CHAPTER FIVE

Los Angeles, 1943–45

I couldn’t muster the courage to look in the mirror, so I concentrated instead on the sound of the snipping scissors at the nape of my neck. Mother waited in a chair, glancing up now and then, saying nothing, then going back to flipping through some magazine with a picture of a man shooting a deer on the cover.

We were at the barbershop, not the beauty parlor where she usually had her hair done. Not where women with deft hands sculpted and combed and wound hair into elegant pompadours and chatted, where everything purred and all the walls were painted in some soft peachy color. This place was hard-edged, with heavy metal chairs and flat wall mirrors that didn’t look very clean.

“I couldn’t get an appointment at Heidi’s,” Mother explained. “But your father says Jim is a fine barber, and he certainly can do short hair.”

I wanted to ask the man named Jim if he had seen For Whom the Bell Tolls, but I figured he probably wasn’t a moviegoer, and I didn’t know how to describe the kind of haircut I wanted. So I stayed quiet.

“There you are, young lady,” he said, whipping the white cotton sheeting from under my chin and shaking dark hair—gobs of it—onto the floor. “That should last you a while.” He turned to a man waiting on a bench. “Next,” he barked. My haircut had taken all of five minutes.

I slipped out of the chair and only then looked into the mirror. I couldn’t believe it. I truly looked like a boy, not Ingrid. It was too short, too straight, too cropped. Hers was saucy and daring; mine was awful. I turned to Mother, whose eyes widened as she looked up from the magazine.

“Well,” she began, then saw the tears welling. She stood and patted me on the shoulder, looking distressed. “Oh dear. It will grow out,” she said.

I refused dinner. I went to my room and cried, vowing I would wear a bandanna every day to school until my hair reached a respectable length. I grabbed skinny fistfuls of it and yanked and yanked, wondering if I could make it grow faster, and soon I was crying as much about my sore scalp as about the haircut.

Somewhere around eight o’clock, the bedroom door cracked open; my father was standing in the doorway.

“Hey, I’ve got an idea for Saturday,” he said.

“So what?” I snapped. He was pretending everything was fine; did he think that would make me feel better?

“I’m going to the studio—lots of work piled up.” He walked in and sat down on the end of the bed.

“What’s new about that?” I didn’t care if I was rude; I was mad at everything and everybody. But he didn’t reprove me.

“I thought you might like to come along.”

“Me?”

My father didn’t like mixing work with personal life. I had been to the Selznick Studio just once, when I was about eight, and had only glimpsed a few extras dressed as cowboys, looking bored, puffing on cigarettes in front of one of the soundstages, before we had to leave.

“Somebody else with short hair will be there,” he said quietly. “And I thought the two of you could commiserate.”

It took time for me to digest this. “Ingrid?” I ventured.

He nodded.

I threw my arms around him, inhaling the fresh soapy smell of his shaving lotion. I remember he laughed and teased, and I begged: Are you sure her hair is still short? You mean I will get to talk to her? Now I could say something knowledgeable about her beauty and graciousness to my classmates, instead of having to admit I didn’t really know her.

“She still looks like a helicopter cut her hair,” he said cheerfully. “Just through the publicity tour for the movie, mind you. But she knows how it feels to look a little like a bald eagle. A great time to meet.”

It was early morning when we arrived. A bandanna covered my hair—no matter how Mother pleaded, I had worn it all week. I pulled my sweater tight against the sudden chill as we stepped into the cavernous embrace of the soundstage. The place was huge; the people running about looked so small. I glanced questioningly to my father, and he nodded in the direction of a lone figure at the far end of a platform cluttered with cameras and floodlights.

“Go, tiger. Say hello.”

And there she was. Ingrid Bergman. Not a floating image, viewed by a girl peering through a car window, but a quite beautiful woman in a gray wool skirt and a plain white cotton blouse, sitting alone in a canvas folding chair. She had a small frown on her face, and it took me a second to realize she was concentrating on a pair of flashing knitting needles in her long, tapered fingers. I blinked. Ingrid Bergman was knitting? Yes.

