Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer

28. The Grand Cosmo

MARTIN SAT IN A CORNER OF THE ROOF GARDEN of the New Dressler, in a gazebo striped with sun and shade, and raised to his eyes a pair of Jena field glasses. He had ordered the glasses from a German optical company, which advertised a finish of bright black enamel on all metal parts, high-power achromatic lenses ground from special optical glass manufactured in the Jena glass factory, and a covering of fine-grade morocco leather. Through the high-power lenses he directed his gaze eight blocks north toward a group of workmen who were standing near a heavy mat draped over a group of boulders in a deep excavation. They were blasting deeper, day after day, far down, for the new building was to have twelve underground levels and a basement; the consulting engineers had said it could be done. Aboveground the building would rise thirty stories, surpassing the New Dressler not merely in size but in every other way, for Martin had leaped beyond the idea of a hotel to something quite new. The leap had been greeted coldly by Lellyveld, who had refused to support the project unless Martin agreed to grant Lellyveld and White a forty percent interest in the building and the power to appoint the head of accounting — a deal strongly opposed by Rudolf Arling on the ground that Lellyveld wanted to gain control of the Cosmosarium and infect it with his mediocrity. Martin accepted Lellyveld’s offer instantly.

He could no longer discuss such matters with Emmeline, who after the inept shooting had resigned her position at the New Dressler to devote herself entirely to the care of Caroline. He had counted on her to return, after a short rest, but it became clear that a change had come over Emmeline: she refused to be alone with Martin, scarcely permitted herself to look at him, and so thoroughly played the part of the guilty woman taken in adultery that he became uneasy and irritable in her presence. As for Caroline, who confessed that the gun had come from Claire Moore in the days of their friendship, for Claire Moore believed in a woman’s right to self-protection, the shot had served to jolt her from her sofa-grave; she had returned to her apartment and her marriage bed as if she had come home from a little vacation at the seaside, with a touch of color and a handful of shells. But Martin, who was not unhappy to see an end to the sofa nonsense, felt a slight heaviness in the air of the apartment, now that Caroline had returned. Caroline alone, Caroline without the promise of Emmeline, was a quiet darkening of the air, a delicate and fine-dropped rain, lightly falling. More and more he found himself lingering in his rooms in the New Dressler, one of which he supplied with a bed. At first he had walked down to the Vernons for dinner each evening, with the old pleasurable sense that he was visiting them as a group, was somehow courting them all over again, but Emmeline’s fussy and over-anxious attendance on Caroline, Margaret’s habit of handling her pearls or fiddling with her dress sleeve as she glanced idly around the room, Caroline’s murmured sentences punctuated by long silences, all this grated on his nerves. He began working in his rooms through dinner or taking his meals alone at the New Dressler, so that he found himself eating with the Vernons only once or twice a week.

And Martin was busy: as the excavation deepened, as carpenters began to construct wooden forms for the foundation walls, he moved about the city, visiting art museums, waxwork museums, dime museums that displayed four-legged chickens and bearded ladies, the new nickelodeon parlors with rows of hand-cranked machines, photograph studios, scientific exhibitions, fortunetelling parlors, the mezzanines of public buildings where he looked down at patterns of people moving in parallelograms of light cast by great windows — and one day, up at the building site, a row of cement trucks with revolving drums stopped one after another beside an open space in the hoarding. All over the city, workmen were breaking up streets. Martin liked to stand on boards thrown across torn-up avenues and peer into deep ditches heaped with rubble; sometimes he could see the arch of a subway tunnel. It pleased him that the city was going underground, that even as it strained higher and higher it was smashing its way through avenues and burrowing through blackness; and Martin imagined a new city growing beneath the city, a vast and glimmering under-city, with avenues and department stores and railroad tracks stretching away in every direction.

One day not long after the new building had begun to rise above street level, Martin decided to pay a visit to the old Bellingham Hotel. He hadn’t been down that way in more than a year. He had been thinking lately of Marie Haskova; perhaps she would like a job in one of his buildings, he wondered why he hadn’t thought of it before. The idea pleased him, even excited him; he wondered how she was getting along, he hadn’t really treated her very well, after all she had been a kind of friend, even if their friendship had been ambiguous from the start. As Martin walked down Riverside toward his old street he recalled his wedding night, the sharp-turning stair-flights dropping away, the dark corridor lit by dim gas-jets, her weary startled eyes. She had taken him by the arm, she had led him in. Had he married her that night? Then his other marriage was only a dream-marriage, and Marie Haskova was his bride. He tried to remember the way she looked, the swift sad smile, the slight bitterness about the mouth. It all seemed long ago, more distant than his Sunday walks with his mother to Madison Square Park. In the warm air that smelled of asphalt and riverwater Martin turned onto his old street. He saw at once that he had made a mistake, he had turned onto a different street, and that was strange, it was downright baffling, because he never made mistakes like that, surely he hadn’t forgotten the number of his old street. And even as he stood puzzling it out, looking about and frowning in the bright sunlight, he felt ripples of anxiety passing across his stomach, for already his stomach knew what he himself was only beginning to realize. No, he hadn’t made a mistake, it was his old street sure enough, but the Bellingham was no longer there. In its place stood a line of five-story row houses with wrought-iron balconies and street-level front doors. He walked up the cut-stone sidewalk, looking at the doors with their brass knockers and electric bells, and an absurd idea came to him: behind one of those doors was the old Bellingham Hotel, with the little parlor off the main lobby. He became aware of someone looking down at him from an upper window and he walked quickly past. The Bellingham had simply vanished. That was the way of things in New York: they were there one day and gone the next. Even as his new building rose story by story it was already vanishing, the trajectory of the wrecker’s ball had been set in motion as the blade of the first bulldozer bit into the earth. And as Martin turned the corner he seemed to hear, in the warm air, a sound of crumbling masonry, he seemed to see, in the summer light, a faint dust of old buildings sifting down.

