The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls (6 page)

Sissy was in the intermediate class; I could see her in the next ring on a skinny Appaloosa, her brown bob flying in her face as she posted. I was in the advanced class, with twenty or so other girls, among them Gates, Leona, and a girl named Jettie, who sat at my dining table. The advanced class was the smallest class, and the privilege of being in it was enormous: you did not have to share your horse. All the other horses were shared except for ours.

Sissy was the weakest rider of her group. I realized it would be easier to be friends with her because I was better, much better, on a horse.

I watched Mr. Albrecht shout out instructions in his quiet, firm way. I liked him. Mother had taught me less and less about riding as the years passed, and though she occasionally offered advice now, I mainly schooled myself. Mr. Albrecht was a jumping master trained in Germany, he had won an individual bronze medal in the 1920 Belgium Olympics, and a team silver. He had already helped me with my seat, taught me a new way of sinking into the saddle that I found most effective. The Yonahlossee horses were all purebred; our courses designed by a jumping consultant, a friend of Mr. Albrecht’s from Germany; the barns were almost nicer, at least as nice, as our cabins, their corridors lined with bricks, the stalls with two windows each for ventilation and thick, sturdy shutters for the winter. Despite Mrs. Holmes’s best intentions, the rest of our education was secondary to horses, as I’d learned my first day when I’d skipped morning classes for my riding evaluation.

At home, Father tutored us from seven in the morning until ten, when he left to see his patients. Idella, our maid, served us breakfast while he explained ideas from books to us. The girls in my cabin thought it odd that I had never been to a real school before, but they didn’t know: we were lucky to be tutored by Father, who was brilliant, who was certainly smarter than the Emathla schoolteacher. I rode all afternoon, and Sam played tennis against the garage wall, and tended to his terrariums, his rescued animals.

“Advanced!” Mr. Albrecht called. “Come!” He clapped his hands.

Leona mounted, and for an instant she and her horse looked like a centaur: part horse, part girl. Then the rest of us swung up into our saddles. Gates cut a pretty figure on a horse, slim and elegant and ramrod-straight. Jettie, short and stocky, looked powerful in the saddle.

We stood on our horses for a moment while the first group filed past us, their horses’ chests flecked with white spit. It was summer, in the early afternoon. In Emathla you stayed inside during this part of the day, when the sun was high. It would have been dangerous to ride right now; you might kill your horse. During the summer I rose before anyone else and rode at dawn, before our lessons, and even then I had to carry an old handkerchief to wipe Sasi’s sweat from the reins. Sam and I would go out anyway, sometimes in the afternoon, and then we were giddy from the heat and danger of it—Mother would be furious if she knew—our brains boiled in our heads, the sun was so powerful it felt like we were lit from the inside. We would climb oak trees, me coaxing Sam higher and higher, and then lie in the embrace of a branch for hours, watching for some sign of life below—only the reptiles, impervious to the heat, presented themselves: thick black snakes, harmless, and bright green, darting lizards.

I bet it never got that hot here. These girls—they wouldn’t know how to survive in such heat. Then Leona’s enormous horse—he must have been over eighteen hands—began to walk, and Naari moved beneath me. We circled the ring in a single file, and then, one by one, as if orchestrated, the horses broke off and carved out their own space; I headed toward the far end of the ring, closest to the mountains. I was a Florida girl, used to hazy skies and flatness; the mountains were like clouds to me, so large and expressive they seemed like something you could reach for.

Naari was twitchy and quick; I knew immediately I would like her. She was too smart, I could already tell that by the way she tested me, twisting her barrel so she could carry her weight unevenly, tugging on the left side to see if I would notice. I did notice, I corrected her sharply, tugged back on the left rein, squeezed my calves against her sides so she’d speed up and straighten out. She was intelligent but fearful, two traits that always seemed to accompany each other in horses. A squirrel climbed up onto a post and Naari skittered sideways.

I thought about the future weeks, when we would know and understand each other, and I was nearly lifted out of the saddle in anticipation. Sometimes anticipation affected me in this way, as if I could feel it coursing through my veins. I suppose it was a girlish habit.

