CHAPTER NINE

Los Angeles, 1949–50

The first part of my senior year at Saint Ann’s was rigorous, with plenty of history tests, English essays, and late nights spent studying. But somehow I had become a very good student. I even mastered chemistry, getting pretty good at fiddling with test tubes and memorizing formulas.

Yet what I loved most was knowing I had become one of Miss Coultrane’s favored pupils when—Mr. Wickham safely behind me—I focused on public speaking. I spent long hours working on diction, orating; I grew to like the sound of my own voice. Miss Coultrane entered me in a few local school tournaments, and I won second place in debate at Loyola High, which pleased my parents. “Stay away from debating communists in labor unions,” Father warned half jokingly. “You’ll have the government on your tail.”

Politics, for me, stayed vaguely on the horizon. Kathleen and I worried over what would happen to the world now that Russia had the atomic bomb: would we all be blown to bits? But such concerns floated out somewhere on the horizon; even small hints in the papers that Ingrid was maybe involved in a romance didn’t rise to the top. We dismissed them. I somehow managed to table my worries about my father. I was much more interested in a coming citywide speech tournament and the pamphlets from faraway colleges that had begun slipping through the mail slot at home. I daydreamed over them. Bennington College: So “back east.” Girls wearing pedal pushers riding bikes around a bucolic campus of green grass and winding paths. Stanford University: So serious and important. A girl could even major in math there. I filled out applications, discussing them with my father, feeling unsure of myself—until Sister Teresa Mary announced one day that Saint Ann’s was not sending out one single additional transcript of mine unless I applied to a Catholic college.

“How can she dare do that?” I railed to Kathleen.

“Does your mother know?”

“Why would she understand? She never went to college.”

“Apply to a Jesuit college and shut up. You don’t have to go there.”

When you were pragmatic like Kathleen, you could cut through all the thorny tangles. I did—and set my heart on Stanford.

That was how my last year at Saint Ann’s began, all orchestrated comfortably and according to script.

The biggest change was Philip. Maybe watching me onstage had helped him understand that my pretending to be Mr. Wickham was an acting challenge, or maybe I just wasn’t that convincing in the role. Whichever it was, he eventually asked me out. So there I was, linked to the star athlete at Thomas Aquinas.

Other girls told me that some boys gave wet kisses, which were sloppy, and others gave dry kisses, which were better. Philip was a dry kisser. I tried to be coy and pull away that first time, remembering Ingrid’s three-second kisses in Notorious, hoping it would make me sexier. But when he flushed and started to back off, I thought maybe he hadn’t seen the movie. It was a bit disappointing—I could hear his breath whistling through his nose—but I discovered that the mechanics of kissing were not as complicated as I had feared. And when his hand moved to my breast, I fervently thanked the falsies I had stuffed into my mother’s bra. Maybe he would think they were real.

Was letting him touch my fake breasts a venial or a mortal sin? I would go to confession tomorrow.

There were to be a series of earnest confessions as we moved further into our senior year in the fall of 1949, but really, I told myself many times, kissing Philip couldn’t be a ticket to hell, because we never went All the Way.

How could I possibly concentrate on anything important when I was busy agonizing over sex? Philip took me to his school’s winter formal, which I remember mostly for its textures—the soft tulle and scratchy net of my blue dress, the dancing glitter Mother sprinkled over my carefully sprayed hair, the feel of the orchid he brought for me to wear on my wrist. And then the secret textures—parking in the dark oil fields above L.A. after the dance, fumbling, tongues locked. Even the Church couldn’t stop sex forever. Everything heaved with possibility.

“Did you hear the news?” Kathleen shouted to me as we biked down a steep hill toward Westwood on our way to a movie. The afternoon was beautiful, one of those sharp, tasty days in Los Angeles when you actually believe that, yes, the seasons do change, even in California.

“You mean that stuff about colleges making the faculty sign loyalty oaths?” I yelled back. I was pleased to be up on the news. Outrageous, my father had said. “They’re hunting for communists everywhere, and this violates freedom of speech.”

“Are you kidding? I mean Ingrid falling in love with that Italian director and living with him in Italy!”

I slammed on my brakes, almost pitching over the handlebars. “I don’t believe it,” I yelled.

“Have you seen the latest Photoplay?”

I shook my head. “They’re making a movie, that’s all,” I said. “It’s just rumor.”

“She admits it.”

Something churned inside of me—a roller coaster of shock and surprise. Hollywood gossip was always about somebody else, not Ingrid.

