Martin Dressler

by Steven Millhauser

  One evening after a late supper with his mother and father in the kitchen over the cigar store, Martin returned to the Bellingham and was surprised to find Margaret Vernon alone. She explained that Caroline had been feeling unwell all day, as she sometimes did after a poor night’s sleep. Emmeline had gone out alone in the afternoon and returned just in time for supper; she had accompanied Caroline upstairs to play two-hand euchre and would come down later. Martin sat down in his armchair, struck by the double absence, by the novel sensation of being alone with Margaret Vernon. She herself seemed a little constrained, and after a few light passages of conversation turned the talk to the subject of her daughters. She was concerned about them—two young women in a strange city. She was less concerned about Emmeline, who had always been a rock, than about Caroline, who—to speak frankly—might easily have been the center of an admiring circle of marriageable young gentlemen had she not so dreadfully discouraged all social efforts on her behalf. It sometimes seemed that Caroline wanted nothing better than to sit through life—simply sit there, without lifting a finger on her own behalf, though with her beauty it would take little more than an ever so slightly lifted finger: like that. Martin watched as the index finger of Margaret Vernon’s left hand rose very slightly from the dark red chairarm and returned to its place. Of course there was no reasoning with her. There was no talking to her. She did what she wanted to do and that was that. There had been a young man or two, one from a good Boston family, but Caroline—well, Caroline had simply acted as if he wasn’t there. She had barely looked at him. And yet she wasn’t cold by nature, she was a warm-hearted trusting girl once you got to know her. Of course she was difficult to get to know. She could be trying at times. He knew that, of course. But he also knew, he was getting to know, how warm and trusting she really was. Caroline was a treasure, really. But oh my. Mrs. Vernon hoped she wasn’t presuming on their friendship by going on and on. It was just that a mother’s patience had its limits. It was good to know she could rely on Martin. And she gave him a searching look.

  Martin assured her that she could rely on him. Her look of relief was so visible, so immense and unexpected, that he suddenly wondered whether she had been asking obliquely about his intentions toward her daughter. Immediately he wondered whether he had answered.

  The theme of Caroline returned a week later, when Caroline rose from her chair in the parlor and, pleading tiredness, retired to her room. Martin, alone with Margaret Vernon and Emmeline, asked whether Caroline had been sleeping poorly again; he hoped she wasn’t coming down with a cold. “Caroline has never been sick a day in her life,” Margaret Vernon declared, drawing back her shoulders and lifting her chin, as if to defy a challenge—except of course for little indispositions, headaches and such, all of which could be traced to her trouble falling asleep. Emmeline looked at her mother wryly and asked how a daily indisposition differed from an illness. At this Mrs. Vernon said that Caroline was healthy as a horse and had never had anything the matter with her that a ten-minute nap couldn’t cure—and she might add that it was unbecoming of Emmeline to paint so black a picture of her sister, whose only fault was a certain nervousness of disposition that prevented her from sleeping like an ox. Emmeline, who had drawn back at her mother’s reply, seemed about to answer but said nothing. When Margaret Vernon rose to leave a half hour later, Emmeline said she would follow in a few minutes.

  As soon as she was alone she said to Martin that she hoped she hadn’t painted a black picture of anyone; sometimes her mother, with the best of intentions, spoke more heatedly than perhaps she ought. In fact Caroline’s health was a mystery to both of them, for though it was true she was almost never sick in the ordinary sense—colds and fevers and what have you—it was also true that she was almost never free of some disturbing symptom or other, such as the headaches that often drove her to her bed. Oh, they had taken her to doctors, who had scratched their heads and pulled at their whiskers and prescribed mysterious tinctures and syrups that might as well have been sugar-water for all the good they did her. What Caroline needed, Emmeline believed, was more exercise; she had been pleased to see her sister’s pleasure in their Sunday excursions. In one sense her mother was right: Caroline was strong, despite her apparent frailty, and she could outwalk anyone when she wanted to. It was just that she so seldom wanted to.

  “Then I’m glad she comes along on our little outings,” Martin said.

  “Oh,” Emmeline said, with an impatient shrug of one shoulder, “she wouldn’t miss those for anything.”

  “I’ve noticed she never complains.”

  “Not to you,” Emmeline said sharply.

  The idea that he was perhaps courting Caroline Vernon without quite knowing it, that his attentions to the Vernons were imagined by them to be a courtship of one of them, that his sense of deepening friendship against a sunlit background of vigorous family outings concealed more complex intimacies, all this did not disturb Martin, who found it perfectly reasonable that he should be assumed to have an interest in the older and prettier daughter, and who did not in any sense wish to deny an interest in her, though he was content to let such interest as he had remain pleasantly undefined.

