Lady of the Snakes

by Rachel Pastan

  “Yes,” Jane said. “I know. But this is only for one day.” Didn’t he know she wouldn’t do it if it weren’t very important? “Let me explain what it is,” she said.

  Billy shook his head. “No, don’t tell me,” he said. “I don’t want to hear about it.” Then he turned around and walked up the stairs.

  Jane sat up on her knees and called after him, “Next Saturday, then!”

  But Billy didn’t turn around.

  Masha Karkova had written:

  What happens between men and women changes everything, and yet it changes nothing. We remain two separate kinds, unknowable to each other, gazing at one another with suspicion and longing.

  Chapter Eleven

  JANE COULDN’T DECIDE whether it mattered if she waited a week or not—or to whom it would matter if it did. To Maisie, who seemed a hundred percent better, sleeping well and chirping around the house at Felicia’s heels, saying, “You ready to play now, ‘Lisha?” To Billy, as a demonstration of Jane’s commitment to the family? To Jane herself, so she could say she was flexible, prove she was willing to listen to what Billy had to say? She didn’t know. All she knew was that the atmosphere of the house was fragile, brittle. The wrong word—the wrong tone—made the air curdle around them. A week wasn’t really a long time, even if it felt like it. So Jane beat back her impatience, taught her classes, and took the bus down on the first Saturday in April.

  It had been a chilly, foggy morning in Madison, but in Chicago the trees were blooming white and pink in the sun. Daffodils swayed near the door stoops and along the sidewalks, and the air outside the bus station was mild, the sky a pure and soothing blue. It was such a beautiful day, and Jane felt such a rush of elation, that she decided to walk from the bus terminal, even though it would take a bit more time. Down Canal she strode and across Kinzie. She passed the Technical Institute, people out shopping or sitting on benches enjoying the weather. Her shoes began to pinch, and she wished she had worn different ones. She thought of the Snake Woman leaving her boots by the side of the road as though expecting elves to take them away and clean them. She thought of the letter: “I remember the first night when I awoke in the dark . . .” How did it go after that? Something about a voice?

  The source of Lady of the Snakes, as Sigelman had said; but how much of a source? She’d been asking herself this question for a week and a half, but she was afraid to guess at the answer. Masha couldn’t really have gone among the peasants as a curer and itinerant pilgrim—could she? Could she actually have left her boots by the side of the road and gone on barefoot with bleeding feet? Could she have carried snakes in a basket, later let them crawl over her naked body? Impossible. Yet didn’t Masha speak in the letter of lifting a snake out of the water—or was it only that she had watched it slither out of the water? It was hard to remember. It was frustrating how the exact words eluded her, but in half an hour she’d have them before her again in all their inky precision. She’d copy them down, take them away with her, keep them close. She would change the face of Karkov scholarship, she thought! She, Jane Levitsky, wife of Billy, mother of Maisie, daughter of Saul and Pamela—she would make her academic career at twenty-nine. I can see you want everything, Felicia had said, and it was true: she did. She was determined to get it, too; for herself, but also for all the other women who would come after her. To stand in opposition to women like Helen, women like Shombauer.

  She climbed the steps to the Newberry, showed her reader’s card, and took the elevator up to Special Collections. She walked up to the desk and filled out and handed in her call slips, relieved to see that this reference assistant was a woman, not the open-faced young man she had tried to stonewall. She went over to a table and waited, laying out her notebook and pencils, her laptop, her index cards.

  A short time later yet another reference assistant came by with the folders she had requested on a rolling cart, like dim sum. Jane’s hands were actually shaking as she opened the heavy archival folder marked as holding the diary from December 1875 to September 1876, and it was hard even to turn the little book over to open the back cover. She did it, though, of course, and stared at the thick cream-colored paper of the back page (Masha often left both the first and last pages of her diaries blank), at the black stitching and tan leather of the binding. There was nothing there.

