her hands interlaced in her lap and her eyelids half-closed, sat Caroline, silent, expressionless, inaccessible.

  The thought of Caroline’s remoteness, her enclosure in a private dream, a secret room, stirred Martin to a kind of irritable desire, and in the lamplit parlor he would turn sharply to her, as if to surprise her in some furtive act. He would see her sitting quietly there, not looking at him, with one arm resting on the dark red chairarm, the sleeve tight at the wrist, the fingers of her hand slightly curved, in a motionlessness that seemed at once tense and languorous.

  And he would try to enter her dream, there in the chair beside him, no more than a foot away—so close that if he wished he could have reached out and placed his hand on the back of her curved hand; and as he imagined the palm of his hand slowly covering her hand, suddenly he imagined her naked body, he saw the ribs expanding and contracting as she breathed, the tendon taut at the side of her bent knee, the nipples stiffening, the tiny pale hairs on her stomach glittering, but he could not imagine the expression on her face.

  He took to inviting the Vernons to accompany him on occasional late-morning or afternoon business expeditions, eager for Emmeline’s impressions. She argued in favor of the Boulevard over Amsterdam, despite higher rents, but urged him to consider Riverside as well, since there he could take advantage of the streams of Sunday cyclists who liked to ride up the winding avenue all the way to the Claremont Inn. Martin argued that he wanted a lunchroom in an established neighborhood, that Sunday cyclists were a weak foundation on which to erect a business, but that perhaps in two or three years, when the Drive had made its choice between the private châteaux of soda-water merchants or glove-hook heiresses and the new apartment houses and family hotels that were becoming visible in the West End—along old Eighth Avenue facing the Central Park, on the Boulevard, on the avenue corners of Seventy-second Street—perhaps then a Riverside Metropolitan would be possible. He showed her his figures, which she studied carefully, and she announced that the figures spoke in favor of an older and half-commercial Boulevard location near the bottom of the Park. He proposed the merits of two or three locations farther north, but Emmeline had become fanatical in defense of the block with the saloon and grocery and butcher shop.

  He needed a place from which to conduct business. It was all very well to study figures and plan advertising campaigns in the parlor of a bachelor suite, but he needed a place in which he might hold interviews with prospective managers, a place of business uncompromised by flowered armchairs and a paneled door concealing a bedroom. He found a brown room with a window on the fourth floor of an old commercial building on Chambers Street, off lower Broadway, which he furnished with an old desk full of pigeonholes, a creaking swivel-chair, two parlor lamps, and a serviceable armchair for visitors. Mrs. Vernon wondered whether it wasn’t rather gloomy, but Emmeline declared that a pair of muslin curtains, not falsely cheery, would give it exactly the touch it needed.

  After that, things moved quickly: Martin leased the vacant store on the Boulevard, advertised for managers, and conducted half a dozen interviews before choosing an energetic man named Henry McFarlane, who had hotel and restaurant experience and displayed an immediate grasp of the linked-store system. Then he called in all three managers to discuss policy, and threw himself into a vigorous advertising campaign, during which he made the decision to change the name of his group of restaurants from the Metropolitan Lunchroom to the Metropolitan Cafe. Dundee was skeptical, but offered no objection; he appeared to be losing interest in lunchrooms. Emmeline’s eager interest in all phases of the business, her confessed dissatisfaction with her idle way of life, and his desire to keep a close watch over the operation of the new restaurant led him one day to offer her the job of cashier, which she passionately accepted despite the murmured objections of Mrs. Vernon, who felt it dimly unbecoming to the family name. The next day Martin took Emmeline down to the cafe, where workmen were setting up pedestal tables along one wall, and showed her how to operate a cash register.

  She was seated behind it on the day of the Grand Opening, announced by the largest publicity campaign that Martin had yet mounted on behalf of his expanding business. Martin cut the ribbon that stretched between the posts of the awning of the new Metropolitan Cafe, with its large plate-glass windows set in brick painted skyblue and its wooden Pilgrim on the sidewalk—and as the two halves of the ribbon fluttered down, the chief cook and the waiters and the dishwashers and Emmeline released into the sky hundreds of blue balloons, while the crowd on the sidewalk cheered. Martin was given to amused skepticism on the occasion of opening days, but he was surprised by the size of the turnout, by the sheer success of the posters and newspaper ads and the skyblue advertising wagons with brightly painted signs that he had hired to roll up and down the avenues two weeks in advance of opening day. As he sat at a window table with Margaret Vernon and Caroline and Walter Dundee, eating two eggs with fried steak and glancing at Emmeline in her striped percale shirtwaist on the stool behind the cash register and at the sidewalk spectators clustered at the window, he felt, even as he turned over the idea of a fourth cafe in Brooklyn, a little sharp burst of restlessness, of dissatisfaction, as if he were supposed to be doing something else, something grander, higher, more difficult, more dangerous, more daring.

