The Postmistress (36 page)

She turned to look at him. He returned her gaze easily. “Fair enough,” she said to him.

“Hell,” he said, “here we are all over again.”

“Well—not exactly.”

“You ever consider coming to speak to Civilian Defense?”

“Why?” She turned on him. “People would just as soon hear a lie as the truth. We should have been in there years ago, but no one gave a goddamn, though reports were clear.”

He grunted agreement and walked to the other set of windows where he stood, binoculars raised, and stared out. He was on a schedule, Frankie realized. It made her want to cry. This single-minded brave idea of order. This man, raising his arm with the same precise angle to the sea each time he stopped to look. This hand and that head working singly and without distraction, bent on getting on.

“Let me ask you something. What were you hoping for, being over there?”

“An end.” Frankie was relieved to divert the conversation.

“To war?”

“Yes,” Frankie answered, nettled. “Well, no. I wanted it to begin, actually.”

“How the hell did you think you could do that?”

“The more people knew, the more they could see—see what had to be done.”

“Bull.” He shook his head without turning around. “No one here can see around the edges of the photos, or whatever story you try to tell about it, into a war—into what lies there.”

“What does lie there?” she asked softly.

“Accident.”

She waited.

“
Chance’s strange arithmetic
,” he recited quietly. “Wilfred Owen.”

She drew in her breath sharply.

Harry picked up his binoculars.

“Jesus.” Frankie stared.

He shrugged. “We can’t change what’s coming. Something is always coming.”

“Is that supposed to be a comfort?”

He grunted and sat down in the chair. “It’s all there is.”

His stomach mounded over his lap, and his sweater was taut around it. She watched him watching, and then she turned in her chair and looked at the water, which spread like a picture away from the town. And she was oddly comforted. This man brought back Will Fitch, sitting beside her—
All you are is a voice and a pair of hands.
She had turned on the doctor in the dark, turned to stop the flood of his relief coming at her, his relief and his joy. Now, in his town, she sat there, quietly. Was he right? The first of the bands started up, calling evening on. Schoolboys gathered and lounged against the post office gate, one of them throwing a stone against the wood. And throwing it again. And again.

Now the boys had arranged themselves in a casual firing squad, pretending to take shots at something she couldn’t see at first, until she pulled forward in her chair. And then she stood straight up without a word to Harry Vale and ran for the stairs, taking them two at a time, her hand sliding down the banister for balance. Past the second floor, down onto the first floor where the clack of the typewriter paused and then resumed as she burst past and pushed through the heavy door. Two of them ambled after him, following Otto up the street. Frankie ran across the green toward the rest of the boys who were still standing with their arms raised, aiming at his back with their fingers.

“Goddamn it!” she shouted at them. “What do you think you’re doing?”

They went dumb. Their arms slack.

Her heart was pounding so hard, she could hardly speak. “You little
shits
,” she spat. “You goddamned
little shits
.” She looked up the street toward Otto who had stopped at the sound of her voice and turned around, seeing for the first time the boys who had been tailing him.

“Get out of here”—she turned back to the boys—“and if I see that again, I’m going straight to the police.”

One of the boys grinned and looked down.

“What’s funny?” Frankie was aware of Otto coming back toward her.

Another boy looked up.

“What the hell’s so funny?”

“My dad’s the policeman,” the first boy hooted, and they all took to their heels, laughing, leaving Frankie where she stood, struck dumb by rage. Otto stopped in front of her.

Frankie looked up. “You all right?”

He shrugged.

Beth Alden, the grocer’s daughter, had come out of the market and stood in the open doorway watching them.

“Otto,” Frankie whispered, “why won’t you tell them?”

“What should I tell them?” he commented quietly.

“That you’re Jewish.” Frankie kept her voice as even as she could. “That your wife is over there.”

He raised his head and looked back at the market.

“Otto,” she prodded.

He shook his head. “I won’t tell anybody anything anymore.”

“But people don’t understand. They don’t understand who you are.”

