Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer

20. The Fate of the Vanderlyn

FOR THE CHRISTMAS SEASON MARTIN DIRECTED his managers to trim their windows with holly wreaths and cotton snow. They were to make room inside for a Christmas tree trimmed with colored glass balls and clearly visible from the street. He instructed each female employee to wear green and red ribbons in her hair and each male employee to wear a green and red silk flower in his buttonhole. Special Christmas napkins were to be used, beginning on the first of December, and each table was to have a red or green wax candle. Free red and green candy suckers, wrapped in red and green waxed paper twisted at the ends, were to sit in baskets beside each cash register. Martin had found a small candy shop and manufactory on Broome Street willing to supply his cafes with hard candy at the low price of twenty cents a pound, if he ordered one hundred pounds, and he instructed the managers to divide the remaining candy evenly among all employees on the day after Christmas.

Holiday profits from the five Metropolitans were so high that Martin immediately began to lay plans for another cafe in Brooklyn; and in the new year he received from the owner of a big department store an offer to purchase his chain of cafes for a remarkable sum.

His life outside the business had returned to its accustomed round. In the morning Martin rose early, long before Caroline, and took breakfast with Emmeline at a corner table in the restaurant of the Bellingham. In the evening he returned to the hotel at eight or nine to find Caroline and Emmeline and Margaret sitting in the lamplit parlor. For nothing had changed, nothing would ever change, throughout eternity he would step from the lobby into the lamplit parlor where three women sat waiting, while somewhere in another life a marriage took place: her hand in her sunny lap, the carriage creaking, fresh flowers in his mother’s hat. And approaching the women Martin would bend over Caroline and kiss her lightly on her uplifted cheek, while a carriage full of sunlight disappeared into the long afternoon, and sinking into his armchair he felt himself sinking down into deep cool subterranean vaults. There he found himself talking with Emmeline and Margaret, while Caroline sat with half-closed eyes. After a while Emmeline would rise, explaining that she had to get up early, urging the others to stay. And at once Margaret would rise, and slowly Caroline would rise, and then Martin himself would rise, out of the cool vaults into steamheated lamplit air. Together all four would walk to the elevators, together they would ride to the fifth floor. And two by two they would walk down the corridor, two by two they would turn left, and at their doors they would pause and say good night, two by two.

Caroline was tired, always tired. She had begun to complain of pains in her back; and although in the days after their wedding night she had obediently performed her nightly duty, Martin had taken to slipping less and less often over to her side of the bed, for she seemed to take no pleasure in his attentions, lying motionless and silent beneath him, and turning abruptly onto her side, without a word, as soon as he was through.

Sometimes, when she was fully clothed, Caroline would fall into a playful affection. She would ruffle his hair, and rub his shoulder, and give him little hugs, and call him her little pet; and sometimes she would sit on his lap. In these moods she would allow him to hug her and stroke her hair, but at the first sign of desire she would stand up quickly, with an odd, disturbed look, as if he had spoiled something, as if he had failed to understand.

She complained of a heaviness, a tiredness, of pains in her legs, of a sensation of pressure in her temples, of headaches branching out like pictures of lightning in chromos of storms, of flutters in her eyelids, of a vague malaise, as if something were not right, not really right at all; and stretching out on the blue-green damask sofa in her mother’s parlor, beneath a heavy comforter, with one arm thrown over her eyes, she would lie for hours in the dusk of long winter afternoons.

One morning when Martin stepped out of the apartment he saw Marie Haskova with her mop and bucket, walking slowly and heavily down the hall. Even as his muscles tightened he realized that it was the fifth-floor maid, a heavyset fiftyish woman with thick hams and very pale smooth skin, who put him in mind of a stern nun. It occurred to him that just above his head Marie Haskova was making her rounds, confined forever to her floor as if she had disappeared into the forests of Bohemia. Secretly she moved through the building by service elevator, silently she took her meals in the basement, unseen she lay down in her attic bed — a ghost of the Bellingham, fluttering in the dark, ungraspable.

Often at night Martin lay thinking of Marie Haskova in her ghostly attic chamber, of Louise Hamilton in her dusky parlor, of Dora and Gerda in the house with rattling windows, of the actresses in the hallway, of women in long dresses, of women who smiled at him in lobbies and elevators, who looked at him in a certain way. Then it seemed to him that he was surrounded by swarms of floating whispering women who brushed against him and bent over him, offering their breasts and tongues, while only Caroline, with her pale hair pulled back tight, stood with her face turned a little to one side, staring dreamily at something in the distance.

