CHAPTER EIGHT

Los Angeles, 1948–49

My mother’s migraines began shortly after that. I would come home from school to a still house, and her bedroom door would be closed. I remember staring at that door, wondering if it was permissible to knock. Neither of my parents said anything to me about the scene in the car. My whole world felt shaky, and they pretended that nothing had happened at all, which stopped me from asking questions. They forced me to pretend with them.

After a week of facing that silent house all by myself, on a day when Kathleen had the afternoon off, I coaxed her into coming home with me by promising fresh chocolate-chip cookies. “We’ll bake them ourselves; they’ll be hot,” I said.

So she came. We pulled out the blue mixing bowl, the flour, and the butter and laughed about finding the sifter in the refrigerator. It was good to be part of a normal conversation again. For a brief time, as we mixed the batter and folded in the Toll House chocolate chips, life felt back on track.

“This stuff is good,” she offered, licking one of the spoons. I took a bite; it was delicious.

“So is your mother sick?”

“She has headaches.”

“Does she spend all day in her bedroom?”

“I don’t know.”

Kathleen nodded, as if this were a perfectly normal thing to say. I told her about my father’s walking out on Father Nolton at Sunday Mass and the fight in the car. She nodded again, more thoughtfully this time. “Nolton’s a jerk. If you listen to the priests, you’d think everybody in Hollywood was either a spy or a communist making dirty movies. No wonder your father got fed up.” She said it in such an offhand way, so matter-of-factly, that I felt the tension inside of me ease slightly. I asked her a question I had wondered about for a while:

“How do you…just decide what you believe?”

“You mean thumb my nose at the rules?”

“More than that.”

“Like, what’s going to send me to hell?” A small smile played across her lips.

I thought of the rosaries I had whispered my way through from a darkened church pew. “Nothing is going to send you to hell,” I said.

“Okay, I have bad thoughts, too. And you know what? I think it’s part of growing up. And I’m not confessing it, and I’m not reciting any rosary for penance. What do you think now?”

“Wherever you go, I’ll go, too.”

Silently, Kathleen picked up a spoonful of cookie dough and held it out to me. “This one has lots of chips,” she said gently.

We never did bake the cookies that day. We just ate all the batter, and it was delicious. I was scraping the almost empty bowl with a spatula when I looked up and saw my mother’s startled face appear in the doorway.

“Girls,” she said in a perfectly normal voice. I clung to the fact that she wore a bright smile and her hair was combed. “What are you thinking? You’ll ruin your appetites for dinner.”

“Yes, ma’am, we’ll make up for it tomorrow,” Kathleen said.

Mother laughed—actually laughed. She was back.

Just as Kathleen got on her bike to ride home, my father pulled into the driveway. He hadn’t come home until after ten o’clock all week, and it wasn’t even dark yet. I let myself consider the possibility that, finally, with him home and Mother smiling again, things might be tipping back into place.

“Hi, kid,” Father said as he climbed out of the car. “Rough week all around, right? Sorry.”

Just like that. To the point. His eyes looked hollow, and I could see sweat marks on the cuffs of his dress shirt.

I couldn’t pretend. “Are you still fighting?” I asked.

“The war is over,” he said. “We talked.”

“Whatever that means.”

“Okay, you’re worried. Do you want to know more?”

I shook my head vigorously. No, no. I strained to keep my departing friend—hair flying, pedaling away down the hill—in sight. I didn’t want to know anything about my parents’ lives, not then and maybe not ever. I just wanted to think about sitting in the kitchen eating cookie batter with Kathleen.

“Okay,” he said again, his voice tired. Together we walked back into the house, where Mother had already set the table for dinner and poured their usual cocktails into their usual glasses, and Father gave us an update on studio news, and it all felt strange, so it barely registered that Ingrid was thinking of making a movie for an Italian director off in Italy.

I wasn’t spending much time pondering any of that. I had landed a part in the school play. We were doing Pride and Prejudice, which I was thrilled about, but unfortunately I had to play Mr. Wickham. I protested that this was unfair, but Miss Coultrane argued that it would test my dramatic skills in a way that playing a female role would not. I didn’t buy that for a minute, but we had no boys at Saint Ann’s and I was the tallest in the class even though I was only a junior, so I was stuck. Our production was in full, semi-frenzied rehearsal. Kathleen wasn’t interested in dramatics, so I saw little of her as the shadows of winter began lengthening. Long rehearsals were filling up the after-school daylight hours. No time for tennis.

I loved learning my lines, loved the feeling of creating a part that involved a person I could bring to life, even if I had to play a male lead. I took it as a challenge when Miss Coultrane insisted I learn how a man walks—the stride, the posture, the chest thrust forward, demanding the easy command of a room.