I moved forward slowly. Was I supposed to talk first?

She glanced up at me, smiled, then held aloft what looked like the half-finished sleeve of a child’s soft blue sweater. “Nice shade of blue, don’t you think?” she said, surveying her work critically. “Angora flattens out too quickly on the needles; I have to work fast.”

“Is it a sweater?” I managed. Of course it was—what an idiotic comment to make.

She nodded. “I’m knitting it for Pia.” She looked at me with sudden interest. “You have the same liveliness in your face that she does. You make me think of what she might look like in a few years.”

I was tongue-tied at first, then blushed. I wanted to say something intelligent, but I was staring at her hair. Oh, it looked nothing like mine; what was my father thinking? It was a halo of curls gathered artfully to her jawline, whereas mine hung as lank and dreary as a man’s. I started to turn away, but her voice stopped me.

“I hear you aren’t too happy with your haircut,” she said companionably. “I felt the same way about mine at first, but it will grow.”

“That’s what my mother said.”

“I also hear they’re calling it the ‘Maria cut.’ All you pretty girls out there are going to despise me for a while.” A smile played at her lips as she rested her knitting in her lap. “It’s nice to meet you again, Jesse,” she said. “And I’m delighted that you liked For Whom the Bell Tolls.”

“Oh yes, I loved it. And it’s wonderful to meet you again, truly,” I managed. Was this really happening? Ingrid Bergman had called me a pretty girl. If only for that, she would have been my hero for life.

A sudden bustle of activity; my small bubble popped.

“Ingrid, sweetheart,” an urgent male voice cut in, “we need some new head shots of you—we’re almost out of photos for your fans. And we’ve got people waiting for your autograph. Can we get you to tuck the knitting away for a few minutes?” A lean-looking man with sharp eyes was maneuvering himself between me and Ingrid.

She laughed. “Here we go again,” she said. She stood, leaving her knitting on the chair. “Don’t push the makeup again; I won’t do it,” she said. “So what’s my image today, Rodney?”

He frowned, clearly devoid of humor. “We’ll shoot you looking up into the light—as the beautiful, noble, pure-at-heart woman we all know you to be.”

“The one who had no idea which man she was supposed to end up with in Casablanca? Is that what makes me pure?” she teased.

“Miss Bergman!” A matronly-looking woman was standing on the sidelines, bouncing with excitement. “Please, can I have your autograph?”

Rodney leaned closer. “She’s a cousin of Selznick’s,” he whispered. “Ten more of them waiting over there.” He nodded in the direction of a cluster of people by the door, peering in. They looked almost hungry, I thought.

Suddenly Father materialized behind me, a protective hand on my shoulder. “The penalty you pay for success, Ingrid,” he said with a grin. “Look, I’ve got a pile of questions here from Hedda Hopper; just give me one quick answer, and I’ll manage the rest. So who’s your favorite leading man?”

She giggled, color rising in her face. “You know who, Gabriel. Gary Cooper.”

“You were wonderful together in For Whom the Bell Tolls,” I burst out. I wanted to tell her my mother had cried when Gary Cooper was dying, but it felt, confusingly, like maybe not the best thing to say.

“Jesse is a great fan,” he said, squeezing my shoulder gently. “Time to go, honey.”

I reached out my hand, which she folded into hers. “Thank you for talking with me,” I said.

“Oh, by the way,” she said before letting go, “try pin curls. You know, for volume.”

“I will,” I said fervently. That was all, but it was enough.

I turned toward my father, and saw a pretty woman in a bright red dress, holding a thick notebook, plucking his sleeve. “Gabriel…” she said with quiet intensity. He bent toward her, and for just a second or two, they murmured to each other. She glanced over at me with the strangest expression, then smiled apologetically and walked briskly away.

“Who’s that?” I asked as we left the soundstage.

“Just a script girl,” he said. “She wants a quick read of a new story draft.”

“Her rouge is too pink for her dress.”

“Anything wrong with that?”

