One day, Bella had announced she wanted French food. This was the first time she had expressed a desire for anything, so Marcus had prayed that their lunch wouldn’t be a repetition of every stilted meal he’d endured with her. But she was as detached as ever, forcing Marcus to cast around for topics of conversation that might elicit more than a monosyllabic response. They’d burned through Mae West’s revue at the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas (she hadn’t seen it); Allen Ginsberg’s Beat Generation poetry (she’d never heard of him); and those new-fangled TV dinners (she couldn’t think of anything worse.)
Exasperated, he had given up—and observed something far more intriguing.
Federico Fellini, Anthony Quinn, Giulietta Masina, and Richard Basehart had become the most famous quartet in Italian films after La Strada had triumphed at the Venice Film Festival. They sat at a corner table, but nobody was paying them the slightest attention.
Marcus never left home without his Leica, so when the quartet got up to leave, he called after Fellini and asked if they would mind if he took some pictures.
Six feet tall, with a lion’s mane of black hair and an animated face, Fellini asked, “Lo Scattino Americano?” When Marcus admitted that he was, Fellini responded, “This is the wrong name for you. Scattini always shove and demand, but they do not ask permission.”
That’s when Marcus had heard Bella laugh for the first time. “You are now Lo Scattino Simpatico,” she called out from their table, “The Nice Scattino!”
An elaborate Louis Quatorze desk stood in the restaurant’s foyer. The La Strada foursome posed in front of it until Marcus ran out of film. By the time Marcus had returned to their table, Bella was a different person.
An impish smile played on her lips. “Your friend Gwendolyn, she painted a different picture. ‘He knows Rome. He is so much fun. He will show you a good time.’ I thought, Good. I need to escape Hollywood and have fun. But instead I get this angry man.”
Marcus was shocked. “Is that how I come across?”
“I thought you resented the burden of a glamor girl who was only here because she is sleeping with the boss. But with those La Strada people, I saw a different person. That man with the camera, it is the real you, no?”
Marcus apologized if he’d made her feel uncomfortable. “It’s my job to do the opposite.”
She giggled like a drag queen’s version of Doris Day. “It doesn’t help when I am Miss Icicle, no?”
Over espressos, Bella had divulged her conflicted feelings about Zanuck.
“He loves me, but it is too much. I live always with fear that the telephone will ring and it will be Darryl saying, ‘I am in the hotel lobby!’”
“Sounds suffocating.”
“Why do you think I volunteered to come to Rome for his idiotic movie? Tell me,” she waved her long fingers at Marcus, “what is this anger I am sensing?”
“You have a lover who won’t leave you alone. I had a one who ended our relationship with a note.”
“Did he leave you for another lover?”
“He joined the church.”
She tsked. “Even worse.”
“I have a new lover now, and he’s terrific.”
“However . . .?”
“Whenever I think of the old one, this boiling anger surges up inside of me. Domenico tells me I say his name in my sleep.”
She plopped a sugar cube into her coffee. “Ah!”
It felt nice to unburden himself the way he would to Kathryn or Gwendolyn. “My friends tell me to forget it. ‘You’ve met someone else. Move on.’”
“Your heart says ‘But! but! but!’”
“I feel like Miss Haversham in Great Expectations.” His reference met with a blank look.
Bella tasted her coffee but frowned and pushed aside the cup. “During the war I was sent to a convent in Toulouse that the Nazis converted to a jail. I was lucky that they didn’t send me to a concentration camp like my brother Robert, may he rest in peace. Still, it was not pleasant. What kept me going was the other young girls. We shared food, confidences, love. We relied on each other for our survival. One day, the guards told me I was free to go. Just like that.”
“That must have been wonderful,” Marcus said.
“It was,” Bella agreed, “but for two years those girls were my whole world and I lost the opportunity to tell them what they meant to me.” She tapped her chest. “Your heart wants what your heart wants. What your friends say is not relevant.”
