Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer

by Steven Millhauser

  To all such talk Martin listened with a certain detachment, for in his year at the Vanderlyn he had learned to distrust the gossip that swirled around hotel guests, while something reserved and respectful in his nature prevented him from enjoying mocking allusions to the bodies of women. Besides, he felt a kind of sympathy for Mrs. Hamilton, the subject of so much malicious talk. Yes, she was fussy and difficult and cranky, and yes, she liked to queen it over the hotel staff, but it was also true that the scrod had been served lukewarm, as the chef had admitted, that the maids, as he himself well knew, were often careless about dusting, that service in the Vanderlyn might be improved in all sorts of ways. It was also true that Mrs. Hamilton never spoke rudely to Martin himself, exempted him from her general disdain, treated him with a kind of haughty politeness that, without being in the least friendly, carried with it a hint of approval. Once or twice he defended her to Charley Stratemeyer, who said she was a high-class bitch who walked as if she had a poker stuck up her corset—what she needed was a well-aimed fist to knock her high-class teeth down her well-fed throat. Martin, who had noticed in his mild-mannered friend a tendency to speak violently and contemptuously of women, let it go, while in his mind he leaped in front of Mrs. Hamilton, as if to protect her from a blow to the face.

  And then one day Mrs. Hamilton came down with a cold. If she was bad before, she was impossible now, pushing the buzzer every five minutes to demand pitchers of ice water, softer towels, throat lozenges, cough medicines. The bellboys were up in arms; Martin offered to go up each time, even when it wasn’t his turn. In the dim parlor darkened by lowered shades and drawn curtains, Mrs. Hamilton in a long dress half-sat and half-lay upon the sofa, her legs stretched across the cushions and covered with a small blanket, one arm lying limply across the back of the sofa, her head flung back, her eyes half closed, her other hand dabbing at her nostrils with a scented handkerchief. “Please set the pitcher down over there, Martin, no, a little closer. And if you’d be kind enough to fill my glass, but not to the very top: of course I know I can trust you to do it just right. I must say it’s a comfort, Martin, when one is simply slaughtered with aches and fevers, to know that someone in this disastrous place understands how to pour a proper glass of water. I really do sometimes think there must be a conspiracy in this impossible hotel to kill me through sheer blundering stupidity. My hanky is sopping, simply sopping. Do you think you could fetch me another from my bureau, in the upper left-hand corner of the second drawer from the top? But of course you remember: you never forget. It isn’t every woman who would trust a stranger in her bedroom, Martin. Thank you, young man. Did you close the drawer all the way, but not too tight? These drawers have an unfortunate tendency to stick: have you noticed? My pulse is racing. I’m sure I’m coming down with a flu. Are the windows closed tight? A draft would kill me, I’m sure. It would finish me off. I really do think my pulse is dangerously fast. Come here, Martin. Feel my wrist. Oh, for heaven’s sake, I’m not going to eat you up. I’m not going to devour you. And yet one might say that your hesitation is a sign of good breeding, Martin: you respect people, I’ve noticed that. Tell the truth, now. Is my pulse dangerously fast? Conceal nothing from me. Would you mind fetching me my shawl? I feel such a draft.”

  As her cold worsened, her demands increased; no sooner had Martin returned to the lobby and sat down on the bellboys’ bench beside the check-in desk than the buzzer would ring: Room 411. Martin was irked, and even took to rolling his eyes in mock exasperation, but in his mind he defended Mrs. Hamilton: her husband was away, she was alone and sick in a big city, for all her air of crossness and imperiousness she really seemed quite helpless. But this was not all of it. Martin had never met anyone so demanding, so difficult, as Mrs. Hamilton, and in part his patience, which at times surprised him, came from a desire to meet a challenge, to rise to an occasion. And there was something else, which he sensed without quite putting it clearly to himself: Mrs. Hamilton, this powerful and far from unattractive woman, was drawing him close to her in some puzzling, secret way. She gave him an occasional look that made him lower his eyes, sent him into her dusky bedroom for scented handkerchiefs, seemed, without moving from her sofa, somehow to be circling round him—and this sense of a secret adventure, of something intimate and slightly dubious that must never be spoken of, something dusky and hidden that at times made a tremor ripple across his stomach, drew him willingly to her side.

