Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer

19. Wedding Night

IN THE WARM MAY EVENINGS THE STROLLS continued, but now Martin always walked beside Caroline, a few steps in front of Margaret and Emmeline. They walked past the sudden sharp scents of window boxes heavy with purple and yellow flowers, under branches of leaves green-glowing and translucent in the light of streetlamps, into the darkening Park. They had never spoken directly of their engagement, although the night after his talk with Emmeline he had walked into the lamplit parlor where the three women were sitting about the little table, and drawing closer he had seen something flash up from the back of Caroline’s hand outspread on the dark-red gold-flowered chairarm. Margaret Vernon, glancing quickly from Emmeline to Caroline, had congratulated him with a kind of muted effusiveness, while Caroline, raising her eyelids abruptly, had looked at him with large dark eyes that immediately vanished under lowered lashes. After that she walked by his side in the warm evenings, holding herself very straight. Sometimes he would bend his head slightly to say something meant for her alone, such as “These spring nights are the best time of year, don’t you think, Caroline?” and the sound of her name, issuing from his mouth, seemed to him so intimate, so much like a hand stroking her face, that he could scarcely attend to her murmured reply, which in any case was so soft that he could barely hear it, a reply that sounded like “Oh, that’s all right,” as if she hadn’t quite heard him correctly. The constraint between them, the sharp edge of formality that thrust at him from every movement of Caroline’s body, seemed quite proper to Martin, since easy-going camaraderie was the note of his friendship with Emmeline — a friendship that flourished precisely to the extent that the sexual wasn’t in question. His ambiguous friendship with Marie Haskova was another matter, for his sense of ease with her, his pleasure in watching her, his playfulness, his laughter, all this was made possible by the existence of something unsettled and secretive between them, which lent to their casual meetings an air of intimacy, of adventure. Therefore the slight awkwardness that he felt in the presence of Caroline, his sometimes exasperated sense of a resistance, an inviolable propriety, struck Martin as entirely correct, since in the absence of such constraints there would have been nothing for her to be except a friend or a mistress. Had she flirted with him, had she invited secret, forbidden caresses, she would have seemed commonplace to him, a mere step away from Gerda the Swede. It was as if her perplexing, irritating coolness, her difficulty, were a sign of her high value.

Nevertheless it was always a relief to be seated again in the familiar circle of the hotel parlor, where he could talk easily with Emmeline and Margaret while watching Caroline out of the corner of his eye. The wedding had been set for early September, and Margaret Vernon threw herself into a flurry of meticulous planning. This too struck Martin as entirely proper, though the plans themselves held little interest for him. Sometimes it all seemed to him a grotesque sham, as if what everyone was really talking about was the night when Caroline would be alone in a room with him, naked and defenseless, with no way out — and at this thought, which filled him with remorse and desire, he would shift uneasily in his seat and glance at Caroline, who sat staring quietly before her with half-closed eyes.

The knowledge that he was going to marry Caroline Vernon, that he would be moving from his two rooms to a larger apartment on a different floor, made him fear that his friendship with Marie Haskova would undergo a change or even vanish entirely. Already it seemed to Martin that she was changing, as if she herself were going to be married; and a jealousy would come over him, at the thought that Marie was leaving him, that Caroline would soon be taking her away. It was cruel of Caroline to do that, even if he and Marie Haskova sometimes exchanged ambiguous glances, glances that, however harmless and playful they might be, nevertheless contained something forbidden. He hadn’t yet told Marie that he was going to be married. The slight deception disturbed him, for he wanted to be frank with Marie Haskova; and his faint, continual sense of wronging her made him hover close, as if he were trying to set things right.

In the hot days of August, Martin prepared to open two new cafes: one on the other side of town, on Second Avenue, and one in Brooklyn, on a shady side street off Fulton Street, a few blocks from City Hall Park. Dundee had been willing, even eager, to let Martin buy his share of the partnership, as if he’d gotten in over his head and were relieved to have his money safe in the bank at last. Martin planned to introduce a new kind of cookie into his five cafes, a modern gingerbread or sugar cookie in four shapes: a Broadway cable car, an El train engine, a Napoleon bicycle, and a Hudson River Day Line steamer. The head chef of the bakery had already ordered the tin molds. Martin next turned to the question of managers. Since the manager of the Boulevard Metropolitan lived in Flatbush, Martin transferred him to the Brooklyn Metropolitan — against the strong protest of Emmeline, who liked McFarlane and argued that the move would harm the cafe. She stared at Martin with a flash of fear when he promptly offered her the vacated post.

