Martin Dressler

by Steven Millhauser

  Martin, struck by something Emmeline had said, asked suddenly: “And do you think Caroline is too difficult for me?”

  Emmeline considered it. “I didn’t think she would be,” she then replied.

  The end came quickly: one evening when Martin sat down to dinner the fifth chair was empty. Caroline said nothing. The empty chair remained for two more nights and then disappeared.

  “She’s dropped her,” Emmeline said.

  “You were right, then. Poor Caroline!”

  Well, yes, Emmeline said, of course: poor Caroline. But had he ever considered that Caroline’s suffering had an effect on those around her, an effect of which poor Caroline could not be unaware? For with her pains, her headaches, her insomnias, her suffering, poor Caroline drew on the sympathies of those who cared about her: she became the center of her family’s attention. For in her quiet way, poor Caroline did like to be the center of attention. Yes, you could almost say that poor Caroline tyrannized over them through suffering, punished them with her pain.

  A few nights later, Claire Moore appeared with a black-haired woman at another table, across the room, laughing and shaking back her hair. It struck Martin that if she had dropped Caroline she had dropped him too, and he had so strong a desire to be at that table that he had to force himself not to glance across the room like an injured lover. Caroline sat looking at her plate; two little lines of strain showed between her dark eyebrows. Emmeline sat looking at Caroline.

  There was a sharp bang. Martin started.

  “What’s that?” cried Margaret Vernon.

  “It’s nothing,” Emmeline said.

  Caroline, reaching for her glass of water, had knocked over the salt.

  The New Dressler

  MARTIN STARED AT THE SPILLED SALT AND thought of the sharper bangs ten blocks north, where blasting had already begun; they were going down, deep down, deep enough for seven subterranean levels and a basement. Lellyveld and White had balked at the new plan, they had raised innumerable objections to the sketches and blueprints, until Martin and Rudolf Arling had risen together in anger, threatening to take the sketches elsewhere—a bluff, really, though the anger had been genuine enough. And Lellyveld had backed down, as if he had only been waiting for them to rise against him before demonstrating his magnanimity. Martin in any case had gotten what he wanted: space to breathe in. The New Dressler would rise twenty-four stories and would incorporate more boldly the idea of inner eclecticism shadowed in the old. Harwinton, who was kept informed of developments, planned what he called a mystery campaign, to pique the public interest. Even as the hoarding went up, the first posters appeared: against a black background stood a large question mark, bright yellow.

  After the Claire Moore episode Caroline had withdrawn to her apartment, from which she emerged only for a late breakfast in a secluded corner of the breakfast room and dinner in the main dining room with her mother and Martin and Emmeline. She refused to go shopping with her mother, refused to stroll after dinner in the courtyard, refused, despite her recent passion for the theater, to set foot in the Theater District. Margaret reported anxiously that the poor girl sat for hours over games of patience; it was bound to be bad for her back. Often when Martin returned to his rooms to dress for dinner, he would find the apartment empty: Caroline was next door, sitting in her mother’s parlor. Since Caroline was always asleep when he woke early in the morning, and asleep when he went up to his bed late at night, it struck Martin that he saw her only at dinner, when she seemed faded and tired, as if she had been pulled with difficulty out of the thick, sticky sleep surrounding her on both sides of dinner, an ooze of sleep into which she would be sucked the moment she put down her fork; and as he glanced at her shadowy form in the bed at night, or her pale face staring at the brilliant white cloth of the dinner table, it seemed to him that she was gradually dissolving, like the sugar cubes he had liked to drop long ago into a glass of water and watch until there was nothing left but a slightly cloudy liquid.

  Martin meanwhile had begun to spend more time away from the Dressler, for he wanted to follow closely every detail of the construction of the new building. He watched the drilling of blast holes in boulders, the arrival of the first steel beams and columns on flatbed trucks pulled by teams of big truck-horses, the making of the plank-and-steel retaining walls, the lifting of the steel by towering steam cranes, floor by subterranean floor; and as the first columns rose over the top of the excavation, Martin had the sudden sharp sense of the bones of his shoulders pressing upward against his skin.

