Household Gods

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 intake 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.”