Nancy Worsley

Nancy Voss is a postal employee who comes to Haven from Augusta to replace Charlie Estabrooke. Known to ’Becka Paulson as “The Hussy,” she becomes involved with Joe Paulson; at work, she also devises a battery-powered contraption that sorts first-class mail, making her a small but telling figure in the town’s entanglement of adultery, invention, and transformation.

Arrival and Place in Haven

Nancy takes Charlie Estabrooke’s position at the Haven post office after transferring from Augusta. Her arrival is one of the changes ’Becka connects to Joe’s withdrawal from their marriage: around the time he stops seeking intimacy with his wife, ’Becka notices perfume on his collars and Nancy has come to the post office. The evidence presents Nancy as older than Joe and ’Becka by roughly five years, around fifty, and trim and well-kept. ’Becka’s account of Nancy’s appearance is inseparable from her own comparison with herself, including her weight gain after her only child, Byron, left home.

Affair with Joe Paulson

Nancy and Joe are having an affair. Joe is drawn to her and, when she shows him her invention at the post office, his attention shifts from his resentment and attraction to the device—though only briefly. Nancy then initiates their physical intimacy, and Joe willingly follows her. The encounter temporarily displaces his thoughts about his anger and his newly uncanny ability to calculate betting odds, while the device continues sorting mail nearby.

’Becka’s knowledge of the affair develops through circumstantial signs: Joe’s changed behavior, the perfume on his collars, Nancy’s arrival, and, most decisively, the speaking image of Jesus on the television, which she believes has exposed Joe’s sin. She refers to Nancy as “The Hussy,” a label that reveals ’Becka’s moral judgment and jealousy rather than offering a neutral account of Nancy. The picture’s apparent revelation also puts the affair within the novel’s wider pattern of ordinary objects acquiring extraordinary powers.

The Mail-Sorting Invention

Nancy presents Joe with a device she has assembled from a child’s Lionel train transformer, D-cell batteries, and seven flour sifters with their screens removed. Filament-thin wires, attached to a mechanism resembling a blender, scoop first-class mail from a pile on the floor into the sifters. Nancy explains that the apparatus sorts the mail and points out destinations including Haven Village, RFD 1 on Derry Road, Ridge Road, and Nista Road.

The invention is improvised but purposeful: it automates a local postal task using household and toy components. Its strange, almost random-looking motion and the sound of its wires remain in the background as Nancy and Joe turn from discussing the machine to their affair. The juxtaposition makes her device more than a passing curiosity: in Haven, ordinary practical ingenuity appears beside increasingly uncanny machinery, while personal loyalties and familiar routines are also being unsettled.