The Sisters Montclair (5 page)

T
he next morning Stella cornered Elaine in the kitchen before she clocked out.

“I have to ask you something,” Stella said. “I hope you won’t think I’m crazy.”

“You didn’t get her to change her dress.”

“What? Oh, no, I asked her but she said no.”

Elaine stared, her eyes blue and emotionless.

Stella hesitated. “Have you ever heard footsteps in the hallway? Or had a strange feeling down in the basement?”

Elaine gave Stella a long, inscrutable look. “Are you asking me if the house is haunted? Because I’ve been here three years and I’ve never seen or heard anything out of the ordinary.” She crossed her arms over her chest, considering. “There was an evening caregiver a few years ago who woke up in the middle of the night and swore she saw an Indian standing in her room. She left and never came back. And there was another one who said she saw a man wearing plaid pants watching her in the basement. But they’re the only ones I know of.”

“I heard whispering on the monitor.”

Elaine’s expression was mildly condescending and Stella wished now she hadn’t said anything. She was a psychology major and she’d taken enough classes to know that ghostly hallucinations are often projections of inner emotional turmoil. Given that definition, it was amazing that she didn’t see phantoms everywhere.

Elaine gave a slight shrug. “Alice talks in her sleep. I’ve heard her.”

“But this voice was low and very – husky. It didn’t sound like her.”

“Her voice is fairly deep.” Elaine smirked suddenly and Stella understood why Alice didn’t like her.

She said, “Did Alice have a daughter?”

Elaine stopped smiling and shook her head. “No. Three sons. Although one is dead and we don’t ever talk about him. Sam, I think his name was. Her husband’s been dead a long time, too, and we don’t ever talk about him either.”

“Okay, well, thanks. I feel a lot better knowing that you’ve never seen or heard anything weird.”

“If there’s nothing else,” Elaine said, gathering her crochet and stuffing it into her sewing bag. “I guess I’ll clock out.” She picked up the phone and called in and Stella went over and wrote her name in the book and read through Elaine’s notes from the night before.
Alice seemed restless,
she had written.
She didn’t sleep well. Once she got up without waiting for me and went into the bathroom and turned on the light. Very sarcastic this morning.

“Oh, one other thing,” Elaine said behind her, and Stella turned. “When she takes off that green dress tonight, take it and put it immediately in the clothes hamper. The thing is crawling with germs. I won’t have her wearing it again until it’s been washed.”

Despite Elaine’s comments in the notebook, Alice seemed rather chipper and happy to see her.

“You came back,” she said when Stella poked her head in the room.

“Of course I came back. Are you used to people not coming back?”

“Some don’t.”

“Well, I’m not like that.”

“I can see that you’re not.” She waved her hand at the newspaper lying on the other twin bed. “You’re welcome to read it, if you like.”

“Thank you,” Stella said, picking up the paper. “Is there anything good to report?”

“Just the usual death and destruction,” Alice said cheerfully.

“Oh, good. I like reading about death and destruction.”

She took the paper out to the sunroom and sat drinking a cup of coffee and staring at the sunny valley below. She shouldn’t be reading the paper at all; she should be working on a term paper due in her
Psychology of Gender
class. The class met on Tuesdays and Thursdays and now that Stella was sitting with Alice on Wednesdays and Thursdays, she would have to miss the Thursday morning session. At least temporarily, until she found some other kind of work. She stirred guiltily, remembering Alice’s comment this morning about her not coming back. Still, some things couldn’t be helped. She had told Charlotte specifically that she couldn’t work Thursday mornings because of her class and yet Charlotte had scheduled her anyway. Her professor was cool and Stella felt certain that once she had explained the situation, she’d be allowed to pick up notes from some other student. But who to ask? Stella kept to herself, she didn’t socialize with the other girls in her class, many of whom had started out together as freshmen, reinforcing their friendships through rush parties and trips to Destin. Stella had never had the time, or the money, for any of that. It was everything she could do just to keep up with her class work, given the number of hours she had to work.

The reality was she couldn’t have done it without the help of Professor Dillard who was also her advisor. Professor Dillard had taken Stella under her wing and seen to it that she was allowed to take
Psychology of Gender
even though she hadn’t taken the prerequisite Women as Victims class. And she would make allowances, Stella felt certain, for her current situation, too.

