Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer

17. Courtship

THE SENSE THAT A DIFFERENT FUTURE awaited him, a future that, once he saw it rising in the distance, would be as deeply familiar to him as his own childhood, remained strong in Martin even as the success of the new cafe became a certainty. It was a certainty measurable by the nightly and weekly and monthly accounts that Martin carefully kept in his brown office with the green muslin curtains, behind a door with M. DRESSLER lettered in gold paint on the panel. On a shiny black typewriter with round black keys rimmed in nickel, Martin typed bi-weekly directions to all three managers, reminding them to keep the plate-glass windows clean at all times, proposing that they advertise daily specials on signboards set up on the sidewalk, and suggesting ways to draw in customers during slow hours. One of Martin’s experiments that proved popular was the Five-Minute Breakfast: a reduced-rate breakfast of fried eggs and hamsteak guaranteed to be served within five minutes, for people in a hurry. But the main purpose of the letters was to remind the managers that the three cafes were not independent businesses but members of a single enterprise, in which the successful operation of one member contributed to the success of the whole.

In the window of Emmeline’s cafe he installed a movable display powered by a toy steam engine. Before the puckered lips of a wooden face in profile, a flat wooden cup of coffee slowly rose and fell, rose and fell; each time it touched the lips, the head tipped back as if to drink. When Emmeline reported that people on the sidewalk were stopping to watch the moving cup of coffee, Martin installed the same display in his two other Metropolitans.

As revenues poured in, Martin continued to advertise, leasing space on billboards and in streetcars; and he began to search for a fourth location, taking the cable cars over the bridge to Brooklyn and walking the streets of neighborhoods once glimpsed from the horsecars of his childhood.

The question of a new location was one he liked to discuss with Emmeline, when he stopped in at the Boulevard cafe once or twice a week during her lunch break and whisked her off to a different restaurant, or when he accompanied her back to the hotel now and then at the end of her shift. Her brave plunge into the world of work, her quick grasp of day-to-day business and the larger design, her sharp insistent questions, all this made Martin seek her company as he had never sought the company of George Henning or Mr. Westerhoven. She seemed to have thrown herself into his business as into a romance. She listened carefully to customers, reported their occasional complaints, proposed the idea, which Martin quickly adopted, of a Metropolitan dessert: a special pastry filled with chopped apples and shaped like a Pilgrim, available to the Metropolitan through the same bakery that supplied their pies. And Emmeline listened to Martin — listened with a faint frown of attention, with a stillness of concentration, that inspired in him stricter efforts at clarity. She took sides with his ambition and kept in step with his boldest designs. One day as they were discussing the expansion of the business to Brooklyn she said to him, “But what do you want, Martin? What is it you actually want?”

“Oh, everything,” he said, lightly but without a smile.

“But I don’t think you do, not in the usual way. In a way you don’t want anything. You don’t care if you’re rich. Suppose you were rich, really rich. What would you do then?”

“Oh, then,” Martin said. He thought of himself as a child standing in the waves at West Brighton, feeling the world rushing away in every direction. “Anyway, what makes you think I don’t want to be rich?”

He saw that he had offended her, that he had taken the wrong tone. “Listen, Em. I don’t know what I want. But I want — more than this.” He swept out his arm lightly, gracefully, in a gesture that seemed to include the restaurant in which they were seated, but that might have included, for all he knew, the whole world.

Sometimes, when he looked across a table at Emmeline, he had the sense that he and she had been married for a long time. It was a comfortable companionable sort of marriage, calm and peaceful as cozy furniture in a firelit room. And at once he would think of Caroline, tense and languorous in her armchair in the hotel parlor, waiting for something, something that was bound to happen or perhaps would never happen — Caroline with her half-closed eyes and motionless fingers and pale hair pulled back tight on both sides. For it was Caroline after all whom he had married, or was about to marry, or had somehow forgotten to marry. And when on Sunday mornings he stood against the doorjamb talking with Marie Haskova and watching her bend this way and that, Marie Haskova with her heavy body and sudden swift questioning glances, then too he would think of Caroline, waiting in her chair for something to happen. Perhaps they were all waiting for something to happen — waiting for him to make up his mind. For it was as if he had three wives, and was married to all of them, or none of them, or some of them, or now one and now another of them. Of the three wives, Emmeline and Marie Haskova were the most vividly present to him, the most solidly there, whereas Caroline seemed a ghost-wife, a dream-wife — though he wondered whether it wasn’t precisely her lack of substance that allowed her to haunt and hover, to invade the edges of other women.

