One day shortly before his eighteenth birthday, two years after he had gone to work as day clerk at the Vanderlyn Hotel, Martin was called into the manager’s office, located off the lobby not far from Mr. Henning’s office. Alexander Westerhoven was a big man with a plump jowly face and a surprisingly sharp profile, as if he had grown thick layers of distorting softness over a sharp hard frame. With a flourish of his right hand he invited Martin to sit in a plumply upholstered oak armchair trimmed with tassels. He began by praising Martin’s service behind the desk, referred obscurely to several testimonials to his loyalty and hard work, and broke off with a wave of the hand to thrust at Martin a sheet of blank white paper.
“Your name,” he said, pushing toward Martin a bottle of black ink.
“My name?”
“Your name, your name. You do know how to write your name, Mr. Dressler?”
Martin, irked, dipped the pen in the ink and wrote his name boldly across the middle of the paper. Mr. Westerhoven snatched up the paper and held it up to his face. He studied it for a few moments before thrusting it down.
“Never,” he said, “underestimate the power of good penmanship.”
Martin looked hard at him, and Mr. Westerhoven, placing the tips of his fingers together, looked hard at the ceiling. Still looking up, he offered Martin the position of personal secretary to the manager at double his present salary. Martin’s secretarial duties would be confined largely to Mr. Westerhoven’s far-reaching correspondence, although they would include miscellaneous duties as well, such as the reading of the assistant manager’s daily reports concerning problems that required prompt attention, the preparation of memoranda for staff use, and the reading and summarizing of each day’s correspondence. His new hours would be seven to six Monday through Friday, with a half day from seven to noon on Saturday, and Sunday off.
At first Martin missed the noise and bustle of the desk, the double view of the street through the doors and of the lobby stretching away, the weight of room keys in the palm, the smart uniform buttoned to his chin, the ring of the electric buzzer and the leaping up of bellboys, the snatches of talk, the sheer splendid sound of things — shuffle of suitcases, clank of keys, swish of dress trains, rattle of cab wheels through the suddenly opened doors — from his post behind the polished mahogany counter, but Martin, wearing a new cutaway coat over a shiny vest with a watch chain looped across the front, threw himself into his new duties with helpless zest. If, out at the desk, he had seemed to be in the lively center of things, it was true only in a special and limited sense, for in fact he had been a minor employee in one department of a vast and complex organization that he had scarcely bothered to imagine. Sitting in Mr. Westerhoven’s quiet office, reading through piles of correspondence, or taking dictation from Mr. Westerhoven, who liked to walk up and down in the small space between his broad desk and Martin’s narrow one with a thumb hooked in his vest pocket and the other hand tugging at his chin, Martin, bewildered but deeply curious, exasperated by his ignorance, vowing to sort things out, to bring disparate details into relation, gradually began to see his way. One thing he saw was that the work of running the hotel was divided far more carefully and precisely than he had imagined, all the way down to the seamstresses and linen-room attendants of the housekeeping department. The bellboys, the day and night clerks, the doorman, and the elevator operators constituted the front office, and were directly under the supervision of the assistant manager, but the maintenance and smooth operation of the elevators was the direct responsibility of the assistant to the chief engineer. The engineering department also looked after the plumbing, the electric push-button buzzers, the gas lighting fixtures, and the new incandescent lights in the public rooms. Martin, wanting to see for himself, needing to arrange it all in a pattern, went with the chief engineer, Walter Dundee, to look at the new electrical plant in the basement that powered the incandescent lamps in the lobby and main dining room. Standing before the big 120-horsepower dynamo that Dundee said could light up a whole city block, Martin listened carefully to the engineer’s prediction that the old push-button buzzers would be driven out by telephones within ten years. Dundee, a lean vigorous man with a gray mustache, and a carpenter’s folding rule weighing down the side of his coat pocket, liked to explain things in detail, in a slow serious voice, and Martin liked to listen. The voice reminded Martin of his father explaining to him as a child how to roll a cigar without tearing the wrapper or how the back-and-forth motion of the piston in a steam engine became the circular motion of the flywheel. Martin warmed to the intelligent engineer, who in turn seemed to take an interest in Martin, and asked precise questions of his own about the management of the cigar stand.
But Dundee was only the most likable member of a large hotel staff. Martin visited the poorly ventilated staff dining room, spoke with the headwaiters, the steward, and the managing chef, listened to the complaints of the Irish chambermaids, visited the chief accountant and arranged to take lessons in the elements of bookkeeping. The details interested him, from the operation of the old steam elevators with their winding drums to the washing of the knives and forks, but they had no meaning until they were connected to the larger design. Then he grasped them, then he held them in place and felt a deep and almost physical satisfaction — and in his mind, in his chest, in the veins of his arms, he felt a secret exhilaration, as when in his childhood he had gone shopping with his mother and had realized not only that all the toy fire engines and diamond necklaces and leather gloves were different parts of one big department store, but that the store itself was part of a block of buildings, and all the blocks went repeating themselves, rectangle by rectangle, in every direction, until they formed a city.
As he threw himself into his new duties, which took him away from the life of the lobby but placed him close to the inner workings of the hotel, he sometimes had the sense that he was being led by friendly powers toward a destination they had marked out for him. The management, in the person first of Mr. Henning and then of Mr. Westerhoven, had shown him unusual favor, had singled him out and raised him up from the lowly rank of bellboy to his present position as personal secretary to the manager, all in the space of a few years. There had been rumors from time to time of Mr. Westerhoven’s retirement, of Mr. Henning’s promotion to manager, of the creation of a new position above assistant manager and below general manager, and Martin, who disliked rumors, which struck him as the exasperating equivalent of speculations about what would have happened if Lee had won the war, or if Booth had been a bad shot — Martin sometimes found himself wondering whether there might be something in the rumors after all, whether the friendly powers might be moving him in a direction. Then the dream-feeling would come over him, as if his real life were not here, where it seemed to be, but over there, a little off to one side, just over there.
Meanwhile the cigar stand was turning a nice little profit. Martin increased the amount of display space for cigarettes and added gift items that proved popular: alligator cigarette cases lined with satin, porcelain figurines of humorous pipe-smoking farmers, cast-iron clown faces that blew streams of little smoke rings. He and Bill Baer discussed ways of drawing women into this mostly male domain: on the cigarette counter they placed a chromo of a well-dressed woman smoking a cigarette, and alongside brightly lacquered boxes of specially selected cigars they set advertising cards directed at a woman in search of the perfect gift for the man in her life. Purchases by women had tripled over the last three months; and Martin added a new line of silver ashtrays, with the hotel insignia, a tiny Vanderlyn, engraved in black and red.