A fear came over him that the old Vanderlyn was gone, even though he had walked past it not three weeks ago. In its place he saw a heap of rubble, with Mr. Westerhoven’s rubbers sticking out. But when he arrived, the Vanderlyn was still there. At lunch Walter Dundee complained that motorcars were worse than the El trains when it came to scaring horses. Only the other day he had seen a drayhorse start up, toppling a barrel onto the street. Martin saw the horse in Harwinton’s ad, the bright red coal burning in its back, the eyes wild with terror. Dundee’s blue eyes were sharp, but the skin of his neck was slack, and there was an occasional note of disapproval in his voice; he spoke of retiring soon, fixing up a house he had his eye on, out in Brooklyn. He asked Martin in a reserved way how the new building was coming along. He asked after Martin’s wife. And a restlessness came over Martin, through the smoky air he glanced at the clock, somewhere a woman began to laugh, a little rippling phrase that rose in a series of four notes and repeated itself, over and over again, and Martin became enraged: what was so funny, why couldn’t she stop laughing like that? But when Dundee set down his empty beer glass streaked with foam and said he ought to be getting back, Martin felt a desire to hold him there, surely it wasn’t necessary to rush away, they had barely begun to talk. But Dundee had already risen to his feet. “Take care of yourself, Martin,” he then said, holding out his hand, and Martin was moved: after all, they had once been partners, even though a lot of water had flowed under the bridge since then. And at the phrase, which he thought distinctly, an image of the great bridge rose up, as he stood by the rail of the ferry with the spray in his face and looked up at the sunny arches, the swoop of the cables, and the dark bridge-pier, sun-striped, where gulls flew in and out of light and shade.

From his lookout station on the roof garden of the New Dressler, Martin watched the skeleton of the new building rise, the Cosmo, the Grand Cosmo: steel beams held by wire cables at the ends of booms swung through the air, cutting torches flared, plumbers and electricians walked on the floors below the ironworkers, and far away Rudolf Arling had only to raise his eyes to see through his window the Brooklyn tower of the suspension bridge, while in another part of town Harwinton was planning a three-part campaign. At lunch Harwinton spoke of image clusters, groups of unrelated images that, presented together, took on special associations. Martin noticed that Harwinton never aged. In thirty years he would have that same look of a schoolboy with blond-lashed blue eyes and small neat teeth. His short straw-colored hair would turn gray so gradually that no one would notice. Omnirama, Cosmacropolis, Unispeculum, Cosmosarium, Stupendeum: he had proposed a long list of names, fretting over each in turn, until Martin woke in the night with the right name ringing in his mind. Consider the fountain pen, Harwinton said. A pretty woman bends over a sheet of paper, smiling as she writes with her fountain pen — all very elementary. Now consider the same woman sitting in a field of daisies. She smiles dreamily as she touches the cap of the pen to her cheek. In the background you see a steamer’s funnel, with white smoke puffs blown back against a blue sky. Instantly the pen is associated with the field and the ship, which is to say, with romance and adventure. Buy this pen and you buy love. Buy this pen and you buy life. For the Grand Cosmo he had prepared several sketches with image clusters designed to pique interest. The question at this stage was simply to prepare the public, to create expectation, for after all the Grand Cosmo was so all-embracing, so overwhelming, that one couldn’t present it all at once, like a safety razor or a dental cream. Martin looked through a number of sketches and stopped at one. In the foreground stood a skyscraper concealed by an immense white cloth. In the background, small but visible, rose an Egyptian pyramid, the Eiffel Tower, and one tower of the Brooklyn Bridge, draped in cables and suspenders. And Martin was startled: it was as if Harwinton had divined his love for the bridge, as if the image of the bridge suddenly bound him to Harwinton. Was it possible that even Harwinton felt the power of the bridge? But Harwinton, if he felt anything, felt it as a private citizen; as an advertising man he saw the world as a great blankness, a collection of meaningless signs into which he breathed meaning. Then you might say that Harwinton was God. That would explain why he never grew old. The thought interested Martin: he was having a ham sandwich and a cup of coffee with the Lord God, King of the Universe, a youthful American god with light blue eyes and blond lashes. But of course God could not believe in the Grand Cosmo, just as He could not believe in the universe, a blankness without meaning, except as it streamed from Him. For only human creatures believed in things: that much was clear.

As the Grand Cosmo rose to the thirtieth floor, as the steel skeleton began to disappear beneath its sheathing of rusticated stone, ads began to appear in newspapers and weekly magazines, showing the building with the cloth lifted to various heights; and around the half-concealed structure stood phrases such as THE GRAND COSMO: CULTURE, COMMERCE, AND COMMODIOUS LIVING.

The Grand Cosmo opened on September 5, 1905, five days after Martin’s thirty-third birthday; the delay was caused by a flaw in the refrigerated-air system, which circulated cool air through wall ducts on every floor and subterranean level. Martin, who had reserved ninety percent of the living quarters for permanent residents and ten percent for transients, noted that fewer than half of the spaces had been rented, but he was certain that the failure was due to the strangeness of the Grand Cosmo: people didn’t know exactly what it was. He had forbidden Harwinton to advertise it as a hotel; Harwinton had been forced to make use of teasing hints, such as THE GRAND COSMO: A NEW CONCEPT IN LIVING. The final stage of the campaign had emphasized the completeness of the Grand Cosmo, the sense that it was a world in itself, a city within the city. Harwinton, in his customary way, presented his central idea in a double manner that could only be called contradictory. For if on the one hand he made the claim that the Grand Cosmo, insofar as it contained everything the urban resident could possibly desire, was nothing less than the city itself, so that to dwell within its walls was to be, at every moment, at the very center of the city, yet on the other hand he emphasized that the Grand Cosmo was set apart from the city, he presented it as an exotic place that provided sensations unavailable to the mere city-dweller unfortunate enough not to enter its enchanted walls, he did everything in his power to turn the Grand Cosmo into an attraction, an eighth wonder of the world, a place you simply had to see. These two contradictory images of the Grand Cosmo, which at first threatened to lead the campaign into confusion, were brilliantly reconciled by Harwinton in a third image that began to emerge more strongly: the Grand Cosmo as a place that rendered the city unnecessary. For whether the Grand Cosmo was the city itself, or whether it was the place to which one longed to travel, it was a complete and self-sufficient world, in comparison with which the actual city was not simply inferior, but superfluous.

