Native Tongue (37 page)

“Wel’ll have to put you in a guest room, I’m afraid—and there are no elevators. And no private bath.”

“I don’t mind that, sir. Really.”

“It’s settled, then?”

“If you’re satisfied with the arrangement, Mr. Chornyak.”

“Then I’ll proceed at once to find the two practical nurses . . . you don’t mind staying on at Barren House until they’re hired and then getting them settled in their duties, I assume.”

“Not at all. I’d be pleased to do it. And if I can do anything else to help in this transition period, Mr. Chornyak, please let me know. For example, sir . . . I know the Nursing Supervisor well. If you would call him to authorize it, I could probably find competent women quickly and make the necessary arrangements. There’s no reason why you should have to trouble yourself about that.”

“Would you do that?”

“Of course.”

“Excellent, Mrs. Landry. I’ll call the man, and we’ll get all this out of the way. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a great deal of work to tackle.”

Michaela allowed her lashes to fall, modestly presenting him a gesture that would imply the ancient courtesy without demanding it of her, and then looked at him carefully. Yes; he liked that.

Thomas found himself much taken with Michaela Landry. There was something about her, some quality he could neither define nor describe, that made him feel somehow . . . oh,
taller
, when she was near him. Taller and stronger and wiser, and in every way a better man. He had no idea what it was she did, and hadn’t time to observe her to find out, but he knew that he enjoyed it. When she was in the room, he found that he tended to move to be closer to her, if he could do it without seeming obvious. And he fell quickly into the habit of calling her to his office each day to discuss various minor matters having to do with the health of Paul John or the Barren House patients.

While she was with him, once the actual purpose of the discussion was accomplished, he noticed that without any awareness of having changed the subject he would suddenly be in the midst of some other discussion entirely. His own projects, his plans, his problems . . . not indiscreetly, of course. He never let slip anything that it was improper for her to know, or for any nonlinguist to know. But their talk went far beyond the remotest outer fringes of what could be called
nursing
. And she didn’t seem to mind at all. She was the most remarkable listener Thomas had ever encountered. Never bored, never uneasy and anxious to leave him and get on with something else, never wanting to put her own two cents in. She made him feel that every word he said was a pleasure to her ears . . . which could not be true, of course, but was a delightful illusion and a credit to her womanhood. If only Rachel could have been like that!

When he found himself sharing her bed, scarcely three months after the move to the Chornyak Household had been accomplished, he was a little disappointed. Not in her performance; she was as skilled in his arms as she was at everything else she did, and he would have been very surprised if that had not been the case. But he had somehow thought of her as a woman of exceptional virtue, still entirely faithful to the memory of her dead husband—a
respectable widow of sterling character and decorous charm. He could not help being disappointed that she wasn’t as he had imagined her to be.

On the other hand, there were advantages to the arrangement. It reinforced his conviction that no matter how admirable a woman might seem, no matter how superior to the usual run of her sex she might appear to be, might in
fact
be, nevertheless all women are truly weak and without genuine strength of character. It was instructive, and it taught him the necessity for keeping an eye on the other women of his Household, an eye that went beyond surface judgments; he had been lax about that, he thought, without realizing it.

They were frail reeds, women, especially in the hands of an experienced man like himself, and a man who was—as he was—a master of the erotic arts. If he’d had any doubts about that mastery, due to his advancing years and Rachel’s dutiful lukewarm attentions, Michaela’s rapt ecstasy at even his most casual efforts would have swiftly dispelled them. She was never in any way indelicate, never demanding, never lustful—lustfulness was abhorrent in a woman, and had she shown any sign of it he would have instantly dispensed with her. But despite her modesty he could always perceive that his touch carried her to the heights, and he realized that her husband had no doubt been one of those bumbling incompetents in the bedroom.

It pleased Thomas to be able to show Michaela how a real man made love to a woman, and he found her reciprocal pleasure precisely what he would have asked for. He had never disappointed her, when her body was what he preferred: and if he wanted to talk rather than make love she was as contented with his words as with his caresses. If he fell asleep, he could be certain that when he woke she would be gone, the bed fresh, the room made neat, and no rumpled and frowsty female presence to interfere with his comfort. Unless he had specifically asked that she stay, in which case she would have somehow managed to arrange her hair and tidy herself without disturbing him, and would be fragrant and ladylike beside him, waiting on his pleasure. An entirely satisfactory woman, this Michaela Landry. As nearly a flawless woman as he had ever encountered. Under the circumstances, he was willing to forgive her her inability to resist his advances and live up to his earlier expectations.

It is unjust, he reminded himself, to expect of a female more than her own natural characteristics allow her to accomplish.
Unjust, and always a source of discord. He could not imagine Michaela ever being a source of discord, but he took very seriously his responsibility not to destroy that quality in her by spoiling her or allowing her to take liberties. She was perfect, just as she was; he wanted no changes.

Chapter Nineteen

Gentlemen, I’d like to get one crucial point settled before we do anything else here today. I want to begin by
properly
defining the medical specialty known as gynecology; I want that straightened out and out of the way so that we may move on to other matters. If you’ll bear with me . . .

For those of you considering gynecology out of a sense of compassion and selflessness, the definition will not matter. For those considering gynecology for the sake of pure research, for the opportunity it provides to add to the sum of scientific knowledge, the definition will be irrelevant. But for the rest of you, who may be wondering if you have made a serious error—I strongly urge that you listen very carefully to what I am about to say. It is of the utmost importance that you do so.

