Household Gods

by Judith Tarr

  These women, these sisters of Umma the tavernkeeper, were a good cut above her with her combed-out-anyhow hair and her two good tunics. They wore soft wool dyed in amazingly off-key colors, and linen that might have made a decent summer power suit in Los Angeles; and they were hung everywhere, it seemed, with necklaces and armlets, rings and earrings. Not all or even most of it was gold, but enough of it was, particularly on the sister with the older man, that Nicole was left in no doubt as to their economic status. These were the local equivalent of prosperous businessmen and their wives. The older man was even tricked out in a toga — about as formal as a dinner jacket, and overwhelmingly so in the humble surroundings of a tavern.

  Even the mother’s simplicity of hair and dress — a couple of layers of black tunic and a black cloak — was deceptive. Her one ornament was a ring on her finger where Nicole’s twentieth-century eye looked for a wedding ring, and it was gold.

  Nicole was more than glad she’d drunk well-watered wine with breakfast, and eaten a good half-loaf of bread and a chunk of cheese. If she’d been as full of Falernian as she was at Julia’s manumission party, she’d have said exactly what she thought: “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Slumming, I suppose?”

  They did have the look, and no mistake. The younger man, a tall reedy fellow with the scars of old acne on his sparsely bearded cheeks, dusted off a bench with an air of great fastidiousness, and helped his mother-in-law to a seat thereon. She allowed him to assist her, but not without paying for it: “Not so solicitous, Pacatus, if you please. It makes you look like a legacy-hunter. Not, I suspect, that you aren’t eager to see me die and leave you my holdings, but it’s more polite to act as if it doesn’t matter.”

  She had a voice like poisoned honey, which was probably what had brought her this far up in the world — widow of a well-to-do man, Nicole guessed, but that man hadn’t been Umma’s father, not by a long leap up the social ladder.

  The old lady got herself settled with much clucking and fussing from all concerned; all but Nicole, who stayed right where she was, safe behind the bar. In the process she picked up names to attach to faces: Pacatus the younger son-in-law, Tabica his wife, Ila the older — and probably oldest — sister; she looked older than Umma. And, most overweeningly pompous of that whole pompous crew, Ila’s togaed husband, Marcus Flavius Probus. No one, not even his wife, called him by his praenomen. Nicole doubted Ila ever did, even in bed. He bore the full triune burden of his name, wherever and whenever he was.

  While the in-laws catered to the old lady, whom Marcus Flavius Probus addressed as my dearest Atpomara, but everyone else called simply Mother, Brigomarus stood a little apart with arms folded, quietly but conspicuously removed from the fray. Nicole didn’t know that she liked him any better for it. He was the light of his mother’s eye, she could see that without half trying. Atpomara sneered at her sons-in-law and tyrannized over her daughters, but when she looked at her son her terrible old eyes went almost soft.

  Queen bee, Nicole thought, and disliked the woman on sight.

  One way and another, the tavern managed to empty of customers while Atpomara got herself settled. Either they knew something was up and were too polite to hang around and witness it, or people knew this family too well to want to be anywhere near it once it assembled in force. Even Julia, who wasn’t usually any kind of coward, muttered something about seeing if the kids were up to something upstairs, and left Nicole to face the music alone.

  She had no doubt at all that that was what was coming. Six pairs of eyes followed Julia out of the room. If the men had been dogs, their tongues would have been hanging out. The women would have been bristling and snarling, of course, like bitches everywhere.

  Oh, dear, Nicole thought. She really had taken a disliking to these relatives of Umma’s. There didn’t seem to be a great deal of close affection among them, either, not even enough to put up a pretense of squealing and cheek-kissing and oh-it’s-been-so-long. From the sisters’ expressions, they didn’t want to touch their poor relation for fear of catching a disease.

  True, they were notably cleaner and better kempt than Nicole managed to be. By twentieth-century American standards they were still fairly ripe, and those elaborate hairstyles reminded Nicole rather forcibly of stories she’d heard her mother tell about the ratted and lacquered constructions of the Sixties, complete with urban legends of spiders and literal rats’ nests. She let herself dwell on that for a while, as she stood behind the bar and waited for someone to speak.

