The Postmistress (21 page)

By four o’clock, the spring day had soured and a quiet drizzle begun. Frankie woke up, her heart racing. The tired-looking pot of geraniums on the fortress-deep windowsill in her single room faced her. She shivered and sat up on her elbow. But for the geraniums, it still looked like the room of someone living elsewhere. Her heart slowed and she swung herself out of bed and sat down in front of the typewriter.

Perhaps by now the doctor had been identified, and the word had begun its journey out along the cable, through the telegraph wires, to someone in Massachusetts who would type it up and send it on. From Boston down the Cape, out to the end to Franklin, where someone else would hold the telegram, and know what it meant, and have to deliver it. And Frankie tried to imagine who would hand the doctor’s wife that piece of paper. But she couldn’t see the town, or the person in her mind’s eye, or even the wife. Just a hand holding the piece of paper, with the fact, but not what happened. She took a piece of paper from the drawer below the typewriter and slid it into the roller, then flicked the carriage lever several times until the page rolled up on the other side.
May 18,
she began,
London.

We think we know the story
, she typed slowly.
We think we know the story because there’s a man and a woman sitting together in a funk hole in the dark. There are bombs. It’s a war. There was a war before, and we’ve read the stories.
She stopped, reading the two lines on the page.
We’ve read Hemingway. We’ve read Miss Thompson and Martha Gellhorn. We think we know who will die and who will live, who is a hero, who will fall in love with whom; but every story—love or war—is a story about looking left when we should have been looking right. That’s the—
Frankie flicked the carriage lever three more times, rolling the paper free of the typewriter. It wasn’t going to fly, she knew it wouldn’t. Not for Murrow, certainly. But neither for Max Prescott or the
Trib
. What, for starters, did she think she was writing about? The Death of an Idealist? Death of a Good Old Boy? She stood up, rereading the lead. There was nothing to say. On a night when many may have died, she wanted to write about one. A man had died by accident this morning. A man who believed that despite the mess, everything added up. A happy man in the middle of the Blitz. She rubbed her eyes, thinking of Max on the other end of the line,
Hell, Frankie, where’s the story?

A clot of blood released into her underpants. Then another. Christ. She shimmied the three steps over to her bureau, holding her hand between her legs so nothing dripped onto the landlady’s carpet. She reached and found a Kotex and a pair of clean underwear and fastened the one to the sanitary belt around her waist, pulled the other up, and tossed the soiled underwear on top of the blouse already soaking in the tiny sink by the door. The tap sputtered as she filled the sink higher, and then she filled a water glass and poured it around the roots of the geranium, and the chalky green smell rose from the leaves and reminded her sharply of her mother’s garden and of summer at home. Her mother would have liked Dr. Will Fitch. She put down the glass, gently. The slant view out the window gave her back slate rooftops, slick and blackened by the soft English drizzle. It was nearly five o’clock.

She changed quickly into her clothes and closed the shutters on the window. Outside, the mist clung to her hair and the wool of her sweater, making her feel safer, as though bombs couldn’t do their full damage in soft weather, which was absurd, but there it was. After two or three blocks, she realized she was getting soaked and put up her umbrella at the same time as someone across the street, the umbrellas opening like black blooms. She pushed down the handle at the cleaner’s and shook her umbrella slightly, not sure of what to say about the doctor’s blood.

“Never mind that,” said tiny Mrs. Dill, forcefully gathering the skirt and rinsed blouse into a pile. “We’ll get it out in a jiff. Hold on.”

Frankie turned around, nearly out the door.

“Yes?”

Mrs. Dill was holding up Will Fitch’s letter, which she’d taken from the pocket of the skirt.

“Thanks.” Frankie slid it into her skirt without looking at it.

The rain and the green spring had crept forward across the soaking opened husks of buildings along Portland Place. Broadcasting House always appeared to Frankie to rise up out of its surrounds like a fortress, ringed by a moat of canvas sandbags, now sprouting, Frankie saw, what looked to be grass. She pushed through the swinging doors into the lobby where the smell of cabbage seeped up from the two sublevel floors on which the studios and the shelter shared space with the kitchen. Aboveground spread the archives and offices. And the people. Frankie made her way to the linoleum staircase rising through the middle of the building. People and their voices, the short waves of laughter and hot, high speech echoed all around her. And gossip. Hello, Frankie. Hello, hello. She rose through her compatriots as though she were swimming back up for air.

