The Postmistress (37 page)

“Do you think I don’t know that?” Iris turned, her voice shaking, and pointed to the sorting room. “Every minute—every second of every minute,” she corrected, “there is the chance in there for something to go wrong.”

“But it doesn’t because of you, is that it?”

“It does. Things go wrong all the time, but I catch them. And when I do”—Iris leaned forward on the counter—“when I do, Miss Bard, I realize that I have been
allowed
to catch them. Every mistake, every accident, every bit of chance caught—is a look at God. It is God looking at us.”

“Sure it is,” said Frankie, gathering the newspapers in front of her, the blood high in her cheeks. She almost made it to the door. Something loose that had been flapping in the back of her mind caught hold. The talk was fine. The talk was cheap, wasn’t it—here, a million miles from where Will Fitch had been hit by a taxi, where Thomas had been shot in front of her, where every day people were dying—real people ripped out of their lives, their bodies blown to bits, shot up and left to cry. She turned around.

“Listen to me,” Frankie began. “A few months ago, I was sitting on a bench with a mother and her baby. It was a lovely spring day. There was a dog.
Dog
, said the baby to his mother—”

“Miss Bard—” Iris interrupted.

But Frankie kept right on going, staring at Iris, daring her to stop. “
That’s right,
the mother said.
Dog
, he said again. She nodded.
Let’s go then, shall we? Go
, said the baby.
Right
, said the mother.
Go
, smiled the baby and then the sirens went off and we all looked up into the sky. It was daylight. It was noon. They were bombing at noon—there must be some mistake, I thought.”

“Miss Bard!” It was intolerable. Did the reporter think Iris didn’t know about horror? About anguish?

“There was that one last moment,” Frankie went right on, “and then I began to run in the direction I was facing, I don’t even recall that I saw anything, for all I remember I could have run with my eyes closed, like a mole nosing toward some dim memory of an opening I had passed coming to the park—a cellar? the tube? And I threw myself down into that hole just as the building on the side of the park where we had all been sitting split apart with a tremendous noise. The noise and then the afternoise—the mortar and brick and glass hurled high up, landing back down on the earth all over, with a thud and a shatter. Then came the screams. I climbed back up the basement stairs and the white dust from the building cascaded down like snow. I could hear people crying out. Someone opened a door. Someone called. I heard the steady raining down of dust.

“And through it, toward me, someone was walking steadily, as though she had walked from Scotland and walked through the bomb and was going to walk out the other side. That’s what I remember thinking, the way she was walking, she seemed immortal. Then I saw that it was the mother from the park, her baby in her arms tucked up tight. She was whispering in his ear as she walked through the others slowly picking themselves up, whispering over and over, the baby’s face turned up to her, his blood running down the mother’s skirt and blouse.
Darling darling darling
she was saying into the baby’s ear.”

The postmistress slapped both hands down on the counter so hard that Frankie felt the wood jump. “Stop it,” cried Iris swiftly. “Stop it! Damn it all. Why can’t you stop?”

Frankie blinked, her mouth closing over the end. Her round eyes roved and seemed to rest on the calendar behind Miss James’s head as though she were picking her way carefully, slowly back, rock by rock across a stream.

“Because it happened,” she said, and quietly, quickly as she could, made it across the lobby and through the doors.

The door thunked after the woman, and Iris stood where she was for several minutes. She stood stock-still and closed her eyes. Bit by bit, sounds reemerged and she smelled the salt in the breeze as it shifted. She stood there, very quietly, to let her heart sink back to normal, to let the picture that that other woman had held and shaken in front of her fade.

For Iris had seen it, she had seen the mother’s face, the eyes frantically searching for help even as she walked straight ahead, whispering into the small dying ear.
Darling, darling, darling.
Iris covered her mouth. She had seen them so clearly on the waves of that woman’s voice. That same voice she’d listened to on the radio and turned off when it got to be too much. The clock ticked again. The
tap tap
of someone’s heels. The wind again. Iris turned around to the sorting room. Two sacks of mail waited where Flores had dropped them. There was the kettle on the hot plate. There was the shade pulled before the blinding slant of afternoon light.

