“You don’t approve of them,” Jo-Bethany had echoed stupidly. It was like not approving of running water! Not approving of soap.
“That’s right. If we’d been given the chance to name them, Miss Schrafft, we would have called them unhealthies. And any woman here who wants one may have one, of course.” She turned to the women in the beds and asked them, “Anybody here want a healthy installed at your bed?”
There was no ambiguity about the resounding chorus of refusals. Or about the laughter that accompanied the chorus. Jo-Bethany, confused past bearing, humiliated, sure she was in the right, with everyone laughing at her, had burst into tears. To her absolute horror. As if she had been Melissa!
The reaction to her distress had amazed her. She had stood with her hands over her face, tears dripping through her fingers, expecting to be ordered to leave at once and not return until she could behave decently—in their place, that is what she would have considered proper. She would not have been surprised to hear herself told to report to the Head, or to pack her things and go home in disgrace, permanently discharged without a recommendation. Instead, women had materialized out of nowhere, half a dozen of them, as if they’d sprung from the floor beneath her feet. Three had gone swiftly to soothe the elderly women, and to settle back on their pillows a few who had apparently decided they had to get up and go to Jo-Bethany’s rescue themselves. Dorcas and another three had bustled Jo-Bethany off to a small empty bedroom on the floor below, installed her in a comfortable chair, and settled themselves on the floor around her feet as if to wait for wisdom to drop from her lips. And someone else had brought strong hot tea and fresh-baked spice bread almost instantly. Not until she’d had the tea and the spice bread and the combined soothing and stroking of all five women present (who certainly had had much more important things to do!) had they allowed her to try to talk about the matter that had set her off. And then they had listened to her with their whole attention, nodding once in a while to encourage her, never once interrupting, until she’d said every single narrow-minded bigoted word she had to say. Only when they were sure she’d spoken what passed for her mind did they begin to explain.
The linguists didn’t use healthies, they told her then, because they were convinced that the touch of human hands, the nonverbal communication of live hands doing the tending, was absolutely essential to the care of the sick. They were willing to pay what it cost to have that tending done by human hands, and to provide much of it themselves, with their own hands. Only when there was no human being available to tend a patient, or when the only human being available would have been unkind or uncaring, did they consider healthies appropriate, and within the Lines those situations did not exist. They might have been wrong in their belief that the mechanical nursing was bad for the patient—certainly the physicians who had taught Jo’s class at nursing school would have considered that not only scientifically incorrect but superstitious, and the evidence for the medical position was overwhelming. But the women of Chornyak Barren House were not without healthies because they were old, or because they were not loved. The women had made sure Jo-Bethany understood that, and they had done it without shaming her.
“How could you have known?” they had asked her. “There was no way you could have known.”
“And, Miss Schrafft,” one said to her firmly, “we think it’s very important for you to know that women were never ‘banished’ to the Barren Houses.”
“Everyone knows they were,” Jo-Bethany had heard herself say, almost in a whisper, as if she had not learned anything at all that day. “The mass-ed computers, in the lessons about the linguists. . . .” She stopped, finally remembering some of the other things she’d heard in those lessons, that had turned out to be nonsense.
“Everyone ‘knows’ all sorts of things, Miss Schrafft. Everyone knows that the world holds still beneath their feet except during earthquakes; that does not keep it from turning around, or from traveling through space at many thousands of miles an hour. Everyone knows a great deal of garbage, my dear. And that banishing business . . . that’s garbage. It’s possible that some of the men did think they were ‘banishing’ women to the Barren Houses—that is possible. But the women themselves . . . they did not feel banished. The women could hardly wait.”
“Being sent out of their home? Being—”
“Miss Schrafft . . . Jo-Bethany . . . please. Look at me.”
It was Dorcas, and Jo-Bethany did look, obediently responding to the tone of voice in spite of her reluctance to look anywhere but at the floor.
“Jo-Bethany, have you lived in a house with a man recently? Just one man?”
“Yes. My brother-in-law. The man who sent me here.”
