The Postmistress (30 page)

20.

A
T FIVE-THIRTY, the doors banged open into the post office lobby and Mr. Flores walked in carrying the last mail of the day on his shoulders.

“Not a damn thing interesting in here,” the bus driver announced.

Iris raised her eyebrows.

“What’ve you got for me?” he grunted.

She pointed toward two sacks in the back, and he pushed through the door in the partition, lowering the one sack he carried onto the sorting table. Iris turned to help him hoist the outgoing mail back up onto his shoulders and went to hold the door open for him on his way out.

“Midge Jacobs in the middle office down in Nauset says there’s something for you on top,” Flores commented, “something needing your attention.”

Iris pressed her lips together. She ought to report Midge Jacobs. Mr. Flores had no business knowing what there was or wasn’t for her to do.

“Thank you,” she said, and closed the partition door firmly behind him, locking herself in on this side. She leaned against the door for a moment, listening for Flores’s footsteps to die away outside, then she reached up and brought down the pebbled glass window in the oak partition with a shove. She bent and unlocked the pouch with the key she kept around her neck, and reached in to pull out the mail.

At the top of the sack there was the special envoy used by postmasters to convey messages, official notices, and bulletins from the postmaster general between stops along the route. She pulled this open and lifted up the flap. Besides the usual business there was also included an envelope wrapped in a letter from Midge Jacobs up the Cape. She read it and then stared at the envelope in her hand.
Mark Boggs,
it said,
Fort Benning—

She put the envelope down on the table and read Midge’s note again.
Please cancel the enclosed as I cannot send it on with no date.

Without a date
, Iris corrected reflexively. The canceling mark was too faint to allow and that mistake—she had been so tired last night, she remembered, she must have missed how faint it was—had been caught and now sat there before her. The system had not buckled, the system held. A mistake had been made. A mistake would be corrected.

She dumped the contents of the rest of the sack out onto the table, the topmost letter skating out across its old beat surface.
John Frothingham
. She placed it at the top of the table in the sixth position, replicating the alphabet. Very likely from his sister judging from the postmark.
Beth Alden.
She put that one in the first position.
Jane Dugan
. Another for Beth Alden. Iris flipped the envelope. Both from Private Mark Boggs. How nice, she smiled. Beth Alden, the grocer’s daughter, was sturdy and clear-eyed and not particularly pretty. Nice for her to have this boy.

Iris stared down at the letter in her hand.
Mrs. Fitch, General Delivery, Franklin, Massachusetts.

It wasn’t in Will’s handwriting. The salt breeze came in and lifted her hair lazily.

“No,” said Iris. The letter was from England.

“Hello? Anybody back there? Hello?”

She thrust the envelope into the pocket of her skirt and turned around, her heart pounding.

“All right,” she snapped, “I’m coming.”

A man needed stamps, and she nodded and opened the stamp drawer, her hand already over the section where she knew she would find what she sought. Her fingers closed over the blue printed sheet. How many? She raised her head, and then counted the ten off the sheet, the words of the letter pressed against the fabric of her skirt, catching in her mind’s eye. Eight, nine, ten. She looked up and handed the man his stamps, and swept his change into the palm of her hand, even as she closed the drawer. The man in front of her nodded and turned to go. She slipped her hand in her pocket. The man turned around. “Say,” he said. “It’s thirty cents for ten, am I right?”

“That’s right,” she said.

He walked back to the window. “Then you owe me another nickel.”

“I’m so sorry,” Iris said hurriedly and found the coin. Sand was dribbling out of the bag of her attention, faster and faster. She handed the man the coin, her face deliberate, but the beginnings of an alarm, the intimations of news, started tugging at her. She had a letter in her pocket. Emma’s letter. Three more people pushed through the door. What could they want? Iris frowned, glancing at the clock. It was four minutes to closing.

“Yes, all right,” a young woman with terribly sunburned shoulders complained as Iris followed her right to the door. “What’s the big rush?”

She snapped the door shut on the girl and clicked the bolt. Then she turned and pushed straight through the partition and hauled the metal shutter down on the lobby window. She regarded the row of boxes. Nothing fluttered, nothing stuck out.

At last, she pulled the letter from her pocket and looked at it. All her years in the post office she had watched out for accident and mistakes—correcting a mismarked envelope, catching insufficient postage on a letter—making sure that the mail passed through, that the mail passed effortlessly through from beginning to end. In Boston, she prided herself on the fact that no one else watched as closely as she, a beneficent spider protecting the threads. Like the glass chutes down which the letters poured in the greater post offices, Iris imagined herself the kind of perfect vessel through which people’s thoughts and feelings could pass and upon which nothing snagged or got stuck. But the whole thing relied on never once looking inside an envelope; Iris had never even held a letter up to the light to read the writing there. The whole beauty of the system, the godliness, lay in making sure the trains ran smoothly on the tracks, that letters sent out arrived, no matter what was inside.

She ought to get on her bicycle and ride up the hill to Emma’s house. She ought to go to the door and knock and when the woman came to answer, she ought to hold out her hand and give the letter over. She ought to do all this, but even as she ought, Iris filled the kettle and set it on the burner and waited. When the whistle blew, she opened the spout, holding the envelope in the current of steam. The envelope came unstuck easily and she slid out the single sheet of paper.

