The Postmistress (5 page)

“You in or out this evening?”

“Out.”
Good night, dear—.
Frankie folded the letter, smiling, and slid it back into its envelope, turning to glance at Harriet. “Guess what Murrow tossed me.”

Harriet narrowed her eyes against the thrill in Frankie’s voice. “Tell me, cowboy.”

“A story on the Gunner’s Battery over there by the hospital.”

Harriet whistled.

“It seems I am not, after all”—Frankie raised her eyebrows—“just a blonde in a skirt. So there.”

Harriet chuckled. From the minute Harriet had first laid eyes on her, Frankie called to mind prairies and Indians and men on the loose.

“How about some scrambled eggs and toast before you go to the boys and the guns?” she said drily, but she was smiling as she moved past Frankie into the tiny kitchenette. “You read Steinkopf ’s report from Warsaw?” she called, reaching into the icebox for the eggs.

“No.” Frankie appeared in the doorway.

“They’ve built a concrete wall around a hundred blocks of the city.”

“How do you mean?’

“A wall, eight feet tall, so tight and smooth, he said, a cat couldn’t climb it.”

“Around the ghetto?”

Harriet nodded.

“Where was this?”

“Just now, it’s on the wires.”

“At least they’re in their own houses.”

“For now,” Harriet answered without turning around.

Frankie watched the slant of the older woman’s shoulders. Like a seamstress, Harriet Mendelsohn had gathered scraps of news about what was happening to Jews as the Nazis swept country after country into their pile, and she had been doing it since the Nazis had taken Poland the year before. She wrote of the thousands of Jews from Warsaw and other Polish cities seeking refuge in Latvia and Lithuania who were turned away at the borders. The suicides in Warsaw, the expulsions, the mass arrests: what she heard she typed up and sent out on the wires. It was Harriet who’d first reported Hitler’s proposal to the Reichstag in 1939 that Germany establish a Jewish reservation within the Polish state, modeled—Hitler had assured his audience—after an American Indian reservation. When Harriet sewed the scraps together, it seemed as if the Nazis were trying to set the Jews moving, set them on the run, set them off—above all else, get them out of Germany.

But was it organized? That was the question. And was it credible? That was the worry. There had been so many sensational and fake atrocity stories written about Germany during the First War, much of the press was chary of a story about deliberate, ominous action against the Jews now. That hadn’t seemed possible until the beginning of this year when the Vatican confirmed that the Nazis were moving Jews—from Austria, Czechoslovakia, and all parts of Poland—into ghettos. But were they being gathered for a reason? the
Times
of London had gently wondered aloud, a couple of weeks ago. Yes, Harriet had begun to believe, they were. The story here was a story about some kind of organized assault. And Harriet parsed scraps and lines of Nazi policy otherwise buried in large speeches to tell that story, though it beggared belief. She had cousins in Poland, and when their letters appeared on the front hall sideboard, along with their news came the unmistakable relief that they were still there in their house, on their street. Still there.

For now, Frankie poured two whiskeys and put one on the sill beside Harriet. For now. For now. Those were the words that built the dread. And how to write that story? Murrow’s three questions, which formed the basis for every broadcast—
What is happening? How does it affect Americans? What does the Common Man say—
didn’t cohere in the face of this one. The scraps added up to a terrible time for the Jews, any man at home could see. Terrible, it was terrible. But war was terrible. God knows, War was hell. And what were we supposed to do about it?

Pay attention
—Frankie tipped her glass against Harriet’s—
and then write like hell
. She took her drink and threw herself into the curve of the white club chair in the front room. A Smithy, class of ’32, she had returned to New York after graduation, presenting herself, to her mother’s bewilderment, at Max Prescott’s office at the
Trib
the following morning. He had taken one look at the impatient, coltish flash of female in front of him, and directed her back out the door to bring him what she found. Her satchel swinging off her hip, she walked without knowing what she looked for, down West Fourth Street into the chaos and maw of Broadway and farther east, toward the tenements hulking along the river. She walked, and found to her bemusement she could go anywhere with a notebook. Not only that, but people would talk to her. People were suckers for a listening ear. And so she collected the scraps she saw or heard and wrote them down. After six months, Prescott had set aside two column inches—without a byline—for her “City Pulse.”