The newspaper reports were on the whole favorable, though Martin detected a frequent note of puzzlement or bewilderment: the critics, while admiring particular effects, seemed uncertain when the question arose of what exactly the Grand Cosmo was. Some called it a hotel; a few, taking a hint from the ad campaign, called it an experiment in communal living. What struck most of the first wave of observers was the overthrow of the conventional apartment. Instead the Grand Cosmo offered a variety of what it called “living areas,” in carefully designed settings. Thus on the eighteenth floor you stepped from the elevator into a densely wooded countryside with a scattering of rustic cottages, each with a small garden. The twenty-fourth floor contained walls of rugged rock pierced by caves, each well-furnished and supplied with up-to-date plumbing, steam, and refrigerated air. Those with a hankering after an old-fashioned hotel could find on the fourth and fifth subterranean levels, which formed a single floor, an entire Victorian resort hotel with turrets and flying flags, a grand veranda holding six hundred rattan rockers, and a path leading down through an ash grove to a beach of real sand beside a lake. Still other floors and levels offered a variety of living arrangements: courtyard dwellings (four to six irregular rooms arranged about a central court landscaped with trees and ponds), screen enclosures (large living areas supplied with folding screens that might be variously arranged to form temporary, continually changing divisions), and perspective views (room-like enclosures with windows that provided a three-dimensional view of a detailed scene resembling a museum diorama and supplied with live actors: a jungle with stuffed lions, a New England village with a blacksmith and a spreading oak tree, an urban avenue). In every case an attempt was made to abolish the corridor, to interrupt monotony, to overcome the sense of a series of more or less identical rooms arranged side by side in a rectangle of steel.

The theme of abolishing the expected was taken up by a number of writers, who reported that in order to avoid the tedium of a fixed architectural scheme, the Grand Cosmo employed a staff of designers, carpenters, landscape artists, and architectural assistants who roamed through the building and decided on changes: the removal of an inner wall, the construction of a new summerhouse or tunnel, the transformation of a cafeteria into an Italian garden or a croquet lawn into a street of shops. It was therefore possible to say that the Grand Cosmo was never the same from one day to the next, that its variety was, in a sense, limitless.

While taking note of the unusual living arrangements, and ignoring conventional features such as lobbies, cafeterias, and a very efficient laundry service, many observers preferred to comment on the large amount of space devoted to services and entertainments not generally associated with hotels: the many parks and ponds and gardens, including the Pleasure Park with its artificial moonlight checkering the paths, its mechanical nightingales singing in the branches, its melancholy lagoon and ruined summerhouse; the Haunted Grotto, in which ghosts floated out from behind shadowy stalactites and fluttered toward visitors in a darkness illuminated by lanternlight; the Moorish Bazaar, composed of winding dusty lanes, sales clerks dressed as Arabs and trained in the art of bargaining, and a maze of stalls that sold everything from copper basins to live chickens; the many reconstructions of Hidden New York, including Thieves’ Alley in Mulberry Bend, an opium den, a foggy street of river dives (the Tub of Blood, Cat Alley, Dirty Johnny’s), and bloody fights between the Bowery Boys and the Dead Rabbits, with a nearby shop called Hell-Cat Maggie’s in which one could purchase brass fingernails and have one’s teeth filed to points; the Pantheatrikon, a new kind of theater in which actors on a circular stage surrounded a central auditorium that revolved slowly; a Séance Parlor with heavily curtained windows, a spirit cabinet of black muslin, and a round table at which sat, in a high-necked black dress, the medium Florence Kane; the Salon of Phrenological Demonstrations, presided over by Professor Geoffrey St. Hilaire of Geneva; the reconstruction of a gloomy Asylum for the Insane, with barred windows and shafts of pallid moonlight, in which more than two hundred actors and actresses portrayed patients suffering from more than two hundred delusions of melancholia, including the sensation of being on fire, of having one’s legs made of glass, of being possessed by the devil, of having horns on the head, of being a fish, of being strangled, of being eaten by worms, of having the head severed from the body; the Temple of Poesy, in which twenty-four young women, led by Miss Fanny Parker, all wearing white Grecian tunics and garlands of green satin vineleaves around their heads, recited one after the other, for an hour at a time, twenty-four hours a day, the best-loved poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Whitcomb Riley, John Greenleaf Whittier, and William Cullen Bryant; the Palace of Wonders, in which were displayed a two-headed calf, a caged griffin, a mermaid in a dark pool, the Human Anvil, a school of trained goldfish fastened by fine wires to toy boats in order to enact naval battles, Little Emily the Armless Wonder, the Heteradelph or Duplex Boy with his second torso and his second set of legs, and the infant Adelaide, a four-year-old musical prodigy who played the complete piano sonatas of Mozart on a specially constructed piano with sixty-four keys; the Museum of Waxworks Vivants, in which waxworks, automated waxworks operated by concealed clockwork, and living actors impersonating waxworks represented tableaux such as The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln by the Actor John Wilkes Booth, Gorilla Seizing a Young Girl, Lazarus Rising from His Grave, and Lizzie Borden Murdering Her Father and Stepmother in Fall River, Massachusetts; the Grand Cosmo Cigar Store, composed of many dusky rooms each opening into the next, as far as the eye could see, including a gaslit workroom where cigars were rolled by authentic German cigarmakers, each room containing one or more wooden Indians automated by clockwork and performing motions such as lifting cigars to their lips and blowing smoke rings, raising and lowering tomahawks, spitting tobacco juice into a brass cuspidor, and in one case walking slowly up and down the length of the room with a menacing expression; elaborate stage sets representing Civilizations of the Solar System, such as the white catacombs of the Selenites, the Venusian gardens, and the glowing palaces of the Empire of the Sun; the Hall of Optical Novelties, including Zemmler’s Eidothaumatoscope, a machine for viewing objects just beyond the edges of inserted photographs; a reconstruction of the Heavenly City, based on the reports of more than one hundred mystics; a new kind of department store, designed to disrupt the monotony of displayed merchandise by attractions such as meandering aisles, festive plazas containing striped palmist tents and crystal-gazing booths, and a pygmy village with real pygmies making spears; the Laboratory of Psychical Science, including Professor Blackburn’s Ectoplasmosphere (a large hollow glass sphere for attracting and collecting ectoplasmic projections for scientific analysis), a curtained booth for the study of automatic writing in which Miss Eva put visitors in contact with a Persian spirit called Aouda, and a number of recently invented machines for measuring the claims of spiritualism, such as a Phantothermoscope for registering the presence of departed dear ones and a mahogany Telekabinett in which electrodes were attached to the temples of clairvoyants in order to display their mental images on a ground glass screen; the Cine-Theater, which showed short films (four to eleven minutes) featuring tricks and illusions and provided by Black Star Films, including “The Decapitated Man,” “Mesmer’s Castle,” “Cleopatra’s Resurrection,” and “Tchin-Chao the Chinese Conjuror”; the Phantorama; the Théâtre des Ombres; the Wonders of the Fairy World, a reassembled plot of genuine Irish forest and glade, including trees and turf shipped in an ocean liner and an authentic woodland stream transported in thirty cedar barrels, the whole illuminated by stage lighting that exactly reproduced the conditions of a moonlit summer night, in order to assist the visitor who wished to search for the fairies who had been observed dancing in a ring on that very plot of ground on May 26, 1904, in County Sligo; and the Theatrum Mundi, a globe-shaped chamber in which black-and-white images from every corner of the known world were projected in ever-changing cinematographic montage, showing oncoming trains, the faces of English coal miners, Amazon alligators, cyclists in bloomers, polar bears, the Flatiron Building, a Dutch girl watering a tulip.

