“Isn’t that a bar on the Bowery?”
Phoebe managed a hollow laugh. She lit a cigarette.
“What the hell am I going to do?”
Anne opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again, and then just wrapped her hand around Phoebe’s and held it tight.
* * *
• • •
The next day, Phoebe posted a note to Hank telling him to meet her at Desiree’s, the nicest restaurant in Greenwich Village. Might as well get a decent meal out of him.
Then she went to visit Mona. The Brookside Sanitarium was nowhere near a brook, but it was a fine facility and had given the Adler family a very good rate in exchange for the honor of subjecting Mona to countless tests. The doctors had never seen someone with virtually no natural immunity, and certainly no one who lived to adulthood. Phoebe had long given up real hope of a miracle cure, but the doctors’ desire to understand Mona’s body meant Brookside took good care of her, and that was enough. Phoebe hurried through the ritual of scrubbing her hands and face with surgical soap and putting on a white coat before she passed through to the patients’ quarters.
“Baby sister!” Mona squealed when Phoebe walked into the dayroom. She wheeled herself across the room at breakneck speed, careening around a cribbage game and coming to a neat stop before Phoebe.
“Glad I caught you before you went ice skating,” Phoebe said.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Mona scolded. “Tuesday is horseback riding. Don’t you remember anything?”
Phoebe hugged her, glad to feel no more bones than usual. Underneath the scent of hospital disinfectant and carbolic soap, she smelled the Shalimar she had sneaked to Mona on her birthday. Rules or no rules, if Mona wanted, as she put it, “a proper, grown-up perfume,” she was damn well going to have it.
Phoebe wheeled her sister into a quiet corner and sat down next to her.
“How come you don’t have a rug over your legs? You’re going to get cold,” Phoebe scolded, knowing she sounded fussy.
“Don’t be fussy,” Mona scolded right back. “I’m fine. You’re the one who’s not. Don’t contradict me,” she said as Phoebe started to protest. “I know your face, you can’t hide anything.”
That was going to be a problem.
Phoebe hesitated, realizing she wasn’t sure what was safe to say. Anyone could be listening, waiting for her to say something they decided mattered.
“I think I’m in a little trouble,” she whispered.
Mona lit up. “Are you pregnant?” She answered her own question. “No, you couldn’t be, that would involve actually going on a date. With a man and everything.”
“It’s not that I don’t want to date,” Phoebe said reflexively. Good lord, we’re not going to have this conversation, are we?
“Well, I do, and I need to live vicariously, so live it up a bit, will you?” Mona stopped smiling. “You don’t have to be so careful all the time, you know. You don’t have to always worry about hurting your career.”
“That happened anyway.” Phoebe leaned closer and whispered the whole story, taking strength from the red rage that spread over Mona’s face. For the first time in years, she looked almost healthy.
“This is how they treat people who helped win the war? What a joke.”
“I’m not the only one,” Phoebe conceded, thinking that a lot of the blacklisted men had been in combat.
“No, but you’re the only one who’s my sister.”
They fell quiet for several minutes. Then they looked at each other and burst out laughing.
“When the hell were the Adler girls ever quiet together?” Mona cried. “Daddy would think we’d died or something.”
“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.”