  Courtship

  THE SENSE THAT A DIFFERENT FUTURE awaited him, a future that, once he saw it rising in the distance, would be as deeply familiar to him as his own childhood, remained strong in Martin even as the success of the new cafe became a certainty. It was a certainty measurable by the nightly and weekly and monthly accounts that Martin carefully kept in his brown office with the green muslin curtains, behind a door with M. DRESSLER lettered in gold paint on the panel. On a shiny black typewriter with round black keys rimmed in nickel, Martin typed bi-weekly directions to all three managers, reminding them to keep the plate-glass windows clean at all times, proposing that they advertise daily specials on signboards set up on the sidewalk, and suggesting ways to draw in customers during slow hours. One of Martin’s experiments that proved popular was the Five-Minute Breakfast: a reduced-rate breakfast of fried eggs and hamsteak guaranteed to be served within five minutes, for people in a hurry. But the main purpose of the letters was to remind the managers that the three cafes were not independent businesses but members of a single enterpri
se, in which the successful operation of one member contributed to the success of the whole.

  In the window of Emmeline’s cafe he installed a movable display powered by a toy steam engine. Before the puckered lips of a wooden face in profile, a flat wooden cup of coffee slowly rose and fell, rose and fell; each time it touched the lips, the head tipped back as if to drink. When Emmeline reported that people on the sidewalk were stopping to watch the moving cup of coffee, Martin installed the same display in his two other Metropolitans.

  As revenues poured in, Martin continued to advertise, leasing space on billboards and in streetcars; and he began to search for a fourth location, taking the cable cars over the bridge to Brooklyn and walking the streets of neighborhoods once glimpsed from the horsecars of his childhood.

  The question of a new location was one he liked to discuss with Emmeline, when he stopped in at the Boulevard cafe once or twice a week during her lunch break and whisked her off to a different restaurant, or when he accompanied her back to the hotel now and then at the end of her shift. Her brave plunge into the world of work, her quick grasp of day-to-day business and the larger design, her sharp insistent questions, all this made Martin seek her company as he had never sought the company of George Henning or Mr. Westerhoven. She seemed to have thrown herself into his business as into a romance. She listened carefully to customers, reported their occasional complaints, proposed the idea, which Martin quickly adopted, of a Metropolitan dessert: a special pastry filled with chopped apples and shaped like a Pilgrim, available to the Metropolitan through the same bakery that supplied their pies. And Emmeline listened to Martin—listened with a faint frown of attention, with a stillness of concentration, that inspired in him stricter efforts at clarity. She took sides with his ambition and kept in step with his boldest designs. One day as they were discussing the expansion of the business to Brooklyn she said to him, “But what do you want, Martin? What is it you actually want?”

  “Oh, everything,” he said, lightly but without a smile.

  “But I don’t think you do, not in the usual way. In a way you don’t want anything. You don’t care if you’re rich. Suppose you were rich, really rich. What would you do then?”

  “Oh, then,” Martin said. He thought of himself as a child standing in the waves at West Brighton, feeling the world rushing away in every direction. “Anyway, what makes you think I don’t want to be rich?”

  He saw that he had offended her, that he had taken the wrong tone. “Listen, Em. I don’t know what I want. But I want—more than this.” He swept out his arm lightly, gracefully, in a gesture that seemed to include the restaurant in which they were seated, but that might have included, for all he knew, the whole world.

  Sometimes, when he looked across a table at Emmeline, he had the sense that he and she had been married for a long time. It was a comfortable companionable sort of marriage, calm and peaceful as cozy furniture in a firelit room. And at once he would think of Caroline, tense and languorous in her armchair in the hotel parlor, waiting for something, something that was bound to happen or perhaps would never happen—Caroline with her half-closed eyes and motionless fingers and pale hair pulled back tight on both sides. For it was Caroline after all whom he had married, or was about to marry, or had somehow forgotten to marry. And when on Sunday mornings he stood against the doorjamb talking with Marie Haskova and watching her bend this way and that, Marie Haskova with her heavy body and sudden swift questioning glances, then too he would think of Caroline, waiting in her chair for something to happen. Perhaps they were all waiting for something to happen—waiting for him to make up his mind. For it was as if he had three wives, and was married to all of them, or none of them, or some of them, or now one and now another of them. Of the three wives, Emmeline and Marie Haskova were the most vividly present to him, the most solidly there, whereas Caroline seemed a ghost-wife, a dream-wife—though he wondered whether it wasn’t precisely her lack of substance that allowed her to haunt and hover, to invade the edges of other women.

