Household Gods

Fabia Ursa’s eyes closed. Nicole had cursed the doctor roundly, almost as roundly as she’d cursed her husband before the baby came. Fabia Ursa seemed resigned to this last effort. She had, after all, been through it twice before.

Aemilia left her to it, wiped the vernix from the baby and dug mucus from his mouth and nose with a finger that hadn’t been washed since the labor began. He struggled feebly and started to wail, a thin, furious sound. The cry brought air into his lungs at last. His face and body brightened from dusky bluish-red to healthy pink, then from pink to raging red as Aemilia dug an oiled little finger into his anus – which Nicole had never seen any nurse do to her own babies – and dabbed at his eyes with a scrap of cloth soaked in olive oil. From the volume and longevity of his howls, nothing whatever was wrong with his lungs.

Fabia Ursa gasped, almost inaudible underneath the baby’s cries, and grunted in a mingling of pain and relief. The afterbirth slipped from her to the rammed-earth floor. It looked like nothing so much as a large, bloody chunk of raw liver.

Aemilia nodded at the sight of it. She bound the umbilical cord and cut it, and sprinkled the baby with salt. Nicole wondered a little wildly if she was going to put him in a pan and pop him in the oven like a Christmas goose.

“Good,” Fabia Ursa said. Her words dragged; her eyelids drooped. “Yes, that’s good. Toughen up his skin. Keep the rashes away.” She shook herself out of her exhaustion and the lassitude that went with it. “Umma, will you go? Tell my husband he has a son.”

“I’d be glad to,” Nicole said. She hoped she didn’t sound too glad to be out of that cramped and airless room with its stink of blood and birth.

Sextus Longmius was still in the tavern, and feeling no pain. When she gave him the news, he fell on her in a reek of wine and tried to kiss her. “Now, now,” she said with mock severity. “Save that for your wife.”

Sextus Longmius laughed as if she’d just made the best joke in the world. He got to his feet somehow – she doubted even he knew how – and reeled across the alley to his shop.

Nicole followed more sedately, but quickly enough to evade the customers, and Julia, who wanted to know every detail. “Later,” she flung at them. No one chased her down, at least. As she left the tavern, she heard someone call for a round in the new father’s name. And probably, she thought uncharitably, on his tab, too.

No one in the tinker’s shop seemed to find his condition in any way remarkable. They took little enough notice of him, even Fabia Ursa, though he half fell on her and deposited the sloppy kiss he’d tried to bestow on Nicole. She fended him off with an indulgent smile and sent him veering toward the cradle and the baby.

While he wavered over it, struck mercifully mute, Aemilia and Fabia Ursa went on with their conversation. They were discussing wet nurses. “No, not the one I had last time,” Fabia Ursa said. “I don’t see any way what happened could have been her fault, but – “

“But,” Fabia Honorata said. “There’s always that but, isn’t there? No, you don’t want her. Let me think – I didn’t much like the one I used for my youngest, though Lucina knows she had plenty of milk. How about the one you used, Antonina? Was she reliable?”

The others chimed in on that, batting names back and forth. Women in Rome didn’t nurse their own babies, Nicole realized, even those who were far from rich. Everybody hired wet nurses. There must be a whole industry devoted to it – the Roman equivalent of bottles and baby formula.

At least the baby would have real milk from a woman’s breast, though it wouldn’t be his mother’s. That had to be better than the twentieth-century alternative.

The party broke up not long after. Sextus Longinius snored on the floor beside the baby’s cradle. Fabia Ursa had fallen asleep rather abruptly, and almost in midsentence. Her sister went to see if the wet nurse they’d decided on was available. The other women had children to tend and work to do. Only Aemilia showed signs of staying, which assuaged Nicole’s conscience. She didn’t particularly want to babysit for exhausted mother and blotto father, though if she’d had to she would have done it. Fabia Ursa and Sextus Longinius had looked after Lucius and Aurelia often enough.

Nicole was free to go home, and glad to do it, too. It was still daylight, rather to her surprise. The tavern was in between the noon crowd and the sundown rush, an interlude of quiet, with one or two dedicated drinkers in the corners, but no demands on Julia’s time.

Julia wanted to know all about the birthing. “Not that I know anything about birthing babies,” she said. “But maybe someday.”

Nicole widened her eyes. “What do you mean, you don’t know anything about birthing babies?” Then, because she’d had a great deal of wine next door, she came out and said it. “Gods know you’ve had plenty of opportunity to make one.”