Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer

5. Room 411

THE HAMILTONS, HUSBAND AND WIFE, HAD returned to the Vanderlyn for one of their sudden and prolonged stays, and among the bellboys, the room clerks, the chambermaids, the elevator boys, the waiters, and the cooks, the grumbling grew louder and more insistent. Even the assistant manager, a master of the unruffled countenance, had moments of abruptness, even of snappish ill temper. The trouble wasn’t the husband, an impeccably tailored graying man with plump well-manicured hands and a boyish face, who was always removing his gold watch from his waistcoat pocket, snapping up the lid, staring at it with a slight frown, and holding it to his ear, and who never stayed for more than two days before dashing off on mysterious business trips to Philadelphia or Baltimore. No, the trouble was the wife, Mrs. Louise Hamilton, a buxom bustling handsome dark-haired lady whose large black eyes were skilled in the expression of disdain, outrage, dissatisfaction, and astonished disbelief that the simplest request had been handled with such ineptitude. She sent back food, discovered dust on the mantel shelf over the parlor hearth, complained to the management about noise in the halls, and rang incessantly for the bellboy — a towel was missing, a drawer refused to open, she needed still another pitcher of ice water in order to endure the terrible stuffy warmth of her wretched rooms. If she was bad when her silent husband was with her, she was worse when he was away, for then she had nothing to distract her from the unsatisfactory state of her surroundings, from the mouse-sized clumps of dust under the bed to the inedible white paste that was set on her plate at dinner under the laughable pretense that it was fresh scrod. The elevator boys made unpleasant jokes about her bursting bodice and plump rump, the bellboys complained about her iron stares and stingy tips; and it was said that her quiet husband with his boyish smile fled her side not for business in Baltimore, but for the brothels off Sixth Avenue near the roar of the El.

To all such talk Martin listened with a certain detachment, for in his year at the Vanderlyn he had learned to distrust the gossip that swirled around hotel guests, while something reserved and respectful in his nature prevented him from enjoying mocking allusions to the bodies of women. Besides, he felt a kind of sympathy for Mrs. Hamilton, the subject of so much malicious talk. Yes, she was fussy and difficult and cranky, and yes, she liked to queen it over the hotel staff, but it was also true that the scrod had been served lukewarm, as the chef had admitted, that the maids, as he himself well knew, were often careless about dusting, that service in the Vanderlyn might be improved in all sorts of ways. It was also true that Mrs. Hamilton never spoke rudely to Martin himself, exempted him from her general disdain, treated him with a kind of haughty politeness that, without being in the least friendly, carried with it a hint of approval. Once or twice he defended her to Charley Stratemeyer, who said she was a high-class bitch who walked as if she had a poker stuck up her corset — what she needed was a well-aimed fist to knock her high-class teeth down her well-fed throat. Martin, who had noticed in his mild-mannered friend a tendency to speak violently and contemptuously of women, let it go, while in his mind he leaped in front of Mrs. Hamilton, as if to protect her from a blow to the face.

And then one day Mrs. Hamilton came down with a cold. If she was bad before, she was impossible now, pushing the buzzer every five minutes to demand pitchers of ice water, softer towels, throat lozenges, cough medicines. The bellboys were up in arms; Martin offered to go up each time, even when it wasn’t his turn. In the dim parlor darkened by lowered shades and drawn curtains, Mrs. Hamilton in a long dress half-sat and half-lay upon the sofa, her legs stretched across the cushions and covered with a small blanket, one arm lying limply across the back of the sofa, her head flung back, her eyes half closed, her other hand dabbing at her nostrils with a scented handkerchief. “Please set the pitcher down over there, Martin, no, a little closer. And if you’d be kind enough to fill my glass, but not to the very top: of course I know I can trust you to do it just right. I must say it’s a comfort, Martin, when one is simply slaughtered with aches and fevers, to know that someone in this disastrous place understands how to pour a proper glass of water. I really do sometimes think there must be a conspiracy in this impossible hotel to kill me through sheer blundering stupidity. My hanky is sopping, simply sopping. Do you think you could fetch me another from my bureau, in the upper left-hand corner of the second drawer from the top? But of course you remember: you never forget. It isn’t every woman who would trust a stranger in her bedroom, Martin. Thank you, young man. Did you close the drawer all the way, but not too tight? These drawers have an unfortunate tendency to stick: have you noticed? My pulse is racing. I’m sure I’m coming down with a flu. Are the windows closed tight? A draft would kill me, I’m sure. It would finish me off. I really do think my pulse is dangerously fast. Come here, Martin. Feel my wrist. Oh, for heaven’s sake, I’m not going to eat you up. I’m not going to devour you. And yet one might say that your hesitation is a sign of good breeding, Martin: you respect people, I’ve noticed that. Tell the truth, now. Is my pulse dangerously fast? Conceal nothing from me. Would you mind fetching me my shawl? I feel such a draft.”

