Excerpts

CHAPTER ONE Greenwich Village, New York City Spring 1955 THE GANGSTER CORNERS MOLLY IN THE ALLEY. GANGSTER Give it up, sister, you're through. MOLLY You ain't got me yet. MOLLY SCRAMBLES UP THE FIRE ESCAPE. SHE'S FAST, BUT HE'S GAINING. SHE TAKES OFF A SHOE AND FLINGS IT AT HIM, HITTING HIM IN THE FACE. IT ONLY BUYS HER A FEW SECONDS. HER OTHER SHOE FALLS OFF AND HE CATCHES IT, TAKING NOTE OF THE POINTY HEEL. HE SMILES AS HE CLIMBS STEADILY, ABOUT TO REACH HER AS SHE'S WRIGGLING INTO AN OPEN WINDOW. Phoebe slammed the typewriter carriage back and pulled out the page. She read the scene several times, trying to view it through Hank's eyes. He was a discerning story editor with a heavy hand. Phoebe grudgingly conceded that his edits improved her scripts, but she always strove to have fewer edits each time, and she was gaining on him as readily as this murderer was gaining on his victim. She needed Hank to see her as his best writer. He was going places. Phoebe wanted to go there too. She added the page to the pile and took several deep breaths. She always needed a break before writing the final scenes. The final murder, the final arrest, the final quip. Goodness and decency prevailing. A sameness she had to make different every time she wrote it. Television-or, at least, the fourth-rate detective show she wrote for-followed a rigid formula. There were better shows, though, with opportunities for real invention, and Phoebe was clawing her way to a spot on one of them. It didn't matter how many ridiculous murders she had to write to get there. She leaned back, giving herself over to ambient sounds. The grunt of the wooden chair's spine. The faint hum of Anne's radio in the apartment across the hall. A news program. Phoebe thought she could hear the announcer saying something about Communists and the Soviets. She couldn't remember the last time a news broadcast didn't talk about the "Communist threat" and the "Red Scare" and the efforts of the House Un-American Activities Committee and J. Edgar Hoover's FBI to keep America safe from Red Russia and the Reds that were assumed to be crawling all over the country, especially in Hollywood and unions and wherever Negroes were organizing. The House committee was in the news so often, it was referred to by one and all as HUAC. Phoebe wondered how Anne could concentrate with such accompaniment, but Anne said the best artists kept up with current events. "How the heck is it current?" Phoebe demanded once, when Anne was listening, enthralled, to Senator McCarthy's yowls. "Those HUAC hearings started in 1947, for crying out loud!" "And now it's in the Senate, too, isn't it?" Anne answered. Though McCarthy himself actually had gone away, censured and disgraced after the Army-McCarthy hearings. People still used the term "McCarthyism," but only because it was a useful shorthand, with more zip than "HUACism." Phoebe stacked up her newspapers, all folded open to local crime reports, and put up another pot of coffee. She lit a cigarette and sat on the makeshift window seat, wrapping her stockinged toes around the jamb and letting her skirt flutter outside the open window in what she hoped looked very devil-may-care without being too saucy. It was warm, and many windows up and down Perry Street were open. Phoebe took long, luxurious drags on her cigarette, reveling in all the street sounds. Other typewriters, of course, clacking away, and music everywhere, some single instruments, some groups, rehearsing or creating or teaching. Next door was the Disorderly Theatre Company, a clutch of young men in a living room, shouting scenes from a political play that even the bohemians of Greenwich Village would say was laying it on a touch thick. But there was always the chance it would blossom into something that would make the world sit up and take notice. That happened. Shop doors were open, and Phoebe watched the steady flow of commerce in and out of the butcher's, grocer's, and fishmonger's. If she leaned out a touch farther, she could see the regulars draped over the outside tables of the Coffee Nook, where the proprietors Floyd and Leo made cappuccinos more addictive than cocaine. It was a sign of being a true Village artist if one was allowed to give a reading or play music any night at the Nook, especially a Thursday. Floyd and Leo presided over the lineup with a severity that would have been the envy of Stalin. The bread seller came down the street on his bicycle, accosted on all sides by housewives vying for the freshest loaves. The artists tussled for the best day-old bread. Phoebe was tempted to run down for a loaf, but was too comfortable in the sunshine. It was like being in an Italian film. Those first early scenes where everyone is poor but happy, scraping along and dreaming big. Anything could happen over the next hour and a