The Postmistress (2 page)

A single rap at the door. “I’m ready when you are, Miss James.”

“I’ll be right in,” she called back.

Everything had been genial. Everything had been perfectly nice. The doctor’s office was the sort to glory in—thick green curtains pulled back from high windows, just skimming a rich gray carpet. The secretary in the outer nook, typing away. The hush of order as she had taken Iris’s coat and slipped it onto the wooden hanger. And the doctor, just right, too. How he’d opened the door and held out his warm hand to her, half as greeting, half as a hand up from where she sat waiting. And he’d led her through into his office, signaling the chair in front of his great oak desk as he continued around it to his own position. He’d even pressed his fingertips together under his chin, his serious eyes upon her as she placed her pocketbook upon her lap. They’d spoken briefly of Mrs. Alsop, exchanging pleasantries about the woman from whom Miss James had acquired Dr. Broad’s name, just as if they’d all been acquaintances bumped into in the lobby of a traveler’s hotel. The doctor had listened and smiled, asking Iris if she got to Boston often.

It had all cracked slightly, with her request. Not audibly, but noticeably enough for Iris to recognize that the doctor was going to need some prodding: that the capacious room notwithstanding, Dr. Broad lacked imagination. He was happy to examine her, he told her, leaning back in his chair. But why the piece of paper?

“I would have thought every man might like to have such a thing?” she suggested.

Dr. Broad cleared his throat.

“Perhaps that’s a bit familiar of me,” she concluded aloud, watching the man across the desk from her inch his hands along the arms of his chair, making as if to rise.

“Why don’t we begin?” He smiled and did rise, bringing the interview to a halt.

So she had not had a chance to answer the question fully. And opening the door between the examining room and his office, she could see, by the studied lifting of his head from what occupied him at his desk, that she’d not be given another chance. He was very busy. She was just one of many women he tended to.

“Please,” he said, “have a seat.”

“Everything’s in order?”

“You’re perfect,” he answered.

“Good.”

His eyes remaining on the paper before him, he took it up and handed it across the desktop to her. “Will that do?”

She reached and took the page in her hand and looked down.

She had been right. There’d been no skimping on the paper. Dr. Broad’s stationery was beautifully creamy, nearly linen. And though he’d obviously had little enthusiasm for the project, he’d written it all out wonderfully. She thought he might have won a handwriting prize in school.

“It ’s perfect,” she smiled up at him. “Thank you.”

“Glad to help,” he said, and graciously stood behind his desk as she rose and moved to the door.

For several moments he remained standing, listening to her there on the other side of the door, asking for her coat from Miss Prentiss, and then for the quickest bus route from here to South Station. Their voices were light and agreeable, the lilt and tone of which he usually managed to ignore while working inside. Then the outer door opened and shut, and, after a pause, Miss Prentiss resumed her typing. He walked over to one of the two windows facing down into the Public Gardens.

He almost missed her. She had emerged so quickly from his building that she was across the street and around the corner pillars of the Gardens, walking swiftly away from him up the outer walk. She carried herself like someone under review, shoulders thrown back, her head pulled up. “What a queer character,” he mused. He followed her the fifty-odd feet she remained in sight, until eventually she was swallowed up by the city and the distance. He turned back around to his desk. “I thought every man should want such a thing,” she had said right there.

AND BOMBS WERE FALLING on Coventry, London, and Kent. Sleek metal pellets shaped like the blunt-tipped ends of pencils aimed down upon hedgerow and thatch. What was a hedgerow? Where was Coventry? In History and Geography, Hitler’s army marched upon the school maps of Europe, while next door in English, the voices recited from singsong memory—
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made.
Bombers flew above the wattles, over an England filled with the songs of linnets and thrush. There were things being broken we had no American names for. There was war. What did it mean, War? Stretched out upon the pages of
Life
, the children of Coventry stared up into an inquisitive camera. We could see them. They looked unafraid there in the ditch dug for safety. Their hands spread-eagled against the dirt walls for balance, the two girls still in skirts. There was a boy with no expression. He looked back at us straight, and the collar of his jacket was fastened by a safety pin. He was already there, in the war.

