Red Letter Days

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Red Letter Days Page 3

by Sarah-Jane Stratford


  “Hank, you know you’re supposed to be upstairs.”

  “Sure, Mr. K, I know. You gonna take me to the woodshed?” Hank asked.

  Mr. Kelvin threw back his head and laughed, reminding Phoebe of a Macy’s Santa.

  “You writers with the mouths on you, it’s too much.” He grinned at Hank, who grinned back but still clutched Phoebe proprietarily. “Now then.” Mr. Kelvin turned his bright eyes to Phoebe. “You’re Phoebe Adler?” he asked encouragingly.

  “I am,” she said, presenting her hand to shake. “Pleased to meet you, sir.”

  “You’re fired, dear.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  * * *

  London, Spring 1955

  “Avast, ye hardy!” Rhoda cried, leaping onto the armchair and waving her cardboard sword over her head. “The battle will begin at midnight, in the middle of dawn! We will kill all the prisoners, and then we’ll tie them up and make them dance for us!”

  Hannah hid her laugh in a cigarette. She couldn’t imagine anything more delightful than the stream of consciousness that flowed from the imagination of a five-year-old. Especially her own child. Hannah swooped Rhoda up and directed her toward a low wooden stool.

  “I know you’re the pirate king, darling, but please don’t ruin the armchair, we’ve just had it restuffed.”

  “Bah, humbug!” Rhoda answered. “’Tis a pirate ship, matey!”

  “Sail out for open sea,” Hannah suggested. “I hear there’s treasure to be found on a distant isle.”

  Rhoda promptly sat on the stool and began to chart the course. Though she gave occasional instructions to her crew, she was mostly silent, her eyes tight on the blue-green wallpaper, her hands steering an imaginary wheel. Hannah followed Rhoda’s gaze, wishing she could climb inside her daughter’s imagination as the wallpaper turned into a sea. She hoped it would be a long, long time before Rhoda stopped believing in the wild worlds she could conjure, just by insisting they were real.

  Hannah sighed and turned back to the script she was reading. Not much of a world conjured here. Another detective thriller. It made perfect sense for writers to submit variations on what was popular, but television was opening up huge vistas for drama, provided it passed muster with the censors, and she wanted her scrappy little production company to make its mark.

  Her company. Incredible. She had a pile of scripts, each one addressed to Hannah Wolfson, Executive Producer, Sapphire Films. She didn’t like the reason she and Paul had left New York for London, but it had changed her world. It all still made her giggle like a schoolgirl.

  “What’s funny, Mama?” Rhoda demanded, steering quickly to shore so that she might share the joke.

  “Oh, nothing really, darling. Only I love my work.”

  “You make stories!” Rhoda cried triumphantly.

  “Not the way you do,” Hannah conceded. “But I read stories, and when one is good, I give the writer money and then hire people to act it and others to film it. And I make an arrangement with a network, who puts it on television, and then people watch it.”

  “Exactly, you make stories,” Rhoda insisted. “And you tell everyone what to do, just like at home!”

  “I beg your pardon?” Paul asked, joining them.

  Hannah smiled at her handsome husband, still so boyish despite gray-speckled hair and deepening lines around his eyes. They’d met at a press conference the day the Allies crossed the Rhine, and spent the next four hours discussing how Roosevelt could expand upon New Deal policies once the war was over. She knew she would marry him three weeks later, the day Roosevelt died. Paul came over, bearing four dozen long-stemmed roses, then put his head in her lap and sobbed for their beloved dead president until she worried he might give himself an aneurysm. They’d wiped each other’s eyes, drank a bottle of Gordon’s gin, and got engaged on VE Day.

  “Just explaining my work, darling,” Hannah told Paul.

  “Ah!” Paul laughed. Hannah knew he viewed her venture into television as a step down. They’d been journalists on rival newspapers when they met, and he saw no profession as more noble. “Mama’s just having a sojourn,” he said to Rhoda. “And lucky for her I can pay for it.”

