The Postmistress (10 page)

He squeezed her shoulders and let her go. “I’ll see you later.”

He turned at the end of the garden and saw her, still in the doorway, her dark hair uncombed. “Will,” she called, clutching her sweater to her neck with one hand and waving with the other. His heart fell out of its casing and he started walking back to the house, toward her in the doorway.

“Don’t!” she laughed. “I don’t know why I called out.”

He stopped.

“Go on,” she said, embarrassed by her longing. “I’ll see you later.”

She was being silly. And when he turned a little ways along down the street and gave her a wave, she tipped her head to the side and stuck out her chin, as gay and brave as Deborah Kerr.

She followed the sharp cutout of his hat above the tall hedge until it was out of sight, replaced by the empty November air. She stood at the front door feeling the cold and hearing what might have been the echo of his footsteps on the frozen sidewalk and looked out at the blank swatch of sky. She looked down at her wristwatch and then back up at the empty view out the front door. There were hours to be gotten through.

She turned back into the little front room, sank into the one comfy chair, and kicked the door closed on the rest of the house.

She had always thought that having a house would be a source of great strength, like a trunkful of memories one never unlocked. Her own family’s house had been sold along with all its contents, except for some photographs and the child’s christening set of silver and her mother’s little seed-pearl wedding ring, which hung loosely off the third finger on Emma’s right hand. She had wondered sometimes where the things had ended up. She didn’t begrudge her great-aunts’ decision—she had lived off the proceeds, as they reminded her, after all—but sometimes she wondered whether she might feel less lonely, somehow less anonymous, if, when she woke in the morning, she opened her eyes and saw the same bureau her father had, for instance. Or, even less grand, used the kettle her mother used to boil water for their junket.

But here—she sighed—out there and upstairs, there was nothing of hers. She felt for the first time in her life the danger of other people’s things—how they might erase her if she weren’t careful. A sob caught at the bottom of her throat. It was that report on the boy in the Blitz; she leaned toward the coffee table to get her cigarette case. The report had reminded her of being little, that was all. She lit the cigarette and drew in a deep, long drag.

5.

T
HE WINTER AFTERNOON had set in and it was near dark, though the last of the sky hung indigo above the water splashing against the spars of the old pier. Maggie and Jim Tom lived in one of the fish houses right along the harbor’s edge, built by the fishermen before the pier to stow their tackle and gear. They were steep-angled tiny boxes, like a child’s drawing of a house, and without windows except for the big double doors in front, which slid aside to let out the spars and gaffs, the heavy lines and mast for the jib. Jim Tom and Maggie had moved into the Winthrop fish house in the days right after their wedding, and Jim had cut out windows, put down flooring in the sail loft, and promised they’d be in their own house after five years of fishing. That had been ten years ago. Never mind, Maggie laughed at him—and she didn’t mind. She’d look up and see Jim Tom steaming in around Land’s End after a long haul, and watch him heading straight for her.

Will could see the angle of the Winthrop fish house ahead, and could just make out the lamp that was burning by Maggie’s bed; but still feeling the warmth of Emma’s body in his, even as he was already outside and long past that moment, he stopped and looked back. The roofline of his house and that of the Nileses beside it bulwarked the oncoming night. Ought he to let Dr. Lowenstein know Maggie had gone into labor? Her labors are hard and long, the old doctor had said to Will the last time he had been in town, and this one will be her fifth in as many years. The porch light went on at Will’s house. He felt sharp sudden joy. No, no need to call. He was the doctor now. He turned his back on his own house and started again toward the Winthrops, letting his doctor’s bag swing in his hand. Jim Tom opened the door before Will could knock, and Will looked up to see if there was any hint of worry in his face.

But Jim Tom had been through this four times before, and he had, Will saw, entering the single big downstairs room, put on a large pot to boil hot water and prepared a basin. There was also a teakettle steaming. The house was calm, but ready. Up there, Jim Tom nodded in response to Will’s glance.

