Martin Dressler

by Steven Millhauser

  Dundee appeared to wait for him to continue, then picked up his knife. “I wouldn’t jump into it,” he said.

  The leasing of the Columbus Avenue restaurant in September, the preparation of the advertising campaign, the lunch hours spent at the developing lunchroom, the long evenings with Dundee, all this had returned Martin to his familiar world, so that at times it seemed to him that he had had a summer dream of women. He still saw the Vernons in the evenings and went out with them on short Sunday excursions, but Saturday afternoons and most of his Sundays were devoted to the Uptown Metropolitan. With Marie Haskova he had fallen into an ambiguous kind of friendship. After Sunday breakfast at the Uptown Metropolitan, he would return to his rooms to wait for the Vernons, but also in the hope of seeing Marie Haskova, who timed her work to coincide with his return. He liked the quiet girl with her sudden questioning glances, felt an interest in her, liked to hear her talk about things. And he was curious about her arrangement with the Bellingham: he questioned her closely about her hours, her room duties, the staff dining room in the basement, the maids’ quarters at the top of the building. She told him that she cleaned fourteen apartments on her floor, starting at seven in the morning. She was so tired by the end of the day that after dinner in the overheated basement she went up to her room and fell asleep, though it was hard to stay asleep for long, what with doors slamming and girls arguing and giggling and making a racket—the laundry girls were the worst, the head housekeeper was always giving them a warning. One morning she took him up in the service elevator to the attic floor. In the stuffy half-dark lit by two dim gas brackets with murky globes, rows of brown doors stood close together. A big girl in a doorway, wearing the gray uniform of a laundress, looked at Marie with a leer. Martin glanced in at Marie’s room, number 7, a dark box with a bed and a wooden chair and a small window giving a view of chimney pots and water tanks on the roofs of row houses. The girls weren’t allowed to eat in their rooms, Marie said, but they all did; she showed him a tin of oyster biscuits. When he and Marie returned down the hall, Martin heard a sudden burst of laughter; a door slammed; and the brown doors, the half-darkness, the muffled laughter, all was strangely familiar to Martin, as if, behind a suddenly opened door, he might find Dora or Gerda the Swede.

  His little Sunday morning friendship with Marie Haskova, with its air of faint ambiguity, as if he were concealing from the Vernons a secret mistress, in one sense simplified his relation to them, for whatever he felt for the three Vernon women had nothing to do with secret liaisons. The Vernons, all three of them in a kind of lump, could be imagined only as a wife. And yet in another sense Marie Haskova confused his feelings for them, for it was as if the vague desire aroused by the Vernon women were seeking an outlet in young Marie Haskova. But there were deeper confusions, elusive connections that he could barely sense. There was something unspoken between him and Marie Haskova, something secretive and unacknowledged—but weren’t the secretive and the unacknowledged the very sign of his union with Caroline Vernon? Then the two women, so rigorously set apart, would grow confused in his mind, so that speaking with Marie Haskova he would suddenly think of Caroline Vernon’s pale tight-bound hair and small straight shoulders, her brown eyebrows darker than her hair, the half-closed indolent eyes, and he would be startled to see, there before him, Marie Haskova with her strong cheekbones, her broad shoulders, her trace of bitterness about the mouth. And once, stepping into the lobby of the Bellingham after his Sunday morning walk and seeing Caroline sitting with her mother and sister, Caroline with her half-closed eyes and fine-cut nose, he suddenly imagined Marie Haskova with her swift, quickly fading smile, her melancholy eyes, her dark box of a room with its view of chimney pots and water tanks on the tops of row houses, and so intense was his vision of Marie Haskova that even as he walked toward Caroline Vernon in the sunny lobby with her head reclined on a garnet-and-green armchair, a few strands of pale hair escaping from the side of her neck, he was walking along the half-dark corridor with Marie Haskova to sounds of muffled laughter, while Emmeline looked at him with her air of alertness and Mrs. Vernon fiddled with the lace collar of her blue silk dress.

