Martin Dressler

by Steven Millhauser

  The roof garden was itself a popular spot, with its railed promenade, its flower gardens and small orchard of fruit trees, its scattering of gazebos and Swiss chalets, its red and blue and green Japanese lanterns, and its open-air restaurant of small round tables and canework chairs beneath a roof supported by white wooden posts joined by scrollwork. One rainy summer night when Martin stepped under the roof with Emmeline he saw that the wind was blowing the rain across the floor, so that customers were huddling in one corner. The next morning he arranged for the installation of protective metal screens on spring rollers, which could be lowered during storms.

  A few days later Martin asked Emmeline to walk with him from the roof garden down to the boiler room, located in one of the basement divisions beneath the underground theaters. As they descended from landing to landing, Martin was struck by the monotony of the descent: each major stairway landing faced a row of elevator doors and had on each side a door with a window that led to a corridor, while between the elevator landings the stairway turned once to form a secondary landing with a potted plant. The plants exasperated Martin. By the time he reached the main lobby he had decided to have them replaced by varied arrangements of couches, lamps, and bookshelves, so that those who chose to walk would be able to rest along the way. The neat, boring elevator landings posed a more difficult problem. Emmeline suggested artwork of some kind, perhaps framed paintings, and it was Rudolf Arling who took it up, turning over the idea and shaping it into a plan that seized Martin’s interest: in keeping with the theatrical nature of the roof garden and the third underground level, each landing would be designed to convey a different atmosphere. The walls of one landing would be hung with fishing nets and starfish and illuminated by green-blue light, another landing would be supplied with an Ionic column and wall murals of ruined temples and blue sea, a third would have a papier-mâché Indian in authentic garb against a background of thick pine trunks and winding forest paths, the whole bathed in a dark green woodland light.

  Although Martin spent a good part of his day inspecting his hotel, talking with workers, and in general considering ways to improve the operation of the Dressler and the well-being of his guests, he also continued his habit of taking long walks in the neighborhood. He liked to follow the progress of excavations, to examine the facades of half-built apartment houses sheathed in scaffolding. Often he would pause thoughtfully before vacant lots. A great burst of building was taking place on the Boulevard, recently renamed Broadway, in anticipation of the new subway that would run under its entire length, but Martin had his eye on a stretch of empty land on Riverside Drive, some ten blocks north of the Dressler. He had reached an understanding with Lellyveld and White, who owned the land and were pleased with the financial reports from the Dressler, and one day after lunch he began meeting again with Rudolf Arling.

  All such matters Martin discussed with Emmeline—at lunch, in her office during the day, and at dinner in the main dining room with Caroline and Margaret. Often the four of them took a stroll in the underground courtyard after dinner, after which Caroline would return to her rooms. Margaret was concerned about Caroline. She had seemed so happy in her new apartment with its lovely view, she had looked forward to exploring the new hotel, which she referred to as the Castle—and really, if you thought about it, she was just like a princess in a castle, married to a powerful prince—but she had gradually returned to her old habits, more and more she had confined herself to her apartment, and now you could scarcely coax her to take an after-dinner stroll in the courtyard. And Margaret Vernon, who had been fiddling with her dress collar, would look sharply at Martin, as if to surprise in him the secret of Caroline’s behavior, while Martin, who had grown skeptical about Caroline’s capacity for pleasure, but who at the same time wondered irritably whether he was to blame for not loving her enough, would answer with a touch of impatience that Caroline was welcome to do as she liked.

  “Of course it’s all very well to let Caroline go her own way,” Margaret said one night, while brushing something from the sleeve of her dress. “Especially when her own husband and sister prefer each other’s company.”

  Martin felt something burst in his neck. “What the devil is that supposed to mean? Em and I have business to discuss—lots of it. If Caroline showed a second’s worth of interest in all this—”

  “Well I just think it’s a shame, that’s all,” Mrs. Vernon said, giving a sigh in the manner of an actress on the melodrama stage as she rose from her seat; and turning to Emmeline she said, “Now don’t stay up late, dear. It’s very bad for your health.”