Iris put the letter down and walked back out through the partition. She straightened the single table in the lobby in short order, the postal forms and savings account applications arranged from left to right against the wall, then filled the sponge pot for the envelopes and wiped the lip on the pot of mucilage. She moved the wastepaper basket closer to the boxes. She came back through the partition, then reached and ripped Tuesday, July 8, down, so the calendar read Wednesday, July 9. She spun the wheel carefully on the franking machine, flipping the iron 8 over to the 9, and pulled the stamp drawer out to check on the numbers. And the doctor’s letter, stuck under the iron change tray, stared back at her. Iris shoved the drawer shut and looked up, guiltily. She opened the drawer farther and pulled the letter out from under the tray.
Mrs. William Fitch
, it said.
PO Box 29, Franklin, Massachusetts.
Iris stared at the handwriting, and the memory of the man, standing before her with this letter in his hand, came back so forcefully, she had to look up. The lobby was empty.
Give it to Emma, when I am dead.
Those were his words. She stared at it.
It will be you
, the doctor had said, relieved.
It will be you who tells Emma.

But he wasn’t dead. He was missing. She shut the drawer.

And nameless. She reached for the landlady’s letter again. That was what she meant, wasn’t it? Will might be hurt somewhere in a hospital bed, hurt so badly he couldn’t speak and there was nothing to identify him. Iris frowned. Could that be? There had been nothing in his pockets, nothing on him at all?

She thought of the tidy pile of Emma’s letters the landlady had stacked just inside the doctor’s room—there must be forty of them silting against the door. Every one of them stamped and put through the machine and into the sack by Iris. Emma’s letters and then all the letters sent to the boys and men who had gone from town—Mark Boggs, the Winstons, Jake Alvarez. All of them written to, all of them writing, and knowing, too, as did everyone in town, that the closer we drifted toward war, the greater the odds for at least one of them, that a man would get out of his car and walk up the pathway to the door and knock. And anyone walking past would know the news before the father on the other side, before the door opened.

When her brother had died, the man had come just as they were lighting the lamps, and the lamp on the table flared up behind her, its whisker of light flicking off the window, causing her to look up. And so she saw the greengrocer standing there in the hallway, for one split second before her mother caught sight of him, too. Those days, if he stayed in his shop, he was fine, but when he walked anywhere in town, it meant he carried news, and everyone watched where he was going.

“Bonnie.” He stepped forward into the room, his hat in his hand.

“No.” Iris’s mother had snapped at him.

No. Iris thrust Emma’s letter back into her skirt. Not yet. Not half-news, no-news, like this. Not when Emma had a baby on the way. If he had died, the news would come, but where was the harm in hope until then? Time would catch up. If something had happened. But not until after the baby. Not until after the poor girl was strong enough, and ready. She flicked off the lights in the back room, unlocked the partition, stepped into the lobby, and went back out the post office doors into the heat and mayhem of the summer evening racketing on just outside, where Harry waited.

“Hello.” She faltered.

“Any good news for me in there?”

“What?”

He put his hand on the flagpole.

“Oh,” she swallowed. “No, I haven’t heard anything yet.”

“Iris,” he said quietly. “Please. Ask again.”

She nodded. She ought to say something. Her heart thudded and turned quietly over in its cage. He had already started down the stairs, expecting her to follow.

“Are you all right?” He stopped and looked back at her. “You’ve an odd expression on.”

She felt the letter in her pocket. If she left the building with it, she was stealing, wasn’t she? She was a thief.

“If you had a chance to spare someone from hurt, Harry, would you do it?”

He considered her. “What sort of hurt?”

“Would you do it?” she repeated, tense.

He frowned. “
Can
you keep someone from hurt?”

“Of course.”

“How’s that?”

“Keeping mum. Keeping them in the dark.”

He didn’t answer. She stood above him on the porch, lost in some private reckoning. He shook out a cigarette, lit it, and looked back up. She was watching him. Harry held out his hand. “Iris?”

She went slowly down the stairs to him. It was wrong what she was doing. Never in her life had she done something like this. He pulled her closer and took her hand and set off down the crowded street. They walked along silently, and the evening sang out golden. After a little, Iris withdrew her hand from his, shoving it deep in her pocket.

Harry glanced over at her. Her long legs took great strides along the road.

“The thing is,” Iris said quite quickly, afraid to look at Harry beside her, returning to the spot on her mind, “all kinds of things can grow in that dark. Calm, for instance. And hope.”

“So?”

She swallowed. “Would it be wrong, that calm?”

“Why?”

“Because it was false.”

“False?”

“Groundless.”

He was quiet.

“That’s what calm is, isn’t it?” he answered after a while. “A little break from knowing what’s on its way.”

Iris stopped walking. “What’s on its way, Harry?”

She sounded so miserable. Harry turned around and looked at her. She stared back. Here, he realized, here it was. It was so little, so unannounced, but a door had suddenly, irrevocably, opened in his heart. Love had found him here in the middle of his life, at the edge of the world in the shape of a redheaded woman with some trouble on her mind. He reached and gently pulled her hand out from her pocket. “I don’t know what’s on its way,” he said gruffly.

She felt how warm his hand was around hers.
It will be you
, the doctor had said. Iris thought of Emma coming into the post office, her tiny shoulders thrown back, daring anyone, daring the world to hurt her.
It will be you.
And Will Fitch had been relieved. That was it, she realized. The doctor had entrusted Iris with the letter, so that Emma was not alone.

“Whatever it is, Iris,” Harry went on quietly, “you can’t stop it.” But until that baby was born, Iris could push back Time on either side of the small woman, hold it off, and then ease her gently through the opening into what was to come. That’s what she was meant to do this one time. That’s what the doctor meant. That was the point, someone was watching. Iris was.

Iris brought Harry’s hand to her cheek, smiling. It would be all right then. It would be all right in the end. The face she turned to him was so grateful, so wide with her love, his heart bolted toward her.