Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer

13. Intimacies

NOW ON LATE SUNDAY MORNINGS IN THE warming air, Martin led the Vernons on excursions about the neighborhood, stopping with them for a late lunch in a shady beer garden or outdoor cafe and then pushing on into the lengthening afternoons. He took them up along the park by the river into a world of turreted granite mansions and ivy-covered red-brick villas rising among tall oaks and lush lawns. They walked in the winding park with its steep bluffs and sudden open riverviews, passed through an orchard of apple and peach trees, ate a picnic lunch while sun and shade moved on their hands. Through the trembling leaves Martin pointed to boys fishing on a sun-flooded wharf. Three-stacked steamers moved on the river. Suddenly a train came clattering past on the open tracks between the park and the river, a smell of animals was in the air; Mrs. Vernon wrinkled her nose. But Martin had come to like the harsh smell of cattle riding in cars toward the slaughterhouses down in the west thirties. Through the upper trees he pointed to a flash of yellow: the cab of a steam shovel sitting in a cleared side-street lot. The West End was growing, it was growing even as they sat like people in a picture eating their picnic lunch on a lazy Sunday afternoon — lots were being cleared, streets graded, rocks blasted, excavations dug. Row houses were springing up left and right, but the future, Martin told them, lay up in the sky — in apartment houses and family hotels, in grand multiple dwellings. And as he spoke, the park, the river, the trembling spots of sun and shade, the three women, all fell away; and he saw, rising up along the avenues between the Central Park and the river, into the blue air, high buildings, shining and many-windowed, serene and imperious.

He learned one evening that they had never ridden on an El train. The next Sunday Martin led them up a flight of roofed iron stairs toward the station high above the street. With its peaked gables and its gingerbread trim, the station looked like a country cottage raised on iron columns. Martin bought four tickets in the station agent’s office and led the three women through the two waiting rooms, one for men and one for women, each with its pine benches and black walnut paneling. Sunlight poured through the blue stained-glass windows and lay in long blue parallelograms on the floor. Outside on the roofed platform they looked down at rows of striped awnings over the shop windows of Columbus Avenue, each with its patch of shade, and watched the black roofs of passing hacks. Suddenly there was a throbbing in the platform, a growing roar — people stepped back. Mrs. Vernon gripped Martin’s arm, white smoke mixed with fiery ashes streamed backward as the engine neared, and with a hiss of steam and a grinding sound like the clashing of many pairs of scissors, the train halted at the platform. There was a sting of coalsmoke in the air. The cars were apple green. Martin looked at his three women defiantly, as if to say: Isn’t it a fine color! Isn’t it grand! Inside he gestured proudly toward the oak-paneled ceilings, as if he had designed them himself, pointed out the mahogany-trimmed walls painted with plants and flowers, the tapestry curtains over the wide, arched windows; and guiding the three women past the long seats that ran parallel to the walls, he led them to the center of the car, where a group of red leather seats were set at right angles to the wall and faced each other, and where Mrs. Vernon, holding onto her hat, insisted on having a seat by the window.

He tried to show them the city stretching away to the north and south, from the northernmost station with its shady beer garden to the South Ferry terminal with its view of the bay: the thicket of masts and yardarms tilted in every direction, the slow-moving tugs hauling barges, ferries crossing to the Jersey shore. From shaking clattering cars he made them look for signs painted on the sides of rushing-away buildings: New York Belting and Packing Company, Vulcanized Rubber, Knox the Hatter, Street Brass, Oyster House, Men’s Fine Clothes. From trains rushing north and south he pointed at the tops of horsecars and brewer’s wagons, at wharves and square-riggers and barrel-heaped barges, at awnings stained rust-red from showers of iron particles ground off by El train brake shoes. He pointed at open windows through which they could see women bent over sewing machines and coatless men in vests playing cards around a table, pointed at intersecting avenues and distant high hotels — and there in the sky, a miracle of steel-frame construction, the American Surety building, twenty stories high, dwarfing old Trinity’s brownstone tower.