  It took a long uncomfortable while, but Brigomarus didn’t disappoint her after all. “Good morning, Umma,” he said.

  “Good morning,” she said civilly. “May I serve you anything? Wine? The bread’s fresh, and we have a nice raisin compote today.”

  He glanced at the others. They were all affecting interest in matters far removed from this low and none too sanitary place. “No,” he said after a pause. “No, thank you. We won’t be staying long.”

  “Really?” Nicole raised her eyebrows. “You’ve come for the company, then? That’s the only other reason to come to a tavern, isn’t it?”

  “In… a manner of speaking,” he said. He was nicely uncomfortable. Or maybe his tunic was new and inclined to itch.

  Nicole wasn’t going to give him any help at all. She folded her arms and waited him out. It had been a useful tactic in court. It did the job here. He blurted out what he maybe had been instructed to frame more tactfully, from the way Atpomara’s face clouded over. “Umma, what were you thinking? You know I forbade you to manumit that slave!”

  “Julia, “ Nicole said with great care and attention to the woman’s name, “was my property. It was my decision, and my right, to set her free.”

  “It was not,” Brigomarus said heatedly. She’d got him on the defensive, and he didn’t like it one bit. “You, in case you’ve forgotten, are a woman. A woman should not act without the approval of her male relatives. That’s the law. “

  “It is also the law that a person of either sex may manumit a slave informally in the presence of a suitable number of witnesses. Male witnesses,” Nicole said pointedly. She reached under the bar where she’d stowed the box with the document in it, brought it out and laid it on the bar.

  He made no move to pick it up, still less to read it. “You can’t do that,” he said.

  “On the contrary,” said Nicole, “I already did.”

  Evidently Atpomara decided that her son might be the light of her eye, but when it came to pitched battles, he needed stronger reinforcements. She shot a glare at the elder son-in-law that made him jerk forward as if stung. “What is done can be undone,” he said with blustering confidence. “Come, dear Umma, consider the path of reason, the light of good sense, the beauty of obedience to one’s blood and kin and kind. Was it not Homer who said, ‘Happy the man who loves his homeland’? Is not one’s family even more sacred? Should one not — “

  Nicole had had plenty of practice in listening to pompous asses both on and off the judge’s bench, but her time in Carnuntum had worn her patience a little thinner than perhaps it should have been. She let him rattle on a while longer, till he came to something approximating a full stop. His words and theme were remarkably similar to twentieth-century political bombast, right down to the stump-thumping about Family Values.

  When he paused for air, she said, “No.”

  He gaped at her. He looked like a fish. “What — “

  “No,” she repeated. “I doubt very much that Homer said any such thing.”

  “Of course he did,” said Marcus Flavius Probus. And stood flat-footed, with all his fancy oratorical effects gone clean out of his head.

  Good: she’d derailed him. Before he could scramble back on track, the other brother-in-law, Pacatus, opened his mouth to say something. Nicole ran right over him. “Does any of you have anything useful to say? I have a business to run, in case you haven’t noticed, and you’re keeping the customers out.”

  The collective int
ake of breath was clearly audible. The sisters looked as if she’d grown three heads and started to bark. Umma apparently hadn’t been this outspoken, though from what Nicole knew of her, she’d had her share of problems with tact.

  Atpomara confirmed it. She sniffed through her elegant nose and glared down it at the woman she thought was her daughter. Her severely declasse, increasingly embarrassing daughter. “Umma, my dear,” she said, “you were always headstrong and never particularly sensible, but this is remarkable even for you. Whatever possessed you to toss away four hundred denarii worth of highly useful slave? Whom, I may point out, your late lamented husband selected and purchased. Or is that why you did it? Have you found it so difficult to forgive a man the exercise of his natural impulses? “

  “The man is dead,” Nicole said in a conspicuously reasonable tone. “He has nothing to do with why I chose to set Julia free.”

  “Obviously,” the elder sister — Ila, yes — said, “nothing has anything to do with why you did it. It’s not as if you could afford to throw away that much money. Are you having an attack of remorse, the way the Christians are said to be prone to? Sometimes they give away everything before they believe they’re due to die.”