  And she was burning up: there was no doubt about it. Over and over again she took her temperature and rang for Martin to read the thermometer, since she could never find the miserable column of mercury in the insufferable glass rod. She waited anxiously while he stood by the edge of a curtained window and turned the glass rod slowly in his fingers. “You see,” she said, “I really am burning up,” as the number rose to 101, to 102, to 102.5. Martin handed her the two blue pills prescribed by her doctor, dampened towels that she pressed to her forehead.

  On the third morning of her fever, when Martin entered the dusky parlor with a pitcher of ice water at seven o’clock, he saw Mrs. Hamilton lying on the sofa with a blanket pulled up to her chin and her head resting on two bedpillows in ruffled shams. Martin poured a glass of water, full but not to the very top, and set the pitcher down carefully on the table behind her head. She lay with heavy-lidded eyes, her hands pale and almost luminous on the dark blanket; below her eyes the skin was waxy and blue-dark. “I’ve had a simply abominable night, Martin. I feel heavy as a lump of lead. Be a dear boy and check the curtains, I feel a wretched draft. I really don’t think I can bear much more of this wretched abominable fever. I really do believe I won’t ever get well. I’ll just lie here and burn to ash and be swept out with the fireplace cinders. They can boast till they’re blue in the face about the incandescent lamp, but they can’t even invent a cure for a simple fever. That doctor is the most stupendous fraud—even his whiskers look false. My pulse is racing; I have a throbbing in my head. Everything’s burning, burning—and cold, I feel cold. Are you cold? I feel it’s all up with me, Martin; it’s far more serious than these fools can possibly know. Everything seems like a dream. That’s what they say, you know: life is a dream. As in that child’s song—how does it go? Merrily merrily. Life is but a dream. My pulse is absolutely racing. If you could bring me a glass of ice water: yes. Just hold it: right there: yes: and lift my head. That’s it. Now set the glass down and take my pulse. Is this a dream? My heart’s racing, racing: can’t you feel it? Can’t you? Silly boy, what’s wrong with you? Here, place your hand here, on my poor racing-away heart. Yes. Yes. Don’t you know anything? Come here now. Here now. Yes.”

  And Martin entered her fever-dream, at first awkwardly, then easily: it was all very easy, easy and mysterious, for he barely knew what was happening, there in the dusk of the parlor, in a world at the edge of the world—Mrs. Hamilton’s dream. The silk-smoothness of her skin surprised him, and under the skin was bone, lots of bone, skin stretched over bone, and then a sudden warm wet sinking and sinking, and somehow he was standing in his uniform with an empty pitcher in his hand and Mrs. Hamilton was looking at him with wide-open eyes over which the lids came slowly down halfway. And she said, “Mind you don’t catch a fever, Martin,” and raised a forefinger that she waggled lightly. Then her eyelids closed decisively.

  Later that morning, when Martin returned to the bellboys’ bench from delivering a pitcher of ice water to another floor, he learned that Mr. Hamilton had just returned from Baltimore or Philadelphia and was riding up in the elevator at that very moment. The buzzer from Room 411 remained silent, a cause for ribald comment by the bellboys and Charley Stratemeyer, and later that day as Martin was delivering a tray of drinks to the fifth floor he suddenly sneezed and nearly upset a glass. By four in the afternoon he felt heavy-headed; that night his temperature rose to 103. He struggled to lift his head from the pillow, and finally sank back into confused dreams. When he woke it was growing dark. He returned to work the next morning, despite burning eyelids
and a heaviness in the temples; the Hamiltons had checked out the day before. Mr. Henning took him aside and said that Mrs. Hamilton had commended Martin to him—he wished to pass on the compliment. “A good job, my boy: you’ve done well. A difficult proposition, if I may say so. Well now: don’t let it go to your head.” “I won’t, sir.” Martin felt drowsy; he could feel his heavy eyelids closing, but forced them open.

  A Business Venture

  A FEW WEEKS AFTER MARTIN’S SIXTEENTH birthday, Mr. Henning summoned him into the small office located behind an oak door between two pilasters near the ladies’ parlor. Seated at a high-backed desk with envelopes sticking out of every pigeonhole, Mr. Henning motioned for Martin to sit down in a mahogany armchair upholstered in green morocco, opened a cedarwood box, and began to remove a fancy Havana. He paused to offer the box hesitantly to Martin, and seemed startled when Martin bent forward and removed one. “Strictly between us, of course,” he said. “Your father—” Martin, who had never smoked a cigar in his life, despite sampling hundreds of them in his father’s presence since the age of thirteen, but who didn’t like to refuse a challenge, sat rolling the cigar under his nose and admiring the smoothness of the wrapper before he thrust it decisively into the pocket of his bellboy jacket. Mr. Henning quickly closed the box, clipped his cigar, rolled it on his tongue, removed it, and seemed to forget about it as he swiveled in his chair, thrust a thumb into the pocket of his vest, and began to speak.