I watched Leona lead King in a figure eight. He kept dropping his shoulder on the diagonal, and she corrected him. She stared straight ahead, which was where, Mother was always reminding me, you were supposed to look—Look where you want to go, and Sasi will follow you there. Looking at my hands was a habit I couldn’t quite break; neither could I pretend a broom was hooked through my arms, to keep my back arched and my arms positioned in just the right way. Leona passed through the diagonal again, and this time King trotted through smoothly. Leona turned him, abruptly, and met my gaze briefly and I squeezed Naari into a trot, embarrassed that I had been caught watching.

We filed out of the ring when our riding time was over, Leona still led, but that was fine. She was more technically expert than I, had been schooled by masters, but she wasn’t better. I wasn’t as physically strong a rider as Jettie, or as pretty as Gates, but I had a way with horses; I could get them to do anything I wanted. I felt strangely powerful: I was a girl of fifteen, locked away in the mountains, surrounded by strangers. But I would be all right; I would emerge from this place.

—

I
fiddled with my books as Mr. Holmes led morning prayer. I could feel Henny watching me from the corner of my eye. Sometimes I looked up and studied the ceiling when we were supposed to be praying. I had never seen anything like it before, tin stamped with an intricate pattern of flowers. Rhododendron, Sissy had told me, and later pointed out a cluster of bushes with a pretty pink flower that lined the path to the barn. I wondered, as I often did, who had done it, and if the work had taken hours or days, days or months, and let Mr. Holmes’s voice recede into the background. As far as I could tell, he asked for the same things every morning: health, happiness, and prosperity. I couldn’t get used to all this sitting still; first at breakfast, then here, then all through classes. By the time lunch hour came, I felt like a caged animal.

And though I still missed my home, terribly, I was getting used to this new order of things. I was learning. I knew, for example, that though Yonahlossee had first seemed enormous, it was not even as large as our farm, only three hundred acres, and most of it was mountain land, uninhabitable.

Mr. Holmes shuffled a stack of papers on his lectern. We all paid attention, for the most part. Mrs. Holmes had caught my eye a few times when she noticed my attention wandering. She sat beside her husband, along with their three girls. When I wasn’t watching the ceiling I was watching the Holmes girls, who fascinated me. Just now Sarabeth put her hand over Decca’s, to stop her fidgeting. Sarabeth was the oldest, at eleven, and reminded me of her mother. Rachel was next, ten, and she was moody, a storm always passing over her face, or threatening to pass over, while her father spoke. I was jealous of them. The distinction between the Holmes girls and everyone else was very clear: they were not alone.

Decca was tall and dark like her father, and even at seven you could tell that she would continue to be tall and dark, would grow, it seemed almost certain, to be beautiful. It was unfair that nature had been so precise: each child born prettier, Sarabeth the first attempt, Decca perfect.

Decca caught my eye, and I looked away, but not before I saw her smile. I wondered what she thought of me. Did she think I was pretty? Did the other girls? I wasn’t sure where I landed on this list. My mother was beautiful, this I knew, both because I could see for myself and also because it was a fact in our family. She had even modeled for a milliner, briefly, before she met Father. I looked like her, but I had always known I was not beautiful. I had my mother’s hair, which was auburn and wavy, wild. I’d once seen a picture of Amelia Earhart in a magazine; the caption had called her handsome. I thought that’s what I was. Handsome.

“And there’s something more,” he said, and paused. He looked up, out into our midst. He stood in front of the window, which afforded the most perfect view of the mountains in the whole camp. When he looked out at us like this, it was as if the room disappeared, as if we were all on top of a mountain. Alice Hunt straightened beside me. We all felt it. “Something very serious.” Heads snapped up. “You all know Herbert Hoover?” A titter spread through the room. “Oh, of course not personally.” He smiled, and I found myself smiling back. “Though I dare say some of you
might
have met him.” Out of the corner of my eye I studied Leona, who sat next to Sissy. Maybe Leona was one of the girls who might have met the president? “Our president has lately spoken of his belief that our country will recover from this financial crisis.” He held up a newspaper, though we were all too far away to see it. A girl in front of me yawned. “This is a little old, of course.” He paused, as if anticipating our laughter, which of course followed. All of the magazines and newspapers were, at the very least, “a little old.” More often they were months and months old, sent to us by our mothers and sisters.

