The Postmistress

by Sarah Blake

  “Send me into France, Mr. Murrow. Please.”

  He tapped the lighter closed and slipped it into his pocket.

  She stayed on her feet, in the grip of a restless urgency, but, knowing how she must look to her boss, exhausted and excitable, she tipped her chin at the paper on his desk. “Any news in there?”

  Murrow eyed her calmly. “What’s doing, Frankie?”

  “Okay.” She looked at him and pointed at the Times. “There has been only one story about the situation of the Jewish refugees in France to hit the front page of that paper. And that was about Secretary Hull’s response to the French. Everything Harriet filed got buried in the middle pages. Why aren’t the stories landing? Why can’t they see?”

  “See what, Frankie?”

  “Beginning in Spain,” she fell into the pitch, “the years of war in Europe have burst the boundary between battlefield and home, crashing through villages, setting people in flight—people walking away from their homes, from Spain into France. Now add in the Jews sent off by the Nazis—and what you have is a tide of people swept across Europe, and now caught in the south of France, where they sit waiting, their backs to the sea.”

  “Go on.”

  “Refugees in war is a story we all know. But who is really in those camps and why? Why are they there? Have they done something? I’ve heard people here talking as though there were a real reason. Ordinary people balk at paying attention because it can’t be true that people are simply rounded up and given twenty minutes to get ready to leave their lives, taking no money with them, only to face a bureaucracy that insists on papers and money and things in their place. It can’t be true, the civilized world thinks, because that would be mad.”

  Her voice was shaking. She thrust her hands into her pockets and leaned forward.

  “What if people back home could hear their voices? We could make the refugees real. We’d get the stories of the people stuck—” Her throat closed up. “Darn it.” She smiled to ward off the tears springing into her eyes.

  “It’s okay,” he said.

  “Okay?” She pushed away the handkerchief he offered her and wiped her eyes with her fingertips. “Okay?” she repeated, almost laughing, and then she gave up and covered her face with her hands.

  “It’s tough,” Murrow said again, more quietly.

  “I just want to continue what Harriet had started, tell this story, tell it all.”

  He nodded. “So you can do what with it?”

  Get us off our duffs, she didn’t say. “What are we doing back home, Ed? What are people doing, for Christ’s sake?”

  “Living their lives.”

  “How can they be?”

  He didn’t answer and she knew she had just stepped on a boat that was leaving shore.

  “In that first week, you remember, Ed—you remember all of those people, thousands of them in the East End with their suitcases, lining up, queuing for Christ’s sake for the buses to come and take them from South Hallsville School, take them to other parts of the city, to safety.”

  Ed nodded.

  “Bombed out of their houses, they were promised transport out of there and told to stay put until the buses came. And they did. And half of them were killed on the third night because the buses never came—the ones who had lived through the first night, dying on the third, because the buses never came—”

  “Okay, Frankie.”

  She stood up. “My point, Ed, is that people here are bombed out of their homes. But it seems clear that the majority of people in the detention camps are there because they are Jewish. Even though the reports stress that there are many nationalities, the refugees are Jews. It’s deliberate. They’ve been deported and gathered. What’s the plan? Is there a plan? That’s all. That’s what Harriet was tracking. Don’t we want to know? Shouldn’t we find out?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “I want to get the story that pricks a hole in the idea that the Jewish plight is simply the usual face of war—”

  “Whatever the hell that is,” Murrow snapped.

  “Fair enough.” Frankie nodded. “But this is not random casualty. It’s abnormal. It’s a pogrom.”

  “Go on,” he said after a little.

  “Let me go over there. Let me get their voices on disk—like the BBC’s ‘Children Calling Home.’ We could call this ‘Voices of Europe,’ or something. A broadcast of ordinary people talking. Talking and real. Real as the people on the other side of the radio—the voice of war, people in the detention camps trying to leave the war, just as true as the bombs—and they’re simply people. Hasn’t that always been our story?”

  “In English?” Murrow was skeptical. “How are you going to deal with the languages?”

