Gibbon's Decline and Fall

by Sheri S. Tepper

  Aggie would say, of course, that there was no such thing as a wasted life, that every life had meaning. So try to put that idea into motion. Try to do for her! Suppose someone adopted Lolly now and gave her fifteen years of the most tender and exquisite care, would that undo the damage done in the first fifteen years? Would that give her life meaning? If it did, where was the treasury that would furnish the people and resources to make recompense for every other wasted life? It reminded her of one of Hal’s favorite lectures:

  “There are no demonstration projects, love. Any do-gooder can save one life or a dozen by spending x dollars, but that doesn’t demonstrate anything unless you’ve got x dollars multiplied by the total number of lives that need saving. Stopping poverty one victim at a time is like mowing a lawn one blade at a time. The problem grows faster than the cure can be applied, and the only people who profit are the agencies who claim to be cutting grass while they’re actually applying fertilizer.”

  If Carolyn managed to keep Lolly out of the tanks, was Lolly any better off? Was it more ethical to keep her out or put her in? She pounded on the wheel with both hands. This was exactly the kind of endless rumination she used to go through before she retired, worrying away the miles between office and home because she’d known the day had been spent turning over the caseload, like compost, while it went on rotting. She drew in a shuddering breath, turned on the car radio, and concentrated on her driving. Ready or not, there were people depending on her.

  She stopped at the mailbox to pick up the mail, leaving the gates open for the expected guests. She was just opening the door when a dusty car nosed its way through the gate and came trundling down the drive—Jessamine, at the end of a day-long trip from Salt Lake. Ophy erupted from the kitchen door to welcome them both. There were hugs all round. Exclamations. How nice the farm looks. Here we are. Same as always. They carried the suitcases and the take-out supper inside, setting things anywhere while Carolyn made a quick clink of ice in glasses, gin and tonic, fresh limes. Stace emerged from the back of the house to be introduced. Hal stuck his head into the kitchen to be hugged; then he shooed them out onto the patio while he tinkered with the food she’d brought home.

  “You look good!” said Jessamine. “Oh, you both look good!”

  “We look like us,” said Ophy, waving her glasses, grinning from ear to ear. “Can’t do much about that.”

  “So what’s happening?” cried Jessamine. “When does Aggie get here?”

  “Everyone gets here tonight,” said Carolyn. “Aggie’s been fetched from New Orleans in William’s private plane, and she and Bettiann are landing in Santa Fe. They’ve got a rental car. They’re bringing oysters.”

  “Lovely to be so rich!” said Ophy, buttering a tortilla chip with guacamole. “Nice for Aggie, too. I told Carolyn I think Aggie’s leaving us. This’ll probably be the last time we see her.”

  “I’ve been thinking that for a while,” said Jessamine. “She’s been a good scout, hasn’t she? She’s tried with us heathen. She’s getting older now, she needs her certainties.”

  “She’s no older than the rest of us,” said Carolyn firmly, almost angrily. “We’d all like some certainties.”

  “The rest of us had other things to hang on to,” Jessamine admonished. “You and I had family, Carolyn. All three of us had careers. Faye had her talent. Bettiann had her family, and her foundation. Aggie only had her religion.”

  “It’s all she wanted,” said Jessamine.

  “I’m not so sure about that,” mused Carolyn. “Her religion has provided every bit as much a career as any of us have had, and I’ve always thought Aggie settled for renunciation as a definite second choice.”

  “The first one being?” asked Ophy.

  “Oh, well, it wouldn’t be fair to speculate.” Though Carolyn did and had, for some time. Aggie was or had been in love with Sophy. From a distance, of course. From a vast, un-crossable distance. As they all were.

  “So!” Ophy drained the last bit, crunched ice, got up to get herself a refill. “What’s the agenda?”

  Carolyn made wet circles with her glass. “We’ve got two days, just for us. The trial doesn’t start until Monday. I’m hoping we can get through it in two days, let it go to the jury maybe Tuesday afternoon, or at the latest Wednesday morning, so you guys don’t get held up here forever.”

  “Are we the only two you’re using?” Ophy asked.