“It’s a shade or two off.” I tried to sound knowledgeable. “That’s what Mother would say.”

He was silent for a few seconds. “So how do you like Ingrid?” he asked finally.

“I love her, she’s perfect. And you know what? She told me I had a lively face, sort of like Pia’s.” I couldn’t help a sudden, wistful thought: what would it be like to have Ingrid as my mother?

He laughed and gave me a hug.

I took the bandanna off as we drove home and tossed it out the car window.

I learned pretty quickly that the “Maria cut” was indeed about to become the most requested haircut in beauty salons all over the country: Ingrid was right. I wouldn’t be the only one winding my hair each night into tiny dime-sized pin curls before bedtime, praying that it would grow fast. And—to my delight—I noticed that the “Maria” was showing up on the heads of dozens of my classmates at Saint Ann’s, even though none of us were supposed to have seen the movie.

Once I made it to seventh grade, Saint Ann’s got considerably tougher academically, which meant I didn’t have quite as much roaming time—not when I was struggling with math. I was proud my school had high standards, and Mother was pleased that our teachers pushed us to do better than the public schools. Periodically, Sister Teresa Mary would announce over the classroom loudspeakers our latest test performance records. The most delicious part of her reports came when she compared our test results with the always inferior performance of the public schools.

We liked the feeling of being superior. It made up for being out of step with Protestants, for being “different.” A lot of us gave off the whiff of coming from immigrant stock; all it took was a name like O’Brien or Romero. Our priests baffled everybody with their vows of celibacy, and it was pretty strange not to be able to eat meat on Fridays. And weren’t our schools really ghettos that went against the grain of true Americanism?

Well, you couldn’t be rejected if you were better than those who didn’t like you, could you? So we made sure we were. We studied hard and played hard, and whether non-Catholics noticed or not, we took pride in being winners.

We also lived in a sunny town bathed in moral contradictions, which made it a little hard to sort things out neatly. Especially when it came to “real” life.

I had made the naïve assumption that Kathleen had a family pretty much like mine, and we didn’t talk about that at first. It was enough to find out that she was able to sneak into any “Objectionable in Part” movie she wanted to see: that made her the worldly one. We would swim together in the school pool at lunchtime, rush out of the water and dry off quickly, then throw on our uniforms and hastily looped ties and barely make it to history or Latin before the bell rang.

Once, as we sat at an outdoor picnic table, munching roast beef sandwiches from the lunch cafeteria, she said abruptly, “I don’t have any sisters or brothers, either. Like you.”

“Just you and your parents?” I remember thinking, Here’s something we share in common.

“No, just me and my mother.”

I stopped eating. “Your father died?”

“He ran out on us. Three years ago. He just left, and my mom doesn’t want to talk about it. She wants people to think she’s a widow. So this is a secret.”

“Oh, that’s awful,” I breathed. “I’m so sorry.”

She seemed to relax. “There, I’ve told you.” Her face was uncharacteristically solemn.

“But—how do you—”

“My mother sells hosiery at the May Company. She’s their top seller—she was named employee of the month a few weeks ago.” She smiled, lifting her chin.

We didn’t discuss it again after that. With Kathleen, it was all play and energy and fun on the surface, but I knew we were best friends now.

She became my teacher on several fronts. Tennis, of course. I came to love the game, even though I wasn’t very good, but Kathleen was usually patient. After a few months, we started playing actual games and keeping score, which made me nervous.

Like that time I kept missing an easy backhand. I was furious with myself. Couldn’t I do anything right? “I’m sorry,” I bawled. I missed a second one. Another apology. And then I missed a third backhand. When I had again wailed out my contrition, Kathleen shocked me by throwing her racquet to the ground and yelling, “Stop saying ‘I’m sorry’ after every shot you miss!”

I was stupefied. Nothing fazed Kathleen. She must hate me now. I felt terrible.

“I’m sorry!” I bellowed in anguish.

She plopped down on the court, shook her head, and started laughing. “Your backhand wobbles like Sister Teresa Mary’s backside!” she yelled.