She had been lucky with teachers. Even during grade school back in Alabama, there’d always been at least one teacher each year who took an interest in her. She was smart and quietly attentive, and she made good grades all the way up until her junior year of high school when everything she knew, or thought she knew, came crashing down around her. Even then it had been Charlie Chesmore, her Honors English teacher, who had taken her aside and demanded to know if she was having trouble at home.

Professor Dillard would make allowances for her for spending Thursdays with Alice Whittington, but she would expect Stella to find someone whose notes she could copy. And the only person Stella could even remotely imagine asking was Luke Morgan.

He was the only male student in her
Psychology of Gender
class; the upper level psychology classes were filled primarily with women, and this made him a great favorite with both the professor and the other students.

“Tell us what you think from a male perspective, Mr. Morgan,” Professor Dillard would say when explaining some controversy over cultural and psycho-biological influences. He’d been in Stella’s
Serial Killers in History
class in the fall, but he’d let his hair grow out over the Christmas holidays and now it fell in soft brown waves around his face. When asked a question, he would always pause thoughtfully before replying in a deep, melodic voice, and everyone in the class would turn their heads to listen.

Last Tuesday he had answered one of Professor Dillard’s questions in a way that made the whole class laugh. Turning to look at him, Stella had found his eyes fixed intently on her. He was sitting a row behind her, they were separated by a group of giggling sorority girls, but he had stared at Stella in such a frank, steady manner that even the sorority girls had turned around to look at her. Stella quickly dipped her head, letting her hair drop around her face like a curtain.

Afterwards, she sat quietly while the rest of the class filed out. He was not the sort she was usually attracted to; he seemed too clean-cut and sincere and his eyes were kind. She had the feeling, sitting there, that he would be waiting for her when she went out, and this thought caused a flutter of dread, but also nervous anticipation, in the pit of her stomach.

She thought of the way he had stared at her, jaunty, appreciative, as if the comment he had made, and the laughter it caused, had been a gift for her. It was pleasant to picture him waiting, perhaps as nervous as she was, pretending to hunt for something in his backpack while listening for the sound of her footsteps.

But when she finally gathered her courage and her backpack and walked out, hopeful and wary, the hallway was empty.

That morning as they walked around the house, Alice told her a story about going on the train from Sweet Briar to New York during the nineteen-thirties.

“You couldn’t tell me anything when I was young,” Alice said. “I thought I knew it all. I went to college at Sweet Briar. Have you ever heard of it? When I asked one of the other caregivers she said,
Never heard of it.
”

“I’ve heard of it,” Stella said firmly.

“Do you go to college?”

“Yes. UTC. I’m putting myself through.”

“Very commendable,” Alice said.

She slid the walker out in front of her in a steady, rhythmic manner. She was quiet for the next lap and Stella was afraid she’d forgotten about the story.

“So you went up on the train from Sweet Briar?” she said, prompting Alice. She had come to enjoy Alice’s stories, the unpredictability of them, the humorous overtones, the glimpses of Alice as a young woman, strong and determined and fearless.

“What?”

“The train.”

“What train?”

“The one that you took from Sweet Briar to New York. You were telling me about a trip you made in the nineteen-thirties.”

“Oh yes,” Alice said. “Anyway, I was going up on the train with my friend, Clarice, up to New York. Several of my school friends were from the city and I used to go up there a lot on the weekends. Oh, they were wild, those Yankee girls. It was shocking the things we could get up to without proper chaperones. Their parents mostly let us alone to do as we pleased and I wasn’t used to all that freedom. Anyway, we left Sweet Briar in the morning and by mid-afternoon I was hungry. But when we got to the dining car there weren’t any open tables. A porter came up to us and said, ‘That lady over there said you could share 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, and Westover was co-ed. The elite of Chattanooga sent their children to one of these three from sixth grade on; it was one of the ways of determining what social class you were from. When adult Chattanoogans met each other for the first time and asked,
What school did you go to?
they weren’t asking about college. Competition to get in was fierce, especially at Westover which only accepted fifty boys and fifty girls each year. The rivalry between Westover and Smithson was legendary, sustained by over one hundred years of fierce competition. Stella had had a girl who graduated from Marymount in one of her classes at the university, a thin, sweet girl who’d flunked out of Sarah Lawrence (
I was homesick
, she’d told Stella mournfully) after only one semester. She was congenial and well-educated and extremely naive, the kind of girl who could recite Sylvia Plath, but didn’t have a clue when a guy in class was hitting on her.