“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.