The Postmistress (16 page)

He didn’t give a damn what Roosevelt said about our boys not fighting in foreign wars. The fact that there stretched forty miles of unprotected coastline from here all the way down to Nauset made Harry feel naked as a girl. And the longer the Blitz had gone on over there, Harry couldn’t knock a rising hunch that the Germans were drawing the world’s attention to London while something else was coming in the dark. He had spent many nights walking up and down along the bluff above town after leaving Iris, standing and staring out to sea.

He figured that if the Germans were to attack, they’d land on the back shore, taking Franklin first, and then sweep up the Cape into Boston. And the Krauts would have showed them all up for sleepwalkers. Even the boys who were going to be drafted—especially those, he corrected—Johnny Cripps and all of them, sitting in rows upon the benches put up on either side of the town hall steps, teasing. “Seen any Germans yet, Mr. Vale?” their laughing questions light and persistent as midges.

“Not today.” He’d grin for them and pass through the swarm. The Coast Guard was no better. Boys, again. Not a one of them really thought a Kraut could ever get close enough in to see, though they’d made it here in 1918, a U-boat surfacing in the waters just off of Nauset. But not this time, the boys boasted. Not in 1941.

“I can see it all so clearly,” he’d said to Iris one night.

“Harry,” she protested.

“They’re coming,” he’d sighed. “I just can’t figure when.”

In the end, Harry couldn’t think of what to do other than climb the stairs up here one lunch hour last month, to sit with his binoculars and face out to sea. He didn’t expect to see anything, but it sure as hell made him feel better.

On the first day, he’d kept his binoculars leveled at the flat waters, his sandwich unwrapped and clutched in his hand. He stayed for a couple of hours, watching, then went back to the garage.

The following day he climbed the stairs to the town hall again. And then again. Now he was up here every day from four o’clock on. Hell, no one needed gas anyway
.
He watched the empty palate before him, sure of two things: he was an idiot and he would be right. Sooner or later the U-boats would strike over here. He waited, like the stern man jigs for cod, the thick line loose in his hands, eyes off to the side, relaxed—every muscle ready to strike.

Down below and across the green, Iris appeared on the porch of the post office with a wet mop. She wrung the head dry over the railing, in three swift twists. Her red hair swung forward and back as she did so, shining and flashing above the plain navy of her blouse.

She gave a fierce shake to the mop at the end and disappeared back into the dark of the porch and through the doors. There was a quiet like an afterclap in the air around the door through which she had vanished. Harry found himself staring down there to see if she’d come back out. The putter of a Ford came slowly down Front Street. Someone shouted. But from the post office there was nothing.

Harry lowered the binoculars to his chest, suddenly aware he’d been holding his breath
.

AT THE END of the day, Iris pulled down the metal shutter on the lobby window and snapped off the light in the back, crossing the worn wooden floor of the lobby by the light of the streetlamps out front. Every evening, she put her hand on the door, preparing herself for an empty porch, which surely must happen, mustn’t it? Tonight, she put her hand on the door and pulled it open. But there was Harry as always, waiting outside.

“Hello.” She drew in her breath, pleased.

He stood up.

“Say,” she said, pulling the post office door shut behind her, “I have good news for you.”

“Shoot.” He smiled.

“You’ll be happy to know,” she arched her eyebrow, “the post office inspector is giving the matter of the flagpole serious consideration.”

“That does make me happy.” He was wry.

“Come on”—she chuffed him, following him down the stairs—“it ’s a start.”

“Right you are. Let’s go.”

She stood where she was, halfway down. “Harry,” she said, “I did ask for you.”

Now he turned back. “Thank you, Iris.”

She studied him to be sure, but there was no trace of the tease in his face. “Thank you,” he repeated. “Maybe they’ll see the sense in it.”

He held his hand out.

They set off quickly down the empty street. It was Wednesday evening all along the way, their neighbors tucked around the table, or resting, their feet up. And though it was the end of February, still, there were canned peaches in a bowl holding the gold of last summer, the sweet syrup sliding down the globes. There was Count Basie coming on in half an hour. There was wood stacked up in the wood box. The pods rattled on the laurel trees in the doorway and the storm doors clicked in and out on their latches. Iris was glad she had decided on a scarf. They walked along silently together, their hands sunk deep in their overcoats.