Where our boys were not going. The president had promised. He spoke bluntly, as if he were one of the people, but he wasn’t, thank God. Nobody thought so. When he said the boys would not fight in foreign wars, we believed him, though we had listened to the names of the French towns falling the way people listen to the names of medicine before they are taken ill themselves.

Now the talk was of a German invasion. Would England stand? Their tanks and trucks, their guns, hulked useless on the other side of the Channel where they’d left them at Dunkirk. But when we were told the Brits had dragged cannons out of the British Museum, wheeling them down to the Thames, we nodded. Bombs had crashed down on London now for sixteen nights. Buses were stopped in the street. Babies hurled from their beds, we were told. Still, in the morning, one by one, Londoners crept back out into the light and we cheered them. England would stand. Nobody knew the ending. Buchenwald was as yet only a town in Germany, where sunlight splattered the trees. Auschwitz. Bergen-Belsen. Simply foreign names. It was the end of summer and the lights were still on.

IN SOUTH STATION, Iris made her way toward the train for Buzzard’s Bay, amusing herself by watching the transfer of mailbags into the freight cars at the back. It happened rarely that she traveled with the mail, but it gave her exquisite pleasure to take a seat in the foremost car, the very front seat if she could manage it. All these letters, all these words scratched out one to the other, spinning their way toward someone. Someone waiting. Someone writing. That was the point of it all, keeping the pure chutes clear, so that anybody’s letter—finding its way to the post office, into the canvas sacks, the many-hued envelopes jostling and nestling, shuffling with all the others—could journey forward, joining all the other paper thoughts sent out minute by minute to vanquish—

Time.

The stationmaster announced the departure of the Buffalo Express and she gazed up at the clock and watched the hand stitch one second to the next. In another minute her train would be called, and she’d join the crowd boarding, pulled back into the shape of her name and of her person. She’d be Iris James, again. Postmaster of Franklin, Massachusetts.

Where Harry was. And the new place in her chest that seemed to have been made by him—that flipped and moved when she caught sight of him on the street, or in line behind others at the post office—bounded. A year ago, he’d just been Harry Vale, the town mechanic, nice enough, good for a spare tire and a chat. And then, one day, he wasn’t. He was something else. For he had walked into Alden’s Market not too long ago and come slowly up behind her so that when she turned around, a can of creamed corn in one hand and plain in the other, there was nothing to do but raise them both to him, offering a choice. He looked at her and then down at the cans, seeming to consider the two very carefully. Finally, he put his thick hand out and pointed to the plain. She nodded. He’d have to tip his head up to kiss her, Iris found herself thinking.

She’d never imagined it would come to her, but here it was—Harry Vale had looked at her with the look that signaled something’s on. And he had done it in plain sight. Never mind Beth Alden watching at the counter. Never mind the heat bolting from the canned goods at the back of the store. She patted her pocketbook. Was it odd what she had done? Well, so what if it was. What she had said to the doctor was God’s own truth—any man would want to know he was the first, she was sure of it—and she could give Harry the paper, beautiful and clean as a white dress at the end of an aisle, which she was too old for, and anyway white was her least becoming color.

At Nauset, Iris descended the Boston train and walked the four blocks through the central town on the Cape to find the bus out to Franklin. Mr. Flores sat in the shade cast by the bus and pushed himself up onto his feet, ambling forward. She had reapplied her lipstick and combed her hair as the train had pulled into the station, which was a good thing because he was staring.

“Hello, Miss James. Good trip down?”

“Yes, thanks.” She looked him straight back in the eyes, daring him to ask her anything more.

He nodded and pointed her toward the bus’s open door. Iris pulled herself up the three short stairs and into the bus. There was a foreign couple, a couple of stray women sitting alone, and an assortment of men clustered around Flores’s seat at the front of the bus. Iris nodded and made her way toward the back, past a young woman with her head in a thick book, the curve of her neck laid bare as her hair swept forward. She did not look up, and she didn’t stir as Iris passed her by to find a seat three rows back.

