The Postmistress (32 page)

FRANKIE WALKED as fast as she could away from her old boss into the heat of Grand Central Station—into the middle of the American travelers, into the hurl and worry of getting on the right train, the right track, kissing good-bye, good-bye—and stopped at last under the dome, the tears streaming down her face. On the timetable in front of her, the white letters staggered out across the black board. People jostled around her, also stopping, looking up, before moving on. What she saw in the station was merely what she saw. Boxes and slants. The green shunts of summer lilies stuck in a pot by the ticket booth. Nothing to look at, nothing to see. And nothing to report. It was a nearly unbearable pleasure. She sniffed and wiped her face with her hand. She gazed up at the clock where the hand stitched second to second toward the top. After another minute or two, the white numbers and letters combined to mean something, and she made her way to where the Boston train waited.

A month ago, Frankie had walked down the gangplank of the SS
Norway
and into her mother’s arms. She had let herself be taken home and put to bed. Downstairs, the voices of her mother and the house-keeper bowled across the hours, stretching in the summer heat through shuttered rooms. She had stared up into the ceiling with her arms crossed over the cotton blanket, while New York racketed outside. In the second week, she asked for a gramophone and lay there in the bedroom she had grown up in, her dressing gown hung up on the bedpost, her slippers lined neatly beneath, listening to the voices from the train.

When her mother came in to sit beside her, she closed her eyes and crept her way backward to where she had been. Backward to Harriet and their apartment. Billy’s mum. Back to the doctor in the shelter on the last night of the Blitz, and his eyes on her as he died. Back through to the trains—to Thomas. To the children. To that last boy she could not follow. So many. There had been too many.

Forward and backward, she crept in her mind’s eye, until slowly, like a river bluing, in the last week, she had come to a picture of the doctor’s wife at a door and herself on the other side. She imagined handing her her husband’s letter at last; and then, she imagined her smiling, as though she had something to give Frankie in return.

At Nauset, Frankie made the bus for Franklin with plenty of time. She sank down into a seat and yanked open the window.

She woke when the bus grumbled to a stop, bumping her head off the window where it had rested. There were people in the streets walking just below where she sat. People in the evening air, laughing. Frankie put her hand out on the seat in front of her and pulled herself to standing. The bright evening light glowed off the windshield and Frankie stepped off the bus and onto the sidewalk; she went to stand in the shade of one of the two trees in front of the post office, waiting for the driver to hand down the bags.

It was the second weekend in August and the town seemed to have gone slightly mad for fun. Vacationers, emerging in their linens and poplins, bathed and glistening from the day on the beach, were out in the early-evening light. They strolled and chattered, looking in shop windows, like loose twigs nudging slowly down an easy stream, their voices lighting along the lanes. Though it was just six o’clock, signs were up in some of the café windows. NO MORE LOBSTER. NO MORE PIE. As she stood there, she heard a shout and a crash, a clang of metal on metal, and then right away the swooning warble of a trumpet as the guesthouses along the rim of the harbor swung into sound, and a tea dance orchestra started to play.

Perhaps she had made a mistake coming here, she thought uneasily for the first time, leaning over to grab the handle on her bag. Perhaps there was no quiet to be had. Though Europe was falling apart, splintering and exploding, at least she understood the direction. But all this—she gazed down the street—motion without purpose, where was it going? There was a movie house, and a dance hall, but the whoops and hollers seemed to come from all over town. She picked up her suitcase and the portable Victrola, swung her satchel over her shoulder, and walked to the end of the sidewalk, waiting for the line of Chevys and Plymouths to thin.

Across the street, a tall red-haired woman emerged from the post office and uncleated the flag at the top of the stairs, her post office blues sitting nicely on her hips. A Dorothea Brooke, decided Frankie, for a snappier fiction. Her lips were painted a shade of red that did nothing for her, as if to say, never mind, Frankie thought. Never mind these lips.

She watched the postmistress loosen the line on the pole and as the flag swam down in the evening light, several young men raced down Winthrop Street for the harbor, brimming at high tide. The damp heat of the day still hung in the evening. Ahead of her they reached the sand and, shedding hats and shirts, ran straight to the water, their khakis sliding down to their hips and hanging there by the grace of their belts. They threw themselves in and then, shouting and blowing, threw themselves on each other. White as winter, their chests and arms flailed beneath the water like fish in a barrel. The draft board must have all of their lottery numbers up Cape. Frankie passed them and walked up Front Street to where it met Yarrow Road, heading single-mindedly up the hill and out of town.

To her right, a ragged hedge of beach roses and slash grew up out of the sand. The late afternoon sang, and on the other side of the hedge and down the bluff, the flats shivered as the tide drew out farther and farther. Salt and roses mixed in the offshore breeze under the warning calls of the gulls.

Up ahead of her, six white cottages the size of playhouses lined up like girls regarding the gentleman caller come at last to the dance. Frankie’s cottage was the fourth to last; as she passed the others she heard the showers running; tired children complained, and the cool extended voices of mothers shook out like towels in the breeze. A woman sat on the porch next door, smoking a cigarette, her feet propped up on the railing so her dress slid down her tanned legs. She looked across at Frankie and waved lazily.

Frankie waved back and pushed open the screen door. The two rooms inside were painted a bright white with filmy curtains hung to lift and lower in the sea breeze. Everything fresh. Everything bright. A small sofa in the front room. Two chairs placed on either side of a side table proudly sporting a gramophone. Music and light, drinks in the evening. Summer—the suggestion was clear—could be found in these three things. The air and water flipped lazily back and forward outside the trim windows. The window above the sink faced directly into the high dunes, motionless and baking in the evening quiet, the silvery-green compass grasses sticking up from the sand like quills.

