CHAPTER THREE

Los Angeles, 1942

Mother didn’t waste much time. Within a week, she had me enrolled at Saint Ann’s, starting in the fall, and had notified Country Day that I wouldn’t be coming back after summer vacation. In the last week of school, my teacher told the class that Country Day was “losing” me next year and everybody should say goodbye. I remember my cheeks burning; she had caught me by surprise, and I had no time to figure out how to arrange my face, or how to field inquiring glances. But that, of course, wouldn’t have changed the fact that I didn’t know what I felt.

Well, that’s not completely true. I brooded over all sorts of terrible things that might be ahead. What if I wasn’t smart enough? What if the girls at Saint Ann’s didn’t like me? Would I have to pray all the time? While my parents discussed the war news, the Nazi killings and bombings in Europe, I brooded more. It was like being sent to an alien country, going to that Catholic school, and no one cared what I thought—that’s what was happening.

“I’ve heard about those secret tunnels they dig,” one of the blond girls who already wore lipstick said one morning. Two of her friends stood waiting for my reaction, giggling.

“What secret tunnels?” I asked.

“You know, the ones between the convents and the monasteries.”

“Why would they do that?”

All three girls broke into laughter. “You know, silly!”

When I came home one afternoon, Mother was sitting at the dining-room table, searching the “Houses for Sale” ads in the Examiner. She looked up long enough to give me a buoyant smile and inform me there were fresh chocolate-chip cookies waiting in the kitchen, still warm from the oven. That was a treat these days, now that the government was rationing sugar. And butter, too. Mother bought margarine as a substitute, with a little button of orange food coloring in the middle of the package. My job was to knead the package, spreading the food color, until it was all a respectable yellow. Then, as my father put it, we could play a game of Let’s Pretend. And, Mother said, we were helping the war effort.

Mother had a peculiar lightness of being that afternoon, and it was clear she wasn’t puzzling out how she felt, which made me grumpy. So I pretended not to hear her when she told me to tidy my room, and got grumpier when she didn’t seem to care that much. I realized I knew two things: She wanted a new house, and I didn’t want anything to change at all. Especially not by being trapped in a dreary new school.

Later, after I was in bed, Father came in and sat down heavily on the floral bedspread that Mother had chosen for me—it was some kind of purple and pea-soup green, and I hated it. One of the best things about getting a new house would be getting rid of that bedspread.

“Your mother said you were kind of a pill today, Jesse,” he said quietly. “Maybe I can guess why.”

I waited. I could use any help he could give.

“You were maybe trying to thumb your nose at us for yanking you out of your school.”

“I don’t care much for Country Day,” I blurted. “Everybody’s a snob.”

“Then?” He raised an inquiring eyebrow.

“I’m not going to like Saint Ann’s, either. I think nuns look creepy. And I heard about the tunnels they build.”

“Tunnels?”

“You know.” I held my breath, waiting for the revelation of one of those jarring grown-up secrets that might provide a stepping stone to being an adult.

A small smile pulled at the sides of his mouth. “Oh, those tunnels. Guess what? It’s not true, and anybody who says it is, is pretty dumb. But I think you’re going to be very happy about something that is true.”

“What?”

“Your favorite actress is signing up to play a nun. Secret information.”

Ingrid? Yes, he said, he meant Ingrid. But he would tell me no more.

“I’m going to miss not seeing her every morning,” I confessed, surprising myself.

He cocked an eyebrow inquiringly. It occurred to me that he might really be listening.

So I told him about the school driver’s winding up the hill every morning to Ingrid’s house, and how beautiful she was, and how I imagined her to be. And how I wished I could be her. And how that was the most special thing I was about to lose, though he probably thought I was being silly.

His face turned thoughtful and he squeezed my hand. “Some things do get lost and stay lost,” he said. “But there are big adventures ahead for you, and you’ll feel better soon. You don’t have to lose the people who will matter the most in the future.” He frowned, his handsome, angular face sagging slightly. “Well, most of the time you won’t.”

I was too tired to try and figure out what that meant, but I did feel somewhat comforted. I turned over on my side and shut my eyes to the world of purple-and-green bedspreads and drifted off to sleep.

It was the last day of school. The town car was winding up Benedict Canyon, and I was concentrating on seeing Ingrid again. I wondered if I had the nerve to tell her I thought she was wonderful in Casablanca.

“You’re going to a Catholic school?” said Debbie, a seventh-grader who liked boasting that her father wrote Gone with the Wind, though my father said that maybe forty screenwriters took a whack at it, and only one of them ever made the credits. She also wore false eyelashes, which was very impressive. “Why?”

