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

Such was the ghost-world into which he sank each night and from which he rose each morning in darkness to set forth in a world of definite things. It was a world in which he could feel his senses waking even as he walked in cold dawns to the iron stairs of the El, a hard sharp exhilarating world — an Emmeline-world, as he had come to think of it, bright and flashing, charged with energy. Business was flourishing. In March he leased a vacant store and basement in Brooklyn, not far from his Metropolitan near City Hall Park, and planned to turn it into a two-floor cafe. Daily he traveled by cable car over the Brooklyn Bridge to check on the progress of the new restaurant, and during the week he continued his habit of stopping in unannounced at any of his five cafes for a quick inspection of the tables and kitchen and a talk with the manager. Always he looked forward to his visit to Emmeline’s Boulevard cafe, where there would be some little change he liked to discover, some small improvement in decor or service. Under her management, business had nearly doubled. There was a sharp feeling of friendliness in the air of the place, and Emmeline had about her a relaxed self-assurance, a radiant ease, that seemed to seep into the folds of the curtains and the gleam of the glass saltshakers.

At dinner one night in March he learned from Walter Dundee that the affairs of the Vanderlyn had reached a crisis. Dundee had it on good authority that rather than dipping into their pockets the owners were planning to turn their backs on the Vanderlyn, to get out altogether — in short, to sell. No telling what might happen now — it all depended on who the devil they sold it to. But Dundee, who had fought for change all along, felt it was a bad affair whatever way you looked at it; things would never be the same. “But I thought you didn’t want them to be the same,” Martin said, struck by the contradiction. Did Dundee secretly want things to stay the same after all, was the shrewd engineer finally ready to sink into the shadows with old Mr. Westerhoven? But Dundee, as if sensing something disdainful in Martin’s words, sharply rejected any suggestion of contradiction. If he worried about the change of ownership, it wasn’t from fear that the Vanderlyn would become modern and efficient and workable, since a well-intentioned push into the modern world was exactly what was necessary. No, what troubled him was that in carrying out the necessary change, the spirit of the place would somehow be harmed, since a hotel was more than the sum of its electric wires and varnish — he had worked in his share of hotels before settling at the Vanderlyn, and he knew. Westerhoven’s error was to confuse the spirit of the place with the out-of-date, the technologically antiquated. But there was a benevolence about the Vanderlyn, a sense of good will, which affected visitors like an atmosphere, an atmosphere of well-being, and this atmosphere had nothing to do with old-fashioned creaking elevators and faulty heading systems but rather with the will of the owners as expressed in the will of the manager and his staff — and it was the possible corruption of this will that troubled his sleep. Martin, who had suspected Dundee of a secret wavering, felt a rush of affection for the man, who had defended himself well and now looked at Martin sternly with his sharp blue eyes. With his close-cropped gray hair, his cleanshaven chin, his long nose and shrewd blue eyes, Dundee reminded Martin of a ship’s captain or a preacher.

“Very much the captain,” Emmeline remarked at lunch the next day, “though I’m not sure about the preacher. More the Sunday-school teacher, I’d say: he has that air of clean-smelling cloth and moral uprightness, though really he’s more worldly than that. He’s right about the spirit of a hotel, too — you can feel it right away, almost before you step into the lobby — but I’d say he underestimates things like rugs, armchairs, paint, all these material things. They’re part of the spirit too, if you see what I mean, a sort of, well, material way of expressing something that isn’t material at all. So if you look at things a certain way, you could say that a good old mahogany armchair isn’t really there at all — it’s sheer spirit! Oh, I’m kidding, but I’m not kidding. I like your friend. He’s a good man.”

As often when talking to Emmeline, Martin had the sense that he had leaped into a comfortable steam train and was off in an exhilarating rush.

“Does it bother you,” Emmeline said, “that Dundee thinks you should have stayed at the Vanderlyn?”

“No.” The question took him by surprise. “No, it isn’t that. But there’s something about this whole Vanderlyn business. I can’t put my finger on it.”

“Well, when you do—”

“When I do?”

She laughed. “Then you can stop thinking about it.”

