Gibbon's Decline and Fall Read online

  “Is that the little herb garden? The pretty green trough with the wavy glaze?”

  “Rosemary, parsley, and thyme, in an emerald pot, yes. I don’t know why they’ve outlived every other houseplant I’ve ever had, but they have. Maybe they really were blessed. Anyhow, we ended the ceremony with a festive meal, and we all drank champagne.”

  “Why haven’t I ever met the rest of them?” Stace asked plaintively. “I only know Aunt Bettiann.”

  “Times we met here, I think you were always off at camp or school or something.”

  “So tell me about the others.”

  Carolyn ran her fingers across the costumed images, then set a fingertip on the oval-faced, olive-skinned image at the left, tassels of red flicker feathers dangling over her ears. “This is Jessamine Iolantha Ortiz-Oneil. Her mother is Japanese, her father is Hispanic, she’s a scientist married to a politician, a professional Irishman: all charm and no damn good. Patrick. They used to live in San Francisco. They moved to Utah in ninety-eight, when Bio-Tech went there, and she’s still up to her neck in genetic research.”

  “This is the sculptor?” Stace asked, pointing to a sleek, dark-skinned woman with cornrowed and beaded hair decked with a long upright wing feather. “The one you say could have been an opera singer.”

  “Yes, that’s Faye Whittier. She has a studio in the mountains outside Denver. She isn’t doing her hair like that now. Last time I saw her, a few weeks ago, she was back to the way I first knew her, with a very short natural cut. She can wear it like that, she has a gorgeous head.”

  “Is she married?”

  “Never. I guess you’d call Faye an evangelical lesbian. In my untutored opinion she’s a very great artist. She’s recently been commissioned to do a huge fountain for a new trade center in Europe, and she wants me to model for her. Don’t laugh. She has in mind some kind of heavy-bottomed earth-mother figure, no doubt.”

  “I wouldn’t laugh. I think you’re very sculptural.”

  “Not a quality I would ever have claimed for myself! I’m worried about Faye. She didn’t look well last time I saw her.”

  “And the skinny one beating the tom-tom? She looks like a lemur.”

  “She does, a little. It’s the huge eyes behind the big glasses. Ophelia Weisman Gheist, M.D. We always called her Ophy. She married Simon Gheist, the journalist. They wanted children but were never able to have any. It’s a pity, she’d be a great mom. She’s still in New York City, trying to save lives in that battle zone she calls a hospital.”

  “And this gorgeous one with the panpipes is Sophy.” The pictured face was serene beneath her finger, the dark hair smooth as silk. “Indian, wasn’t she?”

  Carolyn took the photograph into her hand, letting her eyes slide quickly across Sophy’s face, managing to say, “I think ‘Native American’ would be the correct term, though even that would be a guess.” She stroked the picture with a forefinger. “It’s so hard to believe she’s gone.”

  Stace stared at the pictured face. “She looks like an invention. No real person looks like that.”

  Carolyn snorted, amusement turning into agreement as she considered it. That great flow of silky dark hair, those huge, all-seeing dark eyes, that elegant bone structure, the utterly perfect skin with the roseate fires burning beneath it. She looked no older than thirty, but they’d all been in their fifties when this picture had been taken. Sophy might have been almost anything: a fairy-tale princess, a femme fatale, a demon succubus—she had the looks for it. Their friend, whatever she looked like.

  “She was beautiful, but what I remember most is her absolutely hypnotic speaking voice. She used to tell us stories. We’d sit there, enthralled, loving her voice, no matter what she said.”

  “What kind of stories?”

  “Some were … like folktales, from her people. There was one about girls going to the dragon for wisdom, how they went in groups and the dragon would always threaten to eat one as the price for enlightening the others because only when one is at risk is one truly awakened. And there were stories about women and the moon and the tides. And there was one about how sex got started. And then, later, when she began to travel, she’d bring stories to us about the women she’d met. Her stories weren’t mere accounts; she was a spellbinder. Like it or not, one felt involved. Often we didn’t like it because she dug up some really painful stuff.…”

  Stace grimaced. “Like what?”