As they climbed Yarrow Road out of town, Harry reached into his pocket for his flashlight and flicked it on, aiming it ahead. The eye of light caught the silvered frozen grasses and the sand stretched away from them in pillows and valleys all the way up the bluff to the Fitch house roof. From the east a low wind whipped in off the dark band of the sea. “Listen.” Harry cleared his throat. She looked over.

“I’d like to come in tonight.”

“Sure,” she said, her heart thudding.

“And stay.”

She stared at him a moment, and then she smiled. “Sure,” she said again.

When they arrived at her cottage, Iris simply went through the door and stood in the middle of the room and Harry put his hands on either side of her arms and guided her to the chair, where he sat her down. Iris looked up at him.

He leaned forward and touched Iris on the cheek. Iris closed her eyes and felt Harry’s lips brush hers and then pull away, and when Iris opened her eyes to see where that touch had gone, Harry stood above her, his face very close, studying her, and Iris smiled and closed her eyes again and felt those lips return, this time firmer, intending to stay. She leaned her head back against the wall and Harry pressed in, his warm mouth playing against Iris’s lips, until Iris opened with a gasp, his lips moving from Iris’s mouth, traveling and kissing the hollows and dives of her neck, then along the ridge of Iris’s jaw and back up onto her mouth again. Iris never opened her eyes, following their trace with her pulse.

Harry pulled her from the chair. “Let’s go lie down.”

He rose and very gently led her into her own bedroom and, still holding her hand in his, keeping her close, he reached and turned on the lamp on the bureau. Then he sat down on the end of the bed and pulled her to sit beside him. They sat side by side for a minute. Then he leaned forward and untied his right boot and pulled it off. Then his left boot. Then his socks, which he lay on top of his boots. She sat right next to him. There he was, barefoot now, on the bed beside her. He turned and looked at her.

“What do I do?” she asked.

“I’d like to see you,” he answered.

Slowly, she tugged the cardigan off, and then began unbuttoning her blouse, sitting straight beside him. He reached and put his hand on the bare triangle of flesh above her bra. Her heart leapt to meet his hand. They lay slowly down and he began to kiss her again, and his hands went roaming. Up under her skirt and down her legs and up slowly over her cotton-covered breasts, touching and stroking. And she reached to finish unbuttoning her blouse so that that mouth could find her. She wanted skin and the soft marshland of this man’s body against her own, she wanted that mouth to climb and rove, she wanted that mouth everywhere on her. And that mouth moved on her, moved all over her as if it owned her, it took and stalked, as if it had known her and known where she hid, always. And she closed her eyes and felt what it meant to be held and touched, and after a while she pushed him gently up and she rose onto her feet at the end of the bed and unhooked her bra, and tossed it to the ground and unbuttoned her skirt and stepped out of it, and pulled her underpants straight down, rolling the stockings all the way to her ankles. He stood and unbuckled and dropped and slid out of his clothes and then they were back on the bed again and she could feel him nudging against her, nudging, and then he reached down so he could guide himself in.

“Oh,” she said and he stopped. The tear had been quick and sharp, but now there was the thick heat of him pulsing inside.

“It’s okay,” she said to his face, and with a small moan he pushed in another bit. She closed her eyes, feeling it, him, coming in a little more, then a bit more, then all the way in. And the surprise of him inside, tight tight, all the way inside. She felt herself around him, holding him. And then, he started moving inside. Inside
her
.

Nearly asleep that night, Harry put his hand, heavy and warm, on the spot between Iris’s breasts, on the bone. And she smiled. The heaviness, the himness there right in the middle of her chest, on her chest, rested there, keeping her in the bed, keeping her here. It had never occurred to her that she was looking for a tether. She had thought she was the one who sped things along, the one who sent things on their way, but there she was for the first time, delivered.

11.

