The Postmistress

by Sarah Blake

  “Bonnie.” He stepped forward into the room, his hat in his hand.

  “No.” Iris’s mother had snapped at him.

  No. Iris thrust Emma’s letter back into her skirt. Not yet. Not half-news, no-news, like this. Not when Emma had a baby on the way. If he had died, the news would come, but where was the harm in hope until then? Time would catch up. If something had happened. But not until after the baby. Not until after the poor girl was strong enough, and ready. She flicked off the lights in the back room, unlocked the partition, stepped into the lobby, and went back out the post office doors into the heat and mayhem of the summer evening racketing on just outside, where Harry waited.

  “Hello.” She faltered.

  “Any good news for me in there?”

  “What?”

  He put his hand on the flagpole.

  “Oh,” she swallowed. “No, I haven’t heard anything yet.”

  “Iris,” he said quietly. “Please. Ask again.”

  She nodded. She ought to say something. Her heart thudded and turned quietly over in its cage. He had already started down the stairs, expecting her to follow.

  “Are you all right?” He stopped and looked back at her. “You’ve an odd expression on.”

  She felt the letter in her pocket. If she left the building with it, she was stealing, wasn’t she? She was a thief.

  “If you had a chance to spare someone from hurt, Harry, would you do it?”

  He considered her. “What sort of hurt?”

  “Would you do it?” she repeated, tense.

  He frowned. “Can you keep someone from hurt?”

  “Of course.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Keeping mum. Keeping them in the dark.”

  He didn’t answer. She stood above him on the porch, lost in some private reckoning. He shook out a cigarette, lit it, and looked back up. She was watching him. Harry held out his hand. “Iris?”

  She went slowly down the stairs to him. It was wrong what she was doing. Never in her life had she done something like this. He pulled her closer and took her hand and set off down the crowded street. They walked along silently, and the evening sang out golden. After a little, Iris withdrew her hand from his, shoving it deep in her pocket.

  Harry glanced over at her. Her long legs took great strides along the road.

  “The thing is,” Iris said quite quickly, afraid to look at Harry beside her, returning to the spot on her mind, “all kinds of things can grow in that dark. Calm, for instance. And hope.”

  “So?”

  She swallowed. “Would it be wrong, that calm?”

  “Why?”

  “Because it was false.”

  “False?”

  “Groundless.”

  He was quiet.

  “That’s what calm is, isn’t it?” he answered after a while. “A little break from knowing what’s on its way.”

  Iris stopped walking. “What’s on its way, Harry?”

  She sounded so miserable. Harry turned around and looked at her. She stared back. Here, he realized, here it was. It was so little, so unannounced, but a door had suddenly, irrevocably, opened in his heart. Love had found him here in the middle of his life, at the edge of the world in the shape of a redheaded woman with some trouble on her mind. He reached and gently pulled her hand out from her pocket. “I don’t know what’s on its way,” he said gruffly.

  She felt how warm his hand was around hers. It will be you, the doctor had said. Iris thought of Emma coming into the post office, her tiny shoulders thrown back, daring anyone, daring the world to hurt her. It will be you. And Will Fitch had been relieved. That was it, she realized. The doctor had entrusted Iris with the letter, so that Emma was not alone.

  “Whatever it is, Iris,” Harry went on quietly, “you can’t stop it.” But until that baby was born, Iris could push back Time on either side of the small woman, hold it off, and then ease her gently through the opening into what was to come. That’s what she was meant to do this one time. That’s what the doctor meant. That was the point, someone was watching. Iris was.

  Iris brought Harry’s hand to her cheek, smiling. It would be all right then. It would be all right in the end. The face she turned to him was so grateful, so wide with her love, his heart bolted toward her.

  “All right,” she said.

  “Right you are,” he grinned back. “Let’s go.”

  The sea appeared in bigger and bigger patches at the end of town as the houses dwindled away on their walk out to the breakwater, until finally the two of them stood facing the Atlantic. The last crooked finger of Cape Cod curved away ahead of them, and a mile or so out the simple white lighthouse at Land’s End blinked. Beneath that sky, with nothing moving on the water, it appeared like a chess piece or a child’s wooden block forgotten and set down.

  “I want to get married,” he said suddenly, beside her.

  “As well you should,” she answered primly.

  He laughed out loud. “To you.”

  She blushed and turned toward him, chuckling. They had come to the end of the land and begun.

  “Well,” she said, smiling foolishly at him.

  “Yes?”

  “Yes,” she answered. “Yes.”

  When they turned from the sea and set foot again on the pavement, Iris slid her hand into Harry’s pocket and his fingers closed over hers. They drew back toward the hot throngs of the summer town, the lights appearing in the houses, blinking like low-lying stars. Bicycles spun past in the creeping dark.

  There seemed to be a crowd of people outside the post office. It was one of those nights when everyone had found themselves out in the late light, walking into town. Someone facing their way waved and then more of the faces turned and Iris made out Frank and Marnie Niles, and Florence Cripps. Iris could imagine what they saw. The postmaster and the mechanic joined in his jacket. Harry’s grip was firm on hers, and she smiled. This was how it was now. This was who they were. They were going to be married. They were, in the eyes of the town, already joined. Clearly, cleanly walking just like that down Front Street. Years after, she would remember the warmth of his hand on hers and the last of the sun on her cheeks, and she would remember that moment, in the silence before someone broke it, the single moment of highest summer, brimful, with no room for more, and not time yet for the tipping, the pouring out and away.