“But I can’t—”

“Of course you can,” Martin said. “Believe me. You already know everything about the business.”

“I don’t know. People will say you’re playing favorites.”

“What people? I’ll fire them. Look, Em. I want someone in there who knows the business, someone I can trust. You know I count on you. You’re my right-hand man.”

“I’m not a man.”

“Right-hand woman, then.” He paused to see whether he had hurt her. “Let me tell you something. You already practically manage that cafe. So do it in public. Go ahead and do it. You can do it. Do it.”

She laughed. “Maybe I just will. But keep your voice down. People are staring.”

For the new Second Avenue cafe Martin approached the thirty-year-old manager of a nearby lunchroom that he had discovered during his search for a new location, and offered a ten percent increase in salary. The young manager, who knew Martin, hesitated, folded his arms across his chest, worked a muscle in his cheek, and suddenly thrust out a strong hand. Martin reported the development to Walter Dundee at dinner the next night, and Dundee in return reported that the Vanderlyn was in trouble: the hotel was losing money, the owners were becoming impatient, old Mr. Westerhoven’s days were numbered. Poor Westerhoven seemed unable to make up his mind about anything important, but as if to show that he was a man of iron will he had become fanatical about trivial matters — a bad business, however you looked at it. What the hotel needed was thorough renovation, but Alexander Westerhoven wasn’t the man to see it that way, and even if he’d seen it that way he no longer had the confidence of the owners, who were unwilling to sink more money into a failing business and were said to be divided over what course to pursue. Dundee frowned suddenly and began rapping his forehead with the tip of a finger. His face cleared. “I’ve got it now. A message for you. That Hamilton woman was in last week, asked to be remembered to you. You remember Louise Hamilton.” A sharp regret came over Martin: nearly ten years had passed since his little adventure in Room 411. He wondered whether he had been happy then. “She used to send me out to buy cough syrup,” Martin said. He remembered the dusky parlor, her head resting on two pillows on the sofa, the skin below her eyes waxy and blue, the surprising silk-smoothness of her skin. He had entered her fever-dream: she had dreamed him. A big-boned woman. Marie Haskova: he wondered whether he had known it all along.

“We’ll be moving into a larger suite at the Bellingham,” Martin was saying.

“You like it up there, do you?” Without waiting for an answer Dundee continued: “Mother and sister staying on?”

“Yes.” He paused. “We get on well. What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing,” Dundee said. “Not a thing.”

The two new cafes opened on consecutive Saturdays in early August, to the strains of German band music and the release of a thousand balloons. All children under twelve received a free prize: a little tin bank shaped like a slice of apple pie, with a coin slot at the top. Martin began taking the cable cars daily over the bridge to Brooklyn, where he was quickly satisfied that the new blue cafe had caught on nicely, and on his return he would stop first at the Second Avenue cafe, where the efficient young manager already spoke of expanding the premises by leasing the basement, and then at the Columbus Avenue cafe, and finally at the Boulevard cafe. Emmeline had taken command at the Boulevard, whose brick facade had received a fresh coat of skyblue paint and whose plate-glass windows glistened, but Martin saw that she needed continual reassurance about small matters, such as whether she had the authority to order new sets of salt and pepper shakers without first consulting him. She had had to speak to one of the waiters about his careless appearance and was worried about her tone, but Martin assured her that the staff liked and respected her. He saw that they did. He noticed small improvements about the place — green plants in the windows, a dish of free raspberry candies wrapped in cellophane beside the cash register — and decided to introduce them immediately into his four other cafes. “People like it here, Martin,” she confided with a worried look. “I can see that they do. But it makes them want to linger. The people waiting get annoyed. We lose customers.” She suggested a session for training waiters in the delicate art of moving customers gently along. “Mother is dashing around like mad,” she added, and for a moment Martin imagined Margaret Vernon running in and out of the restaurant with advice for Emmeline, before he realized that of course she was speaking of the wedding arrangements.

