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

her breasts and pressing against her from behind. He had suddenly stopped without doing anything else at all, even though she had just stood there with her eyes closed, waiting for whatever was going to happen. Martin, who had been struck by the slight perversity of that half-seduction, was suddenly disturbed by the tenderness of those kisses. The vivid memory of Gerda’s story, the sharp smell of the leaves, the dim rattle of carriage wheels, the scratchy sound of Emmeline’s and Caroline’s shoes behind him on the gravel path, wisps of light laughter hanging in the branches, the glint of Margaret Vernon’s combs, all this irritated Martin,who turned and said harshly: “Well! Let’s turn back, shall we? It’s getting late!”
    “Oh,” said Margaret Vernon, “it’s such a lovely …”
    Emmeline looked at him sharply.
    Caroline, glancing at him and looking away, murmured, “I suppose … it is getting a little …”

The Eighth Day of the Week
    O N S UNDAY MORNINGS THE V ERNONS NEVER came down to the lobby before ten o’clock. Martin, who always woke early, left the hotel at half-past five in the morning with the sense of seizing for himself a small and private day within the larger day, a kind of eighth day situated between Saturday and Sunday. In his private morning, before the official part of the day that he spent with the Vernons, he would walk down to the railroad yards and watch freight cars being loaded onto a barge destined for one of the Jersey rail docks, or go up along the Boulevard where shanties still stood in the high weeds of unsold lots, or walk up and down blocks of small shops on Amsterdam and Columbus. About eight o’clock he would stop at arestaurant and have a breakfast of eggs and steak, folding a newspaper under the side of his plate and glancing out the plate-glass window at the avenue. Dundee had agreed in principle to putting money in an uptown lunchroom and it was important to choose the location with care. After breakfast Martin liked to walk along the Central Park, admiring the handful of hotels among the undeveloped lots on the other side of the street, and then he would take a crosstown car to Eleventh Avenue and walk down to the park by the river. From time to time he would consult his pocket watch, and a little before ten he would return to the lobby of the Bellingham.
    One Sunday morning when Martin returned to his hotel he saw that the women had not yet come down. Instead of sitting in the lobby with his newspaper he decided to go up to his rooms and change his shirt, for the August morning had grown hot. The door in the corridor stood partway open and in the lock was a big key with an oval piece of stamped metal hanging from it. As he entered the sunny parlor he saw through the open door of his bedroom part of a tin bucket with a mop-handle slanting up. “It’s all right, Marie,” he called out, sitting down in his flowered easy chair beside the sofa. “I’ll wait.” He had spoken a few times with Marie Haskova, a serious heavy-shouldered girl of sixteen or seventeen in a drab black uniform with a white apron, who wore a foolish-looking dustcap on her thick black hair. She had a room in the attic at the top of the hotel, where most of the maids lived. Once or twice from her stubborn face he had wrested a sudden swift smile,which had quickly faded, leaving her with her habitual look of faint bitterness about the mouth, of heavy melancholy in her eyes. Once she had told him that her father was a stonecutter who lived in a room over a saloon near the Brooklyn shipyards. She had been born in Bohemia but could not remember it. In his flowered armchair Martin tried to imagine Bohemia, which his mother had visited as a child, but he could see only vague forests and misty darkness. Irked at his ignorance, and feeling a touch of pity for the girl, Martin walked over to the doorway and leaned a shoulder against the jamb. “I walked down by the river,” he said, “and I tried