If she could survive a Nazi prison, Marcus had told himself, surely I can knock on a church door
* * *
A flock of large dark birds flew across the Piazza Adriana and landed on St. Anthony’s rooftop. They squawked like a Greek chorus announcing his arrival.
Marcus rapped on the monastery’s door. An old priest appeared, his face lined and weary. Marcus asked about their olive oil but the guy simply pointed to the right.
On the southern side of the building a pair of doors opened into a large room. Along one wall stood long tables, each of them piled with second-hand clothing. Along the back wall, people of all ages lined up for bowls of gazpacho and chunks of bread meted out by monks in brown Franciscan robes. A scattering of tables and mismatched chairs offered them a place to eat.
Overseeing everything was a monk in his sixties with the same weather-beaten face of the one at the door. Marcus approached him and asked about their olive oil.
“This is a place of God and charity, not business.”
“I don’t want to buy it; I am searching for the monk on the label.”
“Ah!” The priest smiled. “Brother Bernardino.”
Marcus’s heart fell. A wild goose chase.
“We have a small store.” The priest pointed to a laneway on the far side of the square.
Marcus nodded his thanks and returned to the piazza. With two hours to kill until the next bus to Rome, he walked back to the terminal where he’d spotted a ristocaffé.
The place wasn’t much cheerier than the monk’s soup kitchen, but Marcus was hungry now. On the far wall was a poster, very similar to the olive oil label, but blown up to life size. Marcus studied the face. That monk isn’t any Brother Bernardino.
He headed for the alley.
The store had a doorway, a window, and a three-foot counter with bottles lined up along a shelf. Nobody was around.
Marcus heard the faint sound of singing. He strained until he could make out the melody: “Nice Work If You Can Get It.” It was refreshing to hear a distinctly American song crooned with such clarity.
He lifted the hinged flap in the counter, let himself through the side door, and followed the singing past a storage room to a narrow path. Halfway along, he came to a wooden gate with an iron handle.
The handle squeaked; the singer continued.
The gate opened onto a thicket of mature olive trees arranged in six rows of twenty, hemmed in by a ten-foot wall. Three trees down on the second row stood a monk in a Franciscan habit with his back to him, plucking olives from the branches.
Marcus crept forward until he was one tree away. “Oliver?”
The figure in the brown habit stiffened. He let his hessian bag slide to his feet and turned around.
The label depicted him with his hood on, so it was a shock to see Oliver with his hair completely shaved off. It didn’t suit him—especially with that slight bulge near the back of his head—but the sheer starkness served to highlight the green flecks in his light hazel eyes and the serenity that filled them.
He looks like a Botticelli painting.
“Surprise!” Marcus said weakly.
“That’s an understatement.”
The sound of Oliver’s voice brought a sheen of tears to Marcus’s eyes. He blinked it away. “You’re not easy to find.”
“And yet here you stand in my olive grove.” Oliver’s tone took on a sharp edge.
Marcus risked a step closer. “Your picture on the bottle of—”
“Why are you here, Marc
us?” The dreamy Botticelli impression dissipated.
“I wanted—” What had seemed like a good idea in a fancy French restaurant now sounded trivial and selfish. “—to see you.”
“And now you have.” Oliver draped his bag over a shoulder. “I have a whole grove to harvest and I’m alone, so if you’ll excuse me?” He turned back to the tree and recommenced picking olives.
Marcus had imagined this scenario dozens of times. Oliver was supposed to be so full of regret that tears brimmed over, apologies gushing out in wet sobs.
“Is there some place we could sit down?”
Oliver kept his focus on the branches in front of him. “Even monks keep a schedule.”
“Perhaps I can help you.” Marcus reached up to tug the closest olive.
“That one’s not ready yet.” The words came out peevish. “What is it you want?”
Marcus was glad now that he hadn’t located Oliver while he still burned with resentment. This quadrangle with its three-hundred-year-old walls possessed a tranquility that he would have poisoned had he roared in here, eyes like Lucifer, screaming like Bette Davis, and throwing punches like Kid Galahad.
