The Postmistress (20 page)

Frankie looked at him and then looked down where his big hand held her, his fingers nearly able to wrap around. She shivered. And the hand that held her let go, sliding into his pocket and pulling out his lighter.

“It’s funny meeting you,” he said, taking a drag in on the flame.

“How’s that?”

He pocketed his lighter. “There was one story of yours. A few months ago. About a boy.” He cleared his throat.

She nodded, her eyes on the spark of his cigarette moving in the dark.

“A boy after one of the bombings,” he went on. “You were bringing him home.”

“Yes,” she said. “Billy. That was mine.”

“It was a good story,” Will Fitch said.

“A good story.” She sighed. “That story got me into hot water.”

“Why’s that?”

“Too grim,” Frankie exhaled, “and my voice shook.”

“So what?”

“Too emotional. The news can’t be emotional.”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” Will answered, “but it hit both of us pretty damn hard. You left us sitting there wondering what happened next—” He stopped short. What happened next had been Maggie, Will remembered. The boy in the Blitz had been a story from before he lost Maggie. He shuddered slightly. “Any idea what’s happened to him?”

“No,” she answered. “I don’t know. I moved.”

“Must be tough not to know what happened, not to know whether he’s all right.”

She didn’t answer. The truth was she had passed by Billy’s house several times in the past six months, half-hoping he might be there. But he had vanished into the war. Uneasily, she stretched her legs out along the floor. Her foot touched something soft and it slid away.

“It gets you thinking about
all
the parts in a story we never see”—he cleared his throat—“the parts around the edges. You bring someone like that boy so alive before us and there he is set loose in our world so that we can’t stop thinking of him. But then the report is over, the boy disappears. He was just a boy in a story and we never know the ending, we never get to close the book. It makes you wonder what happens to the people in them after the story stops—all the stories you’ve reported, for instance. Where are they all now?”

Her heart began to thud slowly. She didn’t like where he was going with this, and she imagined getting up, but his voice—with its familiar tints of Harvard and supper parties and the assurance of old money with which she had been raised herself—worked on her like hands on her hands and would not release her until done. He would not stop and she could not stop him.

“You must be pretty tough,” he went on beside her. “I couldn’t bear it—I guess I just like to know how things turn out.”

“Well, I don’t have to
bear
it.” Frankie glanced over at him, provoked. “I tell what I see. I watch and I listen, and I tell all about it. That’s the job,” she said impatiently. “Telling it. Passing it along. That’s the point.”

“ ’Course it is.” He sounded doubtful.

She looked at him. “Listen, the only way out of this is to tell it all. Tell what happens. All the time. And the only way to tell it all is to keep moving. Keep moving and keep telling.”

He watched her with his head to the side, as if listening through a stethoscope. “Only way out of what?”

In the slight pause, she felt something slip from her grasp, gone so quickly she wasn’t sure what it was. She shrugged. “Out of this mess.”

“Why would you want to get out of it?” he asked very gently.

“
I
don’t want to get out of anything,” she said testily in the direction of his shoulder. “I’m the one over here, aren’t I? I’m the one trying to catch what’s happening over here so we can—oh, for Christ’s sake,” she broke off, “it doesn’t matter.”

“So we can what?” he pursued.

She didn’t answer.

He let it go, leaning his head back against the wall. “Sometimes I’m out in the middle of the hell up there, even in the middle of people crying out and that retching smell of gas and fire, and I have to turn my face away to hide my smile.” There was no mistaking the joy in his voice. “Everything matters here,” he said quietly. “Everything adds up.”

She glanced over at him. “Nothing about this adds up.”

“It does,” he said to her. “It’s all there is.”

“That’s nuts,” she retorted angrily. “It’s random as hell out there—that
is
hell—random, incomprehensible accidents happening night after night. A man calling to his son to run toward him for safety and in the moment that the boy runs, in the twenty steps between them, is hit, is killed—”

“And you saw it.”

She frowned.

“That’s all there is. That’s what I’m saying. You saw it.”

“Nuts.” She shook her head.

