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

this soothed something deep in Martin, who found himself speaking about his life and his plans until he suddenly stopped short with an apology and began asking questions of his own. Mrs. Vernon said that she was from Boston, where both girls had grown up. Mr. Vernon had been an attorney, who two years ago had been transferred to a big New York law firm and whose sudden death had been a devastating blow, though fortunately he had left his little family well enough provided for, though heaven knew you couldn’t be too careful, and on the advice of a family friend she had moved uptown into the wilderness, where the rents were half what they were downtown. Of course things were a bit slow out here, especially when you knew no one and had to watch every penny; and sometimes it seemed as if they were becalmed, simply becalmed, waiting for the wind to pick up and fill their sails. “So you’re atraveler, are you?” Martin asked Mrs. Vernon with a smile. “Oh,” Emmeline answered, “we’ve traveled extensively in the lobby of the Bellingham Hotel”—and she looked at him so playfully, so expectantly, that Martin felt he ought to make a witty reply, but he could think of nothing, and burst out laughing. Suddenly Caroline rose, said she was tired, and walked out of the room.
    There was a moment of awkwardness, which Mrs. Vernon quickly covered with talk; and now that Caroline had left, Martin yielded entirely to the warm friendliness of the little circle in the lamplit parlor. When the evening ended nearly an hour later, with Martin’s discovery that it was practically midnight, he felt that an understanding had been reached: they liked each other, they had begun a friendship. And he had learned one fact that struck him: it was Caroline who was the older daughter, by two years, though she looked five years younger. Perhaps it was her small and almost childish features, especially her little girl’s nose, that made her seem younger than Emmeline, whose strong straight nose and black thick eyebrows gave her a look of masculine energy; her shoulders were broader, her voice deeper and more resonant, than Caroline’s. It struck him too that Emmeline in some sense watched over her sister, filled in gaps left by Caroline’s silence, took upon herself the task of speaking for both of them—while Caroline, with her pale hair pulled tightly back, so that it seemed to pull painfully against the skin of her temples, Caroline, with her delicate pale face and small mouth and large brown eyes looking away, Caroline Vernon, sunk in her dream,seemed the younger sister, protected by mother and older sister from unwelcome disturbances and intrusions.
    Now every evening when Martin returned to the Bellingham after late hours at his office in the Vanderlyn, or supper with his parents in the small kitchen over the cigar store, on the familiar old plates with the blue Dutch children on them, or his weekly visit to the brothel on West Twenty-fifth Street, he would glance in at the lamplit parlor off the main lounge. There the Vernon women sat night after night, sipping bright-colored liquids from thin glasses. At a smile from Mrs. Vernon or a wave from Emmeline he would enter the parlor and sink into a waiting armchair, before the dark-gleaming table with its glowing dome-shaded lamp, an ivory-colored lamp with little Nile-green sailboats and a Nile-green island on the translucent porcelain shade and, on the porcelain body, little Nile-green houses on a Nile-green hillside—an admirable lamp, a really first-rate lamp that, he assured the Vernon women, with its removable oil fount and its excellent center-draft burner, was as hopelessly antiquated in the new world of incandescent lighting as the stage coach in a world of steam trains. Had they noticed, incidentally, that the overhead lights in the lobby and dining room were all electric, even the chandeliers? For it was interesting, it was a subject that never ceased to fascinate him, how the