The Postmistress

by Sarah Blake

  The postmistress slapped both hands down on the counter so hard that Frankie felt the wood jump. “Stop it,” cried Iris swiftly. “Stop it! Damn it all. Why can’t you stop?”

  Frankie blinked, her mouth closing over the end. Her round eyes roved and seemed to rest on the calendar behind Miss James’s head as though she were picking her way carefully, slowly back, rock by rock across a stream.

  “Because it happened,” she said, and quietly, quickly as she could, made it across the lobby and through the doors.

  The door thunked after the woman, and Iris stood where she was for several minutes. She stood stock-still and closed her eyes. Bit by bit, sounds reemerged and she smelled the salt in the breeze as it shifted. She stood there, very quietly, to let her heart sink back to normal, to let the picture that that other woman had held and shaken in front of her fade.

  For Iris had seen it, she had seen the mother’s face, the eyes frantically searching for help even as she walked straight ahead, whispering into the small dying ear. Darling, darling, darling. Iris covered her mouth. She had seen them so clearly on the waves of that woman’s voice. That same voice she’d listened to on the radio and turned off when it got to be too much. The clock ticked again. The tap tap of someone’s heels. The wind again. Iris turned around to the sorting room. Two sacks of mail waited where Flores had dropped them. There was the kettle on the hot plate. There was the shade pulled before the blinding slant of afternoon light.

  But there she was also, her own hand slipping a letter into her pocket. There she had stood at the table in the back room and cheated Time. Pay attention. Every single word she had just fired at the reporter she believed to the core of her soul. And yet she had slipped a letter out of the machinery she so proudly tended. The story knew. Iris looked down at the stamp drawer. “Why did none of Theseus’s sailors notice the mistake and call out to their captain?” she had asked her teacher, bewildered.

  “That’s the sorrow of the story,” the teacher had gently answered. “They simply didn’t. And Fate would have it that the father would see.”

  “But, who is Fate?” the child Iris had persisted, but her teacher never answered.

  26.

  LIKE A PENCIL line drawn between the beginning and the end of the beginning, on the eleventh of September, Roosevelt announced that the U.S. Navy would escort convoys of American merchant vessels across the Atlantic, shooting on sight any German raiders. Now the U-boats, who ran in wolf packs, would run head-on into the navy. And Russia, God bless her, refused to fall. When you see a rattlesnake poised to strike, you do not wait until he has struck before you crush him, Roosevelt warned.

  The summer people climbed into their cars and snaked in a long line back to Boston and New York. Children pulled their kneesocks on and went to school. The tea dance players, knickknack shopkeepers, and café owners walked to the beach and lay there, falling asleep in the last of the sun. The holiday was over though the sky overhead still shone. Tourists gone, pockets fuller, the winter ahead could rock on the runners of one of the best summers Franklin had had since the Depression. And the post office inspector had denied Harry Vale’s request, so the post office flag flying high above the town seemed to thumb her nose at the Germans, waving at those ships as gaily as a girl. The town was cast back to itself like a bare bone on the sand, and the reporter stayed.

  “What is she doing here, do you think?”

  “Who?”

  “The radio gal.” Iris pointed her cigarette in the direction of Frankie ’s cottage, where Frankie’s bicycle leaned against the back. Harry turned around in his chair and looked across the three cottage lawns that separated them.

  “Resting. That’s what she’s said.”

  Iris nodded, unconvinced. “Tough to be a war correspondent without a war.”

  “I think she may have quit.”

  Iris shook her head. “Not that one.”

  Harry raised his eyebrow. “How do you know so much about her?”

  “I don’t. I don’t know anything, that’s what worries me.”

  “She’s shell-shocked,” Harry said.

  Iris frowned over at him.

  “Iris.” Harry reached across and took her hand. “What could she possibly have come here for other than what she says?”

  Iris pushed up out of the chair, down the steps, and to the end of the tiny patch of lawn halted by the scraggy beach roses before the sea. Frankie Bard was a messenger. With something hidden away. She was sure of it.

