The Postmistress (29 page)

“Perhaps she is in London.” Emma squinted at the harbor, not looking at him, knowing it was impossible but wanting the words in the air. “Perhaps she is with my husband.”

He didn’t answer. Nor did he pick up the paintbrush again. Neither moved. At last, Emma stood without a word. She walked back down the path and straight out the gate because she couldn’t bear his stiff, sad body etched up there in the sky, and she couldn’t bear her own. And she kept walking, straight out into the dunes, until she had to stop because of the cramp in her side. She stood there between the sea and her house and held her hand to her side and felt her heart bang and bang and bang. When she looked back toward the house, she saw him still up on the ladder, his body arching out, an overlooking angel.

19 .

H
ARRY SAT WITH his binoculars leveled out the back windows of the town hall, across the wilderness of dunes to the sea, breaking the great swath of water into quadrants and staring fixedly at each one in turn, then randomly, so as to keep his attention agile. For a solid hour he stared, his sandwich lying unwrapped in his lap; then, without thinking about anything, he ate, his eyes trained on the empty palette before him. He waited as the stern man jigs for cod, the thick line loose in his hands, eyes off to the side, relaxed—every muscle ready to strike.

He had been staring at the water for so long that the scene in front of him no longer meant anything. In the automatic way a man crosses a street or reaches down to unlatch the hood of a car, Harry stared at the sea. Water and light and the boats bobbed back. Some days he was certain the sea would part, and up would rise the U-boat he was waiting for. Other days he was pretty sure he was a goddamned fool. But by now, coming up here and watching had become a habit.

Harry put down the binoculars and the lobster boats on the water reverted to shapes, a thick child’s smudge for the hull run under the squat trapezoid of its wheelhouse, glass glinting in the bow. Beyond them the navy edged far off in the broad flat blue
.
Just yesterday, a marine brigade landed in Iceland to garrison it and begin protecting the shipping lanes. Transport ships from Admiral Breton’s TF-19 included two battleships, two cruisers, and twelve destroyers. And now there was word that the U.S. Navy was to provide escort for ships of any nationality sailing to and from Iceland. It was clear we were trawling for war.

How do you know where the ball has been hit
? an admiring reporter had asked Red Barber, the great baseball announcer
. How do you know where to call the ball?

I don’t watch the ball,
Barber answered,
I watch the fielders. I watch how they move. If the right fielder starts running, I know it’s a knock into right field.

Harry picked up the binoculars again. He didn’t expect to see anything, but he sure as hell wanted to be ahead of the game.

FLORENCE CRIPPS STOOD on the open part of the green, nearest the post office, working her way around a great heap of shining metal, tossing pots and pans back up that had slid down from the top, pruning the edge into a tidy circle. It rose nearly three feet high—an aluminum pledge in the center of the town. Dishpans, coffeepots, waffle irons, kettles, roasting pans, double boilers climbed one on top of the next in a firm line toward becoming a bomber. Florence’s hair stuck straight out in the heat, and she was flushed from bending over.

From where she sat in Adam’s Pharmacy, Emma watched Mrs. Cripps across the green holding a teakettle up by two fingers as though it were a mouse. The pharmacy was empty at this hour and she had come in for a cup of somebody else’s coffee while she wrote Will. The fan above her head flicked the page of the magazine in front of her idly open again.
Pregnancy is not a disease,
the bold black type cautioned.
A woman’s body must be exercised and toned to prepare for the child . . . and the man after the child
, the subtitle teased. Emma slapped the copy of
Ladies’ Home Journal
closed and slid it back into the wire rack beside the soda fountain.

The page under Emma’s hand was getting sweaty, and she pulled her palm off it and looked at the words—
Mr. Schelling thinks we should paint more than just the trim on the house, or else it will rot.
It had been thirty-eight days without a letter. Over a month of silence, into which she had written day after day, sending him letters as though repeating a charm.

Maggie’s boys trooped by, the eldest one carrying the baby girl in the blanket sling. Every afternoon they went down to the pier to meet Jim Tom’s boat. She’d seen the family there, the boys helping wash the boat down, cleaning the catch, the baby set up on top of the bait box. It didn’t hurt so much to look at them now, without their mother, as it had once, but she still couldn’t talk to Jim Tom. When she saw him coming, she’d nod and wave, as though there was much she ought to do.

