Gibbon's Decline and Fall (22 page)

Sophy wasn't still here. Not the Sophy of college days, not the Sophy of 1997, not any of the myriad Sophys in between. She who should have been changeless had transformed herself again and again. Two years after graduation she was already a different person.

Agnes had been finishing up her M.B.A. that year, ready to enter St. Clare's that fall. Ophy had been in med school in New York, Carolyn in law school near Washington, where she could be near Hal. Faye had spent the two years since graduation studying art in Europe. Jessamine had taken a job in a lab in San Francisco and was pursuing graduate studies part-time. Bettiann had a job as assistant fashion buyer at Neiman Marcus.

And Sophy, their hostess for the meeting, had been living in a commune near Mystic, Connecticut. The other DFC members stayed in a cheap motel nearby, and they met daily to wander the shore, the woods, the sailing museum. Either they'd held the meeting early that year, or it had been a cold summer, for Aggie remembered dappled sunlight off the waters and a chill breeze through the leaves. They'd been poor, all but Carolyn and Ophy, who treated the others to a couple of meals in restaurants. Otherwise they had all chipped in for hamburger and pasta and rice, filing stuff they could prepare at Sophy's shack-cum-slum-cum-group home and share with the women there and with their children—all of them singularly lifeless and hangdog, Agnes had thought.

“What is this?” Agnes had demanded. “What're these women doing here? What're they here for?”

“Survival,” Sophy had confessed almost fretfully, as though expecting them to criticize. “They've all been battered, Aggie. By fathers or husbands or boyfriends, mostly. They've all got scars. I've sort of rounded them up. It's my share of the covenant, not to decline and fall, you know. Caring for them. Helping them. Trying to give them a place to stand, so they won't decline and fall, either.” She said it pleadingly, as though begging for help.

That, from Sophy, had been an uncomfortable revelation. Though Agnes, along with the rest of the DFC, had sworn not to decline and fall, she'd thought that oath less important than
her religious vows, but here was Sophy doing more with her DFC promise than Aggie had yet done with all her hope of holiness. What made it more annoying was that Sophy had never seemed interested in human service. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Agnes had felt almost envious. No thought then that Sophy might have been doing it for some other, alien purpose. No thought that Sophy might be something other than what she appeared to be. Not then. Then Sophy could do no wrong.

“Is this going to be what you do with your life?” Agnes had asked.

But Sophy had shaken her head, saying ruefully, “I don't want to do it at all, Aggie. I get involved out of pity, but intellectually, I know it does little or no good, bit by bit this way.”

“It's good for your soul.…”

“That's terrible,” Sophy had cried, actually sounding angry. “To value other people's pain for such a reason! I hear such a lot of soul petting and sentimentality over these women and their children, but I hear very little willingness to do anything about causes!”

“But, Sophy, what would you have us do—”

“I don't have an answer,” she had cried, still angry, still resentful. “I shelter one, there are six hundred more who need shelter. Somewhere there has to be an answer!”

Sophy's anger should have been a clue. Agnes should have paid more attention. Anger was a sin. Anger could make people unbalanced. Aggie hadn't done anything about Sophy's anger, though she had considered setting up a fund to help Sophy's women when she'd made the final disposition of her trust before entering St. Clare's. The priest she had talked to about it wasn't sympathetic, however. Helping women leave their husbands was not in accordance with doctrine. Helping women take children away from their fathers wasn't theologically sound, either. Besides, women often incited violence by being disobedient or sassy, the priest said, and fathers had the right to chastise their wives and children. If occasionally men were too rough, prayer was the answer, not separation. The Church provided marriage counseling. Let these women take advantage of it!

Aggie had to agree, of course. Separating married couples was not an appropriate act, not for a nun or for anyone. She loved Sophy, yes, but if it came to a choice between Sophy
and the Church, there could be no choice. Sophy was only a mortal love, after all, but the Church was her life, for eternity.

