The Postmistress

by Sarah Blake

  “Where are you going?” Frankie asked companionably after a while.

  “En Espagne,” the boy answered, glancing at his mother who nodded, not looking at Frankie. There was something in the quiet between them that prevented Frankie from asking them any more.

  They traveled for over two hours in silence. The mother’s hand never lifted from her son. It was the local train and made many stops at stations like the one where the mother and son had boarded. The air was balmy outside the window, and the sun winked in and out through the day.

  As it approached Toulouse, the train slowed. Everyone was to get off and either board trains for the north or the south, or stay on this train and carry on across the border into Spain. The boy’s hand crept back into his mother’s. The outlying houses of the city pulled slowly enough past now, that one could see the curtains in the windows and crockery on the shelves. The mother pulled her boy around to look at her, her hands holding each of his arms. He stared into her face.

  And then Frankie understood that the boy was going on alone. Perhaps there had been only one set of papers issued. Perhaps there was only one sponsor in another country for the child. There were many perhaps. But it was clear now that the mother was sending her son onward. Her despair spread through the compartment, thick and silent as a fog. She checked inside his jacket for his papers. She stood and pulled his bag down from above and checked again that he had the food she had packed. He sat very still, watching her hands in among the things she had packed when they left home. Then she sat again next to him and pulled his hands onto her chest, turning him to face her. He was trembling. She drew him to her and kissed him on one cheek and then on the other cheek, so slowly, looking at every bit of his face, and then she reached and folded him to her. The train stopped with a jerk and went quiet.

  Up and down the corridor the compartment doors slammed open. Outside a whistle blew. There was shouting back and forth along the station platform below the window. Finally, the mother let go of her boy and stood. The boy grabbed her hand. She gently pried his fingers loose. Neither of them said a word. She turned to open the compartment door and he followed right behind her, his hand touching her back. But she turned to him with such a smile on her face, with such calm, wide love, that the boy stopped and dropped his hand.

  She pulled open the door and stepped through. He stood in the middle of the compartment. In the passageway, she turned and held her finger to her mouth, as if to say shh, and then kissed her fingers to him and was gone. For a single, long moment, the boy stood where his mother had left him, stood staring at the compartment door through which his mother had vanished.

  The recording needle would have cut this silent line of heartbreak into the disk. And what it had cost the mother, that last smile she gave, that last comfort so that her boy could pass through the final moment, no one would ever know. Frankie looked down at her hands, away from the boy who was now pressed against the window glass, watching his mother disappearing into the coats and dresses of the others, plunging into and then lost in the thicket of the crowd.

  He sank back into the seat, not looking anymore out the window. There were no tears in his eyes. There was nothing. He didn’t speak and Frankie didn’t move. They sat together in the car as the train refueled and took on more passengers. Two women and a man pushed into the compartment. They sat in silence as the engine charged to life and slowly, very slowly, started sliding away, foot by foot. The boy shut his eyes and Frankie watched his lips moving, and realized he was counting.

  When he opened his eyes, nothing had changed. He turned his head and stared out the window.

  “T’inquiètes pas.” Frankie swallowed.

  He looked at her, then back out the window. But then, he stood up, swaying, and crossed the few feet to slide down next to Frankie on the seat. Her eyes met those of the woman sitting across the way. The woman stared back at her and then down at her hands. Frankie glanced over at the boy and saw he had closed his eyes again. After a little while the boy sighed, and Frankie realized he’d fallen asleep, his head at an awful angle, hanging forward. She reached and pulled his head against her shoulder, crumpling him toward her. Then she leaned her own head back against the seat, but found it impossible to sleep.

  They reached Bayonne at the Spanish border at first light. Frankie opened her eyes and turned her head. The compartment doors slapped open up and down the train as people got off with their baggage, heading toward the end of the platform where the Vichy police sat waiting.

  “Where are you going, you and your mother?” The woman across from Frankie addressed the boy in French.

  “She is not my mother.”

  The woman frowned at Frankie.

  “Where are you going?” she asked the boy again.

  “Lisbon,” he answered.

  She nodded. “Good luck, little one,” she whispered, and stood up.

  “Come on,” Frankie said to him, “off we go.”

  The lines snaked all the way down the platform nearly to the end of the train. Frankie and the boy joined them and began the shuffle forward. Where are you going? Eh? How long have you got? Angoulême, Madrid, Lisbon. The names of the line toward the ships at anchor. Ahead of them, a woman wailed sharply. The boy looked at Frankie, worried. Non! They could hear her cry. Non. Je n’ai qu’une semaine. Monsieur! Non! Frankie stepped out of line to see if she could get a better glimpse of the woman, and was shoved roughly back in place.

  It took nearly three hours to reach the head of the line. The boy sat on his suitcase quietly, as if sitting at his desk in school, moving forward with her when the line moved, but he would not talk to her. Neither would he leave her side. When they reached the officer on the other side of the desk, she handed over her transit papers first. The man glanced at them and thrust them back at her.

  “The next train to Paris doesn’t come again for three days after tonight.”

  She frowned. “But I’m not going to Paris. I’m going through to Spain.”

