The Postmistress (6 page)

That was it, wasn’t it? The nothing between. That scant air between the couple kissing this evening: their bodies leaning against each other before going underground was the same air between the gunners and the bombs, and it was the same air that carried her voice across the sea, on sound waves, to people listening in their chairs at home. A newspaper story had to be cast in lead, the words had to be bound and trussed, printed onto paper, folded, and delivered to boys who’d stand on corners saying
Extra Extra,
the story held in a hand, the story bound. In radio, the story flew into the air, from lips to ear—like a secret finding its immediate spot in the dark lodges of the brain—the dome of the sky collapsing space, and the world become a great whispering gallery for us all.

A terrific explosion banged overhead and then the bright torch of an incendiary streaked straight down from the sky. Frankie stopped where she was and began to count, as if she were counting the miles between thunder and lightning. The underside of the silver barrage balloons sailing above the city reflected the flames, carrying their color sideways across the dark. Boom, came an answer. Safe. She didn’t know when she had started the counting, but she’d forgotten how not to anymore. It had been about a mile ahead of her, somewhere near Parliament, she guessed. She walked forward, waiting for her eyes to adjust back to the dark. Just ahead of her the line of white paint the Civil Defense had painted on the pavement to guide people along the unlit streets came to an abrupt stop, then rose three feet in the air where they had painted the circles around the trunk of a tree.

“Mind where you’re going!” someone said right beside her.

“Sorry,” she called after the dark shape hurrying past.

It took her over an hour to make her way back to Broadcasting House. The thick fog of smoke clogged her lungs and she pulled her collar up around her ears, walking forward through the crash and blaze. There were cars lined up outside of bomb sites, orderly as taxis lined up after the theater let out, and a woman in a canteen truck pouring tea. Black and red and the blue blaze of the weird night light caught the sheen of an auto’s hood passing swiftly under a bomber’s moon.

“You look like hell,” Murrow observed as she hung her coat on top of his on the back of the studio door.

“Well, thank you, Mr. Murrow,” Frankie replied tartly, sliding into the chair.

“What have you got?”

She grinned up at him. “It’s mad, Ed. These boys firing round after round into the sky—you can’t see anything, and after a while the noise and the guns and the slam bam, boom, over and over—well, you start to ride it,” she said, “like skiing, down down down into the white, mindless, given up to it.” She stopped. Tom had given the fist with five fingers through the glass behind Murrow’s head.

“We’ll play the opening bit,” Murrow told her, “and then you simply come in and tell it, tell it all just like you were starting to—and with that coil in your voice, Frankie. Keep that.”

She nodded and when Tom gave the signal and the light went on and Ed looked at her and started the chat that led into the story, she smiled and answered, and then he, too, fell away and she closed her eyes as she always did and simply began to say what she had to to her mother—imagining her sitting beside the jet-black box in the front room at number 14 Washington Square—about the men and the cold and the noise and the great surge toward fighting—that was it, wasn’t it?—how your blood roared up into the moon with the shells and how different it was from sitting in a shelter underground.

“Put yourself in the place of any of these men,”
she said as she slowed to her ending.
“Not a one of them wants to be the one who gets it. Still, there comes a wild, intoxicating rush where you take your heart in your hands and hurl yourself right into the teeth of the danger, to forget the danger. So be it, you think, it’s all up to God”—
she smiled
—“and some men. Over here, you close your eyes, do your job, and fling yourself toward it—whatever it may be.”

JESUS
, Harry Vale turned all the way around in his chair in Franklin, Massachusetts, to look at the wireless.

Harry snapped off her voice and sat there, without moving. Throttled in the gal’s voice he heard the rush forward toward the end, the leap that you take into the middle of danger when all you can do is look straight at it, because whatever is coming will come. Harry had forgotten how that felt. Hell, he had heard her
smiling
, though it was past one o’clock in the morning in London, and eight o’clock here. He stood up without thinking, and switched the light off in his sitting room, pulling his jacket off the back of the chair. There, in the new dark of the room that stretched above the shop of his garage, he stood and listened.

The foghorn moaned on Long Point. Harry zippered his jacket and made his way down the dim lit upstairs hall.