  Martin watched Margaret Vernon walk away and then turned to Emmeline. “What the devil was that all about?”

  “I suppose I do monopolize you,” Emmeline said.

  “Oh, wonderful. Caroline has no interest in anything that concerns me, but because I’m her husband I’m supposed to prefer her company to yours.”

  “It would seem reasonable. Please keep your voice down.”

  Martin lowered his voice. “It’s not reasonable. It’s unreasonable. Your mother is being unreasonable. What does she expect me to do? Sit in my parlor all day playing euchre with her and Caroline?”

  “Still, I don’t like it when you speak to her like that.”

  “And the way she speaks to me? Do you like that? ‘Of course it’s all very well.’ Who the deuce does she think she’s speaking to?”

  “Shall we walk?”

  A few nights later Margaret Vernon returned to the subject of Caroline. Martin, stiffening, stared straight ahead while he prepared to tamp down his anger, but Margaret Vernon made no effort to suppress her excitement. Looking from one to the other from behind her rapidly fluttering blue-and-green silk fan, she announced that Caroline had found a friend.

  “A friend!” said Martin, irritated at the sound of false heartiness in his voice. “And who may that be?”

  “You’ll find out soon enough,” Mrs. Vernon somewhat mysteriously replied.

  When Mrs. Vernon had left, Martin looked at Emmeline. “What do you make of it?”

  “It isn’t as if Caroline doesn’t make friends,” Emmeline said. “She’s actually rather good at it, when she wants to be.”

  “Then why doesn’t she ever want to be?”

  “Well, she has you.”

  Martin looked at her. “Well yes. She does have me. And now she has a new friend.”

  “So it would seem.”

  “And what does that mean?”

  “Oh, nothing. I’ve seen these little friendships of Caroline’s. Shall we walk?”

  A Fifth Chair at Dinner

  CAROLINE’S FRIEND JOINED THEM AT DINNER in the main dining room the following night, and as she sat down Martin realized that he had seen her somewhere in the hotel, a tall, thirtyish woman, though for the life of him he couldn’t recall where. It was Margaret who explained: Claire Moore lived on the sixteenth floor around a bend in the corridor. She was a late riser, like Caroline—or, as Claire Moore herself laughingly put it, like all widows without a guilty conscience—and she had passed Caroline several times in the corridor before introducing herself at the elevator late one morning. The next day she had invited Caroline to her apartment for a cup of tea, and after that it was luncheons, afternoon outings, a great visiting back and forth. And Martin was surprised: he had expected someone proper and boring, someone trained to talk about weather and food and to grow gradually invisible in company, and instead he found himself in the presence of a lively woman with a strong laugh in a strong throat, an air of humorous self-assurance, and a habit of sharp observation. She was handsome in a sudden, erratic way, her face with its strong bones bursting into moments of radiance as her long-fingered hands swept through the air and her eyes glistened with energy. Her hair—Caroline’s hair, he saw immediately—moved when she laughed, and it struck Martin that motion was her element: she darted even as she sat, a bird in flight, a flock of birds. And always she glanced admiringly at Caroline, drew her into t
he circle of her anecdotes, praised her hair, a ribbon, the color of her clothes; and throwing back her handsome head, she laughed her full laugh, drawing back her lips from her very white teeth and showing the strong column of her trachea against the skin of her throat.

