The Postmistress (17 page)

How was she to survive on this kind of talk? Without his arms around her, without his smile catching her eye across the table, without the smell of his hair and the taste of his mouth on hers—the words that mouth might say didn’t add up to anything at all. The letter was nothing but a husk in her hand.

She was aware that Miss James had stopped whatever she was doing, and she looked up to find the postmaster standing in the window watching her. She slipped Will’s letter back into the envelope.

“How are you holding up?”

“All right, thanks.”

Behind the postmaster, the telegraph machine whirred into life, tapping out a sharp staccato message. Emma froze, her hand in the box. Iris kept her eyes on the doctor’s wife, listening to the iron hammers, one two, one and two, pounding black letters onto the white sheet. She turned slightly backward, gauging the length of the message. Emma stared at the postmaster. The steel drum turned after the ping of the end of a line. The message continued, clattering across the two women’s silence. The drum turned again.

“It’s too long,” Iris commented.

“Please”—Emma blew out her breath—“go and see.”

Iris studied her a minute. Then she turned away from the window and walked to the back of the sorting room where the telegraph machine was set up against the wall. It was still going, going on far longer than
We regret to inform you
, and even though Iris was certain it was a telegraph for Mr. Lansing, or Mr. Pete in the town offices, the girl’s worry was hard to shake and she hesitated an instant before leaning over the message.
Bona Fide Credit
it began. She turned and went back to the window.

“It’s nothing.”

“I’m being silly.” Emma gave a weak smile.

“Perfectly understandable.”

Emma nodded and slid her letter to Will across the counter along with the three pennies. Iris opened the drawer and pulled out a stamp, passing it over the sponge pot and sticking it firmly to the envelope. Emma watched.

“Will it be all right in the end, do you think, Miss James?”

Iris turned around, the confusion plain on her face.

“Oh, go on.” Emma was only half joking. “You can lie to me.”

“Yes,” Iris answered. “It will be all right in the end.”

Emma gave her the first real smile Iris had seen. “You sound so certain,” she said gratefully.

“So long,” Iris said quietly.

Emma waved backward over her shoulder. Iris watched her all the way out and down the stairs until she vanished at the level of the street. The doctor’s wife came in and out of the post office every day at four o’clock after the mail had been sorted, her chin up, her back straight, walking like daffodils waving in spring. That was how Iris thought of her. Every day she approached the box with the same determined step, unlocking it and reaching in without looking, to pull the envelope out, allowing herself a little smile only when it was firmly in her hand. Each afternoon was a gauntlet thrown. Each day Iris watched Emma gamely pick it up and toss it back, her shoulders softening with relief as she slipped back out the post office door.

It took two weeks for letters to cross the Atlantic, and though there’d been a letter every day since the doctor left, Iris dreaded the afternoon when that box would be empty. Of course there would be a half-dozen reasons for a day without a letter, and Iris was ready to give them, but the truth of the matter was that the day before he’d left town, she had sat at her stool in the back and watched Dr. Fitch walking around and around the small lobby with his hands jammed deep in his pocket, and with nothing, apparently, to mail.

“Miss James?” he finally called.

She had come to the window. A white envelope lay faceup on the ledge, but he put his hand over the letter as if she might take it from him. She looked up at him.

“I—” He was looking at his hand and Iris could see there was nothing for her to say. He shook his head and barreled forward. “It’s for my wife,” he said, “if I’m dead.”

Iris kept her eyes on him, waiting for the next bit. He still didn’t look up at her, his eyes remaining fixed on that letter. “I want to make sure she gets it,” he said, by way of explanation.

“All right,” said Iris finally. And then he did look up, looked directly into her eyes, and smiled.

“You didn’t contradict me,” he said gratefully.

“How could I?”

He nodded. But he didn’t seem to want to leave. “Let me ask you something.”

She waited.

“If something happens to me, how will Emma get the news?”

The pale in his cheeks made him look like a sick boy, she thought. And he was asking questions like a sick boy in his bed, his feverish eyes above the smile, imagining the worst.