  21.

  IN THE BAR at Grand Central Station, the whoosh of the revolving doors let couple after couple into the busy crowded room full of smoke and chatter. Max Prescott of the New York Trib watched them in the long mirror stretching above the length of the bar. The men in suits raised their fingers to the maître d’, signaling how many; the women turned aside and studied the room. Some men, like himself, were alone and made directly for the bar, where they shrugged off their jackets and folded them across their laps. Every time the doors moved, the distant hammer of trains in the station outside chug-chugged and moaned, the mechanical beams of industry crossing and recrossing the luncheon hour. It was the end of summer and hot as hell. The fans overhead moved the damp shirts of the men from right to left, cooling against their skin as it moved.

  “Hello, Boss.” Frankie dropped onto the stool beside him.

  She had appeared without warning—though he had been sitting here waiting for her—as though she’d stepped through the veils dividing one moment from the next.

  “Yes.” She nodded at the bartender. “Whatever he’s having.” She turned to the old man, conspiratorially. “What are you having?”

  “Bourbon and water.”

  “One should never drink bourbon before six o’clock,” she observed.

  “Scotch?”

  “Scotch”—she tipped her glass gently against his—“is for the servants.”

  He shot her a look. She was thinner. And though her tone was light, she seemed exhausted and wary, like a cat who has narrowly escaped a bath. He had caught her last broadcast, two months ago from France, and she had s
ounded odd then, snapped off somehow. But he hadn’t given it much thought until her mother had rung, frantic for news—she hadn’t heard anything from Frankie in over two weeks. Had he? He’d put in a call to Murrow, even Mr. Paley was concerned, but after Jim Holland in Lyon, no one had seen her or heard from her and Europe was full of eyes and ears. Hell, they were the press corps. But there wasn’t a word from Frankie, and there was nothing to think but that she had been caught in some lonely room where the world did not pay attention. She had been in the wrong place in front of the wrong person. Max had been so certain this had happened, when he heard her voice on the telephone yesterday he had turned his head to look out the window to make sure it was still New York outside. I’m back, Max, she had said without a greeting. But I’m through.

  They drank in silence. Their long habit was to be quiet until there was something to say. And often, there was nothing at all to say other than the four or five sentences that had brought them together. Most people he knew, his wife included, wouldn’t make it through an hour on the promise of four sentences. But Frankie Bard was like a camel. She could hold her words for days—as long as she could watch the goings-on.

  “I had forgotten what all this looks like.”

  He looked up into the mirror and saw she was staring at the people in the restaurant behind them.

  “All what?”

  “This.” She pointed. “No one here thinks they’re in any danger.”

  “They’ve left it outside,” he suggested.

  “No, they haven’t.” She tipped her chin at the scene behind them, played out in the glass. “They don’t believe it’s there.”

  He watched one of the men behind him lean over to his companion and say something in her ear. She turned her cheek toward his whispering mouth, though her attention remained on the menu in front of her. The clatter above and around them was as protective as a bower. “Human nature,” he ventured.

  “No, Max.” She crossed her arms in front of the drink. “American nature.”

  He chuckled, uneasily. “Sounds like you want them to pay.”

  “That’s right.” She nodded.

  “For what?”

  She shrugged. “For this.” She nodded again at the ordinary lunch behind them. One of the waiters crossed through the smoke with a tray held high on his way to the kitchen, and the people leaned away from him as he passed. The talk in the room was a low, insistent murmur against which glasses clinked and silver clattered upon the china.

  “People can’t imagine what they haven’t seen,” he answered. “That’s why they need you.”

  “Beg your pardon, Max, but that’s horseshit.”

  “You signed up to see what they haven’t,” he observed. “You can’t blame people for it.”

  “Why in hell you think I’m quitting?” she asked coolly.

  “Hell of a year to quit,” he fired back.

  She finished her drink. The bartender sidled inquisitively down the length of the bar. The old man nodded without looking at him. He knew Frankie well enough to know she never explained. Whatever had happened over there was going to stay over there. She turned and looked at him, then gave him one of her old smiles.

  He took the drink the bartender placed in front of him and pulled it near.

  “Take a break,” he suggested.

  She shook her head. “I want to get off the bus.”

  “It’s the only story there is, Frankie.”

  “Hell it is,” she answered.

  “I don’t get it.”

  She shrugged and kept her eyes on the mirror. “Maybe I’m not up to telling it.”

  “Bull.” The old man thrust out his chin.

  Frankie didn’t answer.

  “I used to think you wrote a story like a hunter threw a spear,” she said after a while. “You aimed. You drew back your arm, hurled, and it landed. It was a straight shot. Beginning, middle, and end.”

  He glanced at her.

