Gibbon's Decline and Fall

by Sheri S. Tepper

  Carolyn said, “Something’s been bothering her. We all knew that.”

  “But why would Sophy—”

  “None of us ever knew why Sophy would do anything,” cried Jessamine. “When we were with her, we thought we did. But we never really knew. We never even knew who she was.”

  “She said she had an enemy,” Carolyn mused. “Long ago she told me that. One of the reasons she didn’t tell us who she was, where she was from—she had an enemy. I didn’t think she meant it literally, not at the time, but it may have been literally true. There are cultures in which families have blood feuds that go on for generations.”

  Faye rubbed her forehead. “She told me once there was something important she had to do with her life.”

  Ophy laughed without humor. “Was this it?”

  “This what?” Carolyn demanded. “Aggie may completely have misinterpreted what she saw, or she may indeed have been hallucinating. We don’t know that Sophy did anything.”

  “Even if she did take the DNA stuff, she could have put it in an incinerator,” offered Jessamine. “Besides, to make a real change, the stuff would be used on embryos, not fully developed organisms.”

  Carolyn held out her hands, patting the air, calming them. “There’s no point in arguing with ourselves. Any way we turn, we’re too short on facts to argue anything. We think Sophy may be … present. But we’re not sure. We think she may have done something, but we’re not sure. We—or at least Aggie—is afraid she may have been diabolical. We need to know the truth about any or all of these things, and honest to God, dear ones, we should be very wary of hypothesizing beyond what we do know.”

  She turned to Faye, saying seriously, “Keep an eye on them. Keep them from falling apart, Faye.”

  “That’s why I’m going, girlfriends. You try to keep Aggie here, she’ll go all to little bitty pieces like a windshield when you hit it with a baseball bat. You notice she didn’t take off the habit this time? Always before she’d take off the habit, borrow some clothes, and dress like us, at least when we were alone. Not this time. She’s on the edge right now. Been that way, probably, ever since San Francisco.”

  “There’s that. But, also, warn Bettiann not to blurt anything out the way she does sometimes.” Carolyn sighed. She felt the walls closing in. Maybe the judge would get sick and the trial could be postponed. Maybe there’d be worse riots, a general insurrection! Maybe they’d declare martial law, and everything would just stop for a while!

  “Just get it done, Carolyn,” said Faye, watching her keenly. “Don’t sweat it. Don’t get into a state. You’ve got the trial all planned, it’ll only be a few days, we can handle this. Just focus on what you’ve got to do and get it done.”

  “Yeah,” said Carolyn with a shudder. “You’re right. I shouldn’t be vacillating like this. It’s all planned, and it isn’t a complicated case. It shouldn’t take more than two or three days, even if Jagger does … something rotten. Call me on the other number, every night. Remember not to use this phone.”

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  After they were gone, while Jessamine and Ophy were back in the big bedroom planning their testimony, Carolyn and Hal wordlessly straightened up the kitchen, coming upon the pile of mail Carolyn had brought in last night and not even looked at.

  “What’s this?” asked Hal. “Brown envelope. No return.”

  “No idea,” she said. “Open it.”

  He fetched a knife and slit the tape-sealed envelope, spilling the contents onto the table. “My God. It’s Rombauer. Sans robes, need I mention.”

  She looked, then looked away disgustedly. “Helen sent this,” she said. “Helen found where Jagger kept the pictures.”

  “Who are the kids?”

  Carolyn knew the faces. “They’re in the tanks, Hal. At the jail. I saw them there. I thought at the time, they’re such children! And Josh said they didn’t belong there. Cisneros. Diego. Ravenna. Wrongly accused and wrongly sentenced, according to Josh.”

  “Rombauer sentenced them?”

  “Wouldn’t you? Kids that are SLEPT can’t testify against you. I wonder how many kids he’s buggered and then put to sleep over the last few years! What do I do with these?”

  He nodded once or twice to himself, figuring it out. “Leave them with me, Carolyn. Decrepit though I am, I may still be able to get something moving.”