  “I’m not going to beat about the bush, Martin: ’tain’t my style. Fact is, you’ve done a pretty good job here at the Vanderlyn. I suppose you know it. We’ve been keeping an eye on you, lad, watching you, you might say—well, we’ll speak no more about that. Pretty soon a fellow gets all full of himself and then his hat won’t fit on his head. Has to get himself a new hat, or maybe a new head, old one isn’t good enough for him any more. You catch my drift. Cochran—clerk—little guy, up to here on me, you may have run into him—Cochran’s been given notice, not up to the mark and so forth, no concern of yours. We’ll move Charley into the night slot where he won’t have to get up at five in the morning and you can take Charley’s spot ’longside of John. He’ll show you the ropes. You’ll catch on quick. Well, then. What do you say?”

  Martin, who had been distracted by the aroma of the cigar in his pocket, an aroma that reminded him of a familiar one he couldn’t quite place, realized suddenly that he had just been offered a promotion. He sat up straight, was about to accept, felt a sharp hesitation, and said he’d think it over. To his surprise, Mr. Henning grew angry.

  “Think it over, by God. Sure sir very good sir I’ll just think it over a bit sir thank you sir will that be all sir. By God, boy, you don’t think over a thing like this. You seize it by the scruff of the neck and hold onto it and pray it don’t get away.”

  Martin realized that he had been careless, that by appearing cool he had hurt Mr. Henning in his pride. He was irked at himself, and at the stupid cigar, but the hesitation had been powerful and couldn’t be ignored. He knew perfectly well that the promotion was a great chance; what caused him to hold back was something else, something that had to do with his relation to this hotel and to any hotel. He needed time to think it over. He said, “What I meant was, I always talk these things over with my father.”

  Mr. Henning raised his eyebrows and threw up his hands, one of which still held the unlighted cigar. “And do you think for a minute I haven’t spoken of it to your father?”

  It struck Martin that Mr. Henning was shrewder than he’d given him credit for: the assistant manager had sensed a crucial thing. Martin agreed to finish out the week as bellboy before taking up his new position, and that night, seated in the parlor over the cigar store, listening to his mother and father talking down below, it suddenly came to him: he had hesitated because his life in the hotel was a dream-life, an interlude, a life from which he would one day wake to his real life—whatever that might be.

  Meanwhile Mr. Henning had plans for him, and that was fine with Martin, who threw himself into his new duties with a zest that surprised him. It was as if, having acknowledged the dream-nature of his life in the Vanderlyn Hotel, he was able to sink wholly into the dream without any fretful hankering to wake up. He liked his new hatless uniform, with its chocolate-brown jacket and brass buttons, and the shiny mahogany counter, and the rows of heavy keys hanging from numbered hooks. Mr. Henning hovered erratically behind the desk before vanishing on mysterious errands. It was John Babcock, the other day clerk, a polite and reserved young man of eighteen whose thick pale eyelashes gave him a slightly blurred look, who helped Martin with the details of his new job, such as presenting the leather-bound hotel register for guests to sign, distributing mail to the rows of wooden boxes, and operating the handsome new cash register, with its jumping-up numerals that appeared behind the glass at the top and the satisfying bing of its bell. It all seemed very clear to Martin, as if he’d been working behind the desk for a long time. He enjoyed attending to newly arrived guests, answering questions, soothing ruffled tempers—talking to people. Was it so different from the cigar store, really? People talked to you, and you talked back. You tried to imagine the confusion of strangers, satisfy their desires, make things simple and orderly and clear. And people liked him back: he could feel it in his bones. Guests began relying on him, coming to him for advice. John Babcock was an efficient room clerk, but Martin saw that he didn’t really like anyone; he spoke to everyone in the same polite toneless voice, which seemed the echo of his eyelashes.

