Gibbon's Decline and Fall

by Sheri S. Tepper

  Then, on the very day she was to fly home from Florence, she’d wandered into the Uffizi and come upon the Botticelli Primavera, a painting she hadn’t seen since student days and hadn’t really looked at even then. Though huge and famous, it wasn’t done in a style she admired. The figures were lumpy, the allusions—so she assumed—outdated, and she’d forgotten anything she’d ever known about it. What was it? And why?

  In answer to her unspoken question, the voice of an English-speaking docent echoed across the gallery, “We see in the Primavera various personifications of fruitfulness.…”

  “Fruitfulness.” The word evoked Sophy’s house in Vermont, a breakfast-time argument over an article found in the morning paper. A fourteen-year-old girl, allegedly pregnant by rape, had been imprisoned by her parents in order to prevent her seeking an abortion, which she had threatened to do, and had then died during a late miscarriage. The charges were manslaughter, the jury said guilty, but the judge suspended the sentence, saying the parents had acted out of good motives, in the girl’s best interest.

  “I don’t believe it,” muttered Faye, slamming down a juice glass with such force she broke it and cut herself.

  “Now, Faye,” Aggie had said, taking the battered hand in her own, stanching the blood with a paper napkin. “Even though the abuse was a terrible thing, surely you can understand her parents’ feelings.”

  “Aggie!” Carolyn had cried furiously. “For heaven’s sake, don’t give us the party line. Not from you! Don’t tell me if you’re raped, accept it as God’s will. Don’t!”

  “But that’s true,” Aggie had cried.

  Sophy had shaken her head. “So you always told me, Aggie. You were impregnated by rape? It’s God’s will. Accept it. This is your tenth baby, and you’re dying? Accept it. You’re thirteen years old? Accept it. Your daddy got you pregnant? Accept it. Twenty Serbian soldiers gang-raped you? Accept it. Why is fruitfulness always supposed to be God’s will?”

  Ophy had laughed, agreeing. “It’s what you called the Hail Mary Assumption, Soph! We assume a woman is only a vessel, and once that sperm’s in there, it’s holy!”

  Faye was looking at the Primavera, but she saw Sophy’s face. While the docent herded his muttering, sore-footed charges away toward some other great work, Faye analyzed the painting in the light of that remembered argument: There was the pregnant victim stumbling in from the right, Cloris, a nymph, looking fearfully over her shoulder at the pursuing rapist, puff-cheeked Zephyr. Cloris was suffering from mythological morning sickness, vomiting up flowers, and was obviously sick and miserable, but there, just to her left, was her metamorphosis: Flora, a smiling goddess with flowing hair, dressed in a flowery gown. See, said the artist: The assaulted, cowering victim becomes fruitful, and with that fruitfulness comes apotheosis: Violence is transmuted into virtue; rape is rationalized; forcible impregnation is deified, just as the fathers of the Church have long insisted. The painting was not only about fruitfulness; it was also about transformation.

  Back then, in Sophy’s kitchen, Faye herself had attempted to end the argument. “Let’s not spend the whole meeting arguing. Women get the short end a lot of times, and I’m tired of talking about it. It’s just the way things are!”

  It was Sophy who had answered. “You’re wrong, Faye. Things are changing.”

  “I’ve noticed no improvement.”

  “No, I mean, all these things that happen to women, they’re getting worse!”

  “Well, I wouldn’t say—”

  “Truly. They are! I’ve been making it my business to find out! The incidence of abuse of women, all kinds, bride burning, rape, mutilation, battering, killing—the rate has increased steadily for the last several decades. Do you think that’s natural?”

  Faye laughed. “As natural as daylight. Population increases, more women to abuse, therefore more abuse. Why? You think something is causing it?”

  “I wasn’t referring to increasing numbers, but to increasing rates,” Sophy said. “I do think something, or someone, is causing it.”

  Sophy had been so serious, so positive, like Red Riding Hood saying, What big teeth you have, Grandma. They’d all laughed, even Carolyn.

