The Postmistress: A Novel Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Fall - 1940

  Chapter 2.

  Chapter 3.

  Chapter 4.

  Chapter 5.

  Chapter 6.

  Chapter 7.

  Chapter 8.

  Winter - 1941

  Chapter 10 .

  Chapter 11.

  Spring - 1941

  Chapter 13 .

  Chapter 14 .

  Chapter 15 .

  Chapter 16.

  Chapter 17.

  Summer - 1941

  Chapter 19 .

  Chapter 20.

  Chapter 21.

  Chapter 22.

  Chapter 23.

  Chapter 24.

  Chapter 25.

  Chapter 26.

  Chapter 27.

  Chapter 28.

  Note

  Acknowledgements

  The Story Behind the Story

  Published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons

  Publishers Since 1838

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Copyright © 2010 by Sarah Blake

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed

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  Published simultaneously in Canada

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Blake, Sarah, date.

  The postmistress / Sarah Blake.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-18525-4

  1. Postmasters—Fiction. 2. World War, 1939-1945—Massachusetts—Franklin—

  Fiction. 3. World War, 1939-1945—Radio broadcasting and the war—Fiction.

  4. London (England)—History—Bombardment, 1940-1941—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3552.L3493P

  813’.54—dc22

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product

  of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living

  or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet

  addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes

  any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher

  does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility

  for author or third-party websites or their content.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For Josh, always

  War happens to people, one by one. That is really all I have to say, and it seems to me I have been saying it forever.

  —MARTHA GELLHORN, The Face of War

  THERE WERE YEARS after it happened, after I’d returned from the town and come back here to the busy blank of the city, when some comment would be tossed off about the Second World War and how it had gone—some idiotic remark about clarity and purpose—and I’d resist the urge to stub out my cigarette and bring the dinner party to a satisfying halt. But these days so many wars are being carried on in full view of all of us, and there is so much talk of pattern and intent (as if a war can be conducted like music), well, last night I couldn’t help myself.

  “What would you think of a postmistress who chose not to deliver the mail?” I asked.

  “Don’t tell me any more,” a woman from the far end of the table cried in delight, shining and laughing between the candles. “I’m hooked already.”

  I watched the question take hold. Mail, actual letters written by hand, being pocketed undelivered. What a lark! Anything might happen. Marriages might founder. Or not take place! Candlelight glanced off the silverware into eyes widening with the thought of such a trick. Around the table the possibilities unfurled. A man might escape the bill collector’s note. The letter assuring a young man of his first job might never arrive, forcing him to look elsewhere.

  “And be perfectly happy,” suggested one of the older men, smiling at the irony of it.

  “And would she tell anyone about it?”

  “Oh no,” the woman across from me decided quickly. “That would spoil the pleasure.”

  “Oh, so she did it for pleasure?” Her companion gave her bare shoulder a little tap.

  “No. Pleasure is too small a theme,” the host pronounced. “She must be a believer of some sort. A scientist of a kind. Someone who planned to watch the machinery grind down. A saboteur.” He smiled across the candles at his wife. “It ’s a great story.”

  “In fact,” I put in drily, “she wasn’t any of those things.”

  Then came the quiet.

  “Hold on,” said one of the men. “This is true?”

  “Perfectly true.”

  “Then it ’s monstrous,” the first woman piped up. “If it’s real, then it’s horrible, and—”

  “Illegal,” the host reached over and filled her glass. “When was this?”

  “Nineteen forty-one.”

  “Then?” Now the host was shocked. I nodded. Somehow this had deepened the question. These days, errancy cannot go long undetected. Someone can pick up the phone and call. There are e-mails and faxes. But then. When a letter was often the sole carrier of news. The thought of a postmaster tampering with one’s letters home, or out to the boys. It wasn’t at all in keeping with our idea of the times.

  “It’s the war story I never filed.”

  “Because it would have been too much for us?” The host tried to laugh it off.

  “It was too much for me,” I answered.

  The lark had ended. The host rose abruptly to uncork another bottle. The woman down at the other end of the table studied me, still unconvinced that I could be telling her the truth. Writers. They are not to be trusted with our hearts.

  Never mind, I thought. I am old. And tired of the terrible clarity of the young. And all of you are young these days.

