Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer

21. New Life

“AND YET YOU’VE ALWAYS SAID YOU WEREN’T cut out for hotel life,” Emmeline said. “So it can’t be that, unless it was really that all along. But I don’t think so. You’d have stayed at the Vanderlyn in the first place.”

“Choking to death on the rope handed to me by Alexander Westerhoven? No thank you.”

“Anyway you’ve answered my question.”

“Which one was that?”

“You know: the one about what you’d do if you were ever rich. Now I know.”

“I’m not rich,” Martin said quickly, bending over his soup.

Nearly four weeks had passed since his vision in the lobby of the Vanderlyn, and the feeling of exhilaration, the sense of a sweet adventure, of a beckoning, was still with him. In a month that seemed both feverish and very calm, he had sold his chain of cafes lock, stock, and barrel to a real estate millionaire grown rich in West End land speculation, and without a moment’s hesitation he had purchased the Vanderlyn. Dundee had grasped his arm warmly at the news, his eyes stern with pleasure, but Emmeline had thrown him a stricken look. To give it all up, all of it, just like that! It was too sudden, too strange, too, well, impulsive and unsettling and confusing. At the very least he ought to incorporate and raise the money for his scheme by selling shares of stock. That way, if he decided — but Martin wouldn’t hear of it. He had gone off in a useful and profitable but finally boring direction and wanted no distractions. With the help of a quarter-million-dollar bank loan he planned to undertake a major renovation. Emmeline had resisted his plan that she leave the small world of the cafe to become the new food and beverage manager of the Vanderlyn; he had begged Dundee to speak to her. After a week of hesitation she had come round, though not without conditions of her own: she was willing to leave the cafe, but insisted on starting in a humbler position, perhaps as a kitchen helper. Martin countered by offering her the position of part-time day clerk and part-time secretarial assistant.

The morning after the purchase, Martin stepped into Mr. Westerhoven’s office, closed the door, and offered him the newly created position of consultant to the manager, at a handsome salary. To his surprise Mr. Westerhoven held up a hand to silence him, closed his eyes, and tendered a flowery resignation. He would not impede the stream of progress, not he; no no, not he; it was time to step aside, to make room for young blood, for the new generation. In the brown room, cluttered with bronze statuettes and shelves of knickknacks, it struck Martin that Mr. Westerhoven looked like a large, bewildered boy. His thin coppery hair was combed neatly to one side, his old-fashioned morning coat had a fresh white carnation in the buttonhole, but his gaze kept drifting about the room, and he had a new habit of tugging at an earlobe and pulling at the end of his nose.

The next morning Martin introduced to the front-office staff and to the chief members of housekeeping, engineering, food services, and accounting the youthful new manager, Mr. James Osborne, whom he had hired away from a small but fashionable uptown hotel that two years earlier had undergone a successful renovation which included the transformation of the top floor into artists’ studios. Martin had no plans to introduce artists’ studios into the Vanderlyn, but he wanted a man who, while understanding what was charming in a somewhat antiquated hotel, wasn’t afraid of change. Osborne, who was thirty-two, had an air of vigorous confidence that was only enhanced by the touch of gravity in his manner. He put Martin in mind of a successful young banker.

“Anyway,” Martin said, “it’s something I understand from the inside. And it’s fresh air — fresh air. I couldn’t breathe any more in the cafe business.”

“You talk a lot about that,” Emmeline said.

“About breathing?”

“About not being able to breathe.”

“Do I? That’s what it comes down to, I guess. Being able to breathe.”

“That sounds like an epigram, Martin. But we’d better get back to the lobby and check up on those carpenters.”

Martin, who counted on Emmeline’s advice, was throwing himself into every detail of the renovation. He planned with Osborne the strategy for closing off a block of rooms while keeping the hotel open, conducted the team of interior decorators through the entire building from basement to roof, and approved the replacement of steam engines by electric motors to drive the elevator drums. He visited furniture wholesalers with an eye to selecting beds and dressers, discussed with Dundee the wiring of the entire building for electricity, studied the plan for the installation of telephones, talked with the wood-finishers in the lobby who were repairing the carved window-moldings and the upholsterers in the basement who were recovering parlor chairs. He visited plumbing supply companies and examined porcelain bathtubs with brass fittings, polished brass tumbler-holders and cigar rests, copper-lined ash and cherry water-tanks with nickel-plated chain and pull. From years of listening to the complaints of hotel guests, Martin knew that the bathroom loomed large in the imagination of Americans. And it was precisely here, as he wandered among displays of veined marble sinks and brass towel racks, that he was struck again by a contradiction in the architecture of hotels, a contradiction that was nothing but the outward expression of a nation’s inner desire. For here the technologically modern and up-to-date clashed with a certain nostalgia of decor: bathrooms with ingenious American flush toilets and needle showers were given a suggestion of the European palace by decorations such as pilasters of Siena marble and shower hoods of carved mahogany. The modern luxury bathroom mirrored the modern hotel lobby, with its combination of electric lighting and old-fashioned carved ceilings, but it was also cousin to the modern department store, where terra-cotta scrollwork and grand marble stairways clashed with electric elevators and brand-new plate-glass windows that displayed the latest folding cameras with rack-and-pinion focusing movement, waterproof overcoats with patent ventilators, and self-threading sewing machines in drop cabinets. Far from deploring such contradictions, Martin felt deeply drawn to them, as if they permitted people to live in two worlds at once, a new world of steel and dynamos and an older world of stone arches and hand-carved wood.

