Gibbon's Decline and Fall

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “This is a mess,” she said frankly. “It should all be cleaned up, but I’ve only worked here for three months. The executive secretary, Mr. Johnson, he left at noon Friday on his vacation, and the person I replaced moved to Memphis, so I can only tell you what they told me. There’s corporate business, and there’s grant information. They should be in separate boxes; the year is on the outside of the box. Inside the boxes things are supposed to be alphabetical. Some scholarships are processed months before they’re used, you know. So if this friend of yours started at the university in fifty-nine, then the papers may be in fifty-eight. Okay?

  “Since you know Mr. Rush ton personally, he says it’s okay to leave you the keys. When you’re finished, please put stuff back where you found it and lock the door to this room behind you. Call this number from a phone upstairs, and a security man will come to let you out and reset the alarm and walk you to your car. Leave the keys with him. I’ll get them from the security office on Monday.” She handed them the keys and a card and was gone.

  “Well,” breathed Bettiann, suddenly wordless. The small room was airless, the only light from a wire-encased bulb above their heads. The walls were bare gray concrete; the shelves were metal, spray painted the darkest possible green, like funereal cypresses.

  Faye shuddered. “Let’s find it.” She started down the aisle formed by two rows of boxes. “These are all nineties.”

  “Eighties,” said Aggie from a dry throat. The boxes sagged onto one another, their edges softening, becoming shapeless. “Seventies.”

  “Sixties here,” Faye murmured. “Sixty-five, sixty-four. Here’s sixty-three.”

  Bettiann had come along the wall, on the other side of the pile. “Fifties here,” she said. “At least four … no, five boxes for fifty-eight and fifty-nine.”

  There was a long table by the door. They unstacked the boxes to get at the fifty-nines, lifted them to the tabletop, then stared at one another helplessly. The tape sealing the cartons was heavy, untearable.

  “What would you all do without me?” said Faye, fishing in her pocket for her all-purpose knife-cum-screwdriver-cum-can opener. She slit the taped boxes neatly down the middle and at each end. Each of them took a box and fumbled with it, turning it so the folders inside faced front.

  “This is invoices,” murmured Aggie. “Paid bills, month by month.”

  “Same here,” said Bettiann. “This one’s grant-related correspondence.” She lifted out a handful of folders. “Ts. Maybe they put her in the T’s. Tabor. Terres. Thomas. Thompson. Talley. Tully. Trujillo. Turner. Tyson.”

  “Alphabetical?” Faye remarked.

  “Maybe they were originally. They’ve been shuffled.” She piled the ones she had looked at on the table and took out the S’s, finding among them two Ts and a W. “Let’s alphabetize.”

  They set the invoice boxes on the floor and made piles of folders down the long table, AB’s, MNO’s, WXYZ’s. No Tesuawane. No aTesuawane.

  They alphabetized within piles and refiled them in the boxes. “What other name?” asked Aggie. “If not under her name, then under whose?”

  “Qowat,” said Faye. “The postmaster. Chendi Qowat.”

  Bettiann turned back to the Q’s. “No Qowat,” she said.

  “Piedras Lagartonas,” said Faye.

  “Here it is,” said Aggie, busy with another folder. “Piedras Lagartonas.”

  They moved closer together, as though to conserve warmth, laying the folder on the table before them. Inside, only two sheets, yellowed at the edges. One a printed application form, laboriously completed in ink by someone at the Piedras Lagartonas Public Schools. The second a form letter from the Lagrange Foundation. “… regret we have committed all our funds for the upcoming year … keep the application for your students on file.…”

  “But the university files said she got it,” Aggie cried.

  “This could be about someone else,” mused Faye. “Let’s try fifty-eight.”

  There was nothing at all in fifty-eight, or in sixty or sixty-one. Or in sixty-two.

  “She was never here,” Aggie laughed dryly, without humor. Was this like everything else about Sophy? A lie?

  “I don’t think that’s it.” Bettiann was examining the tape on one of the boxes. “You know, this layer of tape is sticky and not at all yellowed. Some of these boxes have been resealed very recently. The ones from fifty-nine. Somebody’s been into them, just within the last few days. Someone in a hurry. Someone who wanted to go home or out on a date and who found the things they wanted, then just shoved everything back in any old which way.”