  One summer evening when he entered the lobby and saw all three women look up from their chairs in the parlor with an alertness, an air of pleasurable anticipation, that precisely matched his own, he felt so generously welcomed, even by Caroline, who slowly lowered her eyes, that he could not imagine any deeper happiness than just this nightly surrender to the spiritual embrace of the three Vernon women. He would have liked to keep them like that indefinitely: Margaret Vernon looking at him with frank pleasure as she waved at her chest with her black silk fan, Emmeline Vernon looking up at him intently from under her brownish-black eyebrows, Caroline Vernon gazing at him from half-closed eyes, her head resting back against the dark-red gold-flowered shimmer of the armchair, the pale hair pulled so tightly back that it seemed to tug painfully against the skin of her temples, the long pale-green sleeves buttoned tightly at the wrist.

  For several months now, if not precisely for Caroline’s sake, then for the sake of all three women, Martin had stopped his visits to the room with rattling windows off Sixth Avenue, visits from which he had returned to the lamplit parlor of the Bellingham feeling furtive and unclean.

  One hot summer night at about half-past nine Martin suggested that they all take a little walk. Caroline seemed to hesitate, but then decided to join them, and walking two by two, Martin and Margaret Vernon in front of Emmeline and Caroline, they made their way east to the Central Park, skirted by a low wall of cut stone. They turned in at an entrance and walked along a winding path through sharp scents of unknown blossoms and dark green leaves and distant riverwater. Through the thick-leaved trees Martin could see bits of yellow from the windows in the dark buildings facing the Park. Over the buildings the night sky was a deep purplish blue. Now and then they passed shadowy well-dressed couples strolling arm in arm and Martin overheard bits of murmured conversation: “No, of course, I understand what you …” On nearby paths he heard footsteps and light laughter. Pieces of laughter seemed to float through the branches and get tangled in the leaves. For some reason he remembered a story that Gerda the Swede had told him. One summer night when she was fourteen and still living with her mother she had gone walking with an older boy in the Park. He had led her off the path into a dark clump of trees and begun kissing her, but not in the way she had expected: he had stood behind her, kissing the back of her neck and her cheek over and over and rubbing his hands slowly up and down on her breasts and pressing against her from behind. He had suddenly stopped without doing anything else at all, even though she had just stood there with her eyes closed, waiting for whatever was going to happen. Martin, who had been struck by the slight perversity of that half-seduction, was suddenly disturbed by the tenderness of those kisses. The vivid memory of Gerda’s story, the sharp smell of the leaves, the dim rattle of carriage wheels, the scratchy sound of Emme
line’s and Caroline’s shoes behind him on the gravel path, wisps of light laughter hanging in the branches, the glint of Margaret Vernon’s combs, all this irritated Martin, who turned and said harshly: “Well! Let’s turn back, shall we? It’s getting late!”

  “Oh,” said Margaret Vernon, “it’s such a lovely …”

  Emmeline looked at him sharply.

  Caroline, glancing at him and looking away, murmured, “I suppose … it is getting a little …”

  The Eighth Day of the Week

  ON SUNDAY MORNINGS THE VERNONS NEVER came down to the lobby before ten o’clock. Martin, who always woke early, left the hotel at half-past five in the morning with the sense of seizing for himself a small and private day within the larger day, a kind of eighth day situated between Saturday and Sunday. In his private morning, before the official part of the day that he spent with the Vernons, he would walk down to the railroad yards and watch freight cars being loaded onto a barge destined for one of the Jersey rail docks, or go up along the Boulevard where shanties still stood in the high weeds of unsold lots, or walk up and down blocks of small shops on Amsterdam and Columbus. About eight o’clock he would stop at a restaurant and have a breakfast of eggs and steak, folding a newspaper under the side of his plate and glancing out the plate-glass window at the avenue. Dundee had agreed in principle to putting money in an uptown lunchroom and it was important to choose the location with care. After breakfast Martin liked to walk along the Central Park, admiring the handful of hotels among the undeveloped lots on the other side of the street, and then he would take a crosstown car to Eleventh Avenue and walk down to the park by the river. From time to time he would consult his pocket watch, and a little before ten he would return to the lobby of the Bellingham.