  He pointed at her letter of transit. Clearly marked in blue ink were the words: De 18 May à 9 June 1941.

  “But what is the date today?” she asked.

  “It is the seventh. So, mademoiselle, you have run out of time,” he answered, motioning to one of the guards behind him, who pulled Frankie out of the line and off to the side. “You must get on tonight’s train to Paris. Return here in eight hours.”

  He motioned for the boy’s papers. Confused, the boy looked at Frankie standing there, out of the line.

  She shook her head.

  “Viens!” the officer snapped.

  The boy unbuttoned his coat and pulled his papers out, his hand shaking, but the officer hardly looked at them. He stamped them and signaled the boy through the open gate. “Vas-y.”

  The boy stared at Frankie where she stood at the edge of the table. Then he looked quickly in the other direction at the open gate. He looked back again at Frankie, stricken.

  “Eh!” One of the guards pointed at him to move.

  “Go on,” she said thickly.

  “Vous ne venez pas?”

  She shook her head.

  He frowned and looked down, picked up his suitcase, and walked slowly past the officers toward the gate. Frankie’s eyes filled, watching the small set of shoulders moving forward, utterly alone. Where am I going? she imagined him saying. Where am I going? When will I get there? Who will I know? At the door to the waiting room on the other side of the gate, he turned around and looked at her. She nodded at him, still nameless, and lifted her hand and waved.

  He was shoved forward by the man behind him.

  She stood there, to the side of the table, in the company of the others who were not to be let forward onto the next train, trying to catch sight of him again, long after he had vanished. And when the door closed, she imagined him getting on that train on the other side of the door, then getting off it again. She imagined him all the way up to the Spanish border, into Bilbao where the tracks ran south into
Madrid, then out the other side to Portugal, into Lisbon, off the train and right up the gangway of the boat. This boy, this solitary boy, she tried to carry in her mind’s eye all the way out of here, as though she could take up for his mother, as though she could take him, like an aunt, or a godmother, and put him directly on the boat. She willed the ending, a happy ending, standing there.

  “Mademoiselle!” The officer motioned her toward the station. She could see through the open doors all the way out into the square, dizzy with light at this hour. It was market day, and several stalls were pulled up and draped with canopies. Men and women bent and straightened, turned and talked. A woman tossed her head at someone Frankie couldn’t see. There were melons piled in caskets on the tops of barrels. There were radishes. There was a man selling potatoes.

  She looked back over her shoulder at the door that had shut on the boy whose ending she would never know. She grabbed a bag in each hand and walked across the cool marble of the train station out into the summer day.

  A telephone sign hung from the corner of the post office building at the opposite end of the square, and Frankie walked in. The woman at the window had hair that curled around the nape of her neck like thick fingers. She tapped her nails on the counter while Frankie counted out the centimes and pushed them forward to pay for the call.

  “You would like stamps as well?” She raised her brows, impatient.

  “Stamps?” Frankie stared.

  “You are in a post office, madame.”

  Frankie was too tired, she knew that, but the woman before her, staring at her like that with the faint, French curl of derision in her voice, made her throat close.

  Behind the woman, the telephone rang, and she pointed Frankie toward the telephone closet set at the end of the counter.

  “Where in the hell are you?”

  “Hello, Ed.” She smiled. “Bayonne. I’ll be on tonight’s train to Paris.”

  “Thank God,” he sighed. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “What you asked,” she replied in return. “I’m getting it on disk.”

  “What, exactly?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know—them.”

  There was quiet down the line.

  “You need to get back here.”

  “I will.”

  “I mean now, Frankie.”

  “I will.” She nodded. Someone behind him said something she couldn’t make out.

  “Say, Frankie.” He was back on.

  “Yes.”

  “Bayonne has a fairly decent transmitter. What do you say you get over there later on for one last broadcast from France.”

  She nodded, but didn’t speak.

  “I’m clearing the six-eighteen spot for you.”

  “Okay,” she said, very low. “Ed?”

  “Yeah, Frankie?”

  “Is anyone listening?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Is anyone listening to us? To all this, I mean?”

  “Frankie.” Murrow’s worry made it through the telephone wire.

  “And if they are listening,” she went on, “then why aren’t they here?”

  There was quiet on the line.

  “You need to get back here.”

  “I will.”

  “I mean now, Frankie.”

  “I will.” She nodded. “So long,” she said, and carefully put the receiver back down in its cradle. Then she sat there in the narrow wooden booth as one tear slipped over after another.

  “Mademoiselle?”

  Christ. She shook her head and wiped her cheeks with her hands. She stood up and pushed against the hinge of the door, stepping out into the post office lobby. Out the window, a farm wagon slid past, the back of it piled high with strawberries.

  Get in, get the story, get out. Well, she was getting out. She could get out. She could get out and go home. And she would broadcast, she had told them she would. But it would be this story—this market, and that farmer driving past, and the woman in the post office, the boy on his way into Spain, his mother returning to her house empty of her son, all the people with whom she had ridden and recorded, the people whose lives she had cupped and held for a moment—she’d send out onto the air.

