Lady of the Snakes

by Rachel Pastan

  “Oh, Jane!” Helen said. Her gray eyes left the children, now sitting on the top of the monkey bars, and looked fully into Jane’s flushed face. “How thrilling! This never happens—this kind of discovery. You know that, don’t you?”

  And suddenly Jane believed that everything would be all right. The letter would be found, and it would cast a new and radiant light on everything. She beamed at Helen, intensely pleased, but to hedge her bets she said, “Right at the moment, it feels like it hasn’t happened this time, either.”

  “I’m sure they’ll find it!” Helen said. “In a day or two. I wouldn’t worry. Didn’t the curator tell you not to worry? What is it, Michael?”

  The boy had appeared in front of them, his cheeks red and his long lashes damp. He kicked the dirt with the toe of his light-up sneaker. “Abby called me a word,” he said.

  “What word?”

  Jane watched him stare at the ground, unwilling to say. He had his mother’s face: the same thin jaw and gray eyes, the scattering of freckles.

  “Tell me, Michael,” Helen said.

  “Dummy,” Michael said.

  Helen smoothed his hair away from his forehead. “You’re not a dummy, sweetheart,” she said matter-of-factly. “You tell Abby I said so.”

  “But she—”

  “Tell her I said not to call names,” Helen interrupted firmly. She turned him around by the shoulders and pointed him back toward the play equipment. “Go!” she said, and then, when he’d reluctantly obeyed her, “First children! So sensitive.”

  “Really?” Jane said. “First children?”

  “Because we don’t know how to bring them up yet. They’re our guinea pigs, so they need an extra lot of patience, I always think. But let’s talk about your letter! Tell me again. She was called to God—that’s what she said?”

  “I think so,” Jane said. “I wish I could remember more clearly.” She was thinking of Maisie. Would a second child be less difficult, then? Did Maisie need more patience than Jane was giving her?

  “Like Joan of Arc!” Helen said.

  “Don’t people these days think Joan of Arc had schizophrenia?” Jane said. “Or epilepsy?” She felt doubtful again. What had the letter said, exactly? Had Masha literally heard voices? Suppose Sigelman had read it—was there something in it he wouldn’t have wanted her to see? Had something been hidden that he wanted to keep hidden? Or was his problem Jane herself, that she might make a major contribution to the field he thought of as his own? The field he had, after all, created.

  “Here comes Michael again,” Helen said. “What is it, sweetie?”

  “I want to go home,” he said. His eyes were dark with emotion and he had bits of dead leaves in his hair. Jane could see he was trying hard not to cry, and her heart went out to him. Despite being brown-haired and skinny rather than chubby and blond, for a moment he reminded her of her brother, Davis.

  “Oh, honey,” Helen said. She opened her arms and gathered him in, although he was too big for it, her face relaxed and shining faintly with happiness despite her frown. Jane wondered if her own face looked like that when she held Maisie.

  “What a good life you’ve made for yourself,” Jane said softly.

  “Yes.” Helen rocked her son close, and the sight made Jane long for her own child. “But you know what I miss?”

  “What?” The sun was sinking, now, into the branches of the trees, and the wind was picking up.

  “It’s embarrassing,” Helen said. “I miss the way people used to look at me, when I told them what I did for a living. Some people. As though I might have something interesting to say. I miss that more than the work itself, though I do miss the work, too, sometimes! Reading. Thinking carefully about things. I don’t think I ever think carefully about anything anymore. Anyway, isn’t that awful?”

  “No,” Jane said. “It’s not awful.”

  “Mommy,” Michael said, “can we have pizza for dinner?”

  “We had pizza last night,” Helen said.

  “I love pizza,” said her son dreamily, his knobby knees folded under him and the crown of his head tucked beneath his mother’s chin. “I could eat it every night.”

  Helen made a face at Jane over Michael’s head. “Why do I even bother cooking?” she asked, but it was a reflex more than a real question.

  * * *

  When Jane got home, long past bedtime, Maisie was stretched out on the couch in her pajamas, watching a video while Billy studied at the dining-room table.

