Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer

by Steven Millhauser

  On the first Monday in December the head of accounting met with Martin to urge cuts in staff and the elimination of all inessential services. He further proposed that the six top floors be closed to residents and rented as business offices after a thorough renovation. Removing a bundle of papers from a leather case, he smoothed it over and over with the side of a hand and pushed it toward Martin, who sat down wearily in a chair, began to bend over the papers, and stood up with a curt refusal. He took the elevator down to the laundry, where he walked with his hands behind his back, soothed by the rumble of machines, the heat and steam of winding passageways. The next afternoon he found himself sitting in a public parlor on the twenty-sixth floor, looking at the first snow falling lightly. The lightly falling flakes of snow seemed the dust of vanished buildings; he understood that the Grand Cosmo was a commercial failure and would vanish like the Bellingham.

  And again he strode through the floors of his building, but the doors, the walls, the lobby chairs, the artful gardens with their pools and statues, all turned as he watched the flakes of lightly falling snow. He remembered his ride with Emmeline to the building site of the Dressler, the man knocking his stick against the side of his snowy shoe, white ice on the black river: one by one the mansions of snow and ice would melt away, leaving no trace of what had once been there.

  He came to the main lobby and sat down heavily in a corner chair. Behind the high windows snow was slanting down. One by one the Dressler, the New Dressler, and the Grand Cosmo would melt away, like the Bellingham before them. Marie Haskova had melted away, his marriage had melted away, Walter Dundee, Louise Hamilton, Bill Baer, gone, all gone. He would have liked to talk to Emmeline, but she too had melted away. And at the thought that Emmeline had melted away, a pity came over him, for poor Martin, lost in the falling snow. Poor Martin! He saw Emmeline standing beside his coffin, Caroline in a black veil looking coldly down. His face was calm in the coffin. He recognized that calm face. Tecumseh.

  By the end of January it was clear that he would no longer be able to meet his payments. On the morning of February first he went over the figures with the head of accounting, consulted briefly with the manager, took a stroll along a forest path, and stepped into the brown dusk of the Grand Cosmo Cigar Store, where under the fierce gaze of an Indian who kept raising and lowering a tomahawk he purchased a first-rate Havana. He ran the cigar slowly under his nose and placed it in his jacket pocket as if he were saving it for a celebration. In the afternoon he canceled his account with Harwinton and informed the front office that the Grand Cosmo would no longer accept short-term guests. Only permanent residents who signed long-term leases would be admitted to the community of the Grand Cosmo. The general public would no longer be permitted to make use of the main lobby, of the ground-floor cafeterias and concessions, of the Moorish Bazaar and the winding aisles of the department store, but were to be excluded entirely from the domain of the Grand Cosmo. For the Grand Cosmo was not a tourist attraction or a hotel for transients, but a world within the world, rivaling the world; and whoever entered its walls had no further need of that other world.

  The sense of failure filled him with an odd energy—he wasn’t going to sit in a melancholy stupor and watch the snow come sifting down. For after all he had done what he wanted to do, it could not have been different, his only error was to have dreamed the wrong dream. And Martin embraced his failure, threw himself into the idea of failure as into a new and soaring creation.

  In order to prevent foreclosure, he offered Lellyveld and White a forty-nine percent interest in the New Dressler. He was determined to keep the Grand Cosmo open, to hasten its rush toward disaster; and he was prepared if necessary to transfer to Lellyveld and White the ownership of both Dresslers. For there could be no half-measures, in failure as in success.

  As Martin watched his losses mount, as he waited for the Grand Cosmo to swallow up the two Dresslers and for all three to pass into the hands of Lellyveld and White, he spent his days roaming the floors and levels of his domain, eating lunch in cafeterias where three or four diners sat at widely separated tables, giving instructions to gardeners and electricians, playing-checkers with the groundskeeper in a small park on the fourteenth floor, taking a light dinner in the main dining room, which seemed to grow larger and whiter as guests dropped away. After the elimination of short-term rentals, the Grand Cosmo was able to fill barely forty percent of its living areas, though a third of these had been rented for one-year terms that might not be renewed; and in the large parks and shady gardens, in the lanes of the Moorish Bazaar, in the public parlors, in the dusky rooms of the Grand Cosmo Cigar Store, Martin would wander for hours without seeing anyone at all.

