Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer

by Steven Millhauser

In the warm-cool evenings he again walked out with the Vernon women. He would stroll along the lamplit sidewalks with Margaret Vernon, a few steps in front of Emmeline and Caroline, and at the street crossing he would continue with Emmeline, behind Margaret and Caroline, and at the next crossing he would continue with Margaret, behind Emmeline and Caroline. One night in the park he was surprised to find himself walking beside Caroline, through spaces of lamplight and spaces of dark. A sharp moist smell of green was in the air, heavy and bitter, mixed with the sweet decay of brown oak leaves. In the glare of the lamps her cape was very black, her coat very red, her hair very yellow. She looked like a new painting, all wet and shiny, but already she was fading into the darkness between lamps. Something crackled in the black trees. From beyond a turn in the path a stick struck the ground at regular intervals. “Do you know what I was thinking,” Martin heard himself say, startled by the sound of his voice, as if he had reached out and touched her mouth. Somewhere a man and woman laughed together and suddenly stopped. Around the bend came an old man in a silk hat, striking the ground with his stick, striking the ground with his stick.

  All night long the sharp stick struck the ground as Martin lay in a restless half-sleep, and now the old man was thrusting his pointed walking stick into Caroline’s foot: blood ran from her shoe. Martin rose in the dark, washed in cold water, put on his suit, and went down to the lobby. It was half past three. The lobby was empty except for the night clerk. Martin sat in a lobby chair with a view of the elevator corridor and waited for the graying of the dark lobby windows. She was closed in dream, a princess in a tower, scarcely a flesh-and-blood woman at all. Did he then desire her not for herself but for all that was unawakened in her, all that had not yet come into being? His mother had read him that story: at the Prince’s kiss, Dornröschen opened her eyes. Then the fire leaped in the fireplace, the horses in the stable stirred, the pigeons on the roof took their heads from under their wings. And a mournful desire moved in him, for the princess in her chamber, as he imagined her young body stirring, the ribs moving under the skin, the wrists turning, the eyes, dark with dream, slowly opening after their hundred years’ sleep.

  At five minutes before six, Emmeline appeared around the corner of the elevator corridor and gave a start. She was wearing a coat and hat and carried an umbrella. She came swiftly toward him but Martin did not rise.

  “Tell her—” he said. “Tell her—” His eyes hurt, his eyelids trembled, there was a muffled buzzing deep in his brain.

  “You don’t look well,” Emmeline said, bending toward him with a frown.

  “Tell her,” he said. “Tell her I—” In his throbbing ears his voice sounded faint and thin, and he was reminded of a child he had once seen on a calendar, kneeling and looking up with pleading moist dark eyes. He tried to recall where he had seen that calendar, and in the gray dawn of the lobby, where elevator grilles were already rattling open, his eyes burned, his nose stung, a bell rang.

  The Blue Velvet Box

  TWO NIGHTS LATER WHEN CAROLINE ROSE from her chair in the parlor and Margaret rose after her, Emmeline said that she had some business to discuss with Martin and would be along in just a few minutes.

  Her mother looked at her doubtfully. “Don’t be too long, dear. You know you need your rest, what with this job of yours that makes you get up in the middle of the night like a—like a rooster.”

  “I’ll be along directly,” Emmeline said.

  She and Martin sat silently across from each other as they watched Caroline and Margaret walk from the parlor. They remained silent as they listened to the sound of the closing elevator door.

  Martin leaned forward. “You’ve spoken to her?”

  “I have.”

  “And she’s—receptive?”

  “She’s not unreceptive. With Caroline it isn’t always possible to be definite. So much depends on how she’s slept the night before.”

  “Still, you feel—”

  “I do.”

  Martin reached into the pocket of his coat and removed a small blue velvet box, which he placed on the table. He watched Emmeline look at the box.

  “Here,” Martin said. “Let me show you.”

  He bent over and quickly pulled up the lid, which was attached to the box by a hinge on one side. Emmeline leaned forward, resting one palm on the arm of her chair.

  “Oh, she’ll like that,” Emmeline said, and leaned back.

  “Good. The real question is whether she’ll accept it. You say it all depends on how well she sleeps?”