In addition to the cigar stand, florist’s shop, newsstand, and railway-ticket office in the lobby, Martin wanted to install a barbershop and a beauty parlor. He was persuaded by the team of decorators to preserve the classic lines of the lobby and locate the new shops in the basement, in an area that could be made easily accessible by a new stairway. In the dim-lit basement passages, not yet wired for electric light, Martin imagined a subterranean street of small shops, stretching into the distance. The plan for a row of shops was opposed by Dundee as impractical, but in addition to the barbershop and beauty parlor Martin insisted on having space for a small pharmacy to supply the needs of guests, as well as for a notions shop filled with the buttons and shoelaces and ribbons that were perpetually in demand. By leasing the four shops he would quickly get back his investment; and he began to wonder whether he might be able to open a small gift shop, with sepia postcards showing views of El stations and East River ferries, sets of porcelain salt-and-pepper shakers shaped like bellboys and maids, cast-iron Broadway cable-car banks, tin wind-up express wagons drawn by two horses, toy wooden barges loaded with little barrels and sacks, and optical fountain pens that revealed, when you unscrewed the cap and held it to your eye, a tiny color transparency of the Brooklyn Bridge against a brilliant blue sky.

As carpenters began hammering in the basement, as plumbers and wallpaper hangers set to work in the first block of sealed-off rooms, Martin devoted a few hours each day to wandering the floors of the great department stores that had enchanted his boyhood. The attraction of the great emporiums, though it remained in some sense obscure to him, in another was luminously clear: he admired the stores as immense solutions to problems of organizing space, of bringing together in a complex harmony an astonishing number of often clashing notes. What struck him wasn’t so much the mingling of diverse merchandise in a great flow of departments as the ingenious inclusion of elements that ought to have clashed but didn’t: the tearooms and cafeterias where customers refreshed themselves in order to gain more energy for buying, the organ in the rotunda, the odd services — a bank, a barbershop — that seemed to make of each grand emporium a little enclosed city, a roofed city with an intricate system of elevators and stairs moving shoppers vertically through a world of attractions. One department store contained a dentist’s office, another a small theater. The idea was to lure customers in by means of skillfully arranged display windows and then to persuade them that they never had to leave, since everything they desired was immediately at hand. It struck him that what the stores really ought to do, if they wanted to keep customers there for as long as possible, was add several hundred parlor-and-bedroom suites. And as Martin pursued such thoughts, again he was struck by the kinship between the hotel and the department store, for each sought to attract and hold customers, each sought to be a little world in itself, each brought into a single large structure an immense number of juxtaposed objects serving a single idea. The department store and the hotel were little cities within the city, but they were also experimental cities, cities in advance of the city, for they represented in different forms the thrust toward vertical community that seemed to Martin the great fact of the modern city. That thrust was now being expressed in new forms, based on steel-frame construction, which allowed newspaper offices and insurance buildings to rise above the towering spire of Trinity Church; and Martin imagined great structures hundreds of stories high, each a city in itself, rising across the land.

From such imaginings he returned to the renovation of his six-story hotel, a small affair after all, though on the spot it loomed large enough. The operation was going to take longer than he had thought, some six months at least, as teams of workers moved by service elevator through carefully isolated portions of the hotel. Plumbing, Osborne explained, posed the trickiest problem. Since plumbing systems were vertical, it was difficult to leave access along all corridors while delivering materials to the bathrooms; the solution was a system of hoists erected outside the hotel, which permitted pipes and sinks to be brought in through the windows. Osborne showed himself to be expert at meeting complaints about noise and inconvenience, though even he proved helpless before the fury of guests when one of the new electric elevators stopped for six hours because of an electrician’s blunder. Martin followed closely the remodeling of rooms, sometimes with the exasperated sense that what was really needed was the utter annihilation of all the rooms in the hotel and their rebuilding in new patterns. One day, struck suddenly by the dullness of the etchings that hung in every room, etchings that showed the Grand Canal in Venice, or the Tower of London, or the Arc de Triomphe, he ordered them replaced by contemporary chromos: skaters in the Central Park, tugs and barges passing under the Brooklyn Bridge, fashionable women strolling along Ladies’ Mile, the yellow Moorish tower on Madison Square Garden with the gilded statue of Diana on top. Meanwhile he followed the expansion into the basement with sharp interest. He urged the carpenters to find room for another shop, and another, and he began to think of his basement shops as the Vanderlyn Bazaar, an attraction he planned to advertise.