But from the carpeted cars, steaming along at the height of third-story windows, the city seemed to evade him, to be always ducking out of sight around a corner. Irked at himself, Martin led the Vernon women down clattering station stairways to look at details: strips of sun and shadow rippling across a cabhorse’s back under a curving El track, old steel rails glinting in cobblestones. He bought them bags of hot peanuts from a peanut wagon with a steam whistle. He showed them Mott Street pushcarts heaped with goats’ cheese and green olives and sweet fennel, took them along East River docks where bowsprits and jib booms reached halfway across the street. He walked them through an open market down by Pier 19, where horses in blankets stood hitched to wagons loaded with baskets of cabbages and turnips. “Look at that!” he cried, pointing to an old-clothes seller wearing a swaying stack of twelve hats, a gigantic pair of wooden scissors over a cutter’s shop. Down a narrow sidestreet in a bright crack between warehouses, an East River scow filled with cobblestones slipped by. But the images seemed scattered and disconnected; and Martin felt a disappointment, a restlessness, as if he needed to go about it another way, a way that eluded him.

Although Martin liked having the three Vernon women with him on weekend excursions and on evenings in the lamplit parlor, he also enjoyed the combinations that arose when one or another of them was absent. Some evenings Caroline would excuse herself before the others, pleading tiredness, urging them to stay — and the sense that he was alone with Mrs. Vernon and Emmeline made Martin experience an exhilarating peacefulness, which puzzled and even disturbed him, for it was as if Caroline had in some way constrained him. At the same time his awareness of her absence, sharp as an odor, made him realize the intensity of her presence, when she was actually there, despite the fact that her actual presence resembled nothing so much as absence. Even Mrs. Vernon and Emmeline seemed to relax a little when Caroline was absent, to become slightly more playful — and leaning toward him with shining eyes, Mrs. Vernon tapped him lightly on the wrist with the tip of her black silk fan.

From the beginning he had noticed that Mrs. Vernon had a girlishness, even a flirtatiousness, that seemed to expand and flourish at certain times, such as when her older daughter was absent. She would place the flat of her hand on her breastbone and roll her eyes upward to express exasperation with the chambermaid; she would open her fan and, leaning toward Martin, whisper behind the outspread black silk with its pattern of gold peacocks and fruit trees, about the evening dress of a woman passing in the lobby; she would refer to herself as an old dinosaur and look merrily at Martin, who would immediately compliment her and be rewarded by a tap of the fan on the knee. She demanded that he call her Margaret, which after all was her name, and it was true enough that Mrs. Margaret Vernon, seated beside Emmeline, was the handsomer woman, with her large dark eyes and her thick lustrous dark hair pulled straight up at the sides and arranged in a soft mass at the top, stuck through with glinting tortoiseshell combs. She had passed on to Emmeline her eyes and her hair, but in Emmeline the hair had become thicker and more tangled and lay across her forehead in small tense ringlets, and her dark intelligent eyes looked out from under thick brownish-black eyebrows with small black visible hairs between them. On her cheeks, dusky beside her mother’s whiteness, he saw faint traces of dark down. It struck Martin that Emmeline, however playful and quick-witted she was, kept a watchful eye on her mother, as she did on Caroline — as if, to the degree that Margaret Vernon relinquished motherliness, Emmeline herself assumed the burden. Martin, hearing the creak of a corset as Margaret Vernon turned gaily in her chair, remembered suddenly Louise Hamilton in the dusky parlor, the sound of her dress, the lifting of her elbows as she reached to unbind her hair — and in the lamplit parlor he felt a sensual confusion, as if he were courting Mrs. Margaret Vernon. Then he turned his face abruptly to Emmeline Vernon, who looked at him and said, “Yes?” In the lamplight her black hair and lustrous eyebrows seemed charged with energy, her cheeks glowed, a warmth seemed to penetrate the skin of his face; and turning his eyes to the empty chair, with a directness that would have been impossible had Caroline Vernon actually been sitting there, he studied the faint impression in the dark red cushion and the pattern of raised gold lines in the padded arms. And all the while he felt pleasurably penetrated by the gaze, playful and intense, by the deep inner attention, of Margaret and Emmeline Vernon.

