Patting her face with a white hand towel, Rose emerged from the bathroom, still in her nightgown and bathrobe, a peach-colored thing with creamy silk piping. Sadie had an identical one, a gift, of course, from Rose.
“Hi, Dolly,” she said, walking over and giving Sadie a quick peck on the cheek. “Let me look at you.” She stood back and examined Sadie, who had dressed carefully—as she did every Sunday—in anticipation of this moment.
“What a cute dress!” she said. “Let me see. Stand up.” Sighing, Sadie rose and allowed her mother to pluck at the hem of her skirt. “Where is that from?” Rose was extremely interested in young people’s costumes and shopping habits. Sadie laughed.
“You gave it to me, Mom.”
The older woman scrunched her slender nose. “I did?” She made this second word two syllables, suggesting that, perhaps, Sadie was trying to pull off some elaborate ruse.
“Umm-hmmm,” said Sadie, nodding.
“Where did I get it?” Rose asked suspiciously. She gestured for Sadie to sit down again, then joined her on the chaise, so that the two might solve this mystery together.
“Bergdorf’s,” said Sadie. She was already bored with this conversation. “So,” she said, picking up the paper and depositing it on the chaise, “Tuck was arrested? You’re sure it’s him.”
“Bergdorf’s when?” asked Rose, squinting at the dress.
“Last summer. End-of-season sale. So, Tuck—”
“Didn’t I get you a blue dress, too?”
“Yes,” said Sadie, with a sigh. She started making up the bed. Her mother could, potentially, stand here for hours, cataloging Sadie’s wardrobe. “So, Tuck was—”
“Yes, yes,” said Rose. “It’s funny, isn’t it? Lil didn’t say anything?”
“I haven’t talked to her.”
“Tuck and some other fellow. I can’t remember his name. It sounded vaguely familiar.” She picked the paper off the chaise and riffled through it. “Where is it, where is it. It was a funny sort of article. I read the beginning, then skipped to the end. There’s a picture of Tuck.” Sadie stacked the pillows and ran her hands over the coverlet. She had, she realized, come up to her parents’ early with the vague intention of seeking counsel from her mother—should she tell Lil or stay out of it?—but the subject now seemed unbroachable.
“Ah! Here it is.” She extracted the Style section.
Sadie laughed. “The Style section? So, I take it, he wasn’t arrested for murder?” Rose peered at Sadie distractedly over the tops of her reading glasses, which she’d extracted from the pocket of her robe.
“No, of course not. What makes you say that?”
Sadie gave her a wry smile. “Nothing, Mom. So tell me what happened.” Rose cleared her throat. “Well. Sadie, I don’t know if you know this, but there’s been all this trouble with Crown, the hotel company. Your father has been very concerned about it. His firm, you know, has a big account with them. Your father personally owns stock in the company—”
“Yes, yes, but what’s the trouble?” As these words came out of Sadie’s mouth, she realized exactly what the trouble was. Prisons. Of course. Rob Green-Gold. But it was too late, her mother was going to explain it, in her peculiar, laborious way, taking forever to get to the point.
“Well, it turns out Crown actually makes most of their money off of prisons. It’s kind of funny, isn’t it? Hotels and prisons. It’s kind of like that housing project in Chicago, those big towers that were made into luxury apartments. The apartments were just the same, but some were luxurious—”
“Yeah, Cabrini. They’ve been torn down now,” said Sadie impatiently. “But, yeah, I’ve read all about Crown. They kind of dominate the prison industry.”
“Yes,” said Rose, “well, they made it an industry and, it seems, they’ve been building prisons faster than the courts can”—she clicked her tongue—“drum up prisoners. They just keep building prison after prison. All on government commission, of course. Some are half empty. Even though there’s some ridiculous number of prisoners now, twice as many as ten years ago. Ten million. Or something like that. All from drug crimes, of course. Reagan.” She shook her sleek head. Reagan was a continual source of trouble for her. Sadie’s father had voted for him the first time he ran (“We were in a recession; he had a strong domestic policy; you didn’t live through the Depression, Sadie, you don’t understand”) and, thus, Rose blamed poor James Peregrine for every failure of the administration, as well as the one that followed. “Anyway, people are starting to think that there’s some sort of conspiracy: Crown and the government in cahoots to build more prisons and make more money for Crown—and the politicos approving the prisons—imprisoning every black man in the country in the process. I keep reading about it in The Nation. Your father thinks it’s all a load of bunk, but the company stock is dropping—”
Sadie could stand it no longer. “Mom, Mom, Mom”—Rose stopped talking and shot Sadie a wounded look—“I know. What happened with Tuck?”
Rose raised her black eyebrows. “There’s no need to be short with me.”
“I wasn’t being—”
“Just the facts, ma’am, right? If that’s the way you want it. Fine by me. I need to get dressed.” She stood up, her mouth set in a hard line, and sighed dramatically.
“Please, Mom,” said Sadie, struggling not to laugh. “Tell me what happened. Sit down.”
Rose complied petulantly. “Well,” she said, “it seems that Tuck participated in a, a theatrical protest against Crown. The company was having some sort of executive dinner at the St. Allen on Central Park South, which isn’t called a Crown and everyone thinks it’s still an independent hotel. It used to be, when I was your age, but now everything is owned by some big company. Anyway, Tuck and these people crashed the dinner.”
“But why is it in the Style section?” Sadie laughed.
“Some designer had something to do with it.” Sadie tried, quietly, to peer over her mother’s shoulder. “Shall I read it to you?”
“Yes,” said Sadie, and Rose smoothed the paper and began:
In the 1960s, countercultural types—protesters of the Vietnam War, back to the landers, hippies, yippies, residents of communes, and other bohemians—could be easily identified by their uniform: raggedy hipster jeans, peasant blouses, fitted leather jackets, Frye boots, small round glasses and, of course, the long, flowing locks memorialized in that summer-stock staple “Hair.”
These days, it’s a bit harder to tell a bona fide radical—not that there are all that many in our apolitical, apathetic age—from your average college student, with the entire country’s twentysomething population clad in standard-issue Gap jeans, Patagonia jackets, and Timberland boots. That is, unless you’re talking about the loose network of young people affiliated with überactivist Rob Green-Gold’s fledgling organization Wise Wealth, which helps the young and loaded “lead ethical lives,” by making “lifestyle choices”—like adopting a vegan diet and refusing to patronize chain stores—and donating part of their inheritance to left-of-center causes. Such causes might include PrisonBreak, another of the energetic Mr. Green-Gold’s ventures, this one devoted to dismantling the country’s “prison industry,” in which—according to Mr. Green-Gold, and a number of other prominent antiglobalization advocates—large corporations make fat profits off the labor of mistreated prisoners. Mr. Green-Gold’s innovative ideas and approaches have won him no small measure of fame, and as a result, his organizations have attracted the fiscal and personal attention of any number of Hollywood’s left-wing elite. Sean Penn, Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins, Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke, Debra Winger and Leonardo DiCaprio have all pledged money to PrisonBreak, as have rock stars (Kim Gordon and David Byrne), literary luminaries (David Foster Wallace, Junot Diaz), and technomoguls like Steve Jobs and Ed Slikowski.