As Elphie begins to command the world about her (even if that world doesn’t obey, now or ever), the private lives of her family grow more obscure to her. Once what her mother thought or felt, or her father, might have seemed like an extension of Elphie’s own inner state. But now most conditions of mutuality are severed. We become less porous, less fungible as we claim our own agency.
The girl doesn’t articulate such things yet, even to herself. But she’s beginning to consolidate some Elphie-ness into an eventual Elphaba. When she grows old enough to reflect on this period, she finds her parents distant, inscrutable.
A comfort, in some ways, this independence; but it sets the seal of loneliness upon her, too.
In time Elphie will build upon the clues of her memory to construct her theoretical parents—what they must have been like at this time, given available evidence.
So: Frex. At her age Elphie isn’t able to identify the notions either of benign neglect or of loving affection. Her father’s existence is beyond comment: it’s the invisible aspic, the unacknowledged oxygen of her life. Yet she’s in awe of her father’s determination. On his own intuition Frex leads the family from post to post, from marsh to swamp to the occasional trading post on a hump of higher land. (At this point he’s still rather hapless as a proselytizer.)
Elphie will later wonder how her father heard his marching orders. He never explains it to Elphie, and she never thinks to ask until he is gone. Gone to the Unnamed God, or to some hitherto unannounced destination.
Her father no longer runs to fat. Years of the Quadling diet (and, yes, deprivation) have trimmed him. His beard has settled into a nest of widely set coils. Each curl distinct, as if carven. His face seems burled. He’s not a bad-looking man, though few children manage to apply any rubric of aesthetics to their own parents. He isn’t yet at the height of his confidence—that much Elphie can guess, and she is right. If once long ago, looking over the shoulder of his wife, he’d felt a stirring of tendresse for Turtle Heart, that hasn’t recurred. Frex may have decided that such an inconvenient affliction was part of the deity’s subtle strategy to turn the minister’s attention to the mucklands. To nudge Frex toward the conversion and consolation of the less fortunate, these misbegotten damp people. The damplings. About whose peril the hapless Turtle Heart has been first herald and finally martyr. Year in and year out, the Quadlings fail to grasp the rationale behind Frex’s mission. They’ve never invited him to convert them in the first place. But then, they’re by nature a polite people.
It seems unchanging, the exercise of his calling. He reads and rereads the texts of the unionist fathers. He sermonizes and delivers advice, asked for or no. He smells like citrus peel and beeswax. He stalks about with presence, being one of those Munchkinlanders more ponderosa than dwarf pine. He isn’t an exhibitionist like his wife, so Elphie doesn’t learn from him how the male animal in the human species is kitted out with its master-joke of exposed plumbing. Indeed, Frex is reticent. He wears a frayed white shirt buttoned to the neck except when retiring to his tent. (He and Melena have twin tents, usually pitched adjacent unless Melena is feeling monthly, when her tent is relocated farther away.)
He’s a good person, or good enough. Maybe he isn’t good at being an evangelist, though. Maybe his converts sign on more quickly to placate him, or to convince him that his work among them has been so effective that he really ought to move on to riper pickings, a readier heathenage. Shall we help you pack?
A single instance of his ministry, for what it’s worth. A few Quadlings are approaching from a backwash loop of the river system. Upon a blanket between them they carry an older boy, maybe fifteen, whose limbs are wrecked with rickets or something. He looks as if he was sat upon at birth. His forehead is protuberant and his narrow chin ducks inward toward the gullet. He gibbers. What can Frexispar Togue Thropp, Frex the Godly, do for this unfortunate creature? Elphie remembers this bit, because from early on she is vexed by not knowing how much change is even possible in this world. If Frex can untangle this child, why can’t he petition his boss, the Unnamed God, to heal Frex’s own Nessa? Elphie inches closer. This family grouping is so intent on the suffering of their kin-child that they pay no heed to the green girl. Help us, they say to Frex. We beg you, we pray you, we trust you. Tell us what to do.
Frex chants his chants and rants his rants. The family hangs back, wary and hopeful. The boy moans and shuffles his torqued shins. His hands are bent inward like paw of a dog who has been taught to shake. His eyes don’t focus on the company of the mission. The language is Qua’ati. Elphie is conversant enough now to recognize most of the vocabulary, though not always the inferences. Frex is by turns cajoling and hectoring. He isn’t applying his attention to the sore needs of the boy, however, but to the people who have thought to carry their invalid forward. If Elphie had been able to put it into words, she might have said that her father didn’t exert himself to cure the invalid, the way a magical physician might, but rather he admonished the family for failing to see the beauty in their broken child. A swan on the water—she remembers this part, maybe the single most memorable statement her father ever speaks in her presence—a hobbled swan on the water may be unable to wheel aloft with her sisters. But she is no less beautiful, and she is doubled by her reflection in a way she can never be doubled in the air.
The small party weeps and shuffles, and probably pays for the privilege of being dismissed. They pick up their ailing relative and haul him away. But here’s the thing. They seem genuinely grateful. Consoled. A change has been worked upon them.
Is that a kind of magic, thinks Elphie.
And if so, what good is it? To the crippled boy, anyway?
But maybe it is good, if his people love him more unrestrainedly. Ah, but there’s that thing, love, the secretest charm.
The whole mission camp has been watching. After the family has left, bearing the stretcher, Ti’imit and Boozy are wiping their eyes. Nanny coos some outmoded hymn to Lurline, that ancient goddess whose influence has been eclipsed by the rise of unionism except, as Nanny puts it, among the truly faithful. Whenever Frex goes whole-hog into ministerial mode, Nanny publicly appeals to a more maternal divinity. To annoy him, or perhaps to suggest to supplicants that this mission affords a full range of services. Frex tolerates this, mostly. He can’t do without Nanny. She’s always on the lip of packing it in and going back to civilization where a body can get a proper cup of tea with cow’s milk and a bit of a chin-wag. She puts up with Frex, and he puts up with her. But it’s a fragile contract.
Nanny will be with Elphaba her whole life, in and out. Of course, neither of them know this yet. The governess will become set in her ways, a threadbare grab bag of rural wives’ wit, stale bromides, and a keener talent for observation than many. From humble origins—Cattery Spunge was born in a cow bier, of a milkmaid and a shepherd—she’ll defy the demographics of poverty through her natural wiles and a preternatural patience. She paces herself. If she’s ever had romance in her young life, nothing is known of it. A nanny’s job is to keep her personal life away from the scrutiny of her employers. Cattery Spunge was pretty in her adolescence and will be dignified in old age, but now, in the swamp of midlife—and the swamp of Quadling Country—she’s afflicted with a kind of mildew in the bones. Her movements are slow. She complains. A rheumatism born of the climate. It will lift when this period of her life is over. She doesn’t know that yet. She thinks she is old. She has no idea. Elphie thinks Nanny is old. Elphie has no idea either.
Of Melena, then? But no. Melena has been exposing herself from page one, and her time of delivery is nearly upon her. There’s nothing more to assert about Elphaba’s mother.
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From Elphie: A Wicked Childhood by Gregory Maguire. © 2024 by Kiamo Ko LLC. To be published on March 25, 2025 by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.
