Free Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser

and Emmeline Vernon
    T HE M ETROPOLITAN L UNCHROOM AND B ILLIARD Parlor opened on a Saturday in mid-October of 1894, six weeks after Martin’s twenty-second birthday. The facade had been painted a cheerful shade of blue, with yellow trim, and on the sidewalk near the door stood a wooden Pilgrim in breeches and buckle shoes, holding a horn of plenty. The success of the first weekend wasn’t surprising to Martin, who said to Dundee that people were curious and would try anything once; the trick was to get ’em to stick. When they stuck he refused to celebrate, arguing that it was too soon to be sure, though customers were praising the lunch special: corned beef hash served with German browned potatoes fried in butter, with a slice of hot applepie for dessert. The pies, ordered fresh each morning from a nearby bakery, were three inches thick and flavored with cinnamon. A dip in the fourth week’s revenue convinced Dundee that Martin had been right all along, but Martin gave a shrug and said it was nothing. The same thing had happened with the cigar stand and would happen again. By the end of the sixth week Martin was willing to sit down to a celebratory steak dinner with Dundee, but even as he raised his stein of beer he argued that it would be a serious mistake to stop advertising simply because they were having an early success: now that ads were everywhere you looked, people were starting to feel that the very fact of repeated ads was a sign of success. When Dundee appeared doubtful, Martin proposed that they prepare a questionnaire for customers, asking how they had first heard of the Metropolitan Lunchroom and how many times they had patronized it.
    Martin himself had begun to study the classified pages of three daily papers and to make occasional trips north on the Sixth Avenue El, and one day he made up his mind. Without telling anyone he rented a parlor-and-bedroom suite in a new apartment hotel in the West End that seemed to have sprung up overnight on a vacant side street with a view of the Hudson. He had searched the streets and lanes all through the 60s but kept moving north through the 70s until he had found what he wanted: an impossible building set down in the middle of nowhere by an enterprising developer inspired by the example of the Dakota but with his eye on a middle-class clientele. The nine-story hotel, withits medieval turrets and oriel windows and its modern hydraulic elevators, faced a stretch of weedgrown lots where goats roamed behind ramshackle fences. Martin felt he had moved to another city, one younger and more rural, a world he had glimpsed from the El road as he rushed north on his voyages of exploration.
    Everything seemed new: the smell of the river through his half-open bedroom window, the runny bright-yellow yolks of poached eggs in the hotel dining room, the wintry early-morning walk over to the El station on Columbus Avenue. He still thought of it as Ninth. Up here, in the wilderness, even the names changed: the northern extension of Broadway was the Boulevard, a wide avenue of hard-packed dirt. From the high platform of the Eighty-first Street station he could see to the west the half-iced Hudson and the red-brown Palisades, to the east the thin dark river and the bluish-brown hills of Brooklyn. Below the Park the train swung east, the track split into the Ninth Avenue and Sixth Avenue lines, already he could hear the bang of his heels down the iron steps of the station and feel steam heat on his cold cheeks as he entered the Vanderlyn. They all thought he was mad, banishing himself like that to the remote north. You’d have thought he had moved to the land of igloos and polar bears. But even as he bent over his desk in a corner of the manager’s office, even as he entered the old Paradise Musée and saw with approval the men standing shoulder to shoulder at the polished oak counter of the Metropolitan Lunchroom, Martin looked forward to the night ride into his untamed neighborhood.