Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer

by Steven Millhauser

  Even as journalists attempted to describe the nature of the Grand Cosmo, rumors about the colossal building had begun to circulate in the cheap press, especially rumors about the many subterranean levels, which were said to house darker and more disturbing entertainments as one descended lower and lower. The rumors at first irritated Martin, for hadn’t the Grand Cosmo banished the division between upper and lower that had been a feature of the old-fashioned Dresslers?—but Harwinton was pleased: rumor of any kind was a mark of success, to say nothing of its usefulness as a highly effective and entirely free form of advertisement. Martin, looking at Harwinton’s cool blue blond-lashed eyes, recalled the plump lady in the fountain pen ad, bending over the desk. It struck him that Harwinton himself had probably had a hand in the spread of certain dubious stories, which in any case had begun to lead a life of their own among guests and visitors and the tabloid dailies, and were even being reported, with a certain disdain, by more responsible journalists as evidence of the building’s power to attract attention. It was said that rat-baiting pits flourished in dark corners of the lowest levels, where specially trained rat dogs fought bloody battles against batches of a dozen rats; it was said that a branch of an upstate asylum permitted its inmates to roam the dark in solitary gloom, garbed in the costumes of Napoleon, Marie Antoinette, Jack the Ripper, Edgar Allan Poe. One article reported that the lowest level housed a labyrinthine brothel whose ornate furniture, flowery wallpaper, formidable madam, and thirteen-year-old girls had been smuggled across the Atlantic in the hold of a tramp steamer. Such rumors were to some extent constrained by the very existence of the Grand Cosmo and its verifiable number of subterranean levels, but as if in an effort to evade such constraints, a more fantastic variety of rumor soon began to grow in the rich, shapeless blackness beneath the lowest subterranean level.

  It was said that under the thirteenth level a maze of interconnecting passageways had been constructed, each with stairways leading down to still lower levels, unimaginably far down; and there in the world beneath the world, which yet was only the deepest cellar of the cloud-piercing Cosmosarium, black gardens of imagination bloomed. It was said that in the darkness of that sub-subterranean realm, in a forest the color of black tourmaline, wild children, abandoned at birth and speaking no language, were raised by wolves and lived the life of animals. It was said that in moss-stained halls at the ends of crumbling corridors, statues tormented with human longings came to life, roamed the dark with impassioned eyes, and flung themselves upon human lovers, after which they wandered sluggishly until they assumed new and troubling marble poses. There, beneath the world, white and peaceful cities rose in distant river valleys, beckoning the weary of heart and the sick of soul. There, in the Garden of Black Delight, monstrous jet-black blossoms exuded dangerous perfumes, which produced visions of such searing ecstasy that afterward one lost all desire to live. In the House of Metamorphosis, deep in a cave under a hill whose top was an island, Chinese masters trained in secret academies could transform the traveler into a lion, a butterfly, an angel, a waterfall. It was said that to descend into the world beneath the world was to learn the secrets of heaven and hell, to go mad, to speak in tongues, to understand the language of beasts, to rend the veil, to become immortal, to witness the destruction of the universe and the birth of a new order of being; and it was said that if you descended far enough, down past obsidian-black rivers, past caves where dwarves in leather jerkins swung pickaxes against walls veined with gold, down past the lairs of slumbering dragons whose tails were curled around iron treasureboxes, past regions of ice and fire, past legendary underworlds where the shadowy spirits of the dead set sail for islands of bliss and pain, down and down, past legend and dream, through realms of blackness so dark that it stained the soul black, you would come to a sudden, ravishing brightness.

  But whether the writers spoke of the imaginary world beneath the building, or of the many worlds within, they all acknowledged, even in their puzzlement, a sense not simply of abundance or immensity, but of the inexhaustible. It was as if, despite the finite number of stories (thirty) and underground levels (thirteen, including the basement), the Grand Cosmo produced in the visitor a conviction that it could never be fully explored, that around the next corner or down the next stairway existed something unexpected, exciting, and never seen before.

  And Martin was pleased: the Grand Cosmo was making an impression. If the impression was still a little unclear, if people remained a little uncertain what to make of it all, that was only to be expected, for after all the Grand Cosmo was a leap beyond the hotel, a leap that was bound to take some getting used to. The building was attracting attention as a vast curiosity, but once people took up residence they would understand that the living arrangements of the good old family hotel were no longer possible.

  Martin himself had moved from his rooms in the New Dressler to a living space on the twenty-ninth floor of the Grand Cosmo, where a series of folding screens decorated with Japanese hermits, arched wooden bridges, and waterfalls led past parlor chairs and a concealed bed to a desk with a view of the river. Beyond the farthest screen was a copse of artificial trees, through which a path led to the elevators.