“I know it’s been a long time,” Marcus said. “I know I should forget about us, but I have to tell you, Oliver—I need to tell you that it bothers me—”
“The way I left?”
Marcus clutched the trunk of the closest tree. Its gnarled ridges were rough as sandpaper, but they kept him upright. “It wounded me. Deeply.”
Oliver’s eyes drifted across to Marcus’s hand gripping the folds in the wood. “This life has brought me a calmness that Hollywood could never achieve.” His hands began moving among the branches with a methodical precision born of repetition, but his eyes were now weeping.
“I deserved more than a note.”
“You want to know why I left?”
Oliver breathed in the still air until his shoulders relaxed. Finally, he was able to look Marcus in the eye.
“After I’d been at Cloverleaf a while, and those drugs started to leave my body, I became aware of a deep yearning inside of me. When you wanted me to come with you to Rome, where you’d be working on Quo Vadis, I took it as a sign. After all, it’s the story of a man who succumbs to his faith in Christ. When I saw the photos you took of the scenes where the Christians are fed to the lions, I realized that if I didn’t face the inevitable, I’d get eaten alive myself.”
He smiled for the first time. But it was a sad sort of smile, not the joyful one Marcus missed so much. Marcus ached to reach out, but he clasped his hands behind his back.
Oliver continued, “Quo Vadis was originally called Quo Vadis? with a question mark. It wasn’t until I started studying Latin that I realized it means, ‘Where are you going?’ I had to find out where I was going.”
“And have you?”
“My only wish is that you could also feel the profound contentment I experience every waking moment of my life.”
“That sure would be nice, Oliver, but I’ll settle for an apology.”
Marcus wanted his riposte to come off flippant, but somewhere around the halfway mark it took a darker turn, belying the surge of anger that he was now struggling to constrain.
Don’t screw this up. We are two adults having a mature discussion intended to air grievances. Screaming like a banshee isn’t going to get you the apology you came for.
“I did what I had to do,” Oliver said. “For my own sanity.”
“You left me with a crummy note. What about my sanity?”
“I had to get away from you.”
The quietude inside the olive grove took on a heaviness. “Living with me was so terrible?”
When Oliver answered, it was like a copper pipe to the sternum. “Yes.”
He headed toward a marble bench built into the wall at the end of the row. Marcus followed him, determined to say nothing until Oliver explained himself. Nearly a whole minute dragged by.
“When we met, you were this big-time writer at MGM. Then you headed up the whole department. You were in a position of power that I could never dream of.”
“Oliver, honey, I—”
“When HUAC and the blacklist came along, did you name names or buckle under? No! You got up in front of those clowns in Washington and you told them where to go. I was in awe of you.”
This man he’d lived with, shared his bed with, and his life—Marcus wondered if he had ever known him at all.
“Then our car accident happened, and even as I descended into that murky hell taking those drugs, you refused to give up on me until I physically pushed you out the door. And then what did you do? You came charging into my rose garden at Cloverleaf and spirited me away to a fresh start. You’re the most loyal person I’ve ever met. Nobody’s ever shown me that sort of commitment; I felt like I didn’t deserve it.”
“Of course you deserved it,” Marcus broke in. “You’re a good person—”
“I’ve felt like a fish out of water my whole life: childhood, the Breen Office, in Hollywood, at the Garden of Allah. And then we got to Rome. You were completely absorbed making your big Hollywood movie so I enrolled in the language school with that teaching order—and everything fell into place.”
They joined hands. Feeling the tremble in Oliver’s fingers, Marcus held on tighter.
“It was your trajectory that made me realize I was trudging through the wrong life. The Latin classes, the bibles, the history, the theological arguments, the pageantry of the Catholic Church—it all felt like home. Look at me, Marcus!” He relinquished his grip to sweep his hands through the air. “I’m wearing a plain brown habit and second-hand sandals, picking olives from hundred-year-old trees until my back breaks, and I couldn’t be happier.”