half. "Hey, Adler!" Jimmy shouted up at her. Phoebe sighed. In a film, the neighbor from across the road might or might not turn out to be her true love-the very idea of which Phoebe found snort-worthy-but he would at least be charming. He would keep the audience guessing. Though Jimmy wasn't without his usefulness. Phoebe had written three different scripts in which a scrawny, moonfaced buffoon of a young man turned out to be a criminal mastermind. Not that she really minded Jimmy. As she said to Anne, "He's charmless, but harmless." "That's as may be," Anne replied. "But I wish he'd try to close his mouth when he's around me. Not even a bloodhound drools that much." There was no use in pointing out that all men drooled around Anne. Jimmy's insistence on being friends with Phoebe was mostly based on her friendship with Anne. Phoebe's comparative writing success and general cheerfulness might be other reasons, but they were a distant second. "Do a fellow a favor, huh, and lend me a gasper?" he begged from under Phoebe's window, where he was weeding Mrs. Pocatelli's front garden. "She'll rip your head off if you smoke among the squashes," Phoebe told him. "Then she'll use your torso as a planter." Mrs. Pocatelli, Phoebe and Anne's tiny, wizened landlady and the general terror of Perry Street, would make a terrific fictional criminal, but Phoebe had yet to write a script about a crime orchestrated by Mrs. Pocatelli that wouldn't run afoul of the network censors. "I'll take my chances," Jimmy said, and Phoebe obliged him, tying the end of a ball of yarn around one of her Lucky Strikes and unwinding the ball until the cigarette landed in his hand. He freed it and she wound the yarn back up to her knitting basket. "You'd better not need a match," she warned. He grinned and produced a lighter from his pocket. She saw him cast a furtive, fearful glance into Mrs. Pocatelli's window before lighting up. "I'll leave you to it," Phoebe said. "I don't mind the sight of blood, but I don't have time to be dragged into a murder trial." "You working on a paying job up there?" Jimmy asked, his voice carefully casual. Phoebe sighed. Jimmy wasn't the only Perry Street denizen who made it hard to escape back to work with grace. He was a writer too, and good at what he did, but here he was scrabbling in the dirt for two hours, to earn one dollar and a few lesser cabbages and beets. Not that Phoebe didn't struggle herself. Most of the month she lived on potatoes and eggs. But Phoebe was undeniably on a different level from the other strivers on the street. She had written for radio, and now a television show aired scripts with her name emblazoned on the credits. It didn't matter that it was a lesser show on a lesser network. Phoebe Adler was that strange and glorious thing: A Working Writer. Some men dismissed her success as mere luck, as she'd started writing during the war when they were off serving (she spent her days building fighter planes but was the first to insist it wasn't at all the same). She knew they thought she should be living a different sort of life now, allowing them her opportunities. But they also knew why she needed to work so hard, so grudges were never held long. "Yeah, another shabby whodunit," Phoebe admitted with a shrug. "As if anyone couldn't guess who did it within two minutes. But another couple of these and maybe I can pay some high flier to build a bubble so Mona can go outside." A fantasy. Her sister hadn't been allowed beyond the controlled atmosphere of the sanitarium in years. "Though, really, it'll take getting on a good comedy or Playhouse 90 for that. Still, I don't mind slogging away on the silly stuff to keep Mona well looked after." "No, of course," Jimmy muttered, ducking his head. "How is Mona?" "Good as she can be," Phoebe said. She liked his embarrassment, but every time a variation on this conversation took place, she was seized with the furious desire to secure that comedy or television play. Something, anything, to give her more than the two hundred dollars she earned for a monthly At Your Service script that paid her rent and the basics while also helping with the sanitarium costs. It must be possible. A woman was one of the two writers on I Love Lucy, the biggest hit on TV. She must be making a fortune. Hank could be made head writer on a show like that and bring in Phoebe as his "gal writer." Soon, she hoped, for Mona's sake. In the meantime, everyone always had to help each other out where they could. One never knew who someone might be tomorrow. "Listen, Jimmy, Hank says he'll look at some stuff, he knows a radio fellow who needs a good jingle writer. Wanna give me something to take in?" Jimmy gazed at her with awe. His mouth was open and Phoebe swore she could see drool. "You're a real peach, Adler, you know that?" "Eh, we all have to do for