The Judas Rose

by Suzette Haden Elgin

  She stared at him, not caring now whether the hate showed or not, and she was taking a deep breath, getting ready to tell him what a despicable excuse for a human being he was, no matter what he did to her for it, but she didn’t get a chance. Melissa was there before she could speak, standing in the livingroom door clutching her shoulders in her hands, shivering, huddled into herself. They must have been talking louder than Jo had realized.

  Ham Klander looked at his wife, gave one snort of disgust, and lay back down on the couch to watch the fun.

  “Oh dear God, no,” whimpered Melissa Ann Klander, in the faint thin voice of one about to swoon or flee, “oh dear God, no, Jo-Bethany, please don’t let him do that to me! Oh please, Jo, please, you have to go . . . Jo, I couldn’t stand it! I couldn’t! The baby . . . Jo, I’d have to leave her, if Ham makes me go into nursing training, it would kill me, Jo, I couldn’t. . . .”

  Jo-Bethany had no earlids, that was true. But thirty years of practice had given her a remarkable skill at tuning out her sister’s drivel. Melissa had large breasts and a pretty face and long red hair, which had been enough to get her Hamilton Klander. She had no discernible intelligence or common sense. What passed for communication with Melissa was an almost unbearable confused hodgepodge of silly sentences and parts of sentences strung together any old way, with everything said at least three times, and no sentence said in ten words if fifty would do, and most of it based on the single theme of Poor Little Me. There’d been no money to send either of the Schrafft girls to a marital academy, and Jo-Bethany had not had Melissa’s physical advantages, for which blessings and the single state that accompanied them she was profoundly grateful. But there were times when Jo-Bethany wondered if a marital academy would have been able to teach her sister the basic principles of ordinary conversation—if so, it might have been a good investment.

  “Jo-Bethany!” Melissa wailed. “You’re not listening to me!”

  “Of course she isn’t,” Ham said flatly. “She doesn’t care anything about you, sweetheart. She doesn’t even care if I have to put you in training and send you out to work and the baby has to go to daycare! Why should she care? Hell, it’s not her baby!”

  That was worse garbage than Melissa was putting out, thought Jo-Bethany, calm now. In the first place, Ham made good money. This wasn’t an elegant or expensive neighborhood; it was a blue collar suburb, but it was comfortable. He had a nice house, he had his French courtyard, he had nice furniture and nice clothes and all the toys a man of his age could yearn for. There was a sporty groundcar, and a pair of flyers—one ordinary and one with several illegal features added, for going out with the boys. There was a comset in every room and a swimming pool in the basement made to look like a tropical lagoon, complete with waterfall. There was a robot Irish setter, well-trained, without the disadvantages of either shedding or shitting. Ham didn’t need for Melissa to earn one cent. As for the baby, it was Melissa who needed Flowerette, not the other way around. No baby in the United States was allowed to do without anything it might need, ever, and the daycare centers were absolute Baby Heaven. Flowerette . . . stupid name! . . . would be much better off at daycare, where she would be superbly cared for, than she was here at home. With her mother constantly clinging to her and weeping over her and panicking every time she made a noise she hadn’t made previously, and teaching her to cower in terror before Ham’s every word and gesture.

  But Ham knew his prey; garbage or not, drivel or not, Melissa’s carryings on had the effect on Jo-Bethany that he’d been aiming at. And Melissa was only just getting started. She had fallen to her knees in the doorway and thrown her hands over her face, and knelt there weeping as if she’d been whipped, swaying back and forth like a mourning bereaved mother of seven. . . . Jo-Bethany’s stomach knotted, watching her. And watching Ham, who was beaming at his wife in a positive glow of pleasure. Jo supposed that if Melissa would begin to bleed, there on her knees, in some tasteful way, he would be even more delighted.

  Any minute now, Melissa would begin crawling across the room toward her sister, pleading and dithering. She would not plead with Ham, because that might irritate him; she would plead with Jo-Bethany, and if that meant trouble for Jo-Bethany it was a shame, but it couldn’t be helped. Just so it didn’t irritate Ham.

