“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.
br /> 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.
The needle skittered to the end of the disk and the sh, sh, sh spun around the little room. She sat up and pulled the arm off, flipped it over, and set the needle down on the other side.
There was the old man speaking in broken, halting English, I looked and saw my wife there on the stairs. She was so—he coughed, and Frankie heard herself murmur something to him—wanted. Frankie remembered the man had been sitting alone at the station. They woke us up, a woman explained in French, and I had no time to get food for my boys. Your name? My name is Hannah Moser—
The voices were old and young, soft and round, and rasping, brittle, thirsty. Just like that, her voice instructed somebody. They spoke languages Frankie didn’t know, hadn’t heard ever spoken, mountain Hungarian, Serb, Croat, thick tongues and slivering syllables peeling off into the air as Frankie listened through disk after disk. Three minutes to a side. Most said their names. There was a child who couldn’t say it—every time she asked, he started and burst into fits of laughter, and Frankie’s laugh was on there, too, go on, she’d giggle, try again, Pet—and then he was off.
She set the needle down on the last disk, the one she had recorded on top of what was already there, and the first seconds of sound—Jaspar, I am, Greta, went looking for him, what is? The smallest house at the end of the block was marked but I, Ruth, Sebastian, am—sprang out at her like some mad creature.
She sat there listening to the weird chaos of that last disk—Hannah, I am, non, non j’ai dit, C’est quoi, ça? Ein Kartoffel. No!—voice replacing voice, high and low and insisting one on top of the other. Human voices chasing each other into the air, only to be followed finally by the shh shh of the machine, as she listened to the silence overtaking the men and the women, the giggling children. She had ridden with them, she had stood in lines, she had watched them pass through doors and climb back on trains. Merci, Mademoiselle, they had said. De rien, she’d said. Just the month before last.
23.
T HERE! THERE HE IS! THERE!
Frankie woke up, her heart slamming against her chest. Someone had been screaming, and after a minute she realized it was her. Her throat was sore and dry. She pulled her knees up under the covers, staring into the mirror over the bureau at the foot of the bed. A woman stared back at her whose white face seemed to have no eyes. Frankie blinked slowly twice and the woman’s scattered face crept back into place. She slid her cigarettes and her lighter off the night table and pulled the pillow up higher behind her back, her heart still pounding.
She had the sense of having to climb a long way back up to the world. The shade hung still. The light in the room was softer. She looked over at the clock and saw she had slept far into the afternoon. She heard women’s voices out on one of the porches and she lay there a little, with her eyes closed, listening without hearing what they said. She opened her eyes. All right. She swung her legs off the bed and stretched.
From the end of her bed she could see straight through the living room to the door onto the front porch, where someone was sitting in one of her chairs. She stood up quietly and went to the window, but the high back of the white slat chair kept whoever it was completely hidden. She pushed open the screen door.
The German man from the café rose from the chair. He pulled off his hat and nodded at her. He smelled faintly of turpentine.
“Hello.” She was wary.
“Are you all right?”
“What do you mean?” She frowned.
“You were screaming.”
She didn’t answer.
“I heard you screaming.” He looked at a spot on the door behind her head, as though to give her privacy. “From my ladder.” He turned and pointed to the big house past the cottages.
“Come in, why don’t you?” she said quietly.
“No.” He dropped his gaze back down to her.
“All right,” she said, and sank into one of the chairs, leaving him standing above her.
“You were frightened.” He meant it as a question, she realized. And nodded. And pointed him into the other chair.
“It was a dream. A nightmare.”
“From Germany?”
“What?”
“You were in Europe,” he said. “That’s what they are saying in town.”
She nodded.
He sat down abruptly in the chair beside her.
“Did you just get out of Germany?” Frankie said quietly, her eyes on him.
“Austria,” he nodded. “In April.”
The worn fabric of his coat caught the afternoon sun in its sheen. His hands shoved in his pockets, bent forward, he might have been any one of the men who had leaned in to her microphone and said his name. He was so familiar, just then; he seemed more real than anyone she’d met since coming home.
She reached to touch the sleeve of his coat. “Come,” she said to him. “I want you to hear something.”
Without waiting to see if he followed, Frankie stood up and went inside, took the last disk off the gramophone, and searched through the pile to find the one with Thomas on it. Then she flicked the knob and the disk jerked and began to turn, slowly, forward. She hooked her pinky under the arm of the needle and nudged it carefully over and set it down toward the middle of the side.
Her voice came across first. “Speak here,” she said, “speak into the machine.”
“Begin?”
There was a space on the recording where Frankie had nodded in answer. His voice came through a little stronger, as though he’d moved closer. “I am Thomas Kleinmann. I come from Austria,” and he cleared his throat, “in the mountains a—”
Otto had come inside and stood in the doorway. The two of them listened to Thomas’s voice all the way to the end, Otto still standing, and when the disk ran out, Otto came all the way in, dropping his hat on the chair. He went over to Frankie, where he stopped, looking at the gramophone.
“There are more?”
She nodded. He sat down. Carefully, she flipped the disk to the other side and set the needle down. Then she brought the bottle and two glasses and sank down onto the sofa, and they listened past the second disk into the third and then the fourth. When the second side of that one finished, Otto stood, polite as a parson, lifting the arm off the disk, and replaced it with the next. And then the next.
I am not making these people up, Frankie thought, as voice after voice filled the room. Here we are. Here. I am Marta, a woman was saying. I have just left Gurs.
Otto bolted out of his chair, lifted the needle, and set it gently down again, and the woman’s voice slurred out and caught itself, speeding forward in nearly flawless English—I am Marta. I hav
e just left Gurs.
They opened the gates the day before yesterday, without any warning. One of the women in the nearest building ran to our block and said hurry, hurry, and four of us stood up and followed her. It was as though they had gotten sick of the whole thing—these women and children waiting, dying—they were sick of us and simply left the gate open. Let the Jews out. Cluck, cluck. Let the chickens go.
And then we were on the other side. In France. With a bundle of clothes and old papers. But I had long since stopped thinking that papers meant anything at all anymore, papers, train schedules, the promises from another life. Now it was food and sleep and clothing. That was all there was to pay attention to—
There were so many women walking with me through the trees.
Her voice stopped.
Thank you, Frankie’s voice slid out.
Otto didn’t move. He stared at the disk going around and around, his head bowed, his hands hanging loose from the ends of his sleeves.
Frankie switched the knob on the machine to stop the disk, her heart pounding.
“My wife,” he said finally. “She is there. At Gurs.”
ACROSS THE TWO short lawns, where she stood in her kitchen window, Emma dropped her hand. She had been about to knock. She had watched the two of them in the chairs, staring at the water in front of them, talking. She had watched long enough to want to break in, and she had lifted her hand when the woman had reached out and touched Otto, and now he looked as though he might break down. And the woman had not taken her hand from his arm. Emma felt a knock inside her, so strong and so sudden, it was like a visitation, like an angel come to say Now. She caught her breath. The woman filled her with a vague uneasy dread, sitting over there with her long legs and her scarf and sunglasses; now the two of them, their heads tipped toward each other, not speaking, seemed to her like the pictures of angels weeping, one in an overcoat, the other in a blouse, overlooking, understanding what was coming. What was coming to her.