  In the remote reaches of upper floors he would sometimes pass a couple walking side by side, or a woman walking alone; and in their faces he would see a look of shyness or faint puzzlement, as if they had not expected to meet anyone in such a place, at such an hour.

  He liked to roam the meandering aisles of the nearly deserted department store, ablaze with electric lights late into the night. Slowly he walked among the empty glittering aisles, stopping to examine a pocket watch or a pair of gloves, while a clerk, rising hastily from a chair behind the counter, quickly slipped a jacket over a vest and, rubbing his eyes, proceeded to answer questions about 17-jewel Elgin movements, damascened gold-and-nickel top plates, and oil-tanned calfskin with snap buttons.

  Throughout the day, but especially after dinner, a number of residents sat in the main lobby, which rose two stories and stretched away behind pillars and arches, disappearing around corners, forming nooks and glass-walled alcoves, little half-concealed places with dark-gleaming lamp tables. If you chose your chair carefully, you could have the sense of a festive and crowded place, full of dark wood-glints and laughter, or of a hushed and polished vastness stretching emptily away.

  One evening when the lobby seemed emptier than usual, as if the remaining residents had wakened from a dream to rejoin their actual lives, while the abandoned dream, still vivid from the life that had glowed in it only moments before, was left behind to fade slowly into the blue-gray mist of dawn, Martin had an idea. In return for free room and board he would invite a troupe of out-of-work actors to sit in the lobby chairs, stroll about, play billiards in the billiard rooms and write letters in the writing rooms, to talk, to laugh—to create, in short, the atmosphere of a peacefully flourishing community. It was arranged easily by telephone the next morning, and that evening new faces appeared in the lobby. People strolled about or sat lazily on armchairs and couches, here and there little bursts of laughter could be heard, from a suddenly opened door came a click of billiard balls. And Martin liked the effect, the rather complicated little effect of false life that, in the acting, became less false, that spilled into the real, since the actors knew each other and were pleased to talk, to walk about, to go on with their lives in a pleasant new setting. There was a new liveliness in the main dining room, in the cafeterias and tearooms, in the parks and woods; the Cine-Theater flourished, the actor-residents strolled through the Palace of Wonders and the Hall of Optical Novelties and bought postcards in the giftshop of the Museum of Waxworks Vivants, and always the elevator doors opened and closed.

  One evening in the dining room Martin saw at a nearby table three women absorbed in conversation. One of the women, who appeared to be older than the other two, wore an old-fashioned wide-brimmed hat with fresh flowers; the two younger were bareheaded. Martin did not know whether the three were actresses or residents. They were quiet and soft-spoken, so that he could hear only a murmur broken by soft laughter, and as he ate his roast beef and read his folded newspaper he could not prevent himself from glancing over at them from time to time. Once the older woman caught his eye before looking away; as he lowered his eyes he had the sense that she was leaning over to whisper something to her daughters, for one of them, the dark-haired one, made a movement that he caught out of the corner of his eye, she had turned her head to glance towar
d him, in a not unfriendly way. After a while the three women rose, and he studied his paper, only raising his eyes to give a nod as they passed his table. And later, when he entered the lobby, he saw them sitting by themselves, as he knew they would be. He caught a glance of invitation, dreamily he sank down in a chair in their little circle, and as he did so he had the sense that across the room something had changed, as if a slightly unnatural quiet had invaded the Grand Cosmo, the sort of quiet that accompanies an effort to listen. For surely the women were actresses, playing a daring part, though they presented themselves as a mother and two daughters. The daughters were young, they couldn’t have been more than twenty, the dark-haired and the light, the mother seemed scarcely ten years older, it was a daring and outrageous game they were playing, and yet perhaps they were mother and daughters after all, it wasn’t unusual to find such combinations in hotels all over the city. It occurred to Martin that he could check at the front desk, it was the simplest thing in the world, but when they rose he sat for a long time in the armchair, starting up once to see that the lobby was nearly empty—he must have dozed off.