  “Not entirely, of course. I was exaggerating. Caroline does what she wants to: always. But there are worse times and better times at which to speak to her.”

  “It’s asking a great deal of you, I know.”

  “I can promise only one thing: to find the most propitious time.”

  “But that one thing is everything. I can’t thank you enough. But would you mind”—he bent over the box—“for just a moment? I’d like to see—”

  “If it’s absolutely necessary.”

  “Just for one half second. Here. Let me do it for you.”

  Martin rose quickly from his chair and bent over Emmeline, who held out her hand stiffly.

  Martin straightened up and walked behind her chair, where he stood looking down at her hand. The hand turned slightly in one direction, then in the other. On the table the inside of the blue velvet box was violent black. The fingers contracted into a loose fist and slowly spread out again.

  Martin began walking around the circle of armchairs to his seat, watching Emmeline’s hand as he went.

  As he sank back into his chair he said, “I can’t begin to tell you—”

  “Don’t,” Emmeline said.

  Wedding Night

  IN THE WARM MAY EVENINGS THE STROLLS continued, but now Martin always walked beside Caroline, a few steps in front of Margaret and Emmeline. They walked past the sudden sharp scents of window boxes heavy with purple and yellow flowers, under branches of leaves green-glowing and translucent in the light of streetlamps, into the darkening Park. They had never spoken directly of their engagement, although the night after his talk with Emmeline he had walked into the lamplit parlor where the three women were sitting about the little table, and drawing closer he had seen something flash up from the back of Caroline’s hand outspread on the dark-red gold-flowered chairarm. Margaret Vernon, glancing quickly from Emmeline to Caroline, had congratulated him with a kind of muted effusiveness, while Caroline, raising her eyelids abruptly, had looked at him with large dark eyes that immediately vanished under lowered lashes. After that she walked by his side in the warm evenings, holding herself very straight. Sometimes he would bend his head slightly to say something meant for her alone, such as “These spring nights are the best time of year, don’t you think, Caroline?” and the sound of her name, issuing from his mouth, seemed to him so intimate, so much like a hand stroking her face, that he could scarcely attend to her murmured reply, which in any case was so soft that he could barely hear it, a reply that sounded like “Oh, that’s all right,” as if she hadn’t quite heard him correctly. The constraint between them, the sharp edge of formality that thrust at him from every movement of Caroline’s body, seemed quite proper to Martin, since easy-going camaraderie was the note of his friendship with Emmeline—a friendship that flourished precisely to the extent that the sexual wasn’t in question. His ambiguous friendship with Marie Haskova was another matter, for his sense of ease with her, his pleasure in watching her, his playfulness, his laughter, all this was made possible by the existence of something unsettled and secretive between them, which lent to their casual meetings an air of intimacy, of adventure. Therefore the slight awkwardness that he felt in the presence of Caroline, his sometimes exasperated sense of a resistance, an inviolable propriety, struck Martin as entirely correct, since in the absence of such constraints there would have been nothing for her to be except a friend or a mistress. Had she flirted with him, had she invited secret, forbidd
en caresses, she would have seemed commonplace to him, a mere step away from Gerda the Swede. It was as if her perplexing, irritating coolness, her difficulty, were a sign of her high value.

  Nevertheless it was always a relief to be seated again in the familiar circle of the hotel parlor, where he could talk easily with Emmeline and Margaret while watching Caroline out of the corner of his eye. The wedding had been set for early September, and Margaret Vernon threw herself into a flurry of meticulous planning. This too struck Martin as entirely proper, though the plans themselves held little interest for him. Sometimes it all seemed to him a grotesque sham, as if what everyone was really talking about was the night when Caroline would be alone in a room with him, naked and defenseless, with no way out—and at this thought, which filled him with remorse and desire, he would shift uneasily in his seat and glance at Caroline, who sat staring quietly before her with half-closed eyes.