To his surprise he felt no anger at Caroline, whose remoteness seemed as fixed and unalterable as the paleness of her hair or the half-closing of her dark, unseeing eyes. He felt that he ought instead to be angry at Caroline’s mother, for hadn’t Margaret Vernon brought up her daughter in utter ignorance of everything, hadn’t she watched over and in a sense encouraged her illnesses, her weariness, her unawakened existence, her dream-in-life? Yet he wasn’t angry at Margaret Vernon either. Rather he had fallen into a kind of lassitude, in relation to Caroline, a slumber almost like that of Caroline herself. There were times when he marveled at the strength of her languor, which lapped against him in slow warm waves, soothing away his desire, filling him with a sweet, melting melancholy, a dissolving shadowy sweetness of vague regret and dim longing.

Such was the ghost-world into which he sank each night and from which he rose each morning in darkness to set forth in a world of definite things. It was a world in which he could feel his senses waking even as he walked in cold dawns to the iron stairs of the El, a hard sharp exhilarating world — an Emmeline-world, as he had come to think of it, bright and flashing, charged with energy. Business was flourishing. In March he leased a vacant store and basement in Brooklyn, not far from his Metropolitan near City Hall Park, and planned to turn it into a two-floor cafe. Daily he traveled by cable car over the Brooklyn Bridge to check on the progress of the new restaurant, and during the week he continued his habit of stopping in unannounced at any of his five cafes for a quick inspection of the tables and kitchen and a talk with the manager. Always he looked forward to his visit to Emmeline’s Boulevard cafe, where there would be some little change he liked to discover, some small improvement in decor or service. Under her management, business had nearly doubled. There was a sharp feeling of friendliness in the air of the place, and Emmeline had about her a relaxed self-assurance, a radiant ease, that seemed to seep into the folds of the curtains and the gleam of the glass saltshakers.

At dinner one night in March he learned from Walter Dundee that the affairs of the Vanderlyn had reached a crisis. Dundee had it on good authority that rather than dipping into their pockets the owners were planning to turn their backs on the Vanderlyn, to get out altogether — in short, to sell. No telling what might happen now — it all depended on who the devil they sold it to. But Dundee, who had fought for change all along, felt it was a bad affair whatever way you looked at it; things would never be the same. “But I thought you didn’t want them to be the same,” Martin said, struck by the contradiction. Did Dundee secretly want things to stay the same after all, was the shrewd engineer finally ready to sink into the shadows with old Mr. Westerhoven? But Dundee, as if sensing something disdainful in Martin’s words, sharply rejected any suggestion of contradiction. If he worried about the change of ownership, it wasn’t from fear that the Vanderlyn would become modern and efficient and workable, since a well-intentioned push into the modern world was exactly what was necessary. No, what troubled him was that in carrying out the necessary change, the spirit of the place would somehow be harmed, since a hotel was more than the sum of its electric wires and varnish — he had worked in his share of hotels before settling at the Vanderlyn, and he knew. Westerhoven’s error was to confuse the spirit of the place with the out-of-date, the technologically antiquated. But there was a benevolence about the Vanderlyn, a sense of good will, which affected visitors like an atmosphere, an atmosphere of well-being, and this atmosphere had nothing to do with old-fashioned creaking elevators and faulty heading systems but rather with the will of the owners as expressed in the will of the manager and his staff — and it was the possible corruption of this will that troubled his sleep. Martin, who had suspected Dundee of a secret wavering, felt a rush of affection for the man, who had defended himself well and now looked at Martin sternly with his sharp blue eyes. With his close-cropped gray hair, his cleanshaven chin, his long nose and shrewd blue eyes, Dundee reminded Martin of a ship’s captain or a preacher.

“Very much the captain,” Emmeline remarked at lunch the next day, “though I’m not sure about the preacher. More the Sunday-school teacher, I’d say: he has that air of clean-smelling cloth and moral uprightness, though really he’s more worldly than that. He’s right about the spirit of a hotel, too — you can feel it right away, almost before you step into the lobby — but I’d say he underestimates things like rugs, armchairs, paint, all these material things. They’re part of the spirit too, if you see what I mean, a sort of, well, material way of expressing something that isn’t material at all. So if you look at things a certain way, you could say that a good old mahogany armchair isn’t really there at all — it’s sheer spirit! Oh, I’m kidding, but I’m not kidding. I like your friend. He’s a good man.”

As often when talking to Emmeline, Martin had the sense that he had leaped into a comfortable steam train and was off in an exhilarating rush.

“Does it bother you,” Emmeline said, “that Dundee thinks you should have stayed at the Vanderlyn?”

“No.” The question took him by surprise. “No, it isn’t that. But there’s something about this whole Vanderlyn business. I can’t put my finger on it.”

“Well, when you do—”

“When I do?”

She laughed. “Then you can stop thinking about it.”

