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and had already kissed my forehead, but now she sat on the edge of the bed, setting her hand where my knees were beneath the covers. “Dr. Wycomb has known Daddy since he was a little boy, and she can be a bit bossy. She thinks everyone should share her opinions. I guess you wouldn’t remember her visits here because the first was when you were just a baby, and the next one might have been when you were four or five, but there was something that happened on the second visit, a discussion about Negroes—should they have rights, and that sort of thing. Dr. Wycomb was very keen on the subject, as if she wanted us to disagree with her, and we just thought, for heaven’s sakes, there aren’t any Negroes
in
Riley.” This was literally true, that not one black person lived in our entire town. I’d seen black people—as a child, I’d once been captivated as we drove by a restaurant outside which stood a mother, father, and two little girls my age in pink dresses—but that had been in Milwaukee.
    “Do
you
dislike her?” I asked.
    “Oh, no. No. She’s a formidable woman, but I don’t dislike her, and I don’t think Daddy does, either. It’s more that we all realized it might be simpler for Granny to go there than for Dr. Wycomb to come here.” My mother patted my knee. “But I’m glad they’re friends, because I know Dr. Wycomb was a real comfort to your granny after your grandfather died.” This had happened when my father was two years old; his own father, a pharmacist, had had a heart attack one afternoon at work and dropped dead at the age of thirty-three. Just the idea of my father as a two-year-old pinched at my heart, but the idea of him as a two-year-old with a dead father was devastating.
    My mother stood then and kissed my forehead a second time. “Don’t stay up too late,” she said.
    THOUGH MY CULTURAL enrichment had been the justification for our trip, the train had scarcely left the Riley station when it emerged that my grandmother’s overriding goal in Chicago was to buy a sable stole from Marshall Field’s. She’d seen an advertisement for it in
Vogue,
she confided, and she’d written a letter to the store asking them to save one in size small.
    “If I’d been clever, I’d have ordered it a month ago and worn it to church on Christmas Eve,” she said.
    “Does Dad know you’re buying it?”
    “He’ll know when he sees me in it, won’t he? And I’ll look so ravishing that I’m sure he’ll be thrilled.” We were sitting side by side, and she winked. “I have some savings, Alice, and it’s not a crime to treat yourself. Now, let me put some lipstick on you.”
    I puckered my mouth. When she was finished, she held up my chin and gazed at me. “Beautiful,” she said. “You’ll be the belle of Chicago.” Personally, I did not consider myself beautiful, but in the last few years, I had begun to suspect that I was probably pretty. I stood five feet five, with a narrow waist and enough bosom to fill out a B-cup bra. My eyes were blue and my hair chestnut-brown and shiny; I wore it chin-length and curled toward my cheeks with a wispy fringe of bangs. Being attractive felt, more than anything, like a relief—I imagined life was harder for girls who weren’t pretty.
    Our train ride was just over two hours, and at Union Station in Chicago, we were met by a woman I did not recognize at first as Dr. Gladys Wycomb; absurdly, I think I’d expected her to have a stethoscope around her neck. After she and my grandmother embraced, my grandmother stood next to Dr. Wycomb and set one arm on her back. “A legend in her own time,” my grandmother said, and Dr. Wycomb said, “Hardly. Shall we go have a drink?”
    They seemed to me an unlikely pair of friends, at least with regard to appearance: Dr. Wycomb was a bit heavy in a way that suggested strength, and her handshake had almost hurt. She had short gray hair and wore white cat’s-eye glasses and a black gabardine coat over a gray tweed