One evening after a late supper with his mother and father in the kitchen over the cigar store, Martin returned to the Bellingham and was surprised to find Margaret Vernon alone. She explained that Caroline had been feeling unwell all day, as she sometimes did after a poor night’s sleep. Emmeline had gone out alone in the afternoon and returned just in time for supper; she had accompanied Caroline upstairs to play two-hand euchre and would come down later. Martin sat down in his armchair, struck by the double absence, by the novel sensation of being alone with Margaret Vernon. She herself seemed a little constrained, and after a few light passages of conversation turned the talk to the subject of her daughters. She was concerned about them — two young women in a strange city. She was less concerned about Emmeline, who had always been a rock, than about Caroline, who — to speak frankly — might easily have been the center of an admiring circle of marriageable young gentlemen had she not so dreadfully discouraged all social efforts on her behalf. It sometimes seemed that Caroline wanted nothing better than to sit through life — simply sit there, without lifting a finger on her own behalf, though with her beauty it would take little more than an ever so slightly lifted finger: like that. Martin watched as the index finger of Margaret Vernon’s left hand rose very slightly from the dark red chairarm and returned to its place. Of course there was no reasoning with her. There was no talking to her. She did what she wanted to do and that was that. There had been a young man or two, one from a good Boston family, but Caroline — well, Caroline had simply acted as if he wasn’t there. She had barely looked at him. And yet she wasn’t cold by nature, she was a warm-hearted trusting girl once you got to know her. Of course she was difficult to get to know. She could be trying at times. He knew that, of course. But he also knew, he was getting to know, how warm and trusting she really was. Caroline was a treasure, really. But oh my. Mrs. Vernon hoped she wasn’t presuming on their friendship by going on and on. It was just that a mother’s patience had its limits. It was good to know she could rely on Martin. And she gave him a searching look.

Martin assured her that she could rely on him. Her look of relief was so visible, so immense and unexpected, that he suddenly wondered whether she had been asking obliquely about his intentions toward her daughter. Immediately he wondered whether he had answered.

The theme of Caroline returned a week later, when Caroline rose from her chair in the parlor and, pleading tiredness, retired to her room. Martin, alone with Margaret Vernon and Emmeline, asked whether Caroline had been sleeping poorly again; he hoped she wasn’t coming down with a cold. “Caroline has never been sick a day in her life,” Margaret Vernon declared, drawing back her shoulders and lifting her chin, as if to defy a challenge — except of course for little indispositions, headaches and such, all of which could be traced to her trouble falling asleep. Emmeline looked at her mother wryly and asked how a daily indisposition differed from an illness. At this Mrs. Vernon said that Caroline was healthy as a horse and had never had anything the matter with her that a ten-minute nap couldn’t cure — and she might add that it was unbecoming of Emmeline to paint so black a picture of her sister, whose only fault was a certain nervousness of disposition that prevented her from sleeping like an ox. Emmeline, who had drawn back at her mother’s reply, seemed about to answer but said nothing. When Margaret Vernon rose to leave a half hour later, Emmeline said she would follow in a few minutes.

As soon as she was alone she said to Martin that she hoped she hadn’t painted a black picture of anyone; sometimes her mother, with the best of intentions, spoke more heatedly than perhaps she ought. In fact Caroline’s health was a mystery to both of them, for though it was true she was almost never sick in the ordinary sense — colds and fevers and what have you — it was also true that she was almost never free of some disturbing symptom or other, such as the headaches that often drove her to her bed. Oh, they had taken her to doctors, who had scratched their heads and pulled at their whiskers and prescribed mysterious tinctures and syrups that might as well have been sugar-water for all the good they did her. What Caroline needed, Emmeline believed, was more exercise; she had been pleased to see her sister’s pleasure in their Sunday excursions. In one sense her mother was right: Caroline was strong, despite her apparent frailty, and she could outwalk anyone when she wanted to. It was just that she so seldom wanted to.