We pulled over to the curb and tried to put it all together. The details had been collecting, of course: those sly little hints in Louella Parsons’s columns about a possible romance, not naming names. But to Kathleen and me—no fans of Hollywood’s nasty and lugubrious columnist, though we read every piece she wrote—it pretty much seemed the usual kind of made-up scandal thing. Everyone knew Ingrid was happily married. A shadow passed quickly over that thought as I remembered the tightly stitched husband I had seen with her at the Academy Awards. I hadn’t liked him; I could go that far.

“My father would know, and he hasn’t said anything of the sort,” I reasoned.

“Are you going to ask him?” She was so infernally direct.

“No, why would I have to do that?”

“Because he might tell you if it’s true.”

“I don’t believe it.”

Kathleen sighed. “Maybe you’ve been too busy with Philip,” she said.

It was the closest thing to an admonishment I’d ever heard from my friend.

We decided to pass on the movie. It was just another Roy Rogers Western, the kind of thing we were mostly too grown-up for now anyway. Instead, we got back on our bikes that sunny fall day and pedaled to a nearby park, where we settled on a bench. Kathleen dug into her book bag and came up with her copy of Photoplay. We stared at the cover: a head shot of a smiling, winsome Ingrid in a high-necked white blouse filled the page. Glumly, we stared at the headline.

The Bergman Love Story

The only story personally approved by Ingrid Bergman

Here the real Bergman emerges—a woman Hollywood never knew.

Inside were pages of color photos of a beaming Ingrid on the island of Stromboli, posing both with a lean, smiling Rossellini and with the peasants who inhabited the island.

“I love Roberto,” Ingrid was quoted as saying. In one photo—dressed in a red peasant skirt, long hair blowing in the wind—she looked wholesome and happy. “One day when I am free, we shall be married,” the caption read.

We drank in the words, eager to understand. The author wrote sympathetically of Ingrid’s life journey, from the death of her mother when she was two years old to the glamour of Hollywood. Before she became famous, men ignored the shy young woman, except for a doctor ten years older named Petter Lindström, “who she came to see as the answer to her inner longing for surcease from iron-bound restrictions,” the article said.

“She was too young to marry,” I declared. “He must’ve tried to control her.” I already knew whose side I was on.

We kept reading, hungry for understanding.

People of high position become public domain, the author declared, “which casts idols in the mold of [the public’s] own imagination and standards,” rendering it futile for any “idol to plead its humanness.” And now, “happy with the man she loves, she is struggling to get joint custody with her husband of their daughter, Pia,” but he was resisting.

Kathleen nodded slowly, but stayed oddly silent.

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m wondering how Pia feels.”

I heard a strange note in her voice.

“But we know Ingrid wants her daughter with her, the article says so—she isn’t really abandoning her.”

She nodded again. “I’m just wondering how Pia feels.”

She said no more. We kept reading. Ingrid was an artist, dedicated to her work. She would stay in Italy until her divorce was final, she told the interviewer. She would never stop fighting for custody of her daughter.

It was the author’s last paragraph that stopped us cold. “I talked with her alone, seated by the charred ruins of an old house on the mountain of Stromboli,” he intoned, “as a cloud of sulphur fumes hung over the crater of the volcano.”

We closed the magazine. No need to comment on the image of Ingrid Bergman sitting in a cloud of sulphur fumes, teetering on the edge of a bigger crater than any on Stromboli.

“Somebody has to help her,” I said.

“To do what?”

I couldn’t swim in these waters. “The right thing,” I said.

“Whatever that is,” said my pragmatic friend with a small chuckle.

Christmas was coming, though in Los Angeles you pretty much had to guess the season from store display windows. Either that, or by noting the Salvation Army people jingling bells and smiling every time someone dropped a dime or a nickel into their pots.

Philip and I were an “item” now, in movie language. We saw a lot of films together, necking in the dark. My mother liked him very much, especially after hearing that this handsome captain of the Thomas Aquinas basketball team led his teammates in prayer before every game. On one knee, I told her. We were very proud of him.

Philip and I perused college catalogs together, mostly the ones that interested him. I started knitting him a pair of socks. It was a badge of prestige at school to be knitting your boyfriend’s socks, whipping away, with little spools of different colors dangling from your needles.

Truth was, we were preparing for the usual—maybe a year or two of college, but then marriage, the sooner the better. The unspoken challenge was staying a virgin until Philip slipped a wedding band on my finger. After his first year of college, of course.