  Long ago, I believed that, given a choice, people would turn to good as they would to the light. I believed that reporting—honest, unflinching pictures of the truth—could be a beacon to lead us to demand that wrongs be righted, injustices punished, and the weak and the innocent cared for. I must have believed, when I started out, that the shoulder of public opinion could be put up against the door of public indifference and wou
ld, when given the proper direction, shove it wide with the power of wanting to stand on the side of angels.

  But I have covered far too many wars—reporting how they were seeded, nourished, and let sprout—to believe in angels anymore, or, for that matter, in a single beam of truth to shine into the dark. Every story—love or war—is a story about looking left when we should have been looking right.

  Or so it seems to me.

  Here is the war story I never filed. I began it at the end of the forties, when I could see quite clearly, and charged myself with getting it right, getting it sharper, all this while. What I knew at the time is pieced together here with the parts I couldn’t have known, but imagine to be true.

  And the girl I was—Frankie Bard, radio gal—lives on these pages as someone I knew, once.

  —Frances Bard, Washington, D.C.

  Fall

  1940

  IT BEGAN, as it often does, with a woman putting her ducks in a row.

  It had occurred to Iris a few weeks back—at the height of summer when tourists jammed the post office with their oiled bodies and their scattered, childish vacation glee—that if what she thought were going to happen was going to, she ought to be prepared. She ought, really oughtn’t she, to be ready to show Harry that though she was forty, as old as the century, he would be the first. The very first. And she had always put more stock in words set down on a clean white piece of paper than any sort of talk. Talk was—

  “Right,” said the doctor, turning away to wash his hands.

  Iris supposed she was meant to get up and get dressed while his back was turned, but she had not had the foresight to wear a skirt, thinking instead that her blue dress was the thing for this appointment, and no matter how thorough a man Dr. Broad was, he’d have turned around from the sink long before she’d gotten it over her head, and then where would they be? The leather banquette on which she lay was comfortably firm and smelled like the chairs in the reading room at the public library. No, she would stay put. She slid her gaze from the ceiling over to the little sink at which the doctor stood, rubbing his hands beneath the gurgle. He was certainly thorough. Well, there must be all sorts of muck down there anyone would want to wash their hands of. And as the next step was the certificate, she ’d be the first to insist that nothing chancy landed on that page by accident.

  He straightened, turned off the taps, and flicked his fingers against the back basin before taking up the towel beside him. “Are you decent, Miss James?” He directed the question to the wall in front of him.

  “Not in the least.”

  “Right,” he said again, “I’ll see you in my office.”

  “For the certificate.”

  Nearly to the door, he paused with his hand outstretched, glancing down at her. She gave him her post office smile, the one she used behind her window, meant to invite cooperation.

  “Yes,” he said, and he grasped hold of the handle, pushing it smartly down and pulling open the door. She waited until she heard the latch click softly after him before she rose, holding one hand to the loosened pins in her hair and the other around her front. She felt a bit as she did in the mornings, unbound by bra or girdle, herself come loose. All fine in the security of her own bedroom, but here she was in the middle of Boston, in one of the discreet buildings fronting the Public Gardens, after lunch on a Thursday in September. On the other side of the door, the steady rhythm of a typewriter clattered through the quiet. The tiles were cool under her feet and she reached first for her underthings, leaning against the banquette as she drew one stocking on, then the next, snapping the garters firmly. Hanging from the back of the chair, the cups of her brassiere pointed straight out into the room—like headlights. She smiled, pulling the bra on, and for the third time that afternoon, she thought of Harry Vale.

  A single rap at the door. “I’m ready when you are, Miss James.”

  “I’ll be right in,” she called back.

  Everything had been genial. Everything had been perfectly nice. The doctor’s office was the sort to glory in—thick green curtains pulled back from high windows, just skimming a rich gray carpet. The secretary in the outer nook, typing away. The hush of order as she had taken Iris’s coat and slipped it onto the wooden hanger. And the doctor, just right, too. How he’d opened the door and held out his warm hand to her, half as greeting, half as a hand up from where she sat waiting. And he’d led her through into his office, signaling the chair in front of his great oak desk as he continued around it to his own position. He’d even pressed his fingertips together under his chin, his serious eyes upon her as she placed her pocketbook upon her lap. They’d spoken briefly of Mrs. Alsop, exchanging pleasantries about the woman from whom Miss James had acquired Dr. Broad’s name, just as if they’d all been acquaintances bumped into in the lobby of a traveler’s hotel. The doctor had listened and smiled, asking Iris if she got to Boston often.