He noticed the arrangements out of the corner of his eye as he hurled himself into fifteen- and sixteen-hour days, typing letters, visiting his five cafes, studying managerial reports, keeping accounts. Sometimes he had the sense that, just outside the door of his office, a crowd of wedding guests was gathering — at any moment a great burst of music would sound, champagne would run down the sides of bottles, bouquets of flowers would spring up from empty vases. He had talked vaguely to Caroline of a wedding trip in the late winter or early spring, since it was out of the question for him to leave town now. The five-room suite, directly across the hall from Margaret and Emmeline, would be ready for occupancy a week before the wedding. Martin imagined Marie Haskova cleaning on the floor above, with her red-and-black feather duster. He had told her he was going to be married, but had not said when. In the summer evenings, he walked with the Vernon women to the Park and sat with them for a while in the lamplit parlor off the lobby, as if no one wanted anything to change. Caroline sat in her red chair. From beyond the parlor came muffled sounds of opening elevator doors, dim laughter, a noise in the street. Martin was tired.

And the wedding came, the wedding that he had been hearing about for a long time; it was soon over. Martin smiled and waved his hand and stepped into a waiting carriage. He was very tired. And after all he was relieved to find himself sitting beside Caroline in the carriage he had hired, rolling now through the great Park. The carriage had been decorated with wreaths of flowers, and through one window he could see a purple blossom bouncing in and out of view as it struck the side of the carriage over and over again. He wondered what kind of flower it actually was. “Look at that flower, Caroline,” he said. She sat by the window and he sat beside her, with a space between. In her white wedding dress she struck him as younger than ever — she looked like a young girl dressed up in a play about a queen. His father in his handsome rented clothes, with his thick brown mustache streaked with gray, with his pulled-back shoulders and large melancholy eyes, had looked like a gallant army officer. His mother had worn fresh flowers in her hat; when he bent to kiss her, she turned her cheek in a gesture he remembered from childhood bedtimes. It was three o’clock in the afternoon, and it occurred to Martin, leaning his head back in the soothing carnage, that there was quite a bit of day to get through. He had instructed the driver to take a few turns around the Park and then go up and down the great avenues. Then a light supper and a return to the Bellingham, where their five newly furnished rooms awaited them. It was warm in the carriage: sunlight and leafshade rippled across the dark leather seats, across Martin’s legs and Caroline’s white dress. Her hand, rippling with sun and shade, lay in her white lap. Caroline’s face was turned toward the window. Martin reached out a hand, hesitated, and then gently placed his hand on hers. Caroline stiffened and withdrew her hand as she turned to him with a startled look. “I’m sorry,” Martin said. “I didn’t mean—” “You startled me,” Caroline said, and he in turn was startled: he thought she was going to cry. But she gave an odd, childish pout and suddenly reached over and patted the back of his hand twice. Then she withdrew her hand and placed it in her lap. Martin, holding his breath, looked at her hand in her lap. He looked at her arm, at her cheekbone, at her black eyelashes and brown eyebrows and pale yellow hair. Then he let out his breath and in the warm carriage closed his eyes.

It was late dusk when they returned to the Bellingham, the time of day when the eastern sky has already turned to night and the west looks pale, almost white, so that if you turn your head back and forth — and Martin stopped, in order to show Caroline how to turn her head back and forth, but also because he had been seized by the memory of doing exactly this head-turning, at exactly this time of day, but for the life of him he couldn’t remember when. Caroline turned her head from side to side without saying anything and went with him into the lobby of the Bellingham Hotel. In the lamplit parlor he saw them, Margaret and Emmeline, sitting at the familiar table. And Martin felt a motion of irritation — why didn’t they leave him alone, why were they always surrounding him? But as he sank into the familiar chair he felt deeply soothed, it was as if all his muscles ached and now, in the soft chair in the light of the familiar lamp, among the well-known voices, he were being stroked by gentle hands. And Caroline in her chair seemed less strange to him, though he would have liked to shift her hand slightly on the red chairarm, where it had assumed an unfamiliar position, with three fingers curled under and one outstretched: a horrible, grotesque position, really, as if her hand had come to rest in a painful way from which she was unable to release it. And so he turned his face away and began to settle in, but just then Emmeline rose up before him, and beside her Margaret Vernon: they were leaving. For of course it had to be this way, on a night that was unlike other nights, however much it might look the same. And as he wondered what was going to happen next, Caroline rose, with a little stifled yawn.

