Gibbon's Decline and Fall

by Sheri S. Tepper

Anxiety came in a wave, making her shudder. They had to approve it. She needed the money. With all these medical bills mounting up and up … Oh, she needed the money, but that wasn’t all she needed. Added to the formless longing of childhood was a mature longing of her own. She wanted to be great! Not for notoriety or fame, but only to do something, even if it was only one thing, that was fine. The goal was within reach, she knew it, she could feel it, but she needed time and she might not have enough time. She’d never been in love with anyone but Sophy. She’d never had any hobbies or demands except music and her art. She’d given up all commitments, all relationships—or they’d given her up. Mother and sisters still believed she’d chosen what she was, still believed she could choose otherwise. Faye had even considered giving up the DFC, except they were all she had now, and she needed them.

  Despite the pressure, she was too tired to do anything more tonight. She was out of power. She needed a recharge, a few hours of nothing-ing, a night to read a little, something well loved and easy. A night to listen to music and recover her sense of herself. She would walk across the porch to the kitchen and take the bottle of chilled wine out of the refrigerator. She would sit in her sunset window, quietly, purposefully not thinking about the doctors, turning off the phone so Herr Straub could not call her to argue, yet again, that she should resign the commission. Herr Straub was persistent as a tick and as wounding as a stampede. After each of his assaults, her confidence sank another notch. She didn’t need Herr Straub to question her ability; she could do that herself.

  As she turned to go, she was stopped by the presence in the corner. Petra must have moved the screen, for the bronze stood in silhouette against the north window, the line of the shoulder, the outheld hand, the head, ever so slightly cocked, as though listening to something.

  “Shall I bring you some wine, love?” she asked, her voice breaking slightly. “We could have a little wine, a little music.”

  Her hand went to the light switch, only to stop there, frozen, for there was a sound in the room, a murmur as though a distant door had opened and let through a hint of some faraway clamor. It could have been the wind, murmuring in the air ducts, but it wasn’t. Slightly, very slightly, the figure in the corner turned its head, regarded her thoughtfully, then moved, twisted, became smoke, became fog, became nothing.

  Faye cried out, in surprise as much as fear, thrusting herself against the door. “Sophy!”

  There was nothing there. There could have been nothing there. She turned the lights up full; then tentatively, step by step, she went to the edge of the screen and peered around it. There, totally hidden from the room, the statue of a nude Sophy stood, dusty and unchanged.

  It had been a trick of the light.

  She knew it hadn’t been a trick of the light. She sat down, losing herself, not thinking at all. There she sat, waiting, just waiting, for something terrible or wonderful to happen. She couldn’t even make herself worry over which it might be.

  IN THE GROUND-FLOOR CHAPEL at the Abbey of St. Clare, Reverend Mother Agnes McGann knelt alone before the altar. Behind the altar stood a triptych, the center panel painted with the risen Christ. To the left was a cool Creation, a leafy wilderness in which God Almighty was assisted in his labors by a swarm of officious angels. To the right was the Last Judgment, the same angels thrusting the damned off the cliffs of eternity. The painter’s name was writ large upon the center panel. Faye had looked him up for Aggie, somebody Andrews, died in the early 1900s. Definitely second-rate, if that, said Faye. Agnes, eyes drawn irresistibly to the right-hand panel, where she searched for her own face among the damned, comforted herself with Faye’s last judgment on the artist.

  Around her the abbey buzzed quietly, a hive almost at rest. Upstairs the sisters were getting themselves ready for bed with much attendant rustling and water noises: Toilets flushing, basins draining, showers running. Careful footsteps. Doors closing gently. Even the decorous rustle of ankle-length cotton nightgowns, assumed if not heard from this distance. There would be no talk until tomorrow after mass. Though the order was not enclosed, though it included among its members many women who had at one time been quite worldly, silence was still observed from evensong until breakfast, the vow of obedience was still enjoined, the vow of chastity was considered paramount.

