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

husband was away, she was alone and sick in a big city, for all her air of crossness and imperiousness she really seemed quite helpless. But this was not all of it. Martin had never met anyone so demanding, so difficult, as Mrs. Hamilton, and in part his patience, which at times surprised him, came from a desire to meet a challenge, to rise to an occasion. And there was something else, which he sensed without quite putting it clearly to himself: Mrs. Hamilton, this powerful and far from unattractive woman, was drawing him close to her in some puzzling, secret way. She gave him an occasional look that made him lower his eyes, sent him into her dusky bedroom for scented handkerchiefs, seemed, without moving from her sofa, somehow to be circling round him—and this sense of a secret adventure, of something intimate and slightly dubious that must never be spoken of, something dusky and hidden that at times made a tremor ripple across his stomach, drew him willingly to her side.
    And she was burning up: there was no doubt about it. Over and over again she took her temperature and rang for Martin to read the thermometer, since she could never find the miserable column of mercury in the insufferable glass rod. She waited anxiously while he stood by the edge of a curtained window and turned the glass rod slowly in hisfingers. “You see,” she said, “I really am burning up,” as the number rose to 101, to 102, to 102.5. Martin handed her the two blue pills prescribed by her doctor, dampened towels that she pressed to her forehead.
    On the third morning of her fever, when Martin entered the dusky parlor with a pitcher of ice water at seven o’clock, he saw Mrs. Hamilton lying on the sofa with a blanket pulled up to her chin and her head resting on two bedpillows in ruffled shams. Martin poured a glass of water, full but not to the very top, and set the pitcher down carefully on the table behind her head. She lay with heavy-lidded eyes, her hands pale and almost luminous on the dark blanket; below her eyes the skin was waxy and blue-dark. “I’ve had a simply abominable night, Martin. I feel heavy as a lump of lead. Be a dear boy and check the curtains, I feel a wretched draft. I really don’t think I can bear much more of this wretched abominable fever. I really do believe I won’t ever get well. I’ll just lie here and burn to ash and be swept out with the fireplace cinders. They can boast till they’re blue in the face about the incandescent lamp, but they can’t even invent a cure for a simple fever. That doctor is the most stupendous fraud—even his whiskers look false. My pulse is racing; I have a throbbing in my head. Everything’s burning, burning—and cold, I feel cold. Are you cold? I feel it’s all up with me, Martin; it’s far more serious than these fools can possibly know. Everything seems like a dream. That’s what they say, you know: life is a dream. As in that child’s song—how does it go? Merrily merrily. Life is but a dream. My pulse is absolutely racing. If youcould bring me a glass of ice water: yes. Just hold it: right there: yes: and lift my head. That’s it. Now set the glass down and take my pulse. Is this a dream? My heart’s racing, racing: can’t you feel it? Can’t you? Silly boy, what’s wrong with you? Here, place your hand here, on my poor racing-away heart. Yes. Yes. Don’t you know anything? Come here now. Here now. Yes.”
    And Martin entered her fever-dream, at first awkwardly, then easily: it was all very easy, easy and mysterious, for he barely knew what was happening, there in the dusk of the parlor, in a world at the edge of the world—Mrs. Hamilton’s dream. The silk-smoothness of her skin surprised him, and under the skin was bone, lots of bone, skin stretched over bone, and then a sudden warm wet sinking and sinking, and somehow he was standing in his uniform with an empty pitcher in his hand and Mrs. Hamilton was looking at him with wide-open eyes over which the