He thought about it as he orchestrated the advertising campaign for the opening of the sixth Metropolitan, though it wasn’t so much thinking as a kind of puzzled brooding. The Vanderlyn had threatened to smother him, and he had gone his own way: it was as simple as that. But was it really as simple as that? He remembered his excitement when, in the early days of his secretaryship, he had had the sense of penetrating secrets, of seeing connections and combinations, of holding in his mind the complex system of forces that constituted the world of the Vanderlyn. In comparison to the gorgeous interwoven design of a hotel, a cafe was bare white cloth. The interest lay in the multiplication of cafes, in the complex management of an expanding business. And business was booming: he was a success, people with money had begun to take notice, they were offering large sums for his multiplying chain of blue cafes, which need never stop expanding, which grew, in a sense, with only the slightest help from him: and he saw a line of blue cafes stretching side by side clear across the country. And a restlessness came over him, at the thought of all those blue cafes, repeating themselves across the plains and mountains.

The cafe opened at the end of March, to the music of a fourteen-piece German band. Receipts for the first day more than doubled those of previous opening days, and customers continued to pour into the blue cafe through the double glass doors at street level and the blue wooden door at the bottom of the blue-painted steps. In the sunken area before the basement level there was space for three white metal tables, which proved highly popular on warm days. Martin imagined a great court, filled with white metal tables, under high trees. Already he had begun to plan a seventh cafe, in Coney Island, perhaps in West Brighton. In mid-April the crisis of the Vanderlyn seemed to have passed, the owners were hesitating, but at the end of the month Dundee suddenly reported that the decision to sell was near: there was now talk that the building would be demolished and replaced by a twelve-story commercial building, although this was little more than a rumor. At about this time Martin stopped at the Vanderlyn one sunny afternoon, for he felt a desire to sit in the lobby. He hadn’t entered the building since refusing Mr. Westerhoven’s offer nearly two years ago.

John Babcock was behind the desk, and nodded rather stiffly to Martin. Beside him was a new clerk, who looked up at Martin as if prepared to offer him a room. On the bench sat two bellboys whom Martin had never seen before. He sat down in a familiar armchair in the sunny lobby, with a view of the cigar stand, which was now a cigar-and-candy stand run by a plump man with round eyeglasses. He had heard that Bill Baer had a cigar store of his own on Amsterdam Avenue. The door to Mr. Westerhoven’s office was just out of sight. A man in a checked vest sat in an armchair reading a newspaper, a gray-haired man and a gray-haired woman sat silently in two chairs side by side, a handsome woman wearing a black hat with blood-red roses strode purposefully across the lobby, a bent-over old woman stood motionless beside a chair, balanced on her shiny dark cane. It was unusually quiet for a Wednesday afternoon. Martin still liked the high old lobby, which had about it a kind of small grandeur — the carved woodwork around the arched windows was pleasing, the sort of thing you didn’t see in newer, bigger hotels, and the tall, slightly absurd marble pillars, which led the eye up to a ceiling carved with gilt hexagons, filled him with a kind of anxious tenderness, as if he wished to protect them from a harsher judgment — but everywhere he saw signs of decline. The marble floor had little broken, rough places, on the arm of his chair was a small but very visible burn from cigar or cigarette ash, the curtains looped up beside the arched windows were mottled with fading — it was all beginning to look like the parlor of someone’s grandmother, a comfortable old-fashioned place quietly fading. Perhaps, after all, that was Mr. Westerhoven’s vision of a hotel: an old parlor, with many pleasant places for hiding, presided over by an aproned grandmother smelling of apples and pie dough. Martin imagined many empty rooms above. The lobby was very quiet. Even the sunlight that came through the high windows was transformed into a quiet version of itself, a browner and more faded light, like the light that enters a deep forest — the forest in the tissue-paper-covered picture of Hansel and Gretel in a dimly remembered childhood book. Perhaps that was Mr. Westerhoven’s deeper plan: to turn the lobby of the Vanderlyn into a deep, peaceful forest, penetrated by shafts of dim light. In the warm, faded light, in a stillness made deeper by dim sounds sifting through, Martin closed his eyes.