  Hannah gave him a playful swat. Paul’s grandfather had been a banker—a distant relation of the Rothschilds, though he’d changed the family name to Rutherford—who liked to give money to inventors and anyone who put their inventions to good use, assuming these would lead to shares in stock. He’d invested in the development of dental floss, zippers, and hearing aids, and managed things so well, the family came to possess the sort of wealth that Hannah, born and raised in a Lower East Side tenement, could still barely comprehend. The Rutherford fortune moved her to the foreign territory of Central Park West, where Paul invited her to choose their home from several apartments his family owned.

  Two years later, HUAC, citing the Soviet threat, held their first hearings into Communist activity in Hollywood. People throughout the industry were subpoenaed, suspected of Communist loyalty or sympathy, or any sort of “subversive activity.” They were forced to come to Washington to answer the committee’s questions about that activity. There was outrage, of course, and a group of ten screenwriters and directors pushed back. They not only refused to answer questions, they denounced HUAC for asking them. It went against everything America stood for, they said. Hannah and other liberal journalists applauded, and Hannah wrote an impassioned defense of the rights of Americans to hold unpopular political views. But then the “Hollywood Ten” were cited for contempt of Congress. They were tried and imprisoned. It seemed impossible, but it happened. When the other leftist journalists Hannah knew stopped expressing outrage—in fact, stopped discussing it altogether—that was when she became truly afraid. She soon saw that anyone known for being outspoken was likely to land on the chopping block. Rhoda was on the way, and Hannah had no intention of being chopped. Rutherford money helped her and Paul decamp to London and buy a flat in Chelsea, then financed the setup of Sapphire Films after Hannah’s short stints on a few productions proved she had a knack for the quickly growing world of television.

  “Daddy helped give me a start, but my company is making its own money now,” she assured Rhoda, ignoring Paul’s snort. Sapphire Films wasn’t quite breaking even. “And you’re right. I have to keep on top of what everyone’s doing, keep track of several dozen things at once, make sure it’s all going well and everyone’s happy.” Being an executive producer was not unlike being a wife and mother; it was surprising that most people thought a woman couldn’t manage it.

  Then again, no one had expected Hannah to become a successful reporter either. Low expectations could be useful, she found. They left a lot of space for you to work your way up long before anyone noticed.

  “And have you found your ‘something big’ yet?” Paul asked.

  “Not in this pile,” Hannah said. She consigned the script to the “rejected” stack and reached for another.

  “Well, even my busy bee must break for lunch,” he said, adding: “Shoes.”

  Hannah was in her stocking feet—she did her best thinking when she wasn’t wearing shoes. Paul didn’t insist on his parents’ starchy formality, but as Hannah joked to her friend Shirley, he put his foot down on bare feet during meals. Hannah slipped on her shoes and sat at the table, marveling at the glory of her beautiful family gathered for Sunday lunch. Paul, Rhoda, eighteen-month-old Julie. Also Gemma, whom Hannah called the nanny extraordinaire. Hannah had been advised she could pay Gemma half the wages of “a trained English girl,” since she was a Jamaican émigré. Instead, Hannah paid her above the going rate. Hannah had never thought of herself as someone who would “keep help,” but she’d never thought of herself as becoming a mother either.

  “All mothers need help,” Gemma had said unprompted, a week into her new job. “Not enough can get it.”

  “I suppose I’d do better if
I weren’t working,” Hannah replied, surprised enough to be candid.

  Gemma eyed her shrewdly. “You’re the sort who has to work or lose your mind. It’s no good for children, mamas without minds.”

  Hannah was very pleased to have a strong mind.

  After lunch, Julie went down for a nap, and Gemma took Rhoda into the square’s garden to terrorize the neighbor children. Hannah, needing a change from the thrillers in the living room, went into the master bedroom, where comedy scripts were piled on her bedside table and melodramas were on the vanity under her hairbrushes. She chose a comedy—everyone wanted a hit comedy—tossed her shoes into a corner, and returned to the sofa.

  “Do you really have to do this reading all the time?” Paul asked. “Even on Sundays? That Scotch guy who works for you, can’t he do it?”