In any case in being with Emmeline he was always with Caroline, as if she rose up most vividly in relation to others. One day he asked Emmeline a question about her sister, and after that he asked others — he had many questions about Caroline, as if he had seen a hand-painted photograph of Emmeline’s sister and were working his way up to an introduction. What did she like? What did she do? What did she think about? To all his questions Emmeline listened carefully and gave thoughtful, meticulous answers, which somehow didn’t clarify anything and tended to float out of his mind the moment he was alone. Caroline then was a mystery: the mystery irritated and attracted him, he would have to let it go at that.

Sometimes, speaking to Emmeline about cafe business, he would feel a sudden gratitude to Caroline, for having a sister who understood everything. Then a tenderness would come over him for Caroline, alone with her mother in the big hotel, waiting for something to happen, and he would long to see her in her dark red armchair with her white fingers and heavy-lidded eyes.

One day at lunch Martin said to Emmeline, “Do you think Caroline would like to marry me?”

Emmeline looked at him. “That’s a strange question for you to ask me.”

“But you’re the only one I can ask.”

“There’s always Caroline, you know. Let’s not forget Caroline.”

“Oh, Caroline,” he said impatiently.

The truth was that Caroline often irked him, even as she became fixed in his mind as a white bride. It struck him that the pleasure he felt in the presence of Marie Haskova was in part a pleasure directed against Caroline, as if by enjoying the company of Marie Haskova he were warning Caroline not to push him too far. For Marie liked him, there was no question about that; and when he thought of Marie Haskova with her slow body, her melancholy eyes, and her sudden questioning glances, he would become angry at Caroline, for invading his time with Marie, for harming her in some way.

But when he walked along the cold streets toward the Bellingham at night, taking deep breaths of clear cold air, then he looked about with pleasure at the yellow windows of the dark row houses; and when he entered the Bellingham and felt his cheeks tingle and tighten in the steamheated air, when he saw the three Vernon women waiting for him about the little table, then he felt a great surge of pleasure, and sank down gratefully into his armchair in the circle of his dark-haired sister, his adoring mother, and his sister’s sister, his tense, languorous, floating, ungraspable bride.

“She’s willing,” Emmeline said a few days later, a little breathlessly, as she leaned forward over a corner table. “Willing?”

“To marry you.” She paused. “It’s what you wanted me to find out.”

“And you asked her? Flat out?”

“Well no. You’re angry.”

“I’m surprised. You asked her?”

“I talked to her. We talked about things. Caroline trusts me, she knows I understand her. I didn’t ask her, for heaven’s sake, but I found out.” She picked up her cup of tea and held it in both hands without drinking it. “Now you can decide.”

“Decide what?”

“Whether to marry her.”

“And you think I should?”

She lifted the cup to her mouth but did not drink. From behind the cup, as from behind a curtain, she said, so quietly that he could barely hear her: “It would be so good for Caroline.”

“And me? Would it be good for me?”

“Oh, everything’s good for you,” Emmeline said harshly.

In the evening he felt a slight awkwardness as he entered the lamplit parlor and sank into the familiar armchair, but nothing had changed: Margaret Vernon greeted him with the same girlish effusiveness, Emmeline began describing a jammed cash-register key that she had managed to fix, and Caroline sat dreamily in her chair, glancing at him in greeting and letting her eyes slide away. He tried to find a hint in her, a secret sign, perhaps a faint flush in the skin over her cheekbone or a barely visible tightening of the tendons in the back of her hand, but he couldn’t be certain, and only when he was alone in his room did it strike him that the change was in him, as he watched her secretly, searching for a sign.

