The Postmistress (40 page)

The Story Behind the Story

When I lived in a small town at the tip of Cape Cod, I used to watch the woman who delivered the mail walking up and down the street carrying her mailbag. I wondered if she ever read the postcards she was carrying, since she could. And I wondered if she kept the secrets, which she must have, about all of us. One afternoon, I had a vivid image of this woman standing in front of the sorting boxes in the back room of the post office with an envelope in her hand. I saw her standing there looking down at what she held, deciding, and then simply sliding the letter into her pocket. So Iris James, the postmistress, was born.

At the time, I remember thinking—great, there’s my next novel.

But whose letter was she holding, and why? I realized that in order for the novel to have any suspense, it had to be set during a time when an undelivered letter might actually matter—when the delay might create all sorts of mayhem. Because I had a whole stash of letters between my grandparents, written during the time my grandfather was serving in the Navy in the Pacific during World War II, I decided to set it then, plumbing their letters for atmosphere; and the letter the postmistress chose not to deliver would be from a man writing back to his wife on the home front.

So I had the outlines of a story, but still no idea what the story was about. In search of details that might trigger the novel’s direction, I spent months trolling through
Life
magazines from the war years, boning up on every aspect of the war—stumbling upon Edward R. Murrow’s broadcast of the Blitz in London, reading news reports of the refugees fleeing Europe in the summer of 1941, and discovering the firsthand report of a German U-boat captain who surfaced undetected in New York Harbor in January of 1942 and watched the lights of cars hum up and down the West Side Highway, unbeknownst to the city’s inhabitants.

As my dim sense of the time period grew brighter, I began to write the story of Emma and Will, how Iris James stood at the center of the town, and of her unexpected love for Harry Vale, a man who was convinced that the Germans were coming. One hundred pages into this town and this time, Frankie Bard stepped off the bus from Boston, arriving—completely unexpectedly—into the story.

But how did these characters combine to make a novel? How did their three stories lead to the moment at the sorting boxes when Iris decides not to deliver a letter? I still hadn’t a clue.

The one morning in the spring of 2001, I opened the newspaper to the now iconic photograph of a Palestinian father and his son crouched behind a bunker, caught in the crossfire between Israeli and Palestinian fighters, the son burrowed into his father’s lap as the father tries to protect him from bullets. The photograph captures the moment just before the boy is, in fact, shot and killed. And the fact that I—sitting at breakfast in Chicago, my own son reading the comics beside me—could see the last second of this boy’s life was unbearable. I wanted to write about this somehow—this aspect of war and its terrifying accidents and how we come to terms with the fact that wars are being waged
right now
, even as I write (and you read) these words. How do we
imagine
that simultaneity?

A few months later, I moved with my family to Washington, D.C., and so I was there on September 11. The city’s reaction to the attacks—the F16s flying overhead for weeks afterward, the tanks in the street, the signs that went up along major streets labeled EVACUATION ROUTE, the articles in
The Washington Post
detailing which of our neighborhoods would be affected by a dirty bomb, based on prevailing wind patterns—crystallized for me what it must have felt like in the United States immediately after Pearl Harbor. The question of how we know when we are really in danger as a nation became suddenly central. How do you come to understand that the moment you may be in is historic, and what do you do about it? What must it have been like for Americans trying to make sense of the news they were receiving from abroad?

I realized I wanted to write a war story that did not take place on the battlefield, but showed us around the edges of a war photograph or news report into the moments just after or just before what we read or see or hear.

By this time, I had read so much war reporting by the great journalists of the era—Martha Gellhorn, William Shirer, Ernie Pyle, Wes Gallagher—that the figure of the war correspondent had become compelling. But when I read that Bill Paley, the head of CBS, had decided—in a bid for radio’s dominance over print journalism—that the war was to be carried live, I realized that the story of the person who records the war, who narrates the war, who then goes on into war’s dailiness after making a broadcast, was one I wanted to tell.

As I began to haunt the Radio & Television Museum in Bowie, Maryland, listening to as many old broadcasts as I could, I realized that the immediacy of live reporting proved to be a double-edged sword: On the one hand, it brought a listener directly to the war. However, the rules of objectivity demanded that broadcasters had to walk a tight line, keeping emotion out of their voices, trying to prevent their voices from cracking. What would it be like, I wondered, for that voice carrying the war to be a woman’s?

With a handful of notable exceptions, war reporting remained largely an all-male club. This was even more true in radio, where there was a distinct prejudice against the sound of women’s voices. Betty Wason and Mary Marvin Breckinridge were two women who broadcast from Europe in the early years of the war; Breckinridge, in fact, worked for Murrow for the first six months of the Blitz. They served as Frankie Bard’s inspiration.

The deeper my research took me, the more I thought about the position of those who can see what is going on, or see parts of what is going on, and are powerless to do anything but try to turn people’s heads in that direction. Frankie Bard’s epiphany at the center of the novel—when she realizes that she has seen someone die and knows the ending of a story his parents will never hear—carries the great sorrow implicit in the responsibility of knowledge. And I realized that what happened to Frankie in Europe was that the responsibility of carrying the voices of all the people she meets, whose endings she cannot know, grows unbearable. The portable disc recorder (which was not, in fact, put into wide use by the BBC and CBS until a little later in the war) became a vehicle for her to save them somehow.

And this became for me the central question of the novel: How do you bear (in both senses of the word) the news?

How Iris and Frankie come to betray everything they stand for—that mail must be delivered, that truth must be reported—is the war story I hoped to tell. It is the story that lies around the edges of the photographs, or at the end of the newspaper account. It’s about the lies we tell others to protect them, and about the lies we tell ourselves in order not to acknowledge what we can’t bear: that we are alive, for instance, and eating lunch, while bombs are falling, and refugees are crammed into camps, and the news comes toward us every hour of the day. And what, in the end, do we do?