  Jane’s heart skipped and she blinked at the empty place where the letter should have been. Then, with clumsy hands, she flipped to the front of the book, and then quickly through it from front to back. When that, too, revealed nothing, she set it down and turned each page carefully, but there was still nothing—no folded pages, not even a scrap of paper—only Masha’s clear, bold handwriting making its way across the bound vellum.

  Jane knew she had the right volume, but she checked her notes anyway. Her head had clouded and it was hard to think clearly, so she did not rely on thinking but checked everything by rote, trying not to let herself panic, just mechanically doing each thing: opening each folder, turning each page of every volume (in case the letter had gotten put back in the wrong book), rechecking her notes as to which volumes she’d had out. When all of this activity still yielded nothing, she shut her eyes and put her head in her hands. Then, all at once, she realized what must have happened. A wave of relief poured through her. Only now did she feel how tense she’d been, shoulders hunched, neck stiff, heart beating like a gong. The letter must have been taken out and filed with Masha’s correspondence, since correspondence was what it was. She took a deep breath, feeling her heart pounding still too hard and her arms trembling as she leaned her elbows into the wooden table. Then she pushed her hair out of her face, reached for yet another call slip, and began to fill it out.

  But she stopped almost as quickly as she’d begun. The call slip asked for the year of the correspondence she wanted. Had the letter been dated? She thought so, but she couldn’t quite remember. Had it been written the year that Masha had died—was that right? Everything seemed fuzzy, suddenly, her sharp memory failing like an old TV. She got up and walked over to the desk.

  “I was here a week and a half ago,” she told the reference assistant. She did her best to speak slowly and clearly, but she was sure her voice was either too quiet or too loud. “I was reading one of the volumes of Maria Karkova’s diary, and there was a letter stuck in it, tucked in the back. But today it isn’t there anymore. I assume it got filed with her correspondence, but I don’t know what year that would be.”

  The reference assistant was a tall young woman with caramel-colored skin and a long braid. “There’ll be a separation record where the letter was, saying where it went,” she said.

  Jane shook her head. “No. There’s not. There’s nothing.” She was beginning to panic again, and she looked up to where the bright blue sky was visible out the high windows. It was still a beautiful day.

  “Just a minute,” said the reference assistant.

  She was gone longer than a minute, though, and when she came back, she had with her an older woman in a blue dress, reading glasses dangling on a string of turquoise beads. “I’m the public services librarian,” the woman said. “Is there a problem?”

  Yes, there was. There was definitely a problem. Jane explained it again, and the public services librarian echoed what the reference assistant had said, that there would be a separation record. “Perhaps you have the wrong volume,” she suggested kindly.

  “I’ve checked them all,” Jane said more loudly than she meant to, and several people looked up from their work.

  The public services librarian made a phone call. She sent the reference assistant to collect the documents Jane had been working with, and she herself took Jane to see the curator of modern manuscripts in his office. Now Jane could no longer control her panic. It reached through her with chilly fingers, wrapped itself around her stomach, and squeezed. Panic whispered maliciously in her ear, and she fought back with anger. She could almost manage to feel they were doing this to her on purpose. They had taken her
letter and dropped it deep in the machinery of their bureaucracy; they were wasting her extremely limited time. She sat in the office of the curator of modern manuscripts, Stefan Valdes, and she told him what she had told the other two: the letter was there a week and a half ago, but it wasn’t there now. She did her best to speak politely but firmly, the way she would have spoken to a bank manager whose branch had erroneously debited money from her account.

  Stefan Valdes was a slender man in a blue striped shirt, his shiny black hair cut short, his square jaw closely shaved. He might almost have been a bank manager, except that when Jane looked more closely, she saw he had a tiny silver stud in one ear. “Dr. Levitsky,” he said, “I have no doubt we will find this letter. I can see how concerned you are, but I assure you there isn’t any cause for that. There are lots of places a letter like that might have got to. It might have gotten into a different folder you were working with—”

  “I checked them all,” Jane interrupted firmly. “Don’t you think that was the first thing I did?”