  “Things they wanted?” Aggie asked.

  “To answer a phone query, maybe,” said Faye. “Bettiann isn’t the only person with clout. There are others. They call, they say, get all information out of your files on this person.”

  “Why?” Aggie asked. “Who besides us is interested in Sophy?”

  “Well, that’s really the question, isn’t it? Someone is. Some flunky gets sent down here to pull the file. That person takes the files … where?”

  “Upstairs,” said Bettiann. “To the copying room if they’re supposed to make copies. To the boss’s desk if he or she wants to look at them first. Or in a file basket somewhere if they’re to be brought back down here.”

  “We have the keys,” said Faye, jingling them. “Let’s look.”

  They looked. To the left of the entry hall was a large boardroom with rest rooms and a kitchen behind it. To the right, behind a small waiting room and receptionist’s area, were two offices with names on the door, Executive Secretary, Deputy Secretary. Past the offices was a file room, and behind it, across the back of the building, the secretarial area, four desks sharing one large many-windowed room with a door onto a small sunny garden. The desks were clean, neatened up for the holiday, with very few papers showing. The papers pertaining to Sophy were in a wire basket on one of the desks, originals in one folder, copies in the other, with a note. “Mr. Johnson, these are the files you wanted.”

  “Can we make copies of this stuff?” asked Faye.

  Bettiann led them back into the file room, where the copier stood against the wall. “No log,” she said. “No lock. Evidently they don’t worry about people using the machine. Which makes it nice for us.” She stocked the feed tray with experienced hands, pushed all the right buttons, handed the copies to Faye, and put the originals back in the folder: an application, letters of support, a high-school transcript.

  “You seem to know your way around,” said Faye.

  “I have a foundation of my own,” Bettiann retorted. “I work there sometimes. At the Carpenter Foundation we couldn’t have got away with this. We keep a copy log. And a fax log. And a postage log.”

  Agnes took the folder and went back into the clerical room. “We’ll leave these where we found them.”

  “Johnson’s name is on the director’s office door. Somebody asked him for this information,” said Faye. “Why? Who?”

  “As you pointed out, we have the keys,” said Bettiann. “Let’s see if he made notes.”

  The office door wasn’t locked. The space inside was carpeted and paneled; it held a leather chair, a mahogany desk. Several small yellow notepads lay at the front of the unlocked shallow top drawer. Agnes leafed through them, coming upon the note almost at once:

  “Here,” she said, putting it before them.

  The firm black lettering said simply, aTesuawane, writer? Books? Other writings? Lagrange 1959–63. biographical info, known associates for agent Crespin, FBI. And a phone number.

  “Books?” whispered Aggie. “Writings?”

  “Remember Carolyn telling us the FBI had a dossier on us?” said Faye with a jeering laugh. “Crespin FBI is Carolyn’s cousin Albert. Maybe we’re all under investigation.”

  Bettiann asked, “Do you suppose the local library will be open?”

  “Not today,” said Agnes. “What do you want, Sophy’s books?”

  “Of course. I�
�d like to know what the FBI wants with her writing. I can’t remember anything in them that would interest the FBI. They were simple stories of actual things that happened to women and girls, plus some folktales and some essays. Of course, I’ve got the stuff I’ve been writing without knowing why. It’s in my suitcase. Carolyn asked me to bring it for show-and-tell.”

  In the suite Bettiann had arranged for, they took the brown manila envelope containing what Bettiann called her “spirit writing” and dumped it onto the table.

  “All Sophy’s stories were about women,” said Aggie.

  “These aren’t anything like that,” said Bettiann.

  “There’s a lot of paper here,” Faye commented. “How long you been doing this, girl?”

  “Too long. A couple of years, I guess.”

  They leafed, stopping to read bits, sometimes silently, sometimes to one another. Suddenly Agnes said in a voice that was almost amused, “Listen to this!

  “Sister lizard dancing, back foot, front foot,

  sun hot rock sitter, rising on her toes,

  warming on the rock-top, skipping from the rock’s-root,

  left foot, right foot, so she goes,

  watching for the wing-swoop, talon-snatch and beak-scoop,

  sequin scaled and glittering, what is it that she knows?”