  “‘Scottish,’ darling, not ‘Scotch’—that’s offensive,” Hannah corrected, in the gentle lilt that had first captivated him. “Sidney reads too, of course, but I’m the one who’s going to find the show that puts me on the map. And anyway, you know perfectly well that a lot of these submissions are entrusted directly to me.”

  Paul frowned worriedly and looked as if he were about to scold her. To her relief, he just asked if the script was any good.

  “It would be all right for a film,” she said, scowling at the pages. “I’d sure love it if more writers understood television’s not about shrinking a picture. It’s a whole new medium.”

  “I’m sure you’ll be the one to tell them, dear,” Paul said, laughing.

  Hannah laughed too. She reached for Paul’s hand, wrapping both of hers around it and drawing it to her lips. He had perfect rounded fingernails, neatly pared always; so unlike her own nails, which were invariably chipped at the corners and uneven. During their brief courtship, one of her favorite things to do was marvel at their intertwined hands. Urban sophisticate that he was, his fingers were nonetheless brown and strong, while hers were small and white and dainty. She loved that he didn’t care if she eschewed nail polish—sometimes she wondered if he even noticed—and that her fingertips were always dimly ink stained. She loved that he loved to hold hands.

  He kissed her forehead. “Say, darling, since you’re reading anyway, I don’t suppose you can look at my story?” Paul was a long-form journalist, often spending months on a piece that became a cover story for the New Yorker or Atlantic Monthly. He had made a minor name for himself during the war, writing in-depth pieces on slices of ordinary American life in wartime. His story about the messenger boy who received the wire that his own father had died was made into a film—a would-be weepie that had nowhere to go after the first act and only ran a week, but a film nevertheless. After Paul and Hannah married and she started editing his stories before his editors did, his work became even more popular.

  She looked at the pile of scripts she hoped to get through, and into his expectant brown eyes. It was her work, not his—or not yet, as he said—that had spooked them into upending their lives. She hadn’t named her company Rutherford Films as he’d hoped (“so at least people will know we’re related, darling”), but chose “Sapphire”—a cool blue stone that was remarkably hard and resilient. She smiled at Paul. She loved helping him. He wanted a Pulitzer Prize, and she wanted that for him.

  “It would make a lovely change,” she agreed. “Speaking of lovely change, let’s get Julie and join Rhoda and Gemma in the square. You can play with Rhoda and I’ll read your story. It’s not too cold. Heck, it’s even downright sunny.”

  “Are we sure it’s still London?” Paul asked.

  Hannah laughed and went to gather the sleeping Julie, who hardly stirred as she was laid in her pram.

  Paul had put on a tie and carried his story in a slim folder. He cast his eyes over Hannah, still dressed in a cardigan and a pair of his old tweed trousers.

  “Don’t you think you should change, dear? These people, you know.”

  “That’s exactly how they talk about us,” Hannah said with a laugh. She knew Paul meant a skirt, and a skirt meant a girdle. Hannah’s stomach and hips were still spongy from her last pregnancy, and she hadn’t yet decided if she cared. She presented herself smartly for business, but she was determined to be comfortable on a Sunday. “Anyway, it’s just the square.”

  She saw the flicker across his face and changed her mind.

  “Well, now that I think of it, why scandalize people if we don’t have to?”

  Her gray-checked hiking skirt would do for a cool afternoon. It was a touch too short for the trends, but Paul’s smile was all she cared about.

  The garden was full of neighboring families who thought it a good idea to brave the nippy air, bringing hoops and hobbyhorses and whatever else might encourage children to run mad outdoors, sparing the furniture another day. Hannah saw Rhoda was at the helm of a platoon poised to attack rival pirates.

  “I don’t think pirates use horses much,” Paul observed, watching their daughter gallop around on her red-and-white hobbyhorse.

