The Postmistress (35 page)

She put her hand on the side of her belly, wincing as she walked slowly down the stairs past Frankie and Otto. Wordless, Frankie turned around and followed. At the end of the garden, Emma had stopped and was waiting with her hand on the opened gate, clearly waiting, Frankie realized, for her to go.

24.

I
F FRANKIE WAS proud on any score, it was that she had always been first up to tell the truth. She thought of herself as fearless—some kind of Joan—brave, fiery, impassioned. Everyone had. All her life she had pitched herself headfirst into the race. But she had traveled all this way up here, walked right up to the doctor’s door, opened her mouth, and said nothing. She nearly laughed. The joke had been on her the whole time. All the while Frankie was recording voices, looking into faces of people whose endings she worried she’d never know,
she
was the ending. She was the ending coming for that small fierce woman next door. She was the scissors. And she had thought she was the thread.

What had she imagined? If she handed Emma the letter and told her the whole of what happened, the part leading up to the moment when Will hadn’t looked the right way (because that was the story, that was the bit that stuck in the throat), somehow it would help? If. That was the heart of it. If Will Fitch had not looked at the woman crossing, if he had not been searching every face for Emma’s, he might have looked the right way and seen the taxi coming.
There! There he is! There!
If Frankie had not shouted, Thomas might never have been found.

If.

She kicked off the blanket, too hot to sleep, and went into the front room of the cottage, pushing the windows up to catch the night breeze. The light in what must have been Emma’s bedroom was on, a small yellow square high up in the dark night. Frankie turned from the window and switched the gramophone on. It didn’t matter which disk she played; she set the arm down onto the record and turned off her own light.

We belong to a Federation of Cassandras,
Martha Gellhorn had confided bitterly one night at the Savoy. And Frankie had looked at the older woman’s face and thought,
not me
. The picture of the beautiful mad Cassandra, winding through the streets of Troy, calling
Listen! Listen,
banging her gong, was a caution, not a sign. But now her own words had flown, the proud brave words she thought she owned. Here she was, on a porch at the edge of the country—incapable of speaking, incapable of doing anything other than playing disks with someone else’s voices on them, again and again.

Emma’s light had gone off next door. Frankie nodded at the dark house. Incapable even of delivering the news.

For the next few days, Frankie’s habits fined themselves down to single lines. She found herself in the old familiar state of restless dread, like the feeling before giving a broadcast, the hours of the day growing heavier and heavier until she could speak. She spoke to no one. She slept. She woke. She walked down into town to the café, and then, returning, hesitated at the gate of Emma’s house. Most mornings Otto was up on the ladder, painting the north side of the house. In the afternoons she walked, heading out of town on the black tarmac and then cutting left and into the deep billows and tuffets. And Frankie fell into the deep silence of the hours and the dunes, like a bird fallen to the currents of the sky.

Now Time held its breath. The world was pushed back. As if nothing could happen and nothing had happened, Time tumbled on past the moment when Will had died and Thomas disappeared and the little boy walked away from Frankie through the gates; and somehow, in the silence, Frankie couldn’t see her way backward—or forward.

The screen doors in the other cottages slapped open and shut, announcement and conversation all in one so that Frankie knew when she was alone and when she had the company of these familiar strangers. And the late light smudged the golds of sand and sun, so that that spit of earth, that ear curled into the harbor, floated in perpetual indecision between land and sea. The tide emptied and filled beneath the broad crisscross of clouds; the post office flag rose every morning exactly at seven-thirty above the roofline of the town, and fell every evening exactly at six. Leaning against the mirror on the bureau, the doctor’s letter was the first thing she saw in the morning and the last thing as she turned her light off at night.

On the fourth day, Frankie crossed out of the dunes just as Emma was coming up the street on her way back home.

“Hello,” Frankie waved, though it felt like her blood had turned to sand in her veins.

Emma waved back halfheartedly.

“I’ve decided to stay in town,” Frankie offered, crossing the road between them and coming to a halt, her heart in her throat.

