“Don’t lie and don’t be soft,” said Melena. “If you’re going to help you must be honest.”
“If I’m going to help, you must be honest,” said Nanny. “We need not go into it now, but I will have to know everything, my sweet. So we can decide what’s to be done.” They sipped their tea, and because Elphaba had fallen asleep at last, it seemed for a few moments like the old days at Colwen Grounds, when Melena would come home from afternoon walks with lithesome young gentry on the make, and boast of their masculine beauty to a Nanny who pretended she had not noticed.
In fact, as the weeks went on, Nanny noticed quite a few disturbing things about the baby.
For one thing, Nanny tried to remove the baby’s bandages, but Elphaba seemed intent on biting her own hands off, and the teeth inside that pretty, thin-lipped mouth were indeed monstrous. She would bite a hole through the basket if she were left unfettered. She went after her own shoulder and scraped it raw. She looked as if she were strangling.
“Can’t a barber be had to pull the teeth out?” Nanny asked. “At least until the baby learns some self-control?”
“You’re out of your mind,” Melena said. “It will be all over the valley that the little marrow is green. We’ll keep the jaw strapped up until we solve the skin problem.”
“However in the world did her skin come green?” Nanny wondered, stupidly, for Melena blanched and Frex reddened, and the baby held her breath as if trying to turn blue to please them all. Nanny had to slap her to make her breathe again.
Nanny interviewed Frex out in the yard. After the double blow of the birth and his public embarrassment, he was not yet up to professional engagements and sat whittling praying beads out of oak, scoring and inscribing them with emblems of the Namelessness of God. Nanny set Elphaba down inside—she had an unreasonable fear of being overheard by this infant, and, worse, of being understood—and Nanny sat scooping out a pumpkin for supper.
“I don’t suppose, Frex, that you have green in your family background,” she began, knowing full well that Melena’s powerful grandfather would have confirmed such a predisposition before agreeing to let his granddaughter marry a unionist minister—of all the chances she had!
“Our family isn’t about money or about earthly power,” said Frex, taking no offense for once. “But I’m descended in a direct line from six ministers before me, father to son. We’re as well regarded in spiritual circles as Melena’s family is in parlors and at the court of Ozma. And no, there is no green, anywhere. I never heard of such a thing before in any family.”
Nanny nodded and said, “Well all right, I was only asking. I know you’re gooder than goblin martyrs.”
“But,” Frex said humbly, “Nanny, I think I caused this thing to happen. My tongue slipped on the day of the birthday—I announced that the devil was coming. I meant the Clock of the Time Dragon. But suppose those words unlocked room for the devil?. . . “
“The child is no devil!” snapped Nanny. She’s no angel either, she thought, but kept it to herself.
“On the other hand,” Frex continued, sounding more secure, “she may have been cursed by Melena, accidentally, who took my remark the wrong way and wept about it. Maybe Melena opened up inside herself a window through which an unattached sprite entered and colored the child.”
“On the very day she is to be born?” said Nanny. “That’s a capable sprite. Is your goodness so exalted you attract the truly high-powered among the Spirits of Aberration?”
Frex shrugged. A few weeks earlier he would have nodded, but his confidence was shattered with his abject failure in Rush Margins. He did not dare suggest what he feared: The child’s abnormality was a punishment for his failure to protect his flock from the pleasure faith.
“Well . . .” Nanny asked practically, “if through a curse the goods were damaged, then through what might the ill be overturned?”
“An exorcism,” said Frex.
“Are you empowered?”
“If I’m successful at changing her, we’ll know that I’m empowered,” said Frex. But now that he had a goal, his spirits brightened. He would spend some days in fasting, rehearsing prayers, and collecting supplies for the arcane ritual.
When he was off in the woods, and Elphaba napping, Nanny perched on the side of Melena’s hard marriage mattress.
“Frex wonders if his prediction that the devil was coming caused a window in you to open, letting an imp pass through to spoil the baby,” said Nanny. She was crocheting an edge of lace, clumsily; she had never excelled at piecework, but she liked handling the polished ivory crochet hook. “I wonder if you opened another window?”
Melena, groggy from pinlobble le
aves as usual, arched an eyebrow in confusion.
“Did you sleep with someone other than Frex?” Nanny asked.
“Don’t be mad!” said Melena.
“I know you, honey,” said Nanny. “I’m not saying you’re not a good wife. But when you had the boys buzzing around you in your parents’ orchard you changed your perfumed undergarments more than once a day. You were lusty and sneaky and good at it. I’m not looking down at you. But don’t pretend to me that your appetites weren’t healthy.”
Melena buried her face in the pillow. “Oh for those days!” she wailed. “It’s not that I don’t love Frex! But I hate being better than the local peasant idiots!”
“Well, now this green child brings you down to their level, you ought to be pleased,” said Nanny meanly.
“Nanny, I love Frex. But he leaves me alone so often! I would kill for some tinker to pass by and sell me more than a tin coffeepot! I would pay well for someone less godly and more imaginative!”
