Native Tongue

by Suzette Haden Elgin, Susan Squier

“Convincingly,” said Caroline, nodding. “Not just ‘oh, I’m sorry, officer, I did it with my little potions’.”

  “But who? It won’t go easy with her . . . who?”

  Aquina stared at them as if they’d lost their minds and declared that that was not a question for discussion. This was her fault, she was responsible for it, and it had to be her. And they told her to just shut up.

  “You’d say too much, Aquina,” said Susannah, trying in spite of her deep anger at this careless foolish woman to be gentle. “You’d be sure to. You’d go all political, and you’d make a speech. And first thing you knew you’d have said one word too many . . . I’m sorry. It can’t be you, Aquina.”

  Then who? They were terribly afraid that they knew the answer.

  It was Susannah who said what all of them knew had to be said.

  “There’s only one choice, really,” she mourned. “Only one possible choice. Because it’s not a question of choosing someone eager for self-sacrifice. It’s not a question of choosing someone who is, as the men would put it, dispensable. It’s a matter of choosing someone who will be believable, in view of the profile the police and the men have created for their poisoner. Dearloves, there’s only one woman here who can fit those specifications . . . and they’ll swallow it like a spoonful of fudge and cream. It has to be Belle-Anne.”

  Belle-Anne Jefferson had come to Chornyak Household a beautiful young bride. She’d been chosen for a younger son who looked like an “At Stud” ad, and there’d been high hopes. After three years of trying, when there were still no new infants to be groomed for the Interface and the doctors told Thomas Chornyak what the problem was, he refused to believe it.

  “That’s not possible,” he’d said flatly. “I’m willing to admit a pretty broad range of possibilities in this universe, having seen many an example that’s basically out of the bottom of the bottle in Terran terms—but I don’t believe this. You look again, gentlemen, and you bring me an explanation that doesn’t sound like the Uterus Fairy and The Wicked Testicle.”

  But they came right back with exactly the same tale. Belle-Anne Jefferson Chornyak, twenty years old and a lush ripe peach of a girl, could indeed by the force of her own will kill the lustiest little wiggler of a sperm that any man could produce.

  Thomas was furious, and declared that he’d never heard of such a thing.

  “It isn’t common,” the doctors admitted.

  “Are you sure?”

  “We’re positive. You insert a sperm in that young lady, no matter how you go about it, and she just twitches her little butt and the sperm dies. Dead. Gone.”

  “Well, bypass that stage!”

  “We tried that. We implanted an egg, all nicely fertilized with her husband’s living sperm and healthy as you please.”

  “And?”

  “And two days later, spontaneous abortion. I think it took her two days only because it was a new trick for her. When we tried it again on the off chance it wasn’t her doing, it only took her thirty minutes from lab to basin.”

  “Judas galloping priest!”

  “Yes indeed. You can thank God it isn’t a knack that women can master on any general scale, Chornyak, or we’d have problems . . . not that most women would have any interest in that kind of shenanigan. Most women are crazy about the drippy little creatures.”

  “But Belle-Anne isn’t.”

  “Belle-Anne most surely isn’t.”

  “Have you ever seen this before?”

  “No . . . there are half a dozen cases in the entire medical literature. It is truly rare. Fascinatingly rare. Oh, there are women who can work themselves up sufficiently to miscarry a fetus that wouldn’t have made it anyway . . . but basically, this is a green swan.”

  “And I had to get it in my house.” Thomas swore, long and low, and the doctors grinned sympathetically.

  “How does she do it? Can we bring in the therapists and convince her to cut it effing out?”

  “Well . . . we don’t know,” said one of the men, and the others looked dubious. “She says she does it by prayer, as a matter of fact. You care to tackle that?”

  “What? You mean the little trollop admits this?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Well, for . . .” Thomas was reduced to sputtering silence, a green swan phenomenon of its own.

