Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer

by Steven Millhauser

  “At least you admit,” Martin said, “that there’a a difference between a cake of soap and an eighteen-story hotel.”

  “Only a very small one. Let me explain something, Mr. Dressler. The world sits there. It may have a meaning. As a private citizen, I am entitled to believe that it does. But as an advertiser, I train myself to experience the world as an immense blankness. It’s my job to provide that blankness with meaning.”

  “I’ll grant you the point. Still, you have to admit—”

  “A man comes to me with a cake of scouring soap. He wants me to sell it for him. I see a white lump. It’s my job to make this white lump, which has no meaning, except in the most limited and practical sense, the most important thing in the world. I create a meaning for it. I create desire. To have this soap is to have what Aristotle says all men desire: happiness.”

  When Harwinton spoke, in his cool and precise way, he looked directly at Martin with his light-blue eyes, never once averting his gaze; and Martin noticed that when he spoke he never moved his long, well-manicured hands or his erect body.

  “And you yourself don’t believe a word of it?”

  “Belief has nothing to do with it. I present it. I create an illusion. We are speaking of art, Mr. Dressler. Let me ask you something. Do you believe that the actor on the stage is really a villain? Let me ask you something else. If he isn’t a villain, then is he a liar?”

  Harwinton bent suddenly and removed from a drawer in his desk a thin black folder, which he passed across the desk to Martin. The folder contained a full-page magazine ad that Harwinton had designed for a new fountain pen with a hard rubber barrel—a pen no different, he assured Martin, from a dozen other fountain pens on the market. A frowning clerk was seated at a rolltop desk cluttered with pen nibs, his face and hands covered with black splotches of ink, his hair wild. Beside him, at a second desk, a handsome clerk with a mustache and a smile sat holding a fountain pen. He was speaking to a well-dressed woman with masses of dark hair pinned up under her ribboned hat, who was standing beside him and leaning over so that her elbows rested on the high back of his desk. What struck Martin was the tight corseting of the woman, her look of dreamy adoration, her full bosom and well-defined rump, the slightly rakish look of the clerk with the fountain pen.

  “I’ll order one of these,” Martin said, laughing and pointing to the woman. And at once he felt that he had said something crude, that Harwinton’s light smile was the smile an adult might give to a child who had said something forgivable but wrong. As if to escape judgment Martin looked away and glanced about the office, which seemed to contain nothing but Harwinton’s large flat-topped mahogany desk with its many drawers and, on the bare walls, a black-framed diploma from the University of Minnesota. The room made Martin think of a smooth-shaven face. The big bare desk stood across from an armchair for visitors, in which Martin sat, and it was only here that any concession had been made toward pleasure, for really it was a remarkably satisfying chair, upholstered in red silk plush and richly fringed, with a first-rate spring seat and spring back. Harwinton’s own chair was high-backed, straight, and wooden. The impression of bareness and sharp angles, the high hard chair, Harwinton’s close-trimmed hair and smooth upper lip, his tight-buttoned jacket and thin, almost bony fingers, all this made Martin think of a young monk or priest.

  “You may be interested in other examples of our work,” Harwinton said, and bending over swiftly and precisely he removed from another drawer a heavy black folder. He opened it to reveal a collection of newspaper ads: ads for a blacking brush, an electric insole, a stick of graphite for bicycle chains, a wire rat trap with a coppered steel spring, a cherrywood stereographoscope mounted on a folding rosewood frame on a polished nickel stand, a brick-lined heating stove with a sheet-iron ash pan and mica door, a double-door hardwood refrigerator with a porcelain-enameled water cooler and an extra-large ice chamber, a sewing machine with an automatic bobbin winder in a drop cabinet with carved panel doors. From another drawer Harwinton drew out a four-color poster showing an ad for a new carpet sweeper with a spring-action dumper and a rubber furniture protector—and now from drawer after drawer came bursts of color, a riot of bright designs, showing a copper-lined bathtub, a jar of brilliantine, a spring-wagon harness of oak-tanned leather, a cake of lemon-juice complexion soap, as if the secret life of the room were this hidden profusion of images, sprouting in the dark, multiplying, unstoppable, like scarlet secrets whispered in the darkness of the confessional. Martin lingered over one poster advertising a rubberized protective blanket for horses. It showed a rearing black horse under an Elevated track, with a bright red coal burning on its back. The horse’s nostrils were flared, its brilliant white teeth bared, its eyes wild with terror. Its head was twisted back, as if it were straining to bite the blazing coal. The delivery wagon was on two wheels and a barrel was about to topple into the street.

  The two images—the crazed horse, the full-bosomed dreamy woman—stayed with Martin, mingling with a third: the light-blue blond-lashed eyes of Harwinton, under the smooth forehead with its sandy schoolboy’s hair.

  “He reminds me of something very up-to-date and efficient,” Martin said to Emmeline that evening, “like a typewriter or an electric circuit.”

  “You don’t like him.”

  “I don’t dislike him. He interests me. Harwinton is the future.”