  From this tangle of women Martin was glad to escape into the world of leases and ads and plate glass and cast iron, a hard-edged world of carefully defined problems demanding precise solutions. And Martin was restless again. The new lunchroom had barely been launched when he began searching for a third location on another uptown avenue. He felt stung into activity by the sharp autumn days. Dundee wanted to wait, Dundee always wanted to wait, but Martin thought it was wrongheaded not to strike quickly while people were still talking about the Uptown Metropolitan. Success was in the air.

  He had his eye on the Boulevard, which below Seventy-second Street held stretches of four-story brick or frame buildings with shops at street level and modest apartments above. On one block he found a saloon, a grocery, a vacant store, a butcher shop, an undertaker’s, and a vacant lot. The vacant store interested him—he imagined it with a coat of skyblue paint and a dark blue awning fringed with white—but so did the vacant lot: speculators were clinging to their Boulevard properties as prices rose year by year. Rumors had sprung up again that the city was going underground, that trains would run below the Boulevard, with stations along the way. Martin imagined a city with trains in the air and trains under the ground, a fierce and magical city of moving iron, while along the trembling avenues there rose, in the clashing air, higher and higher, still buildings.

  He was beginning to feel impatient with his long hours at the Vanderlyn. Not only was he reading and thinking through the daily correspondence, but he was drafting and typing up replies, which Mr. Westerhoven merely glanced at before unscrewing the cap of his shiny black fountain pen with the gold point, pressing it over the bottom of the pen with squeaky sounds, and signing his name in gleaming black ink, with many loops and swirls and a final flourish that reminded Martin of tying a shoelace. He would hold the typed letter at arm’s length, stare for a moment as if he were looking at a picture in a museum, and pass it suddenly to Martin with a rush of sound, half flutter and half crackle, for Martin to insert in an envelope and drop into a basket of envelopes, which a desk clerk would later carry over to the bellboys for stamping. Martin didn’t object to writing letters for Mr. Westerhoven, nor did he mind when Mr. Westerhoven, checking a draft, changed blunt phrases to more elaborate and circumspect locutions—no, what he kept coming up against was the knowledge that only small changes would ever be made in the operation of the hotel, and those only after the overcoming of an immense resistance on the part of Mr. Westerhoven, who liked to call himself a “preserver” and a “reconciler.” “You know, Martin,” he would say, pacing in his office with his coat open and his thumbs stuck in the pockets of his checkered vest, “what’s necessary in this business is to reconcile the best of the old with the best of the new.” By this he meant that although he had yielded in the matter of the new incandescent lights, he would be damned if he’d replace his fine old steam elevators with new-fangled electric ones, at tremendous cost—and to what end? To what end? He asked Martin: to what end?

  In Mr. Westerhoven’s arguments there was always a ground of the solid and practical, but Martin knew that they were arguing less about elevators or telephones or expenditures than about something else: they were arguing about the manager’s secret desire to stop the city from its rush into the new century, his desire to return to his childhood parlor with its soft dark rug, its heavy curtains and vases of heavy-headed flowers, its mother with her bag of knitting in an easy chair by the window. Mr. Westerhoven had taken to sighing at the thought of the new department stores with their big plate-glass display windows full of fancy merchandise and had begun shopping in small out-of-the-way places, from which he would return with a hand-woven rug for his office, an old-fashioned snuffbox with hand-painted porcelain Cupids on the boxlid, a walking stick with an ivory head carved in the shape of a monkey. In his office hung a gilt-framed engra
ving that showed a bareheaded young woman with a flower in her hair, standing in a bower with a dreamy look on her sunny-and-shady face; at her feet lay a letter that she had just dropped.

  Perhaps it was Mr. Westerhoven’s accumulation of knickknacks, perhaps it was the sense of stepping from the street into the old-fashioned lobby and from the lobby into the dark-paneled warm office with its thick-piled rug and glints of lamplit dark wood, in any case Martin sometimes had the sensation that he was stepping each day out of a world of excavations, scaffolding, and steam cranes lifted against the sky, into Mr. Westerhoven’s childhood parlor, with its heavy curtains looped back from the tall window, its odor of furniture polish and velvet, its dark softness of rug and sofa and tasseled pillow.