Even as journalists attempted to describe the nature of the Grand Cosmo, rumors about the colossal building had begun to circulate in the cheap press, especially rumors about the many subterranean levels, which were said to house darker and more disturbing entertainments as one descended lower and lower. The rumors at first irritated Martin, for hadn’t the Grand Cosmo banished the division between upper and lower that had been a feature of the old-fashioned Dresslers? — but Harwinton was pleased: rumor of any kind was a mark of success, to say nothing of its usefulness as a highly effective and entirely free form of advertisement. Martin, looking at Harwinton’s cool blue blond-lashed eyes, recalled the plump lady in the fountain pen ad, bending over the desk. It struck him that Harwinton himself had probably had a hand in the spread of certain dubious stories, which in any case had begun to lead a life of their own among guests and visitors and the tabloid dailies, and were even being reported, with a certain disdain, by more responsible journalists as evidence of the building’s power to attract attention. It was said that rat-baiting pits flourished in dark corners of the lowest levels, where specially trained rat dogs fought bloody battles against batches of a dozen rats; it was said that a branch of an upstate asylum permitted its inmates to roam the dark in solitary gloom, garbed in the costumes of Napoleon, Marie Antoinette, Jack the Ripper, Edgar Allan Poe. One article reported that the lowest level housed a labyrinthine brothel whose ornate furniture, flowery wallpaper, formidable madam, and thirteen-year-old girls had been smuggled across the Atlantic in the hold of a tramp steamer. Such rumors were to some extent constrained by the very existence of the Grand Cosmo and its verifiable number of subterranean levels, but as if in an effort to evade such constraints, a more fantastic variety of rumor soon began to grow in the rich, shapeless blackness beneath the lowest subterranean level.

It was said that under the thirteenth level a maze of interconnecting passageways had been constructed, each with stairways leading down to still lower levels, unimaginably far down; and there in the world beneath the world, which yet was only the deepest cellar of the cloud-piercing Cosmosarium, black gardens of imagination bloomed. It was said that in the darkness of that sub-subterranean realm, in a forest the color of black tourmaline, wild children, abandoned at birth and speaking no language, were raised by wolves and lived the life of animals. It was said that in moss-stained halls at the ends of crumbling corridors, statues tormented with human longings came to life, roamed the dark with impassioned eyes, and flung themselves upon human lovers, after which they wandered sluggishly until they assumed new and troubling marble poses. There, beneath the world, white and peaceful cities rose in distant river valleys, beckoning the weary of heart and the sick of soul. There, in the Garden of Black Delight, monstrous jet-black blossoms exuded dangerous perfumes, which produced visions of such searing ecstasy that afterward one lost all desire to live. In the House of Metamorphosis, deep in a cave under a hill whose top was an island, Chinese masters trained in secret academies could transform the traveler into a lion, a butterfly, an angel, a waterfall. It was said that to descend into the world beneath the world was to learn the secrets of heaven and hell, to go mad, to speak in tongues, to understand the language of beasts, to rend the veil, to become immortal, to witness the destruction of the universe and the birth of a new order of being; and it was said that if you descended far enough, down past obsidian-black rivers, past caves where dwarves in leather jerkins swung pickaxes against walls veined with gold, down past the lairs of slumbering dragons whose tails were curled around iron treasureboxes, past regions of ice and fire, past legendary underworlds where the shadowy spirits of the dead set sail for islands of bliss and pain, down and down, past legend and dream, through realms of blackness so dark that it stained the soul black, you would come to a sudden, ravishing brightness.

But whether the writers spoke of the imaginary world beneath the building, or of the many worlds within, they all acknowledged, even in their puzzlement, a sense not simply of abundance or immensity, but of the inexhaustible. It was as if, despite the finite number of stories (thirty) and underground levels (thirteen, including the basement), the Grand Cosmo produced in the visitor a conviction that it could never be fully explored, that around the next corner or down the next stairway existed something unexpected, exciting, and never seen before.

And Martin was pleased: the Grand Cosmo was making an impression. If the impression was still a little unclear, if people remained a little uncertain what to make of it all, that was only to be expected, for after all the Grand Cosmo was a leap beyond the hotel, a leap that was bound to take some getting used to. The building was attracting attention as a vast curiosity, but once people took up residence they would understand that the living arrangements of the good old family hotel were no longer possible.

Martin himself had moved from his rooms in the New Dressler to a living space on the twenty-ninth floor of the Grand Cosmo, where a series of folding screens decorated with Japanese hermits, arched wooden bridges, and waterfalls led past parlor chairs and a concealed bed to a desk with a view of the river. Beyond the farthest screen was a copse of artificial trees, through which a path led to the elevators.