“We’re Catholic,” I said.

“You are? I thought you were Jewish. I knew you weren’t like us. I was wondering, but Jews don’t usually go to Country Day.”

I didn’t answer. My father worked with Jews, I knew that, and he said a lot of idiots who didn’t know anything thought they were worse than Catholics. I never had liked Debbie. Changing schools didn’t seem quite so terrible all of a sudden, and I figured her father probably never wrote a word of Gone with the Wind.

Debbie said something, but I wasn’t listening anymore.

As we rounded the last corner, I caught my breath in surprise.

Ingrid Bergman was standing at the curb, Pia’s hand in hers. When we stopped, Pia jumped into the front seat. But Ingrid didn’t smile and float away; she leaned forward and peered through the back window.

“Jesse? Are you there, Jesse Malloy?” she asked in a soft, almost musical voice.

I raised my hand.

“Ah, the egg-salad girl.” She giggled. “Well, I’ve heard from your father that you are leaving Sheldon, but he says you are going to a wonderful school, and that is exciting. I just want to wish you all the best.”

I thought I would faint. I barely managed to croak out a thank-you before she stood straight and moved back from the car, blowing a kiss to her daughter, and gifting me with a wave of her hand.

The car was dead silent as we drove away. We were pulling back onto Sunset Boulevard before anyone spoke.

“Your father is a friend of Ingrid Bergman’s?” Debbie finally said. She sounded cross.

I nodded, stunned. But somehow I knew—my father had orchestrated that little moment as a goodbye gift, so that everybody at Country Day who cast me sidelong glances, wondering if I was being punished for something, would realize they were wrong. He let me pretend for a moment I was sort of a pal of Ingrid’s. I could think of her by her first name now—because he believed giving me a touch of Hollywood stardust on my way out the door was just fine, and no threat to my morality.

“You let her believe that actress was her friend?” Mother said sharply that night. “Gabriel, what got into you?”

“What’s wrong with doing that? The poor kid gets to feel part of things, the glamour stuff—”

“That’s exactly what’s wrong with it! It’s all fantasy, not reality, and that’s what we need to shield her from.”

“Damn it, Vannie…” Father shook his head and walked out of the room.

I could never quite construct in my imagination how my parents fell in love with each other and got married. They weren’t the fairy-tale prince and princess types. Father was Dick Tracy–handsome without his glasses, but with an easy smile that broke the sculpture of his face and welcomed me. He grew up in Los Angeles, somewhere out in the San Fernando Valley. I never knew his parents; they ran a pharmacy that went bust early in the Depression, and they were killed in an auto accident when he was in high school. He had an older brother, my uncle David, Jeremy’s father, but they didn’t see each other very often, and I wondered sometimes if he had been lonely.

He laughed when I asked. “Not me,” he said. “I always knew, after that crash, that I was going to have to take care of myself.” He had an ingrained geniality, a way of looking at the world that drew people to him. When he met a new person he would find some connecting history between himself and that person almost immediately. Maybe someone had the same last name as a great-uncle (we’re probably related, he would say), or maybe the person played poker at the Los Angeles Athletic Club (let’s put a game together next week). And he’d be off and running with a new pal. People loved it. He warmed a room, and I loved that.

He met my mother when she was working in the ticket booth at Grauman’s Chinese, and always said it was her shy reserve that drew him. He liked the fact that she wasn’t just one more peroxide blonde hoping to be discovered by the movies. She had wrists as thin as a bird’s wing, high Hedy Lamarr–type cheekbones, and a smile she held in reserve, even from me. But when she gifted him with it, he liked to joke, he couldn’t help melting.

It was harder to figure out her history. She grew up as Vanessa Corrigan—a fancy name chosen by her dreaming Irish mother, she always said—in a town called Somerville, outside of Boston.

“Why don’t we ever go to visit your family?” I asked. “Are my grandparents living?” I thought, sometimes, it would be nice to have one or two. Everybody else did, it seemed to me.

She was standing with her back to me at the time, ironing a tablecloth. “No,” she said.

“What happened to them?”

“Bad luck, mostly.” I waited for her to shed a tear, but it didn’t happen.

“That’s awful.”

She gave only a few details. Her father had died in a lumber-mill accident, and her mother was left to clean houses in Cambridge. She had little time for her daughter, and work wore her out early.

“If it weren’t for the nuns at my parochial school, I would have had no moral guidance at all,” she said. “They were stern taskmasters, and they were my true family.” She folded the tablecloth briskly. “That’s all the questions for tonight, Jesse.”

