The Postmistress (38 page)

Emma lay down again and closed her eyes, her heart pounding, that sound echoing in her ears. Keening. That’s what that was.
And the little boy dropped to his knees
. There was a country of mourners, a country like sickness, unimaginable to the healthy, and Emma knew she was going there. Her heart banged against her ribs, and then it wasn’t her heart, it was her baby pounding hard inside her.

She rolled onto her side to cushion the baby’s kicks and the sand on her cheek and the salt brought back Will the second-to-last morning when they’d come out here
so they could make some noise
, he’d whispered; and his lips on hers were warm and his touch opened her lips under his and she could feel the opening all throughout her body. She had smiled against his mouth and cast off into the tide, letting herself be pulled down into the sand, feeling it shift and mold around her, her duffel coat buffering the cold. Behind the horizon of Will’s head, the morning sky arched over her and its blue unblinking stare held hers. And as he sank into her with a groan, she had imagined God looking down and smiling on the bird they made, beating frantic rhythms rising into air.

When she sat up, Frankie wasn’t in sight. The sky was tipping at the top of the afternoon and the sandpipers had grown bold again and skittered on the widening beach right next to her. The surf rolled forward and the wave coming in recalled a giant’s hand, the white knuckles of surf drumming, the fingers tapping, tapping and pulling back.

Just beyond the edge of the breakwater, the gray outline of a battleship overlapped with the smaller, sleeker point of a cruiser alongside. Somewhere, far beyond these two, she knew several more wheeled and turned, practicing maneuvers. The cruiser pulled free of the hull of the battleship and the white plume of its wake appeared to her stark as a knifecut on the blue water. She turned and saw Frankie sitting on the top of the dune path, watching over her. There was the bowl of light and sky arching overhead; a peeper crossed by. Frankie stood up, and the up and down of her body stood like a signpost at a crossroads in the middle of a desert. Here, the reporter’s body said to the sky, the sea, the woman below her on the sand, here.

“Come on,” Frankie waved.

Climbing up from the bottom to the top of the dune was like climbing up a waterfall, having to dig into the sand even as it fell away under her weight. Just below the lip, Emma looked up, and it was as though she climbed out of a hole into the sky.

They took a few steps into the duneland and the sound of the surf fell immediately away, giving over to the hum of trucks and the train arriving on its harbor tracks. When they reached the middle ridge of the dunes, they could see both bodies of water ahead and behind, the sea lying blue there beyond the triangle of houses and here running into the plat of sand.

Emma might have liked to say something to Frankie, something large to show that she understood the cry Frankie had let loose on the water. Something, anything at all. She might have liked to touch her, gently, too, though she did not. She walked beside her, side by side, in quiet.

They emerged onto the town road from the dune path at the edge of the evening, and the windows and glass doors shot back the sinking light. Her eyes picked out the row of cottages at the very end of the road and then, by relation, her own roof. “Hang on,” she said.

Frankie straightened and turned around. Emma was staring down the road to her house where Harry and Iris sat on the porch, clearly waiting.

If she didn’t walk any closer, Emma thought, if she turned around and slipped back into the dunes, if she made her way all the way back across the sand and to the edge of the water, and started swimming, she could swim to him and find him and make what they had to say not true.

“I’ve got you,” Frankie promised, and she took Emma’s hand in hers.

27.

T
HEY HAD ALL been so gentle with her. Frankie, Miss James, and Harry. When she had risen the three steps to the porch where they waited with the news, she had stumbled, and Harry had walked to her. Come on, he had whispered, come on, put your arms around me. And she had looked up into his face and seen it. She had been so tired. But he smelled of axle grease and Old Spice and leather, and she raised her arms and let herself be carried into the house like a child. He laid her down on the sofa, calling her dear, and tucked the blanket around her, watchful as any mother.

A telegram had come. There had been a mix-up. Dr. Fitch had been hit by a taxi on May 18 and buried in Brompton Cemetery on the twenty-eighth. Deepest Regrets. And then Miss James had put the letter in Emma’s hand.

“Dr. Fitch wanted me to give it to you, if he . . .”—Iris flushed—“when he died.”

Emma sat there on the sofa between Harry and Iris and looked down at the envelope.
Emma
, it said. As though he were in the next room, calling.
Emma.

Frankie wanted to stand up, but she was afraid to in case Iris stood up also and left. Emma slit open the envelope and pulled the letter out.

All the breath rushed out of Frankie’s body, and she rose and made her way blindly down the hall where the breakwater lights blinked at her through the kitchen window a long way across the scuffed water. She walked to the window and stood, her mind stalled, her mind spun and stalled. Frankie leaned over to the counter and pulled the cord on the kitchen lamp. She filled the kettle and put it on to boil. There were no cigarettes, and Emma was low on tea. She shook the last of it into the bottom of the china pot. The light from the Frigidaire slivered on the linoleum, and she pulled the bottle of milk out and poured it into the pitcher, holding the door open with her hip, then she slid it back in and slammed the handle shut. When the kettle blew, she poured the water and walked back into the front room with the tea things. The three of them hadn’t moved from the sofa, though Emma had Harry’s handkerchief in her hand.

Iris reached for the lamp and switched it on. Frankie sank down beside the table and poured the milk into the bottom of the mug and then rested the silver strainer over the rim and lifted the teapot and poured. The steam hit her chin, dampening it. She could feel Emma watching her.

Emma held out her letter to Frankie. “Read it.”

