“Don’t you see, Liz?” Mom asked, sounding almost giddy. “When I read your note about the other side of the Looking Glass, it hit me. That’s New York City! If you’re a performer, New York and L.A., they’re the two sides of the Looking Glass.”
Liz and I glanced at each other. We were all crowded in the front seat because Mom had crammed guitars and boxes of sheet music into the back.
“Are we being realistic?” Liz asked.
“Realism, schmealism,” Mom said. Was Gauguin being realistic when he set out for the South Pacific? Was Marco Polo being realistic when he headed off for China? Was that skinny kid with the raspy voice being realistic when he dropped out of college and left Minneapolis for Greenwich Village after changing his name to Bob Dylan? “No one who dares to be great and reach for the stars worries about being realistic.”
New York was where the real scene was, Mom said, much more than L.A., which was nothing but a bunch of slick producers making empty promises and desperate starlets willing to believe them. Mom started going on about Greenwich Village, Washington Square, and the Chelsea Hotel, blues bars and folk clubs, mimes in whiteface and violinists in graffiti-covered subway stations. As she talked, she became more and more animated, and it occurred to me that she wasn’t going to mention the Mark Parker business or the fact that she’d walked out on us—and we weren’t supposed to, either.
“What we’re on now isn’t just a car trip,” Mom said. It was a holiday, she explained. A way of celebrating the forthcoming New York Adventures of the Tribe of Three. “I’ve got a surprise for you.”
“What’s the surprise?” Liz asked.
“I can’t tell you, or it won’t be a surprise,” Mom said, and then she giggled. “But it’s in Richmond.”
We reached Richmond late in the afternoon. Mom drove up a tree-lined avenue, past a bunch of monuments of men on horseback, and stopped the Dart with the orange-and-white trailer behind it in front of a building that looked like some kind of Mediterranean palace. A man in a crimson coat with tails walked up and stood looking dubiously at the Dart and the U-Haul.
Mom turned to us. “This is the surprise. Mother and I used to stay here when we came into Richmond to shop.”
She opened the car door and extended her hand to the doorman in a ladylike way. After a pause, he took her hand and, with a slight bow, helped her out of the car.
“Welcome to the Hotel Madison,” he said.
“It’s good to be back,” Mom said.
We followed Mom out of the car. The doorman glanced down at my sneakers, which were caked with the orange mud of Byler. Mom led us up the carpeted stairs into a cavernous lobby. Rows of marble columns with big dark veins running through the stone lined both sides of the room. There was a soaring ceiling, two stories high, with a gigantic stained-glass skylight in the middle. Everywhere you looked, there were chandeliers, statues, overstuffed chairs, Persian rugs, paintings, and balconies. I’d never seen anything like it.
“Can we afford to stay here?” Liz asked.
“We can’t afford not to stay here,” Mom said. “After what we’ve been through, we not only deserve it, we need it.”
Mom had been talking almost nonstop since we left Mayfield. Now she went on about the hotel’s Corinthian columns and the sweeping staircase that, she said, had been used in a scene from Gone with the Wind. When she and her mother stayed here, she told us, they’d shop for her wardrobe for the school year, and afterward, they’d take tea and sandwiches in the tearoom, where ladies were required to wear white gloves. Her eyes were glowing.
I thought of pointing out to Mom what she’d said earlier, that she had nothing but bad memories of growing up, that she’d always hated the white-glove set. I thought better of it. She was enjoying herself too much. Besides, Mom was always contradicting herself.
At the check-in counter, Mom asked for two adjoining rooms. “Mom!” Liz whispered. “Two rooms?”
“We can’t crowd up in a place like this,” Mom said. “This is not some neon-lit fleabag motel. This is the Madison!”
A bellboy in a brimless hat brought our two-toned suitcases up to the rooms on a trolley. Mom made a show of presenting him with a ten-dollar tip. “Let’s freshen up, then go shopping,” she said. “If we’re going to eat in the main dining room, we’ll need proper clothes.”
Liz unlocked the door to our room. It was extravagantly furnished, with a fireplace and burgundy velvet drapes pulled back with little tassels. We lay down on the four-poster bed. The mattress was so soft that you sank into it.