But there she was also, her own hand slipping a letter into her pocket. There she had stood at the table in the back room and cheated Time.
Pay attention.
Every single word she had just fired at the reporter she believed to the core of her soul. And yet she had slipped a letter out of the machinery she so proudly tended.
The story knew.
Iris looked down at the stamp drawer. “Why did none of Theseus’s sailors notice the mistake and call out to their captain?” she had asked her teacher, bewildered.

“That’s the sorrow of the story,” the teacher had gently answered. “They simply didn’t. And Fate would have it that the father would see.”

“But, who is Fate?” the child Iris had persisted, but her teacher never answered.

26.

L
IKE A PENCIL line drawn between the beginning and the end of the beginning, on the eleventh of September, Roosevelt announced that the U.S. Navy would escort convoys of American merchant vessels across the Atlantic, shooting on sight any German raiders. Now the U-boats, who ran in wolf packs, would run head-on into the navy. And Russia, God bless her, refused to fall.
When you see a rattlesnake poised to strike, you do not wait until he has struck before you crush him,
Roosevelt warned.

The summer people climbed into their cars and snaked in a long line back to Boston and New York. Children pulled their kneesocks on and went to school. The tea dance players, knickknack shopkeepers, and café owners walked to the beach and lay there, falling asleep in the last of the sun. The holiday was over though the sky overhead still shone. Tourists gone, pockets fuller, the winter ahead could rock on the runners of one of the best summers Franklin had had since the Depression. And the post office inspector had denied Harry Vale’s request, so the post office flag flying high above the town seemed to thumb her nose at the Germans, waving at those ships as gaily as a girl. The town was cast back to itself like a bare bone on the sand, and the reporter stayed.

“What
is
she doing here, do you think?”

“Who?”

“The radio gal.” Iris pointed her cigarette in the direction of Frankie ’s cottage, where Frankie’s bicycle leaned against the back. Harry turned around in his chair and looked across the three cottage lawns that separated them.

“Resting. That’s what she’s said.”

Iris nodded, unconvinced. “Tough to be a war correspondent without a war.”

“I think she may have quit.”

Iris shook her head. “Not that one.”

Harry raised his eyebrow. “How do you know so much about her?”

“I don’t. I don’t know anything, that’s what worries me.”

“She’s shell-shocked,” Harry said.

Iris frowned over at him.

“Iris.” Harry reached across and took her hand. “What could she possibly have come here for other than what she says?”

Iris pushed up out of the chair, down the steps, and to the end of the tiny patch of lawn halted by the scraggy beach roses before the sea. Frankie Bard was a messenger. With something hidden away. She was sure of it.

SEEN FROM ABOVE, Frankie thought, letting the door slam after her, it would be impossible to tell whether this woman walking out every day, hesitating at the gate of the Fitch house, and continuing on into the dunes, had any stake at all in the world other than in holding this pattern, sleeping, eating, waking, walking out.

Late afternoon had climbed up the rod of the sky and hung there, the air clear and sharp, the blues of the water and the sky playing against each other, reflecting and resisting like sisters. She had set on the path that led through a grove of beech trees into the dunes behind town, and the sun bore down through Frankie’s blouse as though curious. Someone was ahead of her in the curved hollow the bent trees made; she saw that it was Emma, walking without any interest in what she passed, as though someone had told her it would be good for her, and she obliged.

After a bit, Emma turned. “Oh,” she said, putting some enthusiasm into her voice. “Hello.”

“Hello,” Frankie answered and caught up. “How’re things?”

“Well enough,” Emma said, her eyes ahead of her.

“That doesn’t sound too good.”

Emma didn’t reply.

“May I walk with you a little?”

The tawny flank of the dunes appeared at the end of the tunnel of trees. It looked hot through there, and they walked slowly in single file for about twenty minutes, Frankie behind Emma, through the sand hills to the sea. When they reached the edge of the dune, Emma slid herself heavily down the dune cliff to the beach below, sliding and skidding all the way down to the beach, where she lowered herself onto the sand. Frankie followed and came to a rest standing above Emma who lay with her arms spread out on either side.