Otto raised his eyes and met Frankie’s. Her heart was beating very fast. He looked at her a long time.

“So?” He raised his voice only slightly, but the fury pealed out. “Tell? Who should I tell? How? I should stand up in the park there?” He jabbed a finger at the town green. “Stand up on a platform? Tell everyone—
Ich bin Jude!”

“All right!” she said, but he stepped away from the hand she reached out. He turned away and started walking fast, without running, out of town. She stood and watched him up the street, where he stopped at last and turned around. He stopped and stared at her and then he went on walking.

Frankie blinked, as if coming out of a trance.

“Miss Bard”—the postmistress had come out from the shade of the porch—“there ’s mail in here for you.”

“Did you see that?” Frankie turned to her.

“What?”

Frankie was so angry she couldn’t speak. She walked over to the bottom of the post office stairs. “Those boys,” she spat. “There were boys pretending to shoot Mr. Schilling in the back.”

“No”—Iris shook her head—“I didn’t.” The heavy doors thudded shut behind Iris as she vanished back inside.

“Christ.” Frankie put her hand on the railing just to hold on for a minute. She made out Otto turning the corner at the end of the next block, then turning into the garage. “Christ almighty,” Frankie breathed.

25.

W
HEN SHE PULLED open the doors and walked through into the empty lobby, the postmistress was in the window. From the door, Frankie watched as she brought the canceling stamp down on three letters in a row with a satisfying thump, then turned and tossed what she stamped behind her in quick impatient flicks of her wrist. Easy, efficient, absorbed in her work, the postmistress was completely in charge. Frankie followed the envelopes winging silently over Iris’s shoulder into the sacks. “Have you ever missed?”

“Never.” Iris didn’t look up.

“Never once? That’s not possible.”

“Sure it is. Look at Joe DiMaggio.”

She glanced up then and grinned. Frankie walked in.

“There are moments, though,” the postmistress conceded, “when I do think about the letters that miss. I wonder whether they ought to—whether I ought to leave them where they fall.”

“You’re joking.”

“I’m not,” Iris replied calmly, opening the stamp drawer.

“Have you ever,” Frankie probed, “acted on that? Just let a letter be—”

“Never.” Iris snapped the drawer shut, but Frankie saw that the thought had crossed her mind, if fleetingly.

“How did you come to be postmistress, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“I passed the test.”

“What sort of test is it?”

“The postmaster’s test?”

Frankie nodded.

“Sums and differences,” Iris answered. It was a block. One did not, Frankie felt sure, become postmistress by being merely good at math.

“You like being in charge?”

“Are you interviewing me?” Miss James returned.

Frankie shook her head. “Just curious.”

“Yes.” Iris regarded her. “I like making sure everything stays on track. I like things in their place.”

“But it’s more than keeping everything on track, isn’t it? The whole town moves through here. You hold all the strings on your fingers, like a giant game of cat’s cradle.”

“That’s what they think,” Iris replied mildly.

“Who does?”

Iris tipped her chin in the direction of the town. “They want to believe that I’m in here keeping tabs on them—that because I see what comes to them, I’m somehow able to change things. Make things happen.”

“Maybe it’s only that they hope you’re watching.”

“Watching what?”

“Watching over them.” Frankie shrugged. “Watching their lives.”

Miss James raised her eyebrow and walked back into the sorting room. Frankie waited for her to come back.

“
Are
you watching?” Frankie asked.

“I beg your pardon?”

Frankie changed tacks, slightly embarrassed by the wistfulness she had heard in her own voice. “Well, think of all of the secrets you hold in your hands.”

“I don’t hold a goddamned thing in my hand but the mail,” Iris replied, setting down a thick stack of newspapers and a letter in front of Frankie.