“You understand, I won’t be over there in any official capacity,” he went on, before she could answer, “I’m going over all on my own, which is why I’m just wondering about it. When someone is traveling, for instance, abroad—and something happens, how does the news arrive?”

“By telegram, I think,” she answered. “If anything should happen.”

Will nodded. This seemed to satisfy, even to comfort. “So it will be you.”

“If it is anyone,” she said softly. She had to say it.

“It’s all right, you know.” He shook his head, a little impatient with her kindness.

Iris drew in her breath sharply. “For you, maybe.”

He looked at her. “So, you
do
watch. You do pay attention to everyone in here.”

Ignoring the remark, she reached for her pack of cigarettes tucked at the inside corner of the counter. The doctor had his lighter ready, and when she leaned in for the light, she smelled ink on his hands.

He flipped shut the lid on the flame. “Emma doesn’t believe anyone is watching her.”

“What?”

“Watching over her, I guess I should say.”

“What does that mean?”

“She believes that if you are in the world without parents or someone who loves you, you are invisible. That no one sees you, because no one needs to. No one needs to watch out for you.”

“Well,” Iris said, “that’s true enough.”

He shook his head. “But you just told me off on her behalf.”

She exhaled, studying him. “Dr. Fitch, I didn’t tell you off.”

“You did, though.” His likable face broke open into a grin. “And it makes me think you’re not half so disinterested as you let on.”

Iris merely raised her eyebrow.

The smile on his face faded slowly, but he put out his hand to Iris. “Keep an eye on her, will you?”

She nodded and took his hand in hers. “Good luck, Doctor.”

“Thank you,” the doctor said softly. “Thanks a lot.”

And then she had taken his letter and put it in the drawer with the postal savings account ledgers. It had slid in and out of her gaze nearly every day for months, so often that she knew the curve of the doctor’s hand perhaps as well as his wife did.

Now she looked down at the letter Emma had slid across the counter at her. On the back of the envelope, on the tip of the flap, Emma had written the word
Please.
And then she must have placed her hand down and traced it, so the handprint spread across the envelope’s flap like a small ghost. It nearly broke Iris’s heart—the hand was so slight and fit the envelope so neatly. And there was that “please.”
Please
, what? Iris carried the letter over to the mail sacks, her heart thudding.

Never before had her faith in her own role in the system been so sorely shaken as in these months since the men had been drafted and sent off to Florida or Georgia, one of those states ending in
a
about which Iris had long ago formed a negative opinion. There was John Dimling to whom his wife wrote faithfully every day, and whose persistent silence in return had tempted Iris nearly to break her own code of conduct and write a message on the back of one of his wife’s envelopes saying simply,
Shame
.

Please,
the wife was asking her husband. For what? And though Iris would have liked to let Emma know that she had seen, Iris had to let the lines play out under her fingers, spinning down until the end slipped past, watching out in silence. To protect the words passing across time and distance, that was her special charge, especially now when the letter writers might come to harm. No matter how people behaved out on the streets and in their front parlors, or upstairs in their bedrooms, their mail came and went as silent witnesses. As the postmaster, she knew everybody’s business and almost everybody’s sins. Some postmasters fell in love with the secrets, and played them out as breathlessly as a bad novel. Some couldn’t have borne simply standing by. But she’d give a quick glance at the person handing her their mail, a nice smile, and then she’d turn and toss what they gave her, passing it on. She watched it all. And she never said a word. The whole thing depended on her silence. She was aware that no one else in the town might think of her in this way. It beggared belief that an unmarried woman her age would not be convulsed by a desire to poke about in other people’s secrets, never reading their postcards, never noting return addresses. Nonetheless, she promised the letters before her. Nonetheless, she thought fiercely, it had to be so.
Please,
Lord. She dropped the letter in, then noosed up this last mail sack and locked it. She shook her head. That was the job.