  “I remember that one.” Bettiann shook her head. “I was on the phone with this man who wanted a donation to his church, and he wouldn’t stop talking, and I doodled and doodled, and when he finally hung up, that’s what was on the paper. Later on I saw a nature program on PBS and they showed a lizard doing that, lifting its feet so they wouldn’t burn on the hot rocks.”

  Aggie said firmly, “You didn’t write this, Bettiann.”

  “I wasn’t conscious of having written it, no. Sophy wrote it.”

  “It doesn’t sound terribly Sophy-like, either. She didn’t do jingly stuff like that.”

  “She did, too. She wrote songs for us all the time. You just wouldn’t sing them.”

  Faye moved between them. “Come on, Aggie! Don’t get in an uproar over Bettiann’s subconscious. We’re looking for clues, so let’s look for clues.”

  “I deny lizards in my subconscious,” Bettiann said firmly. “And I can’t rhyme cat and mouse.”

  “I’m still wondering why the FBI would be interested in an almost forty-year-old dossier,” snapped Faye.

  “We don’t know that it’s all that old,” Bettiann replied. “All we know is that’s when Carolyn’s cousin started it. Maybe he’s been adding to it right along.”

  “We don’t even know he’s still alive. And adding what?” Agnes cried, turning to them. “For heaven’s sake, what could he have added? We’re all boringly blameless!”

  Bettiann replied, “Rumors. Myths. Conjecture. Remember when we met with Carolyn last time and Hal was talking to us about the old FBI paying informers for information? How the informer makes his living that way, so if he doesn’t have anything real, he makes something up.”

  “Right. Maybe he’s got the Sisters of St. Clare down as a terrorist organization.” Faye stretched, snarling. “So far we’ve got nothing except the name of a place. Sophy’s letter of application to the foundation is three paragraphs. The three people who wrote in support could be anybody. Her high-school transcript is unremarkable; most of us had better ones. She sent a couple of essays along with the application; they’re no more subversive than her books were.”

  “Still, we’ll want to talk with the people who wrote letters in support.”

  “Tess somebody. Flo somebody. All in Piedras Lagartonas, New Mexico. No point going back with this little bit. Let’s finish what we have to do here in the area. Let’s find some of the women Sophy used to take in.”

  “From Mystic?” asked Agnes.

  “I don’t even remember any names from there,” said Bettiann.

  “From Vermont, then,” said Faye.

  “Jessamine will know.” Bettiann yawned widely. “She used to send outgrown clothes for the children. Lord, it’s almost midnight. Let’s call.”

  Carolyn, Jessamine, and Ophy were assembled in Carolyn’s bedroom, waiting for Faye’s call, which came at about ten o’clock. Faye sounded appropriately weary as she recited the facts they had elicited thus far: Piedras Lagartonas, the names on the support documents, Agent Crespin of the FBI, and Sophy’s writings. They were going to Vermont first thing in the morning. Did the western contingent remember the names of any of Sophy’s abused women?

  Jessamine ran to get her address book, returning momentarily to prop the phone on one shoulder and leaf through the entries. “Names, yes, but no addresses. I used to send packages of clothes my girls had outgrown, but I always sent them in care of Sophy. Here are the women I used to send things to: Laura Glascock, Betty Hotchkiss, Sarah Sourwood. You remember Sarah. She made that marvelous chowder.”

  Ophy sat up, staring at Jessamine. Sarah. Sarah Sourwood. It was Sarah Sourwood who had been sitting in the waiting room at MSRI with her friends, the bag ladies. It had to be coincidence. It couldn’t be the same woman.

  Jessy went on. “Here’s one—Rebecca Rainford. She was Sophy’s lieutenant, her assistant. I can’t imagine it will be easy finding any of them.”

  “Probably not,” Faye replied. “Though I’m amazed at how capable Bettiann manages to be.” She gave them the phone number at Middlebury Mansionhouse, where they’d be staying, and Jessamine wrote it down.

