“The weather’s important if you live off what you grow,” Uncle Tinsley said. “And some people think President Nixon’s doing a pretty good job trying to wind up a war he didn’t start. First Republican I ever voted for.” He stirred sugar into his tea and cleared his throat. “What is the plan for you and the girls?”
“I don’t like plans,” Mom said. “I like options. We have several options, and we’re going to consider them all.”
“What are the options?” Liz asked.
“You could stay here,” Uncle Tinsley said. He took a sip of tea. “For a while.”
“I don’t consider that an option,” Mom said.
Uncle Tinsley set down his teacup. “Char, you need to give these girls some stability.”
“What do you know about looking after children?” Mom asked with a tight smile.
“That’s not fair,” Uncle Tinsley said. “I do know if Martha and I had been blessed enough to have children, we never would have gone off and left them.”
Mom slammed her teacup down so hard I thought she’d break it, then she stood up and leaned over Uncle Tinsley. When anyone criticized Mom, she went on the attack, and that was what she did now. She was raising two daughters completely on her own, she said, and they were turning out darned well. He had no idea of the sacrifices she’d made. In any event, she was an independent woman. She had her own music career. She made her own decisions. She wasn’t going to stand here and be judged by her brother, a broken-down old hermit still living in the house where he was born in a dead-end mill town. He’d never even had the wherewithal to get the hell out of Byler, and she had not come back to this godforsaken place to answer to him.
“Get your things, girls,” she said. “We’re going.”
Liz and I glanced at each other, not sure what to say. I wanted to tell Mom how good Uncle Tinsley had been to us, but I was afraid she’d think I was taking his side, and that might make things worse.
“Didn’t you hear me?” Mom asked.
We climbed the stairs to the bird wing.
“Jeez, they hate each other,” I said.
“You’d think they’d at least be polite,” Liz said.
“They’re supposed to be the grown-ups,” I said, and added, “I sort of don’t want to go. We just met the Wyatts, and I really like them.”
“Me, too. But it’s not up to us.”
Uncle Tinsley was sitting at a writing table, scribbling on a piece of paper, when we came downstairs carrying the two-tone deb-phase suitcases. He folded the paper and passed it to Liz.
“The telephone number,” he said. “Byler two-four-six-eight. Call if you need me.” He kissed us each on the cheek. “You two take care of yourselves.”
“Thanks for letting me bury Fido near Aunt Martha,” I said. “At first I thought you were a little grouchy, but now I think you’re neat.”
And then we walked out the door.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Mom drove as if we were fleeing the scene of a crime, passing cars on the road to Byler and running the stoplight on the south side of town. She was gripping the steering wheel as if her life depended on it and talking a mile a minute. Mayfield had really gone downhill, she said. Mother would have been appalled. It looked like Tinsley had become a complete recluse, though he had always been a bit of a crank. Boy, seeing that place sure brought back memories—bad memories. Same thing with this entire hopeless loser of a town. Nothing but bad memories.
“I like Mayfield,” I said. “I like Byler, too.”
“Try growing up here,” Mom said. She reached into her purse and took out a pack of cigarettes.
“You’re smoking?” Liz asked.
“It’s coming back to this place. It’s made me a little tense.”
Mom lit the cigarette with the car’s push-in lighter. We turned up Holladay Avenue. The Fourth of July was a few days away, and workers were hanging flags from every lamppost.
“God bless America,” Mom said sarcastically. “With everything this country’s done in Vietnam, I don’t see how anyone could be feeling very patriotic.”
We crossed the clanking iron bridge over the river. “I met the Wyatts,” I said.
Mom didn’t respond.
“Aunt Al told me about my dad getting shot.” I bit my lip. “You said he died in an accident.”
Mom took a drag on her cigarette and exhaled. Liz rolled down her window.
“I told you that for your own good, Bean,” Mom said. “You were too young to understand.”
Getting the hell out of Byler was another thing she had done for the good of her daughters, she said. There was no way she was going to let us grow up in a finger-wagging, narrow-minded town where everyone would whisper about me being the illegitimate child of a hotheaded loom fixer who killed someone and then went and got killed himself. “Not to mention that everyone in town saw yours truly as the slut who caused it all.”
“But Mom,” I said, “he was defending your honor.”
“Maybe that’s what he thought he was doing, but he made everything so much worse. By the time it was all over, Charlotte Holladay didn’t have any honor left to defend.” Mom took a long draw on her cigarette. “Charlotte the Harlot.”
Anyway, she went on, she didn’t want to think or talk about the past. She hated it. The past didn’t matter, like where you came from or who you’d been didn’t matter. What mattered was the future: where you were going and who you were going to become. “I’ve figured out the future for us,” she said. “New York City!”
What had happened, she went on, was that she’d been down in San Diego with friends for a little group support, then went on to Baja to spend time alone on the beach looking for signs about what direction to take next. She hadn’t seen any signs, but then she got back to Lost Lake and found Liz’s message about us going off to visit the Mad Hatter and the Dormouse. That, she realized, was the sign. She needed to put California behind her and follow her daughters to the East Coast. She’d rented the U-Haul and thrown most of the stuff from our bungalow inside.
“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 fron
t 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.
“Mom’s never been like this before,” I said.
“Not this bad,” Liz said.
“She won’t shut up.”
“I noticed.”
“Maybe it’s just a mood and it’ll pass.” I plumped up one of the oversize pillows and leaned against it. “Mom and Uncle Tinsley have such different memories of growing up at Mayfield.”
“Like they grew up in two different houses.”
“What Mom said about her dad being inappropriate is creepy. Do you think it’s true?”
“I think Mom believes it, but that doesn’t mean it’s true. Maybe she just needed someone to blame for the way everything turned out. Maybe something happened and she blew it out of proportion. Or maybe it’s true. I don’t think we’ll ever know.”