  One Sunday morning when Martin returned to his hotel he saw that the women had not yet come down. Instead of sitting in the lobby with his newspaper he decided to go up to his rooms and change his shirt, for the August morning had grown hot. The door in the corridor stood partway open and in the lock was a big key with an oval piece of stamped metal hanging from it. As he entered the sunny parlor he saw through the open door of his bedroom part of a tin bucket with a mop-handle slanting up. “It’s all right, Marie,” he called out, sitting down in his flowered easy chair beside the sofa. “I’ll wait.” He had spoken a few times with Marie Haskova, a serious heavy-shouldered girl of sixteen or seventeen in a drab black uniform with a white apron, who wore a foolish-looking dustcap on her thick black hair. She had a room in the attic at the top of the hotel, where most of the maids lived. Once or twice from her stubborn face he had wrested a sudden swift smile, which had quickly faded, leaving her with her habitual look of faint bitterness about the mouth, of heavy melancholy in her eyes. Once she had told him that her father was a stonecutter who lived in a room over a saloon near the Brooklyn shipyards. She had been born in Bohemia but could not remember it. In his flowered armchair Martin tried to imagine Bohemia, which his mother had visited as a child, but he could see only vague forests and misty darkness. Irked at his ignorance, and feeling a touch of pity for the girl, Martin walked over to the doorway and leaned a shoulder against the jamb. “I walked down by the river,” he said, “and I tried to imagine what this city will look like in twenty years. I like to do that, and I’m good at it. But today something happened: I couldn’t do it. Everything stayed just the way it was. I thought: this is how it is for most people. Things just being there.” His words irritated him, as if he had meant to say something quite different, which he could no longer remember. Marie Haskova had looked up as he stood in the doorway and then returned to her work, smoothing down a sheet and tucking it tightly under the mattress. She looked tired and hot in her black dress and slightly soiled white apron, with its drooping bow in back, one of whose loops was much bigger than the other; a hank of black hair hung along one cheek. “It was peaceful down there,” Martin said, suddenly exasperated at this dull block of a girl with her busy hands and expressionless face, at himself, at the red-and-black feather duster lying across the edge of the dresser and the tin bucket with the slanting mop. He took a step into the room with a strange feeling of exhilaration—light poured through the open window. Marie Haskova stopped moving, as if she were listening very hard. In the sudden stillness Martin felt a change in the atmosphere, as sharp and definite as a darkening of sunlit air, and he knew with utter certainty that he could walk across the room to Marie Haskova and place his hand on her arm, her warm upper arm, and draw her to the bed, that in the stillness she was simply waiting for him to complete his walk across the room to her. Even as his thigh muscles tightened in preparation for the walk across the room, where there was a girl waiting for him, a big-hipped girl with a soft-looking back and hair like black fire, Martin felt a hesitation. What surprised him wasn’t the hesitation, already hardening into a refusal, but his sense that the refusal was a burst of loyalty—not to his future bride, closed in her long dream, but to his bride’s sister, with her intelligent, watchful eyes. In the stillness that at any moment would dissolve, that even now was changing, Martin felt an outstreaming of tenderness toward Marie Haskova, with her large pale hands and bitten-down nails. It was all strange, as strange as the sun slanting across Marie Haskova’s broad shoulders, the glitter of black-beaded pins in her hair, the startling blackness of her hair, the red and black feathers of the duster, the reddish light coming through the edge of the heavy red curtains. Then there was only the slow, heavy movement of her body as she resumed her work, the clank of the bucket, the sound of a steamboat from the river.

  When Martin rode down in the elevator and entered the lobby, he saw the three Vernon women sitting in chairs by a window. They looked up at him one after the other: first Margaret Vernon, with her merry dark eyes, then Emmeline, with a slight frown, then Caroline, brushing his face with her drooping glance.

  “What shall it be today, ladies? The Boulevard? The river? The Battery? The Park? Excursions on the half hour to points of interest historical, geographical—”

  “My, but aren’t you the energetic one today,” Emmeline remarked.

  “That sounds like a criticism,” Martin said, thrusting his hands into his pockets and breaking into a laugh.

  Mr. Westerhoven Makes a Proposal

  ON THE FIRST OF SEPTEMBER MARTIN AND Walter Dundee took over the lease of a restaurant on Columbus Avenue near the corner of Eighty-fourth Street, between a greengrocer’s shop and a bakery. By mid-October the new lunchroom was ready for business. The Uptown Metropolitan Lunchroom was carefully designed to bring to mind the original Metropolitan, without imitating it exactly. The facade was painted the same cheerful shade of blue, with yellow trim, the awning was dark blue fringed with white, and on the sidewalk near the door stood another wooden Pilgrim: a man in breeches and buckle shoes, holding in his hands a horn of plenty. On his tall hat was a sign announcing a breakfast special of buckwheat cakes and sausage. The establishment was on a single floor, without a billiard parlor, and sought the patronage of women as well as men. One week before opening day, heralded by posters, billboards, and streetcar ads, a red-painted delivery wagon trimmed with gold, drawn by a white horse with a red-and-gold saddle, and driven by a man dressed like a Pilgrim, made its way up and down the six long avenues of the West End, from Fifty-ninth to 110th streets, bearing on its sides in large gold letters the name of the new lunchroom and the date of the opening day.

  At dinner a week after the successful opening of the Uptown Metropolitan, Martin said to Dundee, “I was wondering whether I ought to get married. What do you think?”

  Dundee looked at him in surprise. “I didn’t know you’d met someone. Keeping her secret, were you?”

  “No, not secret, exactly. Her name is Caroline Vernon and she lives with her mother and sister up at the Bellingham. I wonder whether I ought to marry her.”

  Dundee laughed. “And you want me to make up your mind for you?”

  “It’s this way, Walter. I haven’t though
t much about it, but they all seem to expect it.”

  “They do, do they?” Dundee put down his knife. “Look here, Martin. A good woman who loves you right is the greatest gift a man can have on God’s earth. Let me ask you something. Do you love her?”

  “That’s what I was wondering about.”

  Dundee looked at him. “By George if you’re wondering about it.” He shrugged. “And the young lady? What does she think?”

  “I have no idea. I’ve never spoken to her alone.” Martin paused. “It’s complicated.”