  “As expert witnesses, yes, but everyone’s involved. Faye made some exhibits for me. Bettiann paid for the investigator.”

  “And Aggie?”

  “Chief cheerleader and implorer of divine help. She has let me know that she doesn’t approve of Lolly one bit. Neither she nor Bettiann think what Lolly did is at all excusable, but they don’t think locking her up is going to help matters any. Or, needless to say, executing her.”

  Ophy frowned. “Bettiann and Aggie have always opted for tradition, as I recall. We haven’t changed much, have we, Carolyn? You and Faye were always the radicals. Jess and I were the polite ones, middle-of-the-roaders. We’re all pretty much where we were when we started out, but no matter where we’re coming from, we’re still all working together.”

  “I wasn’t always radical,” Carolyn objected.

  “And I wasn’t always polite,” said Jessamine.

  “That’s not the way I remember it,” Ophy insisted. “Whenever I think about us, I see Carolyn or Faye throwing down the gauntlet, Aggie and Bettiann being offended, and me and you, Jess, trying to make peace. Well, let this time be no exception. At least we’ll end up in a cooperative blaze of glory.”

  “A blaze of glory, or an utter decline and fall,” said Carolyn, the words slipping out unintended.

  The other two fell silent for a moment, considering failure.

  “We’ll have tried,” said Jessamine in a firm voice.

  “We will.” Carolyn reached out to hug them both.

  “I’ll need to see your client,” said Ophy. “Examine her.”

  Carolyn nodded. “I set that up for Sunday morning. Did Simon get the films together for us?”

  “They’re gorgeous,” murmured Ophy. “He got old news tapes from Boston, when they were integrating the schools—wonderful stuff that was simply swimming in matching faces, just what you ordered. A friend of Simon’s is a top-flight computer graphicist, and he did the comparison overlays.”

  “Looks like we’re set,” said Carolyn. “Remember the phones in Hal’s study and here in the kitchen are bugged. I’ve unplugged the extensions in the bedrooms. If it’s just business or travel arrangements, go ahead and use the ones in the study or kitchen, but if you want to make a private call, use the phone in my room.…”

  “What’s that all about, Carolyn?” Ophy begged. “Why you?”

  “I don’t know, Ophy. I think Jagger just has to win, regardless. Don’t let me forget to tell the others when they get here. There’s a car coming. Must be Faye!”

  Faye arrived. Bettiann and Aggie arrived, along with the icy keg of oysters. Faye and Jessamine carried in the maquette from Faye’s van and put it on the end of the dining-room table where they could walk around it and admire it from all sides. The back of the fountain was a roughly curved stretch of rugged rock—shoreline rock on the right, mountain rock on the left, where animals laired or prowled, most of them extinct in the wild: bear and boar and deer and wolf, rabbit and owl. The male figure standing before them was long-bearded, patriarchal, a fox in the curve of his arm, an eagle on his shoulder.

  “He looks like Hal,” cried Carolyn, hugging the real Hal.

  “I had a picture of the two of you,” said Faye gently. “One we took the last time we were here. Of course, in the picture your hair and beard were shorter, Hal. I lengthened both. I didn’t think you’d mind my using you.”

  “I rather like the Noah role,” Hal rumbled. “Quite a monument. How big is this thing going to be?”

  “The figures are to be monumental, one and a quarter life-size, and
there’ll be a surrounding shallow pool. The whole thing will stand in a semicircular recess at the edge of the plaza, and the water will actually spill out of the pool at the back, into a water stair that leads down to a smaller plaza on another street below. From below you’ll see just the rugged back side surmounted by the soaring figure of Fecundity. In this maquette I’ve shaped the big wave out of clay, but in the fountain itself there’ll be a curved, wave-shaped surface of thick, watery glass, with pumps forcing water up along it to make the wave shape.…”

  “That sounds very complicated,” said Hal in an interested tone.

  “I have a hydraulics firm helping me. They did a mock-up with real pumps to get the right shape—it’s really quite realistic. When the water’s moving, you won’t see the support inside the wave at all. The figures will actually seem to be supported by the water. The pools below will be real water, of course, with real fish swimming in them and the children partly submerged, as they’re shown here.”