Emma nodded. “I can see that.”

“I hope that’s all right.”

“Why wouldn’t it be?”

Frankie didn’t answer.

The doctor’s wife leaned her hip against her closed gate and was studying her. “You’re not as grand as I imagined.”

“No?” Frankie reached for her cigarettes and shook the pack toward Emma, following with her lighter. There was the brief sizzle as the flame caught, and then the grateful intake of Emma’s breath.

“On the radio, you come across as someone very tall. Taller than you are, anyway, and kind of ”—Emma pushed her lip out—“impatient.”

Frankie smiled.

“Were you scared over there?”

Frankie paused.

“I’m sorry,” Emma said quickly. “I don’t mean to pry.”

“Christ,” Frankie answered weakly. “Please—pry the lid right off.”

“You never sounded scared,” Emma mused.

“How did I sound?”

“I don’t know. Indignant. And clear.” Emma looked away. “And sometimes, happy,” she went on softly, “like my husband.”

All the breath rushed out of Frankie’s body and she had to concentrate on Emma’s face. “Happy.” She swallowed.

“I’m sorry,” Emma flushed, and pushed open her gate. “Sorry I’ve kept you. I said too much.”

“No.” Frankie cleared her throat. “Mrs. Fitch.”

Emma turned, expectantly.

I don’t want any more news,
she had said. And now, again, looking straight at her, Frankie lost her nerve. “Not at all.” She managed a smile. “You aren’t keeping me at all.”

Emma let her eyes rest on Frankie’s smile and, after a minute, nodded. Then she turned and went slowly up the stairs into her house.

Her heart pounding, Frankie opened her own screen door, walking straight back to the bedroom, and stared at the letter. Her mind stalled, her mind spun and stalled. Every limb of her body had gone impossibly heavy. She couldn’t pick up the letter. She could not kill him. She turned and left it there and went into the front room.

She had bet her career on a piece of advice Max gave her when she started: You told a story by letting the small things speak. You looked straight at it in order to
get
the picture, and then you had to keep looking straight to
give
it. The minute you looked away—into description, into metaphor of any kind—the thing collapsed, silently and completely, before you. But she was lost, every which way, on this one. She had blinked. She had looked away. And now she had no idea how to say what she had come to say. If there had been any good, there wasn’t any now. There might have been a time when she could have simply told Emma what happened, when she could have looked at her and given her the letter and snapped shut the gap in time. Will died, this is how, and where and when. Instead here she was, like an archer, pulling back the string, pulling it wide, and wider.

An archer? Frankie sniffed. She was a liar.

She sat like that, immobile as her heart slowed and the day crept forward.

In the cottage next door, someone flicked on the radio and the unmistakable thrill in the radio announcer’s voice charged the air—“
has been captured. That’s right! U-Boat 570 has been taken. On a routine mission south of Iceland, the German sub surfaced immediately below a Coastal Command Hudson bomber. We have word that the German commander has surrendered, and the submarine today is on its way to Iceland.”

It was switched off. The door slammed open and a man in bathing trunks skipped down the steps into the sand, carrying an umbrella. The heat buzzed. A shaft of sun lazed through the window and lay along the table like a cat. It was a glorious, hot afternoon on August the t wenty-eighth.

Frankie stared through the window as if she could see something, anything other than the sky. The sea. The white prows of boats. It was a three- or four-day journey by boat from Iceland here. For the first time, she wondered whether Harry Vale, sitting up in the town hall, might have the right idea. Were there U-boats in the ocean sliding toward them? The U.S. press corps was not under the government thumb, but she knew how easy it was to cushion the truth, and it had been so long since she had been entirely on the receiving end of the news that Frankie had forgotten what it was like to be outside the rumors, the buzz, the word passed from one correspondent to the next. Rumor and gossip, the steady talk of other reporters, people collecting the bits and pieces and handing them on somehow kept at bay this feeling that something could come from anywhere, any direction. Without the tiny scraps of word, without the others also watching, talking, parsing war, there was the feeling that anything could happen. Anything could come.