“Then I’m glad she comes along on our little outings,” Martin said.

“Oh,” Emmeline said, with an impatient shrug of one shoulder, “she wouldn’t miss those for anything.”

“I’ve noticed she never complains.”

“Not to you,” Emmeline said sharply.

The idea that he was perhaps courting Caroline Vernon without quite knowing it, that his attentions to the Vernons were imagined by them to be a courtship of one of them, that his sense of deepening friendship against a sunlit background of vigorous family outings concealed more complex intimacies, all this did not disturb Martin, who found it perfectly reasonable that he should be assumed to have an interest in the older and prettier daughter, and who did not in any sense wish to deny an interest in her, though he was content to let such interest as he had remain pleasantly undefined.

One summer evening when he entered the lobby and saw all three women look up from their chairs in the parlor with an alertness, an air of pleasurable anticipation, that precisely matched his own, he felt so generously welcomed, even by Caroline, who slowly lowered her eyes, that he could not imagine any deeper happiness than just this nightly surrender to the spiritual embrace of the three Vernon women. He would have liked to keep them like that indefinitely: Margaret Vernon looking at him with frank pleasure as she waved at her chest with her black silk fan, Emmeline Vernon looking up at him intently from under her brownish-black eyebrows, Caroline Vernon gazing at him from half-closed eyes, her head resting back against the dark-red gold-flowered shimmer of the armchair, the pale hair pulled so tightly back that it seemed to tug painfully against the skin of her temples, the long pale-green sleeves buttoned tightly at the wrist.

For several months now, if not precisely for Caroline’s sake, then for the sake of all three women, Martin had stopped his visits to the room with rattling windows off Sixth Avenue, visits from which he had returned to the lamplit parlor of the Bellingham feeling furtive and unclean.

One hot summer night at about half-past nine Martin suggested that they all take a little walk. Caroline seemed to hesitate, but then decided to join them, and walking two by two, Martin and Margaret Vernon in front of Emmeline and Caroline, they made their way east to the Central Park, skirted by a low wall of cut stone. They turned in at an entrance and walked along a winding path through sharp scents of unknown blossoms and dark green leaves and distant riverwater. Through the thick-leaved trees Martin could see bits of yellow from the windows in the dark buildings facing the Park. Over the buildings the night sky was a deep purplish blue. Now and then they passed shadowy well-dressed couples strolling arm in arm and Martin overheard bits of murmured conversation: “No, of course, I understand what you …” On nearby paths he heard footsteps and light laughter. Pieces of laughter seemed to float through the branches and get tangled in the leaves. For some reason he remembered a story that Gerda the Swede had told him. One summer night when she was fourteen and still living with her mother she had gone walking with an older boy in the Park. He had led her off the path into a dark clump of trees and begun kissing her, but not in the way she had expected: he had stood behind her, kissing the back of her neck and her cheek over and over and rubbing his hands slowly up and down on her breasts and pressing against her from behind. He had suddenly stopped without doing anything else at all, even though she had just stood there with her eyes closed, waiting for whatever was going to happen. Martin, who had been struck by the slight perversity of that half-seduction, was suddenly disturbed by the tenderness of those kisses. The vivid memory of Gerda’s story, the sharp smell of the leaves, the dim rattle of carriage wheels, the scratchy sound of Emmeline’s and Caroline’s shoes behind him on the gravel path, wisps of light laughter hanging in the branches, the glint of Margaret Vernon’s combs, all this irritated Martin, who turned and said harshly: “Well! Let’s turn back, shall we? It’s getting late!”

“Oh,” said Margaret Vernon, “it’s such a lovely …”

Emmeline looked at him sharply.

Caroline, glancing at him and looking away, murmured, “I suppose … it is getting a little …”