  They had put off having dessert until after Faye’s call, and now they went back to the kitchen and got out the brownies they’d made during the afternoon, topping each with a mound of vanilla ice cream. Brownies with ice cream, cocoa with marshmallows, popcorn in gallon lots—ritual foods of the DFC, reminiscent of dormitory gatherings in a time when their dormitories had been all female and pigging out was the limit of their depravity.

  “Middlebury,” mused Carolyn around a mouthful. “That takes me back. Remember when we stayed there?” She got up to fetch a pad and pencil and jotted down quick notes between bites. Piedras Lagartonas wasn’t a name she recognized. “Hal? Piedras Lagartonas. Mean anything?” When he shook his head, she reached for her Spanish dictionary. Piedras was “stones,” of course, but lagartonas?

  “Lizards,” she said. “Lizards, female. It also means ‘sly minxes.’ We’d say ‘foxy.’ The stones of the sly ones, clever ones, something like that. Hell, I’ve never heard of it!” She reached for the state atlas, with its series of maps of every road in the state.

  “I don’t much like the turn this is taking, this FBI involvement,” said Jessamine.

  “I see Albert Crespin’s filthy little mind in that,” said Hal. “Are you finding it, Carolyn?”

  Carolyn shut the atlas with an irritated shake of her head. There was no Piedras Lagartonas.

  Ophy asked, “What is he—are they—up to?”

  Hal laughed without humor. “If you mean the FBI, they’re looking for terrorists! They’re after Ophelia Gheist and Carolyn Crespin and Jessamine Ortiz-Oneil. As soon as this sex thing happened, I’m sure the whole Bureau went crazy, burrowing off in all directions, digging into old files like a bunch of rabid gophers. I haven’t the slightest doubt that Albert lied to me about erasing the DFC file.”

  “I don’t think I’d like Albert,” Jessamine grated between clenched teeth.

  “I never liked him, either,” said Hal as he left them and headed down the hall toward his den.

  Carolyn sighed. “I was young and stupid then. Teasing him like that was just dumb. Like smarting off at your mother, telling her you’re going to try drugs, or move in with your boyfriend.”

  “What you told him was true, in a way,” said Ophy.

  Jessamine tapped her fingers on the table, a drumroll. “We wanted fewer nasty old men saying they were controlling us for our own good.”

  “I wouldn’t have put it that way,” Ophy said chidingly. “But, yes.”

  Carolyn agreed. “Of course we did. Of cours
e we do! But Albert was FBI, and he was Albert. He was rigid, self-satisfied, totally sure that his view was the correct one. If Albert were growing up today, he’d join a militia because he’d be positive that he knows what’s right for America! I knew what he was like. I just wasn’t paying enough attention to that, or to what was going on in the world.”

  “A lot of antiwar stuff in the sixties,” Ophy mused. “Protests. Sit-ins. Students occupying administration buildings or turning into terrorists overnight. Even some unlikely women robbing banks, driving getaway cars, like that one who turned herself in a few years back. Given the context, I can see why he believed you.”

  “Simon is going to love this,” Ophy said with a lopsided grin. “His wife, the subversive. I’ll never live it down.”

  “Faye said they couldn’t find anything informative in the scraps Bettiann’s been writing,” Jessamine fretted. “I wonder if Sophy’s books had anything in them.…”

  “I have them,” Carolyn said. “We can look.”

  Hal was in the study, immersed in another road atlas. Carolyn leaned across him to fetch Sophy’s three slim volumes from the corner they had occupied for years.

  “Nothing in there,” he grunted. “I’ve looked.”

  “Well, Jess wants to look again.” She went back to the kitchen and passed the books around. “One for each of us. We can take them as bedtime reading tonight.”

  They leafed through the books between spoonfuls, without much energy. Ophy gathered up the empty plates, put them in the sink, then picked up book one.

  “I’ll take it to bed with me.”

  Hal returned to report no progress on finding Piedras Lagartonas.

  Carolyn yawned. “Let’s not lose sleep over it. Despite all this furor, the trial has to be put out of the way first.”

  Jessy and Ophy trailed off to bed, leaving Carolyn and Hal alone.

  “I wish Albert’s mother had believed in abortion,” growled Hal.