Read Taking Care of Terrific for Free Online Page B

firmly. "No," he said.
    I looked around, but didn't see any signs of a public restroom. "Think you can make it all the way home, Tom? I don't know where else to take you."
    "I'll take him," said a voice. "I'm going myself."
    We turned, and there was our bag lady again. It was the first time she had ever spoken directly to us. And she wasn't mumbling crazily, or anything. "I'll take him," she said again, quite clearly, and held her hand out to Tom Terrific.
    Well, I might have broken a few rules, let him pat a dog or two, given him Popsicles. But I wasn't about to send him off to a public bathroom with a bag lady. Tough to explain that to his mother if he disappeared and I never saw him again.
    "I'll come along," I said. Tom took her hand, I
followed behind, and we headed down the path.
    I glanced back at Hawk. He rolled his eyes, grinned, waved, and picked up his saxophone.
    She was shuffling along at a pretty quick pace, and Tom trotted beside her. In a minute the three of us had reached one of the Arlington Street exits from the park. I still didn't see anything that looked like a bathroom. All I could see were taxis, people, bicycles, cars, and more people. The intersection of Arlington and Newbury was always a big traffic jam.
    "Stay here," said the bag lady to Tom, and she left him on the curb. She walked right out into the traffic, her black coat flapping, her gray hair flying around her head. Cars slammed on their brakes. There were screeches of tires, angry yells from taxi drivers, and a whole orchestra of honking horns. She held up one hand like a policeman. In a second all the traffic had stopped.
    "Come on!" she called to us. Hastily, embarrassed, I took Tom's hand and we crossed the street. She brought up the rear, and behind her the traffic started up again; a few drivers called out a final insult.
    "Terrible street," she muttered. "They ought to put a light there." She took Tom's hand from me and, at her quick, flapping pace, headed for an
entrance. I cringed. For the first time I realized where she was going. I
more
than cringed; I wanted to disappear, to die on the spot.
    The bag lady was planning to pee at the Ritz.

    The Ritz-Carlton is one of the oldest, the most elegant, the most expensive, and the most snobbish hotels in Boston. Movie stars and kings and sheiks and millionaires stay at the Ritz when they're in town. Once Paul Newman was there, when he was making a movie in Boston, and people stood on the sidewalk outside, hoping to catch a glimpse of him.
    My mother told me that once an admiral went there for dinner wearing a dress uniform, the white kind with brass buttons up to the chin, and they wouldn't let him in the dining room because he wasn't wearing a tie.
    Someone at school said that Shirley MacLaine tried to go into the Ritz bar one night after she did a performance of a play, and they turned her away because she was wearing pants. (The same person said, "So then she took her pants
off,
right there in the lobby"; but I don't believe that part.)
    Once when I was there for dinner (my parents take me there each year, on their anniversary), I saw a man wearing a turtleneck shirt trying to
enter the dining room. The maître d' took him aside, and after a minute he came back wearing a tie they had loaned him, wrapped around his turtleneck. My parents hissed at me to quit staring, but I couldn't help it; he looked so stupid, and his wife kept glaring at him while they ate. You could almost tell she was muttering, "I
told
you to wear a tie."
    I was wondering what they were going to say when we tried to go inside. It was so mortifying that the only thing I could do was pretend I was Paul Newman's daughter (ridiculous. Would Paul and Joanne name a daughter
Enid?
). I stuck my nose into the air and fantasized that I was going to meet my dad in the lobby.
    To my amazement, the doorman, in his dark blue uniform, said "Good afternoon" and held the door open for the three of us, as if every day of his