  Faye didn’t laugh as she stared at Botticelli’s masterpiece. The fountain was suddenly there in her mind, a concept based on the Botticelli painting, but transformed. In the sculpture the raping wind would be invisible, its presence indicated only by an invisible force that thrust up a huge wave, the tidal wave of humanity. Taking the place of both Cloris and Flora would be the new incarnation of Fecundity, mindlessly erotic, flower crowned, borne aloft on the wave and spewing innumerable infants from her loins to dive and dabble down the flowing curve. The curve itself would have meaning, the smooth, ascending curve of human numbers. In the Botticelli work there were five other classical figures; Venus Genetrix at the center, the three Graces left of center, and a rather lackadaisical Mercury at the far left. In Faye’s version these, too, would have their metamorphosis, though she had not considered them then.

  Now, almost a year later, the model was gradually fulfilling her initial inspiration. She had finished the figure of Fecundity, and the great wave into which she was placing the children’s bodies. The effect was good—massive, but flowing. When she had the children arranged to her satisfaction, she leaned back, stretching and yawning, rotating her head to relieve sore neck muscles.

  She stopped, aghast.

  From the corner Sophy, crowned in laurel, draped in velvet, regarded her from hooded, secret eyes.

  Faye felt her fingers pressed tight against her mouth, muffling a sound she didn’t want to make. She’d thrown the dustladen props onto the floor. She’d washed Sophy and left her clean. See, there were the muddy puddles, the edges drying in gray craquelure. She’d left the garland and the fabric on the floor. She hadn’t touched them. She hadn’t done it. She couldn’t have done it! But there had been no one else. No one else at all.

  That night Faye dreamed she was walking through a cavern. How she had come there, why she was there, she had no idea. The cavern was dimly lit with flaring torches that reflected fragments of light from statuary stacked all around her, piles and lines of them, sometimes heaped three or four high. The torchlight reflected from bronze and stone, marking an eyelid here, the line of a cheek there, the curve of a breast, a hip, a thigh.

  “They don’t speak,” said an oily, unctuous voice in a tone of enormous satisfaction.

  The voice wakened her, shuddering. For a moment she remembered it all. A few moments later all she could remember was the words: “They don’t speak.”

  Vince Harmston met District Attorney Jacob Jagger and his assistant Emmet Swinter, as though by chance, at the Monday lunch buffet of the Northern New Mexico Club, an organization that billed itself as something like Rotary or the Optimists, but was actually one of several hundred similar clubs that served as recruitment arms for the Alliance.

  The three men carried their filled plates to the far end of one of the long tables, remote from the dais. They rose for the invocation, given that day by the bishop—a guest invited to address the group briefly after lunch on the topic of intercultural relations, a topic in which even the speaker had very little interest. Despite the public setting, the three men wished to discuss a private agenda: the prosecution of Lolly Ashaler.

  Harmston told them briefly and blasphemously of his meeting with Carolyn Crespin.

  “So the guard was right, and you won’t be representing the baby killer,” said Swinter around a mouthful of stringy beef.

  “That’s what he said, Emmet,” remarked Jagger in the dead, toneless voice he used when he was more than merely angry.

  Swinter fell silent, paling.

  “This Crespin woman,” Jagger said. “Don’t we know her from somewhere?” He could not for the moment remember how he knew her. He made no effort to remember female names.

  Harmston cast a glance at Swinter, who replied with an anxious look in his boss’s direct
ion. “I know about her. There was a guy with the same name called me a few years back. Name was Al Crespin, with the FBI. He was her cousin, he said, keeping track of her because she belongs to some subversive group, something left over from the sixties.…”

  Jagger sat up, leaned forward, eyes fixed.

  Vince murmured, “Trouble is, that’s forty years ago. Lots of kids went a little off back then.”

  “You didn’t tell me about this, Emmet,” Jagger said, still in that dead, cold voice.

  Swinter shook his head apologetically. “It was before you were with the office, Mr. Jagger. This guy said Carolyn Crespin was part of this group of militants, terrorists, women scattered all over the country, set on overthrowing the government.”

  “What else?” Jagger asked eagerly.

  “Reason she was still running around loose is she was married to some FBI guy. And her cousin said the husband always protected her, tried to get her file destroyed.…”

  Harmston was puzzled. “She’s never done anything political. Hasn’t even practiced in the last few years, sort of retired. She has a place up toward Chimayo.”