“Listen, I came over here because I had some crackpot idea of order—because a woman died in my care, I thought I ought to go where I could do the most good, help, stand in the way of more death. But you don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t stand in the way of anything.” He was so sure, it was almost electric in the dark. “You can only stand alongside.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” She pulled away. It was embarrassing, this naked excitement. She’d heard it in her father’s voice at the end of too much drink. Flushed and possessed by the wine and the fervor, he would denounce some politician, or make some sweeping absurd gesture and the fire in him would blaze up, too hotly she’d feel, looking at her mother, ashamed. Too bright. Like some great beautiful boy. She looked away into the shadows. That was it. The memory of her father was coming toward her, pale and urgent, through the dark. Gliding forward on the low begotten currents of Will Fitch’s voice. Her father. Ruined sorrow.

“For the first few weeks after I got here,” he went on, “I walked into the hospital ward every day, desperate to heal, to soothe, to save. I worked hour after hour, steady, more like a miner than a man. Inching forward along the beds, taking pulses, temperatures, stitching and binding wounds. Keeping careful records. How many. Who. After a month I had worked more hours, seen more patients than any other doctor on the hall. And they would keep coming. Day after day. No matter what I did, they would keep on dying. Or living.

“And one day, I got it. I lifted my head from the child’s chest I was listening to and realized, with a shock of relief: whatever is coming, comes. That’s what holds it all together. We are all of us here in the mess. There’s no way around it. And all I am in the face of it is a single voice and a pair of hands. Not anyone’s son anymore. Not anyone’s husband. Anonymous but necessary. Vital. A Lucky Strike.”

“Listen,” Frankie snapped. His happiness was maddening. “Whatever is coming does
not
just come, as you say. It’s helped by people willfully looking away. People who develop the habit of swallowing lies rather than the truth. The minute you start thinking something else, then you’ve stopped paying attention—and paying attention is all we’ve got.”

“I’m looking straight at it, Miss Bard,” Will replied calmly. “You can’t stop the mess. You can’t change what’s coming”—he looked across at her—“and you shouldn’t try.”

With an impatient sigh, Frankie pushed off the floor and stood all the way up, needing to move. Needing some air, some light. She reached to refasten her skirt, which had come unbuttoned in the back, and bending to grab her crumpled sweater, she saw that the doctor hadn’t moved. Unnerved, she reached for her satchel beside him.

“If the world had paid more attention in 1939,” she thrust, “maybe we wouldn’t be sitting here in the dark, dodging bombs.”

“We’d be sitting somewhere else.”

“With your wife, for instance.”

“Yes, all right,” he agreed sadly. “With my wife.”

The door to the shelter was thrown open and the long, high whine of the all clear sounded as first light stretched through the opening. Something like a sob was rising inside her, and she pulled her satchel over her head, settling it across her breast.

“You’ve just got to get home,” she said carefully, “that’s all.”

He stood up and held out his hand. “I don’t know.”

Frankie hesitated with her hand in his just briefly, before dropping it and slipping through the knot of waking Londoners and out the shelter door into the soft blue morning. She stood a minute on the pavement above the shelter, back up in the spring air. It was a little after five o’clock. The light shifted on the street, suddenly plunging dark and then immediately bright again upon the pavement. No matter what happened, spring behaved as it always had. It was still just one morning in late May in London.

Late May in London. On her bed under the eaves at school, these would have been the words that called to mind tea parties and strawberries and Henry James, when all civilization could be contained within the blue borders of an English sky. Except for the smoking buildings and the stink of burning rubber and metal, one might almost imagine Dorian Gray, flushed and gorgeous behind one of those windows, and Mrs. Dalloway coming out onto the square. Almost, Frankie thought, noticing the hunk of mortar missing from the side of a house across the square. As if it had been bitten.

“So long,” Will Fitch said behind her. “I’ll be listening for you.”

“So long.” She nodded at him again and watched him walk briskly, singly away down the long block of Wilmot toward the busy hustle of Oxford Circus. She watched him set his hat back on his head with one hand, and watched his suit jacket narrow smartly as he buttoned it at the waist. And she could feel herself unclench as he walked away. Christ, he had gotten under her skin. What had happened to her down there? She tugged at the strap across her chest, embarrassed in the upstairs world by the force of her reaction to the doctor below. She shivered. It had just been too damn dark, too close. And his voice beside her, probing, prodding, insistent as a ghost. That American voice. Out here, aboveground, in the familiar ruin, she felt more like herself.