  Now every night at dinner a fifth chair sat at Martin’s table, awaiting Claire Moore, who arrived with Caroline a little late, a little breathless, glowing with health as if she had just come from a long brisk walk by the river, and who even as she began to sit was already describing the day’s outing: they had gone shopping for hats, they had gone walking in the park, they had found a simply wonderful little out-of-the-way lunch place with the most imaginative sandwiches, they had braved the crowds of a tremendous tearoom that seated seven hundred. Think of it: seven hundred! Caro had been a brick—a brick, really—and she had seen the glorious humor of it: seven hundred ladies in a department store, taking tea. For the joke of it was of course that tea was an intimate occasion, which had been spread out and extended until it was like—well—as she had remarked to Caro at the time—it was like rowing in a boat the size of a barge. Here Martin begged to disagree. He himself found nothing humorous about sheer size, which on the contrary produced a sensation of power, of majesty—had anyone ever laughed at the Brooklyn Bridge? But of course he understood she wasn’t referring to size alone, but to a special development that he himself had given some thought to: the expansion of small private events into large public ones. A family hotel was a perfect example. Here the guest willingly gave up certain privacies, such as that of dining alone, in exchange for the convenience of public service. And in doing so, an entirely new idea was born: the large public dining room, which wasn’t a grotesque, bloated version of an intimate family dining room, but something entirely new, something massive and modern, and no more comic than an El track or a twenty-story office building or a transatlantic steamer.

  Martin, surprised by his little outburst, was gratified and at the same time oddly irritated by the sudden serious attention with which Claire Moore listened to his words; and when he stopped speaking she struck her hands together, shook back her hair, and looking Martin directly in the eye said she would certainly think twice before daring to attack a tearoom again.

  Martin wasn’t sure what to make of this powerful, laughing woman, who had taken up with Caroline and suddenly was there, at dinner, inescapably. She whisked Caroline from one shop to another and reported tirelessly the slightest incident of their daily adventures, suffusing every small thing with the drama of her temperament, while Caroline seemed uplifted on the waves of Claire Moore’s unremitting attention.

  “I don’t know what to make of her,” he said to Emmeline as they strolled along a secluded path in the underground courtyard.

  “I don’t like it,” Emmeline said.

  “It?”

  “This sudden friendship. Her attachment to Caroline—her attachment to us. She herself—” Here Emmeline gave a shrug.

  “She seems fond of Caroline. I can’t imagine what they talk about.”

  “Oh, she’s probably fond of her, in a way. Caroline draws people. She doesn’t need to say much. You see how they are at dinner.”

  “I think I like her. She’s good for Caroline. She gets her out.”

  “It won’t end well,” Emmeline said.

  The friends, Margaret Vernon reported, had become inseparable, simply inseparable. They visited back and forth a hundred times a day, they attended afternoon performances at the Black Rose or the New Lyceum, when they weren’t going off on one of Claire Moore’s thousand little excursions. It was the best thing in the world for Caroline, who needed nothing but a little encouragement before she warmed to people; it was so good for her to get out of herself, to say nothing of getting out of her apartment. She simply adored the theater. And Claire was a good friend; you could tell she cared about Caroline, asking her opinion about things, admiring her, worrying when Caroline was out of sorts. Martin, watching the friendship out of the corner of his eye, was certain of only one thing: Claire Moore was most definitely there, occupying the fifth chair at dinner, a powerful and laughing woman. She was attentive to Caroline, praised her repeatedly, though not quite as often as at first, reported their little adventures, drew Caroline skillfully into the circle of her talk, which would widen suddenly to include Martin and Emmeline and Margaret, rippled with words and laughter; and from time to time, in response to a witty turn of phrase, Caroline would lightly smile.

  For if it was true that Claire Moore had taken up with Caroline, watched her admiringly, seemed to dote on her, it was also true that Caroline in her quieter way was preoccupied with Claire Moore. Martin could feel her soaking up Claire Moore, absorbing her moods, taking her in. Sometimes Caroline would raise her hand in a way Claire Moore had; once, drawn for a moment into the swirl of Claire Moore’s talk about a play they had seen, she began to speak and broke off to search for a word, and the precise tilt of her head, the precise manner in which she tightened her eyebrows in thought, brought Claire Moore sharply to mind. But more than this was the intensity with which Caroline listened to her friend, watched her even when she wasn’t watching her, seemed to take in the talk through the tendons of her neck. She appeared impatient sometimes, as if she wished the dinner would end, and it was true enough that Claire Moore seemed to enjoy prolonging the dinners, seemed to enjoy talking to the others and especially to Martin, whom she liked to draw out on the subjects of modern living, the proposed subway system, steel-frame architecture, the future of the Upper West Side. As Martin spoke, he could feel Claire Moore listening closely to him, penetrating him with her attention. Two chairs away, Caroline sat with her eyes lowered, one hand resting tensely beside her plate.

