“Papu and Mal played soccer together,” I said, “and they went to the prom with girls they later married. When your grandpa was working for the Hodges, he took photos for them all over the place, of the good things they accomplished, like these gorgeous ecologically restored lakes in Minnesota and at this old logging camp in Maine where any family who asked could stay a week for free.”
We often went along. Just like my parents, the Hodges had three daughters, about three years apart in age. They were named sentimentally for an old Longfellow poem that Governor Hodge’s mother read to him and his sisters when they were small. “Your aunts and I grew up with Alice and Allegra and Edith, more like cousins than neighborhood friends. They were all beautiful and accomplished, blond like their father and dark-eyed like their Puerto Rican mother. We went swimming at the governor’s mansion and slept over, thrilled to order hot-fudge sundaes from the kitchen at midnight.”
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.