The Postmistress

by Sarah Blake

  Mrs. Cripps decided that she had quite a lot to tell Marnie Niles. Harry’s hair was combed, for starters. And as he crossed the lobby, she could tell without looking that the temperature had risen slightly behind the window. Oh, she smiled to herself, I will be right in the end about this one. She turned back to Iris and patted the counter between them. “Good-bye, Miss James. I have work to do. Good luck with that,” she pointed.

  Harry set down the mug he was carrying and looked at the canceling machine. “You having some trouble with that?”

  “Yes,” answered Iris, flushing, acutely aware that it was just the two of them suddenly, alone in the post office. “It’s sticking on me.”

  “Let’s have a look.”

  Iris pushed the small machine across to Harry. He picked it up in his hands and shook it. It didn’t make a sound. Then he put it down very gently and reached for a screwdriver in his pocket, looking up at Iris for her okay. She nodded.

  “What do you suppose happened?”

  “Beats me,” he answered with the cheerfulness of someone who’s been around machines all his life. “Things break.”

  How was it possible that he wouldn’t know—or that he wasn’t bothered by not knowing? Iris watched as he carefully loosened the four brass screws that held the front in place. The inside of the machine resembled the gears of a clock and the tiny hammers with the dates, little bells. He leaned down and blew into the belly of the machine, pulled back and looked, then blew again. Iris watched his fingers. There had been nothing said between them, nothing at all but this kind of steady attention. He was in every day for his mail, and though at first she had thought she ought to signal somehow that she was ready, she realized this slow unstated comfort between them was some kind of movement—the beginning of the dance. Without paying much attention, he replaced the plate and screwed it down quickly. “There,” he said, pushing it back toward Iris. “See if that does anything.”

  She slid a clean piece of paper into the canceling slot and turned the knob. Out it slipped onto the ledge in front of Harry. “November 18, 1940,” he said.

  “Wonderful,” Iris heard herself saying. “Thank you, Mr. Vale.”

  “Harry.”

  She looked up.

  “Harry,” he said to her quietly. “It’s Harry.” She flushed and looked down.

  He cleared his throat. “Say, listen.”

  She opened the stamp drawer, her heart thudding.

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you something.”

  The stamps lay in fresh sheets in perfect order before her.

  “Any chance you’d think about lowering your flagpole out there?”

  Oh. She glanced back up, disappointed. He was one town official speaking to another. That was all. “Why?”

  “Well”—he hesitated—“it seems to me it’s sticking straight up, just begging for attention.”

  Iris had to smile, despite herself. “Is that how it seems?”

  “If the Germans get within sight of town, they’re going to plot a course straight in off that pole.”

  He was quite serious.

  “I’d have to speak to the post office inspector,” Iris said and shut the drawer.

  “Fair enough.” He dipped his head, but made no move to leave.

  He had only come in to ask about the flagpole, Iris told herself, a little hotly. Why else would he still be standing there at her window? Best to serve him and be done with it.

  “Need a box for that, Harry?”

  He went a little pale and glanced down at the mug on the counter between them.

  “A box?”

  “Yes,” she answered. He was very pale, indeed. “To mail,” she added.

  “I—”

  She pointed at the mug. “Shall I measure it?”

  And she pulled the tape measure off her waist, to take its height and width. “Just a small box will do you,” she decided, and disappeared behind the sorting boxes into the back of the mailroom where the parcel supplies were kept.

  “I brought some tissue, too. A nice mug like this needs care.”

  “Right.” He leaned his elbows upon the counter. Deftly she folded the thick cardboard along the creases and pulled the sides up into the shape of a box. She fluffed the tissue paper up and carefully settled the mug into that nest. He seemed fixed upon her hands, which only made her work the faster to get them out of the way. At last, the box was sealed up tight.

  She looked up at him. “Where to?”

  “You,” he said.

  Iris blinked and reached for the sleeve of her cardigan slipping off her shoulder. “I beg your pardon?”