  “Whatever they’re speaking in . . . they’re speaking. They are alive. And real, perhaps more so if they are speaking another language. Their voices carry that to an audience. And every day fifteen to twenty-five more of them are dying at places like Gurs.”

  She waited. We do not create mood, Murrow had lectured her when she’d first arrived, we tell what there is to tell. Our job is not to persuade. Just provide the honest news. One person to another. And when there isn’t any news, why, just say so. The news is not atmosphere (although there were shelves of disks at Broadcasting House that used to be used for just that—crickets and birdsongs, Big Ben sounding, and nearly sixty bands on one disk devoted to False Alarm: Cheerful Voices with Chink of Teacups). The war news now came live: the newsreaders’ voices, the microphone on the roof recording the progress of the bombs, and the conversation between broadcasters in the very moment of the Blitz. The world could listen to the war as though we were all pulled up to the fire.

  Murrow shook his head. “It’s too diffuse, too unfocused. Especially if the voices aren’t translated. They are just sound. Voices without a story. People need to know why they are listening and what they are being asked to hear.”

  “Or they won’t understand?”

  “They won’t listen.” He was impatient. “You have to point, Frankie. You have to focus people’s attention on what you want them to hear.”

  “But—”

  “It’s not news.” Murrow was finished. “And I need you here.”

  She stared at him blankly, then stood up. “Okay, Boss.”

  “You’re on in five minutes,” the engineer called after her as she emerged from Murrow’s office.

  “Don’t I know it,” she waved, holding on until she could push through the door into the woman’s loo, where she gave way at last in great gulping sobs, her forehead leaning against the cool tile. And when she had heaved it all out, she pushed back from the wall and turned on the tap in the sink and leaned her face down into the cup of her hands and dunked in the water.

  “There are many positive reports,” she began a few minutes later, closing her eyes to the microphone, to the lamp overhead, to Tom, the soundman, sitting behind the glass in front of her, and imagined her mother as she always did, the open ear turned to her.

  “There are many positive reports from Europe making their way to us here. It has only been a few short weeks since Mr. Laveleye proposed the V for victory sign to unite the occupied people of Belgium, France, and Holland, and we have word that the symbol has appeared, it seems, everywhere. Chalked onto barn walls, on city pavements, on the sides of trucks gliding through towns, the V stands. If washed off, it reappears hours later. Like a ghost finger, pointing. The sign, always the same, infinitely repeated, must remind a German soldier stationed there that he is surrounded. And the walls speak: we are watching, we are waiting for you to fall. All over Europe the silent, invisible V proclaims the voices that cannot speak, asserts the presence of the people underneath.” Frankie paused the infinitesimal moment, the beat of silence that carried the words all the better.

  “Yesterday evening I found myself once again on my stomach, flattened to the sidewalk for protection after a close call. Nothing had been hit nearby but the sound had been deafening an
d there are always the three or four seconds right after a bomb when you are too shaky to stand. After a little while, I pushed myself up, first to my knees, and then slowly to my feet. Across the way on the other side of the street, two boys, about ten years old, had pulled themselves off the ground also and were busy trying to back their frightened horse into the stays of their delivery van. Come on, they cajoled, weeping, wiping their tears on their sleeves, Come on, the boys patted and murmured, though they could not stop their own sobs. And slowly, ever so slowly, the animal calmed and stood. Sniffling, the boys climbed up on the cart, clucked and jerked the reins, and went off again down the street.

  IRIS HAD COME to a stop in front of the radio perched on the shelf in the sorting room of the post office above the hot plate and her teakettle.

  “Waiting and watching. Weeping into your sleeves—those are not the traits of heroes, neither Ulysses, nor Aeneas, and not Joshua. Think, rather, of Penelope. Think of all the women down through the years who have watched and waited—but who, like the boys with their horse, wept and picked themselves up and went on—and you will have a small sense, then, of the heroes here. The occupied, the bombed, and the very, very brave. This is Frankie Bard in London. Good night.”