  Sometimes he seemed to hear, all up and down the West End, a great ripping or breaking, as bedrock split open to give birth to buildings. Along the Boulevard, on Amsterdam and Columbus, on lots facing the Central Park, on side streets between Sixtieth and 110th, hoardings seemed to spring up overnight. Many of the new buildings were small apartment houses under seven stories, which the housing laws did not require to be fireproofed, but ten-story and twelve-story apartment houses were also going up, and here and there a builder of hotels aspired to something grander, something that rang out like a bell. From the roof garden of the Dressler Martin looked down at a world of open pits and blasted rock, of half-finished apartments prickly with scaffolding, of steam cranes slashing their black diagonals across brownstone and brick. It was as if the West End had been raked over by a gigantic harrow and planted with seeds of steel and stone; now as the century turned, the avenues had begun to erupt in strange, immense growths: modern flowers with veins of steel, bursting out of bedrock. The rash of building had its own clear logic, based on the coming subway, just as the downtown construction of higher and higher office buildings was a direct result of the soaring cost of city real estate and the invention of the electric elevator—but Martin, looking down from the roof garden of the Dressler, wondered whether all such explanations were nothing but clever disguises meant to conceal a secret force. For what struck him was the terrible restlessness of the city, its desire to overthrow itself, to smash itself to bits and burst into new forms. The city was a fever-patient in a hospital, thrashing in its sleep, erupting in modern dreams. His own dream was to push the New Dressler beyond the limits of the old, to express in a single building what the city was expressing separately in its hotels and skyscrapers and department stores; and again he had the old dream-sense that friendly powers were leading him along, powers sympathetic to his deepest desires.

  The New Dressler opened on August 31, 1902, on Martin’s thirtieth birthday. The twenty-four-story building, with its seven underground levels and a massive basement, was advertised as the largest family hotel in the world, a claim immediately attacked by a journalist in the Sun, who asked whether it could properly be called a hotel at all. Harwinton, who had foreseen the question and secretly encouraged it, promptly flooded the city with mystery posters reading: MORE THAN A HOTEL: A WAY OF LIFE. The critics were divided over certain features, such as the three-story entrance arch decorated with twenty-four statues of American historical and cultural figures, including Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Edison, Pocahontas, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Elisha Graves Otis, Washington Roebling, James Fenimore Cooper, and William Le Baron Jenney, or the arched bridges spanning the exterior courts at the level of the twelfth floor, or the profusion of ornamentation, from the small terra-cotta scenes representing American Industry on the Gothic window surrounds to the bands of painted tiles running along the base of each wrought-iron balcony and representing New York scenes both historical and contemporary, such as the director of the Dutch West India Company purchasing the isle of the Manhattoes from an Indian with one feather on his head, Washington Roebling seated at his window in Brooklyn Heights looking out at the Manhattan tower of the great bridge, and a procession of trotting rigs on a drive in the Central Park. What struck reporters most sharply, however, was the inside of the New Dressler—the secret hotel, in the phrase of one writer. Much attention was drawn by the seven underground levels, composed of a landscaped park with real squirrels and chi
pmunks (the first level), a complete department store (the second, third, and fourth levels), a series of Vacation Retreats (the fifth and sixth levels), and a labyrinth (the seventh level). The Vacation Retreats of the fifth and sixth levels received the most elaborate comment, for it was here that Rudolf Arling, drawing on his early days in the theater, had designed a series of six vacation spots for the use of hotel guests: a campground with tents in a brilliantly reproduced pine forest with swift-flowing streams; the deck of a transatlantic steamer, with canvas deck chairs, shuffleboard courts, and hand-tinted films of ocean scenery displayed on the walls; a wooded island with log cabins in a large lake with a ferry; a replication of the Atlantic City boardwalk, complete with roller-chair rides, as well as half a dozen streets crowded with theaters and movie houses; a health spa with mineral baths; and a national park containing a geyser, a waterfall, a glacier, a small canyon, and winding nature trails. Harwinton’s ads proclaimed:

  A ROOM WITH VACATION,

  BEST DEAL IN THE NATION

  and critics were quick to point out that a visit to a cleverly reproduced landscape underneath a hotel hardly counted as a vacation, although one reporter, after catching a trout in a campground stream and cooking it over a fire outside his tent, argued that the vacations offered by the New Dressler were superior to so-called “real” vacations, since the Dressler vacation spots cost practically nothing (there were small charges for renting a canoe on the island lake, collecting firewood in the campground, having a drink in the bar of the transatlantic steamer, and so on), could be reached almost immediately and without the inconvenience and irritation of long railway journeys, and, above all, could be temporarily abandoned at night for a sound sleep in the comfort of one’s own familiar bed.

  But if the fifth and sixth underground levels of the New Dressler attracted strong notice, an equal amount of attention was directed at the twelfth floor, with its series of four arched bridges over the four exterior courts. For here Rudolf Arling, following Martin’s careful instructions, had interrupted the pattern of apartments to devote the entire floor to what was called the Museum of Exotic Places—a series of scrupulously designed reproductions of such places as an Eskimo village, a Scottish glen, the Tuileries Gardens, the canals of Venice (with real water and gondolas), an archaeological dig in the Tigris-Euphrates valley, Shakespeare’s birthplace, and the Amazon jungle, each lit by colored stage lights and inhabited by actors in authentic costumes, so that the visitor had the double sensation of entering an actual place and enjoying a clever artistic effect.

  Other floors, it was noted, were not without their peculiarities, for on each floor of apartments was a suite of Culture Rooms, devoted to a wide variety of artistic, scientific, and historical subjects. There were reproductions of masterpieces of American and European painting by the renowned copyist Winthrop Owens, each in its precisely replicated frame; an orrery composed of transparent glass globes, illuminated from within and suspended from a starry ceiling; collections of armor, of fossils, of Egyptian artifacts; crabs and fishes in great glass aquaria; a display of Edison inventions, including the wax-cylinder phonograph, the Kinetoscope cabinet with its eyepiece and lens and its motor-turned strip of film, the carbon-filament incandescent lamp, the fluoroscope, the quadruplex telegraph, and the electric pen with its egg-sized attached motor, all surrounding a table at which sat a lifesized waxwork of The Wizard of Menlo Park, modeled after the famous photograph of the inventor leaning his head against his half-closed hand as he sat beside his phonograph at 5 P.M. on June 16, 1888, after five days without sleep; a moving panorama called A Steamboat Journey up the Hudson and Along the Erie Canal to Niagara, accompanied by sound effects such as booming thunder and steamboat whistles; and a twenty-foot wooden model of Manhattan in 1850, including not only every house, farm, hotel, church, commercial building, pleasure garden, and wharf, not only automated horsecars and omnibuses running up and down the avenues, but more than 10,000 miniature people in individual dress. These displays, designed by artists and stage designers in collaboration with members of the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, were intended to provide hotel guests with a wide range of culture, without the considerable inconvenience of city traffic.

  Such features were described, attacked, and praised in newspaper reviews that Martin read carefully and with a certain impatience, for it seemed to him that the writers were leaving something out, something that had nothing to do with hotel architecture or the suitability of cultural attractions to a family hotel, and it was not until a long article appeared in the Architectural Record, sharply attacking the New Dressler, that Martin felt his deeper intentions had been understood.