Through the windows the blue sky arched effortlessly away. Frankie dropped her bags and filled a glass with water from the sink, then went back outside to sit in the slow slide to evening. She was high enough up and out of town that she could see it all before her, uninterrupted. The fishermen threw tackle and gear on the decks of their trap boats and up through the general quiet came the burst of their end-of-day shouts. Her eyes filled suddenly at the sounds of ordinary life. She knew she’d been rambling this afternoon with Max, and she could imagine how it sounded. She wished she’d never brought up God. She wasn’t even sure what she was trying to say.

She turned her head. To her left an old man, napping on one of his porch chairs in the evening sun, had moaned aloud. Neatly dressed in l ight-colored trousers and a white shirt and dark sweater, his arms rested on the curve of the chair, given utterly to sleep. Sleep? She rose out of her chair, disgusted. The months of reporting, the pages of script she had written over the past four years. What good had they done? She gave one last look at the two strict rows of houses leading into the center of this town. She might as well have broadcast directly into the wind.

22.

T
HE FOLLOWING MORNING, a half-dozen young men sat upon the stools inside the town café, three of them in their waders, hands pressed around the hot coffee. Through the quiet that had descended, Frankie made her way to a stool along the counter, nodded to the woman pouring coffee, and took her place. “Thanks,” Frankie said, accepting the full cup pushed before her.

“Morning.” The man beside her grinned. It was the leader of yesterday evening’s swimmers.

“Morning.” She nodded back.

The door pushed open and a man silhouetted by the brightness outside stood for a minute on the threshold, nodding hellos, before moving forward to the stool beside her. He put one foot up on the step and climbed up lightly, as if into a saddle. He was neat as a barrel, small and compact, his gray-blond hair cut very short along the ridge of his skull. He set his hat down on the counter beside the plate as carefully as a judge.

“Harry,” greeted the young fisherman beside Frankie.

“Hello, Johnny,” Harry said.

The chime for the top of the hour rang out on the radio and the room fell silent as if in front of a fire
. British and Soviet forces have invaded Iran
, the radio announcer’s voice came on, followed by the three chimes signaling the news.
Worried by reports of German “tourists,” Britain and Russia today decided that Iran must accept their protection of oil supplies. British land forces advanced in two areas to secure oil near
b̄d̄n and northeast of Baghdad to take similar sites around Kermānshāh. Meanwhile the Russians marched on Tabriz. There was little Iranian opposition to either the British or Russian forces
.

Johnny grunted, “Damn right.”

Frankie sipped her coffee, wrapping her two hands around the cup, and listened to the war coming in through the wire like anyone else.

The announcer’s voice went on, cataloging the fronts around the world. In Occupied France, twenty thousand German troops were searching Paris for suspects after a weekend of stealthy attacks on the occupying forces. German authorities threatened to shoot hostages if attacks continued. The citizens of Leningrad fought on. And then, Betty Bonney’s cool lilt came dancing out of the radio, the light tone bolting into the room, singing “Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio,” high above the laughing trumpet’s screech. Johnny Cripps stood and leaned across the counter to turn the radio off in disgust. “When are they going to send for us?” he muttered, sitting back down.

The man beside him shook his head. “They won’t.”

“Oh, we’re going, all right,” another declared.

“Well, I’m not,” said his neighbor.

Around the thick boasts, the older men sat and stared into their mugs. The war? thought Frankie. The war was right here in the old men’s silence. She felt the man named Harry listening beside her, one palm laid flat on the counter while he smoked.

“And what in the hell are we supposed to do anyhow about a couple thousand Jews rounded up in Poland?” the man on the other side of Harry erupted. “DeVoris won’t even take them into his hotel down in Sudbury.”

“DeVoris or Jameson. Neither of them will.”

Frankie turned her head away and concentrated on her coffee.

“How do they get away with it?”

“No vacancy. That’s all. There’s never a vacancy for ’em.”

“Anyway. It’s their trouble. And the Krauts just killed those ones to make a point. Jews aren’t the issue, it’s all about territory. And there’s been one kind of war or another in Europe since—”

“That’s why we’ve got the advantage,” someone broke in. “We haven’t had our own war for eighty years.”

“Sure we have. We just don’t call it war. But there’s always an enemy, you bet. Indians. Darkies. Polacks. Always someone to knock off the lip of the pot.”

“You going communistic on us?”

“This time the Krauts’ll bring the war here,” Harry remarked quietly, looking straight ahead.

The group of older men looked up at him seated at the counter. He turned his head slowly toward them. A couple of them nodded, Frankie noticed. The others stared into their cups.

“I don’t know, Harry. What about the Japs?”

“What about them?”

“Shouldn’t we worry about them?”

“Hell, let President Roosevelt worry about them,” Harry shot back.

“The Japs are way the hell over on the other side of the world. I can’t worry about the Japs. The Krauts are already in the Atlantic. I’d say we’ll be headed into their guns long before the Japs get around to reading Roosevelt’s papers. I’m worried about what I can see is a clear danger to us, here.”

Frankie caught the glance thrown between Johnny and one of the other younger men.

“But Harry, don’t you think it’d be better to just wait until we know what the real news is?”

“When the Germans come they will simply come, and there won’t be an announcement.”

He was the kind of man men listen to, but Frankie could see that they didn’t want to listen to this. It defied reason. It defied imagination.

“How can you be so damn sure?”

“I can’t,” Harry answered.