Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer (2 page)

And yet, standing in the window as he adjusted one of the brass wires in his tree, Martin had to admit that in the brown peacefulness of the store he sometimes had ideas that he had to keep carefully out of sight—ideas that his father, with his heavy shoulders and thick brown mustache, would have judged to be extravagant. The cigar tree itself was a much quieter version of Martin’s original idea, which he had known he’d better keep to himself: he had imagined a window filled with elegant French dolls, all smoking cigars. When his father grew angry he never shouted but seemed to harden himself, as if he were holding in an explosion, and his voice became thin and hard; and sometimes when he was angry with Martin’s mother he would tell her to lower her voice, to control herself, to stop being excited. His mother, like Martin, helped out in the store, which stayed open six days a week from seven in the morning to nine at night. But in the parlor over the back of the store was an old upright piano, with a dark bench covered in wine-red brocade, where now and then his mother would sit and play “Für Elise,” and a dreamy look would come
over her: at the end of a phrase she would lift her hand in an odd, graceful way, and leave it suspended in the air for a moment before it seemed to wake up and then plunged down to the yellowish keys. His mother told him that she had played the piano as a girl in Darmstadt and that when she married Otto Dressler he had vowed she would have a piano: he had insisted on renting one by the week in the old neighborhood, at a time when they sometimes had only black bread for supper. Martin liked to hear his mother tell that story, for he saw that his serious father, in his own way, had a touch of the extravagant.

He gave a final bend to one wire branch, moved the tree slightly back so that it stood behind and between two open cigar boxes, and stepped down from the window. Then he opened the door and walked out under the awning. On the sidewalk old Tecumseh stood shading his eyes, staring out at the street. Martin saw instantly that the cigar tree in the window was wrong: it looked funny and spindly, hardly like a tree at all—it gave off an air of poverty, of failure. It was stupid and ugly. It hadn’t even been what he’d wanted anyway. His eyes began to prickle, anger and disappointment flamed in him, and in the dark window he caught sight of his face. It looked thoughtful, even calm, utterly unlike the feeling in his chest. The sight of his calm face calmed him. He felt a moment of anger at his father and then complete calm. He felt calm and clear and wise and old. He was old, old and calm, calm as old Tecumseh by the door.

M
ARTIN
’
S FIRST SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS VENTURE
took place not long after. Charley Stratemeyer, one of the day clerks at the Vanderlyn Hotel, had a fondness for a particular kind of fancy panatella that he couldn’t get at the lobby cigar stand, and for the past few months he had taken to strolling over to Dressler’s Cigars and Tobacco during his lunch hour and chatting with Martin before walking over to a little chophouse he knew on Seventh Avenue. Martin, who liked the humorous young man with the melancholy eyes, and who had been struck by something Charley had said, turned things over in his mind and at last decided to make a proposal. He pointed out that Charley had to walk from the Vanderlyn to the cigar store and then
turn around and pass the Vanderlyn on his way to Seventh Avenue, so that he was losing valuable time on his lunch hour. But if Martin delivered the cigar to Charley at the Vanderlyn each day, then Charley would save time on his walk to the restaurant. In return he asked only one thing. Since the cigar stand in the hotel lobby had disappointed Charley, it must also disappoint many people who stayed at the hotel, and he asked Charley to put in a word for Dressler’s Cigars and Tobacco. At this Charley laughed aloud and clapped Martin on the back, saying he was a sharp little devil.

Now every day at noon Martin walked from the cigar store to the Vanderlyn Hotel, where he delivered Charley’s cigar and took in the great lobby with its chairs of maroon plush, its pillars carved at the top with leaves and fruit, its ceiling decorated with gilt hexagons, the plants in stone pots, the shiny brass spittoons on the marble floor, the cigar stand in the corner. One day he walked over to the stand, behind which sat an old man reading a newspaper, and saw that it was a careless mix of expensive and cheap cigars, displayed without plan, the whole affair badly thought out from start to finish. Soon the first new customer from the Vanderlyn entered Dressler’s Cigars and Tobacco; and business began picking up in a small but noticeable way.