  “She was interested in women’s lives, how they lived, all around the world. So one story was about mothers forcing their little girls to undergo genital mutilation in Africa, and one was about mothers in India who fed unhulled rice to their girl babies so they’d choke to death, because the parents couldn’t feed them.”

  “Real entertainment,” said Stace, sounding sick.

  Carolyn thought about that. “I don’t think entertainment is what she was after. I picked up the notion she came from a matriarchal culture—some Native American peoples are—that wanted to understand the rest of the world, and she was looking for the key or the code word or whatever. She was always asking us to explain things to her.”

  “How did you explain all that?”

  Carolyn frowned at her image in the mirror. “We couldn’t explain it, so Sophy found her own explanation. Sophy said the tradition of women as property is still deeply ingrained and that many women assume they’ll be used in some way without their consent. Since she roomed with Aggie, she’d picked up a lot of religious vocabulary, and she called it the Hail Mary Assumption.”

  Stace laughed shortly. “I’ll bet Aggie loved that. You told me about making her over, into a frump. She doesn’t look like a frump here.”

  “No,” Carolyn said. “When she was with us, she didn’t bother. We didn’t threaten her; she didn’t need to camouflage herself with us.”

  Stace continued the roll call. “And that’s Aggie. She’s the only one not wearing feathers.”

  “Aggie isn’t liberated, Stace. She likes to think she is, sometimes, but she pretty much adheres to the party line. She felt it inappropriate to take part in our ‘pagan’ ceremony. She and Hal merely provided what she called ‘respectful observation.’ ”

  Aggie’s strong-boned face stared at her, framed by the white of the short veil and collar, two lines making a worry track between her eyebrows. Agnes had always had worries. Carolyn smoothed the wrinkles with a forefinger. “When you meet her, remember it’s Reverend Mother Agnes. She was elected abbess last year.”

  “And that’s you, and Aunt Bettiann.” “Aunt” was a courtesy title, one Bettiann had suggested when Stace was tiny. “Aunt Bettiann is gorgeous, too. I’m surprised she didn’t become an actress or something.”

  Carolyn shook her head at the thought. “Bettiann actually thought of being a singer, but Ophy convinced her it wasn’t a good idea. She told Bettiann she needed a career that didn’t make her conscious of her appearance every moment.”

  “Why? She’s lovely.”

  “I know, but we could never convince Bettiann of that. She was anorexic and bulimic. Ophy got quite exercised about it, because if anything, Bettiann was underweight. Ophy told her to find a job where her personal appearance was not an issue, where she didn’t even have to look in the mirror, one where her abilities could be appreciated. Bettiann followed orders. She became a buyer for Neiman Marcus before she ended up married to William; then she talked him into funding a sizable foundation for her to run. She manages it very capably and does a lot of good.”

  “Did the anorexia stop?”

  Carolyn frowned, unsure what to say. “I’m not really sure. She still gets a bit obsessive about food sometimes, but she’s not haggard, the way she sometimes was when we were in our twenties.”

  Stace was still staring at the photo. “All the time I was in school, even grad school, I only met one or two people I thought I’d want to be around practically forever. But here you are, all seven … six of you, and your club’s lasted how long? Close to forty years
!” She curled deeply into the rocking chair, head against the pillowed back. “Was it like men, bonded by their war stories? Did you lead feminist protests? Did you march in freedom-of-choice rallies?”

  Carolyn was genuinely amused. “You’re too early by a decade, Stace! Racial discrimination was the issue in the sixties. Surprisingly—or maybe not, come to think of it—it was Faye who was focused on sexual discrimination. She tried to join the civil-rights movement, and she told us all she was allowed to do for black equality was make coffee, lick envelopes, and lick prick.”

  “Mom!”

