Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer (10 page)

T
HE WARM WEATHER TURNED COLD, A LIGHT
snow fell, and when Martin stepped into the lobby of the Vanderlyn in the early mornings or the lobby of the Bellingham in the late evenings his cheeks tightened and tingled in the dry warmth. Mrs. Vernon said it would be the death of her, simply the death; and Martin agreed that it had been an unusually treacherous winter.

One cold evening when Martin entered the lobby of the Bellingham he was surprised to see Mrs. Vernon step from the parlor and hurry toward him. Her expression was anxious; she began with an apology. Martin, suddenly alarmed, glanced into the parlor and saw four empty armchairs about
the little table. His alarm seemed to alarm Mrs. Vernon, who urged him not to worry. “But what is it?” he said. “What’s happened?” The story emerged slowly: Caroline’s radiator had banged away all night, Caroline hadn’t slept a wink and was on the verge of nervous prostration, the young man who had come to fix it in the morning hadn’t done a bit of good. They were at their wits’ end. “But it’s a simple matter,” Martin said. “There’s water in the radiator and it has to be let out. Did he check the valve?” She couldn’t remember whether the young man had checked the valve or not, and begged Martin to rescue them.

In the Vernons’ lamplit parlor on the fifth floor, Caroline lay back with half-closed eyes on a blue-green sofa, patterned with long, curving ivory leaves and twisting silver vines. Her face against the blue-green damask looked very pale, as if she were a little girl lost in a blue-green forest. Two little lines of strain showed between her dark eyebrows. Emmeline, tired and humorous, led Martin into Caroline’s room, where the offending radiator stood under a windowsill, between the mahogany bed and a mirrored wardrobe. Martin squatted beside the radiator and Emmeline bent over, hands on knees, to watch. He checked the valve, which was open.

“The banging comes from steam hitting water in here,” Martin said, tapping the radiator with a knuckle. “There shouldn’t be any water in the radiator. It’s supposed to flow out through this pipe down here.” He pointed to the pipe
under the inlet valve. “All we have to do is tilt the radiator toward the inlet valve. You don’t happen to have a block of wood or a brick?”

“I might have one in my purse,” Emmeline said, and Martin looked at her with surprise before it struck him that she had said something amusing.

Five minutes later Martin returned to the Vernons’ apartment holding in his hand a dark book. In Caroline’s bedroom he knelt down, lifted the unattached end of the radiator, and slipped the book under. “That should do the trick,” he said, slapping dust from his hands. Still squatting, he looked up at Emmeline. “Does anyone ever fiddle with this valve?”

“Caroline turns the heat off when it gets too hot.”

“Well,” Martin said, “there you have it. You should never turn this knob unless the radiator is cool. If you turn it off when the radiator’s hot, the steam gets trapped in the pipes and can’t drain out when it condenses into water. Better just to leave it alone.” On a mahogany dresser with an oval bevel-edged mirror lay Caroline’s flowered hat.

“I think I see. And your book?”

Martin burst out laughing.
“An Introduction to the Art of Typewriting
. I taught myself last year. This is as good a place for it as any.”

“Well,” said Emmeline, leading him back into the parlor, “the mystery has been solved. You’re quite the hero, sir.”

“I should say so,” said Mrs. Vernon. “How can we ever thank you?”

“Please,” Martin said, holding up a hand and shaking his head. “It’s nothing at all.” He glanced at Caroline, who murmured “Thank you” and, turning her cheek toward the blue-green sofa-back, sank into the curving leaves and twisting vines.

N
OW ON LATE
S
UNDAY MORNINGS IN THE
warming air, Martin led the Vernons on excursions about the neighborhood, stopping with them for a late lunch in a shady beer garden or outdoor cafe and then pushing on into the lengthening afternoons. He took them up along the park by the river into a world of turreted granite mansions and ivy-covered red-brick villas rising among tall oaks and lush lawns. They walked in the winding park with its steep bluffs and sudden open riverviews, passed through an orchard of apple and peach trees, ate a picnic lunch while sun and shade moved on their hands. Through the trembling leaves Martin pointed to boys fishing on a sun-flooded wharf. Three-stacked steamers moved on the river. Suddenly
a train came clattering past on the open tracks between the park and the river, a smell of animals was in the air; Mrs. Vernon wrinkled her nose. But Martin had come to like the harsh smell of cattle riding in cars toward the slaughterhouses down in the west thirties. Through the upper trees he pointed to a flash of yellow: the cab of a steam shovel sitting in a cleared side-street lot. The West End was growing, it was growing even as they sat like people in a picture eating their picnic lunch on a lazy Sunday afternoon—lots were being cleared, streets graded, rocks blasted, excavations dug. Row houses were springing up left and right, but the future, Martin told them, lay up in the sky—in apartment houses and family hotels, in grand multiple dwellings. And as he spoke, the park, the river, the trembling spots of sun and shade, the three women, all fell away; and he saw, rising up along the avenues between the Central Park and the river, into the blue air, high buildings, shining and many-windowed, serene and imperious.