  Mornings, Martin arrived at a quarter to six, changed into his uniform, and took over from Charley Stratemeyer, whose skin beneath his melancholy eyes was the color of plums and who had taken to greeting Martin with ironical flourishes. “Ah, young Lochinvar is come out of the West,” he would say, or “Up bright and early to greet the dawn, eh, Martin?” There was a new coolness about Charley, which shaded at times into an air of mockery, mixed with something murkier that felt like a sort of spiteful respect. It occurred to Martin that at twenty-two his old pal must sometimes wonder whether he was going to spend the rest of his life as a room clerk. Charley had already received two warnings from Mr. Henning for arriving late; the plum-dark patches under his eyes, the waxy skin, the talk of hookers under the El and the joys of bought love in borrowed rooms, a touch of harshness about the mouth, all this gave Martin the sense that Charley was turning into someone else before his eyes.

  From his position behind the front desk he had a clear view of the glass doors before him, through which he could see a strip of awning and the clattering traffic on Broadway. He also commanded a view of the great lobby stretching away to the left and, in an alcove of the lobby, the newsstand and an edge of the cigar stand. Everything about the cigar stand irritated Martin: the choice of cigars, the display, the dullness or indifference of old man Hendricks, who never offered customers advice and sat on a stool reading a newspaper through small square spectacles worn low on his nose. Once or twice Martin had tried to strike up a conversation with him, in an effort to win his confidence and offer a suggestion or two, but the old man had looked up from his paper with red-rimmed hostile eyes. After that, Martin had no qualms about sending cigar-smoking guests to Dressler’s Cigars and Tobacco, conveniently located just down the block. He wondered how the concession could possibly pay, though of course it was more convenient for a guest to step out of an elevator and walk three steps to purchase a morning paper and a so-so cigar than to leave the hotel for even a short walk down the street. The hotel rented lobby space to three other concessions—the newsstand, a florist’s shop, and a railway ticket agency—all of which seemed to Martin to be operated far more skillfully than the cigar stand. When he asked the assistant manager whether the hotel couldn’t enforce higher standards, since it owned the space, Mr. Henning looked at him with amusement. He said that there had been no complaints, that the hotel wasn’t in the cigar business, and that so far as the lobby concessions were concerned, the hotel was simply
a landlord, who demanded from the concessionaires only the rent check and behavior appropriate to the reputation of the Vanderlyn Hotel. Martin argued that the Vanderlyn was in the business of attracting guests, and that the lobby concessions were part of that business, and that therefore—but here Mr. Henning laughed and said that all this talk about cigars was making him hungry for a smoke, and if it made Martin feel better, there was talk that old man Hendricks would be giving up the concession when the lease ran out at the end of the year. “Then I’ll take it over myself,” Martin said irritably. Mr. Henning burst out laughing, then looked at him sharply. “Go easy, lad. One thing at a time.”

  The old man gave notice before the end of the year: John Babcock said he was moving out to Brooklyn to live with his widowed sister, a milliner who owned the house over her shop and took in boarders. And Martin, after thinking things out for two months, explained his plan to his father, presented it in detail to Mr. Westerhoven, the hotel manager, and took over the cigar concession. For the past two years Martin had been giving half his salary to his father and putting the other half in the bank; although he had saved enough money for a month’s rent, he needed his father’s signature as guarantor of the lease, which ran for one year. His father agreed to advance Martin a sum of money good for six months’ rent, after which Martin had to pay the rent himself or give up the lease. And Martin, who had no intentipn of giving up either the lease or his post as day clerk, had in addition to pay the salary of the cigar vendor. He wanted someone young and vigorous, someone who knew cigars, and Otto Dressler had just the man for him: Wilhelm Baer, the twenty-year-old son of Gustav Baer, a cigarmaker on Forsyth Street in the old neighborhood. Wilhelm, who had no trace of a German accent and called himself Bill, had worked as a cigarmaker and a packer before clerking in a cigar store on Third Avenue under the El; he was out of work and would jump at the chance. Martin took an immediate liking to Bill Baer, a friendly man with alert blue eyes and copper-colored hair brushed hard to the side. He seemed grateful for the job, agreed with Martin in principle about the display of cigars but had strong opinions of his own, and seemed untroubled by the idea of working for someone three years younger than himself—although Martin at seventeen, with his serious dark eyes and soft brown mustache, looked like a man of twenty-one.