  Carolyn threw up her hands. “I’m quoting Faye, who enjoys what she calls lively vulgarity. The rest of us accepted sexual discrimination as the status quo we’d grown up with, the role our mothers had filled. I’d never heard phrases like ‘sexual harassment’ or ‘date-rape,’ for instance. In my day women stayed out of dangerous areas—including workplaces—and away from dangerous men. The idea that we had a right to go where we wanted without being attacked would have seemed nonsense to us. The idea of equal pay for equal work was futuristic, as was the abortion issue.” She hid a shifty grin. “A single woman couldn’t even get birth control at Planned Parenthood unless she already had at least one out-of-wedlock child or had a letter from a minister saying she was to be married within a week of the appointment.”

  Stace gave her a weighing glance. “Really? How did you find that out?”

  “How do you think!”

  “I can’t believe it! You and Daddy?”

  “Don’t pretend you’re shocked.”

  “Didn’t you read books? Didn’t you see the injustice?”

  “Well, most of us probably read The Feminine Mystique, but that was later. Our consciences weren’t really raised.”

  “So if you all weren’t feminists, what held you together?”

  “Probably my cousin Albert.” She laughed shortly, this time without amusement.

  “You never told me about any cousin Albert!”

  “Albert Crespin. My intended. Or, I should say, he was what my family intended for me. He’s a lawyer with the FBI. During Christmas vacation, 1959, my first year in college, he came over to the house. I was sitting on the sunporch, putting some snapshots into an album, pictures of us, the DFC. Albert leaned over my shoulder to see what I was doing. He made a sort of disapproving noise; then he put his finger on Faye’s picture, on Jessamine’s and Sophy’s. Tap, tap, tap, very annoyed little taps. He cleared his throat—Albert was always clearing his throat—and said in his pontifical voice that I should be careful about the friends I made in college, that hooking up with the ‘lesser races’ was a mistake because that’s where subversion bred.”

  “Mom! You’re joking!”

  “Not even slightly. I should have ignored him. Instead I blew my stack, told him off, told him my friends were black and yellow and red, homo and hetero, pagan, agnostic, and Christian, and then I added, totally gratuitously, that we were already dedicated to the decline and fall of society, as it was, so I was a subversive already, thank you very much.”

  “He must have loved that.”

  “He was extremely annoyed. I wouldn’t apologize and I wouldn’t recant. My aunts even got the family priest into the act, which just intensified my fury with the world in general. That was the end of my betrothal to Albert. I even gave him his damned bracelet back.” She nodded slowly, remembering. “Things got pretty frosty at home. Mother eventually forgave me, but my aunts never did.”

  “So how did that unify the club?”

  “Albert had no sense of humor, so he did his duty as he saw it and started an FBI file on the DFC! Of course, J. Edgar himself was antiblack, antiminority, and antiwoman, so Albert was just being one of the boys.”

  “How did you find out about it?”

  “Your dad told me. After his first wife died, he asked Albert where I was, and Albert told him to stay away from me because I was a subversive! Hal tried to convince Albert he should destroy the file, but I’m pretty sure Albert wouldn’t have done that. Wounded pride, if nothing else.”

  “My mother, the traitor.”

  “Yeah. Ain’t I special!” She put the photograph back where it had been. “Feminist or not, it gave the seven of us something specific to be angry about, so we had to stick together, us against the world. We never really had an agenda except our fondness for each other. What we called holding our ground. Being together.”

  And they had been together until 1998. And they still were. All of them but Sophy, the sun toward which they had turned.

  Carolyn put her comb away in a drawer, dusted the top of the dresser with a fold of her robe, frozen for a moment by her own image in the mirror. Where had this stout old lady come from? There, for a moment, she’d been twenty again.

  “And you all resolved neither to Decline nor Fall,” Stace prompted the story toward its close. “Do you still do show-and-tell at your meetings?”

  “We still do, bragging on ourselves.”

  “Well, this year when you’re doing show-and-tell, show them all the news accounts and tell them you’re defending Lolly Ashaler.”

  Carolyn felt a chill, a premonitory horror that she resolutely denied. “You’re really serious about this. I don’t want to fail you, dear, but—”

  “You’re blaming yourself for something that wasn’t your fault,” Stace said firmly. “It wasn’t. Dad says so, too.”

  She heaved a deep breath, giving up. “I won’t promise to defend the girl, but I’ll do what I can. I’ll talk to her, I’ll even make sure she gets a proper defender, but I won’t take it on personally if it interferes with the meeting.”