“She could’ve walked by the tennis court just as you said that,” I scolded as we abandoned our game and sat down on the tennis-court bench.

“Not likely. Anyhow, you’re something of a scaredy-cat,” she chided.

“No, I’m not,” I said.

“Well, you’re a bit literal about the rules, you know. You should take more chances, like me.”

She wasn’t just talking about tennis. “Like what?” I parried.

Without answering, she opened a geography textbook next to her on the bench, and I found myself staring at last month’s Photoplay magazine, the one I had flipped through at the drugstore as fast as I could. Shirley Temple was on the cover, and inside, all the gossip about Ginger Rogers and Errol Flynn’s love escapades and—

“Does your mother let you read it?” she asked.

“She says it’s a waste of time.”

“What do you think?”

“I love the stories.”

“Guess who’s on the cover this month?”

I stared at her. “Ingrid?”

She grinned, nodding. “Let’s go get it,” she said. “I’ve got fifteen cents.”

“Sister Teresa Mary doesn’t allow—”

“That’s why geography books are so big. Let’s go.”

We did. We locked our racquets into their wooden presses, left them on the bleachers, and rushed over to the drugstore. There it was, fresh out on the racks, the new Photoplay with a gorgeous Ingrid posing as Maria, gazing out at the world through what looked like a field of wheat. Kathleen put down her money, and it was ours. We folded it into her geography book and hurried back to the school tennis court. Hardly anyone would be around this late; we could enjoy it together.

The story inside was entitled “Candid on Bergman,” and we couldn’t read fast enough. Ingrid wore slacks at home, but never in public. She liked to read sitting on the floor. She had a horror of open-toed shoes. She didn’t smoke and she didn’t drink, but she liked to chew gum.

“How tall is she?” Kathleen asked.

I thought of her figure floating down the driveway of the house in Benedict Canyon and tried to guess. “I think close to six feet,” I said.

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Says here she won’t wear a bathing suit for any photographs, but she’ll wear one on the beach as brief as the law allows.” Kathleen giggled. “She’s never met Sister Teresa Mary.”

Oh, we had a good time. We learned all about Ingrid’s fairy-tale marriage to a doctor named Petter Lindström. And it was true, David Selznick had seen her in the Swedish version of Intermezzo, and was the first one to bring her to Hollywood.

We devoured that issue over the next couple of afternoons. Laraine Day told us mustard yellow was the important color for casual fall wear. Margaret Sullavan, in a piece about Hollywood parents called “Minding Their Minors,” declared her three children would go to public schools, because private schools gave too much attention to Hollywood children whether they deserved it or not.

“My mother would like that,” I said. “Unless she’s Catholic.”

“Well, her name is Sullavan,” Kathleen said knowingly.

The story about glamorous parents riveted us. Joan Bennett’s six-year-old daughter enjoyed ordering the family car and giving orders to the chauffeur over the intercom. Norma Shearer made a practice of changing nurses every few months so her children wouldn’t become too dependent on any one person for their comfort. Joan Crawford, on the other hand, believed in spoiling her little girl and giving her everything she wanted.

I thought of Ingrid, knitting the sweater for Pia. And I suspected, deep down, that she was the best mother of them all.

From then on, each Friday, Kathleen and I played a quick game of tennis, stored our racquets, and hurried out to the drugstore to pick up the latest movie magazines. We would hide them, of course. And well that we did, since Sister Teresa Mary walked onto the tennis court one late afternoon and asked what we were doing, huddled together on the bleacher bench.

Kathleen waved her geography book. “I’m helping Jessica with her geography,” she said.

In truth, I was learning a lot. Sitting there together, Kathleen and I talked one afternoon for a couple of hours about sex and unhappy marriages after reading an article entitled “White Lies—the Truth About the Stars’ Deceptions.” Claudette Colbert was probably getting a divorce, and Errol Flynn was a downright rake, and Jennifer Jones was ordered by the studio not to confess that she had been married and had two children when she played a devout village girl in The Song of Bernadette. Her fans, they said, would be shocked.