  Until recently Reverend Mother Agnes had thought she had managed obedience and poverty quite well, though she acknowledged that the true fulfillment of celibacy had eluded her. Sophy, whose hand she had never held beyond a momentary greeting, whose cheek she had never pressed except to bid hello or farewell, had often haunted her dreams in intimate, erotic detail. To delay if not to eliminate this nightly occurrence, Reverend Mother Agnes McGann had formed the habit of coming each evening to ask God’s protection against her subconscious. The dreams were no doubt a test of her character and spirituality, for though she had lusted for Sophy, she had always been chaste, always loved Sophy celibately despite her passion. Which didn’t accrue to Agnes’s credit, of course, since that was the only way Sophy allowed herself to be loved.

  Faye loved Sophy, too, of course. Faye always had. There was no point in Agnes’s being jealous over that. Faye had been just as frustrated in that love as Agnes had been. As Aggie was! Her feelings should have changed after what she had seen in San Francisco, but they hadn’t. No matter her mental confusion, her love for Sophy remained intransigent.

  “If one witnesses an act that might be sinful, Father Girard?” She knew the answer, but she needed it confirmed.

  “Might be sinful?”

  Was it a sin? Had it been frightening, as Agnes had thought at the time? Frightening and weird and perhaps diabolical? Or had Agnes herself been hallucinating and the act harmless? “Maybe meant as a joke, but perhaps with serious implications, Father.” Anguished attempts at explanation would only confuse the issue. She knew what Father would say.

  He said it, throwing in a kindly chuckle as lagniappe. “Aren’t you being overscrupulous? All these maybes and perhapses? God can decide what a sin is, Reverend Mother. Leave it to Him. Meantime, why don’t you pray for the soul of the person involved and any who may have been sinned against? That way you’ll cover all the bases.”

  She had already prayed for Sophy, assuming Sophy needed praying for, though she’d felt guilty doing even that. Who was she to say Sophy needed her prayers? Perhaps Sophy had done what she had to prevent a greater sin. But, then, there’d been all the rest of it, the part she’d never told anyone because she didn’t know whether to believe it herself. If she told Father Girard, he would think she was a few crayfish short of a gumbo, he really would. There was probably a simple explanation, if Sophy were still here to make an explanation.

  Sophy wasn’t still here. Not the Sophy of college days, not the Sophy of 1997, not any of the myriad Sophys in between. She who should have been changeless had transformed herself again and again. Two years after graduation she was already a different person.

  Agnes had been finishing up her M.B.A. that year, ready to enter St. Clare’s that fall. Ophy had been in med school in New York, Carolyn in law school near Washington, where she could be near Hal. Faye had spent the two years since graduation studying art in Europe. Jessamine had taken a job in a lab in San Francisco and was pursuing graduate studies part-time. Bettiann had a job as assistant fashion buyer at Neiman Marcus.

  And Sophy, their hostess for the meeting, had been living in a commune near Mystic, Connecticut. The other DFC members stayed in a cheap motel nearby, and they met daily to wander the shore, the woods, the sailing museum. Either they’d held the meeting early that year, or it had been a cold summer, for Aggie remembered dappled sunlight off the waters and a chill breeze through the leaves. They’d been poor, all but Carolyn and Ophy, who treated the others to a couple of meals in restaurants. Otherwise they had all chipped in for hamburger and pasta and rice, filing stuff they could prepare at Sophy’s shack-cum-slum-cum-group home and share with the women there and with their children—all
of them singularly lifeless and hangdog, Agnes had thought.

  “What is this?” Agnes had demanded. “What’re these women doing here? What’re they here for?”

  “Survival,” Sophy had confessed almost fretfully, as though expecting them to criticize. “They’ve all been battered, Aggie. By fathers or husbands or boyfriends, mostly. They’ve all got scars. I’ve sort of rounded them up. It’s my share of the covenant, not to decline and fall, you know. Caring for them. Helping them. Trying to give them a place to stand, so they won’t decline and fall, either.” She said it pleadingly, as though begging for help.

  That, from Sophy, had been an uncomfortable revelation. Though Agnes, along with the rest of the DFC, had sworn not to decline and fall, she’d thought that oath less important than her religious vows, but here was Sophy doing more with her DFC promise than Aggie had yet done with all her hope of holiness. What made it more annoying was that Sophy had never seemed interested in human service. Quite the opposite, in fact.