“You look like hell,” Ed observed as she slipped into the office where he stood at his desk.

“Thank you, Mr. Murrow.” Frankie tried to be light, hanging her coat on top of his on the back of the door.

“What happened?”

She turned around and didn’t meet his eye. “A man was killed this morning.”

Murrow studied her. “Someone you knew?”

Frankie shook her head. “I met him in the funk hole last night.”

He frowned.

“Hell, Ed.” She blushed. “It wasn’t like that. He was American, that’s all. And he was hit by a cab because he was looking the wrong way.”

“That’s tough.”

Frankie looked up. “Yeah,” she said. “And he’s got a wife back home.”

“That’s tough,” Murrow said again, more quietly. He pointed to the chair in front of him. She sank down in it.

“Okay?” He was watching her.

She nodded.

“Look at this.” He handed her a teletype from the New York office, the excitement in his voice making her look at him quickly before reading the page in her hand. J. Edgar Hoover had just come out in print damning what he called the Fifth Column Hysteria overtaking the nation. Suddenly, there seemed to be spies under every bed, illegals hiding in every corner, saboteurs skulking in every garage. The FBI received nearly three hundred calls a day reporting suspected foreign-born spies and Hoover wanted to inject some sense into the population. This was a reversal. A year ago he’d been warning the country about being careful.

“There you go, Frankie.”

She looked at him, uncertain.

“There’s the frame. Now it’s American news,” Murrow said. “Now there’s a reason to tell the story—who is fleeing Germany, who’s really on those refugee trains.”

The familiar rush of getting an assignment coursed through her, her excitement surging up and subsuming the doctor’s death. “When do I go?” Frankie sat forward in her chair.

He grinned the smile that inspired all of them to try anything he asked. “Soon as you can pack.”

“Done.”

“Good girl,” he said. “Here you go.”

She stood up and took the press pass, gaining her safe transit through Germany and France. PRESSE ETRANGÈRE was stamped across the page.
Valable du 19 Mai au 9 Juin, 1941. Nom et prénoms: Mlle. Bard Frances. Nationalité: Americaine. Profession: Collaboratrice au “Columbia Broadcasting System.”

“Here’s the deal, Frankie. I’ve got you three weeks to get in, go around, and get out. It’ll take you two or three days to get into Berlin, depending on the trains, and I’m slotting you in for three broadcasts along the route to Lisbon, starting in five days from Strasbourg just over the German border in France. Choose a family for each leg of the journey, all the way from Berlin to Lisbon—that’s how this story has legs. It won’t matter what language they’re speaking because you’re bringing us along with you, you’re the eyes, the ears, and the translator, too. They’re story is alive because you’re in the train car with them.”

“Okay,” she said, hardly believing her luck.

“And I’m giving you one of these.” He pointed to the square wooden case about the size of a Victrola sitting on his desk.

“That’s what they’re calling portable?” Frankie frowned.

“What’s the trouble?”

“It looks heavy as hell.”

“It’s about thirty pounds,” he conceded. “They put it in a wooden case for you to lighten it up. The others come in steel.”

“How’s it go?”

“It’s a snap.” Murrow flipped the top of the case. The turntable took up most of the top of the recorder; the arm of the cutter needle lay across the back. A set of headphones, and the microphone with its cord, rested on top of the turntable.

“You’ve got storage here in the lid for sixteen disks, double-sided—each side can record up to three minutes of whatever you put in front of it.”

She nodded. That gave her about an hour and a half of recording. She watched Murrow plug the microphone into the side of the machine.

“This knob”—Murrow pointed the knurled knob set into the front of the machine—“switches on the amp, takes the brake off the motor, and”—he turned it—“lowers the recording head onto the disk. Say something.”

She raised her eyebrow. “Anything?”

