The Postmistress (33 page)

One of the men who had been shaking his head during Harry’s point about the Japanese snorted.

Harry shrugged.

“You’d be better off paying attention to what’s happening over
there
,” Frankie said, as evenly as she could, “where Jews are being rounded up, moved out of their homes—not in thousands”—she tipped her head toward the man who had spoken—“in tens of thousands. Floods of people walking. A sea of bodies, moving, waiting in lines, pushing up against the doors of consulates and embassies—everywhere. Masses moving and nowhere to go.”

“But, plenty of them are getting out—hell, I read a story just the other day about a group of ’em making it all the way to—”

“It’s too late.” Frankie cut him off. The man beside her shut up. “It’s too late for most of them. And now they’re trapped and it’s going to get worse and worse. There are SS killing squads walking into Russian towns and gathering Jews—murdering them all.” She got up off her stool. “And over here, you’ve been sitting on your hands.”

“Horseshit,” Johnny muttered.

Shaking, Frankie glanced at Harry. She hadn’t meant to speak. She opened her pocketbook to find some change for the coffee.

“You were over there?” Harry asked.

She nodded.

“Where?”

“All over. London mostly.” Frankie slid some coins in front of her coffee cup, aware of the men watching her, the room stilled.

“Doing what?”

“Reporting.” Frankie stuck out her hand. “I’m Frankie Bard.”

Harry whistled. “Harry Vale.” He took her hand and shook it.

“You that girl on the radio?” Johnny pushed in.

She nodded.

“Here for a stay?”

“Few days,” Frankie said.

“Going to do a radio piece on us?”

“Got anything to tell?” Frankie asked coolly.

The men around Johnny chuckled. Frankie turned back around on her stool. The café talk began again. She sipped her coffee. It was one thing she hadn’t banked on—in fact, could have had no way of knowing. She had never heard her own voice come across on a radio, had no idea what she sounded like, or the impression she had made. Last week, she had heard Murrow coming straight through the wires into a store in New York and out the open doors into the street where she was passing, and it stopped her dead in her tracks. She knew the studio he sat in at that moment, knew exactly how he cupped the base of the microphone with two hands like a child, knew that he spoke with his eyes closed so he could hear his own beat, and there he was on a sunny August afternoon, blaring into the crowd. But she wasn’t prepared for people listening to her that way, knowing her voice.

“So, what would you put the odds at a U-boat landing over here?” Harry asked.

“Is that a real question?”

He rested his eyes on her face. “Suit yourself.”

She shook her head. “I don’t buy it. Now that they’re in Russia, they’d be fighting too many fronts.”

If she had disappointed him, Harry didn’t show it.

“Do you have cards?” A man too old for service stood in the doorway, thick blond hair snaking beneath his cap in loose long curls. He moved easily into the café, the floorboards creaking under his shoes; he stopped in front of the cash register, resting his hands lightly on the counter, looking into the rows of coffee mugs on the shelf behind Betty’s head.

“What kind of cards you looking for?” she asked.

“To play.”

He spoke with a German accent. In a bowl below the cash register there were boxes of matches and playing cards. Betty Boggs reached down and pulled out a deck of the new spotter cards, marked with the silhouettes of German bombers, placing it on the counter for the man to see. He picked the box up. “These?” He frowned.

“That’s what I’ve got.”

Frankie and the men watched as he turned the box over and examined the back. Messerschmitt Me-110 German Bomber, it said under the black curve of the warplane’s underbelly. Next to the seven of diamonds stretched the silhouette of the same plane from head on, as if it were flying low and about to drop a bomb. He took his time looking, but Frankie sensed he knew every eye in the place rested on his back.

“Do you want the cards, then?” Betty asked him quietly.

The man looked at her. “Yes,” he said. “I want the cards,” and he put a quarter on the counter.

“Thank you.” She nodded and walked away from him to the cash register down the counter. Then she stood there, her hands on either side of the register, waiting for him to leave. He didn’t linger, and Frankie watched him step off the curb in front of the café and cross the street.

