The Postmistress (12 page)

“Maggie?” He placed the cloth on her brow.

“Oh,” she sighed. “Where’s Jim Tom?” She sounded like herself for the first time in three hours.

“Downstairs,” Will said, so relieved he nearly gasped. She was rousable, after all. She was right here.

“But who’s that?”

“One of your boys, I think. Jimmy, maybe?”

She smiled. “No. Jimmy can’t sing.” She opened her eyes and in the creeping dark, the whites had the same sort of dim glow as the sails. Will’s heart stuck for an instant with some sense that he was looking at a ghost. “Henry?” she called.

The singing stopped and footsteps ran to the bottom of the stairs. “Yes, Ma?” Henry called up.

“Sing some more, sweetie,” she called and fell back to sleep.

6.

S
LIPPING INTO THE THEATER, Iris stood at the back letting her eyes adjust to the dark. The end of a newsreel was playing and lines of German soldiers marched toward her through frozen French fields. Their bodies moved like marionettes, the heads held stiffly and turning left to right as they came down the screen. Because she was standing up, they marched toward her at eye level and she had the sensation of being overtaken by a crowd.

“Goddamn Krauts!” someone yelled. The outlines of the seated people appeared against the wall of soldiers still marching, the ups and downs of their heads and shoulders like an old Greek pattern on the bottom of a vase. Iris took a step forward into the dark theater and chose a seat toward the back.

The newsreel ended and the lights stayed down as the credits introduced the picture. Iris leaned forward to slip her coat off her shoulders and then settled down into her seat. It was a movie from the thirties, one she had forgotten she had seen. But as the opening scene unfolded under the rich tones of the narrator, she remembered she had been here before. It was an old-fashioned love story broken by a war, and she felt herself slowly succumbing to the tug of the characters, into that bright English chatter of the actors as the love affair began. The movie played over her, and she didn’t remember enough of it to feel impatient. In fact, she had the delicious sensation of returning to a place she had once loved but had forgotten, like a room in childhood. The lovers had married, and now there he was, brave man, sailing off to war.

Her heart started to beat a little faster, as though she were walking down a long corridor with many turns. She had remembered what lay at the end of this movie, but she could not remember clearly how it all arrived there. The man had been caught behind enemy lines. He was surrounded, and now he was being marched to the commander. Iris sat up straight. She remembered now. She remembered it all, and the anxiety of what was to come made her heart pound still harder. He was not going to make it, that’s right. He was not going to make it, and the reason why he was not going to make it was because his signal—the flare he had shot up into the sky before capture—would not be seen. He had shot his flare, he had seen the bright white arc in the sky, and he had marched away, his head high, because of his faith that the signal would be seen. His men were only a mile away, he knew.

But what he didn’t know, what he couldn’t see: that was what Iris couldn’t bear. She almost stood to leave. Almost. She had forgotten this horror at the center of this lovely unfolding flower of a movie. She had forgotten that the men, his men, were dead. “Run,” she wanted to say to the screen. “Run,” she wanted to say to him, marching smartly away without a backward glance. “You’re on your own. There is no one left to save you. Run.”

But the story wouldn’t save him. The men were dead and only she and the other people watching knew. As they watched it all play out in front of them, it was the terror of that knowing and the fear he must have felt the moment he understood. He was alone, they felt it. And the sorrow. To watch helplessly, thought Iris, was the worst part. But also, to see the pattern, too. To see the terrible, inexorable pattern of it—the dead and the dying, and the knowledge that he could have run, but didn’t. He took the wrong path. He made the wrong choice. And he died.

The lights came up with the music crashing loudly into the air. Iris stared straight ahead, not wanting to see the others move around her. She stayed where she was in her seat until the last of the movie flickered past and the reel clicked behind her. And then she turned her head and there, sitting six or seven seats over, sat Harry Vale.