  “It’s not as if she were unaware that she’s doing it, you see,” they told him. “She’s doing it on purpose. I think trying to change the young lady’s head would be a waste of your time, your money, and your son’s energies. She’d be very resistant—you’re talking about years of therapy, at tremendous expense. Chornyak, the world is full of pretty young females . . . is it really worth the trouble?”

  Which was how a pretty young woman like Belle-Anne, just turned twenty and eminently beddable, had ended up divorced and a resident at Chornyak Barren House.

  The family had given Thomas a certain amount of argument about that. After all, it was a deliberate act of sabogate on the girl’s part that made her unfit for motherhood; why should they have to bear the expense of her upkeep for the rest of her life?

  “I say send her back to her father,” said her ex-husband, who was understandably disgruntled, and had to face the bleak prospect of the decent waiting period as a bachelor required of him before he could take another, more accommodating, woman to wife.

  “No,” said Thomas flatly, and Paul John backed him all the way. “When we take anyone under this roof and accept the responsibility for their welfare, we’ve taken it just as it says in the wedding ceremony—for better, for worse, till death do us part. My personal preference would not be to send her back to her father, but to drop her off a tall building. But that is not the way this family does things.” And that had been the end of it.

  Belle-Anne would have no trouble at all convincing the policemen; she would be believed. And Thomas Blair Chornyak would not put anything past Belle-Anne.

  It would have to be that way, if it broke every one of their hearts.

  Chapter Eleven

  Religious mania can be exceedingly dangerous in the human female—especially if not caught in the early stages. The stereotype—the woman who prays publicly hour after hour, who hears voices and sees visions and is anxious to tell the world about it—that woman is easily spotted, of course. But few women fit that stereotype unless there is obvious psychosis. Instead, we see what appears to be only a charming modesty and humility of demeanor, a pleasant lack of interest in material things, an almost appealing sweetness of word and deed . . . and only when this seemingly delightful creature is far gone in theophilia do we suddenly realize what we are dealing with.

  We must continue to counsel our clients to encourage their females to be religious, because religion offers one of the most reliable methods for the proper management of women ever devised; religion offers a superb cure for the woman who might otherwise tend to be rebellious and uncontrolled. However, gentlemen, however—I must caution you to insist that a man take time every few months to carry on a religious conversation with the women for whom he is responsible, however tiresome that may be. Ten minutes of carefully structured talk on the subject will almost inevitably cause the woman leaning toward religious excess to betray her disorder. It’s time well spent.

  (Krat Lourd, Ph.D.,

  speaking on a panel

  at the

  Annual Meeting of the American

  Association of Feminologists)

  At a few minutes before eight o’clock, Belle-Anne was already sitting in the interrogation room of the precinct house, where the officers had rushed her frantically as a way of observing their promise that there’d be no publicity. Belle-Anne had not been concerned about discretion, and she was smiling at Morse as if they were both there on a holiday outing.

  “Now, let me get this straight,” Morse was saying. “You came in here, of your own free will, to confess to the attempted murder of Nazareth Joanna Chornyak. Because you didn’t want us to mess up th
e house. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Detective Morse,” said Belle-Anne, “we work very hard to keep Barren House nice. And we get very little rest, what with the work we do as linguists, and taking care of the women who are sick, and one thing and another. We do not need a whole pack of your men tramping through the house in their boots dirtying the floors and getting finger smudges all over the walls and the furniture.”

  “I see.”

  “Furthermore, there’s no reason why the other women at Barren House should have to put up with any kind of fuss at all over this—it is, after all, my idea and my idea alone. I see it as my Christian duty, to spare others the consequences of my bungling.”

  “Bungling.”

  “Yes, indeed. The good Lord told me to be careful, and I meant to be; but you see it didn’t work out.”

  “Perhaps the good Lord made a mistake?”

  “Captain!” Belle-Anne thrust her chin up and fixed him with an outraged stare. “You blaspheme!”

  “I’m not a captain, ma’am, I’m a chief detective.”

  “Well, whatever you are, you’re in danger of hellfire. I’d ask the Almighty for His forgiveness, were I you.”