  The three female figures were as yet only rough shapes, indications of what was intended: a crouching shepherdess with sheep, a kneeling dryad, a gardener holding a sheaf of grain. Faye wanted to use Carolyn for the shepherdess, Ophy for the nymph, and, to Aggie’s surprise, Aggie as the gardener. Faye had brought costumes to dress them up in during the meeting so she could take photographs and make sketches.

  “What goes there in the middle, in front?” Bettiann wondered, pointing at the vacant promontory.

  “The center figure in Botticelli’s painting is Venus Genetrix,” Faye answered. “Venus in her role as fertility deity.”

  “You’ll be using something else?”

  “Definitely something else, though as yet I’m not sure what.”

  Hal was invited to join them for supper, which they dawdled over. “Tell me about the case,” Aggie demanded over coffee, determined not to think about this being the last time.

  Carolyn wrinkled her forehead. “Do we want to talk about the case tonight?”

  “Sure,” said Jessamine. “We’re going to be talking about it sooner or later.”

  “Okay,” Carolyn said resignedly. “This is how we think it will go. Jagger has Lolly’s mother on the witness list and also one of her grade-school teachers—”

  Ophy interrupted. “Dr. George Fulling is on the prosecution witness list also. He’s an expert on developmental anomalies.”

  “Right,” said Carolyn. “The prosecution will use Fulling to refute Lolly’s having fetal alcohol syndrome. Ophy and I laid a red herring over our bugged phone.”

  “Why did you do that?” Aggie asked, puzzled.

  Carolyn said, “Because we wanted people on the jury who could weigh scientific evidence, and normally Jagger would get rid of anyone with good sense. He likes them credulous, the dumber the better.

  “So he’s put this doctor and Lolly’s mother and one of her grade-school teachers on his witness list to refute our claim that Lolly is a fetal alcohol child (which claim, need I say, we are not going to make), and we can use these same people to establish the abuse Lolly suffered at home. We’ve also got records of hospital admissions starting when Lolly was about nine, which show bruises and spiral fractures, plus one episode of sexually transmitted disease when she was ten. We want to give the jury the picture: why she dropped out of school, why she is the way she is.…”

  Jessamine nodded. “All the prosecution cares about is showing that Lolly isn’t retarded. If she’s not retarded, then she’s supposed to be totally responsible for whatever happens to her.”

  Carolyn said, “We’re going to counter this by attacking the Hail Mary Assumption.”

  “You’re what?” asked Aggie, dangerously quiet.

  Jessamine and Ophy had been waiting for this. They shifted uncomfortably.

  Carolyn said, “Just listen, Aggie:

  “Media coverage of this case has used a lot of phrases like ‘Corrupted motherhood,’ and ‘Breakdown of civilization.’ Jagger’s case must begin with the assumption that all women are equipped with a strong, overriding maternal instinct; that all babies arouse this maternal instinct; and that any woman who does not respond maternally is a rotten person who must be guilty as sin; what Sophy called the Hail Mary Assumption.”

  Aggie shook her head slowly, saying, “I think you’ll find that most members of the jury are likely to make that same assumption. And while I won’t say ‘Guilty as sin,’ I still don’t think of her as an innocent.”

  Carolyn took a deep breath. “Well, Aggie, we all know that. But if any of the jurors have open minds, we’ve got a lot of material which should at least throw that assumption into question.”

  Hal smiled rather grimly, leaned back, put his fingers together. “You’re not going to call it the Hail Mary Assumption in court, presumably.”

  “Of course not,” Carolyn agreed.

  They fell silent, several of them covertly examining Aggie’s face, which was very white and withdrawn.

  “Time for dessert?” asked Stace when the resultant pause had stretched too long into silence.

  Hal struggled out of his deep chair. “While you ladies have your dessert, it’s time for us outsiders to do the dishes.” He and Stace went off down the hall, leaving the six of them to relax over more coffee, brandy, and a sinful chocolate torte that Faye had brought with her. They spent an hour or two trading stories of the “what I’ve been doing” variety, including Aggie’s story of the archbishop, and all of them tried to stay away from anything controversial.