He learned one evening that they had never ridden on an El train. The next Sunday Martin led them up a flight of roofed iron stairs toward the station high above the street. With its peaked gables and its gingerbread trim, the station looked like a country cottage raised on iron columns. Martin bought four tickets in the station agent’s office and led the three women through the two waiting rooms, one for men and one for women, each with its pine benches and black walnut paneling. Sunlight poured through the blue stained-glass windows and lay in long blue parallelograms on the floor. Outside on the roofed platform they looked down at
rows of striped awnings over the shop windows of Columbus Avenue, each with its patch of shade, and watched the black roofs of passing hacks. Suddenly there was a throbbing in the platform, a growing roar—people stepped back. Mrs. Vernon gripped Martin’s arm, white smoke mixed with fiery ashes streamed backward as the engine neared, and with a hiss of steam and a grinding sound like the clashing of many pairs of scissors, the train halted at the platform. There was a sting of coalsmoke in the air. The cars were apple green. Martin looked at his three women defiantly, as if to say: Isn’t it a fine color! Isn’t it grand! Inside he gestured proudly toward the oak-paneled ceilings, as if he had designed them himself, pointed out the mahogany-trimmed walls painted with plants and flowers, the tapestry curtains over the wide, arched windows; and guiding the three women past the long seats that ran parallel to the walls, he led them to the center of the car, where a group of red leather seats were set at right angles to the wall and faced each other, and where Mrs. Vernon, holding onto her hat, insisted on having a seat by the window.

He tried to show them the city stretching away to the north and south, from the northernmost station with its shady beer garden to the South Ferry terminal with its view of the bay: the thicket of masts and yardarms tilted in every direction, the slow-moving tugs hauling barges, ferries crossing to the Jersey shore. From shaking clattering cars he made them look for signs painted on the sides of rushing-away buildings: New York Belting and Packing Company, Vulcanized Rubber, Knox the Hatter, Street Brass,
Oyster House, Men’s Fine Clothes. From trains rushing north and south he pointed at the tops of horsecars and brewer’s wagons, at wharves and square-riggers and barrel-heaped barges, at awnings stained rust-red from showers of iron particles ground off by El train brake shoes. He pointed at open windows through which they could see women bent over sewing machines and coatless men in vests playing cards around a table, pointed at intersecting avenues and distant high hotels—and there in the sky, a miracle of steel-frame construction, the American Surety building, twenty stories high, dwarfing old Trinity’s brownstone tower.

But from the carpeted cars, steaming along at the height of third-story windows, the city seemed to evade him, to be always ducking out of sight around a corner. Irked at himself, Martin led the Vernon women down clattering station stairways to look at details: strips of sun and shadow rippling across a cabhorse’s back under a curving El track, old steel rails glinting in cobblestones. He bought them bags of hot peanuts from a peanut wagon with a steam whistle. He showed them Mott Street pushcarts heaped with goats’ cheese and green olives and sweet fennel, took them along East River docks where bowsprits and jib booms reached halfway across the street. He walked them through an open market down by Pier 19, where horses in blankets stood hitched to wagons loaded with baskets of cabbages and turnips. “Look at that!” he cried, pointing to an old-clothes seller wearing a swaying stack of twelve hats, a gigantic pair of wooden scissors over a cutter’s shop. Down a narrow
sidestreet in a bright crack between warehouses, an East River scow filled with cobblestones slipped by. But the images seemed scattered and disconnected; and Martin felt a disappointment, a restlessness, as if he needed to go about it another way, a way that eluded him.

Although Martin liked having the three Vernon women with him on weekend excursions and on evenings in the lamplit parlor, he also enjoyed the combinations that arose when one or another of them was absent. Some evenings Caroline would excuse herself before the others, pleading tiredness, urging them to stay—and the sense that he was alone with Mrs. Vernon and Emmeline made Martin experience an exhilarating peacefulness, which puzzled and even disturbed him, for it was as if Caroline had in some way constrained him. At the same time his awareness of her absence, sharp as an odor, made him realize the intensity of her presence, when she was actually there, despite the fact that her actual presence resembled nothing so much as absence. Even Mrs. Vernon and Emmeline seemed to relax a little when Caroline was absent, to become slightly more playful—and leaning toward him with shining eyes, Mrs. Vernon tapped him lightly on the wrist with the tip of her black silk fan.

