Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan, those old volunteers, were right about that Aspen local who was a ski guide at Camp Hale. Paul Goode was the little mountaineer they remembered—a Tenth Mountain Division man. My uncles were right about the exploits of the Eighty-fifth Mountain Infantry Division in Italy. Paul Goode would see his first combat in the battles for Mount Belvedere and Mount Gorgolesco; the little kindergarten man would be part of the Po Valley breakout and the Po River crossing, too. The Eighty-fifth would be in Verona in April 1945, a month before the Germans surrendered. Paul Goode would set sail from Naples to New York in August of that year, returning home to Aspen from New York. He was nineteen, a very young veteran of World War II. Everyone who remembered him as a kid said he’d been a darling boy. His mother was thirty-six—she’d been very young when she had him, only seventeen.

My uncles were also right about the little guy’s name. Paul Goode was born Paulino Juárez. Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan said Paulino didn’t look Mexican, but his mom was Mexican. Paulina Juárez named her son after herself. In interviews, when he was asked about his father, Paul Goode always said, “The Hotel Jerome has been a good father to me. The Jerome is my father.”

“You have to admit it, kiddo—your dad is pretty clear in interviews,” Nora said.

Paul Goode grew up at the Hotel Jerome, because his mother was a single mom and she worked there; she was a cleaning woman, a hotel maid. Although no one would speak of the boy’s father, Paul Goode’s mother had spoken only once but most succinctly about him. He’d been a guest at the Jerome. “He was a very nice, older gentleman—I’m sorry, but I don’t remember his name,” Paulina Juárez said; that was all she ever said about him.