“Do you think lying is a mortal sin?” I asked Kathleen.

“No,” she said. “Otherwise, I’m going to hell—and I don’t think hiding a movie magazine in a textbook is so bad.”

Kathleen’s confidence intrigued me. We talked about God and the universe and what was a sin and what wasn’t and who got to heaven and who didn’t. Kathleen, to my astonishment, didn’t think much of the concept that non-Catholics would be locked out of heaven. “So why should they sit around in limbo or purgatory?” she demanded. “If they missed out on belonging to the One True Church, why is it their fault?”

Put like that, it made sense. As we sat there, our heads bent over those magazines, we discovered a clandestine world to share. With whom else could I have ruminated over all the tampon ads (how, please, were you supposed to get one into the right place?) and why Lysol was necessary for feminine hygiene, and what you were supposed to do about embarrassingly wet underarms.

Even then, I sensed I was learning as much from Kathleen as I was from Photoplay. We were equals, poised for everything ahead—everything, that is, except tennis.

There was another gravitational pull operating in my life that year. I stumbled for some lucky reason into a class on drama and public speaking, an elective presided over by a middle-aged teacher with a lofty smile who doled out approval in small, fixed doses. Her name was Miss Coultrane. She wasn’t a nun and she wore no wedding ring, but other than that we knew very little about her. She had the high mono-bosom of the stern-faced suffragists in the early part of the century, and dressed each day in a properly buttoned wool tweed suit that was always carefully pressed. Those of us who took her class made up stories about her: Why was she an old maid? Had she suffered the tragic loss of a lover? She gave no clues.

But she understood theater—she was theater—and we who took her dramatics class three times a week were riveted by her style. You never quite liked Miss Coultrane. She reminded me a little of Gloria Swanson when she disapproved of a reading. Her head would tip upward, her eyes would widen, and she would demand that whatever luckless girl was reciting take a deep breath and try harder. I grew to love her class so much, I prayed I would never trigger a frown.

How had she found a place for herself in a quiet convent school staffed by nuns? I never knew. But Miss Coultrane was an institution at Saint Ann’s by the time I got there. She took drama and public speaking seriously. She had managed now for more than ten years to coax performances out of those of her students who were good enough to put on an annual play or musical—a real one, for which the school charged admission, even though buyers were mostly parents and friends of the school.

I didn’t know all of this at the time. All I knew was that Miss Coultrane—who patrolled the classrooms, looking for talent—heard me give an oral report in English and suggested I take her dramatics class.

“Dramatics?” My mother had looked somewhat dismayed. “You don’t want to become an actress, do you?”

The thought had never seriously crossed my mind, even if Ingrid Bergman had called me “pretty.” But I was flattered by Miss Coultrane’s attention.

“Your father and I don’t really approve of acting.”

I already knew there was something wrong about that assertion. I could tell that my parents and their friends loved the reflected glamour of working with stars, even though, at their parties, they would roll their eyes and speak disparagingly about them.

“That’s not what I like the most,” I said. “It’s public speaking, too.”

And so I gained permission to sign up for Miss Coultrane’s class. Within a week, I was fully immersed in the challenge of turning words on paper into words sent floating through the air. Plays, speeches—my voice their “vehicle”—that’s what Miss Coultrane called it. She would sit, straight and forbidding, fingers tapping the surface of her desk, as each of the fifteen girls considered talented enough to deserve her coaching groped her way through that week’s assignment. It might be Shakespeare or it might be—she really did this—a grocery list. “Enunciate!” she would bellow, her own voice so deep it made me quiver inside. We learned. We enunciated.

While I was growing and changing at Saint Ann’s, Ingrid’s career was soaring ever higher. Her next performance was in Gaslight, a spooky movie that captivated audiences. Kathleen and I saw it together and clutched each other at the tense parts—but I couldn’t take my eyes off the beautiful young wife on the screen whose mysterious husband was trying to convince her she is insane. The gaslight would flicker. Ingrid would look up, her eyes conveying deep terror of the unknown. Her face was mesmerizing. She was so alone, so fragile. I wanted to reach out a hand to comfort her, push through the screen into that lonely house to assure her she was loved and sane and her husband, Charles Boyer, was evil.

