The Postmistress

  The foghorn moaned on Long Point. Harry zippered his jacket and made his way down the dim lit upstairs hall.

  He passed the tiny bedroom he had given Otto Schelling in the spring, and saw that the German man had fallen asleep again with the light on, fully clothed. Sleeping like that, his thin blond hair fallen away from his cheeks and onto the pillow, he looked like a child. On the day Flores had brought him down on the bus from Nauset, the man had stood for a long while on the pavement where the bus let off, and it had been cold that afternoon, never mind that it was April. Clear and cold enough to scare the tulips back down for another month. And long after the bus pulled away, through the café window Harry had watched Otto, still on the spot, utterly stalled, as though he had run out of gas. Exhausted and lost, the man stood there, it seemed to Harry, as if waiting for the world to stop spinning.

  It had been queer, Flores said later. The Kraut just arriving like that out of the blue and staying.

  Harry shrugged.

  “Why is he here, Harry? That’s all I’m saying.”

  “He may be a Jew,” Harry answered.

  Harry pulled the door closed on Otto, passing along the hallway and down the stairs, out the door at the bottom into the night. No one was out tonight, the town dark save for the three streetlamps put in to great fanfare last year, punctuating the three blocks of the center of town. To his right lay the green, the town hall, and across the street from them, the post office. To his left, and vanishing into the dark, the road climbed up the hill and away. It was the radio hour up and down the street, the hour before bed. Harry shook a cigarette out of his pocket and lit it, his eye on a pair of headlights moving slowly toward him from the houses on the other side of town. The lights shone along the wooden fences and then, for an instant, lit up the whitewashed flagpole on the post office, rising high above the town like a ghost finger pointing in the night. Harry frowned. With lights on it like that, the flagpole clearly marked the town’s center. He ought to speak to Iris about lopping off the top, he thought, lifting his hand in a wave to the car. Honking as he passed, the doctor’s face flared briefly in the reflected light of the gas station sign, and then it was darkness behind him, darkness pulling the two red tail-lights away with him up the hill.

  Iris. Harry grinned stupidly. He could almost hear her—you want to cut off my flagpole, Mr. Vale? He nodded, still smiling, but it wasn’t a joke. Across the road lay the swath of harbor beach. Past the gray sand it was black. And past that—in the space of eighteen months, Hitler had snatched Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and France, and whether he would cross the twenty-one miles of the Channel, marching triumphant up the Dover Road to London, remained to be seen. Harry stared across that vast dark and tossed his cigarette into the gutter. He turned in the direction Dr. Fitch had driven, but it was pitch-black, the red lights long gone—the town hidden again in darkness. And then Harry turned and stared back out across the water, where the war was waiting for all of them.

  3.

  AT THE REAR of the post office, the wind whipped straight off the water into the high-ceilinged sorting room, and Iris found herself stiff with cold after a couple of hours of work. An inlander, she was used to winter snow, but the wind blasting unchecked across the Atlantic found its way inside and gripped hard at anything it could. She drew the school map out from its mailer and unrolled it on the table. The green, demarcated world before the war spread out.

  There was France and Germany. Austria. England. Poland. Letters printed in straight lines in the comforting typeface of school, the world ordered as neatly as the men now were. Since the draft had begun in October, each man’s number pulled by hand from the War Department’s glass fishbowl and recorded, the roads and rails were full of American boys being sent all over the country, leaning over books and maps in their olive drab, sprawled in the too tight seats moving from Ohio to Omaha. Tennessee. Georgia. The Carolinas. From town the two Snow brothers would go first, then a Wilcox, a Duarte, and a Boggs. Johnny Cripps and Dr. Fitch had numbers so high, it was as good as if they hadn’t been called. They’d never be needed now.