  “She doesn’t look anywhere near dying yet,” the younger sister said with a sniff that tried and signally failed to be as haughty as her mother’s. “Mother, Ila, this is such a bore. Pacatus, take me home, do. I’ve a new perfume I’m dying to try, and I’ve been promised my necklace today, and my dressmaker will be waiting. You know how I hate to keep her waiting!”

  Everybody ignored her, including her husband. Tabica, Nicole deduced, was a chronic whiner. She seemed the sort of person who would flaunt all her successes in her sister’s face, till it became habit so ingrained that she didn’t even know she did it.

  Ila had more backbone, though her air of discontent was just as strong. She reminded Nicole of certain of the partners’ wives at her old law firm, in particular the ones who’d had ambitions — toward Hollywood, toward a profession, toward anything but being a trophy wife for a partner in a mediocre law firm. In Los Angeles there’d been a little scope for such women, jobs they could take, committees to lord it over, charities and benefits and the not-so-infrequent celebrity bash. Carnuntum had nothing to compare with that.

  Ila didn’t whine. Ila exercised herself in rancor: “It’s not as if you were born to better things, Umma, though some of us have aspired to and even achieved them.” She slanted a glance at her mother, who sat in regal silence, letting her daughters make idiots of themselves. “Even so, a person of your status in the world should know better than to do a thing as ill-advised as this — and against the family’s wishes, too. Any foolish thing that you do, we bear the brunt of it.”

  “Oh, do you?” Nicole inquired. “And how are you materially impaired by the freeing of my slave?”

  Pacatus surprised her by rolling his eyes and whistling softly. “Oho! Been talking to some of your educated customers, have you? Which of them taught you those words?”

  “Maybe I found them for myself,” Nicole said acidly. She folded her arms and tapped her foot. “Well? Do I get an answer? How does Julia’s manumission hurt you — aside from the blow to your pride?” To your little power trip, she wanted to say, but no words in Latin quite matched the idiom.

  Nobody did answer, so she did it for them. “It doesn’t hurt you a bit, does it? It’s my financial loss, and my choice to take it.”

  “And our burden when you fall into penury,” Atpomara said, “as you will do if you make any more such choices. What will you do next? Give this tavern to some passerby off the street, and go off to be a wandering philosopher?”

  “If I do that,” said Nicole, “I suppose I’ll live off the charity of others. Not you. Believe me, I won’t come to you for one single as.”

  “What an ungrateful little chit you are!” said Ila. “Is this how you address your mother?”

  She’s not my mother, lady, Nicole wanted to say, but that would have been a very bad idea. She settled for a lift of the chin and a curl of the lip. “I’ll make it on my own. Just you wait and see.”

  “But you can’t do that, “ said Brigomarus. “Unless…” A look of wild speculation came over his face. “Don’t tell me. You’re going to marry old Pisspot across the way.” He thumped his fist down on the table, too loud and sudden for Nicole to get a word in edgewise. “That’s it. That is emphatically it. I will not have it. I forbid it!”

  “You may go right ahead and forbid it,” Nicole said with rising heat, “and I may go right ahead and do as I see fit. I am not your property, and I am not your child. I will not duck my head and do what you want, simply because it is you who wants it.” She turned on the sisters. “Or you.” And, last and fiercest, on Atpomara: “Or you. I am my own woman. I have my own life here, I make my own living, I decide for myself what I will do and not do. You have no say in it.”

  Pacatus and Marcus Flavius Probus exchanged glances. “Poor woman,” said Pacatus.

  “Hellebore,” said Marcus Flavius Probus, nodding ponderously.

  Pacatus blinked but seemed to get the point, which was more than Nicole could claim. “Oh, yes, she’s off her head — or else she’s up to something with that dyer. What if he encouraged her to free the slave for some purpose of his own? Is he clever enough for that? He’ll have dyed his brains bright blue by now, I should think, with all the fumes from his work.”

  Marcus Flavius Probus had no sense of humor, that was evident. He seized on the one thing that must have made sense to him, and worried at it like a dog on a bone. “She can’t marry that person. It’s beneath us all.”

  “She is beneath us all,” Ila said.