He switched the knob off. Then he turned the knob counterclockwise.
Say something
, his voice emerged from the box.
Anything?

She grinned. Immediate playback. She could replay material instantly without any processing. No one had done anything like this yet.

“Record anything you can. Record the train. Get the talk. Get it all. If you can use any of what you record right away, go ahead. If not, just broadcast whatever you’re seeing, whatever you’re hearing, and we’ll use this material when you get back. After Strasbourg, aim for Lyon at the end of the month. Jim Holland is there. Then Lisbon on the fifth of June. That’ll give you plenty of time to make it home.”

She nodded and got up from the chair.

“And Frankie?”

“Yes.”

“When you get to the transmitters, keep the story tight,” he went right on. “The censors are trigger-happy. Get in. Get out—we’re not at war with them yet, but they’ll black you out any chance they can.”

“Right,” she said, sliding the disk recorder off the desk by its wooden handle. Christ, she grimaced. It
was
heavy as hell. “So long.”

There was no one to say good-bye to, no one here to leave. She left a note for the landlady, packed a nightgown and the other two skirts she owned with their three blouses into the blue leather overnight bag her mother had given her years ago, covered them with her underwear and enough Kotex to get her through, and made the night train to Dover with twenty minutes to spare. She hurled the suitcase and then the recorder after it up onto the rack above her head and sank down into her seat. The sharp corner of an envelope poked from her pocket and she pulled it out and turned it over.
Emma Fitch
, the envelope said.
Box 329, Franklin, Massachusetts, USA.
She had forgotten all about the doctor’s letter. Frankie stared at the name of the woman to whom the news had not yet happened. For these few hours until the cable came, the doctor was still alive, and his wife had not yet crossed over to the next part.

Where Frankie was. She shivered and thrust the envelope back down in her pocket. She would mail it from France, so it arrived after word of his death. The doctor would have liked the ends sewn up, she thought, looking into the night outside the glass. His voice beside her, his hope and his joy, flared up like firelight now. Christ, that had made her mad. The whistle blew, the compartment lights snapped off, and the train nosed its way slowly out of the station into the blacked-out city. Frankie slid the letter back into her pocket and watched the blank dark gather the train in its fold, hiding it from the Luftwaffe as it hurried to the coast where the boats to France were waiting.

15 .

O
NE OF THE impossible absurdities of war was that the trains between countries still ran. Like mechanized ants, the trains continued, and a person could get from Dover across the Channel to Calais in a morning, and on into Paris by the end of that day. That and the fact that the northern French countryside bloomed a light fairy green could drive a person mad.
Not at war, not at war,
the train clacked over the rails the following morning. The Norman fields had been turned and planted, and the poplars spiked against the pale sky. Men, loosely wrapped, worked in the fields, paying no attention to the passing train.

The train reached Paris at a little after six. Montmartre’s dome rounded above the sharp roofs in the near distance. Frankie had pulled the window down all the way, and spring crept into the compartment, even as the train slid slowly past the outlying market towns. A woman on a bicycle kept pace with the train, and Frankie watched her ride past the swastika flapping from the flagpole in the village square, so upright on her seat, her head covered in a scarf, so
French
.

She didn’t have much time to find the train for Berlin, but there was little trouble getting on. She climbed onto the second to last compartment and settled herself into a seat as the train started up and Paris fell slowly away.

When the train passed out of France into occupied Belgium, the engine was uncoupled and changed, and the travelers sat in the dark for hours, making it feel like another bloody funk hole, Frankie thought. The sun had set long ago and the blackout curtains pulled in the windows of the tiny station, clear evidence that the British bombers had penetrated this far.

The train crossed into Germany, pushing forward into the dark, the telegraph wires glinting like needles in the night. Sometime before dawn, they stopped at what looked like a crossing and an order was given just below Frankie’s compartment window, and then repeated farther down the line. She lifted her shade and saw what looked like a ghost army in the night, the dim moon glinting off chin straps and gun barrels. There must have been a hundred men down there, all of them silent, waiting to move. The locomotive shuddered and sighed.