  One rainy morning Martin was sitting at his desk in Mr. Westerhoven’s office, going over the housekeeper’s accounts and trying to decide whether the recent rash of torn bedsheets meant it was time to order a complete new set of bed linen, perhaps with the miniature image of the Vanderlyn in one corner, sewn in blue thread. Or was red thread better? The door opened and Mr. Westerhoven entered in his rubbers and ulster, holding a dripping umbrella. He plunged the umbrella into a stand that he had picked up in an antique shop near Washington Square, then hung his coat on a peg of the hat rack. He hooked his fedora over a second peg, pulled off his rubbers and hung each one on a separate peg, undid the buttons of his suit jacket, let out his breath once with a great whooshing sound, and, hooking his thumbs in the pockets of his vest, began walking up and down in the space between Martin’s desk and his own.

  “A splendid day, my boy, wouldn’t you say? Well, but what I meant to say was: wretched, of course. A wretched day! Splendid in its own way, of course, but wretched nonetheless. Were it not for my umbrella—but why speak of that? I have something to say to you and I find myself a little … well of course, yes. And yet I have never been one to beat about the proverbial bush. Suffice to say that your services here—but of course you know all that. Great things are afoot, Martin. Our Mr. Henning—don’t breathe a word of this, my boy—our own Mr. Henning has been offered a managerial position at the Breresley—the Breresley, forsooth—and the good man has seen fit to inform me that it is his wish and desire to terminate his inestimable services and in short to leave us in the um proverbial lurch. To put it in a nutshell: as assistant manager of the Vanderlyn, you will report to me on a regular—but we can discuss the details later. Well? What do you say?”

  Later that morning Martin paid a visit to George Henning in his office. Mr. Henning said that because of certain drawbacks in his present position he had started putting out feelers a year ago, hoping to find an assistant manager’s position at a good hotel; the offer from the Breresley had come as a complete surprise. The drawbacks, to be frank, concerned his prospects of advancement. In the normal course of things he would expect to become manager of the Vanderlyn, upon Mr. Westerhoven’s retirement in five or six years, but the special favor Mr. Westerhoven had shown Martin had made his own prospects less certain. In any case it was a splendid chance for Martin, whose line to the managership would now be secure; and during the next three weeks, before his move to the Breresley, he would be glad to be of help to Martin in the transition to assistant manager. Mr. Henning’s words were friendly, but something cool in his manner, something tight about the mouth, reminded Martin that the assistant manager saw in him only someone who stood in the way.

  At lunch with Walter Dundee that afternoon, where he had planned to discuss his ideas for turning the billiard parlor on the second floor into a second-floor lunchroom, Martin opened his mouth to speak of Mr. Westerhoven’s offer, suddenly hesitated, and closed his mouth over a piece of rye bread and liverwurst. The hesitation puzzled him, but by the end of lunch, during which Dundee had advised waiting another six months before plunging recklessly into additional expense, Martin felt an odd exhilaration. That night in the parlor of the Bellingham he announced his decision to Margaret, Emmeline, and Caroline Vernon: he would leave the Vanderlyn.

  Margaret Vernon, who at the news of Mr. Westerhoven’s offer had clasped her hands at her throat and looked at him with a kind of eager delight, continued to clasp her hands while her look changed to the polite blankness with which she had been taught to conceal disapproval or confusion; Caroline glanced away; Emmeline leaned forward and said fiercely, “Good for you, Martin. Now you’ll show them.”

  “Show them what, dear?” asked Margaret Vernon, and cleared her throat.

  “Oh, mother,” Emmeline said.

  “Not a bad question, actually,” Martin said.

  “Show them what he can do,” Emmeline said. “Without them.”

  “I understand, Emmy, of course I do, but I was wondering …”

  “Does this mean …,” Caroline said. “Yes?” asked Martin sharply.

  “Oh, nothing,” Caroline said.

  “I think what Caroline means,” began Mrs. Vernon, bursting into a cough.

  Business and Pleasure

  A SLANTING RAIN DROVE AGAINST THE AWNING, rushed in black rivulets along the curbs, glistened on the backs of cabhorses and flew from rattling wheels, worked its way down behind the awning and trickled along the restaurant window.