each other as we can, right?" she said, waving away the compliment as she ground out her cigarette. "I mean it," he insisted. "You're a real good egg." "We'll see if you're still saying that when I demand ten percent off you," she said with a laugh. "Want another cig?" "Better not," he said with another glance at Mrs. Pocatelli's window. "Say, I don't suppose you want a drink later? You and Anne, maybe?" he added carelessly. She was tempted to ask how much fertilizer he'd have to spread to afford the sort of drinks he had in mind, but felt sorry enough for him to smile and decline. "Deadline, you know how it is. Drop your stuff off Sunday night if you can, okay?" "Sure," he said, but still looked crushed. Phoebe wondered why men always seemed to think they could get a certain girl, even though she obviously didn't like him. Too many damn movies, probably. She rolled a fresh sheet of paper into the typewriter and stared at it. The next scene would be back with the detectives who were the stars of At Your Service. Now the audience would learn the detectives had woven an intricate plot whereby they could capture both the woman delivering papers to her crime lord boyfriend and the rival gang leader preparing to kill her with her own shoe. The detectives had hoped to keep the woman alive for the sake of her testimony, but another dead gangster's moll was nothing to cry over, and the censors preferred it when a bad girl was killed if there wasn't time for her to reform before the commercials ran. Phoebe picked up her knitting and knit several rows of a cardigan, thinking about the final few minutes of the script. The music and chatter outside, even the screeches of Mrs. Pocatelli, who must have seen Jimmy putting out his cigarette, faded as the sharp heel of the moll's shoe flew toward her neck before the scene cut abruptly to the detectives' dingy offices. The phone rang, jolting Phoebe back to her bright apartment, where everything was painted green and pink and nothing went more than three days without polish. She took a breath, composing herself. It was important to answer the phone at just the right moment, with just the right tone. It might be someone offering work, and so you mustn't sound desperate, or too available. Serene, composed, unruffled, that was the only way a lady writer was allowed to come across. It was not unlike what women on the dating market went through, or so Phoebe was given to understand. She picked up just as the phone stopped ringing. "Well, of course you would do that," she grumbled, slamming it back down again, taking little pleasure in the tinny bing that echoed off the walls. "You should get an answering service," Anne called through the door. Phoebe flung open the door to admit her paint-spattered friend. "I was about to knock," Anne said. "Got a cigarette?" "What am I, the corner store?" Phoebe asked, handing Anne the last of a pack. "Here, finish these and buy the next ones, all right?" "Sure thing." Anne grinned, producing a match from the depths of her coveralls and striking it on the bottom of her work boot. Phoebe shook her head, smiling. Even with no makeup, her red-gold curls bound under a bandanna, and oversized denim coveralls hiding her Marilyn Monroe figure, Anne was a head-turner. "It's ten years since we stopped building fighter jets," Phoebe said. "And here you still look like the world's prettiest model for Rosie the Riveter." "Now I'm covered in acrylic paint, not grease," Anne pointed out, poking Phoebe's shoulder. "Going all right?" she asked, jerking her head at the typewriter. "Fresh piping-hot justice will soon be served," Phoebe said. "That's how we know it's fiction," said Anne. "Sure would be something if just once the criminals got away clean." "Fantasist," Phoebe chided her. "Go on, get back to the masterpiece." "Peggy Guggenheim will open a new gallery just for me," Anne promised. She and Phoebe pointed at each other, an old gesture that meant this was a promise that would be kept, and shut their doors. Ten years. Phoebe didn't miss building planes, and she certainly didn't miss the war-but she missed the easy camaraderie of the women working on the assembly line. The day Phoebe's first sketch aired on the radio, Anne and Dolores Goldstein had rounded up the whole crew to listen. Anne decreed the fifteen-dollar check from CBS "a glorious thing." "Not so glorious that I won't hightail it straight to the bank to let them worship it," Phoebe rejoined. Anne kept her old Brownie camera in her locker and insisted on taking a photo of the check. Though Phoebe protested against making a relic of her first pay for writing, the photo lived in her keepsake box, and she couldn't imagine it ever being anywhere else. Excerpted from Red Letter Days by Sarah Jane Stratford All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.