  Harry put his hands on either side of the box and slid it forward toward the postmaster. “It’s for you.”

  Iris regarded Harry for several seconds. Then she smiled very slowly. “Shall I open it?”

  He grinned then, and leaned his elbows upon the counter. “Go ahead.”

  Carefully, she slit the tape covering the opening with the blade of the scissors hanging from the window and slid her finger in to pop up the top. The mug lay snug in there and she peeled off the paper she had just wrapped it in, aware of Harry watching her, helpless and in a kind of thrall.

  “It’s grand,” she pronounced, setting the blue ceramic mug between them. “Thank you.”

  “I thought you probably like your coffee.”

  She smiled at him. “I do.”

  “Good.” He patted the counter in lieu of good-bye, turned around without another word, and headed for the door. She flushed and looked down. He passed through the door without closing it, and a small breeze reached where she stood.

  4.

  A STEADY, COLD RAIN blew more and more people into the crowded Savoy Hotel bar, bringing the smell of damp wool and hot bodies with them. One hundred and twenty-one nights they’d all lived through, one hundred and twenty-one, night after night, and the people who remained, the people who climbed back up into the light every morning, could be forgiven the extravagant gestures, the brave huzzahs, the fists in the air. Though the bombers might come in the next hour or two, and everyone knew it, no one was going down into the funk holes just now. London was out in the streets. For now, people hurried along calling out to each other even on this miserable wet night, strangers calling—Good night! Good night—sending voices into the streets, not sirens, not whistles, not bombs.

  Frankie sat at a table at the back of the bar, between Jim Dowell, an AP reporter just returned from Paris, Harriet, and Dusty Pankhurst, another one of Murrow’s boys. There was nothing to report tonight but the lack of bombs. Not that there could have been anyway, Frankie thought, watching the scene in the room in front of her—the newsroom was in here.

  “Who dat?” Pankhurst tipped his head idly in the direction of a trio of women just arrived on the threshold, shaking out their umbrellas and laughing, sending a bright heat into the crowded room.

  Dowell turned to look. “More glamour girl reporters,” he drawled, turning back to the table, “come over to be where the action is.”

  “Present company excepted, of course.” Pankhurst was magnanimous.

  “We’re not glamorous?”

  “You’re not girls,” Pankhurst parried.

  “In that sense,” Dowell finished with a smile at Harriet.

  Frankie’s eyes flicked to Harriet, who stuck out her lip but didn’t say anything. Up until recently, only a handful of women survived in the European press corps, but more and more women were pushing their way into serious wartime reporting, coming over with assignments to write about French hemlines and simply staying, sending back copy on bombs and breadlines instead.

  “Matter of fact”—Dowell exhaled, looking around the room—“seems the number of war tourists has hit a record high in here.”

  “It’s wet outside, Jim, that’s all,” retorted Harriet.

  “In any case, plenty of Americans don’t want to enter the war.” Dowell continued the point he’d started before the girls appeared in the do
or. “Over eighty percent plenty.”

  “Never mind.” Pankhurst waved the point away. Round-faced and sweating and impossible to overestimate—he played the goof so well, people had the habit of telling him more than they thought they had—“never mind that. The vote to reelect Roosevelt ended up being a vote to fight.”

  “And the Germans are putting all their pegs in place now,” Dowell agreed. “Way I heard it over there, Admiral Dönitz plans on having his subs in Boston Harbor this time next year.”

  “Crap,” Pankhurst answered. “The Krauts have got the upper hand right where they are. Why would they waste it? You see how fast they shot down thirty-seven ships last month in the Bay of Biscay? They’ll be spread too thin if they try and make war crossings.”

  “Shut up,” Dowell said amiably, “and listen to your elders. I sat in the sailors’ bar last week in Lorient and heard them—bluffing, sure, but you listen underneath the talk and it sounds like there’s a U-boat being fitted up to make the shot all the way across.”

  “God, your lot gets away with murder.” Harriet stubbed out her cigarette.

  “Our lot?” Dowell quizzed.

  “Men,” she pronounced.