He thought about his new secret bride in his brown office with the green muslin curtains, and at dinner in the kitchen over the cigar store as his mother placed before him a heap of stewmeat and boiled onions, and in the parlor of his bachelor suite as he stood against the doorjamb watching Marie Haskova with her red-and-black feather duster; and it seemed to him that Caroline’s power of invasion had increased, that she was hovering behind his heavy red curtains, seeping into the edges of things, rippling in the swish of other women’s dresses, glimmering up at him from rain-slick streets.

At night, instead of falling asleep at once, he lay in the dark imagining Caroline Vernon. She sat in her chair, in the dark of the deserted parlor, and suddenly she rose and came toward him at the other end of the room, but when she reached him she passed through him and came out the other side — and from the chair she rose again and came toward him, and passed through him, while from the chair she rose and came toward him, rose and came toward him, rose and rose and rose.

As the weather grew warm a restlessness came over Martin. He would hover close to Marie Haskova on Sunday mornings, watching her move about in her black uniform and speaking to her about his cafes, his life in the cigar store, the Irish maids in the Vanderlyn; and as he watched the black cloth tighten against her bending back, as he watched her rough-palmed hands with their faint odor of lye and furniture polish, he wondered whether he hovered around her not because she was a temptation that he continually enjoyed overcoming, but because she was a peaceful place he could go to, away from Caroline.

In the warm-cool evenings he again walked out with the Vernon women. He would stroll along the lamplit sidewalks with Margaret Vernon, a few steps in front of Emmeline and Caroline, and at the street crossing he would continue with Emmeline, behind Margaret and Caroline, and at the next crossing he would continue with Margaret, behind Emmeline and Caroline. One night in the park he was surprised to find himself walking beside Caroline, through spaces of lamplight and spaces of dark. A sharp moist smell of green was in the air, heavy and bitter, mixed with the sweet decay of brown oak leaves. In the glare of the lamps her cape was very black, her coat very red, her hair very yellow. She looked like a new painting, all wet and shiny, but already she was fading into the darkness between lamps. Something crackled in the black trees. From beyond a turn in the path a stick struck the ground at regular intervals. “Do you know what I was thinking,” Martin heard himself say, startled by the sound of his voice, as if he had reached out and touched her mouth. Somewhere a man and woman laughed together and suddenly stopped. Around the bend came an old man in a silk hat, striking the ground with his stick, striking the ground with his stick.

All night long the sharp stick struck the ground as Martin lay in a restless half-sleep, and now the old man was thrusting his pointed walking stick into Caroline’s foot: blood ran from her shoe. Martin rose in the dark, washed in cold water, put on his suit, and went down to the lobby. It was half past three. The lobby was empty except for the night clerk. Martin sat in a lobby chair with a view of the elevator corridor and waited for the graying of the dark lobby windows. She was closed in dream, a princess in a tower, scarcely a flesh-and-blood woman at all. Did he then desire her not for herself but for all that was unawakened in her, all that had not yet come into being? His mother had read him that story: at the Prince’s kiss, Dornröschen opened her eyes. Then the fire leaped in the fireplace, the horses in the stable stirred, the pigeons on the roof took their heads from under their wings. And a mournful desire moved in him, for the princess in her chamber, as he imagined her young body stirring, the ribs moving under the skin, the wrists turning, the eyes, dark with dream, slowly opening after their hundred years’ sleep.

At five minutes before six, Emmeline appeared around the corner of the elevator corridor and gave a start. She was wearing a coat and hat and carried an umbrella. She came swiftly toward him but Martin did not rise.

“Tell her—” he said. “Tell her—” His eyes hurt, his eyelids trembled, there was a muffled buzzing deep in his brain.

“You don’t look well,” Emmeline said, bending toward him with a frown.

“Tell her,” he said. “Tell her I—” In his throbbing ears his voice sounded faint and thin, and he was reminded of a child he had once seen on a calendar, kneeling and looking up with pleading moist dark eyes. He tried to recall where he had seen that calendar, and in the gray dawn of the lobby, where elevator grilles were already rattling open, his eyes burned, his nose stung, a bell rang.