  But Iris James had ordered a map nonetheless. And now Florence Cripps, owner of the largest B&B in town, stopped right where she was in the doorway of the post office lobby and put her pocketbook down on the floor. Large and handsome with blond frizzed hair in a good silk dress, Mrs. Cripps stood like a striped tent without an occasion, studying the scene before her. Full attention must be paid. For here was Franklin’s most public official, stepped away from her window and standing on a stool, carefully tacking up a large school map of the world, blithely covering the faces of the Most Wanted.

  “Iris! What are you doing?”

  “Putting up a map,” replied the postmaster, giving a good solid bang upon the last tack with a hammer.

  “But—Iris,” Mrs. Cripps said reasonably, wishing only to point a gentle finger, certainly not to wag. “What if one should come through here”—she advanced upon Iris—“then we’re lost. We’ll never know the criminal element in our midst.”

  Iris stepped off her stool and unlocked the door in the heavy oak partition between the lobby and the sorting room at the back of the post office. “In all your life, Florence, have you ever seen one of the men in these drawings?”

  Mrs. Cripps took every question seriously, and as Miss James was a federal official, she gave the question still more of its due. But no, she shook her head, she couldn’t say as she ever had.

  “There you go then. You’ve been fine until now. Should be so again.”

  “But a map, Iris? We hardly need to know where we are.”

  Iris turned around. “If we are going to war, then we’d better know where the boys are going.”

  “Our boys are not going.” Mrs. Cripps did not like how easily the woman had said “the boys.” They weren’t hers to speak of like that. “The president has promised,” continued Florence. “And Churchill has said he doesn’t need our boys to be sent, not this year, nor next”—she recited the prime minister’s ringing words—“nor any other. He said that.”

  Iris shrugged. “They’ll have to.”

  “Oh, and why’s that?”

  Iris stuck her pencil behind her ear. “The British aren’t enough, Florence. They never have been. What’ve you got?”

  Rankled, Mrs. Cripps handed over her single letter. Iris took it through with her, and reappeared behind the window, throwing Florence’s letter upon the scales.

  When word got out that an unmarried woman was coming to take old Postmaster Snow’s job a year ago, it must be said there were doubts. Mrs. Cripps had made sure she was standing at her sink watching out the kitchen window when the bus with the new postmaster drove into town. Right away the woman’s neat figure and the black beret pinned on top of her straight red hair signaled trouble ahead. Attention would have to be paid.

  “She’ll do the trick, I’d say,” Johnny Cripps drawled at his mother’s elbow.

  “It doesn’t matter to me what she does, as long as she stays at the job,” Mrs. Cripps returned. “Though it’s still a mystery how the United States government sees fit to hire an aging single woman in such a position of influence, when there are plenty of men around unable to find work right now.”

  Mother and son watched the new postmaster follow Flores, the bus driver, along the sidewalk to the bottom of the post office stairs where he set down her three suitcases, touched the soft brim of his hat, and left her. They watched her take off her beret and slowly stuff it in the pocket of her greatcoat. Still she didn’t move, she seemed rapt instead in a long consideration of the solid brick building before her. And then, just before pushing open the gate, the new postmaster had turned and taken a good long look at the town.

  “Well!” Mrs. Cripps burst out. “She won’t find anyone around here to marry!”

  “She may not be looking.”

  “Everyone is looking.” Mrs. Cripps smiled at her son a little dangerously. “Even if they don’t think it.
”

  Like a stone tossed into a flock of birds, talk startled swiftly into flight whenever the new postmaster was mentioned. Miss James was easy on the eyes, though no one agreed as to how. Tall and slim, she wore the Postal Department’s standard-issue navy blue cardigan buttoned at the neck, so it swung over her shoulders like a light cape, leaving her freckled arms to move freely in and out with the deliberate care of a page boy, or a squire.

  That image, of course, disregarded the postmaster’s lips, painted a good bold red, which alarmed some, until the temperature of those lips could be fully taken by the married women in town. Within days, however, it was clear they were nothing to worry over—no more sinister than a channel marker at the mouth of a well-run harbor.