  “Hello, sweetie,” Jane said to Maisie. “I missed you!”

  “This a good video,” Maisie said, lifting her arms for Jane to pick her up.

  “Is it?” Jane carried Maisie through the archway into the dining room. Her weight felt good in Jane’s arms. It felt like ballast. “Hi, Billy,” she said.

  Billy rubbed his hands across his face and looked up. “You have a good trip?”

  “It was okay,” she said. “Kind of frustrating.” He didn’t ask her why, and she didn’t tell him.

  “I didn’t realize how late it was!” Billy yawned and got up, and for a moment they leaned toward each other as if they might kiss, but then they didn’t. “I’ll put Maisie to bed,” Billy said.

  “That’s okay,” Jane said. “I’ve got her.”

  “No, I should have done it before.”

  “Don’t worry about it. You did the whole day.” It was ridiculous the way they were talking, like people trying to hold the door for each other: After you. No, after you. But they couldn’t seem to stop.

  Billy had to spend the whole next day in the law library. Felicia was off somewhere; she never watched Maisie on the weekends, anyway. Jane took Maisie to the grocery store and the video store and the park. She hadn’t done any class prep at all, and she had to stay up very late that night putting her Monday lecture together and looking over student paper proposals to hand back and answering e-mails, and then on Monday she was so tired she couldn’t think straight. She stumbled her way through class, and then she forgot to hand back the paper proposals and had to e-mail all the students to pick them up from her mailbox. Not that half of them would even bother. This was the price she was paying for Saturday. If she had read the letter, she supposed, it might have seemed well worth it.

  In her office after class, she shut the door and put her head down on the desk. She was so tired she almost fell asleep like that, but a sound from the other side of the wall made her open her eyes again. Sigelman was whistling loudly in his office. It was a cheerful tune, possibly a march, surprisingly clear and on key. Spurred by the thought of him, Jane picked up her phone and called the Newberry. She asked to be connected to Stefan Valdes, and then she asked him if he’d found her letter yet.

  “I assure you that we are working on this,” he said, impatience creeping into his voice for the first time. “We do have quite a small staff, however.”

  Jane wondered if the impatience was because the letter hadn’t, as he’d assumed it would, turned up quickly. “Mr. Valdes,” she said, “can I ask you something? If it turns out you can’t find the letter—that it’s disappeared—is this the kind of matter you would report to the police?”

  There was a long pause. Sigelman was still whistling. Jane wondered if he could hear what she was saying into the phone. She could usually hear when he was talking but not make out the actual words. At last the curator said, “Honestly, Dr. Levitsky, they would laugh at us.”

  Through the wall Sigelman had switched to a waltz. Putting down the phone, she thought of all the things she might say to him:

  Remember that letter I told you about? Well, I lost it.

  Did you by any chance go down to the Newberry and take (steal? hide?) my letter?

  What do you think the chances are that the most exciting document you’ve ever touched would immediately and mysteriously disappear?

  Or maybe, The fucking bureaucracy at the fucking Newberry swallowed my goddamned letter!

  In the end, though, she couldn’t
bring herself to say any of these things. When, a few days later, he asked her (as she’d known he eventually would) when she was planning to go back to Chicago and find out what the rest of the letter said, she’d stood up very straight and told him, “Just as soon as I can find the time, Otto!”

  “Time!” he said with a wolfish grin. “You have all the time in the world! I’m the one who’s going to die soon.” He looked very cheerful and solicitous in his canary yellow shirt, the cuffs flapping.

  “That will be nice,” Jane said. “You and Karkov can go snipe shooting together in heaven.”

  “I doubt,” Sigelman said, “either of us will end up there.”

  Chapter Twelve

  THE LAST DAY of the spring semester dawned cold and blustery. Jane woke up with a feeling of relief. The year was almost over; she had almost survived it. The dark gray sky out the window, the sight of the arborvitae shivering in the wind, couldn’t dampen her mood. She buried her face in the back of Billy’s neck and wrapped her arms around him from behind. It seemed to have been a long time since they’d touched each other, but the days and weeks rushed by in such a fog that Jane wasn’t honestly sure how long. “Billy,” she whispered.

