Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer (6 page)

As Martin waited for Mrs. Bell and her daughter to return to Boston—a return that was bound to take place any day, he assured himself, as the mother thanked him profusely, fluttered her handsome eyelashes, and hurried out onto Broadway—he began to notice in Alice a number of puzzling looks. She had grown fond of him in the course of their two-week friendship, but in her large, serious, beautiful eyes he sometimes saw, or seemed to see, a look that made him avert his own eyes. It was a look that could only be described as tender or adoring, as if—but it was precisely the “as if” that stopped him short, for he didn’t know how to think about it, though he understood clearly enough that he was the accidental repository of the girl’s baffled affection. She took to wearing handsome ribbons in her hair, and blushing furiously when her mother suggested that it was for Mr. Dressler’s sake; and sometimes he would exchange with Alice Bell, past her mother’s shoulder, a look of mournful understanding.

One morning she gave him a little flat package wrapped
in blue tissue paper. When Martin opened it, he discovered a lock of blond hair. He was on the point of saying something witty when he raised his eyes and saw little Alice Bell staring at him tensely. Without a word he nodded gravely at her, gently wrapped up the curl of hair, and placed it in his pocket.

A day came when Mrs. Bell failed to return to the hotel at noon. Martin paced in the lobby, trying to suppress his anger, while Alice walked a little bit out of his way, casting at him looks of shame and mortification. He strode over to the cigar stand and talked for a few minutes with Bill Baer, who gave him an apple and half a hard roll, then resigning himself to a ruined hour he sat down in a red-plush lobby chair and watched the guests walking purposefully, striding in and out of parlors, sinking flamboyantly into armchairs and couches. Beside him Alice kneeled by the arm of the chair and seemed to try to see what he was seeing. Martin knew that she felt his irritation and, glancing down at her as she kneeled there, he had a moment of pity for the lobby orphan and of anger at himself. He let his left hand drop over the side of the chair and touched her on the shoulder. Alice grew suddenly tense—turned to him with a startled, almost violent look—her shoulder trembled—and all at once Martin felt something pass over him, his heart beat fast, there was an inner bursting, and the entire lobby was transformed: he became aware of the soft underswish of petticoats, the faint creak of stays, the rub of silk stockings, a dark alluring undersound of silk and lace, a sudden dark flash of glances—and as they strode past or sank sighing
into soft couches, the ladies of the lobby began shedding their long dresses, unlacing their tight corsets, flinging up their petticoats like bursts of snow, throwing back their heads and breathing sharply as veins beat in their necks, while Martin, rippling with terror, started to rise and knocked something over that began rolling away and away and away along the wavy pattern of the marble floor.

T
HREE DAYS LATER THE
B
ELLS, MOTHER AND
daughter, returned to Boston. From Mrs. Bell, Martin received a box of cream-filled chocolates, and from Alice he received—suddenly and secretly, as Mrs. Bell’s back was turned—a small heart-shaped gold locket, still warm from being clutched in a fist. He watched them follow the doorman along the shade of the awning. The locket contained a hand-painted photograph of Alice Bell, with eyes too blue and hair too yellow, staring thoughtfully and a little sadly at the viewer. Martin kept it at the back of his shirt drawer in the bedroom over the cigar store.

With relief he watched them disappear beyond the glass doors, and also with the conviction that something needed
to be done about a part of his life he rarely gave much thought to, and then only in a vague, shadowy way. At dinner he spoke briefly and directly to Bill Baer, and a few nights later he accompanied his friend to a house Bill Baer knew on West Twenty-fifth Street off Sixth Avenue. You had to be careful to choose a good house, Bill said, because some of the houses hired creepers who stole your money through secret panels in the walls. In the gaslit parlor with plush chairs and couches and a yellow-keyed piano, Martin chose a dark-haired girl with heavy shoulders, who reminded him of a younger, coarser, sadder Mrs. Hamilton. He followed her up the nearly dark stairs and had a moment of hesitation as he entered the dim-lit bare-looking room with pink-flowered wallpaper and a drawn yellow shade. Against one wall was a wooden washstand with a zinc basin, beside which stood an enameled white pitcher with a red handle. When she sat down on the bed he walked over quickly. Three things stayed with him: the violent rattle of the window behind the drawn shade as the El train roared past, the girl’s look of fear as he made a sudden gesture with his hand, and the odd feeling of gratitude to Mrs. Hamilton, for teaching him what to do in a brothel.