  Agnes had felt almost envious. No thought then that Sophy might have been doing it for some other, alien purpose. No thought that Sophy might be something other than what she appeared to be. Not then. Then Sophy could do no wrong.

  “Is this going to be what you do with your life?” Agnes had asked.

  But Sophy had shaken her head, saying ruefully, “I don’t want to do it at all, Aggie. I get involved out of pity, but intellectually, I know it does little or no good, bit by bit this way.”

  “It’s good for your soul.…”

  “That’s terrible,” Sophy had cried, actually sounding angry. “To value other people’s pain for such a reason! I hear such a lot of soul petting and sentimentality over these women and their children, but I hear very little willingness to do anything about causes!”

  “But, Sophy, what would you have us do—”

  “I don’t have an answer,” she had cried, still angry, still resentful. “I shelter one, there are six hundred more who need shelter. Somewhere there has to be an answer!”

  Sophy’s anger should have been a clue. Agnes should have paid more attention. Anger was a sin. Anger could make people unbalanced. Aggie hadn’t done anything about Sophy’s anger, though she had considered setting up a fund to help Sophy’s women when she’d made the final disposition of her trust before entering St. Clare’s. The priest she had talked to about it wasn’t sympathetic, however. Helping women leave their husbands was not in accordance with doctrine. Helping women take children away from their fathers wasn’t theologically sound, either. Besides, women often incited violence by being disobedient or sassy, the priest said, and fathers had the right to chastise their wives and children. If occasionally men were too rough, prayer was the answer, not separation. The Church provided marriage counseling. Let these women take advantage of it!

  Aggie had to agree, of course. Separating married couples was not an appropriate act, not for a nun or for anyone. She loved Sophy, yes, but if it came to a choice between Sophy and the Church, there could be no choice. Sophy was only a mortal love, after all, but the Church was her life, for eternity.

  During the next seven years Ophy graduated and went overseas to do research on cultural differences in obstetrical care. Jessamine married Patrick O’Neil, had two baby girls less than a year apart, finished her Ph.D. in an esoteric field of molecular genetics, and received a promotion in her biotech company. Bettiann, despite her doubts and reservations, was swept off her feet by Bill Carpenter and, after several miscarriages, had a baby boy. Carolyn and Hal moved to New Mexico and had a baby girl, and Faye—who by that time was receiving praise for her work plus some sizable commissions—had come out as a professed and militant lesbian. And Agnes herself had remained at St. Clare’s to take her solemn vows, which could have separated her from the DFC forever.

  Should have, she told herself now. Should have. Mother Elias had wanted to be kind, however, and had insisted that Aggie take a little vacation each year to visit her old friends. So Aggie had gone on seeing Sophy, loving Sophy. Risking herself.

  Sophy had hosted the 1972 meeting in a cottage on the shores of Lake Champlain. Carolyn had inherited the place from her great-aunt on her mother’s side and had offered Sophy a fifty-year lease for a dollar a year, to be paid at the DFC meetings. When 1979 rolled around, however, they couldn’t meet at the cottage, for Sophy had once more filled her home with battered women she was trying to make independent.

  Instead, they had stayed at an inn in Middlebury, where, during their traditional show-and-tell, they had toasted Ophy’s marriage to Simon Gheist and had heard a new set of stories about the women Sophy had taken in.

  “Don’t you ever try to … reunite these couples?” Agnes had asked, deeply troubled by all this. Though she still held to chapter and verse on the Church’s teachings about marriage, her work in the parish with real women made it more difficult. “Do you ever help them work out their differences?”

  Sophy had regarded Aggie thoughtfully. “I don’t think they have differences, Aggie. The women I’ve taken in have done everything humanly possible to please their husbands.”

  “If that is true, why are their husbands angry at them?”