During the next seven years Ophy graduated and went overseas to do research on cultural differences in obstetrical care. Jessamine married Patrick O'Neil, had two baby girls less than a year apart, finished her Ph.D. in an esoteric field of molecular genetics, and received a promotion in her biotech company. Bettiann, despite her doubts and reservations, was swept off her feet by Bill Carpenter and, after several miscarriages, had a baby boy. Carolyn and Hal moved to New Mexico and had a baby girl, and Faye—who by that time was receiving praise for her work plus some sizable commissions—had come out as a professed and militant lesbian. And Agnes herself had remained at St. Clare's to take her solemn vows, which could have separated her from the DFC forever.

Should have, she told herself now. Should have. Mother Elias had wanted to be kind, however, and had insisted that Aggie take a little vacation each year to visit her old friends. So Aggie had gone on seeing Sophy, loving Sophy. Risking herself.

Sophy had hosted the 1972 meeting in a cottage on the shores of Lake Champlain. Carolyn had inherited the place from her great-aunt on her mother's side and had offered Sophy a fifty-year lease for a dollar a year, to be paid at the DFC meetings. When 1979 rolled around, however, they couldn't meet at the cottage, for Sophy had once more filled her home with battered women she was trying to make independent.

Instead, they had stayed at an inn in Middlebury, where, during their traditional show-and-tell, they had toasted Ophy's marriage to Simon Gheist and had heard a new set of stories about the women Sophy had taken in.

“Don't you ever try to … reunite these couples?” Agnes had asked, deeply troubled by all this. Though she still held to chapter and verse on the Church's teachings about marriage, her work in the parish with real women made it more difficult. “Do you ever help them work out their differences?”

Sophy had regarded Aggie thoughtfully. “I don't think they have differences, Aggie. The women I've taken in have done everything humanly possible to please their husbands.”

“If that is true, why are their husbands angry at them?”

“Beating women excites some men. They like it. They aren't mad at their wives, though they usually pretend to be
angry over something, to give them an excuse for the first blow. They enjoy hitting, Aggie. For some men it's like skydiving, or hang gliding. It fires them up. They go on a testosterone high! That dark, skinny woman you met—Sarah—she's just recovering from a skull fracture her husband gave her because, so he said, she overcooked the beans. He raped her while she was lying on the kitchen floor unconscious, bleeding from the head.”

Though Aggie had shuddered at this, she had told herself life was, after all, intended as a time of trial. “But if she had paid attention to what she was doing, if she'd tried harder to please him—”

“He'd have hit her for something else. What is it, Aggie? Surely you can't think being raped while beaten unconscious was Sarah's fault?”

Aggie did think it was women's fault—if not proximately, then through original sin. All the daughters of Eve shared the same guilt, the guilt of disobedience. Only one woman in history had been perfectly obedient. The sacrament of marriage united people for life because there was grace enough within it to solve any problem. God never asked anything of people they weren't capable of doing. She'd learned that as a child!

“What happened to the man?” Carolyn had asked Sophy.

“He got seven years. He'll be out in three or less.”

“And what is she going to do?”

“I'm trying to get her to go far away from here and take some kind of work. Something to keep herself and her child.”

Bettiann had cried, “But, Sophy, she married him! She owes it to him to—”

“To nothing!” Faye had erupted. “Let's not talk about this, Bettiann. The rest of us will gang up on you and Aggie, and you'll get your feelings hurt.”

Bettiann hadn't been convinced. The only times William had ever hit her, she had damned well deserved it. “They're married,” she had insisted stubbornly. “When you get married, it's for better or worse, and somehow they should be able to work it out.”

“I've seen how it works out,” Ophy had snarled. “It works out with the woman being brought into the emergency room, and sometimes it's too late, and I can't save her life. Sometimes it's the kids who're brought in, and I can't save them, either. I used to keep score, but the numbers got so depressing, I stopped counting. God knows how many women
and little girls I've signed death certificates for in the last ten years.”

Sophy had nodded, thoughtful as always. “I sometimes wonder if these women are married to men at all. Maybe they are married to the enemy. Or to his minions.”

Whenever Sophy spoke of the enemy, her voice acquired a mysterious, almost metallic, clangor, the dissonant tolling of alarms, a harsh and bitter sound, almost alien. Hearing this strange timbre, Aggie had changed the subject: “I saw your recent infanticide story in the
New Yorker
.” On the horrors of infanticide, at least, she could agree with Sophy. “Ophy sent it to me.”