  Jo-Bethany couldn’t face it. Suddenly, she had the feeling that however repulsive it might be to live with the Chornyaks it could not possibly be as repulsive as watching Melissa grovel and Ham gloat. And watching Flowerette learning how to grovel just like Mama. It could not possibly be that bad.

  While Melissa was still only rocking back and forth on her knees, keening, before she could begin the crawling and begging, Jo-Bethany stood up. “All right!” she said sharply. “Stop it! I’ll go, Melissa . . . don’t worry about it.”

  Her sister raised her face from her hands, and Jo-Bethany noted that even with all her hysterics she was still blandly pretty, the reliable cosmetics she wore still unsmudged, the rosy color from the weeping almost becoming. That would not last, she thought; give Melissa ten years, and her performances would make her ugly. Melissa would not find that out in time, of course.

  “Oh, Jo-Bethany! Sweet Jo!” she began, and no doubt that would go on for a while, until Ham got bored watching the wife-robot he’d created and pushed some different equivalent of a program button.

  Jo-Bethany genuinely loved her sister. She had always loved her, pitiful and pathetic though she might be, since the day their mother had laid her in the older girl’s arms and said, “Jo-Beth, this is your baby.” She had been, too, because Cleo Schrafft had been interested only in her sons. She walked over and drew Melissa to her feet, set her hair to rights with one sure hand, kissed her damp forehead, and went straight on up to her rooms without a word.

  Behind her, she could hear Ham laughing. The full robust laugh of a satisfied adult male, rocked in the bosom of his family, content with his world and all things in it.

  II

  Once she’d made a decision, Jo-Bethany never dawdled. She asked Ham if he could arrange for her to leave at once instead of waiting for the weekend, and he was willing. Having her gone meant one less woman for him to tease and torment, but she was in some ways an annoyance to have around. There were a lot of times when he wasn’t sure exactly what she meant by things she said to him, and he didn’t like that; and because she wasn’t his wife, the means he could use to punish her were restricted in inconvenient ways. He didn’t really mind seeing her go, and when the Chornyaks agreed without argument to start her salary at once, it overruled any faint objections he might otherwise have felt. So that Jo-Bethany found herself, late in the afternoon of that same day, being welcomed in out of the cold rain at Chornyak Household by a woman who introduced herself as Dorcas Ndal Chornyak and who rushed her straight down the stairs to be officially welcomed by Jonathan Asher Chornyak in his office.

  He was quick and thorough and clear; Jo-Bethany saw that he was extremely busy, and realized that her unexpectedly prompt arrival had forced him to interrupt other business for this interview, but he didn’t seem angry about it. He was simply brisk, not wasting any time on social frills or unnecessary details. There were nearly two hundred people at Chornyak Household, he told her, for all of whom she was technically responsible. She would supervise the care of the chronically ill or infirm elderly women, and she would serve as triage nurse for all the rest of the family, deciding when they needed to go to the local clinic or hospital for care rather than seeing to their own needs at home. Ham had not bothered to explain any of that to her, and she didn’t blame him.

  “It’s not as bad as it sounds,” Chornyak added. This man, who was Head not just of the Chornyaks but Head of all the other Lines as well. Head of Heads—what a grotesque idea! “Our women are very clever with matters medical,” he went on, and she told herself sternly to keep her mind in order and pay attention. “Anything that just means bandages and potions and hygiene, they can handle. Dorcas is infirmarian; she
’ll show you her supplies and facilities, and your own quarters. If you find anything inadequate, don’t hesitate to let her know. You’ll have all the help you need with baths and beds and all that sort of thing. But we require someone who can tell us quickly and accurately when our inhouse care isn’t enough—we do not need our people sitting for hours waiting until some med-Sammy deigns to tell them they shouldn’t have bothered to come in because whatever-it-is will go away by itself. We don’t have time for that.”

  He had looked at her, his hands already taking up a packet of chiplets from his correspondence basket, and asked if that was clear, if she felt capable of handling it, and if she had any other questions that couldn’t wait. Jo-Bethany assured him that she could manage, and he dismissed the two women immediately; the interview could not have lasted more than five minutes, she was sure.

