Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer Read Free Page A

land would flatten out and he would smell a change in the air. For they were going down to the ocean.
    As Martin came down the big iron steps of the train he heard band music, as if he were stepping into a parade. The depot opened onto a plaza where the band was playing, and straight ahead rose a high iron tower, where you could ride to the top in a steam elevator—he saw one elevator rising and one falling, high up in the blue sky. As they walked along a big street with their bags, Martin took it all in: the lobster and hot corn vendors, the crayon artists, the peanut stands and chowder pots, a man selling little bottles of beach sand, the towered bathing pavilions, the flag-topped cupolas of the big hotels on the beach. Their parlor and bedroom was in a small hotel on a side street that had a shooting gallery and a fortune teller’s tent with a sign showing a hand divided into zones. As Martin walked with his mother and father from the hotel across a wide avenue to the beach, he seemed to feel the shaking flow of the train and see the trees rushing by the window and taste thecoalsmoke on his tongue and hear the roar of the engine, or the rushing world—or was it the sound of the surf? In the two-story bathing pavilion on the beach he changed into a heavy dark-blue flannel suit with itchy straps over his shoulders. The ocean was warm on his feet. Farther out he could see people standing up to their knees, while lines of surf broke in different places, and far out in the water he saw people up to their chests. An iron pier came out over the water. There were shops and booths on the pier and the roof had towers with flags. He stood a little apart from his father and mother, and tried again to take it all in as the water rose and fell against his stomach: the great pier rising high above their heads, the fancy beach hotels like palaces in the distance, the white-headed gray-winged gulls skimming the waves, his mother suddenly laughing in the water, the salt-and-mud smell of ocean mixed with wafts of chowder cooking on the pier, the iron tower at the railroad depot looking down at the little people in the ocean. Here at the end of the line, here at the world’s end, the world didn’t end: iron piers stretched out over the ocean, iron towers pierced the sky, somewhere under the water a great telegraph cable longer than the longest train stretched past sunken ships and octopuses all the way to England—and Martin had the odd sensation, as he stood quietly in the lifting and falling waves, that the world, immense and extravagant, was rushing away in every direction: behind him the fields were rolling into Brooklyn and Brooklyn was rushing into the river, before him the waves repeated themselves all the way to the hazy shimmer of the horizon,in the river between the two cities the bridge piers went down through the water to the river bottom and down through the river bottom halfway to China, while up in the sky the steam-driven elevators rose higher and higher until they became invisible in the hot blue summer haze.

The Vanderlyn Hotel
    I N THE SUMMER OF M ARTIN ’ S FOURTEENTH birthday it happened that the Vanderlyn Hotel was in need of a bellboy. Charley Stratemeyer walked into Dressler’s Cigars and Tobacco with the news. The assistant manager, Mr. George Henning himself, had asked Charley to see whether Martin was interested. They all knew Otto Dressler’s boy, a hard worker who stayed out of trouble, and after bad luck with two bellboys who had loafed on the job and had been careless about their uniforms, the management was inclined to hire someone whose character they could count on. They were looking for a boy to work the six-to-six shift, though in view of Martin’s age Mr. Henning would be willing to consider a half-time six-to-noonarrangement, at least for the time being. The salary itself wasn’t much to write home about, said Charley, though the tips made up for it. But the whole point was that it was a foot