An excerpt:

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"[...] Franny is among the last survivors of the once flourishing family, who for three generations had found in this hallowed institution a place to educate their sons and daughters alongside the children of Irish and Italian immigrants — some of whom were the very stonemasons who had helped to lay the footings for the now crumbling brick edifices — beginning in the late-nineteenth century.

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Although her own mortar was growing increasingly dusty, Franny nevertheless unfailingly showed up each fall for the homecoming soccer game (the school did not have a football team), when she was hailed by undergraduate students as drunk as Lords and paraded around campus like a proper Lady out for a tour of her rural fiefdom — her motorized wheelchair serving as a passable substitute for a chariot.

 

Behind her back, however, many of the jubilant well-wishers were growing impatient with the gift of her longevity. (Her durée had grown so longue, the medieval Europeanist was overly fond of joking — under hushed whispers and bumped elbows — that they believed she might actually be immortal.)

 

The immoderate measure of Franny’s days was indeed to the detriment of the college.

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You see, Franny was without children, and she treated her alma mater like a spoiled heir.

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And spoiled it had become: the feudal wastrels in the Office of Institutional Advancement did little other than prepare glossy, personalized memorabilia for an audience of one incredibly fortunate but lamentably long-lived alumna."