Come Christmas Eve, as usual, we had our tree up, Bing Crosby was crooning “Silent Night” and “Adeste Fideles” on the radio, and Mother and I were making Christmas cookies, baked ones this time. Everything was exactly as it always was—including the fact that the studio Christmas party was “running late,” as my father put it in his usual nine o’clock phone call home. Mother reminded him that Father Nolton would close the confessional at Saint Ambrose in an hour, and he had promised to make it this year, so we could all three take communion together on Christmas Day. Her voice was tensing up. She told him that I had held off going to confession earlier, that I was waiting to go with him; it was a father-daughter thing. Truth was, I let myself be a bargaining chip in hopes of making this annual scenario play out better.

We waited. Nine-thirty. Mother sat now, hands folded, staring at the clock, and I was mad at both of them. I knew exactly what would happen. He would screech into the driveway at nine-forty-five and yell for me to jump in the car, and off we would go, down the hill to Saint Ambrose. He would be drunk, and I would cross my fingers, hoping that if we crashed it would be on the way back, after the priest’s absolution.

What kept them together? My mother, with her delicate features and huge eyes, was beautiful; any man would have been drawn to her. I had felt their warm and sensual attachment to each other from the beginning, without words to describe it. My father would watch my mother working in the kitchen, joking and conversing, his eyes traveling over her skin, from the nape of her neck to her slender hands as she ladled onto our plates Friday night’s macaroni and cheese. But their rhythms, their personalities, their beliefs—when they fought, I felt like loose electric wires were snaking and buzzing in the air. My job was to dodge them.

“Jesse, get a move on it!” Brakes screeching right on schedule; I grabbed my jacket and ran for the car. “Good girl,” Father said with a grin.

I gripped my seat on our wild ride to the church, trying not to watch the road. What was the use of trying to understand my parents? I couldn’t figure myself out. It was probably natural that the product of two such confusing people was doomed to be a jumble of contradictions. Maybe that wasn’t all bad. I thought of all the roles Ingrid had played, how her essential self always shone through. Even thinking about her was calming.

“Does Ingrid usually come to the Christmas party?” I asked as we skidded into a space in the empty parking lot.

“She did last year,” he said. “She’s still in Italy. In the dumps about Joan of Arc, probably. And Under Capricorn. Two bombs in a row.”

I felt a familiar thump in my heart. How anyone could have watched Joan of Arc and not been transported, I did not know. There was such purity in Saint Joan’s face as she looked up to heaven and vowed her dedication to God. No one but Ingrid could have made Joan so believable, so transcending. She made me determined to be good. Well—anything short of renouncing Philip.

“I don’t see how anybody couldn’t love her movies,” I said.

He gave me a loose smile. “Her publicist thanks you.”

It dawned on me then that maybe he wasn’t going to tell me what was going on unless I asked straight-out. Anything bad for her was bad for him, and that meant for our family, and I was suddenly nervous. I pointed to the cigarette held tight between his teeth. “You can’t take that into church.”

“You sound like your mother.” He pressed the cigarette into the ashtray. Unexpectedly, he put an arm around my shoulder, and pointed to the glittering lights of the city below the sloping hill on which we were parked. “Saint Ann’s makes everything simple, right? Just follow the rules and everything adds up,” he said.

“Pretty much.” I hesitated, and went ahead. “What’s happening with Ingrid? Is she really in love with Roberto Rossellini?”

“Jesse…” He seemed to be debating what to say. “She’s moved on.”

“You mean to the island of Stromboli?”

“You read that carefully planted story in Photoplay?”

“Yes.”

“Did it make you sympathetic?”

“Yes.” I swallowed. I might not say that to Sister Teresa Mary, but I could say it to my father.

“Good. That was the plan.” He stepped out of the car and waited on the path for me to join him. Even under the weak beam of the parking-lot streetlight, I could see the newly worn creases in his face.

“Is Stromboli as—as dangerous as it sounded?” I asked.

“Depends on whether Rossellini’s movie is any good. But, yep, it’s a crummy little island with an active volcano that just might cause plenty of trouble.” He glanced at his watch. “Now run for it—let’s get in there before they close up.”

We made it. Last ones in the confessional.

Stromboli.

Later in the night, drifting off to sleep, home sin-free and alive, I realized I didn’t like the name of the place. It came out like a hollow croak, not the romantic name of a romantic island. Or maybe it was just the way my father said it, inhaling his cigarette, then spitting the island’s name out like a piece of indigestible meat.

