Lady of the Snakes

by Rachel Pastan

  “Did you find her?”

  Felicia shook her head. “She could have got back into a wall, gotten outside. Probably she’s dead. Someone will find her, frozen in a gutter. Imagine that.”

  Jane, who had thought Felicia’s decision to get the snake an irresponsible stunt that would end more or less this way, was surprised to hear real sadness in her voice. “Don’t snakes hibernate?” she asked.

  “Not pythons. They’re tropical.”

  Jane didn’t want to think about either a live python loose in Felicia’s house or a dead one frozen in the snow. “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  Felicia leaned back in her chair with her long legs stretched out in front of her. She looked at her boots. “I don’t know. If it had been last month, I could have stayed with Douglas, but.” She shrugged and looked up at Jane. With her protuberant green eyes and her receding chin, she looked like a beached fish.

  Jane thought about how cold the weather was, ice clinging to every twig and wire. She knew how tight the Madison housing market was, how little money graduate students had. She had been a graduate student herself, after all, until very recently. And Felicia was her student. “You could stay with me,” she said. “Until you find someplace. We have a finished basement, a futon. There’s even a kind of a bathroom down there.”

  “I—”

  Jane thought Felicia had begun to say “I couldn’t,” but then stopped herself. Her nod was so slight it could have been a twitch. Her face wore a mask of brittle nonchalance.

  “You don’t have any babysitting experience, do you?” Jane asked.

  “I have four younger brothers,” Felicia said, with some disgust.

  * * *

  After class Jane drove Felicia to the house. The car hummed down the wet street. The weather was warming up. Jane thought about offering Felicia a deal. Felicia could watch Maisie fifteen or twenty hours a week, and in exchange she could live in the basement rentfree until the end of the semester. They could work out a schedule. She’d have to discuss it with Billy first, but the possibility filled her with hope. With three of them, they could juggle the working week. She hoped Billy would think it was a good idea, but she was having a hard time lately guessing what Billy would think about anything.

  At the house Billy and Maisie were sprawled on the couch, watching cartoons. It was lunchtime, but Maisie was still in her pajamas and Billy looked as though he hadn’t showered yet. He got up when they came in, leaving the television on.

  Jane explained, briefly. “Felicia will be staying for a few days,” she said, daring Billy to object.

  “Without your snake, I hope,” Billy said.

  “There is no more snake,” Jane said.

  “Hey, Maisie,” Felicia said. “Do you know what kind of snake you can eat for dessert?”

  Maisie looked at her blankly, then shook her head.

  “A pie-thon,” Felicia said. “Get it? A pie-thon?”

  Maisie giggled.

  Chapter Seven

  JANE COULDN’T SAY it was a mistake to have invited Felicia to move in. It certainly solved her most pressing problems. The schedule they settled on had Felicia taking care of Maisie nearly twenty-five hours a week. Felicia was done with class work, and she wasn’t TA-ing. Besides writing her Ph.D. thesis, babysitting Maisie was her only job. In a way, Jane thought, it was the same as it had been for Jane herself—writing her thesis and taking care of Maisie, when Maisie was an infant. Only Maisie was more fun now than she had been then, and Felicia was getting paid.

  Maisie adored Felicia. Jane wasn’t sure why this surprised her, but it did. Felicia was very good with her, and this surprised Jane too. She invented complicated games of make-believe and organized art projects involving shaving cream and food coloring, or tin foil and scissors and cardboard boxes—projects that made huge, thrilling messes. Felicia always cleaned up the messes, too, often long before Jane got home, so the only way Jane knew what had gone on was if someone told her. She would never have known about Felicia and Maisie putting on bathing suits so Felicia could body-paint them from head to toe if Maisie hadn’t said at bedtime, “I look good blue, but next time I’m gonna be purple.”

  Jane wasn’t sure exactly what about this bothered her or exactly why. It wasn’t as though body paint was harmful, and she’d never said Felicia had to tell her everything.

  And now spring break—incredibly—was less than two weeks away. Jane would finally get to take her trip to Chicago. While she was there, she thought she might look up her old friend Helen Landis, who had been the graduate student teaching assistant in Jane’s college Turgenev class and had encouraged Jane to pursue her interest in Russian. Helen had gotten a job at Northwestern straight out of graduate school, and Jane had e-mailed her for a while until the responses dried up. A first-year professor now herself, Jane understood it.

  It was cold in Jane’s study, always colder upstairs than down in this house, which didn’t make any sense. The laws of nature seemed to be reversed. “We’ll be walking on the ceiling soon,” Jane had said to Billy the other day, but Billy hadn’t laughed.

