The Postmistress (15 page)

Last month, Vichy France had signaled it would release thousands from the holding camps provided they could prove that other countries would be willing to admit them. It asked the United States to grant refuge particularly for “Jews forced out of Luxembourg, Belgium, and Germany.” But Secretary of State Cordell Hull declined, asserting that “the basic principles” of the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees could not be seen to favor one race, nationality, or religion. The Jews were being interned because they were Jews, and were being denied refuge on the basis of being Jews.

These clerical errors
, Harriet had written, are human beings caught by pieces of paper now stuck in camps like Gurs with sixty to a room.
Send food, clothes, underwear, and medicine
, the cables from the camp shot into the air following relatives who had gotten out.
Send food, clothes, underwear. Tell my sister. Tell my cousin.
Scraps of paper were thrust into visitors’ hands as they left the place where ten thousand women waited for news. Ten thousand scraps of paper.

“The Immigration Department does not refuse visas,” Frankie’s friend Kirchway had written in
The Nation
, “it merely sets up a line of obstacles.”

There had been a teacher at Farmington, where Frankie had gone to school, who chewed her food so slowly Frankie had thought she’d lose her mind in between bites, sitting there at the round table, the forks on the left and the knives on the right and the girls in a circle, stilled, all talk slowed to the pace of the presiding teacher who chewed and thought and chewed. And one night, Frankie had simply leaned back in her chair, opened her mouth, and screamed.

Du calme
—Frankie heard her mother’s voice in her head—
du calme.

But it was nearly impossible now to look away from what was clearly happening in Europe. The Jews were in a permanent, ceaseless pogrom. And the patrician habit of deflecting strong passion or insight first into calmer waters, to reflect, to take stock, belonged to her mother’s generation. Fine for Mrs. Dalloway, impossible for Mrs. Woolf. A writer, a real writer, in possession of a story headed straight for its rapids, eyes on the water, paddling fast for the middle in order to see as well, as closely as could be. In order to see like that, one had to entertain the fact of brutal, simple cruelty. The Germans were, in fact, gathering the Jews in camps and ghettos and simply
letting them die there
. If Frankie could tell that story, if she could tell it as well as Murrow was telling the Blitz, she could move the Jews and their plight onto the front pages—she could bring what was being buried now in details, what could be dismissed as random and unintentional, into full narrated sight.

“I don’t like what’s happened to your voice, Frankie darling,” her mother had said through the telephone last week. “You sound—” There was a long whistle down the line, the vast silence of the sea between herself and her mother standing in the hallway of their house.

“What, Mother?

“Desperate.”

“It is.”

“Come home, dear,” her mother said, finally. “Come and rest.”

The moon was red tonight, set off by the fires reflecting in the frozen Thames. Though by now she was so used to noting these details, description seemed hardly enough anymore. All I have been doing—Frankie nearly ran up the stairs to Murrow—is painting vivid word pictures. Pictures from the Blitz. While Harriet’s story grows.

She paused in the open doorway of Murrow’s office.

“Frankie.” He rose and came around his desk toward her, motioning her into the chair. She smiled hello and sank down. A two-week-old
New York Times
lay triple-folded next to his sandwich on the desk. A cigarette burned in the ashtray in front of him. She pulled out a cigarette and he reached forward with his lighter. She bent into it and nodded, thanking him, exhaling.

“Send me into France, Mr. Murrow. Please.”

He tapped the lighter closed and slipped it into his pocket.

She stayed on her feet, in the grip of a restless urgency, but, knowing how she must look to her boss, exhausted and excitable, she tipped her chin at the paper on his desk. “Any news in there?”

Murrow eyed her calmly. “What’s doing, Frankie?”

“Okay.” She looked at him and pointed at the
Times
. “There has been only one story about the situation of the Jewish refugees in France to hit the front page of that paper. And that was about Secretary Hull’s response to the French. Everything Harriet filed got buried in the middle pages. Why aren’t the stories landing? Why can’t they see?”

“See what, Frankie?”

“Beginning in Spain,” she fell into the pitch, “the years of war in Europe have burst the boundary between battlefield and home, crashing through villages, setting people in flight—people walking away from their homes, from Spain into France. Now add in the Jews sent off by the Nazis—and what you have is a tide of people swept across Europe, and now caught in the south of France, where they sit waiting, their backs to the sea.”

“Go on.”

“Refugees in war is a story we all know. But who is really in those camps and why? Why are they there? Have they done something? I’ve heard people here talking as though there were a real reason. Ordinary people balk at paying attention because it can’t be true that people are simply rounded up and given twenty minutes to get ready to leave their lives, taking no money with them, only to face a bureaucracy that insists on papers and money and things in their place. It can’t be true, the civilized world thinks, because that would be
mad.
”

Her voice was shaking. She thrust her hands into her pockets and leaned forward.

“What if people back home could hear their voices? We could make the refugees real. We’d get the stories of the people stuck—” Her throat closed up. “Darn it.” She smiled to ward off the tears springing into her eyes.

“It’s okay,” he said.

“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.

“It’s tough,” Murrow said again, more quietly.

“I just want to continue what Harriet had started, tell this story, tell it all.”

He nodded. “So you can do what with it?”

Get us off our duffs, she didn’t say. “What are we doing back home, Ed? What are people doing, for Christ’s sake?”

“Living their lives.”

“How
can
they be?”

