Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer

25. A Fifth Chair at Dinner

CAROLINE’S FRIEND JOINED THEM AT DINNER in the main dining room the following night, and as she sat down Martin realized that he had seen her somewhere in the hotel, a tall, thirtyish woman, though for the life of him he couldn’t recall where. It was Margaret who explained: Claire Moore lived on the sixteenth floor around a bend in the corridor. She was a late riser, like Caroline — or, as Claire Moore herself laughingly put it, like all widows without a guilty conscience — and she had passed Caroline several times in the corridor before introducing herself at the elevator late one morning. The next day she had invited Caroline to her apartment for a cup of tea, and after that it was luncheons, afternoon outings, a great visiting back and forth. And Martin was surprised: he had expected someone proper and boring, someone trained to talk about weather and food and to grow gradually invisible in company, and instead he found himself in the presence of a lively woman with a strong laugh in a strong throat, an air of humorous self-assurance, and a habit of sharp observation. She was handsome in a sudden, erratic way, her face with its strong bones bursting into moments of radiance as her long-fingered hands swept through the air and her eyes glistened with energy. Her hair — Caroline’s hair, he saw immediately — moved when she laughed, and it struck Martin that motion was her element: she darted even as she sat, a bird in flight, a flock of birds. And always she glanced admiringly at Caroline, drew her into the circle of her anecdotes, praised her hair, a ribbon, the color of her clothes; and throwing back her handsome head, she laughed her full laugh, drawing back her lips from her very white teeth and showing the strong column of her trachea against the skin of her throat.

Now every night at dinner a fifth chair sat at Martin’s table, awaiting Claire Moore, who arrived with Caroline a little late, a little breathless, glowing with health as if she had just come from a long brisk walk by the river, and who even as she began to sit was already describing the day’s outing: they had gone shopping for hats, they had gone walking in the park, they had found a simply wonderful little out-of-the-way lunch place with the most imaginative sandwiches, they had braved the crowds of a tremendous tearoom that seated seven hundred. Think of it: seven hundred! Caro had been a brick — a brick, really — and she had seen the glorious humor of it: seven hundred ladies in a department store, taking tea. For the joke of it was of course that tea was an intimate occasion, which had been spread out and extended until it was like — well — as she had remarked to Caro at the time — it was like rowing in a boat the size of a barge. Here Martin begged to disagree. He himself found nothing humorous about sheer size, which on the contrary produced a sensation of power, of majesty — had anyone ever laughed at the Brooklyn Bridge? But of course he understood she wasn’t referring to size alone, but to a special development that he himself had given some thought to: the expansion of small private events into large public ones. A family hotel was a perfect example. Here the guest willingly gave up certain privacies, such as that of dining alone, in exchange for the convenience of public service. And in doing so, an entirely new idea was born: the large public dining room, which wasn’t a grotesque, bloated version of an intimate family dining room, but something entirely new, something massive and modern, and no more comic than an El track or a twenty-story office building or a transatlantic steamer.

Martin, surprised by his little outburst, was gratified and at the same time oddly irritated by the sudden serious attention with which Claire Moore listened to his words; and when he stopped speaking she struck her hands together, shook back her hair, and looking Martin directly in the eye said she would certainly think twice before daring to attack a tearoom again.

Martin wasn’t sure what to make of this powerful, laughing woman, who had taken up with Caroline and suddenly was there, at dinner, inescapably. She whisked Caroline from one shop to another and reported tirelessly the slightest incident of their daily adventures, suffusing every small thing with the drama of her temperament, while Caroline seemed uplifted on the waves of Claire Moore’s unremitting attention.

“I don’t know what to make of her,” he said to Emmeline as they strolled along a secluded path in the underground courtyard.

“I don’t like it,” Emmeline said.

“It?”

“This sudden friendship. Her attachment to Caroline — her attachment to us. She herself—” Here Emmeline gave a shrug.

“She seems fond of Caroline. I can’t imagine what they talk about.”

“Oh, she’s probably fond of her, in a way. Caroline draws people. She doesn’t need to say much. You see how they are at dinner.”

“I think I like her. She’s good for Caroline. She gets her out.”

“It won’t end well,” Emmeline said.

The friends, Margaret Vernon reported, had become inseparable, simply inseparable. They visited back and forth a hundred times a day, they attended afternoon performances at the Black Rose or the New Lyceum, when they weren’t going off on one of Claire Moore’s thousand little excursions. It was the best thing in the world for Caroline, who needed nothing but a little encouragement before she warmed to people; it was so good for her to get out of herself, to say nothing of getting out of her apartment. She simply adored the theater. And Claire was a good friend; you could tell she cared about Caroline, asking her opinion about things, admiring her, worrying when Caroline was out of sorts. Martin, watching the friendship out of the corner of his eye, was certain of only one thing: Claire Moore was most definitely there, occupying the fifth chair at dinner, a powerful and laughing woman. She was attentive to Caroline, praised her repeatedly, though not quite as often as at first, reported their little adventures, drew Caroline skillfully into the circle of her talk, which would widen suddenly to include Martin and Emmeline and Margaret, rippled with words and laughter; and from time to time, in response to a witty turn of phrase, Caroline would lightly smile.