  “Failure of imagination on their parts, if you ask me,” Hannah said. She could work anywhere, and she read Paul’s story—survivors of the Blitz in the East End remembering their neighbors as new houses were finally built—and listened to the children go wild with equal delight. The sun wasn’t warm but it was pleasant, and the birdsong, combined with the shouts of the children and murmurs among the adults, was relaxing. This was the world everyone had fought so hard to preserve during the war, and here it was, carrying on. Hannah glanced around at every father on every bench. Each, perhaps, thinking how lucky he was. She hoped they were happy. They deserved it.

  She turned over a page, her mind now wandering to her own week ahead. There was casting to approve for an original play. Set designs to go over for the next episode of the police drama. Option meetings, accounts, script revisions, and time found for all the problems in different quarters that popped up more regularly than crabgrass. It wasn’t much different from working for a newspaper, really, and in its way, each day provided the same little zing of shocked delight she’d felt the first time she held her children in her arms.

  But the story, the television series that would bear her name as executive producer and be a hit, that still felt like a rainbow she was chasing. They would fight about it tomorrow, she and Sidney—or rather, have a free exchange of thoughts—and this was always something to look forward to. Sidney was a clever, shrewd man, an excellent associate producer in the office and program producer on a set. Every day Hannah walked into the upstairs suite on Cadogan Square that was home to Sapphire Films, she thought how grateful she was, for Sidney, for Sapphire, for Paul, for the new life she’d been able to seize and the endless possibilities it offered. Liberal journalists she’d worked with in America had been summarily fired, and here she was, happy and thriving. She knew just how lucky she was.

  She knew, too, that it was foolhardy to compromise that luck. But she couldn’t help herself.

  CHAPTER THREE

  * * *

  Phoebe swayed, all her insides blown out of her, leaving her perfect-posture exterior. It was a joke, it had to be. Or Mr. Kelvin must mean to say he was taking her off At Your Service and hiring her for a better show. She was one of Hank’s handpicked writers. She could not be fired.

  She looked to Hank for sense. His face was puce. She could see him struggling to speak without the sort of language that would get him fired as well. Except that she couldn’t be fired, so he might as well comment on this rotten joke with all the tools at his disposal.

  “Mr. Kelvin, you’re kidding me,” he sputtered.

  You tell ’em, Hank!

  “Phoebe’s my writer. You swore I had total freedom over my writers.”

  Mr. Kelvin’s avuncular face snapped closed. “And you swore you wouldn’t hire any Reds.”

  He wasn’t loud, yet the word shot around the vast room, a pinball hitting eve
ry target with a piercing ring before it slipped between the levers and disappeared.

  Reds. Reds were Communists, supposedly in league with the Soviets. Anyone called Red in entertainment was put on the blacklist—that list of people not allowed to work in the industry because they might be a “pinko traitor,” irrespective of truth or proof. It was the end of a career, the end of everything. And this man was suggesting she was one of those.

  She shook her head wildly, a dog trying to rid its ears of fleas.

  “I don’t understand,” she said in a squeaky voice that sounded nothing like her own. “I don’t understand.”

  She seized Hank’s arm, certain he was the one sane person in the room. The doubt in his eyes made her recoil.

  “Phoebe,” he began, and she could feel his mind working, wanting to ask the question carefully. “This is . . . just a misunderstanding. Isn’t it?”

  “Of course it is! I’m not even political. I’d forget to vote if people didn’t remind me when it’s Election Day.”

  “Listen, girlie,” Mr. Kelvin interjected. “You don’t look like much of a rabble-rouser to me, and I believe Hank wouldn’t have hired you if you were, but he obviously has a soft spot for you and didn’t do all he could to make sure you were okay. He’ll do better from now on, won’t he?”

  His eyes twinkled as he gazed at Hank, but his intent was perfectly clear, and Hank paled. Mr. Kelvin turned back to Phoebe, and his tone was almost kind.

  “I’ve got men to answer to and the show’s got the sponsors. Rules are rules. We can’t have any named Reds working here.”

  Each sentence crashed over Phoebe like Dorothy’s house on the Wicked Witch of the East. She knew how this went—as apolitical as she was, the stories were hard to miss. A few distant acquaintances had ended up on the blacklist. But it was something that happened to other people, something that, until this moment, seemed as remote from her as Easter Island.

 

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