Martin Dressler Page 7

  Martin sat in the lamplit parlor for twenty minutes, looking at the three empty armchairs, in which he could almost see the three Vernon women: Mrs. Vernon, with her dark combs glinting in the lamplight as she laughed; Emmeline, with her sharp intelligent eyes and slightly too large mouth; Caroline, with her hair pulled back tight and her eyelids lowered. As he stared at Caroline’s chair, which showed in the dark-red gold-flowered seat a faint depression that seemed to hold her ghostly form, he saw on the red-and-gold arm of the chair a single long yellow hair. Martin rose, looked quickly about, and bent down to examine it. He saw that it was a trick of the light on the raised gold flowers of the dark-red arm. He felt such an unexpected shock of desolation that a few minutes later when he stepped from the elevator and began walking down the corridor he couldn’t remember whether he had said good night to old Jackson, the elevator man, and later that night he woke from a dream in which he bent to kiss the hand of Mrs. Vernon and saw, on the back of her long black glove, a bright yellow hair that suddenly began to wriggle away.

  A Sunday Afternoon Stroll

  THEY WERE THERE THE NEXT EVENING, SEATED around the little table with its dome-shaded lamp, and as Martin stepped through the open doorway Mrs. Vernon looked at him anxiously, as if to implore his forgiveness. Caroline had been unwell—a headache and low fever—and she and Emmeline had stayed with her in her room, even though Caroline had told them she only needed rest, had in fact urged them to go down and wait for Mr. Dressler in the parlor. But Emmeline had insisted on staying by Caro’s side, and she herself—well, the truth of the matter was that they were all rather fatigued after a long day of walking. But it was so good to see Mr. Dressler again. They had missed him, indeed they had. For surely she did not exaggerate if she said that he had become a regular member of their little family.

  Martin, who had been irritable all day, felt so soothed by her words that he experienced a sharp desire to leave immediately for his room, so that he could lie down with his arm over his eyes and repeat the words carefully to himself, listening to them with close attention, examining them for meanings that might have escaped him in the pressure of the moment.

  Instead he turned abruptly to Caroline and said, a little too loudly, “I hope you’re feeling better tonight.”

  “Yes,” said Caroline, “a little better, thank you,” looking at him a moment with her heavy-lidded, slightly moist eyes, with their dark lashes that did not match her straw-colored hair and, in the lamplight, shone with a faint blue sheen; and as she returned her gaze to the small table, Martin seemed to feel, in the skin of his cheeks, in the tips of his fingers, a faint prickle, as if she had brushed the edges of those sharp lashes across his face and fingertips.

  One Saturday afternoon when he returned to the Bellingham from the Vanderlyn, he saw the three Vernon women in the parlor, drinking tea. Martin had been planning to have lunch at a riverside roadhouse near the railroad yards and then walk up Riverside Drive to watch men blasting a twenty-foot-high ledge of rock to make way for a new shipping magnate’s mansion. Instead he asked the Vernons whether they would like to walk over to the Boulevard and watch the Sunday bicyclists. “Oh, I’d love to!” cried Emmeline, clapping her hands; Caroline lowered her eyes; and Mrs. Vernon said she thought it would make a lovely excursion.

  It was a bright blue day in late March. On the bare-looking branches of the thin new trees in front of the Bellingham, a yellow-green shimmer showed against the sky, like an exhalation. A few brown leaves hung down like scraps of old wrapping paper. They walked two by two along the new cut-stone sidewalk that ended at a vacant lot, Martin and Mrs. Vernon in front of Emmeline and Caroline. Martin, feeling splendid in his new chocolate-brown derby and his new chocolate-brown spring overcoat, looked admiringly at Mrs. Vernon, all decked out in her flower-heaped hat tied with a green ribbon under the chin, her long green coat with its black cape. The weather, Mrs. Vernon said, was simply treacherous, hot one minute and cold the next—a person had no idea how to dress. She had insisted that Emmy and Caro dress for winter, and now it would be her fault if both of them had to take to their beds with a cold. As she spoke she glanced back at her daughters, and Martin followed her glance, struck with admiration at the sight of the two sun-brightened Vernon daughters with their faces in shadow under flower-heaped hats tied under their chins: Emmeline in a long dark-blue coat trimmed with black wool, Caroline in a long brown coat with a black shoulder cape and a small black muff pushed up onto one wrist.

  They crossed West End Avenue and came to a built-up block. Sunlight shone on red brick and tawny brick and cream-colored brick, flashed on copper and tile trim, sparkled on the tall second-floor bay windows. In the windows Martin could see reflections of black branches and red brick and blue sky, and through the branches and the brick a dim vase, the glowing top of a chair, a shadowy oval photograph on a dark piano. Streaks of old snow lay in the shadows of stoops and on the dark squares of dirt under the yellow-green leaf buds. At the end of the street, on the Boulevard, Martin saw high-seated cyclists passing on their tall wheels. People stood watching on the corner, watching and cheering on the wide strip of grass and elms that divided the Boulevard into two cycling roads. On the other side of the grass, cyclists passed the other way. Behind Martin, steamboat whistles sounded on the river, beyond the Boulevard he heard the rumble of the El on Columbus Avenue, somewhere an organ grinder played his bright, melancholy tune, and in the mild air chilled by river breezes he caught a faint peppery smell of horsedung from the daily wagonloads stored down by the wharves. Suddenly a burst of brassy music filled the air. As Martin turned the corner onto the broad sidewalk running along the elm-lined Boulevard he saw a German band under the trees on the central strip, and above the watching faces the high-seated cyclists moved on sun-sparkling spinning-spoked wheels, and past the tall bare elms and the riders in their cycling costumes he could see down the far street to the dark band of the El track and, farther away, the bare trees of the Park hung with a pale green haze; and turning excitedly to look for Emmeline and Caroline, who might, he thought, wish to walk along the sidewalk in search of a better place from which to view the pageant of cyclists, he felt his turning shoulder strike the brim of a hat and saw Caroline’s suddenly exposed sun-dazzled pale hair and startled eyes before she raised both hands and pulled the hat in place, shading her face as he shouted an apology in a blare of trumpets and trombones.

  The Radiator

  THE 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 int
o 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.

  Intimacies

  NOW ON LATE SUNDAY 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 wa
y 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.