  “You can say what you like,” Martin said at the window table, “but my mind is made up. Are you coming in with me or aren’t you?”

  “Now hold on, Martin,” Dundee said. “One thing at a time. Are you sure you’ve thought this thing through? Do you know what you want?”

  “I know what I damn well don’t want,” Martin said. “I don’t want to become Mr. George Henning.”

  “Slim chance of that, Martin.” Dundee slapped the table with the flat of his hand. “Don’t you see what it is? They’re grooming you for manager. Six years at a bet, maybe five. You could take this hotel—”

  “I don’t want to take it. I want to leave it.” Martin heard something harsh and contemptuous in his tone and made an effort to speak evenly. “I’m cut out for something else.”

  “And what may that be?”

  “Something”—Martin shrugged impatiently—“larger. It’ll come to me. But right now: are you in with me or not?”

  “I’m a hotel man, Martin. I don’t aim to set up in a new line of work at this stage of the game. But this scheme of yours—I won’t stand in your way.”

  “Then I can borrow against the business—”

  “For one more lunchroom. After that I plan to sit tight, keep my money safe in the bank. Pick up a little railroad stock, maybe.”

  “Suit yourself.” Martin looked out the window at dark streetcar rails glistening in the rain. “I was thinking of Westerhoven’s rubbers. He hung them on the hat rack to dry. They dripped a puddle onto his rug. I suppose I’ll miss the old place once I’m out of it for good.”

  “Martin!” cried Dundee. “Take the job. It’s the chance of a lifetime.”

  Martin turned to him with a look of surprise.

  As he threw himself into the adventure of his new life, Martin realized how hungry he had been for time, sheer time. Now he rose at five in the morning to walk the still-dark avenues, observing the early morning El stations, the streetcars, the opening of newsstands and streetcorner cafes, the movement of people on the sidewalks. He stood on corners of cross streets and avenues, counting the number of people who passed in ten-minute intervals, recording the numbers in a notebook, studying them over breakfast at restaurants up and down the West End, trying to work out a system. The original idea for converting the Paradise Musée into a lunchroom and billiard parlor had come out of nowhere—it had been an impulse, a whim—but he was convinced that he could now go about things in a clearheaded orderly way. Martin knew that what attracted him wasn’t the actual lunchroom, for he had no passion for lunchrooms, no special fondness for them, in a sense no interest in them; his passion was for working things out, bringing things together, arranging the unarrangeable, making combinations. Even the idea for a second lunchroom resembling the firs
t had been a kind of lucky intuition, but the advantages of a string of separate yet related establishments now struck him as immense: an ad for one was an ad for all, so that advertising costs would be far less than if it were a question of three different businesses, and the risks of newness would be diminished by the air of familiarity lent to the newest member through deliberate association with the others. At the same time, larger food orders from a combination of lunchrooms meant discounts from suppliers. Money saved in purchasing and advertising meant increased profits—and increased profits meant another lunchroom.

  But first it was necessary to look more closely at the operation of the two Metropolitans. The downtown manager was a business friend of Dundee’s, who had been the purchasing agent for the Vanderlyn dining rooms and had managed a lunch counter in one of the big department stores, and was grateful for the chance to manage a small business at a generous salary; he was a scrupulous and good-natured man who had the respect of his workers and provided detailed financial reports. He agreed with Martin that the two floors of billiard tables, though they turned a small profit, could be used to better purpose. The uptown manager had been recommended by a friend of Dundee’s and had struck Martin as being a little too fond of bay rum hair oil and heavy gold rings with raised initials. His reports were always late and included questionable expenses, he had already fired the cashier and two waiters, and he was often absent on unexplained business. Martin asked to see the books, noticed a few suspicious figures, and discovered that the new cashier, who turned out to be the manager’s brother, had been stealing fifty dollars a day. He fired both of them and threatened them with jail unless they returned the missing money. Fortunately the downtown manager knew someone who was perfect for the job and came with sterling references, but the incident impressed on Martin the importance of managers and the necessity for tight control of the business.