The Postmistress

  “What a queer thing to say.” He’d pulled her to him, spreading his hands across the small of her back and feeling her body beneath the blouse. The kitchen tap dripped into the copper basin of the sink behind them.

  “Because if you do,” she said against his shirt, “die, I mean, it will have been for nothing.”

  “You don’t mean that.” He’d stood back and tipped her face up to his.

  She wouldn’t answer. He squeezed her arms. She looked at him. “I do.” She stepped out from between his hands. “To hell with them. Let the English take care of themselves.”

  “Em—”

  “And what you’re doing won’t add up. It’s not right. Or good. It won’t square, Will.” She was savage in her calm. “What happened here was not your fault,” she said, “and that’s all.”

  He shifted in the dark. Right. Good. The old words sounded in his ears like capes for kings. What he had stumbled on here among the bombs was new as an alternate sky. He’d come over to play out what he now saw had been some simple equation: himself for Maggie. As if one and one made two. As simple and childish as the idea of redemption. But he’d come to understand that each one of us was alive, intensely alive, right until the instant of death. And then each of us was gone. There could be no substitutions. He had held so many dying hands over here, he understood it at last. And what he wanted to say in the letter he just wrote Emma was that he was happy here, beyond all measure—but he couldn’t. Not to the people whose faces he bent over, and especially not to Emma, who was slipping away.

  Though he wrote her every night after supper, he found he couldn’t write anything but the news. The news and that he loved her. He loved her. But then this larger thought, the reason he stayed on, and would stay past the six months he had set himself, hung beside him wordless. The life he had lived, at home, was over. How could he tell her that without scaring her? If he returned, nothing up until now mattered—which was to say, nothing need be proved anymore. And tonight, walking home from the hospital in the dark, not paying attention to where he was going, he had suddenly realized he was guiding his way forward by the single small lights of cigarettes, the sign of other people moving, disembodied, through the dark toward him: people whose faces he couldn’t see, but whose voices he heard, whose footsteps passed by.

  And he had nearly burst out crying on the street. Those tiny red lights in the dark going forward and moving away, those single Lucky Strikes, that’s what it was to be human. We lived and died, all of us—lucky strikes. Single lights and voices in the dark. He slipped his hand under his jacket to feel for his letter to Emma. It was there. He’d mail it first thing. And maybe tomorrow what he wanted to say would be clearer than we are all lucky strikes.

  “Have you got a light?”

  “Christ!” He jumped.

  The leggy blonde from across the way stood in front of him. He hadn’t seen her move.

  “You’re American.” She was looking down at him, amused.

  “That’s right.” He got smoothly up onto his feet, and she realized he was quite tall and rangy with an open, easy face. Good bones—her mother would have approved. A bankable man. He fished his lighter out and leaned toward her. She cupped his hand and drew on the flame. His seersucker jacket glowed slightly in the underground light. She cast another glance upward and saw he was staring at her, as if he thought he might find something in the thicket of her hair or in the severe cliff of her chin.

  “Do I remind you of someone?”

  He smiled and flipped the lighter closed. “Not at all.”

  There was room against the wall next to him, and she nodded at it. “Mind if I sit here?”

  “Not at all.”

  “You’re very well brought up.” She lowered herself down. It was darker over here away from the windows, and she had the sensation of having pushed farther backward into a cave. The floor shook as she sat. Some shells hit close, though they were muffled by the building above their heads. There was a break and then a burst of guns again, and then the unmistakable shriek of another descending shell. The walls shook and the air seemed to be sucked up and blown back down, exhaling the cellar damp.

  “Bad as the tenth, do you think?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “Nor the Wednesday bombing, either.”

  “They won’t break,” Will commented quietly to the ceiling, as though he told a secret to the Krauts.

  “Course not,” she affirmed.

  “It’s remarkable.”

  “Well, what else are they going to do?” she asked drily, speaking in the direction of his cigarette. “Give up?”

  “Yes.” He looked down at her. “It’s always a possibility.”

  She frowned. “Funny, I would have figured you more for the gung ho type.”

  “What’s that?” She heard the grin in his voice.

  “You know, charge the hill, never say die, that sort of thing.”

  He did laugh. “You got the wrong guy.”

  “Yeah?” she smiled into the dark. You started with what you saw—good-looking man in a good suit—and then you poked to see what was behind it; you never knew what you’d find, that was the thrill of it. That was the game. She kept her voice cool, a reporter’s voice. “Who’s the right guy?”

  The end of his cigarette flared up and dimmed. He stayed on his feet. She watched him stretch with the languor of a big man, comfortable taking up room, his hands grazing the ceiling above them, and saw he wouldn’t answer. He lowered his arms slowly and held out his right hand. “Will Fitch.”

  “Frankie Bard.” She gave him hers.

  He whistled, keeping her hand. “The radio gal?”

  “That’s right.” His hand was warm and broad.

  He let her go and sank down beside her, folding himself into the dark nook.

  “Never thought I’d see you down in one of these,” he remarked. “You’re usually up on the roof.”