  Martin looked forward to the attack in the Architectural Record, which did not appear for six weeks and then proved even harsher than he had imagined. For the writer, while briskly acknowledging certain minor technological accomplishments, such as the mechanical singing birds in the parks, refused to see in the Grand Cosmo anything but a culmination of deplorable tendencies. The Grand Cosmo, the article argued, represented in an extreme form the age’s love of the grandiose and the eclectic; it brought together so many clashing elements, in so massive a space, as to produce an impression of confusion, of uncertainty. For what, after all, was the Grand Cosmo? Insofar as it pretended to be a place in which people might wish to live, it was uninhabitable. It seemed to combine elements of the hotel, the museum, the department store, the amusement park, and the theater in a colossal enclosure that itself drew on so many styles as to make the worst excesses of late Victorian eclecticism seem a chaste instance of neoclassical restraint. Although the extravagance of the Grand Cosmo, its flamboyance, its sheer hunger for the all-inclusive, might in some sense be deemed praiseworthy as an expression of energy, that extravagance and flamboyance and hunger had been carried to such heights of excess as to turn into the grotesque. What was striking was how the habit of excess, which expressed itself most readily in the form of architectural gigantism, manifested itself in the smallest details, so that the brass doorknobs of the cellar workshops, the numerals in the panels above the elevators, the artificial leaves on the forty-six varieties of artificial tree, were wrought with a Byzantine elaboration. There was thus a paradoxical sense in which the minutiae of the building were expressions of the architect’s obsession with the gigantic, and a corresponding sense in which the sheer immensity of the structure was an expression of a miniaturist’s tendency toward obsessive elaboration. Both senses betrayed a yearning for the exhaustive, which was the secret malady of the age. In this way the Grand Cosmo might be understood as the ultimate architectural expression of its time, after which a rigorous simplification was inevitable. The article ended with a plea for a return to moderation, reason, and simplicity in the architecture of public buildings.

  Martin read the article with close interest, for it seemed to him that the writer, without a shred of sympathy, had penetrated deeply into the nature of the Grand Cosmo. He wondered whether the addition of sympathy would have permitted a still deeper penetration, or whether sympathy would have prevented understanding by getting in the way. It was just the sort of thing he would have liked to discuss with Emmeline, but he could no longer speak to Emmeline in the old way. She was closed to him, she was blind and deaf and dead. And in one sense that was quite right and proper, for during the course of his marriage she had gradually replaced her sister, and now she must efface herself in order that Caroline might regain her rightful pla
ce in the scheme of things. But in another sense it was cruel and wrong, for Caroline could not rise above something cramped in her nature, so that by self-effacement Emmeline was sacrificing a rich form of life to an impoverished one. And therefore the fault must surely be his, for marrying the wrong sister. But at the thought of marrying the right sister an irritation came over him, for he felt repelled by the thick eyebrows, the broad back, the strong hands with their blunt fingernails. For he had been able to desire only the pretty and delicate sister, the sister with the difficult twist in her, the sister lost in dream, who lay motionless beneath him and turned away in silence. And an anger came over Martin, at the mumbo-jumbo of love, the damage of it.

  He could discuss the article in the Architectural Record only with Rudolf Arling, who strode up and down among his ornate tables heaped with statuettes and ivory animals, denouncing the writer as a fool. Martin, surprised not by the outburst but by his own severe lack of sympathy for it, defended the writer in silence and understood that Arling sought praise, only praise, and could not tolerate one jot of disapproval. The little ivory animals, the statuettes, the curved legs of the tables, all this had begun to remind him of something, and as Arling paced back and forth, throwing out a hand in angry emphasis, it came to Martin: it was the familiar atmosphere, the secret but unmistakable impression, down to the curving table legs themselves, of Mr. Westerhoven’s office. And so the fiery architect with the glittering gray eyes was an emissary of Alexander Westerhoven’s—he might have known. It would simply be a matter of time before Arling accepted none but the safest commissions. Martin himself had been stung solely by the charge that the Grand Cosmo was uninhabitable; despite a new burst of publicity, only forty-nine percent of the living spaces had been rented.

  He became reluctant to leave the Grand Cosmo, as if the act of passing through its doors were a form of abandonment, of betrayal. The Grand Cosmo needed him, needed him far more than Caroline or Emmeline, who had married each other and shut him out. For really there was no room for him in that dark marriage of sisters, each deep-twisted into each. He imagined Emmeline sitting in his flowered armchair, stepping into a pair of his pajamas, slipping into his side of the bed. He saw his empty chair at the dining room table in the Dressler. Slowly it began to dissolve, to shimmer like a mirage—and suddenly it was gone, like Claire Moore’s chair, like the Bellingham Hotel.