  He smiled and held up his palms, clean and pink as a cherub’s. “It might have been sent to the Con Lab for preservation. It might have been set aside for reassignment to the correspondence series, though in that case—”

  “In that case, I should have found a separation record!” Jane said, interrupting again. “Yes, I know. But I didn’t find one.” And now the terrible thought that had been attempting to squirm up through the fog of her distress surfaced at last. Who knew about the letter, after all, besides herself?

  “I just don’t understand how you could have lost track of it!” she exclaimed in order to push the terrible thought away.

  “As I said,” he repeated patiently, “I have no doubt we will find this letter. You pointed it out to the reference assistant when you returned your materials?”

  Jane had known this would be coming. “He saw the letter,” she said, stalling. “He knew of its existence.”

  “And you explained where you had found it? And that it seemed to you it was not where it was supposed to be, but that it belonged with the correspondence?” His silver stud winked accusingly in the bright light of the overhead fixture.

  “No,” Jane admitted. “I did not actually say that.”

  “Well, that’s a shame,” the curator said. He folded his hands on the desk in front of him, an ugly metal desk on which books and folders, glossy magazines and bundles of rubber-banded paper were neatly stacked. His hands with their scrubbed skin and neatly trimmed nails attested to his own fastidiousness, seeming to say that he would never have neglected to do a thing like that. “But I’m sure it makes no real difference. It may just delay things more than either of us would like.” He proceeded to ask her questions about the letter. To whom was it addressed? Could she be sure Karkova had written it? Was there any indication of the date? How many pages? Was it handwritten? What kind of paper was it on?

  Jane answered as well as she could, trying not to be distracted by the urgent parallel questions forming inside her head. What if the letter was lost forever? What if finding it took a long time? What if somebody had—? If Sigelman—?

  No. No. It wasn’t possible. Why would he do something like that?

  But she did ask, when the curator had at last exhausted his questions, “Has anyone else looked at that folder in the last week and a half?”

  “That’s privileged information,” Stefan Valdes said. “But I assure you that it’s something we will look into.”

  Jane went back to the reading room. There were still volumes of journals she hadn’t read. There was correspondence she wanted to see—Karkov’s letters in the months after Masha’s death, for instance. She sat at the square table in the bright room and read how, in March 1876, the ice had broken up early on the Vaza River, how swans and mergansers had already been seen. She knew she ought to type the passage about the birds into her “animals” folder, but instead she kept reading, her eyes skimming over the words as though all her good habits of scholarship had vanished along with the letter. She read about how the muslin Masha had ordered had come but was the wrong color, and about some problem having to do with Anton Bek, the young man who had taken over Masha’s role as Grisha’s copyist. Whatever it was, Masha was upset about it (“my head aches as though there were thunder, but the sky is blue as an egg”—an odd metaphor), but either she wasn’t clear about what had happened or Jane was too distracted to follow it. She was thinking of the curator’s clean hands and infuriating smile, about the letter, which had to be somewhere. Her hands trembled and she found she had turned two pages without taking anything in.

  Jane gave up and returned her materials. She retrieved her coat and went outside. Across the street in Washington Square Park, red buds swelled on the branches of the trees, and the benches were crowded with people taking advantage of the warm weather. It was 2:30, and her bus didn’t leave till 7:00. She needed to talk to someone who might understand. She sat on the gritty steps and fished out her cell phone, carefully charged this time.

  At first it seemed no one was home at Helen’s house. The answering machine tape began to play, and the boy’s voice recited the litany of names: “Dr. Paul Williams, Helen Williams, Michael, Abby, and Leonora Williams are not available to take your call.” Here was the family in all its orderly glory. Jane thought of the good dinner Helen had cooked, and the big house full of designated rooms, not just living and dining and bed, but the family room, the sewing room, the TV room. Jane (whose own answering machine said only, “We’re not home right now,” while something clattered and banged in the background) started to hang up, but all at once there was a beep and Helen’s breathless voice said, “Hello?”