Martin looked forward to the attack in the Architectural Record, which did not appear for six weeks and then proved even harsher than he had imagined. For the writer, while briskly acknowledging certain minor technological accomplishments, such as the mechanical singing birds in the parks, refused to see in the Grand Cosmo anything but a culmination of deplorable tendencies. The Grand Cosmo, the article argued, represented in an extreme form the age’s love of the grandiose and the eclectic; it brought together so many clashing elements, in so massive a space, as to produce an impression of confusion, of uncertainty. For what, after all, was the Grand Cosmo? Insofar as it pretended to be a place in which people might wish to live, it was uninhabitable. It seemed to combine elements of the hotel, the museum, the department store, the amusement park, and the theater in a colossal enclosure that itself drew on so many styles as to make the worst excesses of late Victorian eclecticism seem a chaste instance of neoclassical restraint. Although the extravagance of the Grand Cosmo, its flamboyance, its sheer hunger for the all-inclusive, might in some sense be deemed praiseworthy as an expression of energy, that extravagance and flamboyance and hunger had been carried to such heights of excess as to turn into the grotesque. What was striking was how the habit of excess, which expressed itself most readily in the form of architectural gigantism, manifested itself in the smallest details, so that the brass doorknobs of the cellar workshops, the numerals in the panels above the elevators, the artificial leaves on the forty-six varieties of artificial tree, were wrought with a Byzantine elaboration. There was thus a paradoxical sense in which the minutiae of the building were expressions of the architect’s obsession with the gigantic, and a corresponding sense in which the sheer immensity of the structure was an expression of a miniaturist’s tendency toward obsessive elaboration. Both senses betrayed a yearning for the exhaustive, which was the secret malady of the age. In this way the Grand Cosmo might be understood as the ultimate architectural expression of its time, after which a rigorous simplification was inevitable. The article ended with a plea for a return to moderation, reason, and simplicity in the architecture of public buildings.

Martin read the article with close interest, for it seemed to him that the writer, without a shred of sympathy, had penetrated deeply into the nature of the Grand Cosmo. He wondered whether the addition of sympathy would have permitted a still deeper penetration, or whether sympathy would have prevented understanding by getting in the way. It was just the sort of thing he would have liked to discuss with Emmeline, but he could no longer speak to Emmeline in the old way. She was closed to him, she was blind and deaf and dead. And in one sense that was quite right and proper, for during the course of his marriage she had gradually replaced her sister, and now she must efface herself in order that Caroline might regain her rightful place in the scheme of things. But in another sense it was cruel and wrong, for Caroline could not rise above something cramped in her nature, so that by self-effacement Emmeline was sacrificing a rich form of life to an impoverished one. And therefore the fault must surely be his, for marrying the wrong sister. But at the thought of marrying the right sister an irritation came over him, for he felt repelled by the thick eyebrows, the broad back, the strong hands with their blunt fingernails. For he had been able to desire only the pretty and delicate sister, the sister with the difficult twist in her, the sister lost in dream, who lay motionless beneath him and turned away in silence. And an anger came over Martin, at the mumbo-jumbo of love, the damage of it.

He could discuss the article in the Architectural Record only with Rudolf Arling, who strode up and down among his ornate tables heaped with statuettes and ivory animals, denouncing the writer as a fool. Martin, surprised not by the outburst but by his own severe lack of sympathy for it, defended the writer in silence and understood that Arling sought praise, only praise, and could not tolerate one jot of disapproval. The little ivory animals, the statuettes, the curved legs of the tables, all this had begun to remind him of something, and as Arling paced back and forth, throwing out a hand in angry emphasis, it came to Martin: it was the familiar atmosphere, the secret but unmistakable impression, down to the curving table legs themselves, of Mr. Westerhoven’s office. And so the fiery architect with the glittering gray eyes was an emissary of Alexander Westerhoven’s — he might have known. It would simply be a matter of time before Arling accepted none but the safest commissions. Martin himself had been stung solely by the charge that the Grand Cosmo was uninhabitable; despite a new burst of publicity, only forty-nine percent of the living spaces had been rented.

He became reluctant to leave the Grand Cosmo, as if the act of passing through its doors were a form of abandonment, of betrayal. The Grand Cosmo needed him, needed him far more than Caroline or Emmeline, who had married each other and shut him out. For really there was no room for him in that dark marriage of sisters, each deep-twisted into each. He imagined Emmeline sitting in his flowered armchair, stepping into a pair of his pajamas, slipping into his side of the bed. He saw his empty chair at the dining room table in the Dressler. Slowly it began to dissolve, to shimmer like a mirage — and suddenly it was gone, like Claire Moore’s chair, like the Bellingham Hotel.

One evening Martin was sitting in a small glass-walled alcove of the main lobby, where he could have the double pleasure of being alone and at the same time of participating in the movements of the too-peaceful lobby beyond the glass. He was about to rise when the sense of Emmeline’s absence came over him, came so suddenly and so completely that it was as if he hadn’t known before that she was gone. It wasn’t so much a sensation of missing her as of feeling her absence, sharp and definite as a presence — an absence that continued to fill him until he could feel it as a pressure in his chest and a tingling in his fingertips, as if he were being invaded by something, which streamed steadily into him through a little hole somewhere. It felt like a heaviness, this in-streaming of absence. And indeed he could feel himself bent a little awkwardly in his chair, like a man he had once seen who had suffered a stroke in a lobby armchair and continued sitting awkwardly upright and even smiling, despite the ferocious pain in his arm and chest. In the glass of the alcove he could see the faint reflection of his face, through the face he saw a few lobby chairs and a pillar, and the thought came to him, even as Emmeline’s absence began to recede, that he had in fact grown transparent, during the moment he had been entirely filled with her absence.