For if it was true that Claire Moore had taken up with Caroline, watched her admiringly, seemed to dote on her, it was also true that Caroline in her quieter way was preoccupied with Claire Moore. Martin could feel her soaking up Claire Moore, absorbing her moods, taking her in. Sometimes Caroline would raise her hand in a way Claire Moore had; once, drawn for a moment into the swirl of Claire Moore’s talk about a play they had seen, she began to speak and broke off to search for a word, and the precise tilt of her head, the precise manner in which she tightened her eyebrows in thought, brought Claire Moore sharply to mind. But more than this was the intensity with which Caroline listened to her friend, watched her even when she wasn’t watching her, seemed to take in the talk through the tendons of her neck. She appeared impatient sometimes, as if she wished the dinner would end, and it was true enough that Claire Moore seemed to enjoy prolonging the dinners, seemed to enjoy talking to the others and especially to Martin, whom she liked to draw out on the subjects of modern living, the proposed subway system, steel-frame architecture, the future of the Upper West Side. As Martin spoke, he could feel Claire Moore listening closely to him, penetrating him with her attention. Two chairs away, Caroline sat with her eyes lowered, one hand resting tensely beside her plate.

“Caroline’s jealous of you,” Emmeline said one evening after Margaret had retired upstairs.

“That’s ridiculous,” Martin said, but even as he spoke he saw that it wasn’t. Claire Moore was looking at Caroline a little less often, turning a little more often in his direction; without in any sense ignoring Caroline, she was shifting her very slightly from the center of her attention. Martin, who was used to being flirted with by attractive women, detected in Claire Moore no surreptitious looks, no secret signs; but he could feel in her, as she sat down to dinner, as she placed her forearms on the table, as she turned to him with a question and shook back her hair, a quickened interest.

“I’m not mistaken about these things,” Emmeline said firmly. It was plain for all to see that Caroline had a little “crush” on Claire Moore, who was tiring of her; she’d had little crushes before, little intense friendships with women that flared up because of someone’s interest in her. Take the case of Catherine Winter. At the age of twelve Caroline had taken up with Catherine Winter, a slightly older girl with jet-black hair, a sharp wit, and a passion for music, as well as a gift for drawing cruelly satirical sketches of family members. But above all Catherine Winter had the gift of bringing Caroline out of herself, of animating her, of filling her with feelings. The girls quickly became inseparable. The trouble was that whereas Catherine Winter was enough for Caroline, Caroline wasn’t enough for Catherine Winter, who was drawn to Caroline’s quietness but made friends easily and liked social occasions. Caroline, who wanted Catherine Winter all for herself, began making demands, but demands were precisely what one didn’t make of Catherine Winter; there was an argument, tears, and then — silence. Caroline refused to talk to Catherine Winter again, who for her part threw herself into the social round. Caroline shut herself up in her room and wouldn’t speak to anyone for a week — not even to Emmeline, whom she always turned to in the end. Emmeline herself had grown to be a watcher of Caroline’s moods, a student of her sorrows; and while she suffered for Caroline, she had also begun to sense in these little friendships a dubious element. For if Caroline, through her friendships, was trying to achieve a kind of independence from her sister and mother, her efforts took the form always of a new dependence, a kind of desperate fanatical clinging, which was bound to end in defeat. But Caroline wasn’t the only victim, for from the beginning Emmeline had sensed in those friendships an attempt, hidden perhaps from Caroline herself, to make Emmeline jealous, to hurt her by parading a rival. Oh, make no mistake about it, there was a touch of vindictiveness in Caroline’s little passions.

Martin was surprised by the turn in Emmeline’s analysis, which was accompanied by a slight change in her face, as of a tightening of unseen muscles. And feeling a sudden impulse to protect Caroline from a kind of passionate harshness in her sister’s pursuit of hidden things, he tried to turn her attention away from Caroline to Claire Moore, who, he argued, whatever else might be said about her, couldn’t really be blamed for striking up a friendship with Caroline. But Emmeline would have none of it. Claire Moore, she said, was a bored, idle woman with too much time on her hands, who had taken up Caroline as a hobby. Caroline had been glad to be taken up, but she had begun to make demands of her own, she had begun to be difficult, had begun to be Caroline — too difficult, too Caroline by far, for the likes of Claire Moore, who, to be fair to her, had seemed to like Caroline at first. Now she was tiring of her, she had used her up, she found Martin more amusing. For Claire Moore was a kind of woman that Emmeline had observed more than once — a woman empty within, hungry to be filled, a vampire woman, drinking the blood of victims.

Martin, struck by something Emmeline had said, asked suddenly: “And do you think Caroline is too difficult for me?”

Emmeline considered it. “I didn’t think she would be,” she then replied.

The end came quickly: one evening when Martin sat down to dinner the fifth chair was empty. Caroline said nothing. The empty chair remained for two more nights and then disappeared.

“She’s dropped her,” Emmeline said.

“You were right, then. Poor Caroline!”

Well, yes, Emmeline said, of course: poor Caroline. But had he ever considered that Caroline’s suffering had an effect on those around her, an effect of which poor Caroline could not be unaware? For with her pains, her headaches, her insomnias, her suffering, poor Caroline drew on the sympathies of those who cared about her: she became the center of her family’s attention. For in her quiet way, poor Caroline did like to be the center of attention. Yes, you could almost say that poor Caroline tyrannized over them through suffering, punished them with her pain.

A few nights later, Claire Moore appeared with a black-haired woman at another table, across the room, laughing and shaking back her hair. It struck Martin that if she had dropped Caroline she had dropped him too, and he had so strong a desire to be at that table that he had to force himself not to glance across the room like an injured lover. Caroline sat looking at her plate; two little lines of strain showed between her dark eyebrows. Emmeline sat looking at Caroline.

There was a sharp bang. Martin started.

“What’s that?” cried Margaret Vernon.

“It’s nothing,” Emmeline said.

Caroline, reaching for her glass of water, had knocked over the salt.