She blushed. He might think she had followed him in here, that she had stayed on the porch steps and watched to see where he went. But she hadn’t, she thought crossly. She had finished her work and then she had gone to the movies herself. Why did he have to be in here at all? Perhaps he hadn’t seen her. She tried not to move or draw attention to herself. There was an aisle on his side and he could just stand up, anytime; there was no need to look over here. He could just stand up and leave. She decided to wait him out and leaned over as if she had to pick something up off the floor. When she leaned back he was standing up and looking straight at her.

“Did you lose something?”

“No, I—”

He nodded. She was sitting bolt upright in her chair, her coat half on and half off.

“I didn’t think I’d see you here.”

“Why’s that?”

He shrugged and that grin came again, like the grin on a bear. “War movie.”

“It’s not about the war,” she said too quickly.

“Could have fooled me.”

She pulled her arm through the sleeve of her coat. “I mean, I don’t think the war is what is important.”

He watched as she reached inside the opposite sleeve and pulled out her scarf. “What is important, then?” He made his way across the intervening seats between them.

“The fact that there’s nobody there in the end.”

He didn’t say anything, but now he was standing right next to her. She flushed. “I suppose you disagree.”

He shook his head. “No. There is nobody there in the end.”

“Except God,” she corrected, more for herself than for him.

“God,” he repeated, without inflection, as if he had said
bar stool
or
pin
.

“You sound as if you don’t believe He’s there.”

“Oh, He’s there, all right.”

He smelled of Old Spice and axle grease and one of his hands rested on the back of the seat in front of her so casually, so easily, it made her unaccountably happy.

“I know He’s there. Every time I catch a mistake at work, I know it’s Him. Or else how would I have seen it?”

“Because you’re good at what you do.”

“But”—she smiled, almost flirting—“why am I good?” She pushed herself up from her seat and turned to make her way out of the theater. The low light from the sconces along the walls was as dim as candles. She could hear him behind her.

“Walk you home?”

“I’ve got my bike.”

He didn’t comment, and not knowing whether she’d said yes or no, Iris turned in the direction of the post office. He followed. Other people’s voices and laughter ricocheted out of the dark, and the disconnected bursts of talk came and went like fire. She crossed her arms in front of her, her pocketbook hanging off one elbow.

“Nice night.”

“Yes.” She smiled to herself and agreed, again. Out here among all the others, the fact that the two of them were walking side by side made it clearer they were walking together.

“Hi, Joe.”

“Lo,” the other man said as he wobbled by on a bicycle.

“Where’s he off to at this time of night?”

“Night fishing, I’d guess—never mind the Germans.”

“The Germans,” Iris said firmly, “are bombing the British.”

He turned his head and looked at her, but she couldn’t read the expression on his face. He looked at her and then he looked away, and for the briefest instant she felt again that she might have been measured and fallen short. The bicycle spokes clicked around and around between them.

“Anyway, they’ll never allow them in this far.”

“I’ll say one thing about you,” Harry said easily. “You’ve got a hell of a lot of faith in God and the government.”

“I work for the government,” Iris observed, relieved by his tone. Perhaps she hadn’t disappointed.

“That’s my point.”

Iris looked over at him and caught his grin. She shook her head. “What’s your point?”

“Government’s just a bunch of human beings same as you and me.”

“With a plan.”

He whistled. “Who made up that plan?”

“People at the top,” she answered swiftly, “who have an overview of the whole situation. People who pay attention, who know. It’s their job.”

“Like you.” He stepped aside to let a group pass them by, but she kept on walking, wanting him to see what she meant, wanting him to get it.

“Not at all like me,” she said briskly when she heard him again beside her. He had tipped his head to hear her and his arm was just under her elbow as she spoke. “I’m paid to watch out for accidents, for cracks in the machinery. My job is to prevent the system from derailing.”

“How in the hell do you plan to do that?”

“I pay attention,” she said firmly. “All the time. I watch out. That’s my job.”

He chuckled in the dark. “You’re a little nuts, aren’t you?”

“That depends,” she smiled back, “on where you’re standing.”

“Hello, Frank, Marnie.” Harry had stopped short.