  Iris reached for the knob and slowly turned it to the right. She didn’t, as a rule, like the sound of that gal’s voice, didn’t like the undercurrent that seemed always to run through it that she held the truth in her hand and everyone better damn well take a look. Nonetheless—Iris stood back from the radio and crossed her arms—she was fairly sure that the radio gal had just redefined the nature of a hero. She considered the black box. Yes, she was certain that that was what Miss Frankie Bard had done.

  10 .

  HARRY VALE SAT at the top of the town hall looking for Germans. It was a bright, brisk evening. The high flagpole of the post office divided Franklin harbor in half, pointing like a compass needle due north, and still making him nervous as all hell. The attic windows commanded this unobstructed view of the harbor out one end, and out the other, a view across the wilderness of dunes to the sea. Straight on past the curl of Land’s End, the black smudges of boats bobbed up and down on the blue.

  He didn’t give a damn what Roosevelt said about our boys not fighting in foreign wars. The fact that there stretched forty miles of unprotected coastline from here all the way down to Nauset made Harry feel naked as a girl. And the longer the Blitz had gone on over there, Harry couldn’t knock a rising hunch that the Germans were drawing the world’s attention to London while something else was coming in the dark. He had spent many nights walking up and down along the bluff above town after leaving Iris, standing and staring out to sea.

  He figured that if the Germans were to attack, they’d land on the back shore, taking Franklin first, and then sweep up the Cape into Boston. And the Krauts would have showed them all up for sleepwalkers. Even the boys who were going to be drafted—especially those, he corrected—Johnny Cripps and all of them, sitting in rows upon the benches put up on either side of the town hall steps, teasing. “Seen any Germans yet, Mr. Vale?” their laughing questions light and persistent as midges.

  “Not today.” He’d grin for them and pass through the swarm. The Coast Guard was no better. Boys, again. Not a one of them really thought a Kraut could ever get close enough in to see, though they’d made it here in 1918, a U-boat surfacing in the waters just off of Nauset. But not this time, the boys boasted. Not in 1941.

  “I can see it all so clearly,” he’d said to Iris one night.

  “Harry,” she protested.

  “They’re coming,” he’d sighed. “I just can’t figure when.”

  In the end, Harry couldn’t think of what to do other than climb the stairs up here one lunch hour last month, to sit with his binoculars and face out to sea. He didn’t expect to see anything, but it sure as hell made him feel better.

  On the first day, he’d kept his binoculars leveled at the flat waters, his sandwich unwrapped and clutched in his hand. He stayed for a couple of hours, watching, then went back to the garage.

  The following day he climbed the stairs to the town hall again. And then again. Now he was up here every day from four o’clock on. Hell, no one needed gas anyway. He watched the empty palate before him, sure of two things: he was an idiot and he would be right. Sooner or later the U-boats would strike over here. He waited, like the stern man jigs for cod, the thick line loose in his hands, eyes off to the side, relaxed—every muscle ready to strike.

  Down below and across the green, Iris appeared on the porch of the post office with a wet mop. She wrung the head dry over the railing, in three swift twists. Her red hair swung forward and back as she did so, shining and flashing above the plain navy of her blouse.

  She gave a fierce shake to the mop at the end and disappeared back into the dark of the porch and through the doors. There was a quiet like an afterclap in the air around the door through which she had vanished. Harry found himself staring down there to see if she’d come back out. The putter of a Ford came slowly down Front Street. Someone shouted. But from the post office there was nothing.

  Harry lowered the binoculars to his chest, suddenly aware he’d been holding his breath.

  AT THE END of the day, Iris pulled down the metal shutter on the lobby window and snapped off the light in the back, crossing the worn wooden floor of the lobby by the light of the streetlamps out front. Every evening, she put her hand on the door, preparing herself for an empty porch, which surely must happen, mustn’t it? Tonight, she put her hand on the door and pulled it open. But there was Harry as always, waiting outside.

  “Hello.” She drew in her breath, pleased.

  He stood up.

  “Say,” she said, pulling the post office door shut behind her, “I have good news for you.”

  “Shoot.” He smiled.

  “You’ll be happy to know,” she arched her eyebrow, “the post office inspector is giving the matter of the flagpole serious consideration.”