Right through the end of Hoover and out the other side into the New Deal and the great broad teeth of Mrs. Roosevelt, Frankie covered the city, uptown and down, in satin heels and loafers,
Summa cum
, as her mother insisted on introducing her, proudly, hopefully, even still, to a prospective husband.
Summa cum lucky,
Frankie would mutter, watching, reveling in taking something she had seen and turning it until it was torqued tight. Not snapped. Not with the air rushed out of it. But tight and telling. Telling something about living. About life.

Until the evening last spring when she had let herself into her house and heard William Shirer coming through from Berlin on the radio that very minute, and Frankie sank down on the stairs and leaned against the banister, listening to his voice. Thin and reedy, pained, it was not at all like Murrow’s mahogany tones. But for these minutes he was speaking, all of the unseen world was carried in his breath, in his careful, calm measures across distance and time. Here was the world in a voice: what was happening
now
. There in the effort he made to keep his voice under control, in his broad unaccented pronunciation of the words,
Führer
and
Herr,
a Midwestern disgust slipped right by the censor. In this voice lay more than the story, more than the words. Within two weeks, she’d booked herself on the SS
Trieste
and come over with nothing whatsoever to recommend her into radio but a letter from Prescott, her typewriter, and her smile.

When she saw the “studio,” however, not much bigger than a closet, equipped with a battered table and chair and a single light shining on the microphone set in the middle of the table, heavy and blunt as a murder weapon, she nearly laughed at how humble it all was. And how uncertain. You sat at the table, listening on the headphones for New York to say
Come in, London
, and then you flicked the switch on the side of the mike and spoke. If the weather cooperated, your voice was relayed, like a distance runner, through the British air, from the vacuum tubes through to the wires and cables and on to the transmitters, somehow emerging beneath the click and stutter of three thousand miles back out into the air, into America. Or, all of the points along the way could fall through at any time, and your voice would simply vanish into the airwaves.

She typed Murrow’s scripts. She filled the water glasses and set them beside the microphone. She found the people Murrow needed to speak to, and brought them to him for interviews. And she did what she had always done: she walked and she listened. She walked London without a map, turning down streets toward the sound of voices in pubs and in the still-bright lights of theaters and dance halls. Hitler marched on Paris. The British pulled back to Dunkirk. Civil Defense passed out gas masks to the city. The children were sent to the country. And in the shops and waiting in line for the buses, she listened to the Londoners making flesh of these facts. “What does the grocer have to say today?” Murrow had asked her one day early on, and without thinking she’d replied, “Well, he says the sheep won’t make it to mutton if the bombs keep up like last night.” Murrow had chuckled. Two nights later, she was on the air with him, and
What does the grocer say, Miss Bard?
had been a hit with New York, becoming Frankie’s beat. The milkman’s struggle to keep glass bottles; the pair of men’s shoes left unmolested on its plinth in the bombed-out window of a shop,
for two entire weeks,
Frankie noted, as necessary in their perfect peace as the king. With shoes like this still standing, England stands. For the past six months, Frankie had roamed and gathered these scraps of life. But tonight would be a brand-new game. It was a single piece, on men in battle, and it would be all hers.

At nine o’clock, Frankie let herself out the door and back onto the street, casting a reflexive glance upward to check the blackout curtains in her windows before heading west toward the Antiaircraft Gunnery station. When the bombing first started, the guns on the ground were left silent, the War Office betting that the RAF could better blow the Luftwaffe out of the skies. But it made everyone in the city loopy, like sitting ducks, remarked Mrs. Preston from two doors down to Frankie, us down here while the planes buzz and bomb us up above. After a month, the order was given to let the antiaircraft guns fire away—sending ten 28-pound shells a minute, soaring twenty-five thousand feet into the air—though what they aimed at God alone knew. Because the men—huddled under their blankets, the four uncovered guns each aimed at a different quadrant of the sky—waiting for the drone of the German bombers, only knew the cold.