  For the writer, after praising certain features of the design, such as the pleasing division of the massive and massively ornamented facade into three parts marked by string courses, and acknowledging certain technological advances, such as the steam-powered vacuum cleaning system and the filtered cool-air system, in which air was forced by electric blowers over iron coils submerged in icy saltwater, turned his attention to the idea represented by alien elements drawn from such modern institutions as the museum, the department store, and the world’s fair. He noted the large number of theatrical elements—the actors in the twelfth-floor Museum of Exotic Places, the scenery and stage lighting in certain underground levels—which further served to remove the New Dressler from the realm of the family hotel and to give it the dubious, provisional air of a theatrical performance. The writer criticized the New Dressler as a hybrid form, a transitional form, in which the hotel had begun to lose its defining characteristics without having successfully evolved into something else, and he concluded by urging the architect to return to the problems of design posed by the modern multiple dwelling and not to succumb to the temptations of a decadent eclecticism.

  Rudolf Arling was incensed by the review, which he called insolent—the corrupt hack, a lackey of the editorial board, deserved to have his neck broken—but Martin, who was uninterested in the writer’s judgment, was struck by the accuracy of his description. The writer had groped his way to the center of Martin’s intention and, without caring for what he found there, had revealed a shortcoming. For if the New Dressler was transitional, it wasn’t, Martin insisted to Emmeline, because he had strayed from the purity of a traditional apartment hotel, but rather because he hadn’t strayed far enough. He felt grateful to the attacker for revealing an error he would not make again.

  “Even so,” Emmeline said, “you’ve got to admit it’s ungenerous. He simply doesn’t take a large enough view.”

  “Maybe it’s the hotel that doesn’t take a large enough view,” Martin countered.

  Caroline had tensely refused to move to the New Dressler; she seemed alarmed at the prospect of moving anywhere. Even Emmeline had advised against it, arguing that Caroline had grown used to her rooms in the Dressler, that a change of any kind would be jarring and injurious. She and her mother couldn’t of course abandon Caroline and would remain in their apartment in the Dressler, but Emmeline had agreed to join the New Dressler as assistant manager. And Martin, who needed to watch over his new hotel from the inside, took two rooms for himself on the twenty-third floor to serve as an office. Each day he rose in the old Dressler at half past five beside shadowy Caroline, who would not be up for at least another five hours. As he looked at her lying there in the graying dark, fast asleep on her back with her face turned sharply to one side, as though she were straining away from him, she seemed so heavily crushed by sleep that it was as if she could never raise her frail body against it, but must wait until sleep itself rolled from her body and lay wearily watching as, her hair hanging in damp coils about her face, she rose bruised and aching from the twisted sheets. At six Martin walked with Emmeline along the Drive to the New Dressler. There they took breakfast in a window nook of the dining room with a view of the park and the river. Then Emmeline went to her new office in an alcove of the main lobby, while Martin took the
elevator to the twenty-third floor.

  Martin spent most of his day inspecting the New Dressler, speaking to staff, and mingling with guests in the seven underground levels. The atmospheric park, with its high trees, its meandering paths, and its melancholy lake, seemed to him a strong improvement over the tame courtyard of the old Dressler, although one day when he overheard a woman complaining that her children were bored he arranged for the installation of a small zoo and a carousel of wooden horses, dragons, and swans. After lunch he liked to walk along secluded paths with Emmeline, who praised the park warmly but refused to hear a word against the old courtyard of the Dressler. He was advancing, he was pushing in a direction, but he mustn’t, she argued, turn his back on any of the steps along the way. For the old Dressler, just as it was, was perfect of its kind, was in fact incomparable—which wasn’t in any sense meant to diminish the glory of the new. Martin tried to argue that it wasn’t a matter of turning his back on anything, but rather of standing with his feet firmly planted, looking straight ahead. Yet he sensed the rightness of her reproach, for in fact he had lost interest in the Dressler as completely as he had in the Vanderlyn—and even now, as they walked in the splendid park, he had intimations of still richer scenes and adventures. Was there then something wrong with him, that he couldn’t just rest content? Must he always be dreaming up improvements? And it seemed to Martin that if only he could imagine something else, something great, something greater, something as great as the whole world, then he might rest awhile.