A
LOVELY, DREAMY SNOW had begun falling, as if the sky weren’t certain itself whether to empty or hold back. One flake, then another. Then six or seven at a time until at last the snow poured down, straight and thick as rain onto the sand and into the water, sliding down the steep crevices of the roofs. In the snow, Emma thought, looking out at the afternoon disappearing in the gently falling white, nothing terrible could happen. Sudden things, violent swift motion, would be blurred and blotted. Will had been gone now forty-six days.

On such a day—she bent and tucked the blanket in tight on Will’s side of the bed—the world might not bear to hurt a newly pregnant woman. Maybe there was a clause, not divine exactly, but primordial, in which harm would stop short at the gate—seeing the woman crossing, her hand resting on her belly—and neither lift the latch nor step across. She paused. Couldn’t she trust that? Couldn’t that be the way?

She reached over for the packet of cigarettes by the side of the bed, lit one, and exhaled. It was dinnertime in London, before the bombs. She pictured Will pulled up to some café table, his big, long body folded around his plate and eating with the steady, regular concentration men paid to food. She loved to watch him eat. The smoke drifted up and toward the window and she followed it out past the four walls of their room, outward onto the afternoon road frozen under the winter sun.

Outside, three more bombers appeared on the ridge of the horizon, traveling low and racing out to sea. And in the quiet they left on the horizon, she crossed his boyhood room, now theirs. Darling, she thought, darling—she moved to the desk pushed against the window facing away from the harbor, looking straight into the crazy jazz of the town’s roofline—I am disappearing. She sank into the chair and reached for the pen given to Will when he graduated from Franklin High School, and pulled out a sheet of letter paper. The white page regarded her. She wrote two words,
Come Home
.

She folded the paper quickly, then again, so it slid easily into the narrow envelope. She raised it to her lips and licked, and smoothed it shut with her hand. There. That was all she would say today. She stared at the shut envelope.
Dr. William Fitch,
she wrote on the front, in the care of
Mrs. Peter Phillips, 28 Ladgrove Rd., London.
In the upper corner, she wrote
Mrs. William Fitch, Franklin, Massachusetts.
Her name looked across at his. She turned the envelope over.
Come Home,
she thought again, looking down at it.
Please,
she wrote quickly on the flap. But she covered the word with her hand.

She stood abruptly and walked downstairs with her teacup. She hadn’t told Will she was pregnant. She hadn’t told anyone. For now the secret was between her and the baby. Through the kitchen window above the sink, and way out, the long low hulls of the navy wavered on the water. In the months after the president had promised Churchill fifty destroyers, the horizon had been crenellated by these far-off ships. And now that he had promised even more, there seemed to be a distant wall of metal on the sea. Through the snow she couldn’t tell whether they were coming or going, or if they moved at all. The navy hung there and she stared across the gray waves slamming against the iron hulls of destroyers.

That water, that single ocean, was all that stood between us and terror, Mr. Walter Lippmann had commented on the radio last night.
We must help the English hold the Atlantic, or all that we hold dear will drown. Your boys, your homes, the simple pleasures of your neighbor’s talk, well-meaning, American, free—think of it going, think of it gone—
and she had snapped it off.

The snow had stopped. She grabbed for her yellow scarf and tied it over her head as she passed outside.

A powdery inch lay underfoot. Emma took the broom by the door and swept the porch clear and down the steps and then in a kind of frenzy all the way out to the gate. When she had finished, she looked back at the house and saw the tidy path like a child’s drawing leading to the front door. She felt inordinately proud, as if she had offered something and the house had taken her up on it. She left the broom at the bottom of the garden and began the walk into town.

“Hello.” Iris James came around the corner from the sorting room and smiled at Emma. “There’s another letter for you today.”

“That’s good.” Emma nodded shyly as she walked across the lobby to her box, pulling the key up on its chain from beneath her sweater. The key slid easily in and turned. She pulled the single envelope out, shut the box, and opened the letter where she stood. She could see at a glance that it was miserably short.
Dearest
, it began—
Nothing whatsoever to report except regular, even rounds.