She must have realized early on that getting my father to feel as devoutly as she did about the Church wouldn’t work. But she did love Gabriel Malloy, and since she saw no apparent crisis of faith surfacing in my young heart, she just made herself busier with the Church. Until we moved, she was a longtime member of Saint Paul’s Altar Society, which meant, from what I could tell, she had the privilege of laundering the altar linens for the priests every week. My father would shrug and say, “Well, at least it keeps you busy.”

We spent the first month of that extra-hot summer of 1942 touring big new homes, and I liked the smell of fresh wood and all the polished doorknobs, and imagining what my bedroom would look like in each one. Mother finally found the house she wanted. It was on the edge of Beverly Hills, really—a comfortable, sprawling stucco with a red tile roof, shielded from the road by eucalyptus trees. It sat near the bottom of one of those winding streets that undulate up into the hills above Sunset Boulevard, promising treasures of celebrity behind every privacy hedge. There was a large kidney-shaped pool in back that took my breath away, a pool hewn out of a sloping hillside lush with bougainvillea and exotic-looking shrubbery. Mother worried that I might drown, of course. I was awed by its size. I was sure Esther Williams, Hollywood’s glamorous swimming star, could emerge from that pool. It was worthy of her.

It wasn’t long before we moved in, a joyful day with Mother running back and forth, breathlessly directing the Bekins man unloading the van as to what boxes went where—and, oh goodness, where are the pots and pans? And Father standing by, looking so pleased with himself, telling her, Forget them, we’ll buy new ones. Everything new.

After the Bekins van pulled away, my father and mother stood in the living room, their arms wound around each other. My father kissed my mother with such tenderness. I watched her close her eyes, those long, long eyelashes, tipping her face up to his, and they seemed to melt into each other. We all three inhaled change, and I was dizzy with it.

Father insisted on hiring a maid. Mother seemed shy and ill at ease about that at first, not sure quite how to carve out enough for the new maid to do. Fueled by my father’s enthusiasm, she finally decided that, with such a big house, Mandy—that was the maid’s name—would have plenty to keep her busy.

Anyhow, Mother told us both one night, now that her workload had disappeared, she was considering signing up for a volunteer job. She said it a little nervously, but with a bright smile.

“Job? What kind?” Father looked surprised. I think he expected Mother to run any plans of hers that took her out of the house by him first.

“Saint Clare’s. Just helping out a couple of afternoons a week.”

“The place for unwed mothers?”

“Yes. The ones with no place to go.”

He nodded casual approval. “A place for them to hide, right?”

She nodded. “It’s doing good work,” she said stiffly.

I wanted to ask her: Did the pregnant girls have to hide their faces? What happened to them? How did they keep their sin secret? There were all those whispers and giggles I had heard about Loretta Young’s baby, and how it was a girl who had Clark Gable’s ears. I had tried to ask Mother about it, but she called it malicious Hollywood gossip. This time I kept silent, because my parents had moved on to deciding what restaurant we would dine at that night—somewhere fancy, my father insisted. They were absorbed only with each other at that moment, and there was nowhere for me to break through.

But mostly that period was full of hope and promise. I got a new bike, a bright blue one, and Mother began to relax about that pool. She never had to worry again about my picking up polio or something at the local municipal swimming pool, which made her fret less.

I loved eavesdropping on my parents that summer, on those golden late afternoons when they sipped cocktails before dinner. My father’s job was exciting. He talked casually about famous people, tapping a finger against his glass—the only sign of a new restlessness. I didn’t hear him and Mother arguing at night, but he only went to church with us now every other Sunday. When he started joking about becoming a “C and E Catholic”—Christmas and Easter only—Mother reverted to disapproval. She didn’t talk to him through a whole evening.

But all was good. So good, I was jolted when I realized that the first day of school was upon me.

We came, Mother and I, for the first time to Saint Ann’s on a foggy morning, one of those dreary days when nothing seems to reflect light. Nothing sparkled or bounced. My first impression of the school was of an expanse of mud-brown masonry buildings peppered with winding walks and heavy arches that soaked up all color, swallowing it. I knew the school would be large. I was prepared for that. It was a “lifer” school, after all, from first through twelfth grade, and there was a convent here, too. But it was still intimidating.

We walked up the path to the main entrance in silence. On both sides of the walkway, tall, graceful palm trees, precisely placed, swayed with each puff of wind like dancers in a chorus line. Everywhere, lush expanses of freshly mowed grass. I saw a nun, in black garb wearing one of those cardboard collars, walking slowly, silently, about the grounds, a rosary wound through her fingers.

I felt near tears. “Mother—” I said urgently.

“Welcome, Jessica.”