He took up shifting residence in the Grand Cosmo, living in unrented courtyard dwellings, an unrented cottage in the wooded countryside of the eighteenth floor, an unrented room in the resort hotel on the fourth and fifth subterranean levels. He waited for the public to come. It was bound to come. It had always come. He rode the elevators, strolled through the Pleasure Park and the Palace of Wonders, bought a bag of cherries in the Moorish Bazaar and spat the pits into a stream beside an artful oak tree on the eighteenth floor. He sat in lobbies, tearooms, reading rooms, gardens with weathered marble statues, lecture halls, mossy glades, public parlors — sat listening to residents and visitors, speaking with staff, pondering improvements, observing the change of weather through many windows: gray skies and heavy snow, a sudden blue day, sheets of snow. He had been prepared to operate in the red, two years wasn’t uncommon, but the Grand Cosmo was losing too much too fast. On March 5, six months after opening day, he was summoned to a meeting of management in the executive suite on the second floor. The manager, backed by the head of accounting, who kept tapping the ball of a heavy finger against a thick sheaf of pages, urged him to drop his insistence on long-term leases. They were losing nearly thirty thousand a week — a ruinous rate. Irritably Martin agreed. That afternoon he instructed Harwinton to initiate a new campaign of four-color posters and half-page newspaper ads aimed at transient residents. Within a month the ads brought an increase in rentals to seventy-two percent of capacity, but during the spring and summer the numbers gradually diminished, despite new ads in weekly magazines. By September 5, the first anniversary of the Grand Cosmo, rentals had fallen to fifty-five percent of capacity — a rate that could only spell disaster. The manager told Martin that the Grand Cosmo seemed to confuse people — it didn’t appear to be the sort of place they wanted to check into for a few days on a quick trip to the city. And Martin could only agree, for after all the Grand Cosmo was not a hotel, not a hotel at all, but something quite different. One day in a small park on the twenty-third floor he overheard a woman say to a friend, “I simply love it here. I wouldn’t live anywhere else in the world. And you never have to go out, if you don’t want to,” to which her friend replied, “I love visiting here, Julie, but I could never stay, it’s too, it’s too—” “Yes?” the first woman asked, but already they were passing out of earshot along a leafstrewn path. Martin followed them through the deserted park but could hear only murmurs, laughter. For the next two days he brooded savagely over the unfinished sentence as if it contained the secret he had been looking for; one night it struck him that his search for the unspoken words was an acknowledgment that the Grand Cosmo was failing.

Martin strode through the floors of his inexhaustible building, searching for flaws, imagining new enticements. Was it the sense of the limitless that prevented people from flocking to the Grand Cosmo as they had to the Dressler? In the largest hotels, vast spaces were divided neatly into small, repeated rectangles — could the secret of such places be monotony itself? Did the public, along with its craving for the up-to-date and the brand-new, also crave not simply the familiar, but the repetitive, the reassuring sense of boredom provided by multiple sameness? Did the Dressler and the New Dressler flourish not because of their innovations, but precisely because they failed to depart very far from the familiar pattern of the good old family hotel?

It occurred to Martin that perhaps he was being punished for something. The punishment, if that’s what it was, struck him as entirely proper, though he wondered a little about the crime. Was he being punished for marrying Caroline and not Emmeline, the pretty sister and not the plain? He had married the sister in dream, the princess asleep in her tower, ignoring the living sister by his side. Was it because he too was a dreamer that he had been drawn to her then, five hundred years ago? She had never woken up. He had stopped trying. Perhaps he was being punished for not loving Caroline enough. Or was it for not desiring Emmeline in the first place? Was that his crime? Or was it the knock on the door of room number 7, on his wedding night? But maybe he was being punished for something much different. When his father grew angry he would harden himself, as if he were holding in an explosion. Was Martin being punished for not stepping carefully among the cigar boxes? Was that it? For surely the Grand Cosmo was an act of disobedience. Or was he being punished for something deeper than crime, for a desire, a forbidden desire, the desire to create the world? For of course only God and Harwinton could do that. Anyone else was bound to fail.

On the first Monday in December the head of accounting met with Martin to urge cuts in staff and the elimination of all inessential services. He further proposed that the six top floors be closed to residents and rented as business offices after a thorough renovation. Removing a bundle of papers from a leather case, he smoothed it over and over with the side of a hand and pushed it toward Martin, who sat down wearily in a chair, began to bend over the papers, and stood up with a curt refusal. He took the elevator down to the laundry, where he walked with his hands behind his back, soothed by the rumble of machines, the heat and steam of winding passageways. The next afternoon he found himself sitting in a public parlor on the twenty-sixth floor, looking at the first snow falling lightly. The lightly falling flakes of snow seemed the dust of vanished buildings; he understood that the Grand Cosmo was a commercial failure and would vanish like the Bellingham.

And again he strode through the floors of his building, but the doors, the walls, the lobby chairs, the artful gardens with their pools and statues, all turned as he watched the flakes of lightly falling snow. He remembered his ride with Emmeline to the building site of the Dressler, the man knocking his stick against the side of his snowy shoe, white ice on the black river: one by one the mansions of snow and ice would melt away, leaving no trace of what had once been there.

He came to the main lobby and sat down heavily in a corner chair. Behind the high windows snow was slanting down. One by one the Dressler, the New Dressler, and the Grand Cosmo would melt away, like the Bellingham before them. Marie Haskova had melted away, his marriage had melted away, Walter Dundee, Louise Hamilton, Bill Baer, gone, all gone. He would have liked to talk to Emmeline, but she too had melted away. And at the thought that Emmeline had melted away, a pity came over him, for poor Martin, lost in the falling snow. Poor Martin! He saw Emmeline standing beside his coffin, Caroline in a black veil looking coldly down. His face was calm in the coffin. He recognized that calm face. Tecumseh.

By the end of January it was clear that he would no longer be able to meet his payments. On the morning of February first he went over the figures with the head of accounting, consulted briefly with the manager, took a stroll along a forest path, and stepped into the brown dusk of the Grand Cosmo Cigar Store, where under the fierce gaze of an Indian who kept raising and lowering a tomahawk he purchased a first-rate Havana. He ran the cigar slowly under his nose and placed it in his jacket pocket as if he were saving it for a celebration. In the afternoon he canceled his account with Harwinton and informed the front office that the Grand Cosmo would no longer accept short-term guests. Only permanent residents who signed long-term leases would be admitted to the community of the Grand Cosmo. The general public would no longer be permitted to make use of the main lobby, of the ground-floor cafeterias and concessions, of the Moorish Bazaar and the winding aisles of the department store, but were to be excluded entirely from the domain of the Grand Cosmo. For the Grand Cosmo was not a tourist attraction or a hotel for transients, but a world within the world, rivaling the world; and whoever entered its walls had no further need of that other world.

The sense of failure filled him with an odd energy — he wasn’t going to sit in a melancholy stupor and watch the snow come sifting down. For after all he had done what he wanted to do, it could not have been different, his only error was to have dreamed the wrong dream. And Martin embraced his failure, threw himself into the idea of failure as into a new and soaring creation.