  Stace nodded, opened her mouth to speak, but Carolyn beat her to it.

  “I mean it. I won’t do it if it interferes. Since Aggie missed the last meeting, I particularly want to see her.”

  She needed someone to turn to. Someone besides Hal to discuss this recent problem with. Hal was too close; it was like talking to herself. She needed someone else, someone level and sane who would look her in the eye and tell her she was imagining things. Someone, perhaps, with a pipeline to the Almighty. The fact that she would even think such a thing was the measure of Carolyn’s distress. She had shut off that particular pipeline to the Almighty a lifetime ago.

  Stace came over and gave her a hug, kissing her on the cheek, squeezing the sore arm again as she stared at her mother in the mirror, her own face pleading. “You’ll see what I mean when you see her. You were talking about mutilation. Life has chopped on her a good bit. Just talk to her, Mom. Please.”

  Then she was gone, out and away, with the dogs bugling her departure as they had her arrival, leaving Carolyn with the picture before her, staring into the faces of her friends. Between the DFC and Hal, she hadn’t been Crespinized. She hadn’t declined and fallen—not too badly. She’d had, was having, a good life.

  Despite her fear, maybe she owed something to someone who had declined and fallen through no fault of her own, if Stace’s judgment was correct.

  Hector whined urgently outside the kitchen door. Carolyn went to let him in, Fancy and Fandango at his heels. They followed her back to the bedroom, flopped themselves down onto and around the bedside rug while she went into the bathroom to pick up the clothing she’d left piled about. Jeans, shirt, underwear, and jacket into the wash. She’d put grain in the jacket pocket, which shouldn’t go into the wash. She put a tissue on the vanity counter and turned out the pocket atop it. One or two oat flakes, half-caught in the seam. But she’d had a pocketful.

  No. She’d fed Hermes.

  Everything went away, like the light in the TV set when the power failed, dwindling to a dot, everything narrowing into a cone of awareness that ended in a buzzing nothing. She came to herself, head pressed between her hands on the chill tile of the countertop. She couldn’t have fed Hermes because Hermes was dead. Gentle Hermes had been killed by dogs. Last month.

  It must have been one of the rams she’d fed.

>   But the rams didn’t come to the fence. Besides, all five of them had been there, by the watering trough. So who or what had put its soft lips to her palm?

  She found herself crying, helplessly, stupidly. What a foolish thing to be making a fuss over! Silly! No harm done! She’d made a mistake, that’s all. When she talked with Aggie, that’s what Aggie would tell her, she’d simply made a mistake.

  Though it wasn’t a mistake. She knew it wasn’t a mistake. The soft lips had been there, on her palm. The presence had been there, as it often was. The unquiet, the undying friend. The distant sound of panpipes that wakened her, the shadow that stood beside her bed at night in preternatural silence; the strange silhouette seen against a predawn window; the listener who often walked beside her in the pasture. The sound, as of an opening door, and then the sense of the someone coming through. The voice she heard when she was half-asleep. Carolyn, listen! Carolyn …

  “Sophy,” she whispered into her cupped hands. “Sophy, what do you want? Why are you doing this to me?”

  NORTHEAST OF SANTA FE, UP the near side of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, roads wind toward isolated dwellings set above the city, one here, one there, heavy adobe piled into sculptured buttresses and curving walls, rosy surfaces shadow-barred by beamed pergolas, sunny patios reaching under shaded portals and thence into the quiet cool of thick-walled, high-ceilinged rooms. Though the houses ape an ancient architecture that did without windows, here whole walls of glass flaunt an uninterrupted vista across the city, the canyons, the desert, south almost to Albuquerque. On that far horizon the Sandia Mountains stand behind their outliers in receding gradations of gray or blue or violet, paper cutouts against the lighter sky, vanishing into night when the lights of the city come on. Then the stars look down and the air is sweet with piñon smoke as centuries-old nut-bearing trees are burned for the momentary pleasure of those who, unlike the native peoples, never think of the food the trees produce.