“I’ll wash up here, shall I?” He turned on the tap above the kitchen sink and ran the water over his hands several times, finding the soap tucked into the exposed board of the wall in front of him.

“And where are your boys?”

“Mother’s.”

Will nodded and climbed the open stairs. Halfway up, Maggie began to groan in the grip of a contraction. He took the stairs two at a time and followed the sound into a room that had been made into the sail loft by placing two armoires next to each other as a partition. On this side, the stacked-up gear of generations of Winthrop boats, sails tackle, riggings, and masts lay in orderly stacks. On the other side of the armoires there lay a bed pulled up to a window, freshly made, it looked like, the sheets pulled tight.

Maggie was creeping along the wall, one hand on her side, bent over and gasping, but when Will went forward to her, she waved him away. Her breaths came in rapid sighs and she walked in time to them. At the end of the wall, she stopped and straightened and turned around, walking back along the wall in the other direction.

“Shit,” she gasped out, leaning her head against the wall.

“Shit is right,” Will agreed.

Maggie nodded, her face contorted briefly. She gave a deep groan and he watched her shoulders relax. She sank onto the end of the bed, a little pale, Will thought.

“Whew,” she said.

“How long have you been contracting like that?” He moved around the bed and picked up her wrist for her pulse. Brisk. Her forehead was moist and her hair was damp against her temples.

“Off and on about four hours.”

“Pretty strong?” He counted her pulse against the hand of the bedside clock whose comfortable ticking sounded out into the room.

“Strong and long.” She nodded.

“Strong as that one?”

“And forever. That’s how all my babies are. Tommy, the littlest, took two days to come.”

Will helped her sit back against the pillows piled up on the bed, shook down the thermometer, and slid it in her mouth. “Well, let’s hope number five comes a bit quicker for you.”

Maggie shrugged, her mouth closed over the thermometer. It had started; they were both in the chute. Come what may, there was only one direction to go in now.

“Let’s check how far along you are.” Will pushed her knees gently up and open; he slid his fingers up the vagina to the cervix where he could feel the head, but not the bag.

“When did your bag break, Maggie?”

“Has it?” She frowned. “I don’t know. Day before yesterday? There was something then, though I wasn’t sure what it was, there was so little of the junk—and I didn’t have any cramps at all.”

He pulled his hand out and with it there was a slight unfamiliar odor, something he didn’t remember smelling at the births he’d attended before. He washed his hands in the bowl of warm water Jim Tom had brought up and left by the bed; he toweled them dry, frowning. Then he turned and slid the thermometer from Maggie’s mouth and saw that her temperature was slightly elevated. He sat down on the side of the bed.

“Okay,” he exhaled, pushing a faint wisp of worry away.

“Oh.” She pushed herself off the bed, needing to walk at the start of another contraction. Will helped her onto her feet and waited through the next one with her, all the time watching how she breathed. When it had eased, she focused back on him. “How far along am I?”

“Six centimeters or so. You’ve got a ways to go still. But you’re doing swell.”

She smiled weakly, rising to sit on the side of the bed, holding her hand out to Will. He pulled her to her feet and they started walking again, first to the opposite side of the room, then back.

THE GULLS ROSE up suddenly off the pylons on the pier, the swift beating of their wings like hands shuffling cards, and Iris followed them as they wheeled into the sky outside the window. She crossed the wooden floor of the lobby, unlocked the front doors, and the blast of a northerly wind hit her. Quick as she could, she reached out and uncleated the line on the flagpole and the flag came sliding on its tether down the pole into her hands.

“Evening,” a voice said from below.

She jumped and clutched the cloth to her chest as though he had caught her at something secret. “Oh, hello,” she called over her shoulder, shivering. She should have put on her coat, she realized.

“Want help with that?”

She shook her head, releasing the flag from the metal clips on the line, and turned around. Harry Vale had one foot up on the bottom stair and one hand loosely on the railing. He smiled and she smiled back, embarrassed to be standing above him this way. It had the effect of making him appear very small.