  “The harder a story was to file over there, the better. Can you do it, Frankie? You bet, it’s already done.” She looked at him. “It was easy. Hell, it was grand. There was no choice to pull back or look away, you dove in with your eyes and ears open, and you reported what you saw. That was your job. To see and to tell. There was a purpose. There was a plot.”

  “Frankie—” He had turned all the way around on his stool. She pulled out a cigarette and he reached forward with his lighter. She bent into it and nodded at him, exhaling.

  “But there I was one night, Max, standing on a velveteen seat on a train leaving a station, desperate to correct, desperate to right a wrong, gone horribly, finally wrong. I had stood up on that seat as though I were God and I could save those below. As though I could change the story”—she turned to look at him, hearing Thomas’s cry, They’re shooting, Fräulein! Shut up! Shut up!—“and I got a man killed.”

  “Frankie—”

  “What the hell, Max. It never mattered. It was never a straight shot. The war is still going on whether I tell it or not, and now I’m the one holding it.”

  Max studied her, waiting her out.

  “All that time over there”—her finger slid along the rim of the glass—“getting it down, getting it right. But it can’t be gotten—the story just whispers off in the dark. What happens next? What happened? I can’t bear it.” She stopped, remembering her own voice snapping impatiently to Will Fitch, I don’t have to bear it. “Christ, Max—listen to me.” She smiled, tears springing into her eyes. “Don’t pay any attention.”

  He turned toward her. “Okay,” he said, seeing she had begun to cry.

  “Okay?” She pushed away the handkerchief he offered her and wiped her eyes with her fingertips. “Okay?” she repeated, almost laughing, and then she gave up and covered her face with her hands.

  Someone’s joke rose in the background and hit its mark, and the sudden burst of laughter fell down around the room like rain. Frankie turned around on her stool and caught sight of a woman entering the bar on the crest of that laughter. She was lithe and bare-armed and her skirt skimmed above her tanned calves as she moved. Max turned around also, and the two of them watched the woman sit down and lean her elbows on the table—languorous, hot—and rest her chin on her hands, her long, bare arms folding into two soft hooks.

  As long as there were people to watch, this was where they’d look, Frankie thought. At a beautiful woman in a bar. How easily the face of the world turns away. She glanced at Max in the mirror and bent to pull the bundle wrapped in a tea cloth from her satchel, unwrapping the disks from the train and setting them down on the bar.

  “What the hell are these?” Max asked her.

  “What I recorded.”

  “France?”

  She nodded.

  “Does Murrow know you’ve got them?”

  She had come off the train from Paris, gone straight to her flat, and packed her bags. She had grabbed Harriet’s stories, the random pieces of paper above her desk, and stuffed them between the pages of her notebook. She had closed the door of the room behind her and slid the key under the landlady’s door. She had done it all so fast, it was as though she were leaving the scene of a crime. On her way to the boat, she had left the portable recorder at the front desk of Broadcasting House without a word to anyone upstairs. She had run. She had gone straight down to the docks and bought a ticket and waited the several hours until setting sail, sitting in a dockyard pub, staring as the great hoses strafed the sides of the boat, the water streaming down, cleaning off the salt.

  “He does by now,” she answered sadly.

  “What’s your plan?”

  She shook her head and shrugged.

  “Frankie,” he began.

  “None of it matters, Max”—she looked up at him—“but this—these.” She pushed the edges of the disks in line, making a perfect black tower of acetate.

  He watched her. “What’s on them?”

  She smiled, sadly. “Nobody. People. People who are alive.”
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  “What’s the story?”

  She traced a line down the cool glass in front of her. “There isn’t a story, Max.”

  “There’s always a story.”

  She took a long time to answer. “Well, then I’ve lost whatever it is.”

  He pushed back on the stool. “You’re simply going to shut up?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You can’t shut up,” Max said. “It’ll kill you.”

  “You know something,” she blurted out, not caring how crazy this sounded, but needing to push the words forward, the worst things forward. “No matter how much we all want some old man up there, there sure as hell isn’t anyone watching over it all. It’s just an empty sky, Max.”

  “Course it is, Frankie.”

  Frankie stared at the perfect patrician line of his profile, the line that caused the girls in the secretary pool to call him the Yankee Clipper behind his back, and tried to smile.

  “But that’s just it. Then no one is listening. No one hears the gaps. So what I’ve got here is nothing but seventy-odd lost voices traveling the distance but landing nowhere, sliding off the inner dome of the sky. And yet still, somehow, I think these are the whole deal.” She stopped and rubbed her eyes. “Oh, Max,” she asked, tired as a child, “what’s the next part?”

  “We’re going to get into the war.”

  She nodded and finished her drink.

  “Seek Truth. Report It. Minimize Harm. Ha.” Frankie slid off the stool and stood up. She tugged at her jacket and caught his eye in the mirror.

  “Do me a favor,” he said, “take your mother, take a break, and go out to the Island, or the Jersey Shore, somewhere nearby where I can pester you.”

  That brought a little smile. “I’m headed up to the Cape this afternoon.”

  “Hell of a long way to go for a break.”

  “It’s only Massachusetts.”

  He grunted.

  “I’ve got to deliver a letter.” She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “It’s the one goddamned thing I’m going to get right in months.”