  Early Saturday afternoon Jagger’s home phone rang: Martin, the snoop, in a state of high excitement. “You gotta hear these tapes, Mr. Jagger. You gotta hear them right now.”

  Jagger had slept late and prepared himself a large, lazy breakfast with fruit and sausage and fresh farm eggs. He had eaten it in lordly solitude, enjoying the silence, wishing he had achieved it years earlier, teased only slightly by an itchy concern over Helen’s whereabouts. He had not seen the paper or heard the news, and it took Martin some little time to explain to him what had happened.

  “Get over here,” said Jagger. He went to the television and spent the intervening time switching from channel to channel.

  “What kind of epidemic did they say?” Jagger demanded again when Martin arrived.

  “A beedolus epidemic.”

  “What the hell?”

  Martin quickly assembled his materials. “Here’s the morning paper; I figured you might not have it. I’ll play the first tape for you.” The snoop fiddled with his player, making squawking noises. Then Jessamine’s voice came into the room.

  “Have you heard about the epidemic?”

  “What epidemic, Jess?”

  “The libido-loss epidemic. There is one. Ophy says so.”

  “So that’s what’s going on. I’ve been hearing things.…”

  “Do you suppose some biological-warfare experiment got loose or something?”

  “God knows! Why haven’t we heard about it?”

  The snoop pushed a button and the voices stopped.

  “Ophy is the one from New York?” asked Jagger.

  “Yeah. The doctor.”

  “What does she mean, biological-warfare experiment?”

  The snoop shrugged. “Some people are saying the Iranians, or the Libyans. Blowin’ up the World Trade Center and those women’s colleges back east, they didn’t get the Muslim terrorists much respect, so they’re doing this instead. This beedolus epidemic.”

  “Libido loss, Martin. It means sexuality.”

  “A sex epidemic? Like AIDS?”

  Jagger was coldly angry, mostly at himself. “When was this taped?”

  Martin referred to his list. The first tape had been days ago, it turned out.

  Jagger snarled, “Why am I just now hearing about this?”

  Martin was aggrieved. “I started to last time, but you told me you only wanted stuff about the trial.”

  Jagger fumed. “What else do you have?”

  “I got the bugs in late last night, and here’s the first stuff from this morning.” Martin played it, then again, then certain parts of it several times more, Jessamine asking who could have started this, Aggie’s voice saying, “You did,” Carolyn’s voice cautioning silence.

  “It’s important, right?” Martin asked.

  “I’d say so, yes,” Jagger muttered, concentrating on the words coming from the speaker, mouthing them, memorizing them.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “I don’t know, Martin. I’m going to have to think about it.” Jake opened his mouth to ask about another matter, then bit his tongue. Better he not know about Swinter. Or about Helen.

  Martin, dismissed, went back to his spinning recorders. Jagger hadn’t even asked about the disposals, and that was funny. Jagger usually wanted to know. Maybe it was better he hadn’t asked, since Martin had had no luck finding Jagger’s wife. She’d disappeared, as if she’d dropped off the earth, and that was crazy. Where could she go? She didn’t have any money. She didn’t have any friends. Church, was what Jake thought. She’d gone to some church for sanctuary and was hiding out so nobo
dy could find her. Martin had had a guy do that in Mexico once. So he’d bombed the church, and that took care of that.

  Even if he couldn’t find the woman, somebody was bound to find Swinter. Maybe today, maybe next week. The longer the better, was Martin’s view.

  Jagger, left alone in his aerie, thought first of calling Webster or Keepe, then thought again. The women were talking about the epidemic, the thing that had Webster off balance! One woman was accusing the others of actually having done this. Was that true? Did it matter if it was true or not? If he told Webster, he’d have to tell Webster how he knew. And Webster had said don’t fix anything. He mused over this, growing increasingly uncomfortable as he did so, almost as though someone were watching him. If he drew Webster’s attention to this matter, the matter of the bugging would have to come up. On the other hand, if he didn’t tell Webster about it, Webster might find out. In which case …

  He spent half an hour considering the matter before he decided he had to pass on the news and picked up the phone. He had spoken to the Utah bunch and the militia, so he could call Keepe with that information, mentioning casually what had been overhead at the Crespin house. And if Keepe made any kind of fuss, he’d deny that bugging someone’s house was equivalent to fixing something.

