But stay? Forever? Eating endless potatoes and talking to the old fogeys who wanted to marry her off to just about anyone?

July 1964

She’d show them!

At two in the morning, the Burton house — and the houses of all their neighbors — slept quietly, secure in their prosperity and self-righteousness, with only a night-light here and there casting dim rays into the darkness. There was no one around to notice a figure creeping silently out the door and stepping into the red sports car parked in the driveway.

All of suburbia might be sleeping, but once Marjorie reached her destination, the vibrant energy of the neighborhood enveloped her like the embrace of a manic and overexcited old friend. Greenwich Village was alive and pulsing, a crazy quilt of flickering neon signs, jazz melodies, and artists and poets drinking in smoky basement clubs. Here was youth, fresh, alive, rebellious: Exactly what Marjorie was searching for.

Here was her dream. The dream her parents were bent on destroying.

It wasn’t fair!

She’d had it all figured out. She’d believed Father’s promise, as he dangled both rent for an apartment and a car of her own as a trade for finishing college. She would graduate, move to the Village, and then grab life by the shoulders and really shake it up!

By the time she’d reached her senior year, though, the atmosphere of her home was stifling her. She just couldn’t do it: If she stayed at home she knew there would be an explosion before she managed to wear that stupid cap and gown that Father and Mother worshiped. And then her lucky star intervened, in the unlikely shape of a Coney Island hotel. Shabby it might have been, the Freed Hotel, but it was certainly respectable, and even Father and Mother couldn’t object to her living there.