Straight Gate School for Girls is the former schoolhouse that becomes the Fox-Branch residence: a grand, decaying brick building on a sloping lawn above Elliott Bay. Its neglected rooms and grounds make it more than a domestic setting; its past as an institution for girls and the circumstances of Bernadette Fox raising her daughter there give the house an unsettling historical weight.

Building and Setting

The residence is described as a substantial brick building with an immense sloping lawn overlooking Elliott Bay. Inside, rooms are boarded up, and the house is in marked disrepair. The contrast between the building’s former grandeur and its deteriorated condition is central to how the residence is presented: a family with significant income continues to live amid visible neglect.

The account of the house interprets that choice as suggesting a lack of self-respect, ambivalence about financial and social superiority, and poor reality testing. These are assessments attached to the description rather than neutral facts about the family. The physical state of the house nevertheless gives those judgments a concrete setting.

Institutional Past

Straight Gate was not only a school for girls described as wayward. Audrey Griffin recalls that pregnant girls were confined there and that illegal abortions were performed in the basement. The building’s domestic present therefore stands alongside a history of institutional control and concealed reproductive care.

Audrey draws attention to the contrast between that past and Bernadette raising a baby daughter in the former schoolhouse. The account does not explain Bernadette’s choice of home, but the juxtaposition makes the building’s history relevant to the family’s life there rather than a detached piece of local background.

The Grounds and the Intervention

The residence and its grounds recur during the preparations for a family intervention. When Audrey drives past Straight Gate, she sees a police car in the driveway and recognizes Bernadette’s car passing by. A hole in the fence offers Audrey a way onto the property; she climbs through and crosses the hill toward the house to get an investigation file to Bernadette.

The blackberry growth on the hill has begun to return after earlier removal. Its reappearance is a small but concrete sign that the grounds resist remaining cleared, as Audrey’s return to the property turns the familiar landscape into a route around the police presence. Straight Gate thus connects the family’s settled home to the intervention’s immediate crisis and to Audrey’s effort to help Bernadette escape it.