3. West Brighton
ALTHOUGH MARTIN’S FATHER KEPT THE STORE open fourteen hours a day, six days a week, once a year during the hottest part of the summer he put up a sign in the window and took his family to West Brighton for three days. Almost to the moment of departure his father gave no hint that anything extraordinary was about to happen, but at closing time on the evening before the holiday he put up his sign in the window, and that night there was a great scraping of drawers and clicking of luggage locks. The next morning Martin would wake eager to crank down the dark green awning and roll out old Tecumseh into the shade, and as the knowledge of the holiday entered him he felt for a moment a little burst of disappointment, before excitement seized him.
Martin liked the sound of the reins slapping the cabhorse, the thump of baggage on the roof over his head, the shaking bouncing seat and the shaking bouncing window from which he looked out at buildings that bounced and shook in the rattle of high wheels and the bang of horsefeet. At the ferryhouse there was a smell of tar and fish. Masts stuck up over the roof. The fat tower of the almost completed bridge rose into the sky like a gigantic hotel. On the other side of the ferryhouse he looked down through spaces in the planking at the green-black water under his feet. Gulls lazed in the sky on motionless outspread wings. Gulls floated on the gleaming dark water like wooden shooting-gallery ducks. Suddenly the ferry lurched backward. Martin stood at the side rail feeling the spray on his face and taking in the bright red ferries, the sun sparkling on the black coalheaps of the barges, the thick cottony smoke-puffs from the tugs, the trawlers at the fishmarket, the sand scows, the high three-masters thick with rigging like floating telegraph poles. A man held a red lunchpail that grew smaller and smaller. When Martin turned his head he saw the ferryhouse on the other side getting bigger and bigger. A bell banged. There was a jolt as the engine reversed, chains rattled — and no sooner had Martin stepped onto the planks of the wharf than the loading gates of the ferryhouse swung open and men and women rushed from the waiting room toward the ferry. In the street on the other side of the ferryhouse there were snorting cabhorses and horsecars on tracks and two-wheel pushcarts heaped with bananas and hats and apples under big umbrellas. The tower of the great bridge rose over the top of the ferryhouse. In a horsecar with screeching wheels and a clanging bell they rushed along the streets of the other city, the one that was always unaccountably there, on the wrong side of the river. It was too much, too much — the whole world was trembling — at any moment it would crack apart — but already they were climbing into a steam train, already they were hurtling along in the Prospect Park & Coney Island Railroad, soon the 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 the coalsmoke 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.
4. The Vanderlyn Hotel
IN THE SUMMER OF MARTIN’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-noon arrangement, 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 in the door — if it was a door you wanted to get your foot in. If they liked you, and Henning already liked Martin, and if you showed you had the stuff, you could work your way up: already the Vanderlyn employed two day clerks and a night clerk, and there was talk of hiring a mail clerk to take some of the pressure off. And there were openings all the time in other hotels, especially the new uptown joints that were springing up as fast as you could blink an eye. Martin ought to think it over.
Martin didn’t have to think it over, since the idea was as fantastic and crackbrained as the idea of joining a circus, and as he dismissed the offer with a shrug he suddenly imagined himself walking along the red-carpeted corridors of the Vanderlyn, past the high doors, looking up at the brass numbers; and for a moment he saw so vividly the half-open door, and the two feet crossed on the bed, that a confusion came over him, as if he were waking from a dream to find himself in a brown, dusky shop. Charley stood with his hands in his pockets and his head tipped at a jaunty angle. His father’s face was thoughtful. And seeing his father’s thoughtful face, Martin had the sense that he was slipping back into his dream of the dim red corridor, the high doors, the actors and actresses sitting along the walls.