He didn’t answer and she knew she had just stepped on a boat that was leaving shore.

“In that first week, you remember, Ed—you remember all of those people, thousands of them in the East End with their suitcases, lining up, queuing for Christ’s sake for the buses to come and take them from South Hallsville School, take them to other parts of the city, to safety.”

Ed nodded.

“Bombed out of their houses, they were promised transport out of there and told to stay put until the buses came. And they did. And half of them were killed on the third night because the buses never came—the ones who had lived through the first night, dying on the third, because the buses never came—”

“Okay, Frankie.”

She stood up. “My point, Ed, is that people here are bombed out of their homes. But it seems clear that the majority of people in the detention camps are there
because
they are Jewish. Even though the reports stress that there are many nationalities, the refugees are Jews. It’s deliberate. They’ve been deported and gathered. What’s the plan? Is there a plan? That’s all. That’s what Harriet was tracking. Don’t we want to know? Shouldn’t we find out?”

He didn’t answer.

“I want to get the story that pricks a hole in the idea that the Jewish plight is simply the usual face of war—”

“Whatever the hell that is,” Murrow snapped.

“Fair enough.” Frankie nodded. “But this is not random casualty. It’s abnormal. It’s a pogrom.”

“Go on,” he said after a little.

“Let me go over there. Let me get their voices on disk—like the BBC’s ‘Children Calling Home.’ We could call this ‘Voices of Europe,’ or something. A broadcast of ordinary people talking. Talking and real. Real as the people on the other side of the radio—the voice of war, people in the detention camps trying to leave the war, just as true as the bombs—and they’re simply people. Hasn’t that always been our story?”

“In English?” Murrow was skeptical. “How are you going to deal with the languages?”

“Whatever they’re speaking in . . . they’re speaking.
They
are alive. And real, perhaps
more
so if they are speaking another language. Their voices carry that to an audience. And every day fifteen to twenty-five more of them are dying at places like Gurs.”

She waited. We do not create mood, Murrow had lectured her when she’d first arrived, we tell what there is to tell. Our job is not to persuade. Just provide the honest news. One person to another. And when there isn’t any news, why, just say so. The news is not atmosphere (although there were shelves of disks at Broadcasting House that used to be used for just that—crickets and birdsongs, Big Ben sounding, and nearly sixty bands on one disk devoted to False Alarm: Cheerful Voices with Chink of Teacups). The war news now came live: the newsreaders’ voices, the microphone on the roof recording the progress of the bombs, and the conversation between broadcasters in the very moment of the Blitz. The world could listen to the war as though we were all pulled up to the fire.

Murrow shook his head. “It’s too diffuse, too unfocused. Especially if the voices aren’t translated. They are just sound. Voices without a story. People need to know why they are listening and what they are being asked to hear.”

“Or they won’t understand?”

“They won’t listen.” He was impatient. “You have to point, Frankie. You have to focus people’s attention on what you want them to hear.”

“But—”

“It’s not news.” Murrow was finished. “And I need you here.”

She stared at him blankly, then stood up. “Okay, Boss.”

“You’re on in five minutes,” the engineer called after her as she emerged from Murrow’s office.

“Don’t I know it,” she waved, holding on until she could push through the door into the woman’s loo, where she gave way at last in great gulping sobs, her forehead leaning against the cool tile. And when she had heaved it all out, she pushed back from the wall and turned on the tap in the sink and leaned her face down into the cup of her hands and dunked in the water.

“
There are many positive reports
,” she began a few minutes later, closing her eyes to the microphone, to the lamp overhead, to Tom, the soundman, sitting behind the glass in front of her, and imagined her mother as she always did, the open ear turned to her.

“
There are many positive reports from Europe making their way to us here. It has only been a few short weeks since Mr. Laveleye proposed the V for victory sign to unite the occupied people of Belgium, France, and Holland, and we have word that the symbol has appeared, it seems, everywhere. Chalked onto barn walls, on city pavements, on the sides of trucks gliding through towns, the V stands. If washed off, it reappears hours later. Like a ghost finger, pointing. The sign, always the same, infinitely repeated, must remind a German soldier stationed there that he is surrounded. And the walls speak: we are watching, we are waiting for you to fall. All over Europe the silent, invisible V proclaims the voices that cannot speak, asserts the presence of the people underneath.”
Frankie paused the infinitesimal moment, the beat of silence that carried the words all the better.

IRIS HAD COME to a stop in front of the radio perched on the shelf in the sorting room of the post office above the hot plate and her teakettle.

Iris reached for the knob and slowly turned it to the right. She didn’t, as a rule, like the sound of that gal’s voice, didn’t like the undercurrent that seemed always to run through it that she held the truth in her hand and everyone better damn well take a look. Nonetheless—Iris stood back from the radio and crossed her arms—she was fairly sure that the radio gal had just redefined the nature of a hero. She considered the black box. Yes, she was certain that that was what Miss Frankie Bard had done.

10 .

H
ARRY VALE SAT at the top of the town hall looking for Germans. It was a bright, brisk evening. The high flagpole of the post office divided Franklin harbor in half, pointing like a compass needle due north, and still making him nervous as all hell. The attic windows commanded this unobstructed view of the harbor out one end, and out the other, a view across the wilderness of dunes to the sea. Straight on past the curl of Land’s End, the black smudges of boats bobbed up and down on the blue.