  “Ha.” Dowell pressed his shoulder against hers, and Frankie saw the two of them were on again. There’d be the three of them at breakfast in the flat tomorrow. “Because we’re better at getting the goods?”

  Harriet pushed his face away, lightly. “Because the sailors aren’t measuring the precise angle at which your breasts are sailing above the table.”

  Frankie sputtered.

  “You can be invisible, you can be a walking tape machine,” Harriet sighed. “And you can bury that sailor’s chat in your smile, while you file it for later.”

  “I know that smile.” Dowell grinned. “See, here it is.” And he smiled blandly, without any light in his eyes. “The censor’s special.”

  “The story beneath the story,” Pankhurst agreed.

  Frankie nodded. Bill Shirer wrote ten minutes of script for five minutes of airtime, and Murrow often finished every broadcast in a cold sweat, having orchestrated the news so that it went under the wire, his mind ahead of the censor’s, bending and swaying to the imagined cut. Early on, she’d learned what she could say she saw—a full moon could be described as a bomber’s moon—and how to seed the story without telling the Germans, who were listening, what they heard. It was a dare—a dance up to the line. It was the performance of what is, what isn’t.

  “I’ll bet I could get something through from over there,” Frankie mused.

  “I’ll bet you could, Beauty.”

  “Shut up,” she lobbed at Jim. “I’m serious.”

  “That’s two of us, then.” He smiled back.

  She tipped her glass against Dowell’s and finished her drink, watching the sweep of Harriet’s hair as she leaned forward into his hand cupping the match, her gold sweater soft against Jim’s jacket, the way she held her head to the side while she asked and answered, peppering him with questions about France. Though they were never going to be one of the boys, Frankie rather liked this no-man’s-land where she and Harriet reported from. She was a woman, sure. But this talk—the frank and curious talk of reporters, the drug of getting in there, getting it down, getting it—skeined between all of them, man or woman.

  “You really think the Krauts will launch an attack on the States?” Frankie returned to Dowell’s point.

  Dowell drained the last of his whiskey sour. “I’m just telling you what I heard. Dimes to dollars, Dönitz’s boys will surface in New York Harbor one of these nights, do nothing, and come home smiling—an ace in the hole. And then a pack of them will follow”—he squinted into his empty glass—“by end of summer, ’forty-one.”

  “Is that a bet?”

  “Bet.” Dowell nodded. “That’s a bet.”

  “Sure they will,” Pankhurst snorted. “Hey, Reggie,” he called to the bartender, holding up Dowell’s glass. “The dreamer needs another.”

  At a table in the center of the room, Frankie watched one of the men lean over to his companion and say something in her ear. The girl tipped toward him, listening. Then she smiled. Frankie looked down and sipped her scotch. When she looked back up, a good-looking man sitting on one of the stools at the bar held her eye.

  “I’ll tell you what to place your bets on,” Harriet said quietly. “Whether immigration quotas back home are ever going to get lifted.”

  “For the German refugees?”

  Harriet nodded. “Twenty-seven thousand three hundred and seventy spots. That’s what we’ve got to offer. Twenty-seven thousand three hundred and seventy. What in the hell kind of number is that? And so far it won’t budge—hasn’t budged in two years—though there are floods of people waiting on visas. Stuck waiting for pieces of paper.”

  “There’s the worry of spies,” Pankhurst observed.

  “You know and I know these refugees are not Nazi spies,” Harriet retorted. “And though we are still reporting them as ‘refugees’—people washed out of their homes by the tide of war, and that kind of crap—they are Jews. Being moved. Being deported. Being given twenty minutes from the time a knock comes on the door until they are herded down the street. Twenty minutes to pack whatever they can grab. Told to get out. Get out of Germany. Of Austria. Europe. And the United States won’t allow you in unless you can prove you have means. So they’re stuck. And no matter how I phrase it—the indifference of bureaucracy, the refugee crisis—the stories don’t make it onto the front page. What’s happening to the Jews is getting buried in the middle of the newspapers. It’s being cast as a secondary story, that’s all.”