“Who’s that?” Frankie asked.

“Some kind of Kraut.” Johnny winked at Frankie. “So you watch yourself.”

“What do you mean?” Frankie said tightly. The sly excitement in Johnny Cripps’s voice was hateful, a bully’s know-it-all.

“He’s not from here,” the man beside Johnny explained. “He’s named Schelling. And he’s been here since spring.”

“Now he’s painting Doc Fitch’s house, bright as the sun. You worried about that, Mr. Vale?” Johnny frowned. “It sticks out now, awful bright.”

If she could just close her eyes, Frankie thought wildly, and steady herself, she could ignore what felt like a flock of birds suddenly lifting in her chest. Just like that, the doctor’s name had been tossed out into the air. She wasn’t ready.

Harry shook his head.

“Why would you be worried?” Frankie asked, tightly.

“Krauts’ll have a marker on the shoreline,” Johnny tossed off. “A big white mark on the bluff overlooking town.”

“You hear what Fitch’s wife said about that in the market to Beth the other day?”

Harry looked around at Tom Jakes, standing at Johnny’s elbow. “Said she wants to make sure the doctor could find his way home.”

“What?” Frankie said sharply, and leaned over to see the man talking.

“You hush up.” Betty Boggs was fierce, setting the coffeepot on the counter. “You shut right up, Tom Jakes.”

“What do you mean?” Frankie swallowed. “Where is Dr. Fitch?”

“London,” Johnny offered.

“He went to help out during the Blitz,” Betty Boggs said stoutly. “He took it awfully hard after Maggie died,” she went on, almost to herself.

“How’s Jim Tom holding up?” the man behind Harry asked.

“Better than any of you lot would be,” Betty retorted. “He carries that little girl everywhere with him. But it’s hard on his own like that with five little ones all in a row, even with his mother down the road.”

Frankie slid off her stool and stood abruptly.

“Anyway,” Betty nodded at Frankie, “Doctor Fitch ought to be back soon.”

“Okay.” Frankie concentrated on fastening the snap on her purse. “Okay, thanks.”

“So long,” Betty added, sweeping the coins Frankie left into her apron, but she smiled at Harry, pulling the circle closed.

Frankie pushed through the screen door and emerged back out on Front Street where the summer crowds ambled in and out of shops in the bright morning air, her blood pounding in her ears. The doctor was dead. The Blitz had been over for weeks. A man across the way caught her eye and lifted his hat. Frankie nodded and forced a slight smile. It was August. The doctor had been killed in May. He had
died
. She had seen him die. She lifted her head from the white patch of sun on the pavement and saw the German man who’d come in for the cards walking slowly in the direction of the post office and she followed after him, not really thinking what she was doing; she stopped at the post office stairs long after the man had disappeared into the gas station up the street. She’d never imagined she’d be the one walking into town with the news of the doctor’s death.

For a long while Frankie stood where she was, looking up into the shadowy porch of the post office. She was here because she had a letter. It was as simple as that. There was a letter and she was meant to deliver it. She had carried it with her from London to Berlin and back again. She had moved it from the pocket of one skirt to another, across the European continent, across the ocean, up the East Coast, to here. It lay, as it had, against her cigarettes in the satin of her pocket. All she had to do was take it out and hand it over. Though, of course, she could simply mail it. She didn’t need to tell Emma Fitch what had happened, did she? “Oh, for pity’s sake,” Frankie said angrily under her breath, and took the stairs two at a time.

There was a line in the post office and Frankie waited off to the side, by the mailboxes. It was peaceful in here, regular and calm, and the woman in charge stood in her window, proud as a figurehead on the prow of a ship.

“Good morning,” Iris said. She brought the canceling stamp down on three letters in a row with a satisfying thump, then turned and tossed what she stamped behind her in quick impatient flicks of her wrist. Frankie followed the envelopes winging silently over Iris’s shoulder into the sacks, not wanting the order to stop.

“Hello,” Frankie answered.

Iris nodded and went on with her work. When, after a little while, Frankie had neither come forward nor turned around and walked out, Iris looked up.