  “Caroline’s jealous of you,” Emmeline said one evening after Margaret had retired upstairs.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Martin said, but even as he spoke he saw that it wasn’t. Claire Moore was looking at Caroline a little less often, turning a little more often in his direction; without in any sense ignoring Caroline, she was shifting her very slightly from the center of her attention. Martin, who was used to being flirted with by attractive women, detected in Claire Moore no surreptitious looks, no secret signs; but he could feel in her, as she sat down to dinner, as she placed her forearms on the table, as she turned to him with a question and shook back her hair, a quickened interest.

  “I’m not mistaken about these things,” Emmeline said firmly. It was plain for all to see that Caroline had a little “crush” on Claire Moore, who was tiring of her; she’d had little crushes before, little intense friendships with women that flared up because of someone’s interest in her. Take the case of Catherine Winter. At the age of twelve Caroline had taken up with Catherine Winter, a slightly older girl with jet-black hair, a sharp wit, and a passion for music, as well as a gift for drawing cruelly satirical sketches of family members. But above all Catherine Winter had the gift of bringing Caroline out of herself, of animating her, of filling her with feelings. The girls quickly became inseparable. The trouble was that whereas Catherine Winter was enough for Caroline, Caroline wasn’t enough for Catherine Winter, who was drawn to Caroline’s quietness but made friends easily and liked social occasions. Caroline, who wanted Catherine Winter all for herself, began making demands, but demands were precisely what one didn’t make of Catherine Winter; there was an argument, tears, and then—silence. Caroline refused to talk to Catherine Winter again, who for her part threw herself into the social round. Caroline shut herself up in her room and wouldn’t speak to anyone for a week—not even to Emmeline, whom she always turned to in the end. Emmeline herself had grown to be a watcher of Caroline’s moods, a student of her sorrows; and while she suffered for Caroline, she had also begun to sense in these little friendships a dubious element. For if Caroline, through her friendships, was trying to achieve a kind of independence from her sister and mother, her efforts took the form always of a new dependence, a kind of desperate fanatical clinging
, which was bound to end in defeat. But Caroline wasn’t the only victim, for from the beginning Emmeline had sensed in those friendships an attempt, hidden perhaps from Caroline herself, to make Emmeline jealous, to hurt her by parading a rival. Oh, make no mistake about it, there was a touch of vindictiveness in Caroline’s little passions.

  Martin was surprised by the turn in Emmeline’s analysis, which was accompanied by a slight change in her face, as of a tightening of unseen muscles. And feeling a sudden impulse to protect Caroline from a kind of passionate harshness in her sister’s pursuit of hidden things, he tried to turn her attention away from Caroline to Claire Moore, who, he argued, whatever else might be said about her, couldn’t really be blamed for striking up a friendship with Caroline. But Emmeline would have none of it. Claire Moore, she said, was a bored, idle woman with too much time on her hands, who had taken up Caroline as a hobby. Caroline had been glad to be taken up, but she had begun to make demands of her own, she had begun to be difficult, had begun to be Caroline—too difficult, too Caroline by far, for the likes of Claire Moore, who, to be fair to her, had seemed to like Caroline at first. Now she was tiring of her, she had used her up, she found Martin more amusing. For Claire Moore was a kind of woman that Emmeline had observed more than once—a woman empty within, hungry to be filled, a vampire woman, drinking the blood of victims.