Gentlemen, gynecology is not just “health care for the female human being past puberty.” That definition, seen far too often in the popular press, is a distortion that can be a genuine threat to your self-respect—if you accept it. You must
not
accept it; it is an error, understandable in the layman perhaps, but not in the professional man of medicine.

Let me tell you what gynecology is. What it really is. Gentlemen, it is health care for your fellow
man
—whose women you are maintaining in that state of wellness that allows the men to pursue their lives as they were intended to pursue them. As this country desperately needs them to pursue them. There are few more distasteful burdens, few more severe impediments, a man can find himself saddled with than a sick wife, an ailing mother, a disabled
daughter—
any
female in poor health. It is the gynecologist who sees to it that a man does not have to bear that burden or struggle against that impediment.

Gentlemen . . . I know that you have all heard jokes about the gynecologist “serving” women. They are ignorant jokes. By keeping women healthy, the gynecologist serves
man;
few duties are more truly essential to the welfare of this nation and its people. Never forget that, gentlemen, for it is the truth as God is my witness. . . .

(from a welcoming address,

Northwestern Medical University,

Division of Gynecology, Obstetrics, and Feminology)

SUMMER 2205. . . .

Nazareth lay in the narrow hospital bed and waited for the doctors to appear. She was indifferent to the peeling paint on the walls, to the ancient metal beds, to the rows of strangers who shared this decaying ward with her; she was not used to either luxurious surroundings or to privacy. But she was not indifferent to the manner in which she was treated, the hostility that was the primary message whenever anyone spoke to her, no matter what the actual words used. It was cruel of the nurses to have spread the news to all the other patients that she was a linguist and subject her to that hostility—but they inevitably did it. How else were people to know? It was not as if her skin had been pale green, or as if linguists had horns to identify them to the unsuspecting public. . . .

Once, years ago, she had been in the hospital to have her appendix removed. And because she was only a child, and still very naïve, she had asked the nurses specifically
not
to tell anyone she was a child of the Lines.

“Why not, Miss Chornyak? Are you ashamed of it?”

She had wanted to ask, “Aren’t you ashamed of your hard hearts?” But she had kept still, warned by the swift sting of their response. And of course the nurses had told the others not only that she was a linguist, but that she had asked them not to tell. Of course.

She understood all of this much better now. Doctors despised the nurses, but that was not the problem—doctors despised
everyone
except other doctors, and were trained to do so. But the public despised the nurses, too, and that
was
the problem. Nursing, Nazareth understood from the histories, had once been
an admired calling; there were worlds on which it still was. Nurses had once been called “angels of mercy”. . . . there had even been male nurses. But that was before so many of the nursing functions had been turned over to computers. Once the bedside computers, the healthies, had taken over all the record-keeping, all the decision-making not done by doctors, had begun dispensing all medications and injections automatically, the role of the nurse had gone rapidly downhill. And when the healthies were programmed to interact with the patients and provide even the
words
of comfort—words that the nurses unfortunately had thought they did not have time to provide—that was the end of the road of prestige.

Now nurses bathed patients, changed beds, fed the helpless, tended sores and wounds, disposed of wastes and other foul bodily excretions, saw to the cleansing of the dead . . . all the distasteful and unattractive things that are natural to sickness. It was a rare woman now who went into nursing for any reason other than that she needed the money badly, or that some male who had power over her felt that
he
needed the money. Thus the nurses despised
themselves;
it was no surprise to Nazareth that they took out on the patients the frustration that was their daily and nightly portion.

Nevertheless, it hurt her that they must add to their usual unpleasant behavior still one more dose of viciousness, just because she was a linguist. It hurt her not just physically—although that did hurt, because they were needlessly rough as they tended her—it hurt her simply because they were women. Women hurting other women . . . that was ugly. And it hurt her because they were deformed of spirit through no fault of their own and there was nothing whatsoever that she could do to help them.

The doctors would come when it pleased them, of course. They would stay for so long as it pleased them to stay, and leave when it pleased them to leave. She wanted badly to get up and walk in the hall, to distract her mind from the pain of her body, but she didn’t dare. Like washing windows to make it rain, if she left this bed for five minutes she could be certain that the doctors would make their rounds while she was away from the room; she stayed where she was, therefore, and went on waiting.

When they did come at last they were not in a good mood. She had no idea what had caused them to be so cross. Perhaps the stock market had “plunged” . . . it was forever “plunging.” Or perhaps a patient had dared to question something they chose to say or do. Or perhaps they had wanted pink eggs and
hummingbird’s tentacles for breakfast. A doctor needed no
reason
for his irritation—irritation was his birthright, along with the title now reserved to him alone. No longer were there “doctors” of anthropology and physics and literature to offend the
real
doctors and confuse the public; they had put a stop to that, as they had put a stop to so many things that were unseemly and inappropriate.

“Mrs. Chornyak.”

“Adiness, doctors,” she corrected them. The smile that went with the words was not for them, but amusement at her own perversity . . . as if she took pride in bearing Aaron’s name! She had never once corrected any of the government staffers whose principles for system of address consisted entirely of the rule “a linguist is a linguist is a linguist” and called everyone of the lines by whatever name-of-a-linguist happened to be most familiar to them.

“Mrs. Adiness, then. Sorry.”

“Quite all right, doctors.”

“Any problems?”

“No,” she said. “But I have a question.”

They looked at one another, body-parling. WHY THE HELL DO WE HAVE TO PUT UP WITH THIS INSUFFERABLE BITCH? And one of them said, “Well? What is it?”

“Could I be discharged?” she asked.

“Your surgery was when?”