All four walked over to the elevator and waited for the door to open. Together they rose in the elevator, standing in silence behind the elevator man in his maroon jacket and green pants, together they stepped out onto the fifth-floor landing. Martin held open a door with a glass window in it. Two by two they walked along the corridor, Martin and Caroline behind Emmeline and Margaret, and two by two they turned left into the next corridor. Emmeline stopped before her door and inserted the key while Mrs. Vernon said what a lovely wedding it had been and Caroline stood with lowered eyes beside Martin as he opened his own door, across the corridor from the Vernon door and five feet farther along.

“Good night,” Mrs. Vernon said.

“Good night,” said Martin.

“Good night,” Emmeline said.

“Good night,” said Caroline.

Martin held open his door for Caroline and followed her in, and as he closed the door he heard the deadbolt catch in the lock across the way.

“I’m tired,” murmured Caroline in the parlor, and rustled away through a door as Martin entered from the front hall and sank down in his flowered armchair. The chair had been moved to the new parlor from Martin’s bachelor suite on the sixth floor, and it sat uneasily amidst the new sofa, the loveseat, the stiff upholstered chairs, the mahogany rocker with its tasseled cushion. Against one wall stood a dark, shiny piano with framed photographs of Margaret with a bearded stranger, Caroline in an unfamiliar dress, Emmeline and Caroline at the age of twelve; Martin had bought the piano, even though Caroline had said she played “only a little.” One door led to a small library, with a rolltop desk, a tufted reading chair upholstered in silk damask, and mahogany bookcases with glass doors. Three shelves contained Caroline’s collection of books, mostly novels and sets of poets, and one shelf held Martin’s books: Brown’s Business Correspondence, Book-keeping at a Glance, Science for the Citizen, The Home Mechanic, Famous Battles in History, Business Pointers, and a scattering of boyhood books given to him by his mother and various aunts. The remaining shelves held Caroline’s favorite possessions: a music box with a turning ballerina, a large oyster shell, a little glass deer, and above all her many elegant dolls, seated side by side, row after row of them, princesses and soldiers and washerwomen and milkmaids and fine ladies with parasols. Martin had never seen so many dolls; something about their faces disturbed him, as if they had been caught in a moment of sadness from which they could never escape.

But he could no longer hear Caroline moving in the far rooms and rose to find her. He turned out the lamp in the parlor and passed into a room that looked like another parlor, a room whose purpose was not entirely clear to him: Caroline had called it a sitting room. From here one reached a small hall that led to the remaining rooms: the guest chamber, the bathroom, and the master bedroom.

When Martin entered the bedroom it was entirely dark, illuminated only by the dim light that entered through the door he held open. In the near-blackness he saw the dark glimmer of the wardrobe mirror and a big block of darkness that was the marriage bed. Caroline lay on the far side with the covers up to her chin and one arm on the dark coverlet. As he drew closer he saw that the arm was concealed to the frilled wrist by the white sleeve of her wedding dress — but no, coming closer he saw that it was the sleeve of some other garment, a nightdress, probably. She lay on her back with her eyes closed, her head slightly turned, her hair covering her cheek and lying bunched and shadowy on the pillow. She was asleep. And an irritation seized him, to see that she had undone her hair alone, that she had slipped into sleep as into a narrow space where he could not follow her, that of all possible solutions to the problem of the wedding night, a problem he now recognized in all its gravity, she had chosen this one. “Caroline,” he whispered, “Caroline,” and sitting down on the edge of the bed he shook her by the shoulder, which through the bedcovers he could feel in its sharpness of bone and roundness of flesh, a sharp-roundness, a contradiction. Beyond the bed sat an armchair with something hunched over the back, something that looked like a big crab — her corset in a tangle of strings. He shook her harder and her eyes opened. She sat up abruptly, pulling the covers up to her neck, but carelessly, so that a part hung down and exposed a piece of her naked white nightdress. “Caroline,” he said, struck by the note of reproach in his voice, of injury, “you didn’t say good night.”