  In any case in being with Emmeline he was always with Caroline, as if she rose up most vividly in relation to others. One day he asked Emmeline a question about her sister, and after that he asked others—he had many questions about Caroline, as if he had seen a hand-painted photograph of Emmeline’s sister and were working his way up to an introduction. What did she like? What did she do? What did she think about? To all his questions Emmeline listened carefully and gave thoughtful, meticulous answers, which somehow didn’t clarify anything and tended to float out of his mind the moment he was alone. Caroline then was a mystery: the mystery irritated and attracted him, he would have to let it go at that.

  Sometimes, speaking to Emmeline about cafe business, he would feel a sudden gratitude to Caroline, for having a sister who understood everything. Then a tenderness would come over him for Caroline, alone with her mother in the big hotel, waiting for something to happen, and he would long to see her in her dark red armchair with her white fingers and heavy-lidded eyes.

  One day at lunch Martin said to Emmeline, “Do you think Caroline would like to marry me?”

  Emmeline looked at him. “That’s a strange question for you to ask me.”

  “But you’re the only one I can ask.”

  “There’s always Caroline, you know. Let’s not forget Caroline.”

  “Oh, Caroline,” he said impatiently.

  The truth was that Caroline often irked him, even as she became fixed in his mind as a white bride. It struck him that the pleasure he felt in the presence of Marie Haskova was in part a pleasure directed against Caroline, as if by enjoying the company of Marie Haskova he were warning Caroline not to push him too far. For Marie liked him, there was no question about that; and when he thought of Marie Haskova with her slow body, her melancholy eyes, and her sudden questioning glances, he would become angry at Caroline, for invading his time with Marie, for harming her in some way.

  But when he walked along the cold streets toward the Bellingham at night, taking deep breaths of clear cold air, then he looked about with pleasure at the yellow windows of the dark row houses; and when he entered the Bellingham and felt his cheeks tingle and tighten in the steamheated air, when he saw the three Vernon women waiting for him about the little table, then he felt a great surge of pleasure, and sank down gratefully into his armchair in the circle of his dark-haired sister, his adoring mother, and his sister’s sister, his tense, languorous, floating, ungraspable bride.

  “She’s willing,” Emmeline said a few days later, a little breathlessly, as she leaned forward over a corner table. “Willing?”

  “To marry you.” She paused. “It’s what you wanted me to find out.”

  “And you asked her? Flat out?”

  “Well no. You’re angry.”

  “I’m surprised. You asked her?”

  “I talked to her. We talked about things. Caroline trusts me, she knows I understand her. I didn’t ask her, for heaven’s sake, but I found out.” She picked up her cup of tea and held it in both hands without drinking it. “Now you can decide.”

  “Decide what?”

  “Whether to marry her.”

  “And you think I should?”

  She lifted the cup to her mouth but did not drink. From behind the cup, as from behind a curtain, she said, so quietly that he could barely hear her: “It would be so good for Caroline.”

  “And me? Would it be good for me?”

  “Oh, everything’s good for you,” Emmeline said harshly.

  In the evening he felt a slight awkwardness as he entered the lamplit parlor and sank into the familiar armchair, but nothing had changed: Margaret Vernon greeted him with the same girlish effusiveness, Emmeline began describing a jammed cash-register key that she had managed to fix, and Caroline sat dreamily in her chair, glancing at him in greeting and letting her eyes slide away. He tried to find a hint in her, a secret sign, perhaps a faint flush in the skin over her cheekbone or a barely visible tightening of the te
ndons in the back of her hand, but he couldn’t be certain, and only when he was alone in his room did it strike him that the change was in him, as he watched her secretly, searching for a sign.

  He thought about his new secret bride in his brown office with the green muslin curtains, and at dinner in the kitchen over the cigar store as his mother placed before him a heap of stewmeat and boiled onions, and in the parlor of his bachelor suite as he stood against the doorjamb watching Marie Haskova with her red-and-black feather duster; and it seemed to him that Caroline’s power of invasion had increased, that she was hovering behind his heavy red curtains, seeping into the edges of things, rippling in the swish of other women’s dresses, glimmering up at him from rain-slick streets.

  At night, instead of falling asleep at once, he lay in the dark imagining Caroline Vernon. She sat in her chair, in the dark of the deserted parlor, and suddenly she rose and came toward him at the other end of the room, but when she reached him she passed through him and came out the other side—and from the chair she rose again and came toward him, and passed through him, while from the chair she rose and came toward him, rose and came toward him, rose and rose and rose.

  As the weather grew warm a restlessness came over Martin. He would hover close to Marie Haskova on Sunday mornings, watching her move about in her black uniform and speaking to her about his cafes, his life in the cigar store, the Irish maids in the Vanderlyn; and as he watched the black cloth tighten against her bending back, as he watched her rough-palmed hands with their faint odor of lye and furniture polish, he wondered whether he hovered around her not because she was a temptation that he continually enjoyed overcoming, but because she was a peaceful place he could go to, away from Caroline.