The Postmistress by Sarah Blake

Author:Sarah Blake
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Literary, Historical, Fiction
ISBN: 9780425238691
Publisher: Penguin Group USA
Published: 2011-01-31T10:00:00+00:00

14 .

A LONG WHILE after the ambulance had driven away with the doctor’s body, Frankie sat on the curb, her mind scrambling backward to the earlier minutes when he was there beside her in the dark, before the air and the light and the cab. The London dawn clattered and called its way into a full morning, and the crowd that had gathered around her slowly melted back into it. Taxicabs continued up and down the street. She sat there for ten minutes, twenty, another half hour. In the tiny garden across the way the dew-heavy crown of a daffodil slipped sideways onto the grass. Someone’s baby wailed from one of the open windows. A footstep struck hard along the pavement. One of the house doors thunked shut upon the street. The blood on her skirt had dried. Finally, she stood up and made her way home.

By four o’clock, the spring day had soured and a quiet drizzle begun. Frankie woke up, her heart racing. The tired-looking pot of geraniums on the fortress-deep windowsill in her single room faced her. She shivered and sat up on her elbow. But for the geraniums, it still looked like the room of someone living elsewhere. Her heart slowed and she swung herself out of bed and sat down in front of the typewriter.

Perhaps by now the doctor had been identified, and the word had begun its journey out along the cable, through the telegraph wires, to someone in Massachusetts who would type it up and send it on. From Boston down the Cape, out to the end to Franklin, where someone else would hold the telegram, and know what it meant, and have to deliver it. And Frankie tried to imagine who would hand the doctor’s wife that piece of paper. But she couldn’t see the town, or the person in her mind’s eye, or even the wife. Just a hand holding the piece of paper, with the fact, but not what happened. She took a piece of paper from the drawer below the typewriter and slid it into the roller, then flicked the carriage lever several times until the page rolled up on the other side. May 18, she began, London.

We think we know the story, she typed slowly. We think we know the story because there’s a man and a woman sitting together in a funk hole in the dark. There are bombs. It’s a war. There was a war before, and we’ve read the stories. She stopped, reading the two lines on the page. We’ve read Hemingway. We’ve read Miss Thompson and Martha Gellhorn. We think we know who will die and who will live, who is a hero, who will fall in love with whom; but every story—love or war—is a story about looking left when we should have been looking right. That’s the—Frankie flicked the carriage lever three more times, rolling the paper free of the typewriter. It wasn’t going to fly, she knew it wouldn’t. Not for Murrow, certainly.

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