Red Letter Days Read online

  Praise for Radio Girls

  “If the early days of the BBC sound like a recipe for hitting the snooze button, think again. Sarah-Jane Stratford’s crackerjack historical novel Radio Girls smartly tunes in to the beginnings of Britain’s broadcasting behemoth. . . . Radio Girls is a hit.”

  —USA Today

  “A bright, appealing novel about the early days of the BBC and the women behind its brilliant programming. . . . [The] depiction of female friendship and support is one of the great strengths of Stratford’s novel, which so capably describes its characters’ thirst for knowledge, for information of all kinds. . . . An intoxicating look inside a world of innovative new media.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Sparkling historical fiction.”

  —Literary Hub

  “A delightfully literary historical fiction book about the early days of the BBC.”

  —Broadly

  “A highly detailed narrative and well-fleshed characters set the stage for this unique early-twentieth-century story. . . . This is an eye-opening view of the world when women’s rights were newly budding.”

  —Historical Novels Review

  “Sarah-Jane Stratford’s Radio Girls is an achievement of historical fiction so believable that you’ll wonder if the author has access to a time machine. Maisie’s trajectory—from mousy, fearful underling into assertive, independent powerhouse—mirrors that of the nascent BBC for which she works. The promise of postwar prosperity and the looming threat of fascism make for an engrossing background against which Maisie finds herself involved in international intrigue and national rights movements that will make the reader turn the pages frantically, utterly enthralled until the very end. By turns funny and fascinating, Radio Girls is a triumph.”

  —Allison Amend, author of Enchanted Islands

  “Radio Girls carries readers on a memorable, eye-opening journey to London in the 1920s and ’30s, a pivotal time in the history of women’s rights, politics, and the arts. Sarah-Jane Stratford’s storytelling skills are on vivid display throughout, and the strong, believable, and immensely human Maisie Musgrave is the best imaginable guide to that vanished time and place.”

  —Joseph Wallace, author of Slavemakers

  TITLES BY SARAH-JANE STRATFORD

  Radio Girls

  Red Letter Days

  BERKLEY

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2020 by Sarah-Jane Stratford

  Readers Guide copyright © 2020 by Sarah-Jane Stratford

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  BERKLEY and the BERKLEY & B colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Stratford, Sarah-Jane, author.

  Title: Red letter days / Sarah-Jane Stratford.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Berkley, 2020.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019022993 (print) | LCCN 2019022994 (ebook) | ISBN 9780451475572 (paperback) | ISBN 9780698195301 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: McCarthy, Joseph, 1908–1957—Fiction. | Anti-communist movements—Fiction. | Legislators—Fiction. | GSAFD: Historical fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3619.T7425 R43 2020 (print) | LCC PS3619.T7425 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019022993

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019022994

  First Edition: February 2020

  Cover design by Sandra Chiu

  Cover image: Woman by Ildiko Neer / Arcangel

  This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some historical figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical persons appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are not intended to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

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  Contents

  Praise for Radio Girls

  Titles by Sarah-Jane Stratford

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraphs

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Readers Guide

  About the Author

  We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!

  —Arthur Miller, The Crucible

  I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.

  —Lillian Hellman

  I believe in Liberty for all men: the space to stretch their arms and their souls, the right to breathe and the right to vote, the freedom to choose their friends, enjoy the sunshine, and ride on the railroads, uncursed by color; thinking, dreaming, working as they will in a kingdom of beauty and love.

  —W. E. B. Du Bois

  PROLOGUE

  * * *

  Washington, DC, 1956

  “Don’t make jokes.”

  It was the first and last thing the lawyer instructed. No one was allowed to laugh at the proceedings. Especially a woman.

  As she looked up at the panel of men seated at the high table, glaring down at her, she thought she’d never felt less amused. She couldn’t even comfort herself that the accused women in Salem had faced worse. She didn’t want to go to prison.

  It was like a television play. A script she’d tried to write and then discarded as too absurd. But this was all too real.

  The gavel banged, the room fell silent, and the interrogator locked eyes with her.

  “Phoebe Berneice Adler. Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?”

  It didn’t matter that they already knew the answer was no. That wasn’t the point. It never was. The hearing was just for show. Pure theater. And she had to play her part.

  She clenched her hands together to keep from wiping them on her skirt. She took a deep breath, and leaned toward the microphone.

  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.