  No, it became clear to them that Miss Iris James’s motives were best understood by looking around at the Franklin post office. As in any of their houses, the spirit of the woman had insinuated itself firmly there. Inside the lobby, the wastepaper basket was emptied regularly, and the pads of money order application blanks were stacked firmly upon the wall desk. The black-and-white government posters never had a chance to flap untidily in the breeze, pinned as they were on all four corners directly into the big bulletin board hung to the side of the postmaster’s window. Not once on Miss James’s watch did wadded-up envelopes, torn scraps of letters, or ripped catalogs lie on the floor below the tiers of gun-metal lockboxes, as they did in some towns down Cape. One entered, as one did every day, and was immediately met with a sense of calm born out of rigid adherence to an unwavering routine.

  “I just think you ought to be more careful, Iris,” Mrs. Cripps sniffed now. “There’s that German man around, as you well know. The other night I was coming home and there was his light shining straight through the window above Harry’s Garage—no curtains at all, you understand? It could be seen plain as day on the water, shining straight through like that. And then he snapped it off. What do you make of that?”

  “He was probably going to bed.” Iris tossed the envelope into the sack.

  “Yes.” Florence inclined her head. “Well, that’s what I thought, but then, I hadn’t walked much farther when it went back on again.”

  Iris didn’t answer.

  “It may have been a sign, Iris. He might be a part of a German invasion, their advance man on the ground.” Florence drew the phrase out, impressed with herself.

  “He has a wife over there,” Iris said evenly as she could. “In a refugee camp. In France.”

  “So he says.”

  “Yes,” Iris flashed back.

  “I read all about those camps,” Florence sniffed. “There’s no need to tell me. But why is she there in the first place? She must have done something to get herself in there—at the very least stuck her neck out somehow.”

  “I expect there was something wrong with her papers.”

  “Exactly.” Florence nodded, a little triumphant. “That’s exactly my point. You’ve got to be careful. You’ve got to watch out, watch yourself. It’s horrible, but honestly, the French have had a hard enough time without all these people, Jews and what have you, displaced by the war, flooding in from all over Europe, masses of people suddenly to deal with, as if they hadn’t enough already. First the Germans, now this, and she may not be, but some of them are dangerous, you can be sure of it—”

  “It’s been very hard on the man, I think,” Iris broke in to shut the woman up. Otto Schelling came in every day with a letter addressed, Frau Anna Schelling, Gurs Ilot K 20, France; and on Thursdays, he’d add to it a postal order she’d fill out in the amount of five dollars, earned working over at Harry’s Garage. Deep set and dark blue, his eyes regarded her from a long way off as she asked the necessary questions—How are you? Same amount as last week?—taking the single dollar bills he pushed across, writing him a receipt. He wrote a letter every day. And he had never yet gotten a letter back. Every afternoon, he turned around and walked back out as quietly as he had come in, with the exhaustion of a man who hurled himself against the wall of each passing day, and would do so again and again, until the wall broke.

  “We all have to be careful, Iris.” Florence was determined to be mild. “That’s all I am pointing out.”

  “Careful about what?” The doors had opened on Marnie Niles sailing in. “I thought I’d find you in here, Florence,” she declared, satisfied.

  Mrs. Cripps raised her eyebrows at Iris, punctuating the end of their conversation before she turned around to Marnie. But her attention was caught by the sight of Emma Fitch’s head wrapped in a yellow scarf bound who knows where, crossing the frame of the open door.

  “Isn’t she the tiniest thing?”

  “Yes, yes she is.” Marnie had to agree.

  All three women followed Emma out of sight. Iris quite liked “the little bride,” as everyone in town seemed to think of her. She dove in and out of conversations gamely, offering commentary on what her husband thought, what her husband was determined to try—playing the doctor’s wife straight up.

