Read The Postmistress for Free Online

and the other lady upstairs. From his mum. They were reporters. Come over here to tell all the Americans about what’s what.
    “Does that mean you don’t have any, then?” he asked, disappointed.
    Frankie leaned toward him and put her finger to her lips, a conspirator. “I’ll get on the job,” she said to him, “I promise. If there’s a secret, I’ll find it out. Right?”
    “Right,” he breathed, and turned and ran.
    She leaned back into the door to shove it open. His father was in the RAF, gone since the summer. His mother—the door gave—couldn’t have been more than twenty-three.
    “Harriet?” she called, closing the door to the flat behind her.
    “In the bath,” her flatmate shouted.
    “Get out, quick. I’ve got news,” Frankie called down the hall, hanging her key on the hook by the door. She unwound her scarf and shoved it into her hat, glad to find Harriet home. One of the stringers for the AP, Harriet Mendelsohn had been in Europe since 1938, and she was good for a laugh or a chat at all hours. She was older than Frankie and deadly earnest about the need for war reporters, people who were hopeful, and indignant, truth seekers.
    “It’s not enough to stay home and be a good man. Hurt no one, tell no lies. It’s not enough,” she had said as she clicked her glass against Frankie’s the day Frankie took the room in her flat. “It’s not dirty—but it’s dead.”
    There was a letter from Frankie’s mother on the sideboard. She picked it up and slit the envelope open, walking along the tiny passageway into the front room where Harriet had already pulled the blackout curtains on the windows. Frankie flicked on the light by the door and read her letter still on her feet, leaning against the doorjamb. Her mother’s tiny scrawl conveyed all the ordinary news of the house on Washington Square in the past week, and though Frankie loved the familiar slant of her handwriting, her mother was a meticulous accountant of meals eaten, thoughts had, conversations overheard, and she offered all parts of her day as evenly as a mare clopping along a familiar route. Nothing need be hurried, nothing would be missed. And nothing was missed, Frankie would groan to herself, though she read every last word, grudgingly aware that her mother had been a journalist without a paper, or an editor—for years. I woke on Tuesday to a decidedly dreary day and the only cure for it was two eggs on toast followed by a long walk to the Library. Mrs. Taylor sends her. . . .
    “Hullo.” Harriet had come up behind her.
    Frankie wheeled, still reading the letter in her hand. “Hello.”
    “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