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

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.

ON THE FIRST OF SEPTEMBER MARTIN AND Walter Dundee took over the lease of a restaurant on Columbus Avenue near the corner of Eighty-fourth Street, between a greengrocer’s shop and a bakery. By mid-October the new lunchroom was ready for business. The Uptown Metropolitan Lunchroom was carefully designed to bring to mind the original Metropolitan, without imitating it exactly. The facade was painted the same cheerful shade of blue, with yellow trim, the awning was dark blue fringed with white, and on the sidewalk near the door stood another wooden Pilgrim: a man in breeches and buckle shoes, holding in his hands a horn of plenty. On his tall hat was a sign announcing a breakfast special of buckwheat cakes and sausage. The establishment was on a single floor, without a billiard parlor, and sought the patronage of women as well as men. One week before opening day, heralded by posters, billboards, and streetcar ads, a red-painted delivery wagon trimmed with gold, drawn by a white horse with a red-and-gold saddle, and driven by a man dressed like a Pilgrim, made its way up and down the six long avenues of the West End, from Fifty-ninth to 110th streets , bearing on its sides in large gold letters the name of the new lunchroom and the date of the opening day.

At dinner a week after the successful opening of the Uptown Metropolitan, Martin said to Dundee, “I was wondering whether I ought to get married. What do you think?”

Dundee looked at him in surprise. “I didn’t know you’d met someone. Keeping her secret, were you?”

“No, not secret, exactly. Her name is Caroline Vernon and she lives with her mother and sister up at the Bellingham. I wonder whether I ought to marry her.”

Dundee laughed. “And you want me to make up your mind for you?”

“It’s this way, Walter. I haven’t thought much about it, but they all seem to expect it.”

“They do, do they?” Dundee put down his knife. “Look here, Martin. A good woman who loves you right is the greatest gift a man can have on God’s earth. Let me ask you something. Do you love her?”

“That’s what I was wondering about.”

Dundee looked at him. “By George if you’re wondering about it.” He shrugged. “And the young lady? What does she think?”

“I have no idea. I’ve never spoken to her alone.” Martin paused. “It’s complicated.”

Dundee appeared to wait for him to continue, then picked up his knife. “I wouldn’t jump into it,” he said.

The leasing of the Columbus Avenue restaurant in September, the preparation of the advertising campaign, the lunch hours spent at the developing lunchroom, the long evenings with Dundee, all this had returned Martin to his familiar world, so that at times it seemed to him that he had had a summer dream of women. He still saw the Vernons in the evenings and went out with them on short Sunday excursions, but Saturday afternoons and most of his Sundays were devoted to the Uptown Metropolitan. With Marie Haskova he had fallen into an ambiguous kind of friendship. After Sunday breakfast at the Uptown Metropolitan, he would return to his rooms to wait for the Vernons, but also in the hope of seeing Marie Haskova, who timed her work to coincide with his return. He liked the quiet girl with her sudden questioning glances, felt an interest in her, liked to hear her talk about things. And he was curious about her arrangement with the Bellingham: he questioned her closely about her hours, her room duties, the staff dining room in the basement, the maids’ quarters at the top of the building. She told him that she cleaned fourteen apartments on her floor, starting at seven in the morning. She was so tired by the end of the day that after dinner in the overheated basement she went up to her room and fell asleep, though it was hard to stay asleep for long, what with doors slamming and girls arguing and giggling and making a racket — the laundry girls were the worst, the head housekeeper was always giving them a warning. One morning she took him up in the service elevator to the attic floor. In the stuffy half-dark lit by two dim gas brackets with murky globes, rows of brown doors stood close together. A big girl in a doorway, wearing the gray uniform of a laundress, looked at Marie with a leer. Martin glanced in at Marie’s room, number 7, a dark box with a bed and a wooden chair and a small window giving a view of chimney pots and water tanks on the roofs of row houses. The girls weren’t allowed to eat in their rooms, Marie said, but they all did; she showed him a tin of oyster biscuits. When he and Marie returned down the hall, Martin heard a sudden burst of laughter; a door slammed; and the brown doors, the half-darkness, the muffled laughter, all was strangely familiar to Martin, as if, behind a suddenly opened door, he might find Dora or Gerda the Swede.

His little Sunday morning friendship with Marie Haskova, with its air of faint ambiguity, as if he were concealing from the Vernons a secret mistress, in one sense simplified his relation to them, for whatever he felt for the three Vernon women had nothing to do with secret liaisons. The Vernons, all three of them in a kind of lump, could be imagined only as a wife. And yet in another sense Marie Haskova confused his feelings for them, for it was as if the vague desire aroused by the Vernon women were seeking an outlet in young Marie Haskova. But there were deeper confusions, elusive connections that he could barely sense. There was something unspoken between him and Marie Haskova, something secretive and unacknowledged — but weren’t the secretive and the unacknowledged the very sign of his union with Caroline Vernon? Then the two women, so rigorously set apart, would grow confused in his mind, so that speaking with Marie Haskova he would suddenly think of Caroline Vernon’s pale tight-bound hair and small straight shoulders, her brown eyebrows darker than her hair, the half-closed indolent eyes, and he would be startled to see, there before him, Marie Haskova with her strong cheekbones, her broad shoulders, her trace of bitterness about the mouth. And once, stepping into the lobby of the Bellingham after his Sunday morning walk and seeing Caroline sitting with her mother and sister, Caroline with her half-closed eyes and fine-cut nose, he suddenly imagined Marie Haskova with her swift, quickly fading smile, her melancholy eyes, her dark box of a room with its view of chimney pots and water tanks on the tops of row houses, and so intense was his vision of Marie Haskova that even as he walked toward Caroline Vernon in the sunny lobby with her head reclined on a garnet-and-green armchair, a few strands of pale hair escaping from the side of her neck, he was walking along the half-dark corridor with Marie Haskova to sounds of muffled laughter, while Emmeline looked at him with her air of alertness and Mrs. Vernon fiddled with the lace collar of her blue silk dress.

From this tangle of women Martin was glad to escape into the world of leases and ads and plate glass and cast iron, a hard-edged world of carefully defined problems demanding precise solutions. And Martin was restless again. The new lunchroom had barely been launched when he began searching for a third location on another uptown avenue. He felt stung into activity by the sharp autumn days. Dundee wanted to wait, Dundee always wanted to wait, but Martin thought it was wrongheaded not to strike quickly while people were still talking about the Uptown Metropolitan. Success was in the air.