“Spread your legs when you sit,” she snapped from the darkened theater during one rehearsal. “Now place your palms on your thighs. That’s how a man takes charge.”

Strange, to do that. And yet, when I did, I caught a glimmer of what Miss Coultrane was telling me. It felt freeing; that was the truth of it.

Playing Mr. Wickham in general felt comfortable enough, but I hated the uniform I had to wear. The pants were obscenely tight over my too-generous hips. The heavy military coat felt like armor over my proudly developed breasts. My hair was cut short again, and the fake sideburns and mustache made some classmates snicker.

So, okay, I told myself, I didn’t have the body to play a man. But if Ingrid Bergman could stand straight and proud in a full suit of armor, I could manage Wickham.

That worked until the handsome brother of one of my classmates came to pick up his twin sister after rehearsal one afternoon. I had seen him once before, at a church hall mixer, and knew a few things about him. His name was Philip, and he was a junior at Thomas Aquinas, the Jesuit school for boys, but I hadn’t noticed until now that his eyes were a brilliant blue and he had an engaging, lopsided smile that flustered me.

I didn’t see him at first. I was practicing my lines in the fountain garden outside of the auditorium, striding back and forth, trying to deepen my voice, waiting to be called for my scene, when I heard a startled exclamation. I looked up, straight into Philip’s handsome, shocked face. “Who are you?” he asked.

At first I thought he meant what part was I playing, and I had opened my mouth to tell him when I realized he might really, truly wonder if I was a man.

“I’m Jesse, a junior, like your sister,” I blurted. “This is just a costume, I’m playing Wickham—”

He was backing away, looking at me as if he had swallowed a peach pit. “Sure,” he said. “Yep. Hey, you look—swell.” He turned on his heel and exited the garden, leaving me briefly devastated. I wanted to tear off the sideburns and the stupid mustache; how could I ever have let myself become an object of ridicule? And that’s what I would be; I knew it. Philip would laugh and tell his friends and—

“My dear Jesse.” I looked to my left, at the path by the fountain, and saw Miss Coultrane standing there, her straight-up-and-down body as erect as a soldier’s. “What a wonderful thing—you actually convinced that young man that you were Wickham. It takes a good actress to become her part. You should be proud.”

I must have looked unconvinced.

“You do know Miss Bergman plays a woman playing a man in her new movie,” Miss Coultrane said in a voice unusually gentle.

“Yes.” Of course. I felt a glimmer of comfort.

“And you do remember that Portia, in Shakespeare’s world, had to be a man playing a woman playing a man?”

I smiled, still a little grudgingly. Yes, I knew that.

Then Miss Coultrane—steely, demanding Miss Coultrane—touched my shoulder and gently guided me into the auditorium.

“You can quit, you know,” she said. “Or you can play your part. You’re an excellent Wickham.”

I had a fleeting thought: how many parts was I to play in a single life? Probably not as many as Ingrid. “I’ll stay,” I said.

The production was a success. All our families dutifully attended each weekend performance, and several of the local Catholic schools packed the house for our two matinees. I tasted the fear and joy of waiting in the wings for my cue, saw how music and lighting and costumes could create magic, and wondered: did Ingrid feel something transporting like this every time? How exhausting and thrilling that must be. I felt a kinship with her as I peeked through the heavy velvet curtains in Saint Ann’s auditorium. Perhaps she had once been in my shoes, whispering her lines, straining to be ready for the moment when, in character, she had to stride onto the stage and take a rapt audience into the palm of her hand. That possibility was exhilarating. And I was proud to play Mr. Wickham. Even when I spotted Philip sitting in the third row.

Just before Christmas 1948, with great fanfare, Joan of Arc was released. Kathleen and I saw it together, and I was enthralled. Who could not be moved, watching Ingrid as the Maid of Orleans bravely lead the French army into battle—and just as bravely meet her fate at the hands of the dreaded English? It was the noblest of sacrifices, I said to Kathleen.

“Well—if it really happened that way,” she responded. Was she hinting that my reaction was excessive? I didn’t care. I felt elevated, somehow more splendid myself. Ingrid Bergman’s acting had a way of making that happen, and I was sure lots of people must feel the same. She did what heroes were supposed to do: she enlarged me. Into what? I wasn’t sure, but I knew she would point the way.

True to their mission, every movie magazine carried a story. “All my life I dreamed of playing this incredible woman,” Ingrid told Look magazine. “And now I have.”