  Bard Morse let his eyebrows rise toward his receding hairline, and turned the recorder on. This one really was a fruitcake, and he hadn’t even had his breakfast yet.

  “Mrs. Chornyak,” he said carefully, “you do understand that if you make a confession and sign it you won’t be allowed to change your mind? You can’t take it back, my dear.”

  “I’ve done nothing to be ashamed of,” Belle-Anne told him calmly—later he would tell Thomas that she had been “downright proud of it, if you ask me” and Thomas would agreed that he certainly could believe it—“except that I’ve failed in my divine mission. But the Lord knows that I did the very best I could, and He will forgive me. Whether He’ll forgive the rest of you heathens is another matter.”

  “All right, ma’am, I’ll try not to offend the Lord further. But I did want to be sure you understood.”

  “You can be quite sure. I do.”

  “All right, then . . . I’ve got this recorder going, Mrs. Chornyak. As you talk, the computer in the other room there will transcribe what you say, and then one of the men will bring the printout in here for you to sign, and we’ll see what’s to be done next. Okay, dear?”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “I’m not—” Morse began, and then he sighed and let it pass.

  “Just say again what you told the man at the front desk before they brought you in here with me, Mrs. Chornyak. Just speak naturally, please, in an ordinary tone of voice. State your name, and so on, and then begin.”

  Belle-Anne folded her hands on the table before her, stared him right in the eye, smiled like an angel, and recited her piece.

  “My name is Belle-Anne Jefferson Chornyak,” she said serenely. “I am a divorced wife of Chornyak Household, of this city, and I am thirty years old as of a week ago Friday. Exactly . . . well, no, I should say approximately . . . approximately a year ago, I was sitting in the garden at Chornyak Barren House, where I have lived for the past ten years. I was watching a bird on a mimosa tree, and waiting for a little girl to come from Chornyak Household to speak Hungarian with me for an hour—when suddenly, lo an angel of the Lord appeared, and he said to me ‘Hark!’”

  Morse nodded at her and smiled, and made a circle with his index finger to indicate that she should continue.

  “Well, as you can imagine I was very surprised. And even when I heard the Lord Himself, God the Father, speak from out of the clouds above my head, I thought perhaps I had taken a fever, don’t you know? But another angel came to stand beside the first, and the Virgin Mary descended in a cloud of gold to stand between them. And she told me that it was all true. And that the Lord had given to me the task of hurrying Nazareth Joanna Chornyak home to her Heavenly Father.” Belle-Anne stopped and gave the detective the full benefit of her brilliant gaze.

  “You see, Captain,” she went on when he said nothing, “although few people seem to realize it, there are women whose bodies are not intended for the usage of human men. I am one such woman, and Nazareth Chornyak is another. We are, Captain, the brides of Christ, and reserved to Him only, and those who abuse us will suffer unspeakable torments forever and ever. But of course if I had just gone in and told Thomas Chornyak that that was what the Lord had in mind for Nazareth he would have laughed at me.”

  Bard Morse could believe that with no difficulty, and he told her so.

  “And so it was up to me, you see, although it has been a great comfort to me in my task that the angels are always at my right hand, or flying above me in their glory, singing and praising the Heavenly Father to keep up my spirits and encourage me when I falter. And since I am familiar with the use of herbs and plants, it seemed to me that it would be far better if I used such a method, a natural method that springs from the sweet feet of the Beloved, you see, rather than . . . oh, hitting the child over the head with a large rock, perhaps. Rocks are of course the natural creations of the Almighty, too, just as much as the plants and the grasses and the herbs that bedeck our Father’s world—but I am not a violent woman. I would have tried, you know, if the Virgin had said to me, ‘Take up that stone there and smite Nazareth Joanna Chornyak,’ but she didn’t. It was left to me to decide upon the means, and I put a little something into the child’s food and drink. I’m afraid it made her awfully uncomfortable.”

  Morse hit the PAUSE control and stopped the tape. The woman was positively glowing.