“Go on,” she said, peering up at Frankie standing above her. “Lie down.”

“In the sand?”

“Yes.” Emma smiled for the first time. “Stretch out. You can’t hear the waves any other way.”

“I hear them just fine.”

“Lie down,” coaxed Emma and closed her eyes.

Frankie stood awhile longer and then, not looking down at the pregnant woman stretched on the sand, she squatted and dropped to her knees, lowering her bottom slowly. Then she stretched her legs out, keeping them together, and lay back. She closed her eyes. Immediately, she felt the wind shift above her, flowing over her rather than at her shoulders and back. It made her feel welcome somehow.

The sea still rolled and burst. The wind washed along her skin, the cool sand pricking the backs of her knees, Emma’s breath rising and falling beside her. Frankie lay there, the surf lazing in and out. The little breeze shifted and touched.

“Can I ask you something?” Emma said, finally.

“Shoot.”

“That little boy you walked home after the bombs one night—”

“Billy.” Frankie looked over at her.

“The boy who lost his mother. You said he fell to his knees when he realized she had died.”

“He did.”

“And then what?” Emma waited. “What happened?”

“I don’t know.”

Emma was quiet. “Weren’t you worried? Didn’t you want to know if he was all right?”

“Sure I did. Of course I did,” Frankie sighed. “But I never saw him after.”

Emma didn’t answer right away.

“So you could only see what’s going on in pieces.”

“As compared to what?”

“How it all goes together.” And now she started to talk almost to herself, as if Frankie weren’t there. “There are signs all the time. Things that repeat, things that overlap. Things you can’t explain, but refer to each other.” Emma was sitting. “Maggie Winthrop dying like she did, for instance, and Will taking it to mean that he ought to go to England, as though it were a sign. When she was sick already, she must have been—” Emma stopped, remembering Frankie across from her. “And now you see, they’re both gone and it’s me who’s pregnant. There’s a line between them, and it has occurred to me lately that I ought to understand that, see? They’re both gone. The one led to the other, and something else leads out of this. Oh God, I’m tired,” she sighed. She hadn’t said aloud the real sign, the clear signal that had come through last month in the shape of a pair of overalls.

“Listen.” Frankie reached over and touched Emma’s hand. “It all happens very fast over there—you’re in a bar and then you’re outside and then you’re inside and there’s the boy and you walk him home and then you’re home and—there isn’t a line between them at all.”

“But there is, there must be.” Emma shook her head. “What about all those people?”

“What people?”

“I hear their voices sometimes at night, coming from your cottage. Otto says they are the people from France.”

“Yes.”

“You brought them back and played them—for Otto.”

Frankie looked at her, helpless in the face of Emma’s logic.

“Who else in this town needed to hear those voices more than Otto?” Emma asked softly. “Tell me that.”

Frankie shook her head.

“What are you going to do with all those records?” Emma asked.

Frankie turned her head.

“All those people.”

“I don’t know,” Frankie answered quietly.

“You ought to let them go,” Emma told her. “You ought to let everyone hear them.”

“Yeah?” Frankie challenged. “Why? Who around here wants to hear?”

Emma took a long time to answer. Frankie waited, her eyes fixed on Will’s widow.

“Listen.” Emma glanced at her, and looked away. “I don’t know anything about what you do, Miss Bard. But I do know you told me a story about a boy I couldn’t shake.”

“Okay.” Frankie watched Emma.

“You made the war come alive.”

Frankie lay down in the sand.

“He was alive, because you were so”—Emma searched—“broken. Your voice was so sad.”

Frankie looked straight up into the soaring blue cap of the sky.

“Those people on the trains talked to you.” Emma stopped. “They must have told you their names and answered your questions because they wanted you to do something—pass them on, somehow.”

Frankie stood up without a word and walked straight down to the water, coming to a stop with the tips of her shoes in the lip of the surf, and for a crazy half-minute Emma thought she was going to start swimming; instead, Frankie opened her mouth and what came out of her body was a wordless cry. Of pain or rage, it was impossible to tell.