"Larry—"
"Father Mazzare—"
Only Mazarini was silent.
Mazzare held up a hand for silence. "Simon, Augustus, I've had enough of being quiet but I don't have a big enough voice. Monsignor Mazarini, you rode between the armies once, calling for peace."
Mazarini nodded, understanding what was asked of him. "I will fail, of course," he said. "Some things can only be done once."
Mazzare nodded. "Sometimes," he said, "failure counts."
Biting Time
Virginia DeMarce
1
Jeff Higgins climbed the stepstool and eyed the diminishing number of boxes stashed between the top level of the trailer's kitchen cabinets and the ceiling. It was odd, he thought, the things that brought memories from before the Ring of Fire back to him. He and his father used to tease his mother unmercifully for her tendency to buy foods by the case every time there was a special at the grocery warehouse in Fairmont. In the two months since he had married Gretchen, though, it sure had come in handy.
Grandma Richter was really the problem—the rest of them could and would eat almost anything that Gretchen defined as food. Even Wilhelm was doing pretty well on solids, if you considered canned yams to be a solid food.
Grandma had fewer teeth than Wilhelm. Grandma had no teeth at all.
It wasn't that Grandma didn't eat with enthusiasm—she ate instant oatmeal with cinnamon apples, instant mashed potatoes with gravy, cups full of instant ramen noodles with flavoring (add boiling water). After two months of eating twenty-first-century America's versions of dehydrated and reconstituted goo, in addition to the ever-present pease porridge and boiled cabbage, she was, according to Gretchen, just about back to her normal size (wiry but no longer withered) and strength (Jeff's best estimate was, "tough as an old gourd").
Above and beyond all other forms of sustenance, she had taken to StoveTop brand. By his count, there were only three more cases, with six double boxes per case, which figured out as thirty-six more meals. There's no doubt about it, Jeff thought. Grandma needs to get false teeth. She needs to get them right now, before Dr. Sims runs out of supplies.
* * *
"Grandma, we need to talk about your teeth." Jeff had prudently waited until the household was fifteen minutes into supper to bring the matter up—the first quarter hour of every meal, as soon as the blessing had been completed, was devoted to serious eating. He opened his mouth, pointed, said, "Zaehne," and pointed at her mouth. "You need to go to the dentist—to Dr. Sims—to get teeth, so you can eat regular food, not just soft food."
"What teeth? I lost my last tooth a dozen years ago. They say that you lose a tooth for every child. Wahnsinn. What did I have? Ten pregnancies, all my teeth gone, and not one living child to show for it: four miscarriages, two born too early to live, four that made it to the font but died before they were six years old." Grandma paused. "Not, mind you, that Annalise and Hans and Gretchen aren't as dear to me as if their father had been my own son."
Jeff eyed Gretchen rather warily as this spate of words descended upon him. His German had improved rapidly since being immersed in Gretchen's extended family, but Grandma's Oberpfalz accent resembled spoken Thuringian German only vaguely. After considerable participation by everybody around the table, he managed to determine three things. The first was that Grandma had been the stepmother of Gretchen's father, being too young by several years to be her actual grandmother. The second was that all seventeenth-century Germans defined the function of a dentist as pulling teeth, not repairing, much less creating, them.
The third thing that he determined was that Grandma thought he was making fun of her, which was not a good state of affairs—not good at all.
* * *
By the end of August, everyone in Grantville had learned to be wary of the high school library's collection of German-English dictionaries. The original Langenscheidt by means of which Jeff had proposed to Gretchen had been augmented by a ragtag collection of paperbacks formerly in the possession of private owners and a sizable number of travelers' phrasebooks, not to overlook the invaluable little picture book, See It and Say It in German, which had already been reprinted, the cartoons by way of woodcuts, and widely distributed, along with the companion volume created by substituting new subtitles Sieht das und sprecht das auf Englisch. The problems tended to lie in the way the language had changed during more than three hundred and fifty years.
The dictionary said that the term for dentures was "kuenstliches Gebiss." Cautiously checking further, he discovered that Grandma Richter, however, would hear "Gebiss" as a reference to the bit one attached to a bridle and placed in the mouth of a horse. That wasn't going to improve domestic relations if he said it to her . . .