  “Someone ought to go over there and prove that. Paint the picture of the people who are trying to get out of Germany. Follow a family. Then it might be clear that it’s no accident the refugees are Jews. That’s the story to get,” said Pankhurst.

  Harriet shook her head. “Can’t be done. It’s already too dark to tell—there was a woman I met last week in the Marylebone refugee center who was separated from her husband at the border between Spain and France because of a clerical error. One n too few on her visa. And though she had her passport, which showed her proper name, and their marriage certificate, they held her for twenty hours before releasing her. And he had gone on. And all she knows is he was bound for Lisbon and from there to America. America, she said to me, as if somehow I’d know how to find him. They are utterly lost to each other, see? There is no hand to put the two together. She’s not where he thinks she is, and all she can say, over and over to whoever comes into the center: You are from America? America? It’s too grim. You might as well say God has dropped out of heaven. He’s gone. There’s the fucking story.”

  “Christ!” Frankie said. Reckless and itchy, she flicked at her glass with her fingernail. She shifted in her seat, wanting to stand up, wanting to move. “Christ almighty, I want to make some noise.”

  “Say there, Beauty, don’t you ever have any fun?”

  The man who had been watching her from the bar had leaned down between her and Pankhurst. He was fine-featured and dark, his accent upper-crust, Oxbridge. His eyes rested lightly on her face.

  “All the time,” she tossed back at him.

  “Ha!” Pankhurst slapped Dowell.

  “Then come and dance.” The man reached in and held out his hand, and Frankie, looking up at him, took it.

  Following him down through the room, toward the dancers, she looked back over her shoulder and saw Dowell and Harriet stand up also, and Pankhurst raise his glass to them in a toast. The noise in the hotel bar dialed up, the orchestra swinging into “In the Mood,” sending gusts of chatter into the air. Outside in the cold dark, the city waited, but in here, for now, it was light and there was the chance of laughter and the gay tip of a light wave cresting, and the man was leading her onto the dance floor, easily, so easily Frankie felt the shiver starting along her spine where he lay his hand, and she smiled against his jacket. Easy and
familiar, the hours in front of them stretched surely ahead, because of the way he held her and the way her body slid into the curve of his hand. And she gave herself up to what would come like a present, a present about to be opened slowly and with complete attention. The music shifted down a notch, slowing, or he was slowing against a beat, a counterpoint to draw her more cleanly in. It had been months since she had been held like this, and tonight she felt as though she’d ridden to the top of a crest and could slow slightly, and look out, look back. He was very close to her and his lips were so wide, and Frankie smelled the scotch on his breath. All the bombs and the noise had drawn back for a time, and in this moment in between, just right now, the world pushed back and there could be a single complete hour; so when the music stopped, and when he closed the last two inches between them, she opened her mouth under his and he groaned.

  They walked outside into the night, still kissing, and Frankie stumbled against him, and it was so dark outside but there was the smell of burning wood, the burning wood of the city—as if, her mind teased, and she kept her eyes shut—as if they kissed in front of a fire and he’d taken her shoes off and stroked her feet, and they were on a couch and there was snow. It had stopped raining. Her back was flat up against the rough brick of the pub wall and she opened her eyes to watch him kiss her again, and when he did, she kissed him, hard. Over the ridge of his shoulder, people passed in the dark, passed in the street, and as he lifted her up and she sunk down on him, she moaned out loud, and anyone passing, anyone looking, as some did, it happened so often, couples coupling under the bombs, in the shelters, though there were children, weren’t there, down there; but down there it was dark and it was deep and we were returned to the cave and the fire and the glint of life in each other’s eyes, never mind the sigh escaping, the unmistakable oh oh oh—it was all right, we were only human.

  Someone laughed on the street. Someone laughed and Frankie leaned her head back against the wall, her heart racing. Gently, he held her up as he slid out of her and, keeping one hand around her waist, so sweetly, so dearly, zipped himself back into his trousers with the other.