Maybe Ingrid wasn’t one of us, but she was the closest thing to it in the secular world, and we were proud. Sister Teresa Mary took to the school loudspeaker on the movie’s opening day to urge every high-school girl at Saint Ann’s to go see Ingrid Bergman “bring to life a saint of the holy Catholic Church.” We felt bathed in the reflected light of her courageous character, somehow part of it. How easy it turned out to be, this conferring of sainthood on the real person under all that armor. Even Father Nolton knew enough to keep quiet for a while about the danger of the movies.

It was my father’s idea to install a plaque at Saint Ann’s to commemorate the filming of The Bells of St. Mary’s. After all, it was part of the school’s history, he told Sister Teresa Mary. There was no opposition. Sister Teresa Mary was quite pleased with the idea, especially when Ingrid agreed to come for the installation ceremony.

“We might as well get all the publicity mileage for Joan that we can,” Father said offhandedly, out of earshot of the nuns. That gave me pause, but, really, generating publicity was his job, and nothing was wrong with that.

So we crowded together, this time near the chapel, where, in an enclave lined with roses, a bronze marker had been set into the earth. Etched into the metal:

The Bells of St. Mary’s—

starring Ingrid Bergman

filmed on this site in 1945

And we waited for Ingrid.

A half hour passed. Forty-five minutes. Sister Teresa Mary’s welcoming smile was getting strained.

Finally, a polished black Cadillac drove up. It stopped, and our star stepped out, giving us a warm smile. Her dress was navy blue, cut short, with sleeves and a crisp white collar. She looked almost like a schoolgirl herself.

She strode forward and embraced Sister Teresa Mary, who had regained her welcoming smile. Cameras flashed; aides poured from the two following cars. I saw one glancing at his watch, catching the eye of another, and shaking his head. “She’s probably got six more events she’s supposed to show up for,” Kathleen whispered.

Ingrid made a short speech applauding the nuns for their good work and thanked them all for their hospitality. “This is a lovely, serene home for those in communion with God,” she said gracefully. “And I thank you for honoring me by allowing The Bells of St. Mary’s to claim your school as its real-life counterpart.”

I was sitting in the front row, straight and tall and proud, listening to every word. No one clapped harder than I did, and I was thrilled when she spotted me and actually winked. There were some who murmured that she could have talked about goodness and holiness, but I thought they were ridiculously picky.

“She looks almost ethereal,” breathed one of the younger nuns, staring after Ingrid’s departing figure as she worried the polished black beads laced around her waist. “Do you think she’ll convert?”

My father laughed heartily when I relayed that wistful thought. “People will believe whatever they want to believe,” he said.

I did wonder, even then, with the serene presumption of the intellectually superior, how people could be so naïve as to believe such a thing. Ingrid was a Protestant, after all. Anyone with any level of sophistication knew that didn’t work.

Joan of Arc was a failure. No, that is the wrong description. The movie that took Ingrid to sainthood was not a box office success. Somehow we at Saint Ann’s found ourselves suddenly bumping down a rutted road instead of flying, and it was a sour review by Bosley Crowther of the New York Times that did it. He said of Ingrid, “While handsome to look on, [she] has no great spiritual quality. Her strength seems to lie in her physique rather than in her burning faith.”

Was he calling my hero a phony? Or somehow incompetent at playing the role she had dreamed of all her life?

The atmosphere at school the day that review came out was universally glum. We couldn’t help taking it personally: Ingrid was our link to the world beyond our parochial selves. So we made contemptuous remarks about Crowther and went about our day. Kathleen brought over the latest movie magazines to the tennis court, and we soon put the criticisms of Joan of Arc behind us. Ingrid would emerge triumphant in her next movie, whatever it would be.

When I came home that afternoon, I had my first sense that there was more to the failure of Joan than I realized. Yes, it had come as a surprise. I could tell that it was a great surprise by the deepened lines on my father’s forehead. Home early, he sat smoking at the kitchen table. His mood was cranky, with an edge of something else.

That night, I awoke, fully alert, when I heard my father’s rumbling voice through the bedroom door, talking to Mother. I never paused to wonder why I would come back from the deepest sleep any time his voice pierced my dreams.

“Not a good sign, those box-office receipts,” he said.

“What went wrong?” Mother murmured.

He sighed; I heard him exhale. He kept two packs of Lucky Strikes next to his side of the bed now. “Too long, and it cost too much,” he said.

“But Ingrid can save any movie—”

“Not with the route she’s taking. She’s off to make that movie with Roberto Rossellini, the Italian who did Open City. On an island.”

“But surely—”

“Vannie, oh, Vannie.” He sighed again. “She’s going to find out sainthood is a curse.”