  The knowledge that he was going to marry Caroline Vernon, that he would be moving from his two rooms to a larger apartment on a different floor, made him fear that his friendship with Marie Haskova would undergo a change or even vanish entirely. Already it seemed to Martin that she was changing, as if she herself were going to be married; and a jealousy would come over him, at the thought that Marie was leaving him, that Caroline would soon be taking her away. It was cruel of Caroline to do that, even if he and Marie Haskova sometimes exchanged ambiguous glances, glances that, however harmless and playful they might be, nevertheless contained something forbidden. He hadn’t yet told Marie that he was going to be married. The slight deception disturbed him, for he wanted to be frank with Marie Haskova; and his faint, continual sense of wronging her made him hover close, as if he were trying to set things right.

  In the hot days of August, Martin prepared to open two new cafes: one on the other side of town, on Second Avenue, and one in Brooklyn, on a shady side street off Fulton Street, a few blocks from City Hall Park. Dundee had been willing, even eager, to let Martin buy his share of the partnership, as if he’d gotten in over his head and were relieved to have his money safe in the bank at last. Martin planned to introduce a new kind of cookie into his five cafes, a modern gingerbread or sugar cookie in four shapes: a Broadway cable car, an El train engine, a Napoleon bicycle, and a Hudson River Day Line steamer. The head chef of the bakery had already ordered the tin molds. Martin next turned to the question of managers. Since the manager of the Boulevard Metropolitan lived in Flatbush, Martin transferred him to the Brooklyn Metropolitan—against the strong protest of Emmeline, who liked McFarlane and argued that the move would harm the cafe. She stared at Martin with a flash of fear when he promptly offered her the vacated post.

  “But I can’t—”

  “Of course you can,” Martin said. “Believe me. You already know everything about the business.”

  “I don’t know. People will say you’re playing favorites.”

  “What people? I’ll fire them. Look, Em. I want someone in there who knows the business, someone I can trust. You know I count on you. You’re my right-hand man.”

  “I’m not a man.”

  “Right-hand woman, then.” He paused to see whether he had hurt her. “Let me tell you something. You already practically manage that cafe. So do it in public. Go ahead and do it. You can do it. Do it.”

  She laughed. “Maybe I just will. But keep your voice down. People are staring.”

  For the new Second Avenue cafe Martin approached the thirty-year-old manager of a nearby lunchroom that he had discovered during his search for a new location, and offered a ten percent increase in salary. The young manager, who knew Martin, hesitated, folded his arms across his chest, worked a muscle in his cheek, and suddenly thrust out a strong hand. Martin reported the development to Walter Dundee at dinner the next night, and Dundee in return reported that the Vanderlyn was in trouble: the hotel was losing money, the owners were becoming impatient, old Mr. Westerhoven’s days were numbered. Poor Westerhoven seemed unable to make up his mind about anything important, but as if to show that he was a man of iron will he had become fanatical about trivial matters—a bad business, however you looked at it. What the hotel needed was thorough renovation, but Alexander Westerhoven wasn’t the man to see it that way, and even if he’d seen it that way he no longer had the confidence of the owners, who were unwilling to sink more money into a failing business and were said to be divided over what course to pursue. Dundee frowned suddenly and began rapping his forehead with the tip of a finger. His face cleared. “I’ve got it now. A message for you. That Hamilton woman was in last week, asked to be remembered to you. You remember Louise Hamilton.” A sharp regret came over Martin: nearly ten years had passed since his little adventure in Room 411. He wondered whether he had been happy then. “She used to send me out to buy cough syrup,” Martin said. He remembered the dusky parlor, her head resting on two pillows on the sofa, the skin below her eyes waxy and blue, the surprising silk-smoothness of her skin. He had entered her fever-dream: she had dreamed him. A big-boned woman. Marie Haskova: he wondered whether he had known it all along.

  “We’ll be moving into a larger suite at the Bellingham,” Martin was saying.

  “You like it up there, do you?” Without waiting for an answer Dundee continued: “Mother and sister staying on?”

  “Yes.” He paused. “We get on well. What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing,” Dundee said. “Not a thing.”