Iris reached into her skirt pocket for her cigarettes, shook out a Lucky, and considered the head and shoulders of the little child-woman reading in front of her. A runaway, thought the postmaster, though she was quite well dressed in a sensible blue suit, her brown hair cut short and feathering along the straight edge of her collar. In any case, she was the sort who needed tending, the small-breasted women who tip their faces up to men, smiling delightedly as babies. At last the little creature turned slightly, as if to meet Iris’s gaze, aware of her attention, and gave a noncommittal smile—a mechanical response like a hand put out to ward off the sun. Iris nodded, companionably, exhaling smoke. It’s all right—she addressed the woman’s back, now turned away again—I won’t bite. The bus bounced a little as Mr. Flores climbed up behind the wheel and swung himself into his seat, and the engine roared to life, shaking the floor under Iris’s feet.

Emma read the sentence again, distracted by the pillar of a woman behind her. Did Tolstoy really mean making love? She couldn’t think so. Having sex? It would be so bald written on the page like that. Surely they can’t have been making love here and there like this in the nineteenth century. It must refer to something else, something more benign. She flushed, a little guiltily. Not that having sex wasn’t benign—of course it was, it led to babies, after all. Though the things that she and Will had begun to do in the dark had nothing whatsoever to do with babies. But Anna and Vronsky? They had been constrained, wasn’t that the idea? Perhaps it was the translation. She flipped to the cover of the book and read the name beneath Tolstoy’s—Constance Garnett. Emma thought she understood. Vronsky had whispered something loving to Anna, or soothed Anna lovingly, or something like that, and Miss Garnett had used other words instead, painting what ought to be a pink scene—scarlet. Probably a spinster; the pathetic type who reads passion into the twist of a shut umbrella. Like that woman in the back of the bus.

She pushed her bottom back a bit against the seat on the bus so that she sat up straighter, the doctor’s new wife in a very attractive travel suit with a matching scarf thrown around her shoulders. She stared out the window. Since she had said to Will Fitch two weeks ago—hurriedly, afraid to look up at him, Yes. Yes, I will. I do—something firm and satisfying and entirely new had entered into the frequent chaos of her mind. As though Edward R. Murrow’s voice, that brave, impassioned masculine voice, full of its own urgency and volume, had laid down the track upon which she now hummed. Clarity ran upon that track, and purpose.

Pamet. Then Dillworth. Finally Drake. Closing her eyes, Emma recited the names of the towns she knew only through Will’s letters, in which the geography of her new land was mapped by the various ailments of the people he treated. Heart disease. Bursitis. A pair of twins delivered in Drake, which was a miracle, wrote Will, given that the mother had neither the time nor the means to get off the Cape quick enough—

“Is your Bobby turning twenty, twenty-one?” The man’s voice in front of her broke in.

“Twenty-one.”

“They won’t send ’em over there. Get them trained up, okay. Hell, have them build a few bridges! But they won’t send ’em.”

The second man didn’t answer right away and stared out the window. Emma found herself watching the strict profile of his nose and chin as if for some sign. The trees flashed past. “Sure they will,” he said, turning back to his companion.

It served her right. Emma sat back, annoyed at herself for listening in. She had heard it this morning and tried to forget it, had forgotten it in fact, but now here it was again. The draft had passed in Congress, and all men of serviceable age were to report to the draft boards that had sprung up in every town, little and large, like mushrooms after a rain. Not that it would matter to her, she protested to the slight reflection of her hands on her lap in the window. Will wouldn’t go. He had said as much. (Though not definitively, she corrected, scrupulously honest even in her worry.) He shouldn’t go, she amended. He certainly had cause to plead hardship. He was the last in line of the Fitches. He was the sole doctor for miles—and she had just married him.

Anyway, he couldn’t leave her. There was a central fact to everyone’s life, she thought, a fact from which all else stemmed. Hers was that she had been utterly alone in the world—until she met Will. She had lost her mother and father and brother in the epidemic in 1918. They had died in a fever dream, and she had lived; and now, it had been so long, they might have never lived at all. There was a house on a hill, far from the sea, where she had been born. And a town she remembered full of the flappings of flags, which she realized now was her memory of the tents they all lay in, out in the field, because the hospital was gorged with the sick. The memory she might have had of her mother was blotted out by a nurse’s face, wrapped in a mask, bending over her in her cot, checking to see if she breathed.