“Well, did you enjoy it?”
She found herself looking straight into the other woman’s eyes, and those eyes were dancing with amusement, as if Dorcas knew all about what it had been like to live with Ham Klander.
“Oh . . .” she had said weakly. “No. No, not very much.”
“Then would you please try to imagine what it would be like to live in a house with dozens of men? With fifty men, or more?”
The expression on her face must have been eloquent; and what she had said had been the perfect thing to say. She had heard her mother say it so many times. She had said, “A hill is to climb. A man is to pick up after.” Talking to herself, really. And all of the other women had begun to laugh, laughing till there were tears in her eyes; laughing for her, not at her.
“It was such a blessed relief, moving over to Barren House!” Dorcas had managed at last, wiping her eyes with her hands. “I agree with you that the name of the place left a lot to be desired—but then, my dear, it was the men who did the naming. It wouldn’t have been at all tactful for the women to ask them to change it to something like ‘Paradise On Earth House,’ would it?”
And Jo had joined in the laughter, then, because she couldn’t help it.
She still had her doubts about the merits of human tending versus the sterile services of the machines, nevertheless. She understood how they felt about it, and that was a help, but she still fretted. Right now, for instance, as she rubbed a scented cream into Letha Shannontry Chornyak’s skin, so that it wouldn’t be dry and flaking and itching because one hundred and three years of life had robbed it of the oils that had protected it in the past. Jo-Bethany felt squeamish, awkward. She had scrubbed her hands thoroughly before she began the task, twice. But she had seen the electronic microscope threedys of the surface of a well-scrubbed human hand . . . crawling with organisms, that looked like the holograms of nonhumanoid aliens you could buy in museum gift shops. No matter how hard you scrubbed, no matter how powerful the substance you scrubbed with! Suppose you did, by really working at it, manage to get every last little critter off without removing your skin along with them; by the time you walked the few yards between yourself and your patient, you would be alive with creepy-crawlies again. Jo-Bethany knew all about that, and had had nightmares about it at nursing school.
There was no such problem with the mechanical hands of the healthies, bathed constantly by ultrasonic cleaners; there were no bacteria or viruses on those hands! Clean—they were truly clean. All five of them. While her own two hands, now rubbing the balm into Letha’s thin shoulders. . . . Jo-Bethany touched the fragile bones, that felt as if they could be effortlessly crushed, and the delicate thin skin over them, and it seemed to her that she was rubbing in filth right along with the cream. The stuff smelled faintly of almonds, and she was reminded of the mass-ed history lessons, the way ancient kings had poured perfume over the roast meats at their tables to hide the fact that they were rotten. It was Letha’s preference that she do this; it was her job to do this; she would go right on doing it, in spite of the image in her mind of hordes of creatures crawling from her hands into the crevices of the old woman’s skin. . . .
Jo-Bethany Schrafft, if you go on thinking like this there will be trouble! she admonished herself. These women had spent
their lives attending to the communication of others, even Alien others; they instantly sensed the least sign of unease or discomfort. She could just imagine trying to explain what she’d been thinking. She was not going to let it happen. To prevent it, and to provide a plausible excuse for the agitation that she knew would have become apparent to Letha Chornyak by now, she substituted a less serious concern.
“Mrs. Chornyak,” she began—and then stopped short as the old woman reached up and laid a finger over her lips. What in the world?
“Please, child, call me Letha . . . or Aunt Letha, if it suits you better! Everybody in this room, practically, is a ‘Mrs. Chornyak.’ It gets tiresome hearing it. And I’ve asked you twice before. My dear, I will give you three chances, but that is as high as I propose to go.”
“Oh, dear . . . I’m sorry,” Jo answered, awkward and embarrassed because she knew she’d been asked before. “I keep forgetting. I’ll remember now. Letha.” She was not about to call a linguist “Aunt.”
“Much better. Thank you. Now, please go on. What were you going to say to me? And why are you all adither like you are?”
“I have a problem. I need some advice. I wonder if you’d be willing to tell me what I should do.”
