The Hodges’ retainer was generous. When the time came, my parents used that income to buy the block-long building where Demetriou’s Papierie would be located. But my dad reminded me, all the Hodges’ advantages had not insulated them from tragedy. As a triumphant post-doc working on strategies to help single mothers own their own houses, my dear childhood friend Alzy died in a terrible way, from exposure on a winter night in circumstances that were never entirely clear.
“I know it’s hard for you to think of me as being your age,” I said. “But I was once.”
“It’s really not that difficult, Mom. I’m not ten years old. And you’re pretty young for having a kid my age.”
“Well, now that you say that, I’m going to have to tell this in a pretty old lady way. Because this is a story that has to do with your family history too.”
He stifled a sigh, in that moment, but a few minutes later, he was urging me on: “What happened next?”
“Well your project has to do with Alice Hodge, the oldest girl, the one we called Alzy. There was nothing she couldn’t do. Math? You bet. Field hockey? A star forward. Cello? Good enough for the Wisconsin Symphony. After we were in college, the families didn’t hang around together so much anymore, but I would still see Alzy and we would fall into the language we spoke together. She called me Threepy.”
“That fits you.”
“Not that we had much in common any more. Her friends were these sort of campus legends, the intense kids, the brainiacs.” Alzy’s friends graduated in three years and became Rhodes scholars. “And that’s essentially what she did too. After she earned her Master’s in Law and Diplomacy from the Fletcher School, she was chosen to be a fellow at UW’s Maraniss Institute of Journalism and Public Policy, her focus on media bias as it pertained to economically disadvantaged single mothers. Her wedding, to another similarly gifted academic whiz kid, was on a bounteous Midwestern October afternoon.”
“Wait, Mom, back up,” Stefan put in. “You forgot to tell me about your friends.”
“Well, I had friends,” I said. “Julie was always my closest friend. But I hung around with some people.”
“Lit geeks,” he said. “People in black turtlenecks who would break into a frenzy of quoting Yeats at the drop of a hat.”
I said, “No!” And then, I added, “Well, yes. Somebody has to be the one to say, but one man loved the pilgrim...”
“Pilgrim soul in you,” Stefan finished the line.
“How do you know that?”
“Geez, Mom, some kids heard ‘The Itsy Bitsy Spider’ over and over, but I heard ‘Now and in time to be, wherever green is worn...’”
“I’m embarrassed.”
“Don’t be. I’m sure it will impress girls someday.” He prompted me, “So Alzy sounds like the perfect child. I’m guessing that wasn’t all true.”
By the time of that beautiful wedding, I told him, Alzy was already an alcoholic with two failed stints in rehab behind her. “She was so dazzling that no one would ever have believed she was stopping to buy a pint of vodka on the way to work and another on the way home.”
“Jesus. And she must have been, like you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like small. Like that much booze. Guys in jail used to make pruno, they called it pruno, from fruit cocktail and oranges. They would guzzle it, these big skinheads. But if you had one swallow, you saw stars. Even me.”
I ignored that.
Instead I told him about Alzy’s wedding reception in the barn at her father’s farm, about how I, already a wife and mother for several years, thought I was too old, at only twenty-five or twenty-six, to be a bridesmaid in a wedding party, but how I ended up having the time of my life.
“To begin with, I looked so beautiful after the stylist got done with me that your dad did a double take when he saw me,” I said. “He didn’t recognize me.” The twelve bridesmaids were dressed like orchids in strapless wine-red velvet dresses, the bride and groom in a horse-drawn cart filled with pumpkins and sunflowers. “The setting was as close to a fantasy as there could be in real life.” Sun spangled the red-dappled trees and golden sheaves of hay, and the fences festooned with grapevine wreaths twined with dried dahlias and eucalyptus and lavender. “I have a picture of them in that cart somewhere, that your grandfather took. He would not consider letting anyone else take the photographs.
“The meal would not have looked out of place at the court of Henry VIII, and it certainly would not have been confused with cucumber sandwiches at a wedding in Connecticut. Slabs of meat and platters of delicate trout were flanked by pyramids of late sweet corn drenched in butter, followed by six kinds of cheesecake. Then the tables were dismantled and the planks used to set up a platform for the band and a smooth dance floor. Alzy spinning and spinning in her dad’s arms to ‘The Lullaby Waltz.’
“So then go forward, what? Seven years? Eight years? Alzy was divorced. The drinking was out of control. Her husband loved her, but he had no choice, I guess. Their little girls were probably only four and two. He asked for full custody and he got it, even though Alzy took him back to court, more than once, and even though, obviously, the judges all knew Malachy Hodge.”
“Did you see her then, Mom?”
“I didn’t,” I said. “Obviously, I feel guilty about that. Not that it would have made any difference. Alzy had the finest care that science knew about, whether it was here or in New York or California. Her family left no stone unturned. But I was busy with you and I was starting my own graduate school. It seemed like there would always be time. When you are as young as I was then, time seems like a renewable resource, constricting in the moment perhaps but burgeoning in the abstract.
“When Alzy fought back, she lost. And it wasn’t much more than a year, maybe it was a couple of years, after the last custody hearing, that she was dead.”
“That’s crazy. And she was your age? So early thirties then? That went fast.”
“I remember they played that same waltz at her funeral. The two little girls wore matching blue sweaters and black-watch plaid skirts. I thought that those clothes were so tiny they looked like they were made for a doll. The younger one slept in her father’s lap. This was when you were about twelve. Right. I didn’t want you to come to the funeral, although your grandfather did. He thought it would be a good lesson. I’m not sure in what.”
Stefan said, “I am.”
“Well, but there’s a lot of room between...” I was going to say the way you drugged and the way she drank...but there wasn’t. What is worse, to lose your best beloved or to have your best beloved do the very worst thing? I was a beggar at the same door of fate as the Hodges.
“That’s what this application is about, Mom,” Stefan said. “It’s one of the saddest stories in the world. Your friend fell so far.”
“I have to tell you the last part, Stefan,” I said. “It will help you do this project. Governor Hodge got up to read a part of ‘The Children’s Hour’:
“From my study I see in the lamplight
Descending the broad hall stair,
Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra,
And Edith with golden hair.
I have you fast in my fortress,
And will not let you depart,
But put you down into the dungeon
In the round-tower of my heart.
And there will I keep you forever,
Yes, forever and a day,
Till the walls shall crumble to ruin,
And moulder in dust away...
“When he finished, he looked out helplessly at the crowd that filled every seat and overflowed out the doors of the church. As if he had just noticed all of us, he said, ‘I want... I hope that...’ He tried to summon his politician’s firm posture. But his legs wobbled and he could not walk away from the lectern. It was Papu who finally helped him back to his seat in the front row and even your grandmother was crying on my shoulder like a child.”
“Now, I’m messed up,” Stefan said. “And I have to be strong and calm for this person.”
There was a knock at the front door.
On my porch stood the dark-haired young woman I’d just seen in my memory, sobbing in the church pew at Alzy’s funeral—older now but undeniably the same person.
“Mom, this is Rebecca Broom,” said Stefan.
I held out my hand. “I was just talking about you,” I said. “But I didn’t know I was talking about you. It’s the strangest feeling. Like I woke up from a dream, but the dream was actually happening in real life.”