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

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.