  SEEN FROM ABOVE, Frankie thought, letting the door slam after her, it would be impossible to tell whether this woman walking out every day, hesitating at the gate of the Fitch house, and continuing on into the dunes, had any stake at all in the world other than in holding this pattern, sleeping, eating, waking, walking out.

  Late afternoon had climbed up the rod of the sky and hung there, the air clear and sharp, the blues of the water and the sky playing against each other, reflecting and resisting like sisters. She had set on the path that led through a grove of beech trees into the dunes behind town, and the sun bore down through Frankie’s blouse as though curious. Someone was ahead of her in the curved hollow the bent trees made; she saw that it was Emma, walking without any interest in what she passed, as though someone had told her it would be good for her, and she obliged.

  After a bit, Emma turned. “Oh,” she said, putting some enthusiasm into her voice. “Hello.”

  “Hello,” Frankie answered and caught up. “How’re things?”

  “Well enough,” Emma said, her eyes ahead of her.

  “That doesn’t sound too good.”

  Emma didn’t reply.

  “May I walk with you a little?”

  The tawny flank of the dunes appeared at the end of the tunnel of trees. It looked hot through there, and they walked slowly in single file for about twenty minutes, Frankie behind Emma, through the sand hills to the sea. When they reached the edge of the dune, Emma slid herself heavily down the dune cliff to the beach below, sliding and skidding all the way down to the beach, where she lowered herself onto the sand. Frankie followed and came to a rest standing above Emma who lay with her arms spread out on either side.

  “Go on,” she said, peering up at Frankie standing above her. “Lie down.”

  “In the sand?”

  “Yes.” Emma smiled for the first time. “Stretch out. You can’t hear the waves any other way.”

  “I hear them just fine.”

  “Lie down,” coaxed Emma and closed her eyes.

  Frankie stood awhile longer and then, not looking down at the pregnant woman stretched on the sand, she squatted and dropped to her knees, lowering her bottom slowly. Then she stretched her legs out, keeping them together, and lay back. She closed her eyes. Immediately, she felt the wind shift above her, flowing over her rather than at her shoulders and back. It made her feel welcome somehow.

  The sea still rolled and burst. The wind washed along her skin, the cool sand pricking the backs of her knees, Emma’s breath rising and falling beside her. Frankie lay there, the surf lazing in and out. The little breeze shifted and touched.

  “Can I ask you something?” Emma said, finally.

  “Shoot.”

  “That little boy you walked home after the bombs one night—”

  “Billy.” Frankie looked over at her.

  “The boy who lost his mother. You said he fell to his knees when he realized she had died.”

  “He did.”

  “And then what?” Emma waited. “What happened?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Emma was quiet. “Weren’t you worried? Didn’t you want to know if he was all right?”

  “Sure I did. Of course I did,” Frankie sighed. “But I never saw him after.”

  Emma didn’t answer right away.

  “So you could only see what’s going on in pieces.”

  “As compared to what?”

  “How it all goes together.” And now she started to talk almost t
o herself, as if Frankie weren’t there. “There are signs all the time. Things that repeat, things that overlap. Things you can’t explain, but refer to each other.” Emma was sitting. “Maggie Winthrop dying like she did, for instance, and Will taking it to mean that he ought to go to England, as though it were a sign. When she was sick already, she must have been—” Emma stopped, remembering Frankie across from her. “And now you see, they’re both gone and it’s me who’s pregnant. There’s a line between them, and it has occurred to me lately that I ought to understand that, see? They’re both gone. The one led to the other, and something else leads out of this. Oh God, I’m tired,” she sighed. She hadn’t said aloud the real sign, the clear signal that had come through last month in the shape of a pair of overalls.

  “Listen.” Frankie reached over and touched Emma’s hand. “It all happens very fast over there—you’re in a bar and then you’re outside and then you’re inside and there’s the boy and you walk him home and then you’re home and—there isn’t a line between them at all.”

