Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer

14. The Eighth Day of the Week

ON SUNDAY MORNINGS THE VERNONS NEVER came down to the lobby before ten o’clock. Martin, who always woke early, left the hotel at half-past five in the morning with the sense of seizing for himself a small and private day within the larger day, a kind of eighth day situated between Saturday and Sunday. In his private morning, before the official part of the day that he spent with the Vernons, he would walk down to the railroad yards and watch freight cars being loaded onto a barge destined for one of the Jersey rail docks, or go up along the Boulevard where shanties still stood in the high weeds of unsold lots, or walk up and down blocks of small shops on Amsterdam and Columbus. About eight o’clock he would stop at a restaurant and have a breakfast of eggs and steak, folding a newspaper under the side of his plate and glancing out the plate-glass window at the avenue. Dundee had agreed in principle to putting money in an uptown lunchroom and it was important to choose the location with care. After breakfast Martin liked to walk along the Central Park, admiring the handful of hotels among the undeveloped lots on the other side of the street, and then he would take a crosstown car to Eleventh Avenue and walk down to the park by the river. From time to time he would consult his pocket watch, and a little before ten he would return to the lobby of the Bellingham.

One Sunday morning when Martin returned to his hotel he saw that the women had not yet come down. Instead of sitting in the lobby with his newspaper he decided to go up to his rooms and change his shirt, for the August morning had grown hot. The door in the corridor stood partway open and in the lock was a big key with an oval piece of stamped metal hanging from it. As he entered the sunny parlor he saw through the open door of his bedroom part of a tin bucket with a mop-handle slanting up. “It’s all right, Marie,” he called out, sitting down in his flowered easy chair beside the sofa. “I’ll wait.” He had spoken a few times with Marie Haskova, a serious heavy-shouldered girl of sixteen or seventeen in a drab black uniform with a white apron, who wore a foolish-looking dustcap on her thick black hair. She had a room in the attic at the top of the hotel, where most of the maids lived. Once or twice from her stubborn face he had wrested a sudden swift smile, which had quickly faded, leaving her with her habitual look of faint bitterness about the mouth, of heavy melancholy in her eyes. Once she had told him that her father was a stonecutter who lived in a room over a saloon near the Brooklyn shipyards. She had been born in Bohemia but could not remember it. In his flowered armchair Martin tried to imagine Bohemia, which his mother had visited as a child, but he could see only vague forests and misty darkness. Irked at his ignorance, and feeling a touch of pity for the girl, Martin walked over to the doorway and leaned a shoulder against the jamb. “I walked down by the river,” he said, “and I tried to imagine what this city will look like in twenty years. I like to do that, and I’m good at it. But today something happened: I couldn’t do it. Everything stayed just the way it was. I thought: this is how it is for most people. Things just being there.” His words irritated him, as if he had meant to say something quite different, which he could no longer remember. Marie Haskova had looked up as he stood in the doorway and then returned to her work, smoothing down a sheet and tucking it tightly under the mattress. She looked tired and hot in her black dress and slightly soiled white apron, with its drooping bow in back, one of whose loops was much bigger than the other; a hank of black hair hung along one cheek. “It was peaceful down there,” Martin said, suddenly exasperated at this dull block of a girl with her busy hands and expressionless face, at himself, at the red-and-black feather duster lying across the edge of the dresser and the tin bucket with the slanting mop. He took a step into the room with a strange feeling of exhilaration — light poured through the open window. Marie Haskova stopped moving, as if she were listening very hard. In the sudden stillness Martin felt a change in the atmosphere, as sharp and definite as a darkening of sunlit air, and he knew with utter certainty that he could walk across the room to Marie Haskova and place his hand on her arm, her warm upper arm, and draw her to the bed, that in the stillness she was simply waiting for him to complete his walk across the room to her. Even as his thigh muscles tightened in preparation for the walk across the room, where there was a girl waiting for him, a big-hipped girl with a soft-looking back and hair like black fire, Martin felt a hesitation. What surprised him wasn’t the hesitation, already hardening into a refusal, but his sense that the refusal was a burst of loyalty — not to his future bride, closed in her long dream, but to his bride’s sister, with her intelligent, watchful eyes. In the stillness that at any moment would dissolve, that even now was changing, Martin felt an outstreaming of tenderness toward Marie Haskova, with her large pale hands and bitten-down nails. It was all strange, as strange as the sun slanting across Marie Haskova’s broad shoulders, the glitter of black-beaded pins in her hair, the startling blackness of her hair, the red and black feathers of the duster, the reddish light coming through the edge of the heavy red curtains. Then there was only the slow, heavy movement of her body as she resumed her work, the clank of the bucket, the sound of a steamboat from the river.

When Martin rode down in the elevator and entered the lobby, he saw the three Vernon women sitting in chairs by a window. They looked up at him one after the other: first Margaret Vernon, with her merry dark eyes, then Emmeline, with a slight frown, then Caroline, brushing his face with her drooping glance.

“What shall it be today, ladies? The Boulevard? The river? The Battery? The Park? Excursions on the half hour to points of interest historical, geographical—”

“My, but aren’t you the energetic one today,” Emmeline remarked.

“That sounds like a criticism,” Martin said, thrusting his hands into his pockets and breaking into a laugh.