“Good thing he’s not alive to learn about this,” Phoebe said.
“‘Horatio Adler,’” Mona mused. “He must have made that name up.”
The Adler parents were always angry and tired, and worried about Mona. They rarely spoke, so Phoebe and Mona became avid talkers, filling the silence with sound. The girls decided their parents had an interfaith relationship and were thus shunned from their families. Horatio never acknowledged being Jewish, but their mother, born Mary Smith, once divulged she was a Quaker. To the girls, that meant the man with the big hat on the oatmeal box, who seemed an unlikely relative. They treasured the idea anyway, as they knew of no other extended family. “You’re American!” Horatio would shout when they asked about religion. “That’s the only religion you need.” Phoebe pressed him, trying to make him understand the tribalism of New York City public schools, the particularities of expectation that insisted she align herself with a group so as to accept her label and know her place.
“Tell them you’re a New Yorker,” Horatio insisted. “That’s more than enough for anyone.” Mary, preoccupied with keeping the house sterile for Mona, batted away such trivial concerns with flicks of a dust rag.
Phoebe’s playground explanation that hers was a family without religion could have relegated her to a childhood peppered with regular beatings. What saved her was her ability to make people laugh and, later, her telling of strange and scary stories. Nothing original at first, just variations on things learned by sneaking into movies she wasn’t supposed to see and devouring library books she wasn’t supposed to read, but none of the kids knew enough to know she was paraphrasing. Plus, she had the distinction of a sister with a mysterious illness, who went to hospitals rather than school. Such things were respected. The newspaper seller’s daughter was too strange to merit friendship, but she was, mostly, left in peace.
“They’ve been tapping my phone,” Phoebe murmured to Mona. “And I’m pretty sure I’ve been followed.”
“She-eesh,” Mona breathed. “I could sure do with a cigarette.”
“How the heck do you get cigarettes?” Phoebe demanded.
Mona chuckled. “A few of us sneak down the fire stairs a couple times a week. Tubercular Ben gets them, he won’t say how, the worm.”
“Don’t tell me you can get down the fire stairs on your own,” Phoebe said, glancing at the wheelchair that had been Mona’s only transport for ten years.
“Oh, where there’s a wheel, there’s a way,” Mona said airily. Phoebe groaned. “Now listen, Phoebe, you need to make a plan.”
“I know.”
“Because they might drag you in for a hearing.”
“Only if they’re scraping the barrel, surely?”
Mona ignored this. “So you’d better leave the country.”
“What!”
“You got that beautiful passport and you’ve never bothered to use it!”
“Well, for one thing—”
“Don’t make me an excuse,” Mona warned, laying her finger on the tip of Phoebe’s nose. “They’re not going to boot me out now.”
Phoebe glanced at a barrel-armed nurse wheeling a patient into the room. The Adlers had sold everything to buy Mona ten years in Brookside, which was the longest she was supposed to live. That was fifteen years ago. Cancer claimed Mama within six months of Pearl Harbor. And their father—stout, ferocious Horatio Adler—tripped and fell in front of a streetcar six months after that. Phoebe, who had dropped out of school and lied about her age so she could build airplanes, felt like she’d walked through a doorway from her childhood and fell flat on her face into the mud that was a sudden adulthood at seventeen. Every penny she earned for the rest of the war plumped up the family fund that supported Mona in Brookside. Her money now kept Mona in a private room.
“I can share a room,” Mona said. “It’s probably better if someone’s on hand to see me start to check out—stop it!” She pinched Phoebe hard to quell a protest. “Be realistic. If you can’t send money, we’ll manage. The real danger is if you have a hearing and refuse to testify, which you would, because it’s disgusting our government is even asking such questions, and then you’d go to prison. Brookside might balk at having a jailed Red’s sister underfoot.”
“I think only famous people have hearings,” Phoebe said.
“You think wrong, you need to read more,” Mona scolded.
“What I need is to be here, I need to see you.”
