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

“Oh, everything,” he said, lightly but without a smile.

“But I don’t think you do, not in the usual way. In a way you don’t want anything. You don’t care if you’re rich. Suppose you were rich, really rich. What would you do then?”

“Oh, then,” Martin said. He thought of himself as a child standing in the waves at West Brighton, feeling the world rushing away in every direction. “Anyway, what makes you think I don’t want to be rich?”

He saw that he had offended her, that he had taken the wrong tone. “Listen, Em. I don’t know what I want. But I want — more than this.” He swept out his arm lightly, gracefully, in a gesture that seemed to include the restaurant in which they were seated, but that might have included, for all he knew, the whole world.

Sometimes, when he looked across a table at Emmeline, he had the sense that he and she had been married for a long time. It was a comfortable companionable sort of marriage, calm and peaceful as cozy furniture in a firelit room. And at once he would think of Caroline, tense and languorous in her armchair in the hotel parlor, waiting for something, something that was bound to happen or perhaps would never happen — Caroline with her half-closed eyes and motionless fingers and pale hair pulled back tight on both sides. For it was Caroline after all whom he had married, or was about to marry, or had somehow forgotten to marry. And when on Sunday mornings he stood against the doorjamb talking with Marie Haskova and watching her bend this way and that, Marie Haskova with her heavy body and sudden swift questioning glances, then too he would think of Caroline, waiting in her chair for something to happen. Perhaps they were all waiting for something to happen — waiting for him to make up his mind. For it was as if he had three wives, and was married to all of them, or none of them, or some of them, or now one and now another of them. Of the three wives, Emmeline and Marie Haskova were the most vividly present to him, the most solidly there, whereas Caroline seemed a ghost-wife, a dream-wife — though he wondered whether it wasn’t precisely her lack of substance that allowed her to haunt and hover, to invade the edges of other women.

In any case in being with Emmeline he was always with Caroline, as if she rose up most vividly in relation to others. One day he asked Emmeline a question about her sister, and after that he asked others — he had many questions about Caroline, as if he had seen a hand-painted photograph of Emmeline’s sister and were working his way up to an introduction. What did she like? What did she do? What did she think about? To all his questions Emmeline listened carefully and gave thoughtful, meticulous answers, which somehow didn’t clarify anything and tended to float out of his mind the moment he was alone. Caroline then was a mystery: the mystery irritated and attracted him, he would have to let it go at that.

Sometimes, speaking to Emmeline about cafe business, he would feel a sudden gratitude to Caroline, for having a sister who understood everything. Then a tenderness would come over him for Caroline, alone with her mother in the big hotel, waiting for something to happen, and he would long to see her in her dark red armchair with her white fingers and heavy-lidded eyes.

One day at lunch Martin said to Emmeline, “Do you think Caroline would like to marry me?”

Emmeline looked at him. “That’s a strange question for you to ask me.”

“But you’re the only one I can ask.”

“There’s always Caroline, you know. Let’s not forget Caroline.”

“Oh, Caroline,” he said impatiently.

The truth was that Caroline often irked him, even as she became fixed in his mind as a white bride. It struck him that the pleasure he felt in the presence of Marie Haskova was in part a pleasure directed against Caroline, as if by enjoying the company of Marie Haskova he were warning Caroline not to push him too far. For Marie liked him, there was no question about that; and when he thought of Marie Haskova with her slow body, her melancholy eyes, and her sudden questioning glances, he would become angry at Caroline, for invading his time with Marie, for harming her in some way.

But when he walked along the cold streets toward the Bellingham at night, taking deep breaths of clear cold air, then he looked about with pleasure at the yellow windows of the dark row houses; and when he entered the Bellingham and felt his cheeks tingle and tighten in the steamheated air, when he saw the three Vernon women waiting for him about the little table, then he felt a great surge of pleasure, and sank down gratefully into his armchair in the circle of his dark-haired sister, his adoring mother, and his sister’s sister, his tense, languorous, floating, ungraspable bride.

“She’s willing,” Emmeline said a few days later, a little breathlessly, as she leaned forward over a corner table. “Willing?”

“To marry you.” She paused. “It’s what you wanted me to find out.”

“And you asked her? Flat out?”

“Well no. You’re angry.”

“I’m surprised. You asked her?”

“I talked to her. We talked about things. Caroline trusts me, she knows I understand her. I didn’t ask her, for heaven’s sake, but I found out.” She picked up her cup of tea and held it in both hands without drinking it. “Now you can decide.”

“Decide what?”

“Whether to marry her.”

“And you think I should?”

She lifted the cup to her mouth but did not drink. From behind the cup, as from behind a curtain, she said, so quietly that he could barely hear her: “It would be so good for Caroline.”

“And me? Would it be good for me?”

“Oh, everything’s good for you,” Emmeline said harshly.

In the evening he felt a slight awkwardness as he entered the lamplit parlor and sank into the familiar armchair, but nothing had changed: Margaret Vernon greeted him with the same girlish effusiveness, Emmeline began describing a jammed cash-register key that she had managed to fix, and Caroline sat dreamily in her chair, glancing at him in greeting and letting her eyes slide away. He tried to find a hint in her, a secret sign, perhaps a faint flush in the skin over her cheekbone or a barely visible tightening of the tendons in the back of her hand, but he couldn’t be certain, and only when he was alone in his room did it strike him that the change was in him, as he watched her secretly, searching for a sign.

He thought about his new secret bride in his brown office with the green muslin curtains, and at dinner in the kitchen over the cigar store as his mother placed before him a heap of stewmeat and boiled onions, and in the parlor of his bachelor suite as he stood against the doorjamb watching Marie Haskova with her red-and-black feather duster; and it seemed to him that Caroline’s power of invasion had increased, that she was hovering behind his heavy red curtains, seeping into the edges of things, rippling in the swish of other women’s dresses, glimmering up at him from rain-slick streets.

At night, instead of falling asleep at once, he lay in the dark imagining Caroline Vernon. She sat in her chair, in the dark of the deserted parlor, and suddenly she rose and came toward him at the other end of the room, but when she reached him she passed through him and came out the other side — and from the chair she rose again and came toward him, and passed through him, while from the chair she rose and came toward him, rose and came toward him, rose and rose and rose.

As the weather grew warm a restlessness came over Martin. He would hover close to Marie Haskova on Sunday mornings, watching her move about in her black uniform and speaking to her about his cafes, his life in the cigar store, the Irish maids in the Vanderlyn; and as he watched the black cloth tighten against her bending back, as he watched her rough-palmed hands with their faint odor of lye and furniture polish, he wondered whether he hovered around her not because she was a temptation that he continually enjoyed overcoming, but because she was a peaceful place he could go to, away from Caroline.