She ought to finish her letter. But it was simply too damn hot to write, she thought now, listlessly. She looked at the page.
Will? Where are you?
She leaned down and put her lips on the spot at the end of the sentence, leaving the faint red trace of her mouth. There. She folded the page and slipped it into the envelope and slid off the pharmacy stool and out the door, crossing silently to the pair before the pile of junk growing on the green.

“Hello,” she said.

Mrs. Cripps turned around. Without anyone saying a word, the town had begun to treat Emma, now six months pregnant and showing, carefully. Talk stopped at her approach and sprang up afterward like grass. The doctor’s wife oughtn’t to be out in this heat, Florence thought. She was pale and panting.

“Well, hello,” Mrs. Cripps replied.

“How much have you got?”

Mrs. Cripps stared back down at the pile. Nearly three quarters of the Franklin households had brought something down for the aluminum pledge drive. “Five thousand dishpans, ten thousand percolators, two thousand roasting pans, and twenty-five hundred double boilers will make one plane. If everybody contributes even one of these, we can proudly say that we have built”—she stalled gamely, doing some rapid calculation—“a wing?”

“Tip of a wing, more likely.” Harry came up behind them.

Florence stared down, ruefully. “Perhaps no more than a helmet.”

They were silent. “Imagine going to war in Mrs. Gilson’s double boiler,” Florence put in, then immediately wished she hadn’t spoken. Harry had been to war and back and never married, which said it all about war. She glanced sideways at him, but he was rapt in studying some hidden piece. He flicked his cigarette off to the side of the aluminum heap and toed a pie plate off the hubcaps below.

“These aren’t aluminum, Florence.”

She stared at the hub cabs offered her so proudly by the Taraval boys.

“And they’re stolen,” he continued mildly.

“Stolen!”

“From my shop.”

Emma stifled a smile.

“They
look
aluminum,” Mrs. Cripps protested.

Harry allowed as how they did.

Mrs. Cripps bent and retrieved three stainless teaspoons that had been knocked off onto the grass at her feet. She wondered what else was on the pile, other things that looked like the real thing but weren’t. Scraps that might not stand up under fire. She tossed the spoons hard at the top again. “Saw you had that German man over, Emma.” She straightened. “You ought to be careful.”

Emma flushed. “Otto?”

Mrs. Cripps nodded.

Emma turned on her. “Otto Schelling is Austrian, Mrs. Cripps. Not German.”

“Never mind that. He’s not American, and he’s too damn quiet.”

Emma frowned. “Lots of people are quiet,” she said. “I am quiet, for example.”

“You are all alone up there.” Mrs. Cripps tipped her chin in the direction of Emma’s house. “That’s all I’m saying.”

“Yes, thanks, Mrs. Cripps. I know that.” Emma flushed up again, angrily, and made her way past without saying good-bye.

“He’s up there most afternoons, Harry,” Mrs. Cripps declared, as much to Emma’s retreating back as to the man still standing beside her.

“How do you know?”

“You’re not the only one keeping an eye out on the town,” she retorted.

“I believe he is practicing his English,” Harry said mildly, his eyes following Emma marching away toward the fish houses.

Otto was not a spy, Emma thought. Of course he wasn’t. He was a housepainter. Hadn’t he proven as much the last couple of weeks, every morning up on that ladder? But where was Will? All she wanted was to look up and see him walking toward her. All she wanted was Will.

Manny and Jo Alvarez were still out on the water, but Manny’s cousin’s boat had come in early, it looked like, so she made for his fish house at the near side of the harbor. She didn’t know his name, but when she knocked on the fish house door, he motioned her in. The boy stood beside him wearing red overalls, a size too small, she thought, paying attention to the codfish laid out on chunks of ice in front of her, their eyes the color of metal.

“How much you want?”

“One,” she answered, and then thought she’d like extra for chowder. “No”—she nodded at him—“two.” The fisherman pulled two of the limp bodies off the ice and onto the porcelain scale, causing it to bounce up and down in front of her. Then he turned and threw them onto a length of paper laid out on the shelf behind him.

