The Postmistress

  “Well, hello,” Mrs. Cripps replied.

  “How much have you got?”

  Mrs. Cripps stared back down at the pile. Nearly three quarters of the Franklin households had brought something down for the aluminum pledge drive. “Five thousand dishpans, ten thousand percolators, two thousand roasting pans, and twenty-five hundred double boilers will make one plane. If everybody contributes even one of these, we can proudly say that we have built”—she stalled gamely, doing some rapid calculation—“a wing?”

  “Tip of a wing, more likely.” Harry came up behind them.

  Florence stared down, ruefully. “Perhaps no more than a helmet.”

  They were silent. “Imagine going to war in Mrs. Gilson’s double boiler,” Florence put in, then immediately wished she hadn’t spoken. Harry had been to war and back and never married, which said it all about war. She glanced sideways at him, but he was rapt in studying some hidden piece. He flicked his cigarette off to the side of the aluminum heap and toed a pie plate off the hubcaps below.

  “These aren’t aluminum, Florence.”

  She stared at the hub cabs offered her so proudly by the Taraval boys.

  “And they’re stolen,” he continued mildly.

  “Stolen!”

  “From my shop.”

  Emma stifled a smile.

  “They look aluminum,” Mrs. Cripps protested.

  Harry allowed as how they did.

  Mrs. Cripps bent and retrieved three stainless teaspoons that had been knocked off onto the grass at her feet. She wondered what else was on the pile, other things that looked like the real thing but weren’t. Scraps that might not stand up under fire. She tossed the spoons hard at the top again. “Saw you had that German man over, Emma.” She straightened. “You ought to be careful.”

  Emma flushed. “Otto?”

  Mrs. Cripps nodded.

  Emma turned on her. “Otto Schelling is Austrian, Mrs. Cripps. Not German.”

  “Never mind that. He’s not American, and he’s too damn quiet.”

  Emma frowned. “Lots of people are quiet,” she said. “I am quiet, for example.”

  “You are all alone up there.” Mrs. Cripps tipped her chin in the direction of Emma’s house. “That’s all I’m saying.”

  “Yes, thanks, Mrs. Cripps. I know that.” Emma flushed up again, angrily, and made her way past without saying good-bye.

  “He’s up there most afternoons, Harry,” Mrs. Cripps declared, as much to Emma’s retreating back as to the man still standing beside her.

  “How do you know?”

  “You’re not the only one keeping an eye out on the town,” she retorted.

  “I believe he is practicing his English,” Harry said mildly, his eyes following Emma marching away toward the fish houses.

  Otto was not a spy, Emma thought. Of course he wasn’t. He was a housepainter. Hadn’t he proven as much the last couple of weeks, every morning up on that ladder? But where was Will? All she wanted was to look up and see him walking toward her. All she wanted was Will.

  Manny and Jo Alvarez were still out on the water, but Manny’s cousin’s boat had come in early, it looked like, so she made for his fish house at the near side of the harbor. She didn’t know his name, but when she knocked on the fish house door, he motioned her in. The boy stood beside him wearing red overalls, a size too small, she thought, paying attention to the codfish laid out on chunks of ice in front of her, their eyes the color of metal.

  “How much you want?”

  “One,” she answered, and then thought she’d like extra for chowder. “No”—she nodded at him—“two.” The fisherman pulled two of the limp bodies off the ice and onto the porcelain scale, causing it to bounce up and down in front of her. Then he turned and threw them onto a length of paper laid out on the shelf behind him.

  “Sweet?” The boy asked Emma, his voice catching over the hard stop of the English word. He was a dark child, with great big hands that hung awkwardly from the narrow sleeves of his shirt.

  “No, thank you.” She looked at him. Tall for his age, and maybe not altogether there. The overalls had two steamboats embroidered into the top pocket, and the red corduroy was frayed along the bib. Her heart hammered, suddenly.

  “Where did you get those?” She couldn’t stop herself.

  The boy looked back at her, uncomprehending.

  “The overalls,” she pointed at him, impatiently. “Where are they from?”