“Put everything in hock, borrow from everyone, and get on a boat. You ought to see the world. One of us should, and it seems increasingly likely it won’t be me.”
“It’s running away.” Phoebe shook her head, disgusted.
“No, dummy, it’s living your life. It’s telling the FBI and HUAC that they’re wrong, a waste of taxpayer money, and you’re going to take care of yourself until someone finally puts the kibosh on them.”
“Take care of myself,” Phoebe said in a flat voice. “Like there’s nobody else for me to take care of.”
Mona batted this away in an exact imitation of their mother with her dust rag. “Just be ready, all right? Have some cash, pack a bag. Know the times ships sail. And don’t tell anyone.”
Mona’s eyes glittered and she couldn’t stop grinning. Phoebe suspected that if Mona had been healthy, she would have distinguished herself during the war as a spy, and brushed off all honors afterward to live as an adventuress. Despite everything, Phoebe felt her lips twitch. It was nice that someone could enjoy all this.
“Wish I could take a plane.” Phoebe sighed. “Maybe I wouldn’t mind running away if I could fly.”
“Too expensive,” Mona agreed. “I’d offer you a kidney to sell, but it’s not worth much.”
Phoebe sighed again and looked out the window. She could just see the tip of the Chrysler Building.
“I don’t want to go anywhere. This is home. I’m a New Yorker. I don’t ever want to be anything else.”
“No one would ever take you for anything else, not with your accent. Now get out of here, you’ve got work to do,” Mona ordered, allowing nothing more than the usual hug and kiss goodbye. When Phoebe reached the door, Mona yelled, “And bring me some dirty magazines next time!”
* * *
• • •
The phone was ringing as she walked in the door.
“Phoebe Adler,” she answered.
“Hello, this is Hank, from At Your Service . . .” came Hank’s voice, sounding tinny.
“Hank, I know who you are!” she shouted, but he was still talking.
“. . . is Phoebe available?”
“What the—?”
But Phoebe’s mouth snapped closed as she heard Anne’s voice, telling Hank to wait a moment. Her heart pounded harder and harder as she listened, and then it came, her own voice: “Well, hi there, Hank, what’s new?”
She slammed down the phone on Hank’s response suggesting lunch. The whispered rumors had said this could happen—that a bugged phone meant sometimes you’d hear a recording of one of your own conversations. A glitch, presumably. Or not. The FBI might not care if you knew they were listening. They wanted to unnerve you, to scare you into capitulation, into confessing anything they suggested, into naming names. Phoebe backed away from the phone, wiping her hands. She grabbed her bag and ran out to find the nearest travel agent and get the departure schedule of every ship soon leaving New York, bound for somewhere that might give her safe harbor.
CHAPTER FOUR
* * *
“You certainly can pick them,” Sidney marveled, stroking the script Hannah had insisted he drop everything else to read. “’Tis a cracker.”
“It’ll be a good one-off drama,” Hannah agreed. It was a play about a black GI attacked by other GIs for dating a white girl in Liverpool, and the city’s protest against the American attempt to implement race laws. “But it’s
still not a series. And no one will air it in America.”
“Ach, ‘whit’s fur ye’ll no go by ye,’ as they say,” Sidney said in his broadest Scots. He grinned, bouncing on his toes as he did when a script showed promise.
“Translation, please,” Hannah asked.
“‘What’s meant to happen will happen,’” Sidney said. “Our audience will love this, it’ll let them congratulate themselves on being superior to the Yanks.”
“They’re not wrong,” Hannah said. “My friend Shirley and her husband are Negroes. They were Red-hunted out of America for being activists, but she says that here they are treated with decency wherever they go, skin notwithstanding. Not that they’ve been everywhere,” Hannah conceded.
“Isn’t it Shirley whose husband is Will LeGrand?” Sidney asked. “The famous civil-rights activist, sociologist, author, all-round genius? He’s someone the literary crowd would give a place of honor even if he had three heads.”
