Steven Millhauser - Martin Dressler - The Tale of an American Dreamer

As soon as she was alone she said to Martin that she hoped she hadn’t painted a black picture of anyone; sometimes her mother, with the best of intentions, spoke more heatedly than perhaps she ought. In fact Caroline’s health was a mystery to both of them, for though it was true she was almost never sick in the ordinary sense — colds and fevers and what have you — it was also true that she was almost never free of some disturbing symptom or other, such as the headaches that often drove her to her bed. Oh, they had taken her to doctors, who had scratched their heads and pulled at their whiskers and prescribed mysterious tinctures and syrups that might as well have been sugar-water for all the good they did her. What Caroline needed, Emmeline believed, was more exercise; she had been pleased to see her sister’s pleasure in their Sunday excursions. In one sense her mother was right: Caroline was strong, despite her apparent frailty, and she could outwalk anyone when she wanted to. It was just that she so seldom wanted to.

“Then I’m glad she comes along on our little outings,” Martin said.

“Oh,” Emmeline said, with an impatient shrug of one shoulder, “she wouldn’t miss those for anything.”

“I’ve noticed she never complains.”

“Not to you,” Emmeline said sharply.

The idea that he was perhaps courting Caroline Vernon without quite knowing it, that his attentions to the Vernons were imagined by them to be a courtship of one of them, that his sense of deepening friendship against a sunlit background of vigorous family outings concealed more complex intimacies, all this did not disturb Martin, who found it perfectly reasonable that he should be assumed to have an interest in the older and prettier daughter, and who did not in any sense wish to deny an interest in her, though he was content to let such interest as he had remain pleasantly undefined.

One summer evening when he entered the lobby and saw all three women look up from their chairs in the parlor with an alertness, an air of pleasurable anticipation, that precisely matched his own, he felt so generously welcomed, even by Caroline, who slowly lowered her eyes, that he could not imagine any deeper happiness than just this nightly surrender to the spiritual embrace of the three Vernon women. He would have liked to keep them like that indefinitely: Margaret Vernon looking at him with frank pleasure as she waved at her chest with her black silk fan, Emmeline Vernon looking up at him intently from under her brownish-black eyebrows, Caroline Vernon gazing at him from half-closed eyes, her head resting back against the dark-red gold-flowered shimmer of the armchair, the pale hair pulled so tightly back that it seemed to tug painfully against the skin of her temples, the long pale-green sleeves buttoned tightly at the wrist.

For several months now, if not precisely for Caroline’s sake, then for the sake of all three women, Martin had stopped his visits to the room with rattling windows off Sixth Avenue, visits from which he had returned to the lamplit parlor of the Bellingham feeling furtive and unclean.

One hot summer night at about half-past nine Martin suggested that they all take a little walk. Caroline seemed to hesitate, but then decided to join them, and walking two by two, Martin and Margaret Vernon in front of Emmeline and Caroline, they made their way east to the Central Park, skirted by a low wall of cut stone. They turned in at an entrance and walked along a winding path through sharp scents of unknown blossoms and dark green leaves and distant riverwater. Through the thick-leaved trees Martin could see bits of yellow from the windows in the dark buildings facing the Park. Over the buildings the night sky was a deep purplish blue. Now and then they passed shadowy well-dressed couples strolling arm in arm and Martin overheard bits of murmured conversation: “No, of course, I understand what you …” On nearby paths he heard footsteps and light laughter. Pieces of laughter seemed to float through the branches and get tangled in the leaves. For some reason he remembered a story that Gerda the Swede had told him. One summer night when she was fourteen and still living with her mother she had gone walking with an older boy in the Park. He had led her off the path into a dark clump of trees and begun kissing her, but not in the way she had expected: he had stood behind her, kissing the back of her neck and her cheek over and over and rubbing his hands slowly up and down on her breasts and pressing against her from behind. He had suddenly stopped without doing anything else at all, even though she had just stood there with her eyes closed, waiting for whatever was going to happen. Martin, who had been struck by the slight perversity of that half-seduction, was suddenly disturbed by the tenderness of those kisses. The vivid memory of Gerda’s story, the sharp smell of the leaves, the dim rattle of carriage wheels, the scratchy sound of Emmeline’s and Caroline’s shoes behind him on the gravel path, wisps of light laughter hanging in the branches, the glint of Margaret Vernon’s combs, all this irritated Martin, who turned and said harshly: “Well! Let’s turn back, shall we? It’s getting late!”

“Oh,” said Margaret Vernon, “it’s such a lovely …”

Emmeline looked at him sharply.

Caroline, glancing at him and looking away, murmured, “I suppose … it is getting a little …”

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.