Mother stood pale in the doorway when I walked in the house the day after Christmas. I could see my father’s figure in the kitchen, back turned to me, hunched over the telephone on the kitchen counter, talking in low, tense monosyllables.

“They’re sending him there,” Mother said, looking shell-shocked. “He came home half an hour ago, after they told him to pack his bags for Italy.

“He wants to talk to you, Jesse. Now, please be calm—”

We both jumped at the sound of his slamming down the phone.

I brushed by her, not listening anymore.

“Jesse, come sit down.”

He didn’t sound like himself. I moved into the kitchen and sat across from him; he looked very tired. So many times over the last few years, we had sat across from each other like this—me struggling with homework; Father explaining equations and advanced math, helping me with my history homework, shaping explanations so things made sense. I still believed he was the smartest man in the world.

“You’ve got the picture, don’t you, Jesse?”

“I think so.”

“Events may be moving too fast.”

I wasn’t sure what that meant. But I nodded.

“What do you think? Is she still your hero?”

“I…” How did I answer this? “Hero” sounded suddenly like a child’s word. Was it wrong still to admire her? She had looked happy in the photographs in Photoplay. She wasn’t some fallen woman, I told myself. But I was still thrown.

He smiled with a touch of melancholy. “You’re not sure,” he said. “How would you feel if she admitted she was wrong and came home to her husband and child? Would you forgive her?”

“I would feel much better,” I said.

“So you see why the studio is sending me over there?”

I saw. But how was he going to convince her to come back? “How will you do it?” I asked.

“I’ll reason with her,” he said. He stood, obviously unable to sit still, and began pacing. His forehead was damp with sweat. “I’ll tell her what she is throwing away—a career, lots of money. What do you think?”

He was asking what I thought.

“That’s not enough,” I ventured. “Maybe tell her what a hero she is to so many people, and so many young girls like me. Tell her we are shaping ourselves around who she is—”

“It’s too big. It isn’t tangible.”

“If I could only talk to her, I could tell her…” I hesitated, realizing my father had stopped pacing.

“Take me with you,” I blurted. “I could help.”

“Jesse, I can’t do that.”

“Why not?” I was stuttering with excitement now. It made perfect sense—I was my father’s true ally, I could see that now. We thought alike, we shared the same ideas, we could be a team on this—

“No,” Mother said, her alarmed voice cutting through the air. “This is not something a girl your age can be asked to do.”

Father whipped around, and answered just as sharply. Just this one coil of resistance brought it out of him. “Ingrid likes Jesse,” he said. “Maybe she’s a good reminder of what it means to be put on a pedestal, a reminder of all the people, young and old, in this country who admire and respect her. It might even sharpen her loneliness for her own daughter—”

“What about Pia? Her daughter? Surely, if anyone could change Ingrid’s mind, wouldn’t it be Pia?” Mother was clutching the door frame as if to anchor herself against a vanquishing wind.

He shook his head. “Lindström won’t let Pia go see her.”

“That’s awful,” I said. “She must be so lonely. How could a father be so cold?”

“They’ve wrapped that stupid movie on Stromboli. We’ll only be there for a few days.”

“This is crazy,” Mother said. “This is your job, not your daughter’s.”

“The studio will do anything I want if it brings that woman back where she belongs.” He turned to me, ignoring Mother, his eyes lit with fierce energy. “You’ve got a good brain, Jesse. You up for this?”

“Absolutely.”

“Sorry to mess up your Christmas vacation.”

“Oh no, I don’t care, this is wonderful.” He had dealt me in and I was dizzy with triumph. Yes, we were partners in this, and if Mother didn’t like it, too bad. She would be too timid to try something bold. But Kathleen would be impressed, I was sure of that. I might take the rules too literally, but I was not timid.

Father shifted his attention back to Mother, whose face seemed shaped of clay. “Vannie, the knives are sharpening here—and a lot of people will lose their jobs if she stays with Rossellini,” he said. He paused a beat. “Maybe even me. Please understand.”

She then said the strangest thing: “I’m losing her,” she whispered. “To you.”

We stared at each other. Mother stood silently behind me, saying nothing. From the living room, the sound of Bing Crosby’s voice filled the air, and I knew the tree in the bay window glowed with blue lights, just as it always did. This year, we had piled on a ton of tinsel, and I had only broken one shiny Christmas ornament. Just like usual. Everything was the same.

But not really.