“As they should,” Hannah said with feeling. “He’s one of our most brilliant minds and spent his whole life fighting for Negroes to be equal. He deserves scads of adulation, though it should be in his own country.”
“Yanks,” Sidney said, shaking his head. “Chasing blacks, chasing Reds, they’re craicte enough to be committed to Bedlam.”
Hannah grinned. There was some Scottish that needed no translation, though she wouldn’t dare try to pronounce it.
“Never mind,” she said briskly. “Let’s get to work. I’ll get the option secured this afternoon and we’ll need a terrific actor. And director. And a top cameraman.”
“We cannae afford all that,” Sidney protested. “A corner must be cut.”
Hannah gave him a baleful look. “You have to spend money to make money. Good quality pays for itself.”
Sidney stumped off to make the calls, and Hannah chuckled. She’d grown up enduring taunts about Jews being tightfisted—even though her family could barely make rent. Those people should try getting a penny out of a Scot.
She looked out her window down at the leafy Cadogan Square. Her childhood bedroom window on Orchard Street had looked onto an airshaft. She’d known she would go far, but even her vivid imagination had never conjured anything like this. Her own company, and a man as her second-in-command. She and Sidney had met when they both talked their way into minor production roles on a television movie and discovered they had as much acumen as the entirety of the seasoned crew and a shared passion for work labeled “controversial.” He thought they should start slow, but Hannah was far too restless for caution, and had been told too many times in her life to moderate her reach. Once she understood the basics of television production, she knew she could do it, and Sapphire Films was born the next day.
It was only when they produced their third television film—and got it aired on CBS—that Hannah asked Sidney what he thought of the blacklist. She knew he was a fervent socialist who was keen to hire the best writers, provided they came at a bargain rate. But potentially ruffling the feathers of an American television network might be a bridge too far.
“How can a country like America have a blacklist?” Sidney demanded when Hannah brought it up. “How is it not aping something your man Stalin would do?”
“How to explain the inexplicable?” Hannah said. “You’re quite right. The studio heads in Hollywood have always been a strange breed. They want to be seen as innovators, but are terrified of criticism. So when some politicians and religious conservatives yowled about films being filthy, in came the Production Code. Really, they want to be seen as patriots, good Americans. Important. Well, so when HUAC starts huffing and puffing about ‘Commie propaganda’ in movies, the studio heads could have said they’d make the pictures they wanted and let audiences decide, but being them, they all agreed to wipe Hollywood clean of anything even remotely leftist, starting with screenwriters. So sure, there can’t be an official blacklist, that would be unconstitutional. But word can go around saying, ‘Don’t hire this person, don’t hire that one,’ and suddenly the hottest writers, directors, actors in town are as good as dead. No one dares defy the word—who knows what HUAC could do then.”
Sidney shook his head. “We had actual Communist spies here—British men, educated at Cambridge, if you please—and we still believe in civil liberties.”
“That’s why there are Americans escaping the witch hunts living here,” Hannah said.
He grinned at her shrewdly. “Are you hinting you’re one such? I did wonder. They don’t much cotton to leftist journalists, I hear.”
“They don’t,” she agreed. “I saw the heat turning up and decided to get out before it got to me. Word is I’ve been forgotten in the midst of all the bigger fish.”
Sidney had several choice words about the treatment of the bigger fish.
“I’m glad you feel that way,” Hannah said. “Because I have to feed those fish, by which I mean I’d like to hire blacklisted screenwriters.”
Sidney kept a stash of Walkers shortbread, which he nibbled when he was thinking, or worried, or both. He nibbled some now.
“I can’t be the sort of person who shakes my fist from a safe distance,” Hannah went on. “I’ve always been an activist. I have to do something strenuous.”
He grinned. “You bonkers liberal do-gooder, you.” Then he looked around the office, decorated with still photos from Sapphire’s productions. He raised an eyebrow at Hannah. “You’ve been hiring blacklistees already, haven’t you? That’s why some of these writers have no other credits.”