As her cold worsened, her demands increased; no sooner had Martin returned to the lobby and sat down on the bellboys’ bench beside the check-in desk than the buzzer would ring: Room 411. Martin was irked, and even took to rolling his eyes in mock exasperation, but in his mind he defended Mrs. Hamilton: her husband was away, she was alone and sick in a big city, for all her air of crossness and imperiousness she really seemed quite helpless. But this was not all of it. Martin had never met anyone so demanding, so difficult, as Mrs. Hamilton, and in part his patience, which at times surprised him, came from a desire to meet a challenge, to rise to an occasion. And there was something else, which he sensed without quite putting it clearly to himself: Mrs. Hamilton, this powerful and far from unattractive woman, was drawing him close to her in some puzzling, secret way. She gave him an occasional look that made him lower his eyes, sent him into her dusky bedroom for scented handkerchiefs, seemed, without moving from her sofa, somehow to be circling round him — and this sense of a secret adventure, of something intimate and slightly dubious that must never be spoken of, something dusky and hidden that at times made a tremor ripple across his stomach, drew him willingly to her side.

And she was burning up: there was no doubt about it. Over and over again she took her temperature and rang for Martin to read the thermometer, since she could never find the miserable column of mercury in the insufferable glass rod. She waited anxiously while he stood by the edge of a curtained window and turned the glass rod slowly in his fingers. “You see,” she said, “I really am burning up,” as the number rose to 101, to 102, to 102.5. Martin handed her the two blue pills prescribed by her doctor, dampened towels that she pressed to her forehead.

On the third morning of her fever, when Martin entered the dusky parlor with a pitcher of ice water at seven o’clock, he saw Mrs. Hamilton lying on the sofa with a blanket pulled up to her chin and her head resting on two bedpillows in ruffled shams. Martin poured a glass of water, full but not to the very top, and set the pitcher down carefully on the table behind her head. She lay with heavy-lidded eyes, her hands pale and almost luminous on the dark blanket; below her eyes the skin was waxy and blue-dark. “I’ve had a simply abominable night, Martin. I feel heavy as a lump of lead. Be a dear boy and check the curtains, I feel a wretched draft. I really don’t think I can bear much more of this wretched abominable fever. I really do believe I won’t ever get well. I’ll just lie here and burn to ash and be swept out with the fireplace cinders. They can boast till they’re blue in the face about the incandescent lamp, but they can’t even invent a cure for a simple fever. That doctor is the most stupendous fraud — even his whiskers look false. My pulse is racing; I have a throbbing in my head. Everything’s burning, burning — and cold, I feel cold. Are you cold? I feel it’s all up with me, Martin; it’s far more serious than these fools can possibly know. Everything seems like a dream. That’s what they say, you know: life is a dream. As in that child’s song — how does it go? Merrily merrily. Life is but a dream. My pulse is absolutely racing. If you could bring me a glass of ice water: yes. Just hold it: right there: yes: and lift my head. That’s it. Now set the glass down and take my pulse. Is this a dream? My heart’s racing, racing: can’t you feel it? Can’t you? Silly boy, what’s wrong with you? Here, place your hand here, on my poor racing-away heart. Yes. Yes. Don’t you know anything? Come here now. Here now. Yes.”

And Martin entered her fever-dream, at first awkwardly, then easily: it was all very easy, easy and mysterious, for he barely knew what was happening, there in the dusk of the parlor, in a world at the edge of the world — Mrs. Hamilton’s dream. The silk-smoothness of her skin surprised him, and under the skin was bone, lots of bone, skin stretched over bone, and then a sudden warm wet sinking and sinking, and somehow he was standing in his uniform with an empty pitcher in his hand and Mrs. Hamilton was looking at him with wide-open eyes over which the lids came slowly down halfway. And she said, “Mind you don’t catch a fever, Martin,” and raised a forefinger that she waggled lightly. Then her eyelids closed decisively.

Later that morning, when Martin returned to the bellboys’ bench from delivering a pitcher of ice water to another floor, he learned that Mr. Hamilton had just returned from Baltimore or Philadelphia and was riding up in the elevator at that very moment. The buzzer from Room 411 remained silent, a cause for ribald comment by the bellboys and Charley Stratemeyer, and later that day as Martin was delivering a tray of drinks to the fifth floor he suddenly sneezed and nearly upset a glass. By four in the afternoon he felt heavy-headed; that night his temperature rose to 103. He struggled to lift his head from the pillow, and finally sank back into confused dreams. When he woke it was growing dark. He returned to work the next morning, despite burning eyelids and a heaviness in the temples; the Hamiltons had checked out the day before. Mr. Henning took him aside and said that Mrs. Hamilton had commended Martin to him — he wished to pass on the compliment. “A good job, my boy: you’ve done well. A difficult proposition, if I may say so. Well now: don’t let it go to your head.” “I won’t, sir.” Martin felt drowsy; he could feel his heavy eyelids closing, but forced them open.