The meticulously planned ad campaign had already begun in the daily papers and a handful of weeklies, where the New Vanderlyn was said to combine the amenities of a vanished way of life with every up-to-date convenience, but Martin planned to intensify the campaign as the renovation went forward. He needed some striking angle, some catchy device, and in moments of exuberance imagined painting the facade blue or erecting on the roof a fifteen-foot statue of George Washington or Pocahontas. A new hotel on Central Park West had advertised a croquet court on its roof — surely he could find something of the kind for the poor old Vanderlyn. But the poor old Vanderlyn resisted the showy and flamboyant, and Martin confined himself to a continual pressure of newspaper and magazine advertisement and a specially printed brochure that he distributed to the new travel agencies and made available in neat piles on the front desk. Extravagance would be confined to the official opening day, when he planned to release ten thousand balloons into the sky, hire an orchestra to play in the lobby, and invite journalists to a special dinner where he would pass out sealed envelopes, twenty of which contained a ticket allowing a free visit to the new barbershop.

Martin had fallen into the habit of discussing every detail of the business with Emmeline, who in turn reported the reactions of guests to the long renovation. “You’re going to make a success of it,” she said, “though of course you know that. You can tell they like it, like being in on big goings-on, even if they complain about little things. And the questions about the basement! A woman told me the other day she’d heard you were building a department store under the hotel.”

“Now there’s an idea,” Martin said. “I wish I’d thought of it myself.”

“Oh you have,” said Emmeline, “you have.”

She had thrown herself into her new job at the front desk with splendid zest. Martin saw that she was taken with the life of the lobby, with the sense of many lines of energy converging toward her from the elevators and the street, with her responsibility for providing comfort for strangers — and at the same time she revealed a gift for sympathy, for swift intelligent response, entirely lacking in an otherwise highly competent clerk like John Babcock. Her duties as part-time assistant consisted in accompanying him to wholesale furniture dealers and plumbing supply companies, making herself familiar with the working of all departments of the hotel, and reviewing accounts submitted to the Chambers Street office. And she was teaching herself how to type. She confessed to Martin that she had slipped his old book out from under Caroline’s radiator and replaced it with a block of wood.

One morning as Martin was riding up to the fifth floor to inspect a newly decorated parlor-and-bedroom suite, the elevator boy stopped at the fourth floor and opened the car for a handsome woman in a black coat and black hat who asked the boy if the car was going down. When she learned it was going up, she entered with a look of such irritation and impatience that Martin said, “Take us down, Howard. I’m in no hurry.” He was in fact in a hurry. The woman glanced at him sharply and said nothing, but at the ground floor she turned to him and said, “I appreciate your consideration,” and gave him a searching look before striding out of the car. He had seen her once or twice in the lobby, sitting in a straight-backed chair and glancing at the lobby clock. The next day he saw her at a desk in a writing room, and the day after that he met her on the stairs, which he was climbing two at a time. “If you have a minute, Mr. Dressler,” she said, “I need to discuss something with you. Kindly follow me.” He wondered, as he followed, whether she had known who he was all along or whether she had made it her business to find out. In her parlor she turned to give him the same searching look he remembered from the elevator, a penetrating and almost imperious look that seemed to be asking a question and making a demand. A sense of marvelous danger hung in the air. Martin, tense with energy, followed her into the bedroom, where she turned with a look of challenge. He was surprised by the length of her forearms, by the matting of blond hairs on her stomach, and by a kind of cool, wary ardor; she kept her combs in her hair and scarcely moved under him, though he noticed a line of dampness by the hair of her temple. Her long satiny body reminded him of a splendid bridge or a high, glittering steel beam swinging through the air. When he saw her later that day, sitting upright in the lobby, in a dark blue dress and small hat with a half veil, she gave him a quick hard smile and averted her eyes. The veil made it seem as if the upper part of her face were dissolving. He became aware that he had stopped and was looking at her, and immediately he continued across the lobby to the front desk, where Emmeline said, “I hope you’re not falling in love with her too.”

“I like that ‘too,’” Martin said.

“Oh, we’re all in love with her, aren’t we, John. She looks like some wonderful sort of panther.”

“Yes ma’am,” said John Babcock with a tight smile.

An odd shame came over Martin, who suddenly disliked the thought of himself and the woman, her long forearms, the line of dampness at her temple; he disliked having to conceal these details from Emmeline. He glanced over at the lobby, but the woman was no longer there.