“Some of them are my friends,” Hannah admitted. “All of them need help. I can’t change what’s happening in America, but I can continue to give these men a voice. And an income doing what they do best.”
“I’m game,” Sidney said. “And I understand the money end more than you, pardon my saying so. We’ll need additional books and careful means of sending payments. And a stash of cash for legal fees if we’re ever caught—they’d insist on you coming to America to testify, that’s certain. Also, these writers get paid the same as any greenhorn.”
Hannah could hardly argue.
So Sapphire developed the secret reputation as a place for blacklistees to submit work. Despite her determination, and bravado, Hannah was a little nervous. She had no friends in British politics, no one who could protect her if she needed it. She wasn’t certain her status as a UK business owner would save her if the American Embassy requested she no longer be allowed residency, or refused to renew her passport. Or if a registered letter arrived containing a subpoena. Would she be forced to respond? She didn’t want to find out. The fewer people who knew she hired blacklisted writers, the better. If there was one thing Hannah learned the day the HUAC hearings began, it was that even the person you least expected could turn out to be the one who betrayed you.
* * *
• • •
“If any of the men see you reading a script, they’ll have a fit hoping it’s one of theirs.”
Hannah looked up from the script she thought was hidden in her capacious handbag and into the patrician face of Shirley LeGrand.
“Sorry, Shirley. Great gathering, of course, it’s just—”
“You can’t stop working, I know.” Shirley nodded. “I wouldn’t mind doing some composition myself, but I suspect it might look untoward for a hostess to work at her own party, radicals though we all are, naturellement,” she added, with a twirl of her long, slim fingers and slight eye roll at the men huddled in a circle talking politics, ignoring the women until they wanted fresh drinks.
“I thought I was being sneaky,” Hannah confessed.
“But of course. Only don’t forget I was taught to know what every white person in a room is doing at all times. Habits, don’t you know.”
Hannah knew. It was the same trick she’d employed as the only female journalist in a press room, and she had far fewer reasons
than Shirley to be so vigilant.
The Morrisons arrived, accompanied by their sons—a teenager and a ten-year-old, both of whom looked as though they’d rather be hanged than here.
“Oh, strife,” Shirley said, her only concession to cursing. “Why can’t Charlie and Joan leave those boys in a barn? There goes the food.”
“I’ll put another few pounds in the kitty,” Hannah promised. “It’s nice for Joan to get out of that miserable flat. It’s just not her, the poor dear.”
These gatherings were nice for everyone, after a fashion. The American exiles in London met regularly to exchange news and leads on possible work, and quietly put any extra cash into a pot to help any of the group who needed it. Some of the blacklistees were in far more dire straits than others, though they put a good face on it. Surrounded by Americans, it was also a way to feel at home, even if many of them would never have been friends back in the States.
Joan sailed up to Hannah and Shirley with much rustling of her crinoline and kissed their cheeks. Hannah could smell half a bottle of hairspray.
“I hope you don’t mind we brought the boys,” Joan said to Shirley. “I know Bobby ought to be able to manage Alvie for a few hours, but he’s really still a child himself, poor thing, and still in shock from the move. Besides, our neighborhood—”
“Will and I are always delighted to have the children here,” Shirley assured Joan. Hannah sipped her drink to hide her expression. Will had once told her privately that Bobby reminded him of “the sort of white boy who can get carried away,” which meant that, his Hollywood liberal upbringing notwithstanding, Bobby was not to be trusted in a group of white boys who spotted a lone black person. Or even a lone white woman.
Hannah agreed, though Bobby seemed too indolent for trouble. He was furious with his father for joining the Communist Party in the 1930s, sentencing them to the loss of their glamorous Hollywood life and, worse, his privileged American adolescence. He seized a whole plate of canapés and flung himself into a corner, hiding his face in a Superman comic book. Alvie parked himself near the table holding cookies, committed to an evening of sneaking the lot of them.
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