It was naptime along the road. Naptime at the end of summer. She could see the bodies lying in the sun far below on the harbor beach, and the still deep quiet made her hurry forward.

By the time she reached town, she knew who she wanted to see, and as she passed into the shade of the green, and out from under the trees into the open eye at the center, not looking up at the window, she suddenly wanted Harry Vale to be up there. Wanted him up there watching.

She pushed open the heavy door of the town hall and into the linoleum quiet. On the right, the door to the town office stood open; from inside there came a faint sound, like someone scratching or rubbing two boards together, and when she rounded the corner, the woman filing her nails looked up at her without missing a beat, the tiny sawing sound never pausing.

“Hello,” Frankie began, “I wonder if you can help me find the way up to the watchmen?”

The woman had a round face, unfortunate for someone built so small. She put down her nail file. “What’s that?”

“The men who run the Civilian Defense Unit, upstairs.”

“You mean Harry?”

Frankie nodded. “Harry Vale.”

The woman tipped her chin in the direction of the hall behind Frankie. “Up the stairs,” she pronounced.

“Thank you,” said Frankie, turning to go. “Is he up there now?”

The woman regarded Frankie and gave an elaborate shrug, as if she sat behind a desk upon a stage. “If I knew that,” she smirked, “it’d ruin the secret.”

“What secret?”

“You could be a Kraut,” the woman suggested, picking her nail file up again. “And I don’t want to give anything away, one way or the other.” She gave Frankie a broad smile.

“If I were a Kraut,” Frankie observed, “you’d be dead.”

“Hey,” said the woman, the dull thick red pulsing into her round cheeks. “No need to be nasty.”

Nasty
, thought Frankie, as she proceeded out the door and across the round hallway to the stairs. You don’t know the half of it. The silence from the office behind her followed her out. By the time she had reached the bottom of the stairs, the filing of nails had begun again, and she heard the light tapping of feet resume. She took the stairs lightly, two at a time, around and around and up. When she pushed open the door at the very top, she was out of breath.

“Oh, it’s you, Miss Bard,” Harry Vale said, turning from his chair.

Frankie paused in the doorway. Harry Vale sat in a straight-back chair at the center of the row of three windows at the near end of the attic. The afternoon sun poured in, his figure silhouetted against the light. He held a pair of binoculars in his hand, which he had lowered when she appeared; turning slowly back to the window, he lifted them once again to his eyes. He didn’t rest his back against the chair, but sat slightly forward as if he were on drill. She observed a Bunsen burner tucked away, and beside it a cot with its top sheet tightly tucked beneath a blanket. And though it was the top of town hall, Frankie was under the strong impression that Mr. Vale was prepared to live here. It had the spare vitality of a tent—everything necessary, everything handy, though the wide room stretched around them and the empty floorboards smelled like the sea.

“May I?” she asked, crossing to sit on the chair beside his.

“Please,” said Harry.

Frankie arrived at the windows and took in the wide-angle view of the top story. The whole of the harbor, not just the center, was spread before her, as well as the road into town. She could even see the ridge of Emma’s roof. From up here, Harry Vale could watch over them all with the unimpeded eye of a god.

“Well,” she commented. “That’s quite a view.”

He nodded, staring straight out.

She pulled her cigarettes out of her pocket. The post office flag billowed wide above the roofs. Frankie lit her cigarette. “Is it true you want that pole down?”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“Café.” Frankie exhaled.

“No one’s got his eye on this water,” Harry said slowly, “and this is how they’ll come in.”

“That what Civilian Defense says?”

“What I say.”

“What does Civilian Defense say?”

“Horseshit, as far as I’m concerned.”

“What does it say?” Frankie persisted.

“Says look up into the skies. Defense wants spotters in place, with their binoculars aimed straight up.”

“You’re pretty sure.”

“You tell me, Miss Bard,” he said, so gently it caught her off guard. “What did we fight the First War for?”