“You are?” Marcus choked on his question. “Happy?”
Oliver nodded. “I knew that leaving you a note was the coward’s way out, but telling you face to face would have led to a messy, emotional scene. I felt you deserved a clean break and decided a short note was best. For what it’s worth,” he added, “I can see now I was wrong.”
Marcus fell against Oliver’s shoulder and let his tears spill out in wet, heaving sobs until he realized Oliver was doing the same. Together, they cried and cried until at last they were spent.
Marcus took a deep breath and sat up straight. “Is this the sort of messy scene you were trying to avoid?”
Oliver laughed. “Pretty much. We should’ve done this three years ago.”
“But I wouldn’t have seen your olive grove—I mean Brother Bernardino’s.”
“Ah! You even know about that. When they asked me what new name I wanted to go by, the first one that popped into my head was San Bernardino. I didn’t want to completely forget where I came from, so Brother Bernardino it was.”
“And these olives?”
Oliver refastened the bag around his shoulders and returned to the tree to resume his work. “It started as a joke between me and the head of the monastery. He’s the only person who knew my name was Oliver.”
“Oh my God!” Marcus exclaimed. “Oliver—olives. That’s where it came from?”
“Turns out, I’m a natural at growing, harvesting, and pressing them. I’d be proud of it, but of course pride is a sin, so naturally I don’t indulge.” It was nice to catch a glimpse of the old Oliver behind the curtain of this new incarnation. “We started getting orders from all over the country, so a commercial artist was commissioned to do the artwork. The first I knew of it was when the bottles arrived.”
“And now your face is everywhere. The monk who ran away from Hollywood becomes famous.”
Oliver lifted his eyes heavenward. “Such are the mysterious ways in which God works.” He returned to his work. “Speaking of famous, Mister Lo Scattino Americano.”
“You heard?”
“I’m not a hermit. Do you live here now?”
“It’s more of a ‘stuck here’ type situation.”
Oliver plucked handfuls of o
lives while Marcus described the convoluted saga of why he couldn’t leave Italy.
“They can’t hang onto your passport forever.”
“Six months later I’m still here.”
“You’ll figure it out.”
“I guess so. I mean, I am on a trajectory.” They exchanged quiet smiles. “Mind you, I still have to figure out how to get my money out of the country.”
“I might be able to help you there.”
Marcus had a vision of being nailed inside a crate of olive oil addressed to Kathryn Massey, care of the Garden of Allah Hotel.
A mischievous smile emerged on Oliver’s face. “When members of the clergy travel, those border officials barely look at our passports, let alone ask us what we’re bringing into the country. They just wave us through.”
He turned back to his olives and let Marcus wonder how many secret pockets he could fit into a monk’s habit.
CHAPTER 33
Kathryn braced herself as the lights on the Orpheum Theatre stage metamorphosed from baby pink to bright white. She knew the edge was probably ten feet away, but it still left her twitchy and insecure.
One more rousing verse, followed by an extended dance interlude, then a rousing chorus with all twenty members of the cast harmonizing like a Harlem Baptist choir.
She felt a bead of sweat collect at the bottom of her skull. It trickled down her neck until it hit the midway point between her shoulder blades.
She sang out, “Sunbeam’s new Mixmaster!”
The dancer in front of her, a sweet girl from Des Moines named Renee, sank into the splits, her arms sheathed in red silk evening gloves. As she reached toward the ceiling, several of the diamantes glued at the wrist flew off. They caught the lights like microscopic stars as they scattered across the stage.
“Mixes my Betty batter faster!”
Kathryn stepped over Renee’s leg and into a pool of blinding light, maintaining her smile and praying to a God she didn’t believe in that he hadn’t cast a tiny chunk of crystal in her path. But as she put her weight onto her right foot, she felt two of the little suckers skitter underneath her. She tried to pull back, but hesitated a fraction of a second too long—Renee had already started rising to her feet.
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