“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.”