One thing after another, she reminded herself, and cut the string on the newly arrived Sears catalogs. There were two extra. Without thinking, she slotted one into Emma Fitch’s empty box.

B
Y NOW, death had long since lost its power to shock. Everyone had a story: there were thousands piled up in London’s heart. But ever since the first of the year, Hitler had been playing with London’s nerves. There were three nights of bombing in January, then nothing for a week. Then again, and heavier. Then nothing. One day, then another in March, then nothing long enough for daffodils to appear and grass to start sprouting on the banks along the Thames. The city slid into April on a month of quiet. Then came the bombings of the Wednesday and the Saturday—bombs so bad, Ed Murrow joked, you wore your best clothes to bed in case your closet wasn’t standing in the morning. And since then, the memory of those nights had settled into everyone’s crouch, everyone’s quick steps, everyone’s fixed attention on the sky. Would they come again tonight? Or was it over? You didn’t know. You went to bed ready to run.

DARLING—
Emma looked up. But the post office lobby was still empty. Miss James had gone into the back.
This morning the sky was yellow, thick and yellow with ash and smoke and through it the sun rose finally, red. There are clothes in the trees, Emma, blown from the houses the bombs obliterated. The fires are still burning tonight. If they come again, they land the knockout punch, I’d say.

She crumpled the page and stuffed it in her purse.

“Everything all right?” Miss James had come around the corner.

Emma paused. “Yes.” She recovered herself. “He sounds fine.”

She did not, the postmaster considered, look like she was sleeping very well. There was a small bump where the baby was growing, yet Emma seemed to Iris as though she were slighter somehow, frailer.

“It’s good news, Emma.”

“I know,” Emma said mutinously. “Of course it is.” Because it meant he was alive, she knew Iris was trying to tell her. Alive and well. And fine. And that was good news, of course it was—but she was tired. Tired of pretending the whole thing was all right. Tired of cheeriness. Really she’d like to stay here in the post office, bring in a chair and sit, while Iris went about her business. She’d fall asleep maybe, and every so often Miss James could tiptoe in and check on her. And she could sleep here until the baby came and Will came home.

“He sounds so happy in his letters,” she said wistfully, after a little.

“He believes in what he’s doing.”

“Yes, but what am
I
doing? What about sitting here and waiting for word? All I think about is getting the news, and I can’t see straight sometimes. I wish there was a voice over my head, saying something like ‘it’s
all right
,’ or better, ‘
it’s not all right.’
Then I could continue.” She flushed and looked down. “I wish I knew that when the bad part comes, God will sit up straight in his chair and cry,
Watch out, Emma
—”

“Like the movies.” Iris kept a hold of her voice.

“It’s silly.”

“Not so silly, really.” Iris shook her head. “But you oughtn’t to think like that.”

Sometimes it was easier just to stay quiet. Emma regarded Iris. Most people had grown up with parents, with two pairs of eyes upon them. There was no way to make anyone who was used to that attention understand how swiftly you could disappear.

“Hello, Harry.” The postmaster’s voice dropped a note as the doors behind Emma shuddered open.

Emma straightened up and turned around.

“Iris,” Harry answered. “Hello, Mrs. Fitch.” He came to rest beside her at the counter.

Tears welled up at the sound of her name.

“Pretty tough,” he said. Emma looked at him gratefully and nodded. He reached over and patted her hand. Then he turned all his attention on Iris.

“How’s the day?” he asked her quietly.

There was dark in that tone and smiles in the dark, Emma realized. Iris reached down into her pocket and pulled up her cigarettes. Harry had his lighter out for her and she leaned forward into the flame. In the street outside, the first shoots of spring carried forward, there were cars nudging along the black tarmac and bicycle bells, there was a couple necking on the benches in the green. People laughed and passed by. A man yodeled. The sun crossed one inch more over the bright beautiful earth. But in here everything had stopped. A woman took her first long pull on the cigarette, and the man leaned away from her, having given her the light. They were divided by a foot and a half of marble—and her.