  “Do you need anything?” Iris asked Marnie Niles who shook her head. Iris nodded and retreated to the back room where the pile of unsorted morning mail lay thick upon the table. Most of the town did not venture in until after eleven or so, when suddenly she’d look up from the sorting table in the back and find the lobby nearly full, as though someone had called a meeting. The women in the lobby kept on a running patter, to which Iris only half-listened.

  “It’s unfathomable.”

  “Unfathomable and unforgivable.”

  “That’s a bit harsh, Marnie.”

  “No, dear, it is unforgivable for a man to marry a weak woman!”

  “But I imagine he likes taking care of her. Perhaps that makes him feel stronger?”

  “A man takes better care of a woman when she doesn’t depend upon him,” Marnie sniffed. “Will Fitch’ll have his hands full, now that he’s gone and chosen a tiny slip of a city girl—and from away.”

  Marnie’s voice trailed off as Iris returned to the front window with letters in need of canceling.

  “Of course she’s from away,” Florence retorted. “Who would have married Will after what his father did?”

  Iris glanced up. What had his father done?

  “Do you remember after it all, how he’d stand at the end of the garden dressed head to toe in khaki looking like the summer people’s help, his neck and shoulders bowed, staring into the bank of roses?”

  “What was he going to do?”

  “He ought to have left town,” Mrs. Cripps replied crisply. “Anybody with any shame would have, instead of sticking around. Think of the Aldens and the Dales. They lost everything. Everything. And there he was still with his roses.”

  “Still,” Marnie reflected, thrusting her hand into her mailbox and sliding out with a single envelope. “It was hard on Mary.”

  “Always is hardest on the wives.” Mrs. Cripps nodded darkly. “We all might as well be Indian brides.”

  “For pity’s sake, Florence!” Marnie burst out laughing. “You ought to stop taking National Geographic!” And her laughter fluttered behind like ribbons long after the door closed.

  Seeing Mrs. Cripps intended to stay put, Iris went right on feeding the mail into the canceling machine. The envelopes skimmed under the lip of the machine, November 18, 12 pm. Franklin. November 18, 12 pm. Franklin, November 18, November 18, November 18. The letters sped out the other side, Iris giving the crank a good shove. The last envelope had stuck and she had to give it a yank to pull it out the finishing end of the machine.

  “I suppose it’s the power,” Mrs. Cripps commented quietly to Iris, evidently finishing some discussion with herself, “that one loves about a job like this.”

  Iris gave Mrs. Cripps the briefest of glances.

  “After all, just look at what passes through your hands.”

  Iris could feel herself going red. This woman! And something was off with the machine. The next envelope was sticking in exactly the same place.
Yanking it out, she saw with annoyance that the date had smudged. 18? November 19? Iris held it closer. No, it really was off. It could easily be saying that today was the nineteenth.

  “What’s the trouble?” Mrs. Cripps asked solicitously.

  “The date.” Iris put down the envelope. She’d have to write a note to Midge Barnes, the postal inspector down in Nauset. Damn.

  “Does it matter, really?” said Mrs. Cripps, sticking like a burr. She had never seen the postmaster bothered before. “One day or the next, the mail will get there all the same, isn’t that right?”

  Iris had made the mistake of hoping the glitch had ended, but now a third envelope had gone through and hovered somewhere between November 18 and November 19. “Yes, it does matter, Mrs. Cripps,” burst out Iris. “It matters very much.”

  The machine looked the same as always. She stared at it, irritated. Its blue body lay there dully, as if she had done something wrong. She knew that was silly, but this kind of random inexplicable happening drove her around the bend. She could countenance that milk had a shelf life, that human beings trip and fall down, that perfectly clear skies might suddenly cloud and rain—but she refused to accept these things happening without some reason. Someone had left the door ajar on the icebox, someone else had not been looking where he went. But the canceling machine.

  The lobby doors swung open, and Florence turned around to see who it was. A big smile spread across her face. “Hello, Harry,” she said, luxuriously. “Miss James is having some problem with her machine.”

  Iris rolled her eyes.

  “Oh?” said Harry. “What’s wrong?”