The Postmistress (14 page)

The face he had raised to hers was full of such anguish, she nearly put her hands over his mouth to stop him from answering.

She let herself in the front door and unwrapped her scarf slowly, folded it slowly, and placed it on the bench. The radio was on, Will always had it on now, but it was hard to make out the words. She took off her hat and put it on top of the folded scarf. Last she shrugged her overcoat and hung it on the peg. When she came around the corner onto the threshold of the front room, Will held his hand up.

“I got my very first view of an underground shelter crowd,”
the man was saying,
“at the big Liverpool Street tube station. It was around eight o’clock on a raidless night, and somehow I must have thought that there’d be nobody down there that night, or that if they were, they’d be invisible or something, because I wasn’t emotionally ready at all to see on benches on each side, as though sitting and lying on a long streetcar seat, the people, hundreds of them. And as we walked on they stretched into thousands. People looked up as we came along in our nice clothes and our obviously American hats. I had a terrible feeling of guilt as I walked through there—I felt ashamed to be there staring. A bombed building looks like something you have seen before—it looks as though a hurricane had struck. But the sight of thousands of poor, opportunityless people lying in weird positions against cold steel, with all their clothes on, hunched up in blankets, lights shining in their eyes, breathing fetid air—lying there far underground like rabbits, not fighting, not even mad, just helpless, scourged, weakly waiting—”

“You hear?” Will said from the door.

“What?” Emma looked at him and then wearily at the radio.

“Thank you, Mr. Pyle,”
the radio said. “
That’s all from London.”

“You hear him? You hear how it is? It’s worse and worse. They need our help. Doctors are in short supply.”

“And in Washington this morning
—” A businesslike voice clipped into the room.

Will crossed and switched it off. “I have to go.”

“Go?” she asked wildly. “Go where?”

“London,” he said, as if it were the simplest thing in the world.

“Will,” she said softly, afraid to speak any louder, afraid to give it any more voice. “You are the doctor. You can’t go.”

“There’s Lowenstein.”

“He’s retired.”

“He’s a good doctor.” Will stuck out his chin. “He never made mistakes.”

“Oh.” She saw what he was doing now, the dismal math. “You for Maggie.”

He shook his head, excited. “You said it yourself last month. You said yourself, we ought to do something, remember, about the boy?”

“The boy?” She shut her eyes. His eagerness was bright as a fever. “What boy?”

“Who lost his mother. The boy the radio gal brought home. He was all alone. And you remember, you said it, darling. What’s happening over there is happening, right now. Right now that boy could be wandering around—”

“Stop it!” she moaned, opening her eyes, heartsick. The danger had never come from the draft, it had come from Will. Will himself.

“Sweetheart, there are people over there who need help, who need another pair of hands, and I can bring them. That’s the deal. That’s what you were saying without saying it right out. When we know there are people in need, right now, in the same breath as what we are breathing, we cannot look away. It is not abstract. We have to go. That is humanity. The whole thing relies on it. Human beings do not look away.”

She stared at him. How little she knew him, how little she had known him after all.

“No matter how you want to dress it up, Will, you don’t need to go. You don’t need to prove anything. What happened here was not your fault,” she persisted. “What you’re doing doesn’t make any sense.”

“Sense?” He sprang up. “It’s the only goddamn thing that makes sense. What happened with Maggie
was
proof.”

“Proof of what?”

He didn’t answer.

“What proof, Will?” She could barely breathe. “Proof of what?”

The ghost of his father—no, not even the ghost—here was his father, all flesh, slumped in one of the kitchen chairs, his white hair carefully combed and oiled, stinking of gin. Perfectly harmless, except to his family.

Will didn’t answer. And his father looked up at him and grinned the dull, familiar grin. Beaten.

“Dad owned the bank in town and lost it.” He stopped and shook his head. “Worse than that. Dad owned the bank, but when he lost it—when all the banks crashed in ’thirty-two—he shut the doors and locked this town out for three days.