  “Usually am,” she answered. “I nearly fell down here, got blown in really, by that last one—” She shrugged. “I figure I’ve made it this long without a scratch, better stay put. I hate the funk holes, though.”

  “I’m with you,” he agreed. “How long have you been over here?”

  “Just over a year.”

  “And what brought you?”

  She looked over at him, conspiratorially. “Why?”

  “Just a question.” He pulled his knees up and shook his head. “Killing time. Wondering what a girl like you is doing in a hole like this.”

  “I came over here to save the world, brother,” she drawled.

  He chuckled. “How will you manage that?”

  She shifted her position, moving off her knees, and briefly put her hand on his shoulder to steady herself, her hair swinging toward him. “Telling the truth.” Her voice was as light as her touch had been. But there was no smile in it.

  “You think so?”

  “ ’Course I do,” Frankie said squarely.

  To her satisfaction, he whistled. “Well, you’re good. Your stories made Emma cry.”

  “Your girl?”

  “My wife.”

  Frankie raised her eyebrows. “What are you doing over here when you’ve got a wife back home?”

  He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned sideways, slightly away from her.

  “Same as you, I bet,” he said beside her. “Aside from saving the world.”

  “Yeah?” She sat up a little, sending the notepad forward on her lap.

  “What’s that?”

  “Help out if I can. Make some sense out of things.”

  It had been a long time since she’d heard this easy American surety. “That’s very noble.” She poked at the conviction. “I just wanted to be where the action was.”

  He shot a look at her. She returned his gaze.

  “Hell,” he said. “I don’t believe that for a minute.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Why not?”

  “A girl like you?”

  ??
?Whatever that means.”

  “Come on,” he teased. “You don’t fool me. You’re from some swell house somewhere with elms on the lawn.”

  She chuckled. “I’m from New York.”

  “But it’s a brownstone,” he guessed.

  She flashed a quick grin, conceding. “Yes, all right.”

  Someone cried out in his sleep, and with a start Frankie realized she’d forgotten the others around her. She pulled her notebook out of her satchel and flipped it open.

  The perfect line of her forehead and long even nose made him think improbably of a virgin warrior. A Diana who wore her red lips like a sword. And the page on her lap—he watched as she pulled out a pencil from the dark as though she were going to write something down—a shield.

  “What kind of work are you doing over here, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  He nodded at the notebook. “You going to interview me?”

  “Maybe.”

  He shook his head. “I’m not a story.”

  “Fair enough.” She put the pencil down flat.

  “I’m a doctor.”

  “What sort?”

  He paused. “Family doctor. I’ve got my own practice back home.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Franklin, Massachusetts.” He leaned toward her as if in confidence. “Where the Mayflower first landed.”

  “In what history book?”

  “Small-print history.” He grinned. “They landed, took one look at the trees bent sideways by the wind off the back shore, and turned right around.”

  “You sound pleased as punch.”

  “It’s the best way to describe the kind of people who live there.”

  “Not Puritans, I take it.”

  He shook his head.

  “Your parents still live there?”

  “No.” But his voice had tightened.

  “Hey,” she answered lightly. “Just killing time.”

  A fire engine screamed by and disappeared.

  “What’s it like there?”

  “Why?”

  “Why not keep talking?” She had picked the pencil back up and written the words what happened back home? and then circled them, and kept going in a circle around and around them, slightly wider and wider on the page. He could hear the scratch of the lead, long loops and short jabs that couldn’t add up to anything. He wondered briefly how much sleep she’d had. She seemed incapable of being still, a restive, roaming spirit, like a message boy in a hotel lobby, he thought, and somehow this called Emma back so forcefully in the dark that he nearly moaned. There she was, suddenly, in front of him, looking at him with that peculiar capacity to wait and listen and call him forward just by her quiet. Not restless. Still. Christ. He shifted slightly away from Frankie in the dark. “It’s a town like most, I guess. The last town on Cape Cod. The outermost town.”

  “How many people?”

  “Five hundred or so. Twice that in the summer.”

  He was getting away, retreating up her simple questions rung by rung. She caught herself, and smiled. She was interviewing him, though she hadn’t any idea where they were heading. He had got hold of her. Not the other way around. It was never the other way around. You simply caught hold of the rope and climbed blindly along, following it until it arrived at the end.

  “And you left all that, to come over here,” she observed quietly.

  He didn’t answer. When she looked up, he was staring at her.

  “She really isn’t anything like you,” he mused. “Her nose is smaller, a little round at the end there,” he pointed, “and her—”

  Frankie cleared her throat. He lifted his eyes to hers.

  “Sorry,” he said quickly. “It’s become a habit of mine.”

  “Staring at women?”

  “Studying,” he corrected, a little sheepish.

  She nodded and glanced away. He had wide hands. They lay like good dogs, flat and restrained upon his legs.

  “I guess you miss her.”

  “I’m afraid I’ve lost her, coming over here.”

  “Nuts,” Frankie answered. She’d bank on his wife being one of those child-women who wore kneesocks and pearls like most of the girls she’d gone to school with. “She’ll be right there when you get home, wondering why you didn’t bring her cashmere instead of wool.”