After a while, Mom knocked on our door. “Ladies,” she called out, “time to hit the shops.”
She was still wearing her red velvet jacket, but she had teased her hair even higher and had put on glossy lipstick and thick, dark eyeliner. She was also still talking a mile a minute. As we rode the elevator down, she explained that the hotel’s main dining room was so fancy that men were required to wear a jacket and tie, and if they showed up in shirtsleeves, the maître d’ provided them with the proper apparel from a collection of jackets and ties kept in the coat room.
Mom led us back through the main lobby, which was now bustling with smartly dressed guests checking in, uniformed bellboys stacking luggage, and dapper waiters in tuxes hurrying along with champagne buckets and silver trays of martinis. Liz and I were still wearing the cutoffs and T-shirts we had put on that morning at Mayfield, and I felt seriously out of place.
We followed Mom down a corridor lined with stores that had glittering plate-glass windows in brass frames displaying everything from jewelry and perfumes to fancy carved pipes and imported cigars. Mom directed us into a dress shop. “My mother took me to this very store when I was your age,” she said.
There were racks of clothes, tables of shoes and handbags, and headless mannequins wearing expensive-looking pink and green summer dresses. Mom began holding up pairs of shoes and pulling dresses off the rack, saying things like “This was meant for you, Bean,” and “You’d look fabulous in these, Liz,” and “This has my name written all over it.”
The clerk came over, a slightly older woman with half-moon glasses hanging on a gold chain around her neck. She smiled, but like the doorman, she glanced down at my mud-caked sneakers. “Is there anything in particular I can help you with?” she asked.
“We need ensembles for dinner,” Mom said. “We checked in on impulse without bringing much in the way of clothes. We’re looking for something a little formal but also très chic.”
The clerk nodded. “I know precisely what you have in mind,” she said. She asked our sizes and started holding up various dresses while Mom oohed and aahed over them. Soon there was a pile of possibilities draped over a rack.
Liz fingered one and looked at the price tag. “Mom, this costs eighty dollars,” she said. “It’s sort of out of our price range.”
Mom glared at Liz. “That’s not for you to say,” she said. “I’m the mother.”
The clerk looked between Mom and Liz as if she couldn’t decide whom to believe and where this was headed.
“Do you have any bargain racks?” I asked.
The clerk gave me a pained expression. “We’re not that kind of establishment,” she said. “There is a Dollar General on Broad Street.”
“Now, girls, you’re not to worry about money,” Mom said. “We need outfits for dinner.” She looked at the clerk. “They’ve been staying with their tightwad uncle and have picked up his penny-pinching habits.”
“We can’t afford this, Mom,” Liz said. “You know that.”
“We don’t need to eat in the restaurant,” I said. “We can order room service. Or takeout.”
Mom looked at Liz and me. Her smile disappeared, and her face darkened. “How dare you?” she said. “How dare you question my authority?”
She was trying to do something nice for us, Mom went on, something that would lift our spirits, and this was the thanks she got? What a couple of ingrates. Thanks. Thanks a lot. She had driven all the way across the country to get us, and what did we do to show our gratitude? We publicly embarrassed her in a store where she’d been shopping since she was a girl. She’d had it. Had it with the two of us.
Knocking the dresses off the rack, Mom stormed out of the store.
“My goodness,” the clerk said.
We followed Mom out to the busy corridor, but she had disappeared.
“She must have gone back to her room,” Liz said.
We crossed the lobby, rode the elevator up to our floor, and walked down the hushed, carpeted hallway. A waiter passed us, pushing a cart loaded with plates and bowls covered by silver lids. The food smelled delicious and made me realize I was hungry. We hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and I wondered what we were going to do for dinner. The idea of room service started to seem mighty appealing.
We stopped at Mom’s door, and Liz knocked. “Mom?” she called out. There was no answer. Liz knocked again. “Mom, we know you’re in there.”
“We’re sorry,” I said. “We’ll be good.”
There was still no answer.
Liz kept knocking.
“Go away!” Mom shouted.
&n
bsp; “We love you, Mom,” Liz said.
“You don’t love me. You hate me!”
“Please, Mom,” Liz said. “We do love you. We’re just trying to be realistic.”
“Go away!” Mom screamed again.
The door shook with a bang and the sound of shattering glass. Mom had thrown something. Then she started sobbing hysterically.
We headed back to the lobby. There was a line of people standing at the reception desk, but Liz went right to the front, and I followed.
The clerk had polished black hair and was writing busily in a ledger. “The line starts back there,” he said without looking up.
“We have a bit of an emergency,” Liz told him.
The clerk looked up and raised his eyebrows.
“Our mom has locked herself in her room and won’t come out,” Liz said. “We need help.”
We trooped up to Mom’s room with the clerk and a security guard. She was still crying and refusing to open the door. The clerk went to a house phone and sent for a doctor. When the doctor arrived in his white jacket, the security guard took out a master key, opened the door, and led him into the room. Liz and I followed.
Mom was lying on the bed with a pillow over her head. The doctor, a small man with a mild Southern manner, stroked her shoulder. Mom took the pillow off her face and stared at the ceiling. Her makeup was smeared. Liz and I were standing by the wall, but Mom didn’t look over at us. Liz put her arm around my shoulders.
Mom let out a loud sigh. “No one understands how hard it is to be me,” she told the doctor.
The doctor murmured in agreement. He told Mom he was going to give her a shot that would make her feel a lot better, and after that she could probably use a couple of days of rest and observation at Commonwealth Medical. Mom closed her eyes and squeezed the doctor’s hand.
The clerk ushered Liz and me out into the hall. “Now, what are we going to do with you two?” he asked.
The Silver Star Page 7