  The boy froze. The father stopped wrapping the fish and turned around, his face careful and flat. She took a step forward and bent over the fish, ignoring the father and making an effort to smile. She could see Will almost the more sharply for how the overalls fit this boy so badly, this not-boy conjuring him. It was one of the pictures she had kept on the mantel. Her five-year-old husband, squinting into the camera and the sun. Will’s mother must have given them to the Church Thrift. They must have been passed from hand to hand for years.

  “You want your fish?” The fisherman put a hand on his son’s shoulder.

  She stepped back and nodded, taking the fish. They watched her put it in her basket and count out the coins into the father’s hand. She had to say something more. “Listen,” she said softly to the boy. And something in her voice must have made him lean forward. “Those overalls once belonged to my husband,” she whispered. “Tell your mother.”

  The boy’s eyes darkened and he stepped backward. “Muerta.”

  Emma heard the word before she understood what it meant, because she said again, “Tell your mother—”

  “Go away.” The man swatted at the air in front of her, shooing her off, as if to protect his boy from her.

  “Mama e muerta,” the boy said.

  Emma turned, stricken, and made her way out the fish house door and down the pier, the fish piled in crates around her, aware of the man’s and the boy’s eyes trained on her. Now, appearing like this so suddenly on the shoulders of a Portuguese boy, the overalls had the force of a message. She walked without thinking to the end of the pier onto Front Street and across, straight into the post office.

  The wooden shutters were drawn against the steep slant of the summer sun, like the bedroom of a child who has been put down to nap, the light creeping around the shade, the room absolutely still save for the tiny chest of the sleeper, raising and lowering, while the wooden slat at the bottom of the shade lifted in the slight breeze and tapped against the sill. Tap, tap. And Emma remembered, violently, the face of the nurse bending over her to check whether she breathed in the fever tent, the white face of the nurse whose own mouth was covered with gauze. The sweetness of the order in here, the reliable calm, made her want to cry. In here someone was taking care of things. The cool and the quiet swept over her. Perhaps she would just stand here and then turn around in a minute and walk out. The sound of envelopes being slotted, the pock as the edge of the letters hit the end of each wooden box, was regular and soothing. Pock and then the swish. Pock. Pock. Emma closed her eyes and listened. Pock. Someone was watching over. Someone was in charge. Pock. Pock. Perhaps the room itself was all she needed.

  “Emma?”

  She shook herself. Her heart was banging.

  “Are you all right?”

  She nodded. Miss James stood in the window.

  “Would you like a glass of water?”

  Emma nodded. “Yes, please.”

  Miss James turned and went into the back room. Emma heard the tap opened and the sound of water rushing. She felt heavy and flat, as though she’d run into a wall and stuck. But when the postmaster returned with the glass of water, Emma walked toward it and drank gratefully. Miss James stood waiting. When she was done, she put the glass down.

  “Something has happened,” she said. “To Will.”

  “No,” Miss James answered quickly.

  Emma lifted her eyes up to the postmaster and studied her face. “You’re certain.”

  “Emma”—Iris flushed—“there’s been no news.”
r />   “To hell with the news,” Emma whispered, and turned around and walked out.

  The doors chung chunged behind her. Iris stayed very quietly where she was. She listened to Emma’s feet clatter down the post office stairs, and she heard the whine as the gate opened and shut at the bottom. She waited a full minute before she reached down into her skirt pocket and felt for her cigarettes and lighter. The flame curled around the end of the Lucky Strike and she inhaled deeply. Then, at last, she retreated to the comforting order of the back room.

  20.

  AT 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.

  18 June 1941

  Dear Mrs. Fitch,

  I’m sorry to say that I may have bad news. I have not seen your husband since the night of May the 18th when we had a bad night of the bombings. As that was over a month ago, and your letters keep coming, I thought you ought to know.

  But my dear, when I went up to his room just now, I found his wallet with all his papers in it, just sitting there in the top drawer of his desk. I cannot think why he didn’t take it with him on that last night, but it is very unfortunate—if something has happened—

  I’m sorry, dear. I fear the worst. Perhaps you ought to make enquiries to hospital?

  He was a good man and he spoke of you often.

  Yours very truly,

  Edwina Phillips

  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.