“For three days, he sat in there, saying nothing. Never even came to the window. And Mr. Cripps and Frank Niles, Lars Black—all of the men you’ve met—stood banging on the doors outside. Day after day after day. By the morning of the fourth day, Harry Vale and some of the others brought up a dory mast from the beach and rammed the door of the bank.”

He had never told her this part.

“Dad was sitting in there, with a German bayonet from the Great War across his knees, bawling.” Will snorted. “Like some kind of hero of the Alamo, or some damn idea he had about duty. About protecting—”

“What happened?” she whispered.

“Not a goddamned thing. He put down his gun and walked out of the bank and walked home to my mother.”

Emma waited, so nervous she couldn’t speak.

“He went on and on like some character in a book whose part is over—for years after that, looking like the hired man, hair carefully combed back from his forehead, in khaki trousers and shirt, and smelling ripe as a gin bottle. He should have died, snapped in the instant, that defying moment. Better for my mother and me waiting it out with him.”

“Waiting what out?” Emma was incredulous.

“
Life,”
Will cried. “When it should have been over. It should have ended—” Will snapped his fingers.

Emma recoiled.

“You mean to die there,” she said. “Is that it?”

“What a queer thing to say.”

“I’m trying to understand what you mean to do,” she said helplessly.

“I mean to help.”

“You’re running away,” she leveled at him. “You are running.”

He froze. “Is that what you think?”

“Yes.”

He nodded and leaned against the kitchen door and went through it. Emma stood in the middle of the kitchen watching the door swing back and forth, back and forth, until it closed. Let them kill each other over there, let them tear each other’s throats out—why should we help? Why should other people’s lives mean more than theirs? Why should Europe take him and deprive his own town? Or her? Why should she, who had already given enough—had already suffered—give any more?

A flat cry cast out between the houses and she turned her head toward the window over the sink. Was it a child? She listened. Again it came. A child, protesting sleep perhaps in one of the nearby houses. She pulled her cardigan close. Now a second cry came. Much closer this time. And then she saw the white body cross the window, flying itself into the air, the sharp beak open now again and calling as it swaled into the spent sky. A gull. It had been the cry of a bird. She shuddered as the white dot disappeared into the gray, not liking having been fooled.

She walked straight through the kitchen door and down the hall. He was sitting in the dark in the front room, leaning against his mother’s cushions.

“Will?”

“Six months,” he whispered. “I’ll be home in the summer.”

She looked at him a long time before her lips parted in answer. What could she say? What would stop him? He was already gone. “Okay,” she said slowly and quietly.

WITHIN THREE WEEKS he’d heard back from City Hospital in London. They were delighted to have his help on staff. Within six weeks he had passage and papers. In the end there was very little to pack. And when the last morning came, Will reached forward and put his hand on the front doorknob and opened it as though it were any other. The cold winter sun slashed into the hall. Emma clasped her purse to her chest and walked through it, past him.

“Wait,” he said, and he pulled her back inside. “Give me a kiss inside, in here.” She looked up at him. His attention was focused on the living room as though he wanted to gather it into a blanket and toss it over his shoulder, take it with him. She put her hands on his overcoat and closed her eyes as her hands reached the solid of his arms inside the sleeves. “Good-bye,” he whispered. She held on to his arms and then she stepped even closer and slid her arms around his neck, holding him very hard against her.
God—
the word pealed in her head, her throat too tight to speak—
God. God. God. God. Look down.

“Prove it to me, Will,” she said into his coat.

“What’s that?” he murmured.

“Prove to me that people stay alive.”

“You’ll see,” he said into her hair, and let her go.

They emerged from the house. Above them the gulls dove in and out of the cold bright blue day. Emma tucked herself neatly beneath Will’s arm. His one hand rested on the belt of her coat, and he reached for her with the other; they held hands and moved as if they were skating. He didn’t look at her but she felt his hip against hers as he steered her down Yarrow Road.