  Keepe, somewhat to his relief, was not available through the Alliance number, which was the only one Jagger had. Away for the long weekend, said a minion.

  Jagger left a message, then went out to get the papers, including the New York papers, putting the bug on Carolyn’s house temporarily out of his mind. He had for so long controlled his own destiny that he did not for a moment consider that some other person might have also planted listening devices. It did not cross his mind that he himself might have been overheard.

  WHEN AGGIE, FAYE, AND BETTIANN arrived at their alma mater late Saturday afternoon, there seemed to be no one around. The university still sprawled its mellow brick across green acres under mossy oaks and maples a century older than the structures they sheltered, but humans were few and scattered.

  “He said he’d have someone meet us at the admin office,” said Bettiann.

  The old administration building was locked. The student center was open but empty, except for a few people in the kitchens.

  “Didn’t I hear about a new admin building?” Aggie remarked.

  “Of course,” Bettiann snarled to herself. “Of course there is. Over where Harridan Hall was.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t call it that,” said Aggie. “The poor woman’s name was Lou Anna Harrigan.”

  “Everybody called it that then,” said Faye without apology. “It probably went unisex; they mostly did.”

  Outside the new administration building, a car was parked. As they approached, an angular woman with an air of brisk efficiency got out of the driver’s seat and came toward them.

  “Mrs. Carpenter?”

  Bettiann stepped forward. “Yes. I’m Bettiann Carpenter, from the Carpenter Foundation. I spoke to Fred Willard.”

  The woman glanced at her watch, lips compressed. “I’m Rose Jensen, the office manager. I’ve got the keys right here. Come on in.”

  Bettiann introduced Faye and Aggie as they trudged up the stairs. The heavy door was unlocked to let them through, then locked again behind them. Bettiann was saying they had just flown in her husband’s private plane; she’d been thinking for years about making a gift to memorialize her old friend; her husband often said, invest in education, that’s where our future lies.

  By the time they reached the offices, Ms. Jensen had warmed up considerably. “You really want to talk to the people in the development office when you decide on the terms of your gift,” she said, “but I can access the alum files to find the information about your friend.…”

  They went through a large outer office into a smaller one, and through it into one smaller yet. “This is a separate system, not connected to anything else, so it’s not vulnerable to hackers who want to make their records look better than they were. All the alum files are in this computer,” she said over her shoulder. “At least almost all. We’re back to 1892, thus far, and I told the dean just the other day we’ll be back to the founding fathers by the end of the year.”

  “Eighteen fifty-two?” cried Bettiann. “Well, congratulations.”

  “It was really fifty-three before they took any students,” Ms. Jensen said. “Now. What was your friend’s name?”

  “It’s an odd name. Sovawanea aTesuawane.” Bettiann spelled it. “She was in the class of sixty-three, as we all were. We called her Sophy.”

  Screens lighted, scurrying lights made beeping noises. The class of sixty-three appeared in alphabetical order. The cursor hunted up Sovawanea aTesuawane and went digging for another file, while Bettiann babbled indefatigably on:

  “When Sophy died, we all thought of a memorial, of course, but we were too upset, too bereaved to think straight. We decided to wait until we could consider it calmly. Well, we’ve just held a meeting, and we’ve decided to see if we can’t set up a scholarship fund for girls from her community—”

  “But we couldn’t remember exactly where she was from,” said Faye, getting into the act.

  “We seem to be having somewhat the same difficulty,” said Ms. Jensen in a tone of annoyance. “We’ve added some new software to this system, but only Friday I was assured they had the bugs out of these files. Look at that! Unknown. Not found. Silly. It says right there she was a recipient of a Susan R. Lagrange scholarship. She didn’t get that sitting in the middle of a mud flat. They must have had an address for her.”