  “But there is, there must be.” Emma shook her head. “What about all those people?”

  “What people?”

  “I hear their voices sometimes at night, coming from your cottage. Otto says they are the people from France.”

  “Yes.”

  “You brought them back and played them—for Otto.”

  Frankie looked at her, helpless in the face of Emma’s logic.

  “Who else in this town needed to hear those voices more than Otto?” Emma asked softly. “Tell me that.”

  Frankie shook her head.

  “What are you going to do with all those records?” Emma asked.

  Frankie turned her head.

  “All those people.”

  “I don’t know,” Frankie answered quietly.

  “You ought to let them go,” Emma told her. “You ought to let everyone hear them.”

  “Yeah?” Frankie challenged. “Why? Who around here wants to hear?”

  Emma took a long time to answer. Frankie waited, her eyes fixed on Will’s widow.

  “Listen.” Emma glanced at her, and looked away. “I don’t know anything about what you do, Miss Bard. But I do know you told me a story about a boy I couldn’t shake.”

  “Okay.” Frankie watched Emma.

  “You made the war come alive.”

  Frankie lay down in the sand.

  “He was alive, because you were so”—Emma searched—“broken. Your voice was so sad.”

  Frankie looked straight up into the soaring blue cap of the sky.

  “Those people on the trains talked to you.” Emma stopped. “They must have told you their names and answered your questions because they wanted you to do something—pass them on, somehow.”

  Frankie stood up without a word and walked straight down to the water, coming to a stop with the tips of her shoes in the lip of the surf, and for a crazy half-minute Emma thought she was going to start swimming; instead, Frankie opened her mouth and what came out of her body was a wordless cry. Of pain or rage, it was impossible to tell.

  Emma lay down again and closed her eyes, her heart pounding, that sound echoing in her ears. Keening. That’s what that was. And the little boy dropped to his knees. There was a country of mourners, a country like sickness, unimaginable to the healthy, and Emma knew she was going there. Her heart banged against her ribs, and then it wasn’t her heart, it was her baby pounding hard inside her.

  She rolled onto her side to cushion the baby’s kicks and the sand on her cheek and the salt brought back Will the second-to-last morning when they’d come out here so they could make some noise, he’d whispered; and his lips on hers were warm and his touch opened her lips under his and she could feel the opening all throughout her body. She had smiled against his mouth and cast off into the tide, letting herself be pulled down into the sand, feeling it shift and mold around her, her duffel coat buffering the cold. Behind the horizon of Will’s head, the morning sky arched over her and its blue unblinking stare held hers. And as he sank into her with a groan, she had imagined God looking down and smiling on the bird they made, beating frantic rhythms rising into air.

  When she sat up, Frankie wasn’t in sight. The sky was tipping at the top of the afternoon and the sandpipers had grown bold again and skittered on the widening beach right next to her. The surf rolled forward and the wave coming in recalled a giant’s hand, the white knuckles of surf drumming, the fingers tapping, tapping and pulling back.

  Just beyond the edge of the breakwater, the gray outline of a battleship overlapped with the smaller, sleeker point of a cruiser alongside. Somewhere, far beyond these two, she knew several more wheeled and turned, practicing maneuvers. The cruiser pulled free of the hull of the battleship and the white plume of its wake appeared to her stark as a knifecut on the blue water. She turned and saw Frankie sitting on the top of the dune path, watching over her. There was the bowl of light and sky arching overhead; a peeper crossed by. Frankie stood up, and the up and down of her body stood like a signpost at a crossroads in the middle of a desert. Here, the reporter’s body said to the sky, the sea, the woman below her on the sand, here.

  “Come on,” Frankie waved.

  Climbing up from the bottom to the top of the dune was like climbing up a waterfall, having to dig into the sand even as it fell away under her weight. Just below the lip, Emma looked up, and it was as though she climbed out of a hole into the sky.