She wanted to push it all back. No time, no town. Nothing but each other’s hands and the tempo of their tread. The sky seemed to bowl up and away, curving like a cat. It was a mild morning, as can sometimes happen, as though May had slid in quietly for this January day. There was no wind at all. They walked along, and under the silent morning sky, she imagined she could pull Time like taffy, stretching it longer and longer between her hands until the finest point had been reached, the point just before breaking, and she could live there. A point at the center of time with no going forward, no looking back. Clasped in this way, without speaking, walking into no discernible ending, she could almost believe they tread on time.

The street remained empty all the way into town. There was no one to say good-bye. The bus idled on the curb in front of the post office. Flores was having some trouble with the door to the luggage hold, and there was a small delay as he and Will jimmied the catch, but then suddenly the last kiss came, and Will was gone.

O
NE DAY SOMEONE you saw every day was there and the next he was not. This was the only way Frankie had found to report the Blitz. The small policeman on the corner, the grocer with a bad eye, the people you walked to work with, in the shops, on the bus: the people you didn’t know but who walked the same route as you, who wove the anonymous fabric of your life. Buildings, gardens, the roofline, one could describe their absence. But for the disappearance of a man, or a little boy, or the woman who used to wait for the bus at the same time as she did, Frankie had found few words: Once they were here. And I saw them.

Reporting had always meant the lining up of details—the heat of a day, the frayed hem of a woman’s skirt—details like pebbles on a beach, cast up to be collected and arranged into a story. She had come to Europe, she had laid detail after detail down for Ed Murrow and for herself. The snow piles of glass, the bombs raining down, the sky black with bombers a city block wide, and the jumpy impatience of people in the funk holes waiting it out until they couldn’t stand it,
couldn’t stand it, do you hear?
And they’d get up and walk out into the street in the middle of it all—impatient for the night to be over, the bombs to be done—and were killed where they walked, mad for the end to come and find them.

And she had believed that the scraps of life pulled together into a shape. But there was no shape that morning after she had left the boy, Billy, at his house, and pushed through her own front door where the thick smell of gas and ashes found her immediately. And even as her mind saw the blue air where the back of the house had been sheared off from the front by the force of the bomb, neatly, as if an elevator had dropped straight down through all five floors, she had run up the stairs where the door to her flat still stood, though the sky stretched through the torn end of the hall. The back of the flat had simply vanished, while the front remained as usual, the lamp on the table, the hooks across from the door on which hung Harriet’s coat, and Dowell’s. It was unreal. No shape. In the first few seconds she stood in the door, looking at Harriet’s coat, seeing that there was no bedroom anymore to the left, while to the right the morning light reached all the way through the glassless windows of the front room, and seeing that a letter waited from Harriet’s cousin in Poland, waited patiently by the front door, standing perfectly normally against the wall, waiting for Harriet.

“Harriet?” she had called out, her scared voice choking in her throat.

There was no shape for details like that. Shape was the novelist’s lie.

AND YET, AND YET—She thought, making her way toward Broadcasting House—the story that had possessed Harriet, the secondary story of the Jews, was quietly shaping into something clear and horrifying. In the room she had rented after Harriet was killed, Frankie had continued Harriet’s habit of filing away stories devoted to the Jews in Europe. A crazy quilt of paper stretched on the wide wall above her makeshift desk: tacked up, in no particular order, were news reports, the letters from Harriet’s Polish cousins, handwritten notices she had found in the parks and pasted on the sides of buildings:
Jens Steinbach, are you here?
(This one was handwritten in both German and English.)

By now, Alsatian Jews sent into the unoccupied zone had joined German Jews pushed over the border to join the floods of Jews sent from Austria, Danzig, and the Sudetenland part of Czechoslovakia, where they were being pooled at the bottom of France, the men diverted to the camps at Le Vernet or Les Milles and the women and children to Gurs. The lack of food, clothing, shelter, and medical supplies meant that the race of these people to flee to other nations had become a race against death.