  “Helen?” Jane said. Just the sound of Helen’s voice gave her a rush of warmth. “It’s Jane. I don’t suppose you’re free for a late lunch? Or coffee, maybe?”

  “Jane!” Helen said. “How’s Maisie doing? I was glad to get your e-mail.”

  “Much better,” Jane said. “Thank you.”

  “I’m so glad!” Helen said. “I was so worried! But today, I can’t exactly go anywhere, but you could come up here. I can feed you something, if you’re hungry.”

  “I don’t know,” Jane said doubtfully. She couldn’t bear to be in the library, but she didn’t want to go too far away, either. She watched the people trickling in and out of the doors, some in sport jackets or colorful skirts and some in jeans, but all serious and pale, all scholarly looking with their worn-out satchels and their scuffed shoes, their look of not being aware of where they actually were. Did she look like that? “I don’t want to disrupt your plans.”

  “Oh, please,” Helen said. “I’m in desperate need of some kind of disruption!”

  * * *

  The Evanston house seemed smaller than Jane remembered it, maybe because it was so much messier. Shoes and boots and sweaters were strewn everywhere, library picture books lay open in heaps, action figures stood at attention behind barricades of battered cardboard blocks, and someone had apparently upended a jar of marbles all over the carpet.

  “Don’t even look,” said Helen, holding a squirming Leonora against her shoulder.

  “Ma-ba!” Leonora cried. “Ma-ba!” She tried to lunge for the floor and the winking marbles.

  “Do you mind if we just leave the house?” Helen said. “There’s a park a couple of blocks away, and the weather’s so nice. It’s been—you know—one of those mornings. Afternoons. I made you a sandwich, though.”

  “That was so thoughtful,” Jane said. “I’ll take the baby.”

  “No, she’s a mess. Sticky, and she needs a bath, but I didn’t have a chance—Michael! Abby! Get your shoes on!” She reached down with one hand and tried to unfold a faded umbrella stroller that was lying in the foyer.

  “I’ll get it.” Jane opened the stroller and Helen put Leonora in it, buckled the straps, and stuck a pacifier in her mouth. Leonora spit the pacifier out and began to cry.

  “Oh god,” Helen said. “Wou
ld you mind just wheeling her up and down the front walk?”

  At last they got everyone out the door. It was still too early for the first leaves, but rhododendrons showed bursts of purple on nearly every lawn, and daffodils and hyacinths encircled tree trunks with yellow and white and pink blossoms. A few people were out walking dogs or clearing last autumn’s detritus from flower beds, and the shouts of children and the roar of traffic on the expressway carried clearly through the gossamer air. Helen pushed Leonora in the stroller, and Abby ran ahead as far as the next corner every time they crossed the street, but Michael dragged his feet and had to be urged to keep up.

  “Is Paul working?” Jane asked. She was eating the chicken-salad sandwich as they walked.

  “Conference in Seattle,” Helen said. “Things get a little tenuous. But he’ll be home tomorrow.”

  “One more person to take care of,” Jane joked, licking her fingers. Or maybe it wasn’t a joke.

  “Yes,” Helen said. “But I miss him.”

  The park was a large expanse of grass with a baseball diamond at one end and a playground at the other. The swing set was full, and some older kids were kicking around a soccer ball. Michael and Abby raced each other to the monkey bars. The sun was still warm, but the shadows of the swing set and the trees already stretched their long fingers across the grass. Leonora had fallen asleep.

  “Thank god,” Helen said. “She hasn’t napped in days.”

  They sat on a bench and watched the children.

  “Helen,” Jane said. “I don’t think I told you before, but when I was here a couple of weeks ago, I found something. Something potentially very interesting.”

  Helen looked at her, her gray eyes narrowed with attention and intelligence—the look Jane remembered from years ago. “What?” she asked. “What did you find?”

  Jane told her the story, or what there was of it: the letter with its suggestion of Masha’s adventure and of being the source for Lady of the Snakes, and how, when she had gone back this morning, the letter wasn’t there.