“Can I help you with anything?”

“Does everyone in town have one of these?” Frankie began, looking at the mailboxes in front of her and still not moving from where she stood in the middle of the lobby.

“Yes,” Iris frowned. “Why do you ask?”

“Just wanted to know if that’s how people here get their mail.”

“Yes.”

“And you are the postmistress?”

“Postmaster,” Iris corrected her. “There’s no such thing as a postmistress. Man or woman. It’s
postmaster
.”

“In England you’d be called a postmistress.”

“You’ve been in England?”

“Yes.” Frankie advanced slowly on the window. “I’m just back.”

“Are you here for a while?”

“For a rest,” Frankie answered.

Iris nodded, warily. The woman didn’t seem capable of rest.

I have a letter
, Frankie wanted to say.
Take my letter.
“Let me just make sure I’ve got this right—”

Miss James waited.

“Every single piece of mail goes through your hands?”

“Why?”

“All the news, all the word in town goes through here?”

“Just what exactly are you asking?” Iris asked, a little sharp.

Frankie shook her head. “I’m trying to understand something.”

“Everything that has to do with this town comes through here, yes. That’s how the Post Office Department works. That’s how the whole bailiwick runs. Someone mails a letter and it goes through the system, gets sorted and sent and sorted again, and then is delivered where it ought to be.”

“I see,” Frankie said, exhausted. “So if a piece of news were to come here, you would see it? You’re the first beach?”

“What beach?” Iris swallowed. “What news?”

“Anything. That someone had died, for instance.”

“Who are you?”

“No one,” Frankie answered. “A reporter.”

“Are you writing a story?”

Frankie shook her head.

“No one has died,” the postmistress said evenly.

The clock buzzed as it passed ten-thirty.

“All right,” Frankie answered. “All right, so long.”

A Plymouth rumbled past Frankie where she had halted at the bottom of the post office stairs. A blue Plymouth driven by a man in a hat. She watched it maneuver slowly along the hot street. Across the way a couple of the men from the café were sitting on the two benches. She stared at them. How
can
this be going on at the same time as that? Before her the town bunched and unraveled in the heat. She felt as dislocated as she had that morning Harriet had died, waiting for Billy, the little boy she had walked home, to turn around on his front step and look at her.
Home?
She remembered erasing those words in her head as she watched him understand that his mother was dead. She wasn’t inside the house. She wasn’t anywhere.
Home
was a word from another world, another language, where people woke and stretched and saw a clear sky out a bedroom window hung around with birds.

It was nearly eleven by the time she returned to her own cottage. Some of the bathers had come back already from the beach and were sitting out on the neighboring porches before lunch. She pushed open the door into the shaded interior and reached for the bottle of whiskey she had brought and a glass and drank it neat at the sink, still standing.

The doctor flipped into the air, and then the little boy smashed down into the crowd, and Thomas looked at her just before he was shot. Like a series of cards ready to fall, what had happened began toppling down the long passageway in front of her, the one falling and silently, surely, pushing the next over, then the next—tumbling in a line before her standing there at the sink, her legs trembling. She followed the images all the way to the nameless boy on the last train turning to find her before he disappeared on his way and clapped her hands over her mouth, leaning against the edge of the bureau with the final image in her head.

Behind her, the black bulk of the gramophone sat. She turned around and stared at it a minute. The disks from the trains lay wrapped in her satchel. She pulled one out and set it down gently on the turntable. Then she flicked the knob and the disk jerked and began to turn forward slowly. She hooked her pinky under the arm of the needle and nudged it carefully over and set it down.
Speak into here
, came her voice,
Say your name.
She sat down, and the faint drumbeat of train wheels,
ratata, ratata, ratata,
came through on the disk beside her
. Speak
, her voice came more softly.
Inga? Inga Borg
, the girl answered again, shyly. And her nervous, narrow face swum straight up before Frankie again.
I am Litman
, her brother’s voice shot forward. Frankie closed her eyes, listening to the familiar pattern, through the girl, her brother, the man, to Thomas.