I once told Ted and Alice that Maria Mancini (i.e., Maggie Dubris and I) had compiled a list of “The 100 Greatest Poems of All Time” and they made me run home and bring it right over. There were only 23 works on the list, some of which weren’t poems (“Love in Vain,” Robert Johnson, and Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne). Ted was there with The Sonnets. Alice wasn’t surprised to make our selective list, but she was highly annoyed that she was represented by “Poem (St. Mark’s Place caught at night in hot summer).” Too short, she grumbled. But perfect! I said.

When a bunch of us let Anselm, age 7, walk home alone, at night, the same summer that a kid his age had been snatched off the street, Ted was going to call the host and yell at her. Call Elinor, Alice said; she’ll feel much worse. I don’t know who that story is about, actually.

The summer that Ted died, Alice and the boys and I drove in my big old LTD over the Manhattan Bridge down Flatbush, yelling out the names of the fried chicken places we passed: Kennedy Fried Chicken! Arkansas Fried Chicken! Korean Fried Chicken! There seemed to be dozens. I know we didn’t drive like that every night but in my hot memory we did. Our hearts had stopped but we didn’t stop. We drove all the way across Brooklyn and turned around and went home.

It wasn’t so much that I would tell Alice secrets. It was more that I didn’t know what my secrets were until we were catching up, sitting on the floor in the kitchen at 101 St. Mark’s Place or later on, in a café when she was in town from Paris. She would look squarely at you, and you told her things that shocked you—but not her. She answered every truth with one of her own. Giggled and gave us all the beautiful broken pieces. O Alice.