Martin liked the hot noon walk down his street to the Vanderlyn at the corner of Broadway. He knew each window and awning well: the paper and twine window under its green-and-white-striped awning, the window of derbies and fedoras under its red-and-white-striped awning, the
window of umbrellas and walking sticks under its brown-and-white-striped awning, the window of ladies’ dress trimmings, the stone steps going down to the linen draper’s shop, the window of bolts of cloth past which he could see old Grauman the tailor, the window of ladies’ hats, the barbershop window with the reflection of the turning pole—and then the fringed awning, the rounded stone entranceway, the high glass doors of the six-story Vanderlyn Hotel. Martin was soon friends with the doorman in his maroon-and-gold jacket, who for some reason reminded him of old Tecumseh, and the lobby no longer seemed like one of the colored pictures in the
Arabian Nights
, but a familiar place filled with interesting details: the heavy room keys hanging on a board behind the desk clerks, the chairs grouped in twos and threes around small tables, the gentleman with gloves and a fancy walking stick who sat smoking a second-rate cigar. Sometimes when Martin handed Charley his cigar he would stand talking for a few minutes before returning to the store, but one day Charley said he’d like to show Martin something. He led Martin through the lobby past a group of pillars into what seemed another lobby, with half-open doors giving glimpses of smaller rooms, and turning a corner he came to a row of three elevators.

An elevator boy in a dark green uniform was pulling open the shiny door. Inside Martin saw polished dark wood. Two benches covered in dark red velvet stretched along the walls. “Fifth floor, Andy,” said Charley. The door slid shut, followed by a rattling brass gate that unfolded like a bellows. There was a deep rumble, and Martin had the odd
sensation that he was falling upwards. Once, coming downstairs to the cigar store, he had reached the bottom and started forward, only to discover that it wasn’t the bottom, there was nothing at all, and he had been about to fall when he suddenly understood that he had miscalculated the number of steps—and this sense of being about to fall, while understanding that you weren’t going to, was what the elevator was like. He was beginning to enjoy it when they came to a clunking stop. The elevator boy pulled open the brass gate. The floor of the elevator was too low. They lurched up; the boy pulled open the heavy door; Martin stepped out after Charley Stratemeyer onto a landing with stairs in front and doors on both sides. He followed Charley through a door and down a red-carpeted dusky hall lit by gas brackets with blue glass globes, past high doors with brass numbers on them. He heard voices. Charley held up a hand in warning, and when Charley turned the corner they both stopped abruptly.

Martin saw men and women sitting on the floor against both walls and standing in open doors. In the middle of the corridor a woman in a black dress with yellow flowers in her hair was pacing up and down, wringing her hands. A man with a brown beard stood with his arms folded on his chest, glaring at a younger man in a silk hat who carried a walking stick. The woman covered her face with her hands and began to weep. Suddenly she fell to the floor, the young man in the silk hat dropped to his knees beside her. Martin, watching in terror, saw that no one was doing anything: a woman sitting on the floor was peeling an orange, a man in
a doorway bent over to brush something from his shirt front, someone was smoking a perfumed cigarette. A few faces turned toward Martin and then looked away. He had the strange, melancholy sense that something terribly wrong was happening, it was as if he had stepped into someone’s dream, but already Charley was tugging at his arm and whisking him back along the way they had come. In the elevator, which suddenly began to fall, so that Martin stumbled back against a bench, Charley explained that a troupe of actors and actresses had rented a row of rooms on the fifth floor. They liked to rehearse at strange hours, sometimes they didn’t come in till four in the morning, you saw all kinds of queer things in this line of work, and as Martin stepped out into the hot sunlight of the street he recalled with sudden vividness a curious detail: through one of the half-open doors he had seen the corner of a bed with a pair of crossed feet on it, one of which was naked and white and one of which wore a shiny black button-up shoe.

A
LTHOUGH
M
ARTIN
’
S FATHER KEPT THE STORE
open fourteen hours a day, six days a week, once a year during the hottest part of the summer he put up a sign in the window and took his family to West Brighton for three days. Almost to the moment of departure his father gave no hint that anything extraordinary was about to happen, but at closing time on the evening before the holiday he put up his sign in the window, and that night there was a great scraping of drawers and clicking of luggage locks. The next morning Martin would wake eager to crank down the dark green awning and roll out old Tecumseh into the shade, and as the knowledge of the holiday entered him he felt for
a moment a little burst of disappointment, before excitement seized him.

