Old Friends

I heard by way of an email forwarded by one old friend from another old friend that Francie Kohfeldt had died in Phoenix. I guess she went back there after college and found the lawyer she was determined to marry. I mentioned this to Katharine and she asked who Francie Kohfeldt was. I said she was an old girl friend from college, really a friend of everyone in our group. “We all sort of …” I stopped because we hadn’t all dated her. “Co-felt?” she suggested archly.

I remember waiting for her in the lobby of the Pi Phi house. It was a fancy sorority house, but it still seemed a little shabby for Francie, who always looked like she was used to the best. Pi Beta Phi was founded at Monmouth College in 1859—one of those facts that just stick in my mind. Did Francie say that, or did I read it in the sorority house lobby? We drove her Alpine Sunbeam—was it red?—up to the first overlook on Mt. Lemmon and parked facing the lights of Tucson. “Che bella cittá!” was Francie’s comment; she was taking Italian that year.