The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror(10)
The girls’ father had called it a public concern, reminded them the family had never balked at civic participation, and left it at that. Gomer and Robin’s mother had calculated their bridewealth in both directions the day they were baptized and determined that whether they went as grooms or as maids, the budget would abide. So they were all right to go, if they liked, and both decided they would like.
“Gomer might bathe, for a change,” Paul said over the washtub to her sisters the afternoon they had been granted ordinary leave. “There’s plenty of room with the laundry; jump in and take a bath, if you think you can stand the shock.”
“And resign my wife to a lifetime of disappointed hopes, dreaming always of the day I take another?” Gomer said. “Thanks just the same, but he’ll have to be clean enough for both.”
“You’d wife him, then?” Paul said.
“What, catch me volunteering for anything more than husband’s work?” Gomer said. “He’s a priest’s son, he can already read, and anyhow I’m too old to train in anything new. No, I’ll go unwashed and husband both, or I won’t go at all.”
Robin looked more shocked than usual, which took some doing. “It would be presumptuous,” she said, “to assume yourself husband, when you do not know their household’s need—when our own mother has set a perfectly good example of finding a role that suits her talents, rather than making demands of—”
“I rather wonder, Robin,” Paul said, “at your eagerness to follow her good example, as it is no secret that you’d scrape up the dust with your heels and crow like the Devil if our godmother told you it held the key to mastering the mothering arts.”
There was silence for a minute, then Paul spoke again. “What an interesting game you’ve found, Robin, alternating your mouth between open and closed so quickly. I wonder what it’s called, and if anyone can play?”
“Spoken like a true wife,” Gomer said, laughing, and after a minute Robin found it in herself to laugh, too.
The seat by the fire had been empty, and then it was not; the godmother did not fuss about making her appearances now that the girls had grown and ceased to be overcome with delight by the many secret ways she knew to enter a room.
“How much joy you find in thinking which of you will leave me first,” she said, writing something unintelligible with her finger in the ashes on the hearth, “which of you will take your strength and add it to another family, and diminish the power of mine. I wonder if you have ever thought of bringing someone to me, of joining their strength with ours? Perhaps not. You will notice, of course, that your father has granted you leave, and your mother has granted you leave, but I have granted you nothing, nor indeed has my leave been sought.”
Gomer was the first to her feet, genuflecting so earnestly she quite lost her balance and had to reestablish herself against the table. Robin followed suit, a little less desperately, and remained frozen mid-droop until the godmother nodded her acknowledgment. Paul kept at the washtub.
“See how Paul doesn’t greet me,” the godmother said sadly to the ashes on the hearth. “Paul, Paul, you are careful and troubled about many things, yet only one thing is needful. Your sisters have chosen that good part, and it will not be taken away from them.”
“Luke ten, forty-one and forty-two,” Robin said, but no praise was forthcoming, and she sat back down.
“The mangler is electric,” Paul said without looking up, “and I know you don’t want us running out the generator.”
“Let me mind the generator,” the godmother said. “You mind your manners and look at me.”
Paul did, and grinned a little as she felt the familiar tug against her own mind as she caught her godmother’s hopeful eyes. “Godmother,” she said, and swept a leg slowly behind her.
“Mind your labor” was all the godmother said, and Paul returned to her laundry.
“We would not go without your permission,” Gomer said. “That was never our intention.”
“Remember your baptism and do not lie,” the godmother said. “You mock me in my own home and make plans to leave it. But the journey could be quite difficult, I should think. A journey to the priest’s house could be quite impossible, if it were undertaken without permission and without blessing to guard the walk. Fire, what do you think?”
The fire went out quite suddenly, throwing the room into blackness and smoke. Robin, who could never manage her response to anything, squealed aloud, and Gomer choked out something that might have, if one were feeling generous, been described as a cough.
After a moment, a scrap of flame reappeared over the hearth, and the godmother’s face was wreathed in lights. “I am not unreasonable,” she said. “Make an act of contrition, and you can go with my blessing.”
Gomer and Robin, on both their knees, declared they were heartily sorry for having offended her, and detested all their shortcomings because of her just punishments, but mostly because they had offended her who was deserving of all-love; they firmly resolved, with her help, to err no more and to avoid the near occasion of ingratitude. Paul said nothing. Paul was not allowed to make the same acts of contrition as her sisters; Paul could only ever be forgiven in a manner that was peculiar to herself, which often meant that she went unforgiven altogether.