Me, and everybody else.

“Hey, guess what, ladies,” Father yelled out one evening as he walked in the door. “Ingrid’s been nominated for best actress for Gaslight—damn, this is great news. Are you impressed?”

Yes, oh yes, we were impressed. The night of the awards ceremony, we huddled close around the brand-new Packard Bell in the living room. “She’s going to win this time,” my father predicted, with a sweep of his hand that could have been taking in the whole world—or at least that’s the level of confidence his gesture conveyed to me.

“What if she doesn’t?” Mother worried. “Will people feel sorry for you?” Mother had a thing about pity; that’s what she called the whiffs of condescension she had endured from her early years. She hadn’t graduated from high school. I only learned that when I was a teenager, but I had noticed her wariness, the way she held her head high, when she and my father started going to Hollywood parties. I loved watching her dress for those parties, loved the dazzling array of crystal perfume bottles that had seemed to appear overnight when we stepped into our new house. She would stare into the mirror, smoothing her hair into place, mostly without smiling. It was as if she was wondering what she saw—her old self or her new.

“Feel sorry for me?” He laughed, leaned close, and kissed her nose. “Never, babe. Never.”

It turned out there was no reason for anyone to pity Father. When Ingrid Bergman’s name was called out as best actress of the year, our living room filled with the radio’s explosion of applause. Father scooped up Mother from her chair, then reached for my hand, and soon all three of us were laughing and hugging.

“Okay, you two, you think this is wonderful?” Father said, stopping for breath. “Well, have I got news for you.” He beckoned Mother and me to sit down and turned off the radio. He sat down himself, circling the rim of his Scotch and water with a finger, looking almost solemn.

“Is anything wrong?” I asked, feeling anxious.

He looked up with a vaguely bemused expression. Mother and I waited.

“Sorry,” he said. A smile spread across his face. “My mind was elsewhere. But I’ve got news I think you’ll like. It’s been in the works for a long time, but now it’s real.” He lifted his empty glass and winked at Mother. “Another hit, honey?”

He said it just like that: “news I think you’ll like.” The most extraordinary thing was about to happen at Saint Ann’s, and that’s how he told us.

Ingrid, my Ingrid, was already filming a movie in which she was to play a nun. That was exciting enough. But now, Father announced, she was actually going to film scenes at my school.

“What?” I gasped.

“It’s true,” Father said.

Ingrid Bergman would walk in her black robes, hair covered, rosary beads in her fingers, through the halls and on the pathways and around the shrines of Saint Ann’s in person—actually in person. And not only would she be at Saint Ann’s, but so would Bing Crosby, who would play a priest, wearing a Roman collar for the second time in his career. Was I hearing this right?

“Yep,” my father said. The movie was Leo McCarey’s The Bells of St. Mary’s—and McCarey, a stickler for authenticity, wanted location shots at a real convent school. Ingrid was enthusiastic. “I told him about Saint Ann’s—told him it was picture-perfect; it’s what a convent school should look like. I gave your yearbook to Ingrid to look through. She loved the palm trees and those leafy little shrines, and insisted this was where we should shoot some scenes from the movie.”

“How have you managed to stay so quiet about it?” Mother asked, looking proud, as she poured more Scotch into his glass.

“The studio had to explore the site first. That school principal of yours? Sister—what’s her name? Sister Teresa something?”

“Sister Teresa Mary.”

“She’s a bit of a tough nut, but a healthy donation to the school and it was decided pretty fast. What Ingrid wants—now especially after Gaslight—Ingrid gets.”

That rakish grin of his—he so loved astonishing me. And he had; oh, he had. This was happening at my school? Saint Ann’s would be famous. All those girls at Country Day would feel jealous when they found out.

But the most amazing thing? This time, I wasn’t going to Ingrid. She was coming to me.