  And indeed he was tired, so tired that he could barely lift his head, though at the same time he felt intensely alert. The Grand Cosmo would soon pass away, even now it was fading, becoming dreamlike as he watched. Already he could hear it falling, falling like white snow. The three women were a sign, demon-women summoned up from deepest dream. For a building was a dream, a dream made stone, the dream lurking in the stone so that the stone wasn’t stone only but dream, more dream than stone, dream-stone and dream-steel, forever unlasting. Friendly powers had led him along dark paths of dream, they had been good to him—to him, Martin Dressler, son of Otto Dressler, seller of cigars and tobacco. For really he had traveled a long way, since the days when he rolled out old Tecumseh into the warm shade. For he had done as he liked, he had gone his own way, built his castle in the air. And if in the end he had dreamed the wrong dream, the dream that others didn’t wish to enter, then that was the way of dreams, it was only to be expected, he had no desire to have dreamt otherwise. And as Martin in his chair sat deeply asleep and yet entirely awake, for so it seemed to him, as Martin in his dream-chair slipped in and out of dream-thoughts that were the clear thoughts of day, he became aware of something just out of reach of his mind, something that needed attending to. And it came to him: a man, one of the actors whom he had noticed from the beginning, a man whom he had picked out without giving him much thought, simply nodding to him now and then, one actor among others. Maybe it was the full brown mustache, maybe it was the erect posture, or some gesture of the hands, but what had struck him was the resemblance, slight to be sure, between himself and that stranger. But now in his dream-waking, in his sleep-alertness, he seemed to grasp the slippery meaning of the man, who until this night had been scarcely in his thoughts at all.

  The next day he had a private interview with the actor, a thoughtful and humorous fellow a little older than the others, a little down on his luck; it might well have been another, but Martin wanted only him. And in Martin’s vest and jacket, with his hair combed back off his forehead, with Martin’s habit of thrusting a hand in his pants pocket and jiggling loose change, he really did, in a way, at a short distance, look like Martin, though anyone could see it was only an actor. In the course of the day Martin explained to the man, whose name was John Painter, everything he needed to know: the habits of Martin’s day, the morning meetings with the manager, his favorite soup. Of course the idea wasn’t to fool anyone, but only to complete the cast of characters. During the afternoon he took Painter with him on his rounds, pointing out an attractive courtyard dwelling on the twenty-sixth floor that he might wish to occupy, lingering over a wooden Indian who raised a cigar to his mouth and blew a thick, slowly turning smoke ring, presenting the actor with a key to the boiler room. In the evening Martin took the elevator down to the department store and wandered among the deserted, brightly lit aisles before stopping at the clothing department to buy a shirt collar.

  The next morning he went down early to buy his paper in the lobby and wait for the barbershop to open. In the barber’s chair he closed his eyes for a moment and at once he was back in the Vanderlyn: his bellboy jacket felt tight around the chest, luggage creaked, buzzers rang, from the street came a clatter of wheels and hooves. He would transfer the title of the Vanderlyn to Emmeline Vernon, she could do with it as she liked. At breakfast he read his paper over steak and eggs, then folded it twice and left it beside his plate. He pushed back his chair and nodded at the three dream-women, who were just then entering with their demon-smiles, and as he stood up there rose to his nostrils a faint, pleasant odor of violet water and scented soap from his close-shaved cheeks.

  He walked through the lobby to the heavy glass entrance doors, and when he pushed one open he stopped: the light was so bright that he had to shut his eyes, even though at this early hour he stood in the building’s shade. Suns danced in the red of his closed eyes. He hadn’t left the Grand Cosmo for a long time.

