The Postmistress (28 page)

W
AR WAS COMING, everyone said it, though it was hard to believe what they said. Outside the windows here, gulls and swallows divided an undivided sky; the clear blue draped over a flat green sea, day after hot summer day. June had opened her throat wide and wider, and it was honky-tonk all the time. Tourists poured off the Boston boats into the throng along Front Street, mixing with sailors on shore leave walking in packs. The sunstruck beaches popped with parti-colored umbrellas while the turrets of navy boats crenellated the horizon far off in the bay.

“Anyone back there?” a man called from the lobby. Iris jumped and looked at the clock.

“Coming,” she answered.

If there was a psychology of summer people it was this: though they were out here on vacation, way out on the tip of the American world—sunstruck, hungover, or stupid with lying in—they responded to the morning as dogs to the sound of their master’s voice. Alert and bright, they trooped into the post office with letters and cards, wanting to get the work of their vacation out of the way in the morning. Then the rest of the day could go to the dogs. The rest of the day could slip easily as the evening sun into the surrounding ocean.

Iris stood in the window dispensing stamps and postal orders, directing newcomers to the town hall, nodding and counting and looking up for the next person in line to step forward. Yes, one could reach the back beach by way of the dunes. But one ought to carry some water. About a mile and a half. Yes, it looks like it’s going to be a scorcher. The summer people came and went like froth at the tip of the wave, and she listened as one half-listens to the symphonics of chickadees and a crow. Out the back window, she heard the deep grumble of engines.

“Will it rain again, do you think?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

“Come now, Miss”—the old man’s eyes glanced past her shoulder to her name printed next to the Post Office Department mandate stuck to the bulletin board—“James. You ought to know the weather.”

“Sorry, sir.”

Emma did not look at the old man as she passed. Neither did she look at Iris. She concentrated on getting to the box, reaching for the key in her bag and inserting it carefully in the lock. She could have risen on her toes to see whether there was the angle of a letter inside, but she always used the key. Iris watched her turn it and open the door and put her hand in, though by now she’d know that her hand would come out empty. She closed the door back upon the box and turned the key quietly again, and now she would know it was another day—the fourteenth day—without a letter.

“Hang on,” Iris called out quietly.

Reluctantly, Emma stopped where she was, a few feet away, and turned around.

“How are you doing?” Iris followed up.

“Fine.” Emma nodded. “I’m fine.” She dropped her gaze, a little nervous in the older woman’s stare.

“There’ll be something tomorrow.”

“Please don’t,” Emma said in a stiff little voice. “Please.”

The lobby doors split open upon the sound of men’s laughter. “Well, well, get a load of this joint!” One of the men sang out with a great smile.

“Miss James.” Johnny Cripps singled out Iris. “Nice to see you again, as always.”

Iris nodded in the general direction of the men but kept her eyes on Emma.

“Hello, Mrs. Fitch,” Johnny breezed.

“Hello,” Emma said, feeling everyone was a little too close.

“There it is.” Tom pointed to the wall beside Emma’s head, and the three of them looked up at the poster Iris had put up the day before yesterday and went silent. There was a girl dressed in a sailor blouse and cap, her thumbs hooked around blue suspenders, her hips thrust forward.
Gee!! I wish I were a Man
, the lettering read—
I’d join the Navy.

“Christ,
I’d
join the navy,” muttered Johnny Cripps, “if she were in it.”

Emma turned around. She needed to get home and sit down. She needed to get home and lie down. She needed to get out of her dress and her stockings and this kind of chatter.

“So long, Miss James.” She looked up at Iris and turned, nodding at Johnny on her way out.

“So long,” Iris called.

The men watched her out the door, and in the silence the telegraph machine pecked away like a bird in the back.

“Hell,” Iris said under her breath and pushed through the partition door and out to the post office porch, keeping her eye on Will’s wife walking slowly down the sidewalk, past the shops, holding her brown pocketbook firmly in her fist as though it might get away. It banged slightly against her knees and made the small woman smaller, carrying it like that, like a little girl. At the corner, she paused and looked carefully in both directions. Something caught in Iris’s throat and she had to look down, look away from the woman taking such care.
God almighty
, she whispered, clearing her throat of the tears. When she looked back up, Emma was halfway along the next block, her head and shoulders thrown back as though someone had told her to stand up straight.

“It’s sissy to cut it down.”

Johnny Cripps and the Jakeses had emerged behind her and were staring up at the flag.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Cut down the flagpole, the way Mr. Vale wants.”

“He doesn’t want to cut it down,” Iris said carefully. “He wants to lower it.”

“Is he right, do you think, or just nuts?” asked Tom Jakes.

“Nuts,” Johnny said without a pause. “The Germans can’t get all the way over here to get us.”

“You going to the meeting tonight?”

“What meeting?”

“Defense. Mr. Vale’s asking around for all available bodies.”

“I don’t think he means someone like me,” Johnny answered with a laugh. “He means people without skills, I think. No offense, Warren.”

“None taken,” Warren said easily.

“Oh, for pity’s sake.” Miss James yanked wide the post office doors. “Go on, all of you. Don’t stand out here spouting.”

She crossed the lobby and pushed through the door into the back part of the post office, shutting it firmly behind her. Grabbing the kettle and walking it over to the sink, she tugged the cold water faucet open, letting it run over her hand until she felt the chill from the deeper well water, the water pumped up past the stuff sitting in the pipes all night long, and the cold on her skin, the deeper cold, recalled her to herself. The topic of the flagpole had gone back and forth between Harry and her so often, she had almost thought it was private. And though of course that was silly of her, there was no reason to get so cross. The flag was hers, but it wasn’t
her
, after all. The Post Office Department had yet to give an answer on the issue of the flagpole. It was out of her hands. She filled the kettle and put it on the electric hot plate snug up against the sink, pressing the knob on high. Still, it made her uneasy, the talk like that on the lips of young men.

