“You want to lure ’em in, do you?” Dundee said, looking at Martin with amusement.
“I want more than that,” Martin said. “I want to keep ’em in. I want people to return. I want them to be unhappy when they’re not here.”
“That’s a tall order,” said Dundee.
“It’s a tall city,” Martin said quickly.
One Saturday about a week after workmen began to arrive at the Paradise Musée, Martin took Bill Baer to look at the work. He had spoken to Walter Dundee about his friend, with a view to including him somehow in the project, and as he stepped among workmen’s tools and piles of lumber and old sawhorses he tried to make Baer see the new lunchroom — the gleaming windows, the curve of the polished oak counter, the pedestal tables, the steady glow of electric lights. Later, at dinner, he made his proposaclass="underline" Bill would give up the cigar stand and come to work on the first of the year for Martin and Dundee. They needed a man to oversee the daily operation of the lunchroom and billiard parlor, to keep close track of expenses and profits, to be on the premises, to settle problems and keep his eyes open — to serve in short as a kind of managing assistant, at a salary nearly double his present one. Martin, who had expected to see a look of bewildered gratitude on Bill Baer’s face, was puzzled to see him stare down at his plate with a small tense frown. He looked up and said, “It’s not for me.”
Martin gave an impatient little lift to his shoulders and turned both hands palm up.
Bill said, “Oh, I could probably learn the ropes well enough, and not shame myself or let anyone down. And God knows I can use the money. But I’d never feel — it would never suit me, Martin. I’d always feel I was in over my head. Cigars are what I know — it’s in my blood. I’m a cigar man, every inch of the way.”
“You’re any kind of man you damn well want to make yourself,” Martin said, surprised by the sharpness in his voice.
“Then I damn well want to be a cigar man.”
“Then what you damn well want—,” Martin began, but gave it up. Bill was explaining how he wanted to have a cigar store of his own one day, maybe down in the old neighborhood; he was saving like crazy. He too broke off and looked sharply at Martin.
“Look here, Martin. Say someone offered to let you run a carriage factory, or a big city bank. The whole shebang. Would you do it?”
“Like that,” Martin said, snapping his fingers.
Bill burst out laughing. “I think you really would.” He shook his head. Martin expected him to say something more but Bill took a long drink of beer, and the next day, as Martin reported the conversation to Walter Dundee, he didn’t know what irked him more: the sharp tone he had taken with his friend, or Bill’s bewildered, slightly sorrowful shake of the head. Dundee, who had had misgivings about hiring an amateur, was visibly relieved, and Martin turned his attention to a part of the business that Dundee had failed to consider at all.
Martin had been studying the rows of advertising cards that adorned the inside of every car on the horse railway lines, for he had immediately sensed their tremendous power: people trapped in the slow-moving cars, with nothing to look at except the face of some stranger across the way, let their gaze drift to the advertisements, which attempted to seize their attention with bold lettering and clever pictures calculated to make a sharp, decisive impression. The Jap-a-lac lady in her white apron, painting a window frame and smiling at the viewer over her shoulder, or the man in the ad for Sapolio soap, staring at his face reflected in the shiny back of a pan, were the daily companions of thousands of horsecar riders, who saw the same ads in daily papers and weekly magazines, on cards in shop windows, on posters stuck on hoardings and the walls of El stations, until they were as familiar as the nose on George Washington’s face. One afternoon Martin paid a visit to one of the new downtown ad agencies, which placed ads in newspapers and did business with a dozen different streetcar lines, including the new Broadway cable cars. The art director agreed to prepare some sketches for him.
Martin envisioned a single, striking image that would draw people to the lunchroom: a bowl of soup with wriggly lines indicating warmth and, just above the bowl, a man’s face with half-closed eyes and a smile of rapture.
Meanwhile his work at the hotel was going well. Mr. Westerhoven knew the hotel business thoroughly, took pride in the Vanderlyn, and behaved with scrupulous fairness toward every member of the staff, though he proved to have one flaw: he liked his hotel just as it was, and was indecisive over the question of costly innovations. He understood that times were changing, that steam radiators were replacing hot-air vents, that room telephones were bound to replace electric buzzers, but he questioned the necessity of such changes even as he bowed, rather stiffly, to the inevitable. He seemed to enjoy hearing Martin’s view of such things, as if this permitted him to maintain his opposition while passing on to his youthful secretary the responsibility for each disastrous turn to the modern. Martin, who believed that the Vanderlyn was in danger of becoming antiquated, argued that up-to-date improvements weren’t luxuries but necessities of the modern hotel, though he acknowledged that the spirit of a hotel was larger and more complex than technology alone could account for: people liked telephones and the new electric elevators and private toilets and incandescent lights, but at the same time they liked old-world architecture, period furniture, dim suggestions of the very world that was being annihilated by American efficiency and know-how. People needed to be assured that they weren’t missing the latest improvements, while at the same time they wanted to be told that nothing ever changed. Hence the cleverness, the sheer genius, of a little invention like the electric chandelier, with its combination of Mr. Edison and the courts of Europe. To Mr. Westerhoven’s objection that this was a hopeless paradox, Martin answered that that was the point: people wanted the paradoxical, the impossible, and it was the Vanderlyn’s job to provide it. The solution, Martin argued, was to move in both directions at once — to introduce every mechanical improvement without fail, and at the same time to emphasize the past, especially in decor. He had seen the same idea at work in the El trains: miles of iron girders and columns, the whole thing a masterpiece of modern engineering, the cars equipped with up-to-date running gear — but step inside those cars and you saw old-world mahogany paneling on the walls, tapestry curtains on the windows, and Axminster carpets on the floors. He had been told that the old-fashioned curtains were hung on concealed spring rollers.