Nettie and I took a flying drive to Delaware this week to inspect the campus of a boarding school. Pandemic ennui makes even the shortest jaunt seem like a grand holiday, and we timed our extremely modest (yet giddy!) escape precisely so we wouldn’t be in the non-contiguous state of Delaware beyond the 24-hour limit that kicks in a travel-quarantine requirement, and we dined intentionally all the way up and down the I-95 at frankly disgusting fast-food drive-through restaurants so the only place we’d have to step inside was the glamorous, empty lobby of the Hotel Du Pont in Wilmington.
Wilmington is Biden country, and as we took the exit off the interstate toward the Brandywine Valley, skimming over the city outskirts on an extended overpass, Nettie let out a victory whoop as billboards extolling the presidency of the hometown boy whipped past. The Hotel Du Pont was built in 1913 and is a member of the Historic Hotels of America. (I always choose to stay at one of the Historic Hotels of America, if I can, over the objections of my kids, who call them “musty” and would take a Hilton Garden Inn any day, as long as it has an indoor pool or one of those breakfast machines where you press a button to make your own pancakes.) The ceilings of the lobby, mezzanine, and dining rooms of the Hotel Du Pont are elaborately carved in what I gather is a 1913 take on an Italian-Renaissance style. When it opened, 25,000 Delawarians, they say, streamed through to gawk at its magnificence.
Nettie and I were alone with the front-desk clerk, who, standing behind a Plexiglas barrier in the soaring lobby, told us there was nowhere to walk and nothing to see on a Sunday afternoon in downtown Wilmington during a pandemic.
We elevatored up to the fifth floor, trotted down an endless, deserted hallway to our room, dropped our one overnight bag, and went back outdoors for a stroll anyway.
Around the corner we found Market Street, which is the very pretty and doll-size main drag of this small city’s business core. We window-shopped down the empty street, Nettie adjusting her pace so she remained 10 paces behind me or 10 paces ahead, anonymous and not related to her mother, no matter how I sped up or slowed down to try to get her back by my side. (Nettie readily admits this is because she is black and I am white and this family circumstance is excruciatingly embarrassing when we’re out in public and a group of teenage boys might appear from behind a mailbox at any moment.) Nothing was open on Market Street except the African hair-braiding salon, but Nettie loitered on a corner at a discreet distance while I peered into the alluring interiors of two different old-fashioned restaurants of the kind where — like the Candy Kitchen, once upon a time, and Riverhead’s Star Confectionary — they sell fancy chocolates in golden gift boxes alongside the Salisbury steak.
The sun was shining at 4 o’clock but there was hardly anyone around, just a few panhandlers and . . . suddenly, a group of teenage boys on the hoof who sprang out from an alleyway and got one look at 13-year-old Nettie in her Yankees baseball cap and began catcalling her, shout-singing “New York, New York!”
The Hotel Du Pont fills a city block. It’s a monolith. Passing through the lobby again, we encountered the only other guests we saw the entire time: an older couple with a small dog that stood nervously on the plush carpet, looking at us, in a winter coat. Closed was the hotel florist, closed was the gift shop, closed was the jewel box of a ballroom — where 400 celebrants gathered on New Year’s Eve of 1947, when the lights came on again after the dark duration of the War. I pointed out to Nettie some lobby-display photographs of days gone by when there was a millinery shop, too, in the concourse off the lobby.
The Hotel Du Pont is spanking and well mood-lighted, and some designer has chosen chic new wallpaper for the public spaces: oversized icy-white blooms by the elevators, spotted cheetahs in the entranceway to the Green Room restaurant, which was closed, but which I peered wistfully into before we caught the elevator. The Green Room is a swanky, romantic space with high, arched windows, plush curved banquettes, and warmly glowing gold chandeliers.
Nettie and I elevatored up to the gym on the 12th floor, did a madcap workout on the weight machines in our street clothes, then rode back down to the fifth floor for the thrilling vacation adventure of hot baths in a soaker tub and a nostalgic reviewing of Disney’s “Frozen 2” (a movie selected by Nettie because it reminded her of the happier days and happier vacations of childhood, when we would fly to Orlando and wallow in the lazy rivers and nonalcoholic tropical fruit drinks of American good fortune). On the long jog down the endless, muffled hallway, Nettie Facetimed with friends, letting them have a peek at the grandeur of our accommodations.
“It looks like the hall in ‘The Shining’ with the evil little girls!” one friend’s voice bellowed through Nettie’s iPhone.
“It does not!” I shouted back.
If Nettie decides to go to boarding school — and this is very much an open question, as we’re still caught up in the mother-daughter push and pull, her lingering 10 paces behind or shooting 10 paces ahead, trying not stand beside me but not wanting to be left walking by herself — I expect to stop off at Wilmington again, and to stay again in the Hotel Du Pont. Maybe we’ll run into one of the Bidens there. I really could use a good Hotel Du Point cocktail, brandy and bitters, in the Green Room bar.
Pushing aside the curtains as the sun went down and the clock ticked onward towards 5, I looked across the carless street at an office block devoid of office workers, floor after floor of empty windows and empty desks, the stilled center of another American small city. The lights were on, but no one was there.