He began visiting the house with rattling windows regularly, once or twice a week, at first choosing only Dora, the dark-haired girl, out of a sense of loyalty. One night when she remained upstairs he chose a big blond girl in a blood-red robe called Gerda the Swede, and in time he made his way through the remaining four girls, though he always chose Dora when he could. Martin looked forward to the
night strolls up the sidewalks of Sixth Avenue, past the high columns of the El. Bursts of piano music came from the concert saloons. Rushing trains shook the overhead tracks, spewed out coalsmoke shot through with red flames. It was a world of top-hatted swells and toughs in reefer jackets, of brazen-eyed women standing in doorways, of sawdust smells through swinging saloon doors mingling with the tang of horsedung thrown up by clattering wheels and ironshod hooves—and then the sudden plunge into darkness under the high tracks. One night a man with a black scarf around his neck lurched out at him from behind an El stanchion, holding a knife. Martin, frightened and outraged, swung from the shoulder. He left the man kneeling on all fours, coughing blood onto the dropped knife. In the sudden glare of an arc light Martin saw his split-open knuckle crusting with blood. But for the most part his walks were undisturbed; he welcomed the red streetcorner lamps casting their glow over the fire-alarm boxes, harsh laughter from the saloons, the familiar doorway with its red lantern, the gaslit parlor with its yellow-keyed piano on which stood a pair of double-branched tarnished brass candlesticks containing four white candles, the girls in low-cut robes and half-bare breasts walking in and out or sitting on the chair-arms. It struck him that the parlor and the girls were night versions of the hotel lobby, as if these were the same women who by day walked about in long dresses and wide-brimmed hats heaped with fruit. Sometimes he found himself imagining how, at night, all the hotel ladies loosened their hair and put on blood-red robes and walked back and
forth, showing their breasts, leaning close, giving off warmth and a sweetish, sharp smell of liquor and perfume.

Meanwhile he was working harder than ever at what he called his triple life: day clerk at the Vanderlyn Hotel, lessor of the cigar concession in the hotel lobby, and part-time assistant in his father’s cigar store. From Monday through Friday he clerked full time at the Vanderlyn, from six to six, and on Saturday and Sunday half-time, from noon to six, for a total of seventy-two hours. He worked at the cigar store four nights a week, from seven to nine, and two or three hours on Saturday mornings, for a total of ten or eleven more hours. Three nights a week—Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday—were his own, as well as Sunday mornings and two hours on Saturday mornings when he didn’t work in the store; much of this time he spent with Bill Baer, walking about town, riding the horsecars and the El roads, exploring the city. Martin was fond of taking the Sixth Avenue El all the way up to the 155th Street terminus and emerging in a world of picnic grounds and beer gardens and dance halls, with a flight of steps up to Washington Heights. But what struck him most on such trips was the vast stretch of land between the Hudson River and the Central Park—a strange mix of four-story row houses and weedgrown vacant lots with rocky outcroppings, of isolated châteaux and clusters of squatter’s shacks, of unpaved avenues and tracts of sunken farms like canyons. He had heard a good deal of talk about this wilder and newer part of town; it was said that speculators were holding on to lots in expectation of a boom.