  It had all cracked slightly, with her request. Not audibly, but noticeably enough for Iris to recognize that the doctor was going to need some prodding: that the capacious room notwithstanding, Dr. Broad lacked imagination. He was happy to examine her, he told her, leaning back in his chair. But why the piece of paper?

  “I would have thought every man might like to have such a thing?” she suggested.

  Dr. Broad cleared his throat.

  “Perhaps that’s a bit familiar of me,” she concluded aloud, watching the man across the desk from her inch his hands along the arms of his chair, making as if to rise.

  “Why don’t we begin?” He smiled and did rise, bringing the interview to a halt.

  So she had not had a chance to answer the question fully. And opening the door between the examining room and his office, she could see, by the studied lifting of his head from what occupied him at his desk, that she’d not be given another chance. He was very busy. She was just one of many women he tended to.

  “Please,” he said, “have a seat.”

  “Everything’s in order?”

  “You’re perfect,” he answered.

  “Good.”

  His eyes remaining on the paper before him, he took it up and handed it across the desktop to her. “Will that do?”

  She reached and took the page in her hand and looked down.

  This is to certify that

  Miss Iris James

  was examined on 21 September 1940

  and found to be

  Intact.

  She had been right. There’d been no skimping on the paper. Dr. Broad’s stationery was beautifully creamy, nearly linen. And though he’d obviously had little enthusiasm for the project, he’d written it all out wonderfully. She thought he might have won a handwriting prize in school.

  “It ’s perfect,” she smiled up at him. “Thank you.”

  “Glad to help,” he said, and graciously stood behind his desk as she rose and moved to the door.

  For several moments he remained standing, listening to her there on the other side of the door, asking for her coat from Miss Prentiss, and then for the quickest bus route from here to South Station. Their voices were light and agreeable, the lilt and tone of which he usually managed to ignore while working inside. Then the outer door opened and shut, and, after a pause, Miss Prentiss resumed her typing. He walked over to one of the two windows facing down into the Public Gardens.

  He almost missed her. She had emerged so quickly from his building that she was across the street and around the corner pillars of the Gardens, walking swiftly away from him up the outer walk. She carried herself like someone under review, shoulders thrown back, her head pulled up. “What a queer character,” he mused. He followed her the fifty-odd feet she remained in sight, until eventually she was swallowed up by the city and the distance. He turned back around to his desk. “I thought every man should want such a thing,” she had said right there.

  AND BOMBS WERE FALLING on Coventry, London, and Kent. Sleek metal pellets shaped like the blunt-tipped ends of pencils aimed down upon hedgerow
and thatch. What was a hedgerow? Where was Coventry? In History and Geography, Hitler’s army marched upon the school maps of Europe, while next door in English, the voices recited from singsong memory—I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made. Bombers flew above the wattles, over an England filled with the songs of linnets and thrush. There were things being broken we had no American names for. There was war. What did it mean, War? Stretched out upon the pages of Life, the children of Coventry stared up into an inquisitive camera. We could see them. They looked unafraid there in the ditch dug for safety. Their hands spread-eagled against the dirt walls for balance, the two girls still in skirts. There was a boy with no expression. He looked back at us straight, and the collar of his jacket was fastened by a safety pin. He was already there, in the war.

  Where our boys were not going. The president had promised. He spoke bluntly, as if he were one of the people, but he wasn’t, thank God. Nobody thought so. When he said the boys would not fight in foreign wars, we believed him, though we had listened to the names of the French towns falling the way people listen to the names of medicine before they are taken ill themselves.

  Now the talk was of a German invasion. Would England stand? Their tanks and trucks, their guns, hulked useless on the other side of the Channel where they’d left them at Dunkirk. But when we were told the Brits had dragged cannons out of the British Museum, wheeling them down to the Thames, we nodded. Bombs had crashed down on London now for sixteen nights. Buses were stopped in the street. Babies hurled from their beds, we were told. Still, in the morning, one by one, Londoners crept back out into the light and we cheered them. England would stand. Nobody knew the ending. Buchenwald was as yet only a town in Germany, where sunlight splattered the trees. Auschwitz. Bergen-Belsen. Simply foreign names. It was the end of summer and the lights were still on.