He passed the tiny bedroom he had given Otto Schelling in the spring, and saw that the German man had fallen asleep again with the light on, fully clothed. Sleeping like that, his thin blond hair fallen away from his cheeks and onto the pillow, he looked like a child. On the day Flores had brought him down on the bus from Nauset, the man had stood for a long while on the pavement where the bus let off, and it had been cold that afternoon, never mind that it was April. Clear and cold enough to scare the tulips back down for another month. And long after the bus pulled away, through the café window Harry had watched Otto, still on the spot, utterly stalled, as though he had run out of gas. Exhausted and lost, the man stood there, it seemed to Harry, as if waiting for the world to stop spinning.

It had been queer, Flores said later. The Kraut just arriving like that out of the blue and staying.

Harry shrugged.

“Why is he
here
, Harry? That’s all I’m saying.”

“He may be a Jew,” Harry answered.

Harry pulled the door closed on Otto, passing along the hallway and down the stairs, out the door at the bottom into the night. No one was out tonight, the town dark save for the three streetlamps put in to great fanfare last year, punctuating the three blocks of the center of town. To his right lay the green, the town hall, and across the street from them, the post office. To his left, and vanishing into the dark, the road climbed up the hill and away. It was the radio hour up and down the street, the hour before bed. Harry shook a cigarette out of his pocket and lit it, his eye on a pair of headlights moving slowly toward him from the houses on the other side of town. The lights shone along the wooden fences and then, for an instant, lit up the whitewashed flagpole on the post office, rising high above the town like a ghost finger pointing in the night. Harry frowned. With lights on it like that, the flagpole clearly marked the town’s center. He ought to speak to Iris about lopping off the top, he thought, lifting his hand in a wave to the car. Honking as he passed, the doctor’s face flared briefly in the reflected light of the gas station sign, and then it was darkness behind him, darkness pulling the two red tail-lights away with him up the hill.

Iris. Harry grinned stupidly. He could almost hear her—
you want to cut off my flagpole, Mr. Vale?
He nodded, still smiling, but it wasn’t a joke. Across the road lay the swath of harbor beach. Past the gray sand it was black. And past that—in the space of eighteen months, Hitler had snatched Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and France, and whether he would cross the twenty-one miles of the Channel, marching triumphant up the Dover Road to London, remained to be seen. Harry stared across that vast dark and tossed his cigarette into the gutter. He turned in the direction Dr. Fitch had driven, but it was pitch-black, the red lights long gone—the town hidden again in darkness. And then Harry turned and stared back out across the water, where the war was waiting for all of them.

3.

A
T THE REAR of the post office, the wind whipped straight off the water into the high-ceilinged sorting room, and Iris found herself stiff with cold after a couple of hours of work. An inlander, she was used to winter snow, but the wind blasting unchecked across the Atlantic found its way inside and gripped hard at anything it could. She drew the school map out from its mailer and unrolled it on the table. The green, demarcated world before the war spread out.

There was France and Germany. Austria. England. Poland. Letters printed in straight lines in the comforting typeface of school, the world ordered as neatly as the men now were. Since the draft had begun in October, each man’s number pulled by hand from the War Department’s glass fishbowl and recorded, the roads and rails were full of American boys being sent all over the country, leaning over books and maps in their olive drab, sprawled in the too tight seats moving from Ohio to Omaha. Tennessee. Georgia. The Carolinas. From town the two Snow brothers would go first, then a Wilcox, a Duarte, and a Boggs. Johnny Cripps and Dr. Fitch had numbers so high, it was as good as if they hadn’t been called. They’d never be needed now.

But Iris James had ordered a map nonetheless. And now Florence Cripps, owner of the largest B&B in town, stopped right where she was in the doorway of the post office lobby and put her pocketbook down on the floor. Large and handsome with blond frizzed hair in a good silk dress, Mrs. Cripps stood like a striped tent without an occasion, studying the scene before her. Full attention must be paid. For here was Franklin’s most public official, stepped away from her window and standing on a stool, carefully tacking up a large school map of the world, blithely covering the faces of the Most Wanted.

“Iris! What are you doing?”

“Putting up a map,” replied the postmaster, giving a good solid bang upon the last tack with a hammer.

