PART ONE
1
1958
The dean and the dorm mistress stood brooding over the student housing plans laid out on the rosewood conference table. It had been a parching August, happy news only for the tobacco growers transporting their precious harvests from the fields to the curing barns. The tall sash windows of the old building, lowered and raised from top and bottom, failed to entice a flutter of air. The sheer net curtains hung as still as in a painting. The dean had prohibited grass mowing and faculty showers until the day before the girls arrived on campus.
“Maybe we could put her in the Lanier room, with Eskew and Linzey,” suggested the dorm mistress. “Back in ’48 when we had a full house again, we fitted three beds and dressers into Lanier, and those girls hit it off so well they ended up serving as one another’s bridesmaids.”
Despite the sapping heat, Winifred Darden, dorm mistress at Lovegood College for thirty-one years, displayed the ramrod posture of a woman born in the last century—which indeed she had been, though midpoint in her tenure at Lovegood College she had moved her birth across the dividing line. (“Don’t you dare tell a soul, but I am the same age as this century!” she gaily fibbed to each new crop of girls.)
“I somehow can’t see either Eskew or Linzey asking Feron Hood to serve as a bridesmaid,” said the dean.
“Well, as you know, I wasn’t on campus that day and didn’t get to meet her and give her the tour. What was your impression of her?”
Susan Fox paused to assemble her answer. Beginning her second year as dean of Lovegood College (though some continued calling her the new dean), she still had not become fluent in the southern art of evasive overlay. “At Saxon Hall, we had a teacher who would throw herself off a cliff before saying something negative about a student. The worst thing she allowed herself was, ‘So-and-so is not forthcoming.’ That phrase kept beating through my head while interviewing Feron Hood and her uncle.”
“Not forthcoming,” Miss Darden helpfully repeated. “And by that you mean …?”
“I had to guess, from the little her uncle told me, that she was … well, that she had been subjected to a wider range of life’s misadventures than our typical Lovegood girl.”
“I see,” said the dorm mistress, who didn’t exactly. “Perhaps we might … that little annex next to the infirmary that Mr. Sikes converted into a single room in case of a quarantine …?”
“The last thing a knocked-about girl like Hood needs is to feel quarantined. She needs a positive, steadying influence. I had the idea of pairing her with Jellicoe.”
“But Jellicoe’s already in with Chasteen! A perfect match. Both fathers are in farming.”
“But the purpose of college, after all, isn’t to settle down with a carbon copy of yourself. We could switch Chasteen to the Lanier room. As you pointed out, it’s spacious enough for three. Eskew and Linzey are second-year girls. They’re old news to each other. They’ll make a pet of pretty little Chasteen.”
“But if Hood has been knocked about and isn’t very forthcoming—I mean, Jellicoe struck me as such a positive girl. She knows how to appreciate things. When I was giving her family the tour, I was about to show them our new wing with the modern rooms, but Jellicoe said she liked the high-ceilinged old rooms. Her mother asked if they shouldn’t at least see what the new wing had to offer, but Jellicoe said, ‘No, I like the way more has happened here in this old part, you can feel it.’ That is insightful for an eighteen-year-old, don’t you think?”
“They might benefit each other. When I was headmistress at Saxon Hall, each girl was allowed to bring one horse. Just one. The rule had been written in stone since the founding of the school. Then this desirable girl we really wanted insisted her horse couldn’t be separated from its companion pony. The horse was a skittish thoroughbred, and the pony kept it calm. I made an executive decision, and we got the girl and the horse. And the pony of course. It worked out well.”
Not quite sure which girl was meant to represent the thoroughbred and which the pony, the dorm mistress asked the dean if she could elaborate a little on Feron Hood’s misadventures.
“Her uncle telephoned and asked for an interview. It was all very last minute, as you know. He’s a lawyer down in Lauren County. The niece had simply showed up at his office. Walked across town from the bus station with her suitcase and asked if he would take her in. He had no idea who she was.”
“He didn’t know his own niece?”
“He had never met her. She was his late brother’s child from a very short marriage. The couple divorced soon after the baby was born. There was no contact until the next husband petitioned to adopt the child. Since his brother had recently died, the uncle handled the matter. Then years went by. The mother had died of a fall, and the girl blamed her stepfather and caused quite a scandal. But she reversed herself at the inquest and continued to live with him for several months before she ran away. She stopped in Chicago for a short time, sleeping in the park, and then decided to head south to the uncle.”
“So she knew she had an uncle.”
“The mother must have told her if things got impossible, they might throw themselves on his mercy. From what Hood told her uncle, it was not a happy home.”
“I wonder why the uncle picked Lovegood College.”
“Oh, his grandmother was one of Lovegood’s earliest students.”
“Really! What was her maiden name?”
“It was Seawell, or Sewell. I made a note of it. But while they were here for the interview, I forgot to follow up on the grandmother, I was so intent on studying the girl. She was polite but said no more than she was asked. I got the sense she was being very careful until she was sure she had been accepted.”
“I will go through the old records,” said Winifred Darden happily. “That means Hood will be eligible for the Daughters and Granddaughters Club. That should provide her with some ballast. We’ve kept everything, you know, even the first yearbooks, which were stitched together by hand.”
“There’s a problem with transcripts. She ran away before finishing high school. I told them we would work it out.”
“Will she be coming as a full-tuition student?”
“You bet your sweet life. And he’s paying extra for tennis lessons.”
What would it be like, Susan Fox wondered, to move into a school building at thirty and find yourself still living in it at sixty-two? Darden, the dorm mistress, was not a secretive person and had dropped a discreet crumb-path of self-history for the attentive person to follow. Here was a case of a poor, well-born girl reaching marriageable age just as the young men were leaving for World War I, earning her keep by living with rich people and taking care of their children until Lovegood College decided it needed a live-in dorm mistress. Winifred Darden was recommended by a family friend who was a Lovegood trustee. When the student body shrank by half during the Depression, the dorm mistress made herself indispensable in other ways, and by the time the Depression was over, she was going on forty. (“I still wake up and thank my stars for this solid roof over my head, not to mention my beautiful living quarters.”)
Making the most of her scant bounty, whereas ambitious Susan Fox, fortunate in all but the well-born start, prospered in her era until she brought the roof down on herself.