He thought about it as he orchestrated the advertising campaign for the opening of the sixth Metropolitan, though it wasn’t so much thinking as a kind of puzzled brooding. The Vanderlyn had threatened to smother him, and he had gone his own way: it was as simple as that. But was it really as simple as that? He remembered his excitement when, in the early days of his secretaryship, he had had the sense of penetrating secrets, of seeing connections and combinations, of holding in his mind the complex system of forces that constituted the world of the Vanderlyn. In comparison to the gorgeous interwoven design of a hotel, a cafe was bare white cloth. The interest lay in the multiplication of cafes, in the complex management of an expanding business. And business was booming: he was a success, people with money had begun to take notice, they were offering large sums for his multiplying chain of blue cafes, which need never stop expanding, which grew, in a sense, with only the slightest help from him: and he saw a line of blue cafes stretching side by side clear across the country. And a restlessness came over him, at the thought of all those blue cafes, repeating themselves across the plains and mountains.

The cafe opened at the end of March, to the music of a fourteen-piece German band. Receipts for the first day more than doubled those of previous opening days, and customers continued to pour into the blue cafe through the double glass doors at street level and the blue wooden door at the bottom of the blue-painted steps. In the sunken area before the basement level there was space for three white metal tables, which proved highly popular on warm days. Martin imagined a great court, filled with white metal tables, under high trees. Already he had begun to plan a seventh cafe, in Coney Island, perhaps in West Brighton. In mid-April the crisis of the Vanderlyn seemed to have passed, the owners were hesitating, but at the end of the month Dundee suddenly reported that the decision to sell was near: there was now talk that the building would be demolished and replaced by a twelve-story commercial building, although this was little more than a rumor. At about this time Martin stopped at the Vanderlyn one sunny afternoon, for he felt a desire to sit in the lobby. He hadn’t entered the building since refusing Mr. Westerhoven’s offer nearly two years ago.

John Babcock was behind the desk, and nodded rather stiffly to Martin. Beside him was a new clerk, who looked up at Martin as if prepared to offer him a room. On the bench sat two bellboys whom Martin had never seen before. He sat down in a familiar armchair in the sunny lobby, with a view of the cigar stand, which was now a cigar-and-candy stand run by a plump man with round eyeglasses. He had heard that Bill Baer had a cigar store of his own on Amsterdam Avenue. The door to Mr. Westerhoven’s office was just out of sight. A man in a checked vest sat in an armchair reading a newspaper, a gray-haired man and a gray-haired woman sat silently in two chairs side by side, a handsome woman wearing a black hat with blood-red roses strode purposefully across the lobby, a bent-over old woman stood motionless beside a chair, balanced on her shiny dark cane. It was unusually quiet for a Wednesday afternoon. Martin still liked the high old lobby, which had about it a kind of small grandeur — the carved woodwork around the arched windows was pleasing, the sort of thing you didn’t see in newer, bigger hotels, and the tall, slightly absurd marble pillars, which led the eye up to a ceiling carved with gilt hexagons, filled him with a kind of anxious tenderness, as if he wished to protect them from a harsher judgment — but everywhere he saw signs of decline. The marble floor had little broken, rough places, on the arm of his chair was a small but very visible burn from cigar or cigarette ash, the curtains looped up beside the arched windows were mottled with fading — it was all beginning to look like the parlor of someone’s grandmother, a comfortable old-fashioned place quietly fading. Perhaps, after all, that was Mr. Westerhoven’s vision of a hotel: an old parlor, with many pleasant places for hiding, presided over by an aproned grandmother smelling of apples and pie dough. Martin imagined many empty rooms above. The lobby was very quiet. Even the sunlight that came through the high windows was transformed into a quiet version of itself, a browner and more faded light, like the light that enters a deep forest — the forest in the tissue-paper-covered picture of Hansel and Gretel in a dimly remembered childhood book. Perhaps that was Mr. Westerhoven’s deeper plan: to turn the lobby of the Vanderlyn into a deep, peaceful forest, penetrated by shafts of dim light. In the warm, faded light, in a stillness made deeper by dim sounds sifting through, Martin closed his eyes.

And at once he saw: deep under the earth, in darkness impenetrable, an immense dynamo was humming. Above the dynamo was an underground hive of shops, with electric lights and steam heat, and above the shops an underground park or garden with what seemed to be a theater of some kind. Above the ground a great lobby stretched away: elevator doors opened and closed, people strode in and out, bells rang, the squeak of valises mingled with the rattle of many keys and the ringing of many telephones, alcove opened into alcove as far as the eye could see. Above the lobby rose two floors of public rooms and then the private rooms began, floor after floor of rooms, higher and higher, a vertical city, a white tower, a steel flower — and always elevators rising and falling, from the cloud-piercing top to the darkness where the great dynamo hummed. Martin had less the sense of observing the building than of inhabiting it at every point: he rose and fell in the many elevators, he strolled through the parlor of an upper room and walked in the underground park or garden — and then it was as if the structure were his own body, his head piercing the clouds, his feet buried deep in the earth, and in his blood the plunge and rise of elevators.

Martin’s eyes opened. He was sitting in the lobby of the old Vanderlyn Hotel. He was feeling a little tired, his heart was beating rapidly — and from his heart there beat, in wave after wave, a wild, sweet exhilaration.