  Jake had it. He remembered. “She came up against me in a child-custody case.” Of course! The Crespin woman had represented Helen’s sister, Greta Wilson. Jagger had represented Wilson himself, and he had squashed Greta Wilson and Carolyn Crespin like bugs underfoot. He smiled. “We don’t need to worry about her. I beat her so badly last time, she’ll never forget it. It’s not every day a lawyer loses a case so badly that the client commits suicide.”

  Emmet concentrated on his plate. It had been whispered at the time that Greta Wilson might have had some help committing suicide. She had this huge trust fund that went to her sister if she died, and the sister was married to Jagger. Greta Wilson wasn’t the first person to hang herself in the county jail, and usually it was because somebody looked the other way while somebody else helped the hanging along. Not that Emmet intended to say anything to Jagger about that.

  Vince shrugged. “Well, you’ve got the little whore dead on. She killed her baby. No question about what happened.…” He fell silent as Jagger turned toward him.

  “The question may be raised how she got pregnant.”

  Harmston said, “What the hell difference does that make? These stupid little shits screw like jackrabbits. So they get pregnant!”

  Jagger merely stared at him, leaving it to Swinter to reply.

  “He means this Crespin woman may find some plausible line of defense, that’s all. Like if the kid was raped—”

  “Dr. Belmont didn’t say anything about rape! There’s nothing on the tape.”

  Jagger said very softly, “Vince, there’s nothing on the tape at all except the questions Dr. Belmont was instructed to ask.”

  Emmet lowered his voice almost to a whisper. “Belmont’s a good girl. She does what she’s supposed to do, and she wasn’t supposed to ask about rape.” He leaned back in his chair, cast a roving glance around him, making certain they were not overheard. “Mr. Jagger preferred to keep rape or incest out of it, but then we’d figured on your handling the defense.”

  Jagger purred, “I doubt it’s necessary, but, still, this FBI informant might come up with something useful. Always nice to discredit the opposition.” The words were casual, but the tone was clear. Emmet was to take care of it, soonest. Without waiting for a reply, Jagger rose and moved across the room to speak to Judge Roger Rombauer, leaving the two men behind him to exhale—long, relieved breaths.

  “Jake is in a mood, isn’t he?” muttered Harmston.

  “You don’t call him Jake to his face,” remarked Swinter in a snide tone. “Better not call him Jake to anybody.”

  “Sorry. I meant Mr. Jagger. What’s he so up about this trial, anyhow? It’s not much.”

  Swinter murmured, “You know what Mr. Jagger stands for, Emmet! He’s not a member of the Alliance just because it’s good for business—he’s a real American. He’s willing to stand up against the people that want to ruin our country, and you know who they are, Vince. He’s not afraid to say a lesbian’s really a pussy-suckin’ dyke. You know what I’m sayin? Mr. Jagger told me, he said, this little bitch baby killer, she’s a symbol of everything that’s wrong with our country. I mean, when women forget their duty and their place, that’s the end, right? Mr. Jagger wants to send a message.”

  Harmston nodded thoughtfully. “Crespin’s from New York, originally. Lots of Jews in New York.”

  “Nah,” said Swinter, his brow furrowed. “She’s not a Jew. She’s Catholic. Or used to be. So we’ll see what we can find.”

  He shook his head, slightly annoyed. With an attractive female witness or opposing lawyer, Jake had a way of letting his eyes travel up her legs and under her clothes. By the time he was through looking up her skirt, the whole jury would think she was selling it on the street. Unfortunately, however, the Carolyn Crespin he had seen out at the jail was stout, sixtyish, and looked like somebody’s grandma. Not a prime target.

  He turned in his chair, casting a glance at the dais. “Here comes Mr. Jagger, and there’s our speaker, ready to tell us all about brotherly love.”

  OPHY SAT IN HER OFFICE at Misery, holding a coffee cup in one hand as the other busily sorted bits of paper into piles. Patient notes. When in hell was she going to get time to record this stuff? She couldn’t concentrate, anyhow. Simon had called last night. Hi, darling, how you doing? Great, great, gotta run. Got a story brewing in the Balkan Protectorates.