  They took a few steps into the duneland and the sound of the surf fell immediately away, giving over to the hum of trucks and the train arriving on its harbor tracks. When they reached the middle ridge of the dunes, they could see both bodies of water ahead and behind, the sea lying blue there beyond the triangle of houses and here running into the plat of sand.

  Emma might have liked to say something to Frankie, something large to show that she understood the cry Frankie had let loose on the water. Something, anything at all. She might have liked to touch her, gently, too, though she did not. She walked beside her, side by side, in quiet.

  They emerged onto the town road from the dune path at the edge of the evening, and the windows and glass doors shot back the sinking light. Her eyes picked out the row of cottages at the very end of the road and then, by relation, her own roof. “Hang on,” she said.

  Frankie straightened and turned around. Emma was staring down the road to her house where Harry and Iris sat on the porch, clearly waiting.

  If she didn’t walk any closer, Emma thought, if she turned around and slipped back into the dunes, if she made her way all the way back across the sand and to the edge of the water, and started swimming, she could swim to him and find him and make what they had to say not true.

  “I’ve got you,” Frankie promised, and she took Emma’s hand in hers.

  27.

  THEY HAD ALL been so gentle with her. Frankie, Miss James, and Harry. When she had risen the three steps to the porch where they waited with the news, she had stumbled, and Harry had walked to her. Come on, he had whispered, come on, put your arms around me. And she had looked up into his face and seen it. She had been so tired. But he smelled of axle grease and Old Spice and leather, and she raised her arms and let herself be carried into the house like a child. He laid her down on the sofa, calling her dear, and tucked the blanket around her, watchful as any mother.

  A telegram had come. There had been a mix-up. Dr. Fitch had been hit by a taxi on May 18 and buried in Brompton Cemetery on the twenty-eighth. Deepest Regrets. And then Miss James had put the letter in Emma’s hand.

  “Dr. Fitch wanted me to give it to you, if he . . .”—Iris flushed—“when he died.”

  Emma sat there on the sofa between Harry and Iris and looked down at the envelope. Emma, it said. As though he were in the next room, calling. Emma.

  Frankie wanted to stand up, but she was afraid to in case Iris stood up also and left. Emma slit open the envelope and pulled the letter out.

  All the breath rushed o
ut of Frankie’s body, and she rose and made her way blindly down the hall where the breakwater lights blinked at her through the kitchen window a long way across the scuffed water. She walked to the window and stood, her mind stalled, her mind spun and stalled. Frankie leaned over to the counter and pulled the cord on the kitchen lamp. She filled the kettle and put it on to boil. There were no cigarettes, and Emma was low on tea. She shook the last of it into the bottom of the china pot. The light from the Frigidaire slivered on the linoleum, and she pulled the bottle of milk out and poured it into the pitcher, holding the door open with her hip, then she slid it back in and slammed the handle shut. When the kettle blew, she poured the water and walked back into the front room with the tea things. The three of them hadn’t moved from the sofa, though Emma had Harry’s handkerchief in her hand.

  Iris reached for the lamp and switched it on. Frankie sank down beside the table and poured the milk into the bottom of the mug and then rested the silver strainer over the rim and lifted the teapot and poured. The steam hit her chin, dampening it. She could feel Emma watching her.

  Emma held out her letter to Frankie. “Read it.”

  “I can’t read your letter.” Frankie’s voice shook.

  “Please.” Emma handed it up to her and Frankie took it.

  Sweetheart, it began, If you hold this in your hand, I will never hold that hand again.

  Frankie closed her eyes and lowered the letter.

  “Did you finish?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Please, Miss Bard.” Emma’s voice caught. “That’s him, there—on that page. I want you to see him.”

  January 3, 1941

  Sweetheart,

  If you hold this in your hand, I will never hold that hand again. And the thought of that is unimaginable—impossible, because you are so real. And because I am. Here is my hand holding down the page, here is the other hand, writing.