Now two lines appeared between her dark eyebrows, she looked at him with sleepy reproachful eyes. “I fell asleep,” she said. In her white nightdress, with her sleepy pouting gaze and her hair falling over one shoulder, she looked to him like a little girl, a sullen mischievous little girl who was trying to tease him and make him lose his temper. But it was all a game, and in the spirit of the game he reached out and put his hand on her hair-covered sharp-round shoulder. The shoulder pulled away. “I’m tired,” she said irritably and slid down under the covers. Turning away, she pulled the covers tightly about her. Martin sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the mirrored doors of the wardrobe. The Vernons had traveled with their wardrobes, even though the Bellingham had built-in closets. After a while he rose to prepare for bed. But at the dresser a new problem confronted him, for he did not know whether the stylish new pajamas he had purchased for the occasion might strike her as immodest, might perhaps alarm her by thrusting before her gaze the outline of a pair of legs, and after standing in doubt before the open drawer with the folded pajamas in his hands, he replaced them in a corner of the drawer and removed his new striped nightshirt, with its embroidered collar and cuffs.

When he returned from the bathroom he lay down on his side of the bed and listened to the angry thudding of his heart, which reminded him of the sound of heavy rain on the awning of his father’s store, when he stood under it on rainy mornings. And a desolation seized him: she was not treating him right, she was slipping away into the sleep of girlhood and leaving him out in the rain. Under the covers he slipped toward her until his leg touched hers. All along his leg he felt a sharp burning, his head felt hot, he was about to burst, and rolling heavily against her he began shaking her shoulder, but struggling into half-waking she pushed away his hand, she pushed at him and pressed the side of her face into the pillow as if he were burning a light in her eyes.

Angrily Martin got up and went out of the room.

He walked up and down the unfamiliar parlor in his morocco slippers, he threw himself into his armchair and tried to remember his first sight of Caroline, but it was no use, nothing was any use, and for some reason he thought of the corridor in the Vanderlyn, the actors and actresses, the naked foot on the bed seen through the half-opened door. He rose from the chair, for he needed to walk, to move about; and making his way to the entrance hall, he took down his black overcoat from the hall tree and put it on. Then a remorse came over him, for after all it was his wedding night, and with his coat still on he returned to the bedroom and stopped in the doorway. “I’m going out, Caroline,” he said, in a whisper so soft that it was as if he had only thought the words, while he stared at shadowy Caroline lying in the bed, lying so motionless that one might have thought he had plunged a knife deep into her chest. “I’m going out, Caroline,” he said again, but she lay silent in the coffin-bed. Then he turned and made his way from the too-still room into a small hall that led him astray, for he found himself in the library, where glints of dark glass concealed dolls bowed down with sadness, and passing through a door he saw that he was in the dark parlor, of all places, which led to another hall, and seeing his hat on a hook he placed it on his head, opened a door, and stepped into the dim-lit corridor.

He walked briskly past neighboring doors and turned into the longer corridor. At the end he pushed open a door that gave onto the landing. Martin began to climb the stairs, pulling himself up faster by holding onto the rail. At the eighth floor he looked down over the railing and saw the sharp-turning stair-flights dropping away in smaller and smaller rectangles, as if the stair-flights were parts of a swiftly unfolding telescope. He pushed open a door and climbed a final flight of stairs, pushed open another door, and found himself in a narrow dark corridor lit by two gas brackets with murky globes. Some of the doors were without numbers, he could barely see, suddenly he was standing before number 7. He knocked lightly and then sharply, not caring, but looking around anyway to see whether any doors were opening, inside he heard a noise, and then the door opened. Marie looked at him with weary startled eyes. Gently she took his arm and led him into the small black room, where he knocked his foot against a wooden chair that scraped on the floor. In blackness she drew him to the bed, in silence she waited while he removed his coat and hat, in silence and blackness he lay down with Marie Haskova and celebrated his wedding night, thinking for a moment of Louise Hamilton on her fever-couch and then of Caroline’s unbound hair, her sharp-round shoulder, her sullen sleepy look, the white sleeve of her nightdress, so that it seemed to him, as he lay back on the black bed beside Marie, whom he could hear breathing as if she had already fallen asleep, that if he had been unfaithful to Caroline by coming here on his wedding night, he had also been unfaithful to Marie, who had taken him in without a word, without a reproach, only to find herself secretly replaced, in her own bed, by Caroline.

