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

of the block, on the other side of the street, where he never walked as a child except when his mother took him to see the exhibits. Moved by memory and curiosity, Martin paid a visit during his lunch hour to the gloomy old building with its dark rooms full of melancholy wax figures and its third-floor hall of dungeons and prisons. The museum was deserted except for a single heavyset man in a silk hat who walked slowly about with his hands behind his back. On the shadowy second-floor landing, beneath an arched window thick with dust, Martin passed a guard in a dark green uniform who stood leaning an elbow on thewindow embrasure. The guard stared at him with an expression of hostility and rudely ignored Martin’s question. Martin, feeling a burst of anger in his neck, began to ask the question again sharply, before he saw that the guard was made of wax. A small spiderweb hung over his mustache. The real guard sat dozing in a chair on the second floor not far from a hooded executioner holding an ax. Downstairs the elderly ticket seller knew only that the lease was up in a few months and that the museum’s proprietor, Mr. Toft, was not planning to renew. He had already sold the whole lot of wax figures to an establishment in Coney Island off Surf Avenue. No one knew the landlord’s plans, but Martin could ask for himself: Mr. Toft was somewhere in the museum at that very moment, a big man in a silk hat.
    Mr. Toft seemed sunk in some private grief and turned to Martin a pair of gloomy dark eyes over folds of tired flesh like melted candlewax. He changed immediately when he learned who Martin was—he remembered buying cigars from him when Martin was a mere slip of a boy. And how was Otto? And his fine mother? In a small restaurant off Third Avenue he listened to Martin’s proposal, burst into a sudden sharp laugh, then narrowed his eyes and agreed to lease the building to Martin if Martin could come up with a rent check before the end of the month. He named a large sum that Martin at first thought was a joke. Mr. Toft wiped his mustache with a napkin, removed his watch from his vest pocket and slipped it back in, and asked to be remembered to Martin’s father and mother.
    Martin watched Mr. Toft’s broad back retreating downthe street and tried to recall him from the old days, but saw only the present Mr. Toft with his melancholy eyes, bushy mustache, and candlewax eye-pouches. He gave up the idea of the lease as a stupid mistake, then changed his mind and paid a visit to his bank, where he was well known. In a small neat room with a big dark desk that reminded Martin of a great slab of chocolate, the banker explained that under the circumstances a loan would have to be guaranteed by a co-signer.
    “But I can guarantee it myself,” said Martin. “Down to the last nickel.”
    “Not in the way we mean,” replied the banker patiently, with a slight smile.
    Martin, who was determined to act without his father’s help, angrily abandoned his crackpot scheme. So that was how it was! Despite his success at the Vanderlyn, in the eyes of the world he was nothing at all. It occurred to him that the world was of course right. All very well and good to be the private secretary to the manager of the Vanderlyn Hotel, and to put a little vim into a dead cigar stand, but measured against his own confused desires, these were the accomplishments of a boy. Mr. Toft’s sharp laugh came back to him, and the patient dry tone of the banker, and he wondered what kind of young dummkopf they supposed he was. In his boyhood bed over the cigar store he slept badly for two nights, and at noon the next day he had lunch with Walter Dundee.
    He laid out his plan carefully before the chief engineer, whose good will he had felt from the beginning and whoseclear hard sense of how things worked was never dry or dreary. Martin described his interview with the banker and presented the plan in its entirety: a lunchroom on the first floor and a billiard