In order to prevent foreclosure, he offered Lellyveld and White a forty-nine percent interest in the New Dressler. He was determined to keep the Grand Cosmo open, to hasten its rush toward disaster; and he was prepared if necessary to transfer to Lellyveld and White the ownership of both Dresslers. For there could be no half-measures, in failure as in success.

As Martin watched his losses mount, as he waited for the Grand Cosmo to swallow up the two Dresslers and for all three to pass into the hands of Lellyveld and White, he spent his days roaming the floors and levels of his domain, eating lunch in cafeterias where three or four diners sat at widely separated tables, giving instructions to gardeners and electricians, playing-checkers with the groundskeeper in a small park on the fourteenth floor, taking a light dinner in the main dining room, which seemed to grow larger and whiter as guests dropped away. After the elimination of short-term rentals, the Grand Cosmo was able to fill barely forty percent of its living areas, though a third of these had been rented for one-year terms that might not be renewed; and in the large parks and shady gardens, in the lanes of the Moorish Bazaar, in the public parlors, in the dusky rooms of the Grand Cosmo Cigar Store, Martin would wander for hours without seeing anyone at all.

In the remote reaches of upper floors he would sometimes pass a couple walking side by side, or a woman walking alone; and in their faces he would see a look of shyness or faint puzzlement, as if they had not expected to meet anyone in such a place, at such an hour.

He liked to roam the meandering aisles of the nearly deserted department store, ablaze with electric lights late into the night. Slowly he walked among the empty glittering aisles, stopping to examine a pocket watch or a pair of gloves, while a clerk, rising hastily from a chair behind the counter, quickly slipped a jacket over a vest and, rubbing his eyes, proceeded to answer questions about 17-jewel Elgin movements, damascened gold-and-nickel top plates, and oil-tanned calfskin with snap buttons.

Throughout the day, but especially after dinner, a number of residents sat in the main lobby, which rose two stories and stretched away behind pillars and arches, disappearing around corners, forming nooks and glass-walled alcoves, little half-concealed places with dark-gleaming lamp tables. If you chose your chair carefully, you could have the sense of a festive and crowded place, full of dark wood-glints and laughter, or of a hushed and polished vastness stretching emptily away.

One evening when the lobby seemed emptier than usual, as if the remaining residents had wakened from a dream to rejoin their actual lives, while the abandoned dream, still vivid from the life that had glowed in it only moments before, was left behind to fade slowly into the blue-gray mist of dawn, Martin had an idea. In return for free room and board he would invite a troupe of out-of-work actors to sit in the lobby chairs, stroll about, play billiards in the billiard rooms and write letters in the writing rooms, to talk, to laugh — to create, in short, the atmosphere of a peacefully flourishing community. It was arranged easily by telephone the next morning, and that evening new faces appeared in the lobby. People strolled about or sat lazily on armchairs and couches, here and there little bursts of laughter could be heard, from a suddenly opened door came a click of billiard balls. And Martin liked the effect, the rather complicated little effect of false life that, in the acting, became less false, that spilled into the real, since the actors knew each other and were pleased to talk, to walk about, to go on with their lives in a pleasant new setting. There was a new liveliness in the main dining room, in the cafeterias and tearooms, in the parks and woods; the Cine-Theater flourished, the actor-residents strolled through the Palace of Wonders and the Hall of Optical Novelties and bought postcards in the giftshop of the Museum of Waxworks Vivants, and always the elevator doors opened and closed.

One evening in the dining room Martin saw at a nearby table three women absorbed in conversation. One of the women, who appeared to be older than the other two, wore an old-fashioned wide-brimmed hat with fresh flowers; the two younger were bareheaded. Martin did not know whether the three were actresses or residents. They were quiet and soft-spoken, so that he could hear only a murmur broken by soft laughter, and as he ate his roast beef and read his folded newspaper he could not prevent himself from glancing over at them from time to time. Once the older woman caught his eye before looking away; as he lowered his eyes he had the sense that she was leaning over to whisper something to her daughters, for one of them, the dark-haired one, made a movement that he caught out of the corner of his eye, she had turned her head to glance toward him, in a not unfriendly way. After a while the three women rose, and he studied his paper, only raising his eyes to give a nod as they passed his table. And later, when he entered the lobby, he saw them sitting by themselves, as he knew they would be. He caught a glance of invitation, dreamily he sank down in a chair in their little circle, and as he did so he had the sense that across the room something had changed, as if a slightly unnatural quiet had invaded the Grand Cosmo, the sort of quiet that accompanies an effort to listen. For surely the women were actresses, playing a daring part, though they presented themselves as a mother and two daughters. The daughters were young, they couldn’t have been more than twenty, the dark-haired and the light, the mother seemed scarcely ten years older, it was a daring and outrageous game they were playing, and yet perhaps they were mother and daughters after all, it wasn’t unusual to find such combinations in hotels all over the city. It occurred to Martin that he could check at the front desk, it was the simplest thing in the world, but when they rose he sat for a long time in the armchair, starting up once to see that the lobby was nearly empty — he must have dozed off.

And indeed he was tired, so tired that he could barely lift his head, though at the same time he felt intensely alert. The Grand Cosmo would soon pass away, even now it was fading, becoming dreamlike as he watched. Already he could hear it falling, falling like white snow. The three women were a sign, demon-women summoned up from deepest dream. For a building was a dream, a dream made stone, the dream lurking in the stone so that the stone wasn’t stone only but dream, more dream than stone, dream-stone and dream-steel, forever unlasting. Friendly powers had led him along dark paths of dream, they had been good to him — to him, Martin Dressler, son of Otto Dressler, seller of cigars and tobacco. For really he had traveled a long way, since the days when he rolled out old Tecumseh into the warm shade. For he had done as he liked, he had gone his own way, built his castle in the air. And if in the end he had dreamed the wrong dream, the dream that others didn’t wish to enter, then that was the way of dreams, it was only to be expected, he had no desire to have dreamt otherwise. And as Martin in his chair sat deeply asleep and yet entirely awake, for so it seemed to him, as Martin in his dream-chair slipped in and out of dream-thoughts that were the clear thoughts of day, he became aware of something just out of reach of his mind, something that needed attending to. And it came to him: a man, one of the actors whom he had noticed from the beginning, a man whom he had picked out without giving him much thought, simply nodding to him now and then, one actor among others. Maybe it was the full brown mustache, maybe it was the erect posture, or some gesture of the hands, but what had struck him was the resemblance, slight to be sure, between himself and that stranger. But now in his dream-waking, in his sleep-alertness, he seemed to grasp the slippery meaning of the man, who until this night had been scarcely in his thoughts at all.