It was still dark when Martin returned a little while later to his apartment. He hung his hat on the hall tree and stepped into the parlor, where the mantel clock showed that it was not yet three in the morning. When he pushed open the door of the bedroom he saw Caroline sitting up in bed in the dark. “Where were you?” she said. “I was frightened.” And a tenderness came over him: she wasn’t angry, he had abandoned her, he longed to ask her to forgive him. “I couldn’t sleep,” Martin said. “I can’t sleep either,” Caroline said, in a tone so forlorn that Martin sat down beside her and put an arm around her stiffening shoulders, as if to comfort a child. “It will be all right,” Martin said, stroking her hair, and now there came to him, looming out of nowhere, the face of little Alice Bell, with her yellow hair and serious eyes, her trembling shoulders. But already he could feel desire rising in him, a scent of blossoms streamed from her hair or her nightdress, he noticed that he was still wearing his coat, and dropping his hand to the front of her nightdress he touched her breast. Caroline stiffened and pushed away his hand. “Don’t do that,” she said. Rage flamed in him. “Damn it,” he said, and struck the bed with his fist. Then he stood up and strode from the room, strode through room after room, until it seemed to him that he was rushing through hundreds of rooms, until he came to a door that he jerked open.

He strode across the corridor and knocked loudly on the door across the way. “I’ll knock it down if they don’t open,” he said to himself, or maybe aloud, the words sounded very clear and distinct, so perhaps he had spoken them. It was Emmeline who opened the door.

“What is it? God! Are you all right?”

“Get your mother,” Martin said as he stalked into the parlor, barely able to see Emmeline for the rage in his heart. He could feel blood beating in his temples and in his eyes. Emmeline returned with Margaret Vernon, in a flowery dressing gown that she clasped at the throat; she looked up at him in fearful bewilderment, as if she were about to cry. Martin felt like slapping her face; his arm was trembling, he wanted to lie down.

“Tell her,” he said in a kind of hushed shout.

“I don’t understand,” wailed Mrs. Vernon.

Martin took a deep breath. “Instruct your daughter. Tell her about marriage. Tell her. Tell her.” He pointed to the door.

A confused, pained look crossed Margaret Vernon’s face, as if he had struck her, but to Martin’s surprise she said nothing and, lowering her eyes, obediently opened the door and went out. Martin sat in a chair and closed his eyes; when he opened them he was puzzled to see Emmeline sitting across from him. He had been dreaming of his old room over the cigar store. Behind him the door opened. “It’s all right now,” Mrs. Vernon said, with dignity. “You can go back.”

Martin nodded stiffly and strode back into his apartment, shutting the door hard behind him. He hung his coat on a peg of the hall tree, then turned out the lamp in the parlor and made his way through the dark, till passing through a door he found himself suddenly surrounded by dim dolls in glass cases. He groped his way back into the parlor and made his way to another door, and stepping through he saw again the glimmering glass cases, the shadowy sad dolls, and stumbling away he passed through another dark room, and again it seemed to him that he was passing through many rooms, through all the rooms of the city, in order to reach his wife. After a while he came to a door, a door that was partly open, as if he had already come through it the other way. He pushed at it uncertainly. Caroline was sitting up in bed, in the dark. “Mother spoke to me,” she said.

Martin wondered what the devil Mrs. Vernon had told her. He went over to the bed and lay down, and as he did so a heavy weight seemed to roll through his skull and press against the top of his head. He felt something soft and dry and cool on his forehead, and for a moment he was startled, almost frightened: what could it be? Then he realized that it was Caroline’s hand. He raised a hand and patted the back of her hand.

“Everything’s going to be all right, Caroline.” The words soothed him, an immense, crushing peace came over him, in the dark he patted her hand again, and at once he began dreaming: he was sitting on a sunny-and-shady bench beside his mother, she was wearing a hat with black ostrich feathers, and beyond the edges of the hat, which seemed far above his head, he could see tall buildings against the brilliant blue sky.