“But think of it. Something could be diverted, or stopped, and it would be your hand that fixed it, your hand that set the story going again. You’re like a good narrator.” Frankie paused, noting the flush rise in Iris’s face. “Or even, the author. You could choose who gets their mail and who—”

“Even if I could, I wouldn’t, Miss Bard.” Iris cut her off. What did the reporter want? Why was she in here with her probing and her questions? “It goes against every single thing I hold dear.”

Frankie held her gaze. “Like what?”

“Order,” Iris answered. “Calm. Each thing in its place.”

“Sounds nice.” Frankie leaned on the counter. “Sounds sweet.”

“Nothing sweet about it.” Miss James lifted her head swiftly and stared at Frankie. “And you can take that high-and-mighty right out of your voice.”

The postmistress stared down at Frankie, impassive and watchful as a Madonna on a wall. Without warning, Frankie felt tears starting in her chest. “Miss James—”

“When a person writes a letter, they take a pen in their hand and write down what they need to onto a page. They put it in an envelope. They stamp it. And they bring it in to me.” Frankie raised her eyebrows, but Iris continued, paying no attention. “They hand it to me and I forward it. I put it in the mailbag. Mr. Flores takes it to Boston. From there it’s sorted and sent all over the country, or the world. That letter. That letter is what the whole thing is based on.”

“What whole thing?”

“All of it.” Iris slowed, the effort of saying it aloud making it hard to breathe. “There is an order running beneath us, an order and a reason, and every letter sent, every goddamned letter sent and received, proves it. Something begins, something finishes. Something is sent, something arrives. Every day. Every hour. As long as there are letters—”

“Horseshit.” Frankie broke in swiftly. “It’s you, Miss James, not some high-flying order, not some reason. It’s just us down here, doing our jobs.”

“You don’t believe that.” Iris was terse. “I don’t think you really believe that.”

“You don’t know the first thing about what I believe.”

Iris turned around and pointed to the black radio humped on the shelf above the mail sacks. “I listened to you last month on that thing, telling me to pay attention. I stood right here and heard your voice through there and it told us what we ought to do, in the face of it all, was
pay attention
.”

“Okay.” Frankie swallowed.

“What the hell are we paying attention for? Why else would we be watching?”

Frankie held her breath.

“It ’s nothing different in here. Watching out. Paying attention all the time, and then sounding the horn.”

“Paying attention to what?”

“Mistakes.” Iris answered swiftly. “Cracks. In the machinery.”

“Machinery?”

Iris studied the reporter. “Do you remember the story of Theseus?”

“Theseus?” This caught Frankie by surprise. “The Greek hero?”

Iris nodded. She wanted to quash the woman before her somehow, make her see. Make her take her tiresome, provoking questions elsewhere.

“Go on.” Frankie exhaled.

“When Theseus sailed off to war, he promised his father he’d return under white sails if he was alive. And every day, all the years his son was gone, the king climbed the cliff to watch for the sails and saw nothing. Every damn day for years.”

She stopped, not looking at Frankie. She had been told this story, long ago in school, and it had been the worst thing she’d ever heard.

“And then, one day, there were sails. Coming over the horizon. There were the sails indeed, after years of waiting. After years.”

Frankie waited.

“But the sails were black. Black as grief. So the father, the king, walked off the cliff to his death in the rocks below, while his son sailed forward, triumphantly, his promise forgotten.” Iris flushed. “Why didn’t someone on the ship look up and notice the mistake? Theseus could have fixed it. If only he had known.”

Frankie stared back at the postmistress, an idea creeping dimly forward.

“I’ve never gotten over the waste of that accident,” Iris said quietly.

“But the story knew.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The story”—Frankie nodded, still not quite sure what she was saying—“
it
knew. The story wouldn’t have mattered without the mistake. If Theseus had remembered to change the sails, the thing wouldn’t have been told. The story would have ended, as they all do, with the hero’s triumphant return. But that mistake made the story. That mistake
is
the story. That’s why it’s told.”

Iris stared. “You can’t really be so coldhearted.”

“It’s a myth, Miss James,” Frankie went on, exhausted. “Mistakes happen all the time.”