“Try me. There are few things I like better than giving advice.”
“It’s the Thursday Night Devotional Meetings.”
“Something wrong with them?”
“No. Not at all.” Jo-Bethany shifted the old lady on the pillows gently, unbuttoned the plain cotton gown, and began rubbing the cream over her chest and throat. “No, I enjoy them very much. In fact, I enjoy them so much that I wanted to share them with some people I’m fond of—my sister, and a few nurses who are friends of mine.”
“They’d be very welcome, child, I’m sure,” said Letha. “If you’re afraid young Johnny would be a wart about it, ask Dorcas to arrange it for you.”
It took Jo-Bethany a moment to realize that “young Johnny” would be Jonathan Asher Chornyak, Head of all the Lines, and she had to cough to cover her amusement at that; of course, this woman had probably changed the diapers of the Head of Heads, and saw him more as the Bottom of Bottoms. “The problem,” she said hastily, “is that their husbands won’t let them come.”
“Ah, I perceive! No slumming about in the nasty Lingoe dens, eh? That sort of problem!”
“Something like that,” Jo said, not meeting the brown eyes, that were so uncomfortably piercing in spite of their setting of fine skin fallen into folds of wrinkled crepe. “I know it’s ridiculous.”
“It’s not your fault, dear,” the old lady said comfortingly. “You mustn’t worry about it. Heaven knows we’re used to it—we old Lingoe bitches!” And she chuckled the wise wicked chuckle of the very old, while Jo-Bethany felt pale red flare on her own cheeks. “Don’t you apologize, Jo-Bethany! After a person listens to such stuff for a hundred years, I assure you she gets used to it!”
Jo-Bethany didn’t believe that; she was sure she couldn’t have joked about such a thing, not if she’d been listening to it for two hundred years. But perhaps she was wrong. Again. Perhaps when she was a hundred years old she’d find many things less worth worrying about than she found them now.
“It seems like such a shame,” she murmured, moving carefully on to Letha’s arms and hands. “I know they would enjoy it, and I do wish they could be there just once. It’s such a beautiful service.”
“Especially on sermon night.” Letha puckered up her mouth, and pinched her nostrils in. “Beautiful, my eye.”
“But that’s only one Thursday a month. And the sermons aren’t that bad.”
“Huh!” Letha made her back poker rigid and spread all the fingers of both hands wide and high, and proceeded to flabbergast Jo-Bethany with a flawless imitation of a Neo-Presbyterian hellfire-and-brimstone man in full spate.
“My goodness!” she said, for want of anything better, and she rubbed the last of the pleasant cream into her own hands. Rubbing little filthy critters into her own skin, she realized.
“That’s beautiful, is it?” Letha challenged her. “That ranting?”
“No, it’s not beautiful. Good for us, I’m sure, but not beautiful. But the rest of it . . . the music, and the readings, and the other parts . . . all of that is beautiful.”
“You mean the Láadan parts, don’t you?”
“Láadan?”
“Langlish, child. Láadan is the word for Langlish, in Láadan.”
“I didn’t know that,” said Jo-Bethany. “But yes, that’s what I mean. I love the sound of it . . . it eases me, somehow. But it’s hard to describe it to people who haven’t heard it for themselves.”
“And the husbands are all dead set against it? What if one of our men asked? A formal invitation, on your behalf, from one of the senior Chornyak men? Would that help?”
“I don’t think so,” said Jo-Bethany slowly. “All the husbands are—stubborn.”
“All bigots.”
“Perhaps. I hope not.”
“It used to be so much worse, dear child. There used to be crowds of nincompoops out in the front yard throwing rocks at our windows. No need for you to be distressed, child—it’s getting better! Why, there was a time when no amount of money would have been enough to hire a ‘decent’ woman to come take the job of nurse at Chornyak Household, but here you are. With some man’s approval.”
“My brother-in-law.”
“Well, then! You perceive, he’s not all that much of a bigot. Just a smidgen of a bigot, on the upward road. He’ll risk the contamination of his sister-in-law, even if not his wife. That’s progress, my dear.”