  “But I don’t have a sense of him. I don’t know what he’s like.”

  “But that’s just the point. He isn’t ‘like’ anything. He reminds me of a boy I knew in third grade, William Harris was his name. He was a quiet boy, wrote very neatly, and kept to himself. I remember he wore very tight knee socks. No one disliked him, but no one really liked him either. He moved away the next summer, and when I tried to remember him in fourth grade, I couldn’t remember his face. I couldn’t remember anything he did. I could only remember that he was there.”

  “At least he was there. That’s something. I’ll cling to that. Well then. Do you think you’ll hire this Mr. Harwinton?”

  “I’ve already hired him.”

  “Then you do like him!”

  “I don’t dislike him. And one other thing: he takes you in. Those baby-blue eyes never stopped looking at me for a second.”

  “Well don’t forget, you interest him. You’re a native, a kid from New York, and he’s from—you said Indiana?”

  “That’s what he said: Indiana. Imagine being from Indiana. Where is Indiana?”

  “It’s near Alaska,” Emmeline said.

  The Dressler

  THE HOTEL DRESSLER OPENED ON AUGUST 31, 1899, on Martin’s twenty-seventh birthday. Long articles in the major city papers praised the building’s boldness of vision, its structural ingenuity, its ability to overcome sheer massiveness by means of an elegant design that led the eye upward through three major groupings to the two-story mansard roof with its tower, and if one journalist chose to complain that the building was “wasteful,” that the facade was so heavily ornamented that it put him in mind of a gigantic wedding cake, even he felt compelled to acknowledge the exuberance of the Dressler, its sheer delight in itself. Crowds came to stare at the block-long building on Riverside Drive that rose eighteen stories into the air, with a central tower that soared to the height of another six stories; and the management received scores of requests for apartments, requests that were carefully entered on a large waiting list, for all apartments had been rented six months before opening day.

  Harwinton had devised a shrewd ad campaign. It was aimed broadly at the middle class, but sought in particular to attract what Harwinton called the expanding middle of the middle class—those people who, having reached a comfortable level of existence, aspired to the trappings of wealth without being wealthy. His central theme was “luxury for the non-luxurious income,” an idea repeated in countless newspaper and magazine ads and in a handsome promotional brochure. But Harwinton also emphasized a second and far more dramatic theme: the location of the Dressle
r. In doing so he drew on two contradictory ideas. The Dressler, he argued, was a rural retreat, a peaceful outpost far from the clamor of downtown Manhattan, but at the same time the Dressler was located in a new and thriving part of the city, only a short distance from a convenient Elevated station, and even closer to the projected subway station on the Boulevard—was located, in short, in the very path of progress. For it was Harwinton’s belief that every city dweller harbored a double desire: the desire to be in the thick of things, and the equal and opposite desire to escape from the horrible thick of things to some peaceful rural place with shady paths, murmuring streams, and the hum of bumblebees over vaguely imagined flowers. It was the good fortune of the Dressler to be able to attach to itself both these desires, for while on the one hand it could offer to the prospective long-term resident a park and a river, a veritable vision of pastoral retreat, on the other it could offer the thrilling sense of being in the forefront of the city’s relentless northward advance. It simply sat there, waiting for the rest of the city to catch up.

  The Dressler itself, as the doubting journalist had pointed out and as Martin readily acknowledged, was a massive contradiction: a modern steel-frame building sheathed in heavily ornamented masonry-walls meant to summon up a dream of châteaux and palaces. Every effort had been made to draw the eye away from the monotony of vertical repetition to interruptive or irregular features, such as the two-story arched entranceways and the group of gigantic statues on the fourth-floor cornice, representing Pilgrims and Indians. Above all the eye was drawn to the elaborate roof, with its corner cupolas, its high chimneys, and its central openwork stone tower supplied with a circular observation platform and topped by an eight-foot finial. But the real battle against symmetry took place inside, where no two apartments were alike and where every public room was designed in a different period style. Even more striking, as several journalists remarked, were a number of odd features never seen before in an apartment hotel. It was noted that among the public rooms of the first two floors—the restaurants, the smoking rooms, the reading rooms, the ladies’ parlors—was a scattering of peculiar rooms that seemed to be there to amuse or instruct. Thus there was a circular theater in which a panorama of the entire Manhattan shoreline continually unwound; a room containing a wigwam, a wax squaw gathering sticks, a young brave hacking a rock with a sharpened stone tool, and a seated chief smoking a long pipe, set against a painted background depicting a riverbank; and a hall called the Pageant of Industry and Invention, which contained working scale models of an Otis elevator, a steam train on an Elevated track, a Broadway cable car, and a steam crane lifting an I-beam, as well as full-scale models of a steam turbine, an internal combustion engine, and an electric generator with a drive pulley. These rooms seemed to some commentators a puzzling intrusion of the museum into the world of the hotel, although most acknowledged the rooms’ festive and instructional nature.

