Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser Read Free Book Online Page B

streetcorner lamps casting their glow over the fire-alarm boxes, harsh laughter from the saloons, the familiar doorway with its red lantern, the gaslit parlor with its yellow-keyed piano on which stood a pair of double-branched tarnished brass candlesticks containing four white candles, the girls in low-cut robes and half-bare breasts walking in and out or sitting on the chair-arms. It struck him that the parlor and the girls were night versions of the hotel lobby, as if these were the same women who by day walked about in long dresses and wide-brimmed hats heaped with fruit. Sometimes he found himself imagining how, at night, all the hotel ladies loosened their hair and put on blood-red robes and walked back andforth, showing their breasts, leaning close, giving off warmth and a sweetish, sharp smell of liquor and perfume.
    Meanwhile he was working harder than ever at what he called his triple life: day clerk at the Vanderlyn Hotel, lessor of the cigar concession in the hotel lobby, and part-time assistant in his father’s cigar store. From Monday through Friday he clerked full time at the Vanderlyn, from six to six, and on Saturday and Sunday half-time, from noon to six, for a total of seventy-two hours. He worked at the cigar store four nights a week, from seven to nine, and two or three hours on Saturday mornings, for a total of ten or eleven more hours. Three nights a week—Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday—were his own, as well as Sunday mornings and two hours on Saturday mornings when he didn’t work in the store; much of this time he spent with Bill Baer, walking about town, riding the horsecars and the El roads, exploring the city. Martin was fond of taking the Sixth Avenue El all the way up to the 155th Street terminus and emerging in a world of picnic grounds and beer gardens and dance halls, with a flight of steps up to Washington Heights. But what struck him most on such trips was the vast stretch of land between the Hudson River and the Central Park—a strange mix of four-story row houses and weedgrown vacant lots with rocky outcroppings, of isolated châteaux and clusters of squatter’s shacks, of unpaved avenues and tracts of sunken farms like canyons. He had heard a good deal of talk about this wilder and newer part of town; it was said that speculators were holding on to lots in expectation of a boom.
    One day shortly before his eighteenth birthday, two years after he had gone to work as day clerk at the Vanderlyn Hotel, Martin was called into the manager’s office, located off the lobby not far from Mr. Henning’s office. Alexander Westerhoven was a big man with a plump jowly face and a surprisingly sharp profile, as if he had grown thick layers of distorting softness over a sharp hard frame. With a flourish of his right hand he invited Martin to sit in a plumply upholstered oak armchair trimmed with tassels. He began by praising Martin’s service behind the desk, referred obscurely to several testimonials to his loyalty and hard work, and broke off with a wave of the hand to thrust at Martin a sheet of blank white paper.
    “Your name,” he said, pushing toward Martin a bottle of black ink.
    “My name?”
    “Your name, your name. You do know how to write your name, Mr. Dressler?”
    Martin, irked, dipped the pen in the ink and wrote his name boldly across the middle of the paper. Mr. Westerhoven snatched up the paper and held it up to his face. He studied it for a few moments before thrusting it down.
    “Never,” he said, “underestimate the power of good penmanship.”
    Martin looked hard at him, and Mr. Westerhoven, placing the tips of his fingers together, looked hard at the ceiling. Still looking up, he offered Martin the position of personal secretary to the manager at double his present salary. Martin’s secretarial duties would be confined largely to Mr.Westerhoven’s far-reaching correspondence, although they would include miscellaneous duties as well, such as the reading of the