  “I hope we didn’t upset you with the Hail Mary bit,” Carolyn said later when she encountered Aggie in the hall. “I know how you feel about these things, party line and all that.”

  “It’s a … bad time for me just now,” Aggie murmured. “Please don’t be angry with me, Carolyn. The archbishop’s request has made me question things I’ve taken for granted for years. In a way, I can see your side of this. I see similar things in the parish all the time, men ignoring the children they father, and the Church taking very little account of it. Let some single father leave his kids with sitters all day because he has to work, or even with a mistress or second wife who doesn’t give a hoot for the kids, that’s okay, but let a single mother hire a nanny so she can work to support them, that isn’t okay, she’s unfit, and they take the kids away.

  “I see the fundamental unfairness of that. The sexism of it. I’ve always seen the sexism of it, just as you do. You solved the problem by giving up your religion. I will not give up my religion, so I may simply have to accept sexism. We sisters have done it for hundreds of years. Perhaps they have been more welcome in heaven than the feminists today. God moves, as we have always been taught, in mysterious ways.”

  She went down the hall with a still and shuttered face, leaving Carolyn to stare after her, positive that Aggie was indeed going to leave them. Well, if it had been their last time, it had been a well-shared time. Carolyn comforted herself with that thought as she crawled into bed beside Hal, being careful not to wake him.

  “Nice girls,” murmured Hal, too drowsy to be PC.

  “Wonderful friends,” she corrected. “It was good to be with them. We had a good time.”

  It was the last good time for a long time.

  The news broke Saturday. Despite Carolyn’s best efforts at occupying the smaller half of the bed, Hal had not slept well, and when Carolyn got up, he announced his intention of staying right where he was for an hour or so. Carolyn patted him on the shoulder, pulled the light covers up around him, and left him there while she started the coffee and walked out to the road to get the paper. She was accompanied by a strangely lethargic Leonegro, who ambled beside her with his head down, as though he’d lost something along the way. She unfolded the paper as she strolled back, only to be stopped short by the size of the headline that took up half the front page.

  Her first thought was how sensible it had been to let the news out on a weekend. People would have a day or so to get used to the idea before the workaday
world started over again on Monday. Her second thought was that one or two days wouldn’t be anywhere near enough for anyone to get used to the idea.

  When she got back to the house, Aggie was waiting outside, her white-bordered short veil whipping in a light breeze.

  “I turned on the TV in the kitchen,” she said. “Carolyn, they’re saying—”

  Carolyn handed her the morning paper. “I know.”

  The others were assembled, gathered around the little TV Carolyn kept in the kitchen, Bettiann full of exclamations and horrors, the rest of them suspiciously unresponsive.

  “You knew!” challenged Aggie, catching a conspiratorial glance between Ophy and Jessamine. “Ophy, you knew!”

  “Ophy merely thought something of the kind might be happening,” Carolyn soothed diplomatically. “You know, in his work Simon picks up rumors from all over the world.”

  “But you didn’t say anything to me.” Aggie was angry, her skin ashen. “Why didn’t you tell me? You should have told me.”

  “It was only a rumor,” said Ophy firmly.

  “But what is it? What’s happening?”

  “No one knows,” said Jessamine, looking up from the paper, one obviously hastily composed in the middle of the night, banner headlines and all. “It says right here, Aggie. No one knows. Some indication of a genetic change, that’s all. Happening to everyone at once could mean it’s a virus.…”

  “A disease!” Aggie cried.

  “Well, many viruses cause disease, yes, but they don’t have to. Some viruses change the organism. This may be one that makes some kind of hormonal change. That’d be my guess.”

  “That thing you told us about a few years ago, Jessamine,” Aggie demanded. “You talked about a universal carrier.…”

  Jessamine frowned. “The viral carrier?”

  “Didn’t you tell me you’re not allowed to use it anymore?”

  “There are several viral carriers, and we can’t use the primate carrier anymore. Not since ninety-seven.”

  “Because it was dangerous! What if somebody did use it! Maybe someone—”