“Is it?”
“Oh, yes, indeed! And you,” she added, “you’re getting less prejudiced against us yourself. I’ve noticed it.”
Jo-Bethany had almost dropped the vial of skin cream, she was so startled. What could she have said, or done, to make these women aware of her prejudice? She was ashamed of it; and it wasn’t in her mind, it was in her nasty gut, where she couldn’t get at it. She would have sworn that never, not by look or word or deed, had she betrayed that anything so foul lurked in her! But Letha Chornyak didn’t seem the least bit disturbed.
“I am so sorry,” Jo whispered. “I didn’t think it showed. And it is going away, ma’am. It’s just—it’s the way I was brought up.”
The old woman laughed softly, fondly. “Don’t you give it a thought,” she said. “I myself am prejudiced against women that can’t cook a decent meal. I always have been. I’m ashamed of that. Some of those women are in every other respect good fine women, and I ought to be able to remember that and not be so nitpicky.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Jo-Bethany, gratefully, although it wasn’t the same thing at all, and she knew it.
“I have a suggestion, child.”
“I’d be very pleased to hear it.”
“Don’t you go over to the local hospital a good deal? You do volunteer nursing over there, don’t you?”
“Yes. I go once a week, usually.”
“Do they need you over there? What’s the government up to? Not putting enough nurses on?”
“No—no, it’s not that. It’s that nobody here is really very sick, Letha. I go over to the hospital to work with more serious cases, so that I won’t get behind, or out of practice. No, they have everything they need. I go for my own benefit, not theirs.”
Letha nodded approvingly, and told her she was a good dutiful conscientious child, and then said, “That means you have free use of the women’s chapel at the hospital, then.”
“Does it? I suppose I do have. . . . I hadn’t thought of it.”
“I’m sure you do. And all you have to do is start your own Thursday Night Devotionals, there at the hospital. Take half an hour, maybe—nobody will mind. Then the husbands could let their wives attend without having to worry about contamination, don’t you know. And we’d send one of our women with you to do the Láadan readings a time or two, until you felt comfortable do
ing it yourself.”
It was an astonishing idea, and Jo-Bethany would never have thought of it on her own. But now that Letha had pointed it out, it was the obvious solution; in a way, it was exciting. There were possibilities . . . every hospital had a chapel for women, where nothing at all ever happened. Once in a great while some devout woman might step in there to pray for a loved one gravely ill, but most of the time the room was wasted space. Regular services there once a week would never be noticed. But the nurses at the hospitals would come, and Jo knew that would be a good thing.
She knew how much better she felt, listening to the language, how soothed she was afterward, how it made the tension inside her melt away. She was a better nurse, she was convinced of that, because those services somehow lifted from her the piled-up strain of the preceding week. If nurses in the hospitals could have that, too, it would mean that Jo-Bethany had really done something useful in this world.
She could feel the excitement in her throat; she put it firmly down. A hundred things could happen to stop her. The hospital administrators could forbid it. The husbands could refuse. The women could refuse. It could turn out that she didn’t have sense enough to learn to read the Langlish—Láadan?—out loud. She knew the women of the Lines wouldn’t have time to do it for her more than once or twice, and then it would be up to her. She must not get her hopes up. But she would try.
“Do you think I could do it?” she asked hesitantly.
“Why in the world not? You’re a woman, aren’t you? You’re literate? Your vocal tract works normally? Of course you could.”
“I wonder.”
“We’ll help you,” said the old woman.
“Pardon me?” Jo-Bethany’s hands stopped straightening the shelf at the head of the bed; she listened carefully, realizing that this mattered to her. More than she wanted anything to matter. The way Melissa mattered was enough.
“I said, we’ll help you. We old doddering ladies, here in this room. We have time. You go to Dorcas Chornyak and you tell her that Letha said to give you copies of some of the readings you like best—short ones, to start with. And you bring them up here and let us help you learn to do them properly.”
The Judas Rose Page 15