  The two new cafes opened on consecutive Saturdays in early August, to the strains of German band music and the release of a thousand balloons. All children under twelve received a free prize: a little tin bank shaped like a slice of apple pie, with a coin slot at the top. Martin began taking the cable cars daily over the bridge to Brooklyn, where he was quickly satisfied that the new blue cafe had caught on nicely, and on his return he would stop first at the Second Avenue cafe, where the efficient young manager already spoke of expanding the premises by leasing the basement, and then at the Columbus Avenue cafe, and finally at the Boulevard cafe. Emmeline had taken command at the Boulevard, whose brick facade had received a fresh coat of skyblue paint and whose plate-glass windows glistened, but Martin saw that she needed continual reassurance about small matters, such as whether she had the authority to order new sets of salt and pepper shakers without first consulting him. She had had to speak to one of the waiters about his careless appearance and was worried about her tone, but Martin assured her that the staff liked and respected her. He saw that they did. He noticed small improvements about the place—green plants in the windows, a dish of free raspberry candies wrapped in cellophane beside the cash register—and decided to introduce them immediately into his four other cafes. “People like it here, Martin,” she confided with a worried look. “I can see that they do. But it makes them want to linger. The people waiting get annoyed. We lose customers.” She suggested a session for training waiters in the delicate art of moving customers gently along. “Mother is dashing around like mad,” she added, and for a moment Martin imagined Margaret Vernon running in and out of the restaurant with advice for Emmeline, before he realized that of course she was speaking of the wedding arrangements.

  He noticed the arrangements out of the corner of his eye as he hurled himself into fifteen- and sixteen-hour days, typing letters, visiting his five cafes, studying managerial reports, keeping accounts. Sometimes he had the sense that, just outside the door of his office, a crowd of wedding guests was gathering—at any moment a great burst of music would sound, champagne would run down the sides of bottles, bouquets of flowers would spring up from empty vases. He had talked vaguely to Caroline of a wedding trip in the late winter or early spring, since it was out of the question for him to leave town now. The five-room suite, directly across the hall from Margaret and Emmeline, would be ready for occupancy a week before the wedding. Martin imagined Marie Haskova cleaning on the floor above, with her red-and-black feather duster. He had told her he was going to be married, but had not said
when. In the summer evenings, he walked with the Vernon women to the Park and sat with them for a while in the lamplit parlor off the lobby, as if no one wanted anything to change. Caroline sat in her red chair. From beyond the parlor came muffled sounds of opening elevator doors, dim laughter, a noise in the street. Martin was tired.

  And the wedding came, the wedding that he had been hearing about for a long time; it was soon over. Martin smiled and waved his hand and stepped into a waiting carriage. He was very tired. And after all he was relieved to find himself sitting beside Caroline in the carriage he had hired, rolling now through the great Park. The carriage had been decorated with wreaths of flowers, and through one window he could see a purple blossom bouncing in and out of view as it struck the side of the carriage over and over again. He wondered what kind of flower it actually was. “Look at that flower, Caroline,” he said. She sat by the window and he sat beside her, with a space between. In her white wedding dress she struck him as younger than ever—she looked like a young girl dressed up in a play about a queen. His father in his handsome rented clothes, with his thick brown mustache streaked with gray, with his pulled-back shoulders and large melancholy eyes, had looked like a gallant army officer. His mother had worn fresh flowers in her hat; when he bent to kiss her, she turned her cheek in a gesture he remembered from childhood bedtimes. It was three o’clock in the afternoon, and it occurred to Martin, leaning his head back in the soothing carnage, that there was quite a bit of day to get through. He had instructed the driver to take a few turns around the Park and then go up and down the great avenues. Then a light supper and a return to the Bellingham, where their five newly furnished rooms awaited them. It was warm in the carriage: sunlight and leafshade rippled across the dark leather seats, across Martin’s legs and Caroline’s white dress. Her hand, rippling with sun and shade, lay in her white lap. Caroline’s face was turned toward the window. Martin reached out a hand, hesitated, and then gently placed his hand on hers. Caroline stiffened and withdrew her hand as she turned to him with a startled look. “I’m sorry,” Martin said. “I didn’t mean—” “You startled me,” Caroline said, and he in turn was startled: he thought she was going to cry. But she gave an odd, childish pout and suddenly reached over and patted the back of his hand twice. Then she withdrew her hand and placed it in her lap. Martin, holding his breath, looked at her hand in her lap. He looked at her arm, at her cheekbone, at her black eyelashes and brown eyebrows and pale yellow hair. Then he let out his breath and in the warm carriage closed his eyes.