  No less puzzling to the journalists were a number of curious developments on the upper floors. At the end of a corridor on the sixth floor a four-room apartment had been transformed into an artificial cave, with narrow dim-lit passageways and a real waterfall. On the fourteenth floor a five-room apartment had become a forest, with thick trunks manufactured to resemble pine and oak, greenish light falling through a roof of thick-leaved branches, and a sudden bright-lit glade of real-looking grass and yellow silk wild-flowers. These playful rooms, which Harwinton had named Relaxation Rooms, gave to the hotel a slightly theatrical flavor, a note reinforced by the Riverview Lobby on the tenth floor. Reserved for the exclusive use of hotel guests, the Riverview Lobby was notable not only for its dramatic view of the Hudson and the cliffs of Jersey, but for its meticulous design in the style of an old-fashioned Victorian parlor, with plenty of fringed and tasseled armchairs and couches, statues of coyly bending nymphs, flower arrangements under belljars, majolica vases, an ormolu clock on the marble mantel shelf, and sepia photographs of unsmiling grandfathers in oval frames.

  Martin followed the newspaper reports with close interest, puzzled himself by an occasional note of bewilderment or blame, for didn’t they understand that it had all been thought out carefully, didn’t they understand that in any case it had been given to him by the friendly powers, who had led him to the Vanderlyn Hotel at the age of fourteen? But he was pleased by the sheer weight of attention given to the Hotel Dressler, attention that, even if it was sometimes perplexed or disapproving, suggested that he had struck a nerve. He was above all pleased by the interest shown in the first three underground levels, for it was here that he had permitted himself to develop certain ideas that gave him a deep, almost guilty pleasure, as if the sunken world beneath the hotel had encouraged a freedom forbidden by the clear light of upper floors. On the first level, not open to the general public, was the courtyard, with its gardens and gravel paths and wooden benches, its shady bowers, its central three-tiered fountain—a place where hotel guests and invited friends might walk at all hours of the day and night, untroubled by changes in weather. On the second level was the Shopping Arcade, composed of scores of shops and booths on intersecting corridors, interrupted by well-lit plazas with fountains and benches. And on the third level, advertised by Harwinton as one of the wonders of the West End, you came to the Theater District, where Rudolf Arling had designed a series of paved streets illuminated by electric streetlamps and lined with theaters in flamboyant styles with alluring names (the Chinese Garden, the New Lyceum, the Little Theater, the Black Rose), including, in addition to dramatic theaters, a vaudeville theater, a concert hall, an opera house, and a nickelodeon.

  Beneath the three levels, and entirely ignored by the journalists, lay the basement, the true bottom of the Dressler, which housed the electric plant, the steam plant, and a warren of workrooms for the maintenance staff.

  From the artful rooms and subterranean paths of his high hotel Martin sometimes liked to remove himself in order to look up at the great mass of the building, pierced on each of its facades by an exterior court. It was as if he wanted to hold it all in his eye in a single glance. But what he saw in that glance gave way with a rush to all that he couldn’t see, so that the unseen courts became filled with flowerbeds and gravel walks, the high-arched main entrances on the side streets were immediately connected by a block-long gallery leading to the elevator lobby, each room revealed its furniture, and below the ground, invisible but seen, people walked in the paths of the courtyard and the aisles of the Shopping Arcade and the streets of the Theater District until Martin seemed to hold in his mind the entire contents of the building—and almost reeling under the weight of images he would return inside with a sense of seeking relief from an attack of dizziness.

  Martin had taken a modest apartment for himself and Caroline on the sixteenth floor, facing the river, and a second apartment, adjoining theirs, for Emmeline and Margaret. It was Emmeline who understood: the move from the Bellingham to the Dressler had nothing to do with a desire for luxurious living and everything to do with being on the spot. Martin needed to take possession of his creation, to feel it working all around him and through him. He had given the actual job of management to James Osborne, whom he hired away from the Vanderlyn; at first Emmeline had refused the offer of assistant manager, but after a week of brooding she accepted with the understanding that it was only a trial. Daily Martin consulted with Osborne and Emmeline, weekly he attended the meeting of the manager and the department heads, but his passion was to inhabit the Dressler as fully as possible. He ate meals at each of the seven restaurants and tearooms, spoke to the linen-room attendants and seamstresses and chambermaids, sat in the main lobby and listened to guests from behind his newspaper. He examined the steam plant and electric plant in the massive basement beneath the theaters. He strolled in the underground courtyard, bought neckties and umbrellas in the Shopping Arcade, took Caroline and Emmeline and Margaret to a melodrama at the Black Rose. Emmeline had quickly become ardent in her loyalty to the Dressler and often accompanied Martin
on his rounds; once, stopping abruptly on a street in the Theater District, she seemed about to say something and then to change her mind. “A penny for your thoughts,” Martin lightly said. Emmeline hesitated a moment before answering. “I was thinking,” she said, “about the castle in the forest, that night,” and Martin was cast suddenly back to the lantern-lit columns, the ladders going down, the moon-glittering edge of the pit.