  When the town’s censor, a beefy man who tipped his brim up when she entered the studio, held out his hand for the script, she smiled, shook her head, placed the recorder on the table in the studio, and pointed to the seat in front of the mike. “Puis-je?”

  He frowned but waved her in.

  Smiling all the while at the man, she opened the lid, selected one of the disks, and slid it onto the metal pin. When the soundman behind the censor pointed at her, she took a deep breath and plunged in. “This is Frankie Bard for the Columbia Broadcasting System in Bayonne, France.

  “What you are about to hear are the voices of several people on one of the French trains—a man, three women, and a child. They are all of them refugees, all of them traveling toward the west, hoping upon hope to get there, to get toward where you sit right now.”

  The man sitting across from her hardly blinked. He watched as she stood and gently lowered the arm down into the metal groove of the recorded disk. Je m’appelle Maurice—a man’s voice swam up into the air—Maurice Denis. Je vais à Lisbon, et puis aux Ètats-Unis. The voice stepped lightly over the m’s, lithe and expectant, though the man had slumped in the corner of the railway carriage after he’d finished speaking, and Frankie had written in her notebook that he carried only a soft satchel, that he wore a wedding ring, but that he traveled alone. Frankie kept her eye on the censor who watched the spinning disk intently. Now the voices of the girls rushed in, one of them speaking her name urgent and low, as though she was telling America her secret. Oui, Madame, she had said to Frankie, je m’appelle Laura. The voice was thrilling heard through the hiss and scratch of the record as she went on to say where she had been born and where she was going and yes, like the others, yes, I am Jewish—we are Jewish, the voice pronounced, my sister and I. And Frankie, like a shepherd followed after in the gaps, translating the girls’ French into English, so they were understood. But the girls soared into the air. Like the single strand of color lifted free and shining out of a mess of yarn, the fullness of the voices, the round girl tones, spoke lives. And this was radio’s soul, Frankie thought, this human sound sent into the air to make a dome of the sky, a whispering gallery.

  Frankie watched the clock and, after a full sixty seconds, lifted the arm off the disk. “Those were the voices of the Jews of Europe. They are on the trains tonight. They are traveling even now. Alive for now. Right now—”

  “Arrête!” The censor snapped her off.

  Frankie stood straight up from the table, her heart pounding. He remained seated and motionless. Either she would make it to the door, or he would arrest her. He stood up and came around the table, slowly, stopping in front of her. There was no more than a foot between them, and she could smell the sweat on his uniform under the cologne. He stared at her and for a long second she wasn’t sure whether he knew which way he was going with her. She kept her eye on the silver button of his collar, waiting. When at last she looked up at him, his gaze slid off her and away.

  He put his hands on her hips and drew her toward him. She gasped out loud, as his thick hands went down into the pockets of her skirt and slid out again easily, his fingers raking her stomach through the silk lining. “Danke.” He flicked a smile at her and looked down at the papers he had pulled out. He opened her letter of clearance, looked at it, and then folded it back up. He looked at her passport, fingering the pages, one by one. Then he slid the letter of passage into the passport. Last, he looked at the doctor’s letter. He seemed to take a long while. She blew out her breath, but it came as a kind of strangled sigh.

  “What is this?”

  “Nothing,” she shrugged. “A letter.”

  “To whom?” His eyes were flat.

  “My sister,” she said softly.

  He shook his head and looke
d over at the radio operator, smirking. Frankie didn’t see whether the other man paid any attention; she kept her eyes on this one. He swung his gaze back down, and she saw that he would let her go in the end.

  “So?” He bent toward her.

  Frankie kept her eyes on him and nodded. When he held the letter out, she reached for it. He gave it a little yank, and she held fast. He burst out laughing and stepped out of the way of the door, and she jammed the letter back into her pocket, bent to pick up her suitcase and the recorder, then walked through the door of the studio as carefully as she could. She kept her eye on the next door at the end of the hall, making it all the way and through that door, and down the first turn of the stairs before she started shaking. Around the second turn of the stairs, a dim triangle of light shone over the door to the street, and she pushed through it, into the wide, inconsolable blue.

  Summer

  1941

  WAR WAS COMING, everyone said it, though it was hard to believe what they said. Outside the windows here, gulls and swallows divided an undivided sky; the clear blue draped over a flat green sea, day after hot summer day. June had opened her throat wide and wider, and it was honky-tonk all the time. Tourists poured off the Boston boats into the throng along Front Street, mixing with sailors on shore leave walking in packs. The sunstruck beaches popped with parti-colored umbrellas while the turrets of navy boats crenellated the horizon far off in the bay.

  “Anyone back there?” a man called from the lobby. Iris jumped and looked at the clock.

  “Coming,” she answered.

  If there was a psychology of summer people it was this: though they were out here on vacation, way out on the tip of the American world—sunstruck, hungover, or stupid with lying in—they responded to the morning as dogs to the sound of their master’s voice. Alert and bright, they trooped into the post office with letters and cards, wanting to get the work of their vacation out of the way in the morning. Then the rest of the day could go to the dogs. The rest of the day could slip easily as the evening sun into the surrounding ocean.