  “Would you just say a few specifics?” he asked her. “Just for our records? What substances you used, that kind of thing?”

  Belle-Anne had made sure she knew all that last night, just in case the officers did show up at Barren House before morning, and what she said for the disk matched the facts the police had at their disposal. Close enough. She was sure they would not expect her memory to be flawless. She just had to be close, and she was.

  The detective turned off the machine, and patted her hand gently, saying, “You’ve saved us, and your housemates, a great deal of trouble, Mrs. Chornyak. I want you to know that we appreciate it.”

  “Oh,” warbled Belle-Anne, “I live only to serve!”

  “Of course,” said Morse. “Of course you do, love.”

  “Praise the Lord,” Belle-Anne said demurely. “Praise His holy name.”

  “Yes indeed,” Morse agreed, passing her the printout to sign while his clerk stared at the ceiling and whistled between his teeth. He would not have to tell the man to call the ambulance from the mental hospital. The clerk had been there when Belle-Anne came waltzing in, gave the man on the front desk a fervent “Hallelujah, it’s another beautiful morning in our Father’s world!” and followed that up with the point blank announcement that she was the Chornyak poisoner and had done it all for God and the Blessed Mother and an assortment of he-angels.

  “I never counted them, you know,” she’d confided to the flabbergasted desk sergeant. “It didn’t seem polite . . . having to point my finger and so on.”

  It was this kind of thing that made Morse stay in police work. Every time he thought about retiring he’d remember something like this, and he’d realize that if he had retired he would have missed it, and he’d stay on. He wouldn’t have missed this one for the world; he was only sorry he couldn’t talk about it over a few drinks down at the Changing Room. It would have made one hell of a story. And it was just blind chance that there hadn’t been some bored reporter there looking for an amusing drunk to take pictures of when Belle-Anne had decided to put on her extravaganza.

  “Will they hang me, do you suppose, Captain Morse?” Belle-Anne asked him, her brown eyes huge in her beautiful face and fringed with lashes like chocolate velvet.

  “Oh, I’m sure they won’t,” he soothed her, not that she seemed at all worried about it. Curious, perhaps, but not worried. “I’m sure you don’t have to worry your lovely head with t
hings like that.”

  No, sir. This little lady wasn’t going to have to worry about anything ever again, or even think about anything. When they got through with her, there wouldn’t be enough of her brain left to say the alphabet with. She had absolutely nothing to worry about.

  Morse called Thomas Chornyak and told him to forget about expecting detectives prying around his place, watching Belle-Anne out of the corner of his eye as he talked to be sure she had nothing out of the ordinary in what passed for her mind. This case was all sewed up.

  Thomas knew how the women loved Belle-Anne, buttburr that she was. He sent somebody firm over to Barren House to tell them. And there was the anticipated weeping and wailing and hysterics, followed by the speech Thomas had specified.

  “Now, perceive this,” said Adam, being avuncular as hell. “I want you all to know that we approve in principle of the wholesome interest you good ladies take in being enthusiastic Christians. I’m sure that we’ll all benefit one day from your devotion. But whatever you’ve been up to in the way of religious fervor that caused this—excess—will have to stop. We know that Belle-Anne was never all that stable; she probably went over the edge pretty easily. And we are sure that it’s all been completely innocent on your parts. But it’s gone far enough. You’ll go to church in the usual way, and you’ll do what the Reverend tells you—and you’ll let it go at that. No fancy embellishments. Is that quite clear?”

  It was, they told him, still weeping and sniffling.

  “And Thomas also wants you to know that while he’s sure there’s nobody else in this house who might feel that the Lord had picked her out personally to take care of Belle-Anne’s unfulfilled divine contract, he intends to take no chances. From now on there will be guards with Nazareth when she’s awake; and a comset camera will be watching her when she’s asleep. Just to be absolutely sure nobody else decides she’s Joan of Arc on a white unicorn sent to do holy deeds. Is that quite clear?”

  It was, they assured him; it certainly was. All of it was entirely, perfectly, clear.