Sophy had said distantly, “I got quite a bit of mail about that piece. It's strange. The situations I write about are almost always widely reported in the newspapers and on television, yet people don't seem to react strongly until I redo the truth as fiction! I thought perhaps if I put the stories into a book …”

They had gone on to talk of other, less disturbing things. Sophy's first book had come out soon afterward, a slender volume called simply
Women's Stories
. It included many of the stories she had told them about her Asian travels: of Burmese village girls sold to the brothels of Thailand, of Indian brides burned to death by dowry-greedy grooms, of women's schools burned in Bangladesh, of Muslim “honor killings” of girls who were victims of rape. The book contained a list of shelters and women's movements to which contributions could be made. Each member of the DFC had contributed to at least one of them, though Aggie and Bettiann had chosen agencies that worked predominantly with children.

Despite their differing viewpoints, Aggie had always envied Sophy her certainty. Though Sophy had struggled to understand, she had never seemed to doubt her own actions. Whatever she had done, she had done surely, as though guided by some invisible beacon. Throughout Aggie's years as a nun, whenever presented with difficult choices, she has asked herself what Sophy would do if Sophy were Agnes. Since Sophy hadn't been Catholic or even Christian, since she and Aggie hadn't agreed at all about women's roles in life, it was an odd question to ask, but Aggie had asked it nonetheless. She had used her image of Sophy as a mariner uses a compass. She had kept her direction, had worked hard, had set aside almost all distractions. She had done well, so she was told by others.

So why was everything so solemn? Why was there so little joy?

She had asked Sophy that question one time when the two of them were alone. Desperately, she had asked it. “Shouldn't there be joy, Sophy?”

“We should each have a place,” Sophy had told her—her hands on Agnes's shoulders, her eyes fixed on Agnes's eyes. “A lofty and rejoiceful place, Aggie, on which our hearts can dance. Perhaps the abbey isn't it.”

“But I longed to be a nun,” Agnes had cried. “I believe in the Church and her teachings. How can you say that?”

Sophy had seemed as mystified as Aggie. “I don't know, Aggie. Except that it seems true.”

Came a whisper of sound, bringing Agnes back to the present, a soft shush, like the opening of a door. She raised her head and saw movement, someone walking from pillar to pillar in the side aisle. A graceful, flowing motion with the feeling of beauty behind it. The idea of loveliness. Someone young, dressed in the wide-coifed habit the order had not worn for decades.

She turned her head resolutely away. She would pay no attention. It had been a shadow shifting. Too many times lately had she imagined shapes, always moving away, away from the altar, or away from the chapel, or away from the chapter house. Whichever way Agnes was going, the shadow went the other way.

It was hallucination. She was working too hard, not sleeping well, and seeing things was the result. The flowing shapes made her acknowledge her failure at forgetting Sophy, as she had promised herself and her confessor she would do. Her eyes drifted upward to the Last Judgment once more, she imagining herself among that mob of females, stripped naked, mouth open in a howl of despair, being driven off the edge of the earth into the void while the angels regarded the plunging forms with satisfaction. Most of the damned were female. The painting was full of women falling, screaming, trying to cover their nakedness. Many paintings of the Last Judgment seemed to populate hell with naked females. Was it the artists or the Church that took such prurient pleasure in sending women to hell? Like old Father Conley, back at St. Monica's, doing one of his little chastity lectures, talking about modesty, all euphemisms and avid looks. Beautiful women would burn in hell, he said. Beautiful women were occasions of sin. Saying it, his
tongue came out, like a frog's tongue, licking his lips, savoring the notion of women in hell, finding the idea delicious.

True sacraments could flow through bad priests. That was doctrine. Father Conley had the mystical quality of maleness, which Christ had shared. That quality made him acceptable as a conduit for grace. Though he had been uncharitable and maybe even sexually obsessed, the grace that flowed through him was still pure, and pure grace, flowing from God, was enough. Amazing grace—which would be enough for Agnes, too, if instead of wallowing in might-have-beens about Sophy she concentrated on becoming more obedient. Obedience, as Father Girard had pointed out, would not be as spiritually rewarding if it were easy.