Was war something in a man’s blood at conception, then? The father knocking into the mother exploding the boy seed inside her? With every passing week Harry seemed to grow more urgent, bird-dogging the war. He’d given up all of the garage work to Otto, so convinced was he that a U-boat had set out for this coast. There were the men like Johnny Cripps in the lobby who bunched and bragged and scoffed, their yearning and their fear in equal parts. And there were the mothers, when they were sure they were alone in the post office, sighing in relief when one of the boys had failed his physical. “I never thought,” said Biddy Green, “I’d wish for something wrong with him, flat feet, a crooked limb—something not quite right to save him.” Impossible wish. Harry Green was the big boy of the lot and effortless in his young body, diving off the edge of the pier at the highest arc of summer—Iris had watched him out the post office window—his arms cleaving the slack water, like a god cracking open the mortal surface of the world.

She stalled at the back windows of the post office sorting room, which framed the pier and the harbor beyond. It was low tide, and the trap boats pushed slowly out, one by one. She watched them, following them around Land’s End, out into the open water of the sea, as if she could look into the broad heart of whatever was coming.

Though there was nothing there to see, she told herself impatiently.

EMMA KEPT HER EYES on the road out of town. The boys in the post office made her tired. The boys and their talk made her feel still more invisible, like a balloon at the end of a longer and longer string, held by no one. Floating off. There was nobody. No breath in her ear at night, no length of his leg along hers under the covers, no body. She felt like she had begun to disappear. Back into the gray, unaccented time when one day flipped over into the next without distinction, as in her life before Will, when she hadn’t a soul in the world.

Look at you, she conjured his voice saying it. Before bed, after making love, on the street, across the table. Look at you. There you are. And there, she had found, she was. For the first time in her life, with Will, she had come to see herself because she’d look down and
see herself
—her waist, her arms, the bone on her wrist—in his hands. Because he’d been watching her. Like a fairy kissed into being, or the mermaid suddenly walking, or any damn story about someone who had been invisible, suddenly, fantastically, appearing.

Someone was hanging in the air ahead of Emma as she pushed up the last bit of the hill on Yarrow Road, the sun behind the figure in the sky, turning it black, a black letter. But it was Otto, she realized. Otto Schelling’s body carved the letter
I
bending into the air. His waist leaned against the rung of the ladder set up against the second-floor window, the loose fabric of his trousers blowing backward slightly in the small breeze. He was thin and reedy and careful, his outstretched hand holding the paintbrush like a pen, running it along the bottom sill. He dabbed and then pulled back. Reedy but strong. His legs spread across the ladder were planted. He would not fall.

When she finally had decided to paint the house, it felt like an answer dropped through the mist in her brain. The clarity, the surety with which one day she had simply understood it was the answer, had stopped her where she stood at the kitchen window. She would not run. She would not turn away from the water between Will and her, she would paint the house a bright hard white, a charm to bring him home. To her. He could be on the boat right now, meaning to surprise her.

She went to sit on the porch steps, her back against the column, her legs stretched out before her. The sun had crawled up to the top of the sky and hung heavy above them. Otto was the letter
I
. The boats on the bay hardly moved, their triangles pasted on the hot sky. Otto made a sound through his teeth somewhere between a whistle and a sigh, running the paintbrush smoothly along. When he reached the side rim of the window, he stopped and looked over his shoulder at her.

“No,” she answered. “Nothing.”

He nodded.

She watched him. He had a wife, she knew, over there. And she knew he sent money to her, she had been behind him in line at the post office. She knew he had one shirt and one pair of trousers, because he appeared every morning for the past five, just exactly the same.

“Otto, where are you from?” She squinted up at him.

“Here.”

She cocked an eyebrow.

He shot her a brief, amused glance. “Even you.”

She flushed. “What do you mean?”

“Everyone thinks they’re going to get themselves a Kraut.” He paused lightly over the word.

“What are you talking about?” she asked, faintly.

He shook his head and jabbed gently at the corner with the brush.

“They follow me,” he said.

She frowned. “Who does?”

He tipped his head toward town. “The men in the café,” he said. “The boys.”

“What do you mean?”

His hand descended evenly down the middle pane along the narrow band of wood, then across on the horizontal. He didn’t answer.

“Well, the Germans are out
there
”—she tipped her head at the ocean in front of them—“according to Mr. Vale.”

“What do you think?”

“It’s phony baloney,” Emma said stoutly.

He chuckled, and she saw his teeth and the pink curl of his tongue. She frowned, but he smiled even wider. “What is it?” She couldn’t help smiling back.

She squinted up at him. He was still smiling at her.

“Sometimes,” she said lightly, so as not to make it matter, “I think you might be following
me
.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

He pointed to her belly with the paintbrush.

She flushed. The truth was, she had forgotten the baby, would forget for long stretches of the day, forget the whole thing until she lay down at night and her stomach flopped over like a dog beside her.

He climbed down two rungs and began the boards beneath the sill. The ladder crosshatched the sky above his head. He was, she watched him, profoundly alone, a long lean line, a body painting wood.

“Where is your wife, Otto?” she said to his back, very softly.

He glanced down at her. She looked back up at him. He picked up the brush and dipped it in the can. The white paint glowed in a long line out from under his brush. He drew the line as far as he could and then returned to the ladder and dipped again.

“My mother paints her house green,” he said. “This annoys her neighbors.”

“In Germany?”

“Austria.” He stopped and looked at her. “In Salzburg.”

“Oh,” she said. He turned back around and paused for a minute, his hand holding loosely on to the ladder.

“I do not know where is Anna,” he said. And shook his head, and said again, correcting himself, “I do not know where Anna is.”