It was spring before anything actually began happening. That was when small squads of squinty-eyed men with notebooks and pencils behind their ears started roaming the campus, choosing the most picturesque sites, even asking Sister Teresa Mary if they could move one of the statues of the Virgin Mary to a different location: “Better light, you see.” She stared them down and said no, not under any circumstances, that statue had been in that grotto for fifty years and no movie people were going to…Well, they got the message and backed off. The whole deal was suddenly in jeopardy when Sister Teresa Mary realized the fictional convent school in the movie was supposed to be depicted as poor and dilapidated. It took some soothing sessions with Leo McCarey, my father reported, to calm her down.

I got that information directly from Kathleen, who had been in the school chapel when the argument began outside one of the stained-glass windows.

We were thrilled when Father brought home a copy of the shooting script. We memorized it, poring through the pages after tennis, agreeing that it was a wonderful story, a story that unspooled without a single scene in it that could, surely, be objectionable to anybody. Not even the pope.

…Father O’Malley, a warmhearted and gentle priest, is sent to evaluate whether a run-down school should be closed. He meets Sister Mary Benedict, a wise and dedicated nun hoping to convince an irascible property developer to gift Saint Mary’s with a new building to save the school from that fate. Father O’Malley and Sister Mary Benedict spar, becoming friends. The script turns dark when Sister Mary Benedict becomes ill and has to be sent away from Saint Mary’s for treatment—but no one tells her the reason why. Until…

“Bing will be perfect as Father O’Malley,” Kathleen said, rubbing her eyes. She wore glasses now, but kept taking them off and losing them, which made my tennis game seem slightly better than it was.

The weather was changing, in that imperceptible way it does in Los Angeles—the days get warmer and longer with fresh blooms popping up each day, but nothing drastic, and we barely noticed as we sat huddled together. Change was sneaky in our town.

“For Bing, it’ll be Going My Way all over again,” I agreed authoritatively. We felt empowered with that script in our hands, like full partners in this Hollywood venture. Bing and Ingrid were coming into our domain, telling a Catholic story: our Catholic story.

So when were they going to start? Why was it taking so long? The whole school spent the month of April holding its collective breath.

Finally, the morning came when trucks, huge ones, began rumbling into the school parking lot. Workers with muscular arms began unloading stacks of mysterious equipment as girls and nuns giggled and watched—until Sister Teresa Mary got on the loudspeaker and ordered us all back to our classrooms.

It was three more long days before the actors began to arrive. Enormous portable dressing rooms had appeared overnight—and even Sister Teresa Mary couldn’t stop the peeking and clustering as black limos drove up, depositing familiar faces onto our ordinary piece of the city. When I looked up at one point, I was sure I saw some of the cloistered postulants in the convent windows peeking out, too. Those windows, so dark and gray.

I felt a heavy hand on my shoulder just as I saw Ingrid Bergman step from one of the limos, wave to all of us, and disappear into her dressing room.

“Jessica, you have class this period, I presume.” It was Sister Teresa Mary, and now her leaden hand pressed harder.

I wanted to say it was just dramatics, which surely didn’t count as a class, did it? I was supposed to be learning Portia’s speech from The Merchant of Venice, but I couldn’t concentrate on that now. And, after all, dramatics was play, not work. Of course, that would not have been a wise comment.

“I need you to set an example,” she said. “Go to class.”

I dragged myself reluctantly away, glancing back, hoping for just one more glimpse of Ingrid. But the bell had long since rung, and I half ran down the stairs to Miss Coultrane’s classroom.

She stared at me, the webbing of tiny wrinkles around her eyes magnified by owlish glasses, as I slipped into my seat and tried to keep my head down.

“You’re late,” she said.

Being late was almost unforgivable in that class. And even though other classroom teachers were quietly giving their students permission to skip out that morning to watch the excitement, I knew Miss Coultrane would not do the same. When the hour was over and all the others began packing up notebooks and pencils and rushing for the door, she stopped me.