  “Takes your breath away with his cordiality, doesn’t he?” Dorcas said, as they hurried back up the stairs to the ground floor. “‘I’d apologize, but he genuinely is busy, and we hadn’t expected you to arrive for several days—there was a more seemly chunk of time on his schedule for you on Saturday. He’s not busy enough to excuse the way he rapid-fired all that at you, but busy enough to provide an explanation. And be glad, my dear. If he’d had time to talk to you at leisure, you’d have been awfully bored before it was over.”

  The woman led her through the buildings, all earth-sheltered, all connected by covered walkways above ground and by well-lit and ventilated tunnels below, explaining as they went along. There was the main house, for the married men and the bachelor males and the children; there was Chornyak Barren House, with only women in residence, a number of them bedfast but none acutely ill; and there was Chornyak Womanhouse, which sheltered the wives, and all girls past puberty, and any barren woman who just preferred being there to living at Barren House. Because her regular patients would be the elderly and bedfast women at Barren House, Jo-Bethany’s room was in that building, and Dorcas took her there to catch her breath.

  The room was small, and had no windows; there was an attached cubicle, hardly bigger than a closet, that was supposed to serve her as an office. Jo-Bethany stood looking around her, shocked, and her distress must have been obvious on her face, because Dorcas Chornyak spoke at once.

  “You won’t be expected to see people here,” she said. “If you’re needed, you’ll be paged on your wrist computer and arrangements will be made in whatever way is appropriate to the situation. We’ll do our best not to have you running back and forth among the buildings, I promise. This space is just somewhere to keep your database and your medical texts and your equipment.”

  Jo-Bethany looked at her, and then away, trying to maintain a pleasant expression, wondering what to say. This woman, who seemed genuinely concerned about her comfort and her feelings, was what people like Ham Klander called “a bitch Lingoe.” What do you say to a nice bitch Lingoe?

  Dorcas could apparently read minds as well as faces; she helped her. She said, “I know what the problem is, Nurse Schrafft, and there’s no reason in all this world for you to try to hide it. We know you’re used to a very different sort of living arrangement . . . this will be strange to you, and terribly cramped. If you find you can’t be comfortable with us, just say so, and you’ll be released from your contract—no one wants you miserable, my dear.”

  Jo cleared her throat and spoke carefully. “It must seem ridiculous to you. You women living four to a bedroom, and the children all in dormitories, and the women here at Barren House all together in one big room the way they are—”

  “And communal baths, which you’re not used to. Let’s not forget communal baths. And communal diningrooms.”

  “That’s what I meant. With all of you living like that, it must seem silly that I feel crowded, when you’ve given me a room all to myself.”

  Dorcas looked at her hard, her brows drawn slightly together, and Jo-Bethany felt a flush rise on her cheeks. Damn. This was going very badly. “You’re used to . . . what?” asked Dorcas. “Precisely.”

  Jo thought of her suite in Ham Klander’s house. Bedroom, sittingroom, bath, and a tiny enclosed garden all her own. And all of it above ground, with windows for light and air to pour through, instead of these solid walls and the artificial lighting.

  “A small suite,” she managed. “Three rooms. And a little garden.”

  “My goodness,” Dorcas said. “No wonder you’re startled at what we’re offering you!”

  Jo-Bethany wanted to defend herself. To say, we were a blue collar family, the man in our house was a factory worker, we lived in an ordinary working class residential district. But she hadn’t been criticized or accused of anything; she had been treated with the most complete courtesy. She had no reason to feel defensive.

  And she was confused, because everybody knew that the linguists of the Lines lived in luxury paid for by the honest taxpayers they so shamelessly exploited. But she hadn’t seen any luxury. The buildings were clean and well-built, and the one they called Womanhouse was nicely furnished and seemed to have all the necessary comforts. But there was no luxury, and the crowding was awful. She stood there speechless, trying not to do absurd things with her hands, feeling foolish and miserable.