The next day he had a private interview with the actor, a thoughtful and humorous fellow a little older than the others, a little down on his luck; it might well have been another, but Martin wanted only him. And in Martin’s vest and jacket, with his hair combed back off his forehead, with Martin’s habit of thrusting a hand in his pants pocket and jiggling loose change, he really did, in a way, at a short distance, look like Martin, though anyone could see it was only an actor. In the course of the day Martin explained to the man, whose name was John Painter, everything he needed to know: the habits of Martin’s day, the morning meetings with the manager, his favorite soup. Of course the idea wasn’t to fool anyone, but only to complete the cast of characters. During the afternoon he took Painter with him on his rounds, pointing out an attractive courtyard dwelling on the twenty-sixth floor that he might wish to occupy, lingering over a wooden Indian who raised a cigar to his mouth and blew a thick, slowly turning smoke ring, presenting the actor with a key to the boiler room. In the evening Martin took the elevator down to the department store and wandered among the deserted, brightly lit aisles before stopping at the clothing department to buy a shirt collar.

The next morning he went down early to buy his paper in the lobby and wait for the barbershop to open. In the barber’s chair he closed his eyes for a moment and at once he was back in the Vanderlyn: his bellboy jacket felt tight around the chest, luggage creaked, buzzers rang, from the street came a clatter of wheels and hooves. He would transfer the title of the Vanderlyn to Emmeline Vernon, she could do with it as she liked. At breakfast he read his paper over steak and eggs, then folded it twice and left it beside his plate. He pushed back his chair and nodded at the three dream-women, who were just then entering with their demon-smiles, and as he stood up there rose to his nostrils a faint, pleasant odor of violet water and scented soap from his close-shaved cheeks.

He walked through the lobby to the heavy glass entrance doors, and when he pushed one open he stopped: the light was so bright that he had to shut his eyes, even though at this early hour he stood in the building’s shade. Suns danced in the red of his closed eyes. He hadn’t left the Grand Cosmo for a long time.

Carefully shading his eyes he made his way down the steps and across the light-filled warm shade of the avenue to the low wall of the park. On a dark green bench a white-haired woman in a black dress sat feeding pigeons from a paper bag. The fat sleek birds strutted about with their chests stuck out, their shot-silk throats shimmering pink and green. Martin entered the park and walked along a sunny-and-shady path matted with blackish-brown leaves. Through the trees he could see flashes of the river. After a while he stepped off the path onto a downward slope, into green-black shade spattered with spots of sun. Only then did he look up: through branches crowded with little green leaves he saw a patch of blue — a blue so blue, so richly and strangely blue, that it seemed the kind of blue you might find in pictures of castles in books of fairy tales, after you peeled away the crackly thin paper. It occurred to Martin that it was early spring.

He came to a place where the trees were more widely spaced, and sitting down in the grass he leaned back against a trunk and took off his hat. A light smell of hair oil rose from the leather sweatband. Carefully he placed the hat on one knee. The dark hatband had a silky shimmer that brought to mind the throats of the pigeons. Through the trees he could see the river and the red-brown Palisades. A sunny barge was moving slowly along. Sometimes it failed to come out from behind a trunk at the precise moment he imagined it should, and then he wished it wouldn’t emerge at all, that it would vanish entirely behind a single tree and never be found again, as though it had slipped through a rent in the world and come out in another place, but immediately it would appear, barely moving, a great cat lazing in the sun. Before him he could see a more open place among the trees, where some boys were playing ball. They had laid down their caps and jackets to serve as bases. At his foot grew a single dandelion, a dark stem bursting into a blaze of yellow.

He had slipped out of his life, he had passed through a crack in the world, into this place. By turning his head slightly he could see the Grand Cosmo through clutches of upper branches. It was still there, it hadn’t vanished quite yet. But neither was it entirely there, half hidden as it was behind the leaves, the faintly moving little leaves, which perhaps were moving only to prevent him from attending closely to the crumbling masonry and falling steel behind them. His neck began to hurt. He turned back to the boys, the trees, and the river.

Martin closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them he was aware of a change in the light. The sky was brighter, the sun higher — the day was getting hot. He felt light, transparent. Here in the other world, here in the world beyond the world, anything was possible. For when the friendly powers let go of your hand, so gently that you were barely aware of it, then you needed to hold on to something, or you would surely be lost. You might float up into the too blue sky and never come back. You might dissolve into flickering spots of sun and shade. For when you woke from a long dream of stone, then you wanted to lie there with closed eyes, trying not to hear the sounds of morning, pressing back into your pillow as if by the sheer pressure of your head you could sink back beyond sleep, into your own childhood. But the light was too bright, his left buttock hurt, his calves itched. Martin shifted against the tree. The ridges of bark, long diamonds, pressed into his back. He felt like walking.

Martin got up and brushed off the seat of his pants with his hat. He put his hat on his head and started back toward the path. For when you woke from a long dream, into the new morning, then try as you might you couldn’t not hear, beyond your door, the sounds of the new day, the drawer opening in your father’s bureau, the bang of a pot, you couldn’t not see, through your trembling lashes, the stripe of light on the bedroom wall. Boys shouted in the park, on a sunny tree-root he saw a cigar band, red and gold. One of these days he might find something to do in a cigar store, after all he still knew his tobacco, you never forgot a thing like that. But not just yet. Boats moved on the river, somewhere a car horn sounded, on the path a piece of broken glass glowed in a patch of sun as if at any second it would burst into flame. Everything stood out sharply: the red stem of a green leaf, horse clops and the distant clatter of a pneumatic drill, a smell of riverwater and asphalt. Martin felt hungry: chops and beer in a little place he remembered on Columbus Avenue. But not yet. For the time being he would just walk along, keeping a little out of the way of things, admiring the view. It was a warm day. He was in no hurry.