“Sweet?” The boy asked Emma, his voice catching over the hard stop of the English word. He was a dark child, with great big hands that hung awkwardly from the narrow sleeves of his shirt.

“No, thank you.” She looked at him. Tall for his age, and maybe not altogether there. The overalls had two steamboats embroidered into the top pocket, and the red corduroy was frayed along the bib. Her heart hammered, suddenly.

“Where did you get those?” She couldn’t stop herself.

The boy looked back at her, uncomprehending.

“The overalls,” she pointed at him, impatiently. “Where are they from?”

The boy froze. The father stopped wrapping the fish and turned around, his face careful and flat. She took a step forward and bent over the fish, ignoring the father and making an effort to smile. She could see Will almost the more sharply for how the overalls fit this boy so badly, this not-boy conjuring him. It was one of the pictures she had kept on the mantel. Her five-year-old husband, squinting into the camera and the sun. Will’s mother must have given them to the Church Thrift. They must have been passed from hand to hand for years.

“You want your fish?” The fisherman put a hand on his son’s shoulder.

She stepped back and nodded, taking the fish. They watched her put it in her basket and count out the coins into the father’s hand. She had to say something more. “Listen,” she said softly to the boy. And something in her voice must have made him lean forward. “Those overalls once belonged to my husband,” she whispered. “Tell your mother.”

The boy’s eyes darkened and he stepped backward.
“Muerta.”

Emma heard the word before she understood what it meant, because she said again, “Tell your mother—”

“Go away.” The man swatted at the air in front of her, shooing her off, as if to protect his boy from her.

“Mama e muerta,”
the boy said.

Emma turned, stricken, and made her way out the fish house door and down the pier, the fish piled in crates around her, aware of the man’s and the boy’s eyes trained on her. Now, appearing like this so suddenly on the shoulders of a Portuguese boy, the overalls had the force of a message. She walked without thinking to the end of the pier onto Front Street and across, straight into the post office.

The wooden shutters were drawn against the steep slant of the summer sun, like the bedroom of a child who has been put down to nap, the light creeping around the shade, the room absolutely still save for the tiny chest of the sleeper, raising and lowering, while the wooden slat at the bottom of the shade lifted in the slight breeze and tapped against the sill.
Tap, tap.
And Emma remembered, violently, the face of the nurse bending over her to check whether she breathed in the fever tent, the white face of the nurse whose own mouth was covered with gauze. The sweetness of the order in here, the reliable calm, made her want to cry. In here someone was taking care of things. The cool and the quiet swept over her. Perhaps she would just stand here and then turn around in a minute and walk out. The sound of envelopes being slotted, the
pock
as the edge of the letters hit the end of each wooden box, was regular and soothing.
Pock
and then the
swish. Pock. Pock.
Emma closed her eyes and listened.
Pock
. Someone was watching over. Someone was in charge.
Pock. Pock.
Perhaps the room itself was all she needed.

“Emma?”

She shook herself. Her heart was banging.

“Are you all right?”

She nodded. Miss James stood in the window.

“Would you like a glass of water?”

Emma nodded. “Yes, please.”

Miss James turned and went into the back room. Emma heard the tap opened and the sound of water rushing. She felt heavy and flat, as though she’d run into a wall and stuck. But when the postmaster returned with the glass of water, Emma walked toward it and drank gratefully. Miss James stood waiting. When she was done, she put the glass down.

“Something has happened,” she said. “To Will.”

“No,” Miss James answered quickly.

Emma lifted her eyes up to the postmaster and studied her face. “You’re certain.”

“Emma”—Iris flushed—“there’s been no news.”

“To hell with the news,” Emma whispered, and turned around and walked out.

The doors
chung chunged
behind her. Iris stayed very quietly where she was. She listened to Emma’s feet clatter down the post office stairs, and she heard the whine as the gate opened and shut at the bottom. She waited a full minute before she reached down into her skirt pocket and felt for her cigarettes and lighter. The flame curled around the end of the Lucky Strike and she inhaled deeply. Then, at last, she retreated to the comforting order of the back room.