One day shortly before his eighteenth birthday, two years after he had gone to work as day clerk at the Vanderlyn Hotel, Martin was called into the manager’s office, located off the lobby not far from Mr. Henning’s office. Alexander Westerhoven was a big man with a plump jowly face and a surprisingly sharp profile, as if he had grown thick layers of distorting softness over a sharp hard frame. With a flourish of his right hand he invited Martin to sit in a plumply upholstered oak armchair trimmed with tassels. He began by praising Martin’s service behind the desk, referred obscurely to several testimonials to his loyalty and hard work, and broke off with a wave of the hand to thrust at Martin a sheet of blank white paper.

“Your name,” he said, pushing toward Martin a bottle of black ink.

“My name?”

“Your name, your name. You do know how to write your name, Mr. Dressler?”

Martin, irked, dipped the pen in the ink and wrote his name boldly across the middle of the paper. Mr. Westerhoven snatched up the paper and held it up to his face. He studied it for a few moments before thrusting it down.

“Never,” he said, “underestimate the power of good penmanship.”

Martin looked hard at him, and Mr. Westerhoven, placing the tips of his fingers together, looked hard at the ceiling. Still looking up, he offered Martin the position of personal secretary to the manager at double his present salary. Martin’s secretarial duties would be confined largely to Mr.
Westerhoven’s far-reaching correspondence, although they would include miscellaneous duties as well, such as the reading of the assistant manager’s daily reports concerning problems that required prompt attention, the preparation of memoranda for staff use, and the reading and summarizing of each day’s correspondence. His new hours would be seven to six Monday through Friday, with a half day from seven to noon on Saturday, and Sunday off.

At first Martin missed the noise and bustle of the desk, the double view of the street through the doors and of the lobby stretching away, the weight of room keys in the palm, the smart uniform buttoned to his chin, the ring of the electric buzzer and the leaping up of bellboys, the snatches of talk, the sheer splendid sound of things—shuffle of suitcases, clank of keys, swish of dress trains, rattle of cab wheels through the suddenly opened doors—from his post behind the polished mahogany counter, but Martin, wearing a new cutaway coat over a shiny vest with a watch chain looped across the front, threw himself into his new duties with helpless zest. If, out at the desk, he had seemed to be in the lively center of things, it was true only in a special and limited sense, for in fact he had been a minor employee in one department of a vast and complex organization that he had scarcely bothered to imagine. Sitting in Mr. Westerhoven’s quiet office, reading through piles of correspondence, or taking dictation from Mr. Westerhoven, who liked to walk up and down in the small space between his broad desk and Martin’s narrow one with a thumb hooked in his vest pocket and the other hand tugging at his chin, Martin,
bewildered but deeply curious, exasperated by his ignorance, vowing to sort things out, to bring disparate details into relation, gradually began to see his way. One thing he saw was that the work of running the hotel was divided far more carefully and precisely than he had imagined, all the way down to the seamstresses and linen-room attendants of the housekeeping department. The bellboys, the day and night clerks, the doorman, and the elevator operators constituted the front office, and were directly under the supervision of the assistant manager, but the maintenance and smooth operation of the elevators was the direct responsibility of the assistant to the chief engineer. The engineering department also looked after the plumbing, the electric push-button buzzers, the gas lighting fixtures, and the new incandescent lights in the public rooms. Martin, wanting to see for himself, needing to arrange it all in a pattern, went with the chief engineer, Walter Dundee, to look at the new electrical plant in the basement that powered the incandescent lamps in the lobby and main dining room. Standing before the big 120-horsepower dynamo that Dundee said could light up a whole city block, Martin listened carefully to the engineer’s prediction that the old push-button buzzers would be driven out by telephones within ten years. Dundee, a lean vigorous man with a gray mustache, and a carpenter’s folding rule weighing down the side of his coat pocket, liked to explain things in detail, in a slow serious voice, and Martin liked to listen. The voice reminded Martin of his father explaining to him as a child how to roll a cigar without tearing the wrapper or how
the back-and-forth motion of the piston in a steam engine became the circular motion of the flywheel. Martin warmed to the intelligent engineer, who in turn seemed to take an interest in Martin, and asked precise questions of his own about the management of the cigar stand.