Gibbon's Decline and Fall Read Online Free PDF

soul?”
    â€œLike that, perhaps,” said Sophy, shaking her head in confusion. “If you cannot feel it as I do, then pretend for my sake that it’s real. Pretend it’s possible. I don’t want them using me that way.”
    Carolyn nodded. “Then you want to be invisible.”
    â€œExactly,” Sophy whispered. “Oh, if I could be invisible.”
    Carolyn rose to her feet, hands on hips, jaw jutted. “Then we’ll help you become so.”
    It took the others a few moments to catch up with her.
    â€œShe doesn’t have to be beautiful,” Carolyn said scornfully in the face of their doubt. “No law says she has to be beautiful.”
    And she gathered the five of them up into her hands like a deck of cards and dealt them out again: You go here, you go there, fetch this, fetch that, supervising Sophy’s makeover without a moment’s hesitation. Clothing first, baggy skirts and too-large tops, shapeless and of indeterminate colors, borrowedfrom Carolyn herself; a little liquid makeup on the lips and brows, fading them into the face; a little more on the lashes, making her eyes look bald. Faye saw to that. Hair pulled straight back into a knot, Bettiann’s contribution. A touch of olive base, Jessamine’s, to take the bloom from those cheeks. Ophy provided the glasses, frames only at first.
    It was Agnes who suggested the book. “You need a heavy book,” she said. “You can carry it up against your chest and walk sort of bent over. You’ll look like a brain, armed with the shield and buckler of the female intelligentsia.”
    â€œI’ve got a thick book,” said Jessamine. “I found it in the bottom of the cupboard in my room, with about fifty years’ worth of dust on it. I’ll get it.”
    She returned moments later bearing Edward Gibbon’s
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, volume one. An old leather-bound library book, checked out years before by a feckless student, never returned. Sophy rose, took it into her arms, stooped slightly over it, and shuffled across the room. They all burst into laughter, even Sophy, though hers was a sound of honest joy floating on the sea of derision. What the rest of them took as a joke Sophy accepted as a reprieve.
    In time her new self became familiar to them. With them, after a shower, her robe belted loosely around her, she was lovely as the dawn, but in public Sophy wore borrowed clothing, was camouflaged like a hermit crab, no longer the object of male fascination and desire.
    It was a shared secret, one that made them more than merely friends. They became a club: the Decline and Fall Club. They swore an oath to one another. Even after they left school, they would stay close to one another. They would meet every year, and each of them would find a place to stand where she could be woman as woman was meant to be, and thereafter she would never decline or fall from that place.

SPRING: THE YEAR 2000
    I N THE BARN WHERE C AROLYN Crespin Shepherd knelt, the muted grays of hay and sheep blended indistinguishably in shadow. Outside, the field and woods glistened in a day’s-dessert of sunset, a sky like a split melon that oozed bright juice over every greening twig and unfolding leaf. Out there was a fete, a carnival, puddles from the departing thunderstorm throwing sun around like confetti, but here were more serious matters, a murmuring woolliness beneath the cob-webbed beams, the tidal smells of birthing.
    Light and shadow. Brilliance and dark. Chiaroscuro.
    The word popped out of nothing, a printed word, not an oral one, not one Carolyn could remember using. Still, there it was, stored away in her mental attic along with all the other pack-rat bits and pieces of mind-furniture: old affections, old fears, old games. Hide-and-seek in the summer dusk, shrubberies making monster-shadows amid polygons of lamplight from windows, clarity and mystery, reality and