  She was so far off the mark that it made Will smile. “Emma wouldn’t care about cashmere,” he said.

  From the deepest corner of the shelter, across its width and to the left of them, unfurled a small unmistakable moan. Frankie stiffened. A second, long and low, belled out, more deeply into the dark, the wave of the woman’s pleasure opening around them all, until it vanished back into her throat where it began, followed by the man’s chuckle and an abrupt quiet as though he had shut the door. Then nothing. The silence left behind in the shelter was full of their sex, and everyone else suddenly found themselves silent, too, listening at the open keyhole, wanting together in the dark. Wanting more. “Christ,” the doctor sighed, pulling out the cigarettes again.

  “No, thanks.” Frankie shook her head.

  He slid one out, pocketing the rest. Then he tapped it against his long first finger and, sticking it in his mouth, he reached toward her and she felt his hand wrap around her upper arm just above the elbow.

  “This part on her,” he said very quietly, “makes you want to put your hand around it.”

  Frankie looked at him and then looked down where his big hand held her, his fingers nearly able to wrap around. She shivered. And the hand that held her let go, sliding into his pocket and pulling out his lighter.

  “It’s funny meeting you,” he said, taking a drag in on the flame.

  “How’s that?”

  He pocketed his lighter. “There was one story of yours. A few months ago. About a boy.” He cleared his throat.

  She nodded, her eyes on the spark of his cigarette moving in the dark.

  “A boy after one of the bombings,” he went on. “You were bringing him home.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Billy. That was mine.”

  “It was a good story,” Will Fitch said.

  “A good story.” She sighed. “That story got me into hot water.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Too grim,” Frankie exhaled, “and my voice shook.”

  “So what?”

  “Too emotional. The news can’t be emotional.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that,” Will answered, “but it hit both of us pretty damn hard. You left us sitting there wondering what happened next—” He stopped short. What happened next had been Maggie, Will remembered. The boy in the Blitz had been a story from before he lost Maggie. He shuddered slightly. “Any idea what’s happened to him?”

  “No,” she answered. “I don’t know. I moved.”

  “Must be tough not to know what happened, not to know whether he’s all right.”

  She didn’t answer. The truth was she had passed by Billy’s house several times in the past six months, half-hoping he might be there. But he had vanished into the war. Uneasily, she stretched her legs out along the floor. Her foot touched something soft and it slid away.

  “It gets you thinking about all the parts in a story we never see”—he cleared his throat—“the parts around the edges. You bring someone like that boy so alive before us and there he is set loose in our world so that we can’t stop thinking of him. But then the report is over, the boy disappears. He was just a boy in a story and we never know the ending, we never get to close the book. It makes you wonder what happens to the people in them after the story stops—all the stories you’ve reported, for instance. Where are they all now?”

  Her heart began to thud slowly. She didn’t like where he was going with this, and she imagined getting up, but his voice—with its familiar tints of Harvard and supper parties and the assurance of old money with which she had been raised herself—worked on her like hands on her hands and would not release her until done. He woul
d not stop and she could not stop him.

  “You must be pretty tough,” he went on beside her. “I couldn’t bear it—I guess I just like to know how things turn out.”

  “Well, I don’t have to bear it.” Frankie glanced over at him, provoked. “I tell what I see. I watch and I listen, and I tell all about it. That’s the job,” she said impatiently. “Telling it. Passing it along. That’s the point.”

  “ ’Course it is.” He sounded doubtful.

  She looked at him. “Listen, the only way out of this is to tell it all. Tell what happens. All the time. And the only way to tell it all is to keep moving. Keep moving and keep telling.”

  He watched her with his head to the side, as if listening through a stethoscope. “Only way out of what?”

  In the slight pause, she felt something slip from her grasp, gone so quickly she wasn’t sure what it was. She shrugged. “Out of this mess.”

  “Why would you want to get out of it?” he asked very gently.

  “I don’t want to get out of anything,” she said testily in the direction of his shoulder. “I’m the one over here, aren’t I? I’m the one trying to catch what’s happening over here so we can—oh, for Christ’s sake,” she broke off, “it doesn’t matter.”

  “So we can what?” he pursued.

  She didn’t answer.

  He let it go, leaning his head back against the wall. “Sometimes I’m out in the middle of the hell up there, even in the middle of people crying out and that retching smell of gas and fire, and I have to turn my face away to hide my smile.” There was no mistaking the joy in his voice. “Everything matters here,” he said quietly. “Everything adds up.”

  She glanced over at him. “Nothing about this adds up.”

  “It does,” he said to her. “It’s all there is.”

  “That’s nuts,” she retorted angrily. “It’s random as hell out there—that is hell—random, incomprehensible accidents happening night after night. A man calling to his son to run toward him for safety and in the moment that the boy runs, in the twenty steps between them, is hit, is killed—”

  “And you saw it.”

  She frowned.

  “That’s all there is. That’s what I’m saying. You saw it.”

  “Nuts.” She shook her head.