From the beginning he had noticed that Mrs. Vernon had a girlishness, even a flirtatiousness, that seemed to expand and flourish at certain times, such as when her older daughter was absent. She would place the flat of her hand on her breastbone and roll her eyes upward to express exasperation with the chambermaid; she would open her fan and, leaning
toward Martin, whisper behind the outspread black silk with its pattern of gold peacocks and fruit trees, about the evening dress of a woman passing in the lobby; she would refer to herself as an old dinosaur and look merrily at Martin, who would immediately compliment her and be rewarded by a tap of the fan on the knee. She demanded that he call her Margaret, which after all was her name, and it was true enough that Mrs. Margaret Vernon, seated beside Emmeline, was the handsomer woman, with her large dark eyes and her thick lustrous dark hair pulled straight up at the sides and arranged in a soft mass at the top, stuck through with glinting tortoiseshell combs. She had passed on to Emmeline her eyes and her hair, but in Emmeline the hair had become thicker and more tangled and lay across her forehead in small tense ringlets, and her dark intelligent eyes looked out from under thick brownish-black eyebrows with small black visible hairs between them. On her cheeks, dusky beside her mother’s whiteness, he saw faint traces of dark down. It struck Martin that Emmeline, however playful and quick-witted she was, kept a watchful eye on her mother, as she did on Caroline—as if, to the degree that Margaret Vernon relinquished motherliness, Emmeline herself assumed the burden. Martin, hearing the creak of a corset as Margaret Vernon turned gaily in her chair, remembered suddenly Louise Hamilton in the dusky parlor, the sound of her dress, the lifting of her elbows as she reached to unbind her hair—and in the lamplit parlor he felt a sensual confusion, as if he were courting Mrs. Margaret Vernon. Then he turned his face
abruptly to Emmeline Vernon, who looked at him and said, “Yes?” In the lamplight her black hair and lustrous eyebrows seemed charged with energy, her cheeks glowed, a warmth seemed to penetrate the skin of his face; and turning his eyes to the empty chair, with a directness that would have been impossible had Caroline Vernon actually been sitting there, he studied the faint impression in the dark red cushion and the pattern of raised gold lines in the padded arms. And all the while he felt pleasurably penetrated by the gaze, playful and intense, by the deep inner attention, of Margaret and Emmeline Vernon.

One evening after a late supper with his mother and father in the kitchen over the cigar store, Martin returned to the Bellingham and was surprised to find Margaret Vernon alone. She explained that Caroline had been feeling unwell all day, as she sometimes did after a poor night’s sleep. Emmeline had gone out alone in the afternoon and returned just in time for supper; she had accompanied Caroline upstairs to play two-hand euchre and would come down later. Martin sat down in his armchair, struck by the double absence, by the novel sensation of being alone with Margaret Vernon. She herself seemed a little constrained, and after a few light passages of conversation turned the talk to the subject of her daughters. She was concerned about them—two young women in a strange city. She was less concerned about Emmeline, who had always been a rock, than about Caroline, who—to speak frankly—might easily have been the center of an admiring circle of marriageable young gentlemen had she not so dreadfully discouraged
all social efforts on her behalf. It sometimes seemed that Caroline wanted nothing better than to sit through life—simply sit there, without lifting a finger on her own behalf, though with her beauty it would take little more than an ever so slightly lifted finger: like that. Martin watched as the index finger of Margaret Vernon’s left hand rose very slightly from the dark red chairarm and returned to its place. Of course there was no reasoning with her. There was no talking to her. She did what she wanted to do and that was that. There had been a young man or two, one from a good Boston family, but Caroline—well, Caroline had simply acted as if he wasn’t there. She had barely looked at him. And yet she wasn’t cold by nature, she was a warm-hearted trusting girl once you got to know her. Of course she was difficult to get to know. She could be trying at times. He knew that, of course. But he also knew, he was getting to know, how warm and trusting she really was. Caroline was a treasure, really. But oh my. Mrs. Vernon hoped she wasn’t presuming on their friendship by going on and on. It was just that a mother’s patience had its limits. It was good to know she could rely on Martin. And she gave him a searching look.