  Nicole stepped in before they could go on. She was quite coldly angry by now, the same anger she’d honed so well in dealing with Frank and his late-model bimbo. “You had better leave,” she said.

  No one seemed to hear her. The brothers-in-law and Ila were too busy dissecting her mental state. Tabica was elaborately and tearfully bored. Brigomarus frothed and steamed. Atpomara sat in state, waiting for someone to notice her lofty silence.

  Nicole hefted one of the heavy iron skillets near at hand, and let it fall with a ringing crash. That got their attention, one and all. She braced her hands on the bar and leaned across it, glaring at the lot of them. “Did you hear me? I asked you to leave.”

  “You can’t do that,” Brigomarus said. It seemed to be a favorite refrain.

  “This is my house,” Nicole said, shaping each word with care. “This is my business. This is my life. If you can do nothing better with or for it than play the petty tyrant, then I don’t want or need you. I’ve been getting by on my own so far. I’ll keep right on doing it, too.”

  “How can you get by on your own?” Brigomarus demanded. “You’re a woman. You can’t do a single legal thing without my approval.”

  “Would you like to bet on it?” Nicole asked him. She thumped a fist on the papyrus that still lay, unregarded, on the bar. “If there’s anything I know about the way the law works, it’s that there’s a way around everything. Sometimes it’s hard, often it’s twisted, but it is there. No law was ever written that didn’t have a loophole somewhere. And I,” she said, “will be sure to find it. “

  “My, my,” murmured Ila. “Aren’t we cocky today? What’s got you going, sister dear? Your so-fragrant beloved?”

  “I don’t need a man to get going, as you put it,” Nicole shot back, “least of all that one — though he’s worth ten of you. Now get out. I have work to do.”

  She thought she’d have to eject them bodily — and wasn’t it ironic that she’d never needed a bouncer in all her time in the tavern, but now, with her putative family, she would dearly have loved to have one. Ila and Brigomarus seemed inclined to camp there till she broke down and let them run all over her.

  They’d wait a good long time if so, and she wasn’t lying. She did have work to do. Lots of it. Which she would go
ahead and do, starting with cleaning the area behind the bar, till they got fed up and left.

  It wasn’t too hard to ignore them. They couldn’t or wouldn’t get at her with the bar between. Their bluster fell on deaf ears. Nobody was inclined to get physical — the one thing she’d been afraid of, because when it came right down to it, a woman was at a major disadvantage against three men.

  Nobody came to her rescue, either. Julia was hiding upstairs with the kids. The Calidii Severi were safe in their shop, oblivious to the trouble she was in — and, she had no doubt, to the family’s interpretation of her relationship with Titus Calidius Severus. Her regular morning customers seemed to have conspired to stay away.

  Well, and so be it. She’d been alone when Frank deserted her, and she’d handled that just fine. She could deal with a frustrated and clearly dysfunctional family — after all, it wasn’t her family.

  As she’d expected, after a while they ran out of things to shout at her and started shouting at one another. When that palled without her taking notice, they gave up at last and left her, as Marcus Flavius Probus said, to her self-inflicted fate. The peace and quiet then were heavenly, and barely disrupted even by the stream of customers that came flooding in. Nicole greeted them with a wide and welcoming smile, and the first few got their orders at half price, just for being there and not being Umma’s relatives. By that time Julia had come out of hiding and gone to work, so quietly Nicole couldn’t find it in herself to ream the woman out with proper ferocity. She settled for a frown and a hard glance, which made Julia flinch rather more than was strictly necessary — slave reflexes, consciously suppressed as she remembered, yet again, that she was free.

  Even after the rain stopped, the street in front of the tavern remained a wallow for several days. Lucius thought that was wonderful, and went out and coated himself in mud from head to foot. Nicole had been more affected by the relatives’ visit than she knew at the time; she had no patience left for muddy small boys. The first time he came in black to the eyes and slopping odorous bits on her freshly swept floor, she yelled at him. When that didn’t take the self-satisfied gleam out of his eye, she spanked him. She didn’t feel nearly so guilty about that now as she had the first time. It was, she told herself, like a rolled-up newspaper for a puppy: a nonthreatening but necessary form of discipline.