  Carefully shading his eyes he made his way down the steps and across the light-filled warm shade of the avenue to the low wall of the park. On a dark green bench a white-haired woman in a black dress sat feeding pigeons from a paper bag. The fat sleek birds strutted about with their chests stuck out, their shot-silk throats shimmering pink and green. Martin entered the park and walked along a sunny-and-shady path matted with blackish-brown leaves. Through the trees he could see flashes of the river. After a while he stepped off the path onto a downward slope, into green-black shade spattered with spots of sun. Only then did he look up: through branches crowded with little green leaves he saw a patch of blue—a blue so blue, so richly and strangely blue, that it seemed the kind of blue you might find in pictures of castles in books of fairy tales, after you peeled away the crackly thin paper. It occurred to Martin that it was early spring.

  He came to a place where the trees were more widely spaced, and sitting down in the grass he leaned back against a trunk and took off his hat. A light smell of hair oil rose from the leather sweatband. Carefully he placed the hat on one knee. The dark hatband had a silky shimmer that brought to mind the throats of the pigeons. Through the trees he could see the river and the red-brown Palisades. A sunny barge was moving slowly along. Sometimes it failed to come out from behind a trunk at the precise moment he imagined it should, and then he wished it wouldn’t emerge at all, that it would vanish entirely behind a single tree and never be found again, as though it had slipped through a rent in the world and come out in another place, but immediately it would appear, barely moving, a great cat lazing in the sun. Before him he could see a more open place among the trees, where some boys were playing ball. They had laid down their caps and jackets to serve as bases. At his foot grew a single dandelion, a dark stem bursting into a blaze of yellow.

  He had slipped out of his life, he had passed through a crack in the world, into this place. By turning his head slightly he could see the Grand Cosmo through clutches of upper branches. It was still there, it hadn’t vanished quite yet. But neither was it entirely there, half hidden as it was behind the leaves, the faintly moving little leaves, which perhaps were moving only to prevent him from attending closely to the crumbling masonry and falling steel behind them. His neck began to hurt. He turned back to the boys, the trees, and the river.

  Martin closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them he was aware of a change in the light. The sky was brighter, the sun higher—the day was getting hot. He felt light, transparent. Here in the other world, here in the world beyond the world, anything was possible. For when the friendly powers let go of your hand, so gently that you were barely aware of it, then you needed to hold on to something, or you would surely be lost. You might float up into the too blue sky and never come back. You might dissolve into flickering spots of sun and shade. For when you woke from a long dream of stone, then you wanted to lie there with closed eyes, trying not to hear the sounds of mor
ning, pressing back into your pillow as if by the sheer pressure of your head you could sink back beyond sleep, into your own childhood. But the light was too bright, his left buttock hurt, his calves itched. Martin shifted against the tree. The ridges of bark, long diamonds, pressed into his back. He felt like walking.

  Martin got up and brushed off the seat of his pants with his hat. He put his hat on his head and started back toward the path. For when you woke from a long dream, into the new morning, then try as you might you couldn’t not hear, beyond your door, the sounds of the new day, the drawer opening in your father’s bureau, the bang of a pot, you couldn’t not see, through your trembling lashes, the stripe of light on the bedroom wall. Boys shouted in the park, on a sunny tree-root he saw a cigar band, red and gold. One of these days he might find something to do in a cigar store, after all he still knew his tobacco, you never forgot a thing like that. But not just yet. Boats moved on the river, somewhere a car horn sounded, on the path a piece of broken glass glowed in a patch of sun as if at any second it would burst into flame. Everything stood out sharply: the red stem of a green leaf, horse clops and the distant clatter of a pneumatic drill, a smell of riverwater and asphalt. Martin felt hungry: chops and beer in a little place he remembered on Columbus Avenue. But not yet. For the time being he would just walk along, keeping a little out of the way of things, admiring the view. It was a warm day. He was in no hurry.