  More tapping, digging, glancing at watch and muttering. Aggie rubbed her fingers under the tight white band that bound her forehead. Normally the band shaped the wimple, served as the anchor for the short veil, and was otherwise ignored. All the way out on the flight, however, she had felt as if it were squeezing her brain, tighter than it should be. Ever since Sunday morning the habit had felt unfamiliar to her, though she’d worn it now for over twenty years, and before this one, another one that was even heavier.

  “Do you miss the old habits?” asked the woman at the keyboard with a sideways glance. “Two of my aunts are nuns, and they say they miss the old long habits with the big wimples. So beautiful they used to look back in the fifties and sixties. Like angels.”

  “I do miss the longer skirts sometimes,” said Aggie. “There was a certain gravity to all that weight of fabric. A kind of gracefulness.” A kind of peacefulness, too. A sense of stability. Like an anchor.

  “I always thought so, too.” She cast a quick smile in Aggie’s direction, then said, “Ah. There it was all the time. Sovawanea aTesuawane. Piedras Lagartonas, New Mexico. Only it says care of someone, someone, here it is. Chendi Qowat. Postmaster. Isn’t that an odd name? It must be Indian.”

  Bettiann was already writing it down. “Do you have any other information on her at all? If she received a scholarship, surely …”

  “Well, her transcript is here, of course. Language major, wasn’t she? Gracious! French, Spanish, special studies in Asian and African languages … a very good student, too. The scholarship information wouldn’t be here. All that would be over at the Lagrange Foundation office: her application for a scholarship, and supporting letters from her teachers or community people. Since she’s deceased, I’m sure there’ll be no problem getting access to it. They’re very sensible people over there, not long on formality. Though you won’t be able to see them until Monday, of course. Everyone will have gone home by now.” She glanced at her watch again. “As must I! We have a family date for a birthday party!”

  They were out, going back down the long hall, Ms. Jensen saying good night to the janitor, good night to the security guard at the door, good night to them. “Sister, Ms. Carpenter, ma’am, so nice to have met you.”

  And gone, with a little kindly wave, trip-trip down the sidewalk, off to feed the family, the dog, the cat, off for the birthday party. Past her trotting figure the sun s
ank onto the treetops, barring the campus with long shadows.

  “I know some people with the Lagrange Foundation,” said Bettiann. “I’ve attended workshops with some of the trustees. The founder inherited a lot of money. She decided to use it to educate minority students, ghetto kids, recent immigrants, that kind of thing.”

  “What will they have in the way of documents?” Agnes sounded exhausted. Her eyelids were swollen, as though she’d been weeping.

  “Just what she said. There’ll be a letter of application. No doubt some supporting letters from people who knew her. If the foundation kept them, which they may not have done. It was a long time ago.”

  “Monday,” said Faye. “That’s a pain, when we don’t even know if they’ve kept the information.”

  Bettiann said, “No, that’s what I was saying. I know the president of the Lagrange board of trustees. His name is Matt Rushton. I’ll call him now.”

  “An imposition,” murmured Aggie.

  “Of course it is, Ag. But it’s important. You know how important.” She laughed, a breathless little sound, both deprecatory and amused. “Money has its privileges, Aggie. Faye has her talent, you have your faith, what’ve I got? Might as well use it, whatever.”

  By the time they met in the hotel dining room for supper, Bettiann had already made her call.

  “They’ve kept everything,” she said. “Unfortunately, the stuff before the midseventies isn’t computerized. It’s in document boxes in the basement, and if we want it before next week, we’ll have to find it ourselves, because there’s no one working this week at all. One of the young women who works there will come down in about an hour and let us in.”

  “Good work,” said Faye with a sidelong glance at Aggie.

  Aggie seemed not to have heard. Aggie seemed lost in some private vision.

  “What is it, Aggie?” Faye whispered.

  “Lost,” said Aggie. “And mistaken. All those years.”

  Faye reacted to closed and dusty spaces—attics, basements, storerooms—as some people reacted to graveyards—with a superstitious edginess amounting almost to aversion. Beth, the young woman who let them into the small, dimly lit room in the basement of the Lagrange Foundation building, seemed to feel only annoyance.