“I’ve been using your mug.” She let her eyes down to look at his hand on the railing, the flag still crumbled into a ball in her arms.

“Good.” He nodded. But his attention drifted to the pole above her head. “Just the top three feet,” he nudged, smiling. “Would you give me the top three feet? Just to get it below the roofline.”

She cleated the line and rested her hand on the painted wood, not quite sure what she wanted to say. It had become something like a joke between them, a running patter, though it wasn’t a joke and she knew it. “I haven’t heard from the post office inspector,” she said.

He lowered his gaze to her face. “It doesn’t worry you?”

She flushed. “We can’t allow ourselves to take things into our own hands like that.”

“Why not?” He slid his hand along the ridge of the gate.

With a small, efficient stab, the question pricked her. They were at odds, she realized, unhappily.

“Never mind,” he said gently. “Good night.”

“Good night,” she answered and he ambled off. That hadn’t gone at all the way she wanted.

She crossed the lobby with the flag in her arms and pushed through the door into the back part of the post office, shutting it firmly behind her. One couldn’t behave as though the post office was just another building, its flagpole just another piece of wood. It represented something. Order. And here at the very heart of the system, she let out her breath, carefully. Back here the open mailboxes stretched floor to ceiling, ready for her to fill. The broad wooden sorting table was cleared for the morning’s mail. If there was a place on earth in which God walked, it was the workroom of any post office in the United States of America. Here was the thick chaos of humanity rendered into order. Here was a box for each and every family in the town. Letters, bills, newspapers, catalogs, packages might be sent forth from anywhere in the world, shipped and steamed across water and land, withstanding winds and time, to journey ever forward toward this single, small, and well-marked destination. Here was no Babel. Here, the tangled lines of people’s lives unknotted, and the separate tones of voices set down upon a page were let to breach the distance. Hand over hand the thoughts were passed. And
hers
was the hand at the end.

Still. Harry’s gentle wave as he walked away took some of the pleasure out of it all. She climbed up onto the chair beside the sorting table, holding the flag above her shoulders so it did not touch the floor, and shook it out like a bedsheet, holding a corner in each hand. The certificate in its envelope lay perfectly safe up the hill in her cottage, among her nightgowns in the bureau drawer. It had lain there all these weeks since she’d gone into Boston, and every day he’d come into the post office and she could feel the tie between them tightening, sighing as it tightened, and she didn’t have the faintest idea what to do next.

The vision of her mother standing in the passage on the way to her parents’ bedroom flashed before her. Thin-framed but gone to fat, her mother’s body hung like too many coats thrown over a hanger. She was thick and mealy, but Iris had caught her laughing in response to something coming from her father in the bedroom that Iris couldn’t hear, turning her girlish. Iris appeared in her nightie at the end of the hall and her mother had turned, concerned, but still headed for the bedroom—her whole attention in there. In one hand she held a rubber pouch, like a hot water bottle, with a long tube snaking out of it and over her mother’s arm. In the other hand, Iris saw she held the glass bottle of vinegar from the pantry. “Iris,” her mother said, “you’re dreaming, dear. Go back to bed.” And Iris had.

How did the next part work? She couldn’t imagine it. She couldn’t think past the looking and the smiling to a moment like that with a douche in one’s hand, without any pretense what for. A woman standing like that, wide open. Like an announcement.

She folded the flag in half, then half again, then held it against her chest, smoothing it flat. Still holding to one corner, she let the other drop against the flat length, so that it made a triangle. And then again, she let the triangle fold against itself into a second triangle. This way and that she folded the flag until it was fully collected into a single triangle of cloth into which she tucked the ends.

The moon was rising as she latched the post office gate and stepped back into the matter-of-fact world where her bicycle leaned against the side of the building at the bottom of the post office steps. A fog was coming in and the foghorn sang its steady single note. Across the green, the light inside Alden’s Market shone fiercely down on the people inside. She could see Florence Cripps from here. And another woman. Leaning over the counter to talk to Beth, the grocer’s daughter. They looked like figures in a painting, stuck onto the light.