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her table.’
    She seemed nice enough, but kept asking us all kinds of questions. I was a sociology major, you see, and I knew everything there was to know about everything. And I told her what I thought about the New Deal and the WPA and the CCC.
    When we got back to our berth, Clarice said, ‘Say, I know who that lady was.’ And she pulled out a magazine and sure enough we’d been talking to Eleanor Roosevelt. The president’s wife.
    I said, ‘
I should have known from her teeth,
’ and Clarice just laughed and laughed.”
    Stella stopped just inside the living room doorway. She stared at the slowly retreating Alice. “Are you telling me,” she said in a loud voice, hurrying to catch up. “Are you telling me you had lunch on the train with
Eleanor Roosevelt
?”
    Alice paused in front of the French doors, staring down at the steep wooded lot that sloped precariously toward the valley below. “When I got home, I told my father and my grandfather. My father was a lawyer and my grandfather owned a bank. And when I told them all the things I’d said to the First Lady about social security and union protection programs, my grandfather shook his head and said to my father, “Law, Roderick, is this what comes of educating girls? Is all my money going to educate future socialists?”
    Stella stepped up beside her, still feeling the shock of her revelation. “Alice, do you know how incredible that is? You’re probably one of only a few people still living who can say they ever had lunch with Eleanor Roosevelt.” They stood looking at the hazy mountains and the distant, snaking glint of the river.
    “Well, I don’t know about that,” Alice said.
    “You should write a book.”
    “No one would read it.”
    Alice turned, sliding the walker in front of her. Halfway across the living room she stopped again and pointed to a framed photograph that lay, face up, on the coffee table. It was of a group of school children, lined up in three neat rows in front of a bricked school building. The girls all wore their hair with bangs and two points that curved forward on their cheeks, and the boys wore their hair slicked back from their faces. They were all dressed in white, white dresses for the girls and white shirts and knickers for the boys. “Can you pick me out of that group of scallywags?” Alice said.
    Stella let go of the mental image of Eleanor Roosevelt and picked up the photograph. She held it up and studied it carefully. There were several girls who looked like what she imagined Alice must have looked, but one in particular, a tall girl with blonde hair and a stubborn, mischievous expression, caught her attention. She was standing on the back row with the boys, her arms crossed over her chest.
    “That one,” Stella said, pointing.
    Alice chuckled. “That’s right,” she said. “You’re the only one who’s ever guessed right the first time. That was at Miss Fenimore’s School. It was downtown by the river in those days. My mother was so displeased when she saw me standing with my arms crossed on my chest. That was considered very unladylike in those days.”
    “I thought you lived on Signal Mountain.”
    “Only in the summer. During the school year my father rented a house downtown so my sister and I could go to school at Miss Fenimore’s. Later, I went to Marymount Academy for Girls and I didn’t like that so much, shut up all day with only females. In those days, both Westover and Smithson were boys’ schools. Westover wasn’t coed like it is today, or I’d have wanted to go there. Of course my family were all Westover people but the Whittingtons were Smithson people. So when I married Bill, I had to become a Smithson person, too. My sons all went to Smithson.”
    “And your granddaughters went to Marymount?”
    Alice gave a long fluttering sigh. “That’s right,” she said.
    There were three prep schools in town; Marymount, Westover, and Smithson. Marymount was all girls, Smithson was all boys,