Around the four AA guns at 165 Battery in Kensington Gardens sheep’s meadow, a command post with two spotters glided in slow arcs on the reclining seats, their night glasses trained at the sky.

“You can’t stay here, love.” One of the spotters spoke, his eye on the telescope.

Frankie reached into her satchel for her press documents and handed them up to the other spotter who had taken his eye off the sky and held out a hand.

“You’ll get hurt.” He thrust it back at her.

“As will you, if I do,” she commented.

He grunted and went back to the sky.

She turned and faced the gunners. Nine of them, she saw, and young as they come, sitting ready and waiting.

“What are the chances of hitting anything tonight?” She settled herself next to one of the guns.

“Slim as my wife’s waist,” a man across the circle of guns sighed.

“Shut up about your wife, will you?”

Frankie smiled at that man. “Where’s your wife, soldier?”

“Kent.”

Safe, in other words. Out there in England where the distant fires of London were the new moon in the otherwise pitch-black country sky.

“Take post!” one of the spotters cried, and the men around Frankie ripped off their blankets and took their stations—gun layer, fuse setter, gun elevator, rammer, breech man, ammunition carrier. “Ready,” the man from Kent shouted. “Ready, sir!”

The men around her were tense and quiet. She flicked on her flashlight and glanced down at her watch, noting the time and the sound of waiting all around her. Men breathing, a couple of coughs. A quiet with eyes and ears. An animal quiet.

Off her left shoulder, to the east, came the old, familiar, uneven drone of the first of the German planes. Fly straight, you buggers, whispered one of the men, his hand on the gun, fly straight so we can get a shot at you. Frankie put her helmet on and pressed hard against the battery wall.

Boom. The first shell shot out of one of the guns, roaring toward the sky at a plane no one could see, but whose sound the spotters tried to read as they started yelling coordinates. The first shell was followed right away by another, and the windows of the houses around the park buckled in the dim light and popped. Shattering glass silvered down into the street. Now the shells slammed again and again into the sky above, and the shrapnel from the guns clattered down on the rooftops, like clog dancers without a song. Murrow had considered sending a recording truck over here with her, but even if she could have heard the sound man’s voice at that moment urging her,
Come in, Frankie, come in,
it was too wild, too loud, and there would have been nothing to say but
it’s wild
. “Fuck you,” the soldier beside Frankie grunted, his cheek against the trigger,
Fuck you, fuck you,
like a prayer he hurled up and blasted. Blasted again and again upward into nothing, and Frankie wanted to grab something and hurl it up, too; and the fact that every shot could be traced back to them, every shot could draw the attention of a pilot high above them, who could flick his thumb and rain down death so fast they’d never hear it coming, didn’t matter—now, despite the cold of the October night, the men were sweating, the shells roaring out in answer to the spotters’ shouts, stripped to their shirtsleeves and going at their guns like drummers.
Come on, come on, come on,
the gunners bellowed, drawing fire, and the lights blazed green and bright electric blue and the cordite burned down the back of their throats.
Come on, come on, you fuckers—
they slammed the shells into the guns, deadly hopeful stevedores, again and again and again until one of the spotters called the halt.

Some of the men simply sunk down on the ground beneath their guns where they had been standing. Frankie’s legs were shaking. It was over. They hadn’t been hit. The sudden quiet, the release from the explosions, was deafening.

“Christ, you’re brave,” she said into the exhausted silence.

“Just the job, Miss,” someone joked from the dark.

One of the other men snorted, “Shut up, Jack.”

“You are, though.” She was close to tears and wanted to laugh out loud at the same time.

A draft of night air hit her, and the sound of bombs falling now, farther along to the west. A thick gust of smoke crossed as the wind shifted off the river carrying the stink of the explosions. Around her, some of the men seemed actually to have fallen asleep. There was no veil, no protective curtain where it happened out of sight, “over there.” This was the shock. This had always been the shock, and it seemed to Frankie the most important thing for people to know. Over here, there was nothing between you and the war. She picked up her satchel and stole away, quietly as from a nursery, elated and exhausted, her mind racing forward already into what she would say on the air.