“I can’t read your letter.” Frankie’s voice shook.

“Please.” Emma handed it up to her and Frankie took it.

Sweetheart,
it began,
If you hold this in your hand, I will never hold that hand again.

Frankie closed her eyes and lowered the letter.

“Did you finish?”

“I can’t.”

“Please, Miss Bard.” Emma’s voice caught. “That’s him, there—on that page. I want you to see him.”

Frankie shivered.

I’m not going home
, he’d said, just after he’d looked at Frankie and said
, it all adds up.

When she looked up, Emma was watching her and smiled. And it was with a shock of relief that Frankie realized she was never going to tell. She was never going to hand the letter she had brought to Emma. She had carried it up here, and she would carry it away. The news had come. Will Fitch was dead. Iris had given Emma this last letter, the letter he had meant her to read when he died. Frankie had nothing to add but Will’s happiness that night beside her in the dark, and she would not pass that on. She crossed the room, sank down beside the slight woman in the chair, put her arms around her, and held her.

And the seed that had lain curled in Frankie’s heart all this while unfurled. Petal after white petal opened slowly from her heart and started reaching up and out. Some stories don’t get told. Some stories you hold on to. To stand and watch and hold it in your arms was not cowardice. To look straight at the beast and feel its breath on your flanks and not to turn—one could carry the world that way.

They sat together, the four of them, a little longer, before Harry rose slowly to his feet. It was Thursday. It was the end of the afternoon. It was time to pick up and carry on to the other side of the day.

AND THOUGH SHE KNEW Harry was going to go back down the hill and to his watch, and that she’d see him later, Iris didn’t want him to leave; she wanted him to stay a little longer here and then to come and sit in the back room of the post office, and then when it was time to close, to take down the flag and walk her home. She wanted him near and followed him out onto Emma’s porch.

He had turned around at the bottom of the stairs and looked up at her, and she smiled down at him and nodded very slightly, made shy by the women in the quiet room behind her.

All that he loved in this world stood there above him. And as he looked at her, the word
Always
came into his head and stopped there
.
“See you tonight,” he called as he opened the door of his truck and climbed inside.

It was five-thirty on a Thursday afternoon. Across the green, the lights were on in Alden’s store and along the shuttered street the yellow bands glowed through the slats. Harry climbed up the town hall stairs quickly, without thinking, urging his body upward as though he were going to meet someone. At the top, he paused, winded. The bells above his head struck the half hour, and as the clamor died away Harry closed his eyes.

He thought of Will Fitch gone. He thought of Emma. And he watched the grocer’s daughter come down the post office steps—annoyed to see it closed—stop and tuck her hair inside her scarf before she started away swiftly along Front Street. He followed her all the way to the break in the fish houses where the harbor appeared. The waves in the window’s old glass shivered her form so she seemed like water walking on water. Her red scarf appeared and disappeared between the dark green of the beeches. He followed her, like a lighthouse keeper, to the end of Front Street and all the way out of sight.

He skimmed his gaze back across the roofs of town and toward the center and the harbor beyond and paused. Then Harry stood up and marked the thirty feet down the town hall attic to the window facing out to sea.

He raised the binoculars and anchored his elbows on the window ledge before him. The sun bounced off the chop in the near stretch, the tips of the waves like white kerchiefs waving. There was a record run on horse mackerel, and the trap boats were returning to the pier with fish so big caught in their weirs, the tail ends had to be sawed off and tucked inside the gutted bodies to fit the four-foot boxes stacked and stapled and bound up Cape. He slid his gaze off ten degrees to the east. Nothing. He leaned forward.

Far to the east, beyond the fishing boats, what looked like the gray shadow of a whale broke the surface of the water, waves pouring off its sides. It nosed forward slowly, the high wide turret of the U-boat climbing up into the empty air. Long and low along the water, the dark gray menace showed only its top half.

“Holy God,” he breathed.

The U-boat stopped forward propellers and the gray shoulders of the sub rocked, holding steady, its metal sail fifteen feet above the waves. The Germans inside must have no idea how far in they had come; any farther and they would beach. Harry lowered his binoculars, barely breathing.

He raised them again and watched as the head and shoulders of a man climbed onto the bridge at the top of the sail, followed by what looked like an officer.

Come on.
His heart raced, nearly laughing at the joke—they had come and here he was. Far away and up here behind glass.
Come on, you fuckers,
his eyes on the German sailor who had swung himself onto the rim of the bridge and was lightly pulling himself to standing, settling his body against the roll of the submarine beneath him. The officer raised a pair of binoculars and started to scan the shore.

“Come on, come a little closer,” Harry whispered. “Come on in, you fuckers. You’re going to run out of water.”

A massive knock inside his chest made him drop his binoculars and grab for the windowsill to catch his breath.

Another knock came inside, and this one dropped him to his knees. He opened his mouth to shout—It is coming. They are coming. And a sound he’d never heard came from down inside him, came up through his throat, somewhere between a groan and a laugh, and the knock inside had spread sideways, and he closed his eyes to shut it away. He picked himself up from the ground, stumbling down the length of the attic where the rope to the tower bell hung. He could see it. He groaned again, the pain knocking his breath away, and grabbed hold of the line and pulled, grunting, not breathing. A feeble iron tap sounded. Another knock came at his heart, this time shutting out the light in the room. He pulled. Pulled with all his last life. Far away, there was a great clash. Again, one last time. Another crash. He had always known it. They had come.