  “Beating women excites some men. They like it. They aren’t mad at their wives, though they usually pretend to be angry over something, to give them an excuse for the first blow. They enjoy hitting, Aggie. For some men it’s like skydiving, or hang gliding. It fires them up. They go on a testosterone high! That dark, skinny woman you met—Sarah—she’s just recovering from a skull fracture her husband gave her because, so he said, she overcooked the beans. He raped her while she was lying on the kitchen floor unconscious, bleeding from the head.”

  Though Aggie had shuddered at this, she had told herself life was, after all, intended as a time of trial. “But if she had paid attention to what she was doing, if she’d tried harder to please him—”

  “He’d have hit her for something else. What is it, Aggie? Surely you can’t think being raped while beaten unconscious was Sarah’s fault?”

  Aggie did think it was women’s fault—if not proximately, then through original sin. All the daughters of Eve shared the same guilt, the guilt of disobedience. Only one woman in history had been perfectly obedient. The sacrament of marriage united people for life because there was grace enough within it to solve any problem. God never asked anything of people they weren’t capable of doing. She’d learned that as a child!

  “What happened to the man?” Carolyn had asked Sophy.

  “He got seven years. He’ll be out in three or less.”

  “And what is she going to do?”

  “I’m trying to get her to go far away from here and take some kind of work. Something to keep herself and her child.”

  Bettiann had cried, “But, Sophy, she married him! She owes it to him to—”

  “To nothing!” Faye had erupted. “Let’s not talk about this, Bettiann. The rest of us will gang up on you and Aggie, and you’ll get your feelings hurt.”

  Bettiann hadn’t been convinced. The only times William had ever hit her, she had damned well deserved it. “They’re married,” she had insisted stubbornly. “When you get married, it’s for better or worse, and somehow they should be able to work it out.”

  “I’ve seen how it works out,” Ophy had snarled. “It works out with the woman being brought into the emergency room, and sometimes it’s too late, and I can’t save her life. Sometimes it’s the kids who’re brought in, and I can’t save them, either. I used to keep score, but the numbers got so depressing, I stopped counting. God knows how many women and little girls I’ve signed death certificates for in the last ten years.”

  Sophy had nodded, thoughtful as always. “I sometimes wonder if these women are married to men at all. Maybe they are married to the enemy. Or to his minions.”

  Whenever Sophy spoke of the enemy, her voice acquired a mysterious, almost metallic, clangor, the dissonant tolling of alarms, a harsh and bitter sou
nd, almost alien. Hearing this strange timbre, Aggie had changed the subject: “I saw your recent infanticide story in the New Yorker.” On the horrors of infanticide, at least, she could agree with Sophy. “Ophy sent it to me.”

  Sophy had said distantly, “I got quite a bit of mail about that piece. It’s strange. The situations I write about are almost always widely reported in the newspapers and on television, yet people don’t seem to react strongly until I redo the truth as fiction! I thought perhaps if I put the stories into a book …”

  They had gone on to talk of other, less disturbing things. Sophy’s first book had come out soon afterward, a slender volume called simply Women’s Stories. It included many of the stories she had told them about her Asian travels: of Burmese village girls sold to the brothels of Thailand, of Indian brides burned to death by dowry-greedy grooms, of women’s schools burned in Bangladesh, of Muslim “honor killings” of girls who were victims of rape. The book contained a list of shelters and women’s movements to which contributions could be made. Each member of the DFC had contributed to at least one of them, though Aggie and Bettiann had chosen agencies that worked predominantly with children.

  Despite their differing viewpoints, Aggie had always envied Sophy her certainty. Though Sophy had struggled to understand, she had never seemed to doubt her own actions. Whatever she had done, she had done surely, as though guided by some invisible beacon. Throughout Aggie’s years as a nun, whenever presented with difficult choices, she has asked herself what Sophy would do if Sophy were Agnes. Since Sophy hadn’t been Catholic or even Christian, since she and Aggie hadn’t agreed at all about women’s roles in life, it was an odd question to ask, but Aggie had asked it nonetheless. She had used her image of Sophy as a mariner uses a compass. She had kept her direction, had worked hard, had set aside almost all distractions. She had done well, so she was told by others.

  So why was everything so solemn? Why was there so little joy?