“Jessica, stay here. I want you to practice Portia’s speech. You haven’t been giving it your full attention.”

For the next fifteen minutes or so, I stumbled my way through the speech. I didn’t care right now about Portia’s argument.

“You are enunciating without meaning.” Miss Coultrane’s eyes were fierce. “What is this speech about?”

I was her favorite, I knew that, but I was losing my preferred status. All I could think of was that Ingrid was somewhere on the grounds of Saint Ann’s, and I wasn’t able to see her.

Only slowly did I become aware of a commotion out in the hallway that connected the drama classroom with the school auditorium. There was a knock on the door. Miss Coultrane, frowning, walked over and opened it. She stepped outside and I stood there, listening to the murmur of voices.

And then the door opened again. Miss Coultrane moved aside and beckoned the person behind her to come in. Ingrid Bergman, wearing slacks and a dark sweater, stepped forward, a retinue of people clustered behind her, hovering, looking anxious.

She gracefully apologized to Miss Coultrane for interrupting, as if any apology was necessary, and looked around the room, voicing regrets that she hadn’t been able to visit earlier—she wanted to meet as many of the girls at Saint Ann’s as possible, and what a wonderful school it appeared to be.

Miss Coultrane never lost a moment of her own dignity as she greeted the actress, nodding gravely. “I’m delighted to have you here, Miss Bergman,” she said. She nodded in my direction. “From what I understand, you and Jessica have met before.”

I blushed scarlet. What if Ingrid had forgotten?

“Yes, indeed, we have,” Ingrid said. “And I see your hair grew out, too.” This, with a faint smile, was enough to make me guess that my father must be among the cluster of people waiting out in the hall.

“Jessica is working on Portia’s speech,” said Miss Coultrane. “She has a way to go, I’m afraid, but she is a talented speaker, all the same.”

“I know that scene,” Ingrid said directly to me. “It’s one of Shakespeare’s greatest speeches. May I hear you?”

My mouth went dry. I swallowed, glanced at my teacher, and saw something in her eyes I hadn’t seen before. She was nodding. She wanted to be proud of me. She thought I could do it. Well, I would try.

“The quality of mercy is not strain’d, / It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven / Upon the place beneath….”

I faltered.

“Think of what was at stake in that courtroom,” Ingrid volunteered. The polite commotion at the door was getting louder, but she ignored it. “It is a man’s life against the twisted logic of justice. This is Portia’s plea for the truth about salvation, taking it to the core. Taking it to mercy.”

“Please,” I managed. “Let me hear you.”

She smiled faintly. “If you want,” she said.

Her face began a slow transformation. What was changing? Her eyes widened, filling with dignity and resolve—she was becoming someone else.

“It is twice blest; / It blesseth him that gives and him that takes,” she began, picking up from where I had left off. “ ’Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes / The throned monarch better than his crown….”

There was no supplication, no tearful pleading. Ingrid’s voice, her presence, grew in strength, expanding through the room. Without histrionics, she swam deep into the soul of Shakespeare’s scene. And, finally, to Shylock: “Though justice be thy plea, consider this, / That, in the course of justice, none of us / Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy: / And that same prayer doth teach us all to render / The deeds of mercy.”

I blinked as she continued, finishing the last lines. Then—just silence. Shakespeare’s Venetian court of law and all the players in it shrank back into my copy of The Merchant of Venice.

“Miss Bergman, that was wonderful. I am stunned. Thank you.”

Miss Coultrane had regained her voice before I regained mine. I saw tears in her eyes. She looked—what was it, transported? I wondered briefly if she had ever hoped to be an actress like Ingrid.

She rose, opening the door to the auditorium as wide as it would go. At least a couple of dozen people stood there, eyes wide, craning for a view of Saint Ann’s dazzling visitor.

I vowed I would never allow myself to forget that brief visit of Ingrid’s. She took me, without the artful help of film, to a place of imagination I had never been. I couldn’t know then how Portia’s eloquent plea for mercy would fare in the real world ahead. But I had truly heard it for the first time.