“Here our president declares the Depression over.” He tapped the paper, lightly, with his fingertip. “He asks for our continued effort in supporting the economy.”

Gates, who sat a row ahead, raised her hand.

“Yes, Gates?” Mr. Holmes said. He folded the paper neatly while Gates spoke.

“How can we help?” she asked. I thought that she was perhaps being impertinent, but Mr. Holmes didn’t seem to think so.

“A good question,” he said, “and one best answered by your fathers. To put it bluntly, money begets money.” Even Mrs. Holmes smiled a little bit, behind her husband. “Encourage your fathers to invest, to spend, to trust the banks.”

At first I didn’t understand what had triggered the merry laughter that followed Mr. Holmes’s answer. Sissy was giggling next to me, and as I watched her pretty fingers cover her mouth I understood completely: there was nothing we could do to help. We were but daughters. The idea that we would offer our fathers financial counsel was, indeed, laughable. I smiled, too, but not because I was amused; I smiled so that I was indistinguishable from the other girls.

“Let us pray that by the time you leave Yonahlossee, you will reenter a world that will be happier,” Mr. Holmes said, and stepped back so that his wife could step forward.

I hadn’t heard the name Hoover since I’d left home. I thought of Uncle George, who had returned from Miami the last time and said he would not go back, that it was useless, that the bank could take it all. How President Hoover was handling the crisis was a point of contention between my father and his brother: my father thought he was handling things fine. Uncle George thought more needed to be done, and soon.

Everyone here seemed so rich and Southern, impervious to the slings and arrows of the world. And there was me, who had learned to ride from Mother, on a pony without papers. My middle name was not an important family name, my family did not have five homes stateside, or spend Christmas in Venice. We were fine, because of the citrus money, but my father was a physician, not a cotton magnate or an oil king.

Yonahlossee was where important Southern men sent their daughters. I would later learn more: an Astor, via marriage to the Langhornes of Virginia, had graduated the year before I arrived. One of the girls counted Robert E. Lee as a relative. Her family owned rubber plants in Malaysia. There were other girls’ schools, but Yonahlossee was the oldest, and it must have provided a certain comfort to these men, locked away as it was in the mountains; nobody could reach their daughters here. Nobody could touch them. After World War II, these same men would begin to send their daughters to Northern schools, where they would become worldly. But in this moment, worldly wasn’t what anyone was after. The South was still a land unto itself, in some ways it was a land that time had forgotten. There were girls here who refused to believe, or at least admit, that the North had claimed victory in the War Between the States.

“Thank you, Mr. Holmes,” Mrs. Holmes began. There was still tittering, somewhere from the back, and Mrs. Holmes abruptly stopped speaking. “Girls!” The tittering disappeared.

“On that same note, but perhaps more specifically”—here she smiled, almost imperceptibly—“allow me to bring your attention to a way you might do more than simply keep those less fortunate than you in your prayers.” Her elocution was perfect. Miss Lee would have approved. “In the spirit of Christian charity, please consider making a pledge for a contribution to a Fund for the Mill Girls, who live a few hours’ drive from us and enjoy none of our benefits.”

Jettie and Henny stood and walked to the front of the room, carrying a papered box with
FUND FOR MILL GIRLS
carefully lettered on it in red. Jettie placed a stack of small papers next to it, along with a cup of pencils, and girls started to rise and scribble figures on the papers, then fold them and drop them into the box. It resembled the kind of box Mother had brought home from the Red Cross, for which she had volunteered when we were very small.

“Thank you in advance for your generosity,” Mrs. Holmes said. I didn’t have any money, not a single cent. I’d never had any money, or at least any that I could touch. “All right, girls,” Mrs. Holmes said. This is what she always said when she finished. It was a place maintained by routine. Mrs. Holmes was nice enough, I supposed. But not too nice, which was how you had to act if anyone was going to listen to you. That’s how I was when I rode.

Henny stood. We were going to class—I had elocution, then etiquette, one right after the other. They were so boring I could have cried. My parents had never seemed interested in a daughter who had perfect handwriting, or could spot the difference between an olive fork and a lemon fork (an olive fork had two tines; a lemon fork, three), but I wondered if Mother knew or any longer cared exactly what kind of education I was getting. Someone pinched my arm.