  “Miss Schrafft,” said Dorcas, when the uncomfortable silence had dragged on too long, “please don’t be distressed. It really is all right. I know the sort of thing you’ve been told. You were expecting sunken marble pools in all the bedrooms, and gold-plated bathroom fixtures, and hothouses full of exotic colonial flowers, and hallways lined with priceless paintings, and all the very latest laser toys. I do know, my dear. You had been thinking, ‘Well, if I have to go and live with Lingoes, at least I’ll be comfortable.’ And instead you find yourself in this spartan place, and underground besides, and not even a bathroom to call your own. It must be awful for you.”

  Jo-Bethany was a Southern lady; she prided herself on her manners, and felt much contempt for those who had none, like Ham Klander. Now her manners had failed her; she had insulted this woman, who had done her no harm and was in some ways her hostess. She was so dismayed at herself that all she could do was put her hands to her hot cheeks and murmur that she was terribly sorry.

  “Don’t be sorry. I’m sure you didn’t choose to come here. Some man signed you up, because our salary is attractive and he had little trinkets he wanted to buy, isn’t that so? Uhuh. I thought so. It isn’t what you wanted, and it’s even worse than you expected.”

  “I should not be so . . . obvious.”

  “Nonsense. You’re doing very well, under the circumstances. But Nurse Schrafft, current conditions in this country are very recent. Your great-grandmother would have considered the ‘small suite’ you mentioned to be fairy tale accommodations . . . so would your grandmother, I expect, unless she was a wealthy woman. And there are many of our colonies where the Chornyak buildings would still seem like luxury. The problem, and the essential difference, is that here you don’t have that sense of adventure that goes with living in a nine-by-twelve bubble hut on the red barrens outside New St. Louis. There’s nothing exciting about being here. In a plain old crowded Lingoe den, in the plain old state of Virginia, on plain old Earth. And there’s nothing we can do about it, because this is the way we live; this is the way all linguists of the thirteen families of the Lines live, no matter what you see on the newspapes. Perhaps you won’t mind it as much as you think, once the first shock is over; our last nurse was contented here, I know.”

  “I’m sure I will be, too,” Jo-Bethany stammered.

  “And if not, we’ll help you find another place. If your male guardian . . . husband? Father?”

  “Brother-in-law. My sister’s husband.”

  “If your brother-in-law will allow you to make the change.”

  “You’re very kind, Mrs. Chornyak.” It was quite true. She was very kind, and Jo-Bethany had been very rude. She could not remember ever having been that rude before in her whole life.

 
; The other woman smiled at her. “Your reaction was expected,” she said, and her lips twitched. “It happens every time a new nurse is hired in one of our Households. They always are looking for the sunken marble pools. And except for what our men refer to so tastefully as our ‘rendezvous rooms,’ there’s not even a hot tub in any of our buildings, from one end of the Lines to the other.”

  “Rendezvous rooms?”

  “Mmmm. When one of our men wishes to invite his wife to spend an evening, or a night, with him—always supposing he has energy left for that after the sort of days our men put in—he may, if he chooses, reserve one of those rooms instead of just taking her to his bedroom. Shall I show you a rendezvous room, my dear? They’re a bit fancier than the rest of our accommodations.”

  Jo-Bethany shook her head. “No . . . thank you. I understand the concept.”

  “No marble pools, even there,” chuckled Dorcas. “It means fancy bedclothes, and extra pillows. And flowers, sometimes. But I’ll tell you what: why don’t you try to pretend, just for now, that you’re on a frontier planet, facing magnificent adventures. While in reality I take you down to the basement to show you where I work. Perhaps it would help.”

  “I swear,” Jo-Bethany blurted, worn out with trying to be polite, “I don’t know how you can be so pleasant about all this!”

  “Nurse Schrafft, we linguists spend our entire lives interacting with cultures that don’t even originate on this planet—Alien cultures. Being surprised at what one finds is our most common problem—it would be disgraceful if we couldn’t understand it. Now, if you’ll follow me, please, we’ll finish the tour. Please be prepared for really bare bones surroundings now; we spend very little on decorating basements.”