“She vanishes,” Emmeline was saying. She lowered her voice melodramatically. “The ghost of the Vanderlyn.” Martin saw her staring at him, her eyes shining with innocent mischief, with pleasure; some instinct in her had penetrated his secret, though she herself knew nothing about it. And an irritation came over him at her ferreting out his secret and not knowing it, at his many wives, all sliding into one another, at the vanishing woman who now reminded him a little of Caroline, despite the broad shoulders, for the pale hair at the temples was Caroline’s hair and the look of slight strain between the eyes was Caroline’s look. Then she was an emissary of Caroline’s, sent by her to trap him on the stairs.

“So long as she doesn’t vanish without paying for her room,” he said.

That night he felt a slight awkwardness on seeing Caroline, an awkwardness immediately replaced by irritation as she failed to ask him about his day, for he thought he might have confessed to her what he had done. But she was tired, a tiredness came over him at her tiredness, and he slipped as if comfortably into his marriage tiredness, waking for only a moment to notice a faint change, a little hairline fracture in the smooth surface of his marriage, through which other women might now enter, even if they were only emissaries of Caroline, ghost-Carolines who lured you into a room and turned to place both hands on your shoulders as they began to dissolve under the blue mist of their veils.

As the official date for the completion of the New Vanderlyn and the opening of the Vanderlyn Bazaar drew near, Martin was seized with restlessness. The New Vanderlyn gave every promise of success. The last block of rooms had been reserved far in advance, the new bathroom fixtures were praised by every guest, the grand old lobby had been skillfully remodeled with period furniture meant to summon up the amenities of a vanished past and with new steam radiators hidden behind Japanese screens, people in the street stopped in to inquire about the Vanderlyn Bazaar, and though Martin had no doubt of the success of his venture, he was aware of a sense of impediment, of dissatisfaction. His feeling reminded him of something, and one morning as he walked from the El station to the Vanderlyn and passed a cigar store it came to him: he recalled standing in the window of his father’s store, stepping among the neat wooden boxes of cigars. What the window had needed was a dramatic new treatment, an eye-striking all-new display, but hampered by the heaviness of his father’s disapproval, by the sheer weight of things-as-they-were, he had produced his inadequate cigar tree. Now he had created the New Vanderlyn, a far better cigar tree, a successful cigar tree that was going to make a success of the old hotel — but in truth he was still stepping carefully among the neat cigar boxes.

One afternoon not long after the official opening of the New Vanderlyn, in October 1897—it had been a success, as he had known it would be, and the shops of the Vanderlyn Bazaar were bursting with business — Martin rode uptown on the Sixth Avenue Elevated, which above Fifty-third Street continued along the double track it shared with the Ninth Avenue line. He did not get off until the station at Ninety-third Street. It was a clear cold blue day. He walked toward the river and then turned uptown along the winding avenue that ran along the park. It was rumored that an apartment house would soon rise among the stone mansions of the avenue, but blocks of vacant lots and high rocky outcroppings still gave a touch of wildness that invigorated him. On a sloping side street he stopped at a hoarding and looked over the rough boards at an excavation in progress. A yellow steam shovel sat at the bottom of a pit of blasted rock and hard-looking chalky dirt. The dipper handle of the shovel swung slowly and stopped over a truck heaped with dirt and rocks. Dirt poured from the dipper and slid down the sides of the heap in the truck. A dark horse with a dirty white mane that looked like thick pieces of yarn snorted as it lifted and lowered a hoof. A workman in a blue wool cap sat on a rock eating an apple. Perhaps because of the cold clear air and the clear blue sky, Martin had the sense that he could see things very clearly: the woolly yellowish-white hairs in the horse’s mane, the workman’s reddish hand matted with yellow hairs, wheel ruts in the dirt ramp leading down to the pit, the shadowed hole drilled in a boulder for a stick of dynamite, the glistening black letters of the company name on the yellow cab of the steam shovel, the smokelike rippling shadow cast on the rocky dirt by bursts of steam from the shovel’s stack. He felt clear and clean and calm. You dug into the ground and made a hole, and from that hole a building grew — or a wondrous bridge. In his childhood, workmen had been lowered to the bottom of the East River in two great wooden caissons, and from there they had dug down through mud and clay and sand and boulders to a depth of more than forty feet. From those two holes under the river the towers of the great bridge had slowly risen up, block by granite block. Now buildings with frames of steel were rising above the height of the mighty bridgetowers. All across the city steam shovels were digging, truck horses pulling, boom derricks swinging. The edge of a pink poster flapped on the fence. Steam poured from the shovel, the truck horses snorted and stamped, a small bird lit on the hoarding and at once rose up, flying higher and higher into the bright clear sky.