  “Simon,” she’d pleaded, hating the whine in her voice. “When are you coming home?”

  Silence at the other end of the line. God, why didn’t he just tell her, whatever it was? “I need you,” she murmured. “I really do.”

  Throat clearing.

  “Tell me,” she demanded. “Simon, for God’s sake, tell me!”

  “Ah,” he said. “Damn. Ophy, I’ll be home next week. Let’s talk about it then.”

  Talk about what then? Had he met someone else? Was he in trouble? What the hell?

  It did no good to speculate. Speculation only made the matter seem worse. Weighing down the paper scraps with a couple of books, she slipped out of her suit jacket and into the long lab coat she habitually wore at Misery. Get this meeting out of the way, get her notes recorded, and she’d be caught up by noon. It was Friday. Starting tomorrow, she would have four days off. And Simon, damn him, was playing world traveler!

  Was he covering bag-lady terrorism, wherever he was? Were old ladies making bonfires of cosmetics and stockings and sexy underwear? Time magazine called it the revolt of the unwashed against the overdecorated. How about the Family Values Shock Troops with their switches and whips, driving women off the streets? Or the Sons of Adam, who were still picking off unveiled girls on street corners? Were they wherever Simon was, as well? How about the cultists? Three more bunches of bodies found this week, a total of over five thousand bodies since the first of the year, burned, shot, poisoned, hanged—lots of them children. The mad leading the mad, the blind leading the blind. Was Simon covering all that?

  The conference room was on the second floor, off a back corridor and facing the light well at the center of the building, a quiet location. The dozen or so people already in the room were as quiet. Most of them were working on their first or second cups of coffee, needing more before they’d even be awake. The chief sat to one side, well-shaven morning face rosy with aftershave, but no more alert than the rest of them.

  Ophy came in, mumbling “Good morning” to the others, some of whom grunted in reply. She fetched herself a cup of coffee and joined them at the table, two seats down from the chief. She had her nose sunk in her coffee when the door opened and strangers came in.

  “Here they are,” muttered the chief, nodding toward the man and woman who stood murmuring to one another in the doorway. “Lotte,” he called. “Come on in.”

  The couple advanced, he putting his briefcase on the table before turning back to close the door. With
some effort Ophy brought her mind back to the table as the chief made introductions:

  “Lotte Epstein. Joe Snider. Dr. Ophy Gheist, chief of quartage here at MSRI; Jean Morrison, Southside and MSRI ob-gyn; Genevieve Simmons, Citywide Internal Medicine; her associate, Roger Falls. Ben Morrell, Surgical Services …” And so on and so on.

  “If you all have coffee, I’ll turn this meeting over to Dr. Epstein. Lotte and I are old friends; we met in school; she’s been with the Centers for Disease Control as long as I’ve been in medicine.…”

  His voice trailed off and he sat down, gesturing vaguely at the plump little woman to his right. She was a grandmotherly type, all rosy-cheeked, with soft white hair. Her expression wasn’t grandmotherly, however, unless it was Red Riding Hood’s grandma. She looked urgently apprehensive. Ophy sat up straighter and paid attention.

  “We can’t enforce a silence order, but we’re asking that you not discuss this meeting with anyone, not even with one another outside this room. This is one of several such meetings we’ve had and will be having. We’re looking for data.…”

  “What?” demanded Genevieve Simmons, thrusting out her jaw. “Data about what?”

  “Give her time, Genevieve.” The chief cleared his throat. “Let Lotte tell it.”

  Lotte cleared her throat. “All right. Back in early 1998 we began to receive reports from health departments that cult deaths, suicides, and suicide attempts were all increasing. The suicide rates had been rising for years among teenagers, but in ninety-eight they began climbing the age ladder. The cult deaths covered all age groups. We also saw a doubling in the number of sexual assaults, though they stayed in the usual age group, midteens to midthirties. The opinion among psych people was that people were joining cults out of fear, were killing themselves out of fear, that even the sexual assaults had some basis in stress.” She cleared her throat. “Kind of an ‘I’m going to die anyway, why not get it over with?’ or maybe, ‘I’m going to catch AIDS eventually, why not get it over with?’ It made as much sense as any other theory.