Iris swallowed and nodded to the couple in front of them. Marnie Niles was bundled in a long coat, next to her husband. Now she patted Frank’s hand, which was resting easily on her hip. Harry and the postmaster, that hand said. Think of it. Iris’s heart sputtered open.

“Hello, Harry.” Frank Niles smiled. “Miss James.”

Harry nodded. Iris stood beside him feeling like the lights had suddenly been switched on.

“Where are you two off to?”

“We’re walking Iris home,” Harry answered swiftly, and he turned to her, waiting. He was waiting for her. Iris nodded, afraid to trust herself to speak. Marnie’s eyelids lowered slightly, as if she’d seen a sign.

“So long,” Harry said.

“See you,” Marnie called out. Iris stepped off the curb after Harry. They walked away from the bright splash of town in the opposite direction, where the arm of land curled into a fist, and began the slow climb up Yarrow Road to Iris’s cottage. After a long patch of quiet, they heard footsteps up ahead on the tarmac, though Iris’s bicycle lamp caught nothing but the dark hedge and the rosehips, black balls hanging. A man appeared in the light.

“Otto,” Harry said.

Startled, the German man lifted his eyes off the road; he seemed not to have seen the two of them coming, or their light. He stepped around the beam of the lamp and moved toward them.

“Harry,” he said, and nodded at Iris.

“You okay?”

“Yes, yes. I am just walking.” He nodded again.

“Okay, Otto.” Harry clapped the man on the shoulder. “Good night.”

“Good night.” His footsteps carried on behind them into the pitch black. She wondered how he made his way on the dark road like that.

“He walks up here most nights, I think.” Harry started walking again.

Iris gave the bike a push. “Why?”

“He comes up to the bluff to stare at France.”

“Dear God,” Iris breathed.

Harry’s hand found hers on top of the bicycle handle and closed over it. Just like that, she thought, amazed. They kept on walking without a word. She let her hand slide off the handle so they were walking hand in hand now; the farther they went, the more quiet and the clearer it grew that they had arrived. That’s how these things started. So little.

And then, very gently, he slowed, turning toward her, resting one hand back on the bicycle so they were holding it upright together and he pulled her toward him and she had to shuffle a little to get close, maybe a hairsbreadth taller than he; when his lips found hers, she did have to tip slightly to meet him. His kiss was soft at first, his lips against hers gentle, an introduction. Then it seemed he had decided something, for he pulled her toward him harder and drew her in close, and in the dark, with her eyes shut, she had simply walked through a door into this soft, wet place encircled by a man, kissed and kissing, and she could have been anywhere, she realized—anywhere at all, if this man kissed her in the post office, she’d walk into the circle gladly and lose herself over and over to find this spot in the dark, this damp wide opening.

They kissed for a long time, and when they pulled away, she realized they were still standing in the middle of Yarrow Road, and that her hand was stiff with cold on the bicycle handlebars. She thrust it into her pocket, letting the bicycle fall against her hip.

“Would you like some tea?”

“Yes,” he said, and they started back up the road, as though nothing had happened, she marveled. There was all the time in the world now, because it would happen. This would happen. She had never felt so free. That’s how these things started. So little. She turned and smiled at him in the dark. They started slowly off again.

Outside Jim Tom and Maggie Winthrop’s fish house, someone sat on the stairs, the red ember of a cigarette a punched hole in the dark.

“Evening,” a voice called out to them.

“Who’s that? Jim Tom?”

“Aye.”

“All right there?”

“Maggie’s having the baby.”

“Everything all right?”

“Aye. We’ve got Will Fitch inside.”

“Good luck, there.”

“Aye, thanks.”

They walked in quiet the rest of the way up the hill, the lights of Franklin behind them like a low cluster of stars, the shingled sides of the houses they passed glowing violet in the half-moon. The porch light was on at the Fitch house, making even darker the row of summer cottages of which Iris’s was the last, the only one the owner, Mr. Day, had insulated and put a stove in for himself.