She ought to get on a bus. Sit down, stop moving. Get home. The sooner she got home, the sooner she could put her head on Anne’s shoulder and cry.
But she couldn’t stop walking. She couldn’t stop the same thoughts from turning over and over in her mind. Her name had been dipped in compost. She might not get to work as a writer anymore. It was the only thing she’d ever wanted, ever since she was nine and her teacher, the harassed and irritable Miss Wittkins, a woman who never seemed to know any of her students’ names, shook Phoebe’s essay “I Watched Them Paint a WPA Mural” in her face and snapped, “You’re brighter than the others. You better keep making an effort.” Phoebe had. Now she wondered if praising Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration had been the first tick on a list.
When she reached Bryant Park, she wandered down one of its paths toward the big, beautiful library, which might have books that could help her, tell her how to fight back. She was nearly at the door when logic reminded her that top blacklistees like Dalton Trumbo and Ring Lardner Jr. had retained excellent lawyers, and that didn’t prevent them from being brought before Congress, asked about their politics, and tossed into prison when they refused to answer. Even the American Civil Liberties Union chose not to defend accused Reds.
But maybe there’s something. Maybe I can be like a gal in some story—the nobody who finds the key no one expected and blows it all wide open.
She was at the card catalog, making a list of likely books, when she remembered that the FBI scrutinized people’s library records. And what arcane point of law did she expect to find, anyway? The First Amendment was right there for anyone to see, and it had thus far saved no one.
Phoebe plopped into a wooden chair, pulled out her handkerchief, and wiped the sweat from her neck. Wonderful, now I’m going to stain my good blouse. A flicker at the end of the card catalog caught her eye. A man’s hat. He was watching her.
Bile rose to her mouth, and she pressed her handkerchief to her lips. She jumped up and ran for the stairs, even though she knew it made her look more suspicious. She couldn’t stop running now, not until she was underground, on a subway, heading back to the sanctuary of Perry Street. She glanced around the lightly populated subway car. Mostly women. Were any of them watching her? Women were no less dangerous than men and could be far more so—Hedda Hopper might as well be a ranking member of HUAC, having fingered at least half the Hollywood denizens who ended up blacklisted.
Mrs. Pocatelli was nosing about her garden. The tenants often wondered what had become of Mr. Pocatelli. Phoebe had been disappointed to learn she wasn’t the first to assume he was feeding the beets, carrots, and cabbages.
“You!” Mrs. Pocatelli shouted. Phoebe shrank from the bony finger pointing at her. “You promised me sfogliatelle from Veniero’s!”
The buttering up of a lifetime ago. “I’ll get them later, Mrs. Pocatelli,” Phoebe assured her. The landlady looked skeptical—Phoebe could feel her scowl all the way up the stairs and even as she turned down the corridor toward her door.
She heard Thelonious Monk’s “Straight, No Chaser,” in Anne’s apartment and pounded on the door.
“Holy cannoli, what the hell happened to you?” Anne said on seeing Phoebe’s face.
Phoebe opened her mouth and a giant sob came out. She dropped her bag and sank to the floor, howling.
“Come on, let’s get to your place,” Anne said. Her furniture was covered with tarps while she worked on a complicated painting. She grabbed a bottle of bourbon, heaved Phoebe from the floor, and soon settled them on Phoebe’s love seat. Anne poured bourbon to the brim of two amber cut glass Victorian tumblers—a lucky secondhand shop find—and Phoebe downed hers in one gulp.
“I’ve been blacklisted,” she said. It was like speaking a foreign language, the word weird and twisty on her lips.
Anne whistled low and topped up Phoebe’s glass. She flipped through albums, put on Call Me Madam at top volume, and sat close to Phoebe.
“If there’s a listening device in here, it doesn’t stand a chance of hearing us over Ethel Merman,” she insisted.
A listening device! Phoebe wrapped her arms around herself and glanced around the cozy apartment she loved so much. Pale green walls, pink and yellow curtains, the art deco love seat Anne had helped her re-cover. Her desk and typewriter. Had someone been listening to her when she thought she was safe in her home?
“Stay calm,” Anne instructed, reading her face. “They want you to break.”
Phoebe finished another tumbler of bourbon and strode to her Roseville cookie jar, the last thing her mother ever bought. It was filled with change, mostly nickels and dimes. No more than ten dollars altogether.
“I’ve got this and about seventy-eight bucks in the bank,” she told Anne. “What do I do? You know the score. No one’s supposed to hire a blacklisted writer, Constitution or no Constitution. I’m no big shot like Dalton Trumbo. I can’t afford to disappear, become nobody.”
The phrase caught in her throat, and she added gin to the last of the bourbon.
“You can get some crummy job to tide you over,” Anne advised. “Then you’ll sell a script under a fake name, people do that.”
“Not easily, they don’t. And even crummy jobs can check names. No one wants to hire an accused Red. How am I supposed to cover me and Mona?”
For the first time, Anne looked doubtful. “I don’t know,” she whispered. She frowned in contemplation. “Why you, though? Unless . . . the airfield?” she ventured.
“It’s the only time I remember being radical. They might get you on it too.”
Anne nodded. No doubt nearly everyone on Perry Street was the sort of person who might end up on a list before long, if they weren’t already.
The phone rang. Phoebe recoiled. “It’s being tapped. I know it. It’s been ringing with no one there. That friend of Floyd and Leo’s said that was a giveaway.”
“Geez, the FBI must be feeling flush—they’re pouring more money into you than the network is,” Anne said. She snatched up the phone.
“It’s Hank,” she told Phoebe, wrinkling her nose and holding the receiver out between two fingers, like it was a rotting carcass.
Phoebe was tempted to ask, “Hank who?” but took the phone.
“Well, hi there, Hank, what’s new?” she asked brightly.
“Phoebe, honey, let’s have lunch Saturday, all right? You pick a place, drop me a line.”
The phrasing was too perfect, designed so that anyone listening wouldn’t know the meeting spot. Phoebe shivered. Hank had done this before. She hung up and looked at Anne.
“Maybe I should suggest Hell’s waiting room,” she said.