  A sound sleeper, he lay still and unresponsive. She didn’t know what she wanted to say, anyway, just to somehow share her gladness, to offer some reassurance, maybe. He still had exams to get through, but he’d get through them. Then they would have the summer. She was determined that the summer would be different: easier, happier, with more time for each other and for Maisie. She would ask Felicia to find a place of her own. She would think of the things she and Billy used to enjoy doing together. Maybe they would rent canoes at the boathouse at Wingra Park, put Maisie in a life preserver between them, and paddle out to where the water was calm and clear in every direction.

  She went downstairs to the chilly kitchen to make coffee, came back up for her slippers, and heard Maisie singing to herself in her bed. Jane went into the room, and Maisie stopped singing and shut her eyes. Jane sat on the edge of the bed and put her hand on the birthmark on Maisie’s shin, ran her hand down to her toes and squeezed her foot.

  “Time to get up,” Jane said. “It’s going to be a lovely day.”

  “I sleeping,” Maisie said.

  “Okay,” Jane said. “But you have to wake up soon.”

  She went back downstairs and made toast, emptied the dishwasher, threw out the soured milk and opened a new carton, put milk on the shopping list by the microwave. She took a package of chicken breasts from the freezer and put it in the refrigerator to defrost. Her mind whirred cleanly, knowing what had to be done. Her body, strong and efficient, executed tasks. The wind rattled the window as though it were early March.

  Upstairs Billy was running the water. In this house the water moaned in the pipes whenever anyone turned on a sink or flushed a toilet. It made a melancholy human sound, almost like weeping. Not enough insulation in the walls, perhaps.

  The moaning of the water stopped, and Billy came downstairs wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt, rubbing his eyes. His feet were bare. “It’s freezing,” he said. “Jesus—it’s May!” His hair stuck up, dark near his scalp but nearly colorless at the tips, as though something went out of it as it grew.

  “It’s the last day of the semester,” Jane said.

  “It feels like January.”

  “In January it’s still dark at a quarter to seven. The sun’s been up for half an hour.”

  “What sun?” Billy said, looking out the window. He poured himself a cup of coffee and sat down at the table.

  Jane waited until he had half a cup in him. She wanted to tell him how she felt they were emerging from some shared darkness, real or metaphysical. “The weather certainly is nasty today,” she said. “But I feel as though I can feel the world turning. Do you know what I mean? As though I’m sitting on the top of the world and the seasons are moving through me somehow! The winter moving out and the summer moving in—you know? Because of the way the light is, maybe.”

  “Sitting on top of the world, are you?” Billy said. He opened the refrigerator and poured milk into his coffee. Jane was pleased that she’d thrown out the soured carton. It made her feel like a good wife.

  Thump, thump. Maisie was hopping down the steps. She came around the corner, her blanket dragging on the floor. “Hungry,” she said.

  Jane got a bowl, poured cereal. “Swimming lesson today,” she said, setting the bowl on the table. “Mommy’s going to take you.”

  “No,” Maisie said. “No swimmy.”

  “You liked it last week,” Jane said. “You kicked with the kickboard, remember? And the water splashed up.”

  “Don’t want to,” Maisie said. Her face darkened.

  Now the pipes in the walls groaned again. Felicia would be up soon. “Well, I think you’ll have fun,” Jane said. “Once you get there.”

  “No!” Maisie kicked the table and cereal splashed out of the bowl.

  Billy picked the Cheerios up from the tabletop and ate them. “I’m sitting on top of the world,” he said, “and I feel a storm blowing in.”

  * * *

  Jane drove to campus, parked in the remote lot, and took the shuttle bus from there. Gray clouds gathered over the lake, low and dark. The water was the color of granite and the racing waves were topped with dirty foam. Wind ripped through the trees, tearing cherry blossoms from their twigs, filling the air with showers of petals, and bending daffodils flat against the grass.

  In the lobby of Van Hise she ran into John Lewin, who was waiting for the elevator.