We had reached the steps to the entrance of the school. I looked up into the alert, very blue eyes of a slightly stooped nun standing at the top of the stairs. Her hands were clamped in front of her ample stomach, and there was a somewhat stitched smile on her weathered face. She looked as immovable as a rock.

“Sister Teresa Mary?” my mother said. She took my hand and we started up the stairs; I felt like some kind of Aztec sacrifice.

The nun nodded. “I am delighted to welcome you to Saint Ann’s,” she said. She and my mother appraised each other, in that kind of benevolent, alert way that people have of signaling preparedness for the unknown.

Her eyes shifted back to me. “I suspect you are feeling nervous about changing schools,” she said.

“Jessica is very much looking forward to her new school,” Mother lied, fingering the clasp of her purse with lacquered nails that clicked against the brass. “And she’s well prepared academically.”

“Is that true, Jessica?”

What? That I was looking forward to being in this strange place? Or that I got good grades at Country Day?

“My name is Jesse, not Jessica, please.”

“But that’s a boy’s name,” Sister Teresa Mary said, a touch of amusement in her voice. “This is a girls’ school, dear.”

“She enjoys English and is exceptionally good at math.” My mother’s voice had hardened.

Sister Teresa Mary was quite adroit at sidestepping small confrontations, as I would later realize. “I’m sure she will be an excellent student. I thought we could take a little tour of the campus before introducing Jessica to her homeroom teacher,” she said to my mother.

The three of us set out across the green grass, following the threaded pathways that led to the main campus, past a shrine to the Blessed Virgin. Two nuns in sheer black veils knelt there, heads bowed. They did not look up.

“Two of our postulants,” Sister Teresa Mary said. “We are gratified that some girls each year choose the convent.”

“At what age?” my mother said in an interested voice.

“We don’t allow such a choice to take place before the age of sixteen.”

For some stupid reason, I was counting the years between me and sixteen in my head when I saw a pool emerging through all the foliage. It was good-sized, and a tall girl with slender, muscular legs had just sprung from the board in a graceful dive as we arrived. She certainly wasn’t a nun. I felt immensely cheered; this was somebody about my age.

Sister Teresa Mary’s reaction caught me short.

“Kathleen, just what are you wearing?” she snapped at the girl in the water.

The girl looked up and froze, her face—framed in a white rubber cap that couldn’t fully hide copper curls at the nape of her neck—alert, but as rosy as an apple.

“My bathing suit had a rip in it,” she said. “I’m sorry, I borrowed my mother’s.”

“Do I have reason to believe that?”

“Well, Sister…” The girl seemed to be contemplating her answer as she drifted in the water. “I guess I have used that excuse before.”

Sister Teresa Mary let out an exasperated sigh.

“Two-piece suits are not allowed, as you are well aware.”

“Yes, Sister. But they are more comfortable.” She glanced at me, and I saw her eyes dance.

“I believe we will have to discuss detention, Kathleen Cochran.”

“Yes, Sister.”

“Now, please come out of the pool.”

Kathleen pulled herself out of the water, flashing a quick glimpse of a pale, bare midriff before she wrapped herself in a towel. She stood obediently before Sister Teresa Mary, waiting for further instructions.

“What do I do with you, Kathleen?”

The girl looked up with a quick grin. “Forgive me?”

“Not yet,” the nun replied coldly. “You will not be allowed to play basketball for two weeks. Enough of these infractions. Now, go.”

Kathleen glanced at me with casual indifference. She turned, the towel swinging around her hips, and strolled slowly into a changing room.

But not before I noticed that the bright blue two-piece Rose Marie Reid suit she wore was exactly the same as the one I had been trying to convince Mother to buy me.

Mother and I exchanged glances, but said nothing.

Sister Teresa Mary marched briskly onward, past peaceful expanses of lush grass, her black robe swishing back and forth, the rosary beads at her waist clicking in cadenced rhythm, queen of the elegant campus over which she presided. Mother and I followed, nodding and hmmming in agreeable harmony, as our guide pointed out the functionality of various stolid buildings: the gymnasium, the school auditorium, the new study hall named after a liberal grant from—surprise, surprise—Bishop Doyle, who was clearly a friend of the school.

And then we arrived, inevitably, at the door of the classroom that would be mine.

In front of me, through that door, was a phalanx of classmates in identical black rayon uniforms, all taking me in quite coolly; I could see the coldness of their eyes. I took a deep breath. I said goodbye to my mother and walked in after Sister Teresa Mary, not quite absorbing her introduction, my brain scrambled between two conflicting worries—the stares of a classroom-full of strange girls and the argument ahead at home, when I would try very hard to talk Mother into buying me that new bathing suit.