“But—Iris,” Mrs. Cripps said reasonably, wishing only to point a gentle finger, certainly not to wag. “What if one should come through
here
”—she advanced upon Iris—“then we’re lost. We’ll never know the criminal element in our midst.”

Iris stepped off her stool and unlocked the door in the heavy oak partition between the lobby and the sorting room at the back of the post office. “In all your life, Florence, have you ever seen one of the men in these drawings?”

Mrs. Cripps took every question seriously, and as Miss James was a federal official, she gave the question still more of its due. But no, she shook her head, she couldn’t say as she ever had.

“There you go then. You’ve been fine until now. Should be so again.”

“But a map, Iris? We hardly need to know where we are.”

Iris turned around. “If we are going to war, then we’d better know where the boys are going.”

“Our boys are
not
going.” Mrs. Cripps did not like how easily the woman had said “the boys.” They weren’t hers to speak of like that. “The president has promised,” continued Florence. “And Churchill has said he doesn’t need our boys to be sent,
not this year, nor next
”—she recited the prime minister’s ringing words—“
nor any other
. He said that.”

Iris shrugged. “They’ll have to.”

“Oh, and why’s that?”

Iris stuck her pencil behind her ear. “The British aren’t enough, Florence. They never have been. What’ve you got?”

Rankled, Mrs. Cripps handed over her single letter. Iris took it through with her, and reappeared behind the window, throwing Florence’s letter upon the scales.

When word got out that an unmarried woman was coming to take old Postmaster Snow’s job a year ago, it must be said there were doubts. Mrs. Cripps had made sure she was standing at her sink watching out the kitchen window when the bus with the new postmaster drove into town. Right away the woman’s neat figure and the black beret pinned on top of her straight red hair signaled trouble ahead. Attention would have to be paid.

“She’ll do the trick, I’d say,” Johnny Cripps drawled at his mother’s elbow.

“It doesn’t matter to me what she does, as long as she stays at the job,” Mrs. Cripps returned. “Though it’s still a mystery how the United States government sees fit to hire an aging single woman in such a position of influence, when there are plenty of men around unable to find work right now.”

Mother and son watched the new postmaster follow Flores, the bus driver, along the sidewalk to the bottom of the post office stairs where he set down her three suitcases, touched the soft brim of his hat, and left her. They watched her take off her beret and slowly stuff it in the pocket of her greatcoat. Still she didn’t move, she seemed rapt instead in a long consideration of the solid brick building before her. And then, just before pushing open the gate, the new postmaster had turned and taken a good long look at the town.

“Well!” Mrs. Cripps burst out. “She won’t find anyone around here to marry!”

“She may not be looking.”

“Everyone is looking.” Mrs. Cripps smiled at her son a little dangerously. “Even if they don’t think it.”

Like a stone tossed into a flock of birds, talk startled swiftly into flight whenever the new postmaster was mentioned. Miss James was easy on the eyes, though no one agreed as to how. Tall and slim, she wore the Postal Department’s standard-issue navy blue cardigan buttoned at the neck, so it swung over her shoulders like a light cape, leaving her freckled arms to move freely in and out with the deliberate care of a page boy, or a squire.

That image, of course, disregarded the postmaster’s lips, painted a good bold red, which alarmed some, until the temperature of those lips could be fully taken by the married women in town. Within days, however, it was clear they were nothing to worry over—no more sinister than a channel marker at the mouth of a well-run harbor.

No, it became clear to them that Miss Iris James’s motives were best understood by looking around at the Franklin post office. As in any of their houses, the spirit of the woman had insinuated itself firmly there. Inside the lobby, the wastepaper basket was emptied regularly, and the pads of money order application blanks were stacked firmly upon the wall desk. The black-and-white government posters never had a chance to flap untidily in the breeze, pinned as they were on all four corners directly into the big bulletin board hung to the side of the postmaster’s window. Not once on Miss James’s watch did wadded-up envelopes, torn scraps of letters, or ripped catalogs lie on the floor below the tiers of gun-metal lockboxes, as they did in some towns down Cape. One entered, as one did every day, and was immediately met with a sense of calm born out of rigid adherence to an unwavering routine.