  One evening Martin was sitting in a small glass-walled alcove of the main lobby, where he could have the double pleasure of being alone and at the same time of participating in the movements of the too-peaceful lobby beyond the glass. He was about to rise when the sense of Emmeline’s absence came over him, came so suddenly and so completely that it was as if he hadn’t known before that she was gone. It wasn’t so much a sensation of missing her as of feeling her absence, sharp and definite as a presence—an absence that continued to fill him until he could feel it as a pressure in his chest and a tingling in his fingertips, as if he were being invaded by something, which streamed steadily into him through a little hole somewhere. It felt like a heaviness, this in-streaming of absence. And indeed he could feel himself bent a little awkwardly in his chair, like a man he had once seen who had suffered a stroke in a lobby armchair and continued sitting awkwardly upright and even smiling, despite the ferocious pain in his arm and chest. In the glass of the alcove he could see the faint reflection of his face, through the face he saw a few lobby chairs and a pillar, and the thought came to him, even as Emmeline’s absence began to recede, that he had in fact grown transparent, during the moment he had been entirely filled with her absence.

  He took up shifting residence in the Grand Cosmo, living in unrented courtyard dwellings, an unrented cottage in the wooded countryside of the eighteenth floor, an unrented room in the resort hotel on the fourth and fifth subterranean levels. He waited for the public to come. It was bound to come. It had always come. He rode the elevators, strolled through the Pleasure Park and the Palace of Wonders, bought a bag of cherries in the Moorish Bazaar and spat the pits into a stream beside an artful oak tree on the eighteenth floor. He sat in lobbies, tearooms, reading rooms, gardens with weathered marble statues, lecture halls, mossy glades, public parlors—sat listening to residents and visitors, speaking with staff, pondering improvements, observing the change of weather through many windows: gray skies and heavy snow, a sudden blue day, sheets of snow. He had been prepared to operate in the red, two years wasn’t uncommon, but the Grand Cosmo was losing too much too fast. On March 5, six months after opening day, he was summoned to a meeting of management in the executive suite on the second floor. The manager, backed by the head of accounting, who kept tapping the ball of a heavy finger against a thick sheaf of pages, urged him to drop his insistence on long-term leases. They were losing nearly thirty thousand a week—a ruinous rate. Irritably Martin agreed. That afternoon he instructed Harwinton to initiate a new campaign of four-color posters and half-page newspaper ads aimed at transient residents. Within a month the ads brought an increase in rentals to seventy-two percent of capacity, but during the spring and summer the numbers gradually diminished, despite new ads in weekly magazines. By September 5, the first anniversary of the Grand Cosmo, rentals had fallen to fifty-five percent of capacity—a rate that could only spell disaster. The manager told Martin that the Grand Cosmo seemed to confuse people—it didn’t appear to be the sort of place they wanted to check into for a few days on a quick trip to the city. And Martin could only agree, for after all the Grand Cosmo was not a hotel, not a hotel at all, but something quite different. One day in a small park on the twenty-third floor he overheard a woman say to a friend, “I simply love it here. I wouldn’t live anywhere else in the world. And you never have to go out, if you don’t want to,” to which her friend replied, “I love visiting here, Julie, but I could never stay, it’s too, it’s too—” “Yes?” the first woman asked, but already they were passing out of earshot along a leafstrewn path. Martin followed them through the deserted park but could hear only murmurs, laughter. For the next two days he brooded savagely over the unfinished sentence as if it contained the secret he had been looking for; one night it struck him that his search for the unspoken words was an acknowledgment that the Grand Cosmo was failing.

  Martin strode through the floors of his inexhaustible building, searching for flaws, imagining new enticements. Was it the sense of the limitless that prevented people from flocking to the Grand Cosmo as they had to the Dressler? In the largest hotels, vast spaces were divided neatly into small, repeated rectangles—could the secret of such places be monotony itself? Did the public, along with its craving for the up-to-date and the brand-new, also crave not simply the familiar, but the repetitive, the reassuring sense of boredom provided by multiple sameness? Did the Dressler and the New Dressler flourish not because of their innovations, but precisely because they failed to depart very far from the familiar pattern of the good old family hotel?

  It occurred to Martin that perhaps he was being punished for something. The punishment, if that’s what it was, struck him as entirely proper, though he wondered a little about the crime. Was he being punished for marrying Caroline and not Emmeline, the pretty sister and not the plain? He had married the sister in dream, the princess asleep in her tower, ignoring the living sister by his side. Was it because he too was a dreamer that he had been drawn to her then, five hundred years ago? She had never woken up. He had stopped trying. Perhaps he was being punished for not loving Caroline enough. Or was it for not desiring Emmeline in the first place? Was that his crime? Or was it the knock on the door of room number 7, on his wedding night? But maybe he was being punished for something much different. When his father grew angry he would harden himself, as if he were holding in an explosion. Was Martin being punished for not stepping carefully among the cigar boxes? Was that it? For surely the Grand Cosmo was an act of disobedience. Or was he being punished for something deeper than crime, for a desire, a forbidden desire, the desire to create the world? For o
f course only God and Harwinton could do that. Anyone else was bound to fail.