Martin liked the sound of the reins slapping the cabhorse, the thump of baggage on the roof over his head, the shaking bouncing seat and the shaking bouncing window from which he looked out at buildings that bounced and shook in the rattle of high wheels and the bang of horsefeet. At the ferryhouse there was a smell of tar and fish. Masts stuck up over the roof. The fat tower of the almost completed bridge rose into the sky like a gigantic hotel. On the other side of the ferryhouse he looked down through spaces in the planking at the green-black water under his feet. Gulls lazed in the sky on motionless outspread wings. Gulls floated on the gleaming dark water like wooden shooting-gallery ducks. Suddenly the ferry lurched backward. Martin stood at the side rail feeling the spray on his face and taking in the bright red ferries, the sun sparkling on the black coalheaps of the barges, the thick cottony smoke-puffs from the tugs, the trawlers at the fishmarket, the sand scows, the high three-masters thick with rigging like floating telegraph poles. A man held a red lunchpail that grew smaller and smaller. When Martin turned his head he saw the ferryhouse on the other side getting bigger and bigger. A bell banged. There was a jolt as the engine reversed, chains rattled—and no sooner had Martin stepped onto the planks of the wharf than the loading gates of the ferryhouse swung open and men and women rushed from the waiting room toward the ferry. In the street on the other side of the ferryhouse there were snorting cabhorses and horsecars on
tracks and two-wheel pushcarts heaped with bananas and hats and apples under big umbrellas. The tower of the great bridge rose over the top of the ferryhouse. In a horsecar with screeching wheels and a clanging bell they rushed along the streets of the other city, the one that was always unaccountably there, on the wrong side of the river. It was too much, too much—the whole world was trembling—at any moment it would crack apart—but already they were climbing into a steam train, already they were hurtling along in the Prospect Park & Coney Island Railroad, soon the land would flatten out and he would smell a change in the air. For they were going down to the ocean.

As Martin came down the big iron steps of the train he heard band music, as if he were stepping into a parade. The depot opened onto a plaza where the band was playing, and straight ahead rose a high iron tower, where you could ride to the top in a steam elevator—he saw one elevator rising and one falling, high up in the blue sky. As they walked along a big street with their bags, Martin took it all in: the lobster and hot corn vendors, the crayon artists, the peanut stands and chowder pots, a man selling little bottles of beach sand, the towered bathing pavilions, the flag-topped cupolas of the big hotels on the beach. Their parlor and bedroom was in a small hotel on a side street that had a shooting gallery and a fortune teller’s tent with a sign showing a hand divided into zones. As Martin walked with his mother and father from the hotel across a wide avenue to the beach, he seemed to feel the shaking flow of the train and see the trees rushing by the window and taste the
coalsmoke on his tongue and hear the roar of the engine, or the rushing world—or was it the sound of the surf? In the two-story bathing pavilion on the beach he changed into a heavy dark-blue flannel suit with itchy straps over his shoulders. The ocean was warm on his feet. Farther out he could see people standing up to their knees, while lines of surf broke in different places, and far out in the water he saw people up to their chests. An iron pier came out over the water. There were shops and booths on the pier and the roof had towers with flags. He stood a little apart from his father and mother, and tried again to take it all in as the water rose and fell against his stomach: the great pier rising high above their heads, the fancy beach hotels like palaces in the distance, the white-headed gray-winged gulls skimming the waves, his mother suddenly laughing in the water, the salt-and-mud smell of ocean mixed with wafts of chowder cooking on the pier, the iron tower at the railroad depot looking down at the little people in the ocean. Here at the end of the line, here at the world’s end, the world didn’t end: iron piers stretched out over the ocean, iron towers pierced the sky, somewhere under the water a great telegraph cable longer than the longest train stretched past sunken ships and octopuses all the way to England—and Martin had the odd sensation, as he stood quietly in the lifting and falling waves, that the world, immense and extravagant, was rushing away in every direction: behind him the fields were rolling into Brooklyn and Brooklyn was rushing into the river, before him the waves repeated themselves all the way to the hazy shimmer of the horizon,
in the river between the two cities the bridge piers went down through the water to the river bottom and down through the river bottom halfway to China, while up in the sky the steam-driven elevators rose higher and higher until they became invisible in the hot blue summer haze.