  “Can you believe the weather?” he said as the doors closed. He rubbed his red hands together. “I didn’t bring gloves.”

  Jane held up her own gloved hands. “I found mine in my coat pockets,” she said. The wind had tangled her hair and numbed her ears.

  “Eighteen years since I left Arizona,” he said, “and I’m still not used to this god-awful climate!”

  The elevator stopped at the fourteenth floor, and they got off together. Carmen Bilinsky, the Slavic religions specialist, clattered down the hall in high-heeled pumps with a mug of coffee in her manicured hands.

  “I’m just warming myself up,” she said. “It’s like Siberia out there!”

  “We should consider it a form of research,” Jane said.

  The others laughed politely. Or maybe the laughter was genuine; Jane couldn’t tell.

  “Well,” John said heartily. “The last day of the semester. Congratulations, Jane, you made it!”

  “I have two classes to get through first,” she said.

  “Oh, the first year,” Carmen said. “How well I remember it.”

  “I was wondering if it was like childbirth,” Jane said, “where you forget the pain.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that,” Carmen said.

  The elevator doors opened again and Otto Sigelman emerged, wearing a heavy brown overcoat, his face flushed with cold. The few strands of hair on his head were in disarray.

  “We’ll have snow by nightfall,” John said, clapping his hands together. “Six inches, I predict!”

  “Talking about the weather?” Sigelman remarked. He strode past them, keys in hand, and disappeared around the corner.

  “Are you going to be like that in thirty years, Jane?” John asked her with a smile. “Supercilious and grumpy?”

  “A big-headed crab,” Carmen clarified.

  “Let’s see if I get tenure first,” Jane said lightly.

  “Speaking of which,” John said. “I haven’t seen anything of yours in print lately. I trust you’ve been busy?”

  Carmen was still looking down the hall where Sigelman had disappeared. “I thought when he retired we’d see less of him, but he’s around as much as ever. Lingering, like a bad smell. And he’s been whistling, too. With Otto that’s always a bad sign.”

  “Whistling?” Jane said.

  “Bustlingly secretive. Have you noticed?” She directed her question to John.


  “I know he took a trip somewhere,” John replied. “To see someone he was interested in. Professionally, I mean. No more young women!”

  “I should hope not,” Carmen said.

  “To Chicago?” Jane asked. She shifted her shoulder bag to the other side and pushed her hair back out of her eyes, trying to look casual.

  “To Iowa, I think. Some relation of somebody or other. Has he mentioned anything to you, Jane?”

  “No,” Jane said. “No, he hasn’t.” But she knew that Stephen Olen’s son, Greg Olen, lived in Dubuque.

  “He shouldn’t be driving,” Carmen said. “He’s a heart attack waiting to happen! Even fifteen years ago his cholesterol was almost three hundred.”

  “They don’t care about the whole number anymore,” John Lewin said. “Just the HDL.”

  “Nevertheless,” Carmen said, while Jane looked at her appraisingly. Young women, she thought, mentally subtracting fifteen years.

  * * *

  In her office Jane set her satchel down. Through the wall she could hear a file drawer slide open and then rattle shut again. A chair was pushed back; blinds rattled. The sounds of a restless animal, waiting to be let out.

  She went out into the hall and knocked on Sigelman’s door.

  The clattering inside ceased.

  She knocked again. “Otto,” she called through the heavy blond striated wood. She looked at the nameplate on the door, dusty black with old-fashioned gold lettering. The new nameplates—hers, for instance—were dull brown, with plain, square white letters. She could imagine the sermon Sigelman would offer on this theme—how the profession had become debased, the professors dishonored; you couldn’t even get a decent nameplate for your office anymore! Once, people like him had been revered, respected, left alone, no state legislature breathing down their necks about teaching loads. No students complaining about grades, homework, rising tuition. Was it all this that had embittered Sigelman, or was it something else? The bald fact that times changed, that his had come and gone? There were students working in Slavics today (as he must know, or at least suspect) who’d never heard of him, others who’d heard of him but assumed he was dead.