My mother’s schooling in the Jews Hospital and Orphan Asylum in the Norwood section of London’s East End, where the girl then named Lily Shiel lived from 1910, aged six, until she “graduated” at fourteen, was the real parallel to Davy’s Salem House. On her admission to the orphanage Lily had her golden hair shaved to the scalp as a precaution against lice. Students who failed to live up to the codes of conduct had their punishments recorded in the “Sulking and Punishment Book.” This was an experience one could—and my mother in hindsight did—call “Dickensian.” But no slightest hint of the grim conditions of Salem House troubled either of our minds as she whisked me to New York’s Saks Fifth Avenue to buy me jodhpurs and riding boots because riding at a nearby stable was one of Rosemary Hall’s many extra-curricular activities. She didn’t want me to miss out on any pleasure or privilege.
Yet I remember the boarding school as desolate much of the time. We called it the “pink prison” because of our confinement within its faded rose-colored stucco facade. I moved through cold, ill-lit corridors, off which, through doors left ajar, you could glimpse the dorm rooms, small and austere, no matter how girls tried to brighten these with a poster or a rug. We ate our meals in the dining refectory, a large high-ceilinged room modeled on the dining hall of an English college. The teachers sat at a raised high table and we students in rows of rectangular tables beneath them. The food was institutional—overcooked and bland. Often as I lingered, captive in my seat, a fast eater waiting to be allowed to rise and go back to studying, I would stare at the dulled gold-lettered plaques on the walls, bearing the names of girls who had won prizes for Latin or English, or who were former captains of the field hockey or tennis team. Who were these girls? They seemed alluring and remote.
In the chapel, plaques hung as well, these with the names of the Optima girls, the students, one each year, deemed simply the best. We attended the chapel every weekday morning and again, for a full service, on Sunday afternoons, as Rosemary Hall was nominally Episcopal and chapel in that era still an unquestioned staple at most Eastern boarding schools. I welcomed any distraction from the oppression of enforced religion, silently parsing the gold-lettered names on the plaques as the congregation intoned the mellifluous yet automatic words of the Nicene Creed: “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth, and in Jesus Christ, His only Son our Lord . . .” Although I had willingly joined the choir, I had also decided I was an atheist with a personal rule that I would sing but wouldn’t pray. While my schoolmates knelt in prayer, I would look all about me, scanning the rows of bent heads from my conspicuous place in the second-soprano section of the choir stalls. Many didn’t like this scrutiny and told me so. I wasn’t popular. As David learns, a world has its rules and culture. If you fail to conform, you will at the very least be teased—your bed short-sheeted, as mine was. I was a studious girl, often with ink on my fingers, three thousand miles from home.
But somehow I managed. Like David, who worships the charismatic but deeply flawed James Steerforth and takes decent Tommy Traddles for granted, I made a few friends, who seemed sufficiently ordinary for me to relax with, and I fixed on an object of veneration in the class above me.
My best friends were Pam Wilkinson, a wry scholarship girl from Pittsfield, Massachusetts, who used to stick pins in a little doll effigy of her mother—my own mother was alarmed to learn about this—and Sue Stein, dark-haired and overweight, one of the very few girls in the school who was Jewish. At that point, I didn’t know about my mother’s Jewish background. By the time I learned of it, at age sixteen, my friend Sue had already left to finish high school back with her family in Brooklyn. One year at Rosemary Hall had been enough for her. I remember confiding in Pam that I was half Jewish and being counseled that it wasn’t necessary to broadcast this inconvenient alteration to my identity.
My idol was Judy Wilson, a tall big-boned blonde with a pixie haircut. Judy was not just a rider but one of the best riders in the school. Those of us who had signed up for this expensive activity rode at a nearby stable run by a florid-faced man named Teddy. Despite the correctness of my Saks Fifth Avenue riding togs, I never quite got the hang of East Coast equestrian style; I was used to Western saddles and trail rides in the hills above Malibu. Without a saddle horn, the Eastern saddle seemed alarmingly bare; its stirrups were too high, and you weren’t supposed to neck-rein the horses. Judy Wilson, in contrast, had a wall in her room lined with blue ribbons from jumping com-petitions, and her popularity was such that she was elected head boarder marshal her senior year. She moved through the corridors of Rosemary Hall, often in her riding boots, with a calm assurance I considered the epitome