  “That does make me happy.” He was wry.

  “Come on”—she chuffed him, following him down the stairs—“it ’s a start.”

  “Right you are. Let’s go.”

  She stood where she was, halfway down. “Harry,” she said, “I did ask for you.”

  Now he turned back. “Thank you, Iris.”

  She studied him to be sure, but there was no trace of the tease in his face. “Thank you,” he repeated. “Maybe they’ll see the sense in it.”

  He held his hand out.

  They set off quickly down the empty street. It was Wednesday evening all along the way, their neighbors tucked around the table, or resting, their feet up. And though it was the end of February, still, there were canned peaches in a bowl holding the gold of last summer, the sweet syrup sliding down the globes. There was Count Basie coming on in half an hour. There was wood stacked up in the wood box. The pods rattled on the laurel trees in the doorway and the storm doors clicked in and out on their latches. Iris was glad she had decided on a scarf. They walked along silently together, their hands sunk deep in their overcoats.

  As they climbed Yarrow Road out of town, Harry reached into his pocket for his flashlight and flicked it on, aiming it ahead. The eye of light caught the silvered frozen grasses and the sand stretched away from them in pillows and valleys all the way up the bluff to the Fitch house roof. From the east a low wind whipped in off the dark band of the sea. “Listen.” Harry cleared his throat. She looked over.

  “I’d like to come in tonight.”

  “Sure,” she said, her heart thudding.

  “And stay.”

  She stared at him a moment, and then she smiled. “Sure,” she said again.

  When they arrived at her cottage, Iris simply went through the door and stood in the middle of the room and Harry put his hands on either side of her arms and guided her to the chair, where he sat her down. Iris looked up at him.

  He leaned forward and touched Iris on the cheek. Ir
is closed her eyes and felt Harry’s lips brush hers and then pull away, and when Iris opened her eyes to see where that touch had gone, Harry stood above her, his face very close, studying her, and Iris smiled and closed her eyes again and felt those lips return, this time firmer, intending to stay. She leaned her head back against the wall and Harry pressed in, his warm mouth playing against Iris’s lips, until Iris opened with a gasp, his lips moving from Iris’s mouth, traveling and kissing the hollows and dives of her neck, then along the ridge of Iris’s jaw and back up onto her mouth again. Iris never opened her eyes, following their trace with her pulse.

  Harry pulled her from the chair. “Let’s go lie down.”

  He rose and very gently led her into her own bedroom and, still holding her hand in his, keeping her close, he reached and turned on the lamp on the bureau. Then he sat down on the end of the bed and pulled her to sit beside him. They sat side by side for a minute. Then he leaned forward and untied his right boot and pulled it off. Then his left boot. Then his socks, which he lay on top of his boots. She sat right next to him. There he was, barefoot now, on the bed beside her. He turned and looked at her.

  “What do I do?” she asked.

  “I’d like to see you,” he answered.

  Slowly, she tugged the cardigan off, and then began unbuttoning her blouse, sitting straight beside him. He reached and put his hand on the bare triangle of flesh above her bra. Her heart leapt to meet his hand. They lay slowly down and he began to kiss her again, and his hands went roaming. Up under her skirt and down her legs and up slowly over her cotton-covered breasts, touching and stroking. And she reached to finish unbuttoning her blouse so that that mouth could find her. She wanted skin and the soft marshland of this man’s body against her own, she wanted that mouth to climb and rove, she wanted that mouth everywhere on her. And that mouth moved on her, moved all over her as if it owned her, it took and stalked, as if it had known her and known where she hid, always. And she closed her eyes and felt what it meant to be held and touched, and after a while she pushed him gently up and she rose onto her feet at the end of the bed and unhooked her bra, and tossed it to the ground and unbuttoned her skirt and stepped out of it, and pulled her underpants straight down, rolling the stockings all the way to her ankles. He stood and unbuckled and dropped and slid out of his clothes and then they were back on the bed again and she could feel him nudging against her, nudging, and then he reached down so he could guide himself in.