The doctor had gotten nearly to the end of the street. She stifled a momentary urge to call out to him, and stood a minute longer to watch him move out of sight. In the distance, at the far corner, men and women crossed the street. It looked like it would rain. A woman walked toward him from the opposite direction, carrying a baby in her arms.

Afterward, Frankie couldn’t remember, but something the woman did made the doctor turn and look at her, as though he had recognized her, and didn’t see the London taxi coming from the direction no American thinks to look, didn’t see the black, efficient machine, and stepped off the curb. Frankie took one step forward with a scream and the other people emerging from the shelter turned and all of them saw the large man flipped up off his feet and tossed into the air—where, even still, though they all saw it happen, he might live, he might not have to fall back down—until he did fall, hit the road flat on his back heavy and hard, with a sick, unmistakable thud, his body a punctured sack.

She heard a low hissing from the front of the cab. The taxi driver sat frozen inside, his hands on the wheel, the taxi inching forward toward the spot where Will had been flung.

“Stop!” Frankie ran along the street. “Pull your brake, God
damn
it.” She scrambled to Will and sank down beside him. His nose was broken and the bone had shot through the skin, naked and off-kilter, bleeding a steady stream down his cheek. He stared up past her shoulder at the sky. Frankie tried to wipe the blood away with her hand, but there was too much, and the mark of her fingers crossed his face. She tried to gather a part of her skirt to wipe it off, but the blood was streaking past now, covering the marks. His eyes opened and shut, and he moaned.

Frankie couldn’t see anything broken other than his nose, though beneath his breathing she heard a low persistent sigh, as if air was escaping somewhere.

“What do I do? What should I do?” The cabbie had gotten himself out of his taxi.

Above Frankie, all around her, a crowd of people stood and stared down at Will lying flat on his back, the breath wheezing in and out of him, his eyes open. Behind them, ambulance bells rang and the daytime traffic of the city honked and whirred. Even now, in a city where the number of dead had climbed into the thousands, where the rotten smell of burnt flesh and rubber hung in the air and where the exhausted grimy faces of men and women in the mornings on the streets were unremarkable, this was not. The man had simply not paid attention. It had nothing to do with the war. They couldn’t help it, they had to talk, and their voices above Frankie sounded like the wild clucking of birds.

“Get an ambulance,” Frankie cried. “Get an ambulance, someone!”

Will made a sound as though he were clearing his throat. There was blood coming from his mouth now. Frankie felt faint.

“Dear God,” the cabbie whispered.

Frankie jammed her hands under Will’s arms. “Help me,” she called to the driver. He bent and the two of them half-dragged, half-shoved Will onto her lap. She cradled his head in her elbow and looked down into a face that someone had already pulled the shade on. A warm pool spread in her lap, though she couldn’t see the source of the bleeding. She wrapped her arms around Will to keep him warm, and the frantic clanging of ambulance bells came on, then passed down Oxford Street. Had someone gone for an ambulance?

The cabbie was trying to give her something. An envelope. She stared at him. “It was on the street, there,” he pointed. “His, I think.” She looked at the address and shoved it in her jacket pocket, and caught Will’s eyes on her.

“It’s okay,” she said to him quietly, though she knew he could not hear or answer. “I’ve got you.” And she rested one hand on his head and the other on his heart, until she felt it stop.

14 .

A
LONG WHILE after the ambulance had driven away with the doctor’s body, Frankie sat on the curb, her mind scrambling backward to the earlier minutes when he was there beside her in the dark, before the air and the light and the cab. The London dawn clattered and called its way into a full morning, and the crowd that had gathered around her slowly melted back into it. Taxicabs continued up and down the street. She sat there for ten minutes, twenty, another half hour. In the tiny garden across the way the dew-heavy crown of a daffodil slipped sideways onto the grass. Someone’s baby wailed from one of the open windows. A footstep struck hard along the pavement. One of the house doors thunked shut upon the street. The blood on her skirt had dried. Finally, she stood up and made her way home.