  Tonight Jane sat at her desk and took out her address book, an old, tattered volume decorated with photographs of objects from the Hermitage collection: ornate silver samovars and bowls carved out of amber, diamond tiaras, jeweled eggs. Relics from the age of opulence. Russia was such a vast, abundant country, and its associations were so multiform: tsars and armies of faceless soldiers, countless miles of wheat, blinding blizzards in Siberia. Ravaged Jewish shtetls, chandeliers in the subways. Jane loved Russia’s contradictions and its extremes, its superstitions and its incomprehensibly vast geography. She loved its language, rich and deep and guttural, amazingly expressive. In part, of course, the Russia she loved was gone, as the Karkov estate was gone, bulldozed to build a toothpaste factory. But as long as she and people like her—Shombauer and Sigelman, Helen and Felicia, too—continued their work, it would not entirely vanish from the earth.

  Jane hadn’t talked to Helen in years. She dialed the number in her book but wasn’t surprised to get the recording saying the number wasn’t in service. Next she tried e-mail.

  Dear Helen,

  I wonder if this address still works. I feel a little as though I’m launching a message in a bottle. My own e-mail is new, courtesy of the University of Wisconsin where I’m in my first year as an assistant professor! So much has happened it’s hard to know where to start, but I’ll be in Chicago from the 14th–18th and hope perhaps we could get together, and then I can tell you more easily how strange and tangled life has become, the wonderful things (like the job) seemingly inextricably linked to the less wonderful things, like having no time and being exhausted and feeling I can’t manage this, that the juggling pins are about to hit the ground.

  Did you know I married Billy Shaw? I think you did. Now we have a daughter, 2½ amazingly articulate and so much her own self. I’m anxious to catch up with you and hear about your work, and maybe get some hints about how to manage this crazy life. Academia is certainly not the quiet, meditative, monastic world it is sometimes portrayed as being. More like trying to think clearly while strapped onto a roller coaster.

  Hope all is well, and that I’ll see you soon!

  Fondly,

  Jane

  In the morning, when Jane switched on her computer, she found the following message waiting:

  Hi, Jane!

  How lovely to hear from you out of the blue! I only have a moment, but of course we must see each other. Why don’t you stay with us in Evanston? Life here is ridiculously hectic, but it would be great to have you. Congratulations on your job!! I’m sure you’re wonderful, however uncertain you feel. And of course congratulations on your daughter. Sounds like as much has changed for you as for me. Sorry things are hard! No easy solutions. We’ll talk it all over. Let me know exactly when you’re coming, and I’ll send address and directions.—Helen

  The day before Jane’s trip, Maisie caught a cold a
nd wandered blearily around the house with a dripping nose. Jane gave her orange juice and heated up chicken soup, but Maisie turned her face away from the spoon. She didn’t have any appetite. Jane wondered if she should cancel Chicago (again!) and stay home. Did Maisie need her? What did need mean in this context? Was it more like a plant needing sunlight, or more like Jane needing a cup of coffee at three in the afternoon? What did other mothers do when things like this happened?

  Jane didn’t know. She didn’t know who to ask. She could talk it over with Billy, but then if he said she should stay, she’d have to stay. And, after all, it was only a cold. Maisie had had a dozen colds in her short life. Jane mixed cinnamon into a saucer of sugar for cinnamon toast, hoping to tempt Maisie to eat something, then washed her hands. It might be only a cold, but Jane didn’t want to catch it. She cut the toast into four even triangles and brought it over to the table, where Maisie had put her head down as though she were exhausted.

  “Mama,” she said, and sniffled. “Ma-ma-ma-ma-ma . . .” The word dissolved in her mouth into pure lament.

  No, it would never be banished, Jane saw—the guilt, and the worry about what the right thing was. You could pluck it the way she plucked shiny leaves of goutweed by the driveway, but the blind white roots always thrust up more.

  The next morning Jane woke Maisie early to say good-bye, holding her close and smelling her sweaty hair while Maisie yawned and rubbed her eyes. She coughed, a sound like a small engine trying to start up.

  “Bye, Maisie. I’ll see you on Friday, okay?”

  Maisie coughed again and laid her head against Jane’s chest. “Okay,” she said sleepily, barely awake. There were no tears, no wailing; no protest of any kind. That was something to be grateful for, Jane told herself.

  …

  It was bright and cold in Chicago. On the windy sidewalk in front of the Newberry with its measured marble arches, Jane paused with one hand on her head to keep her hat from blowing off. She had spent most of one summer here years ago, but the building looked different now, its cornices weighted down with snow and its fountain turned off, like an old friend who has aged since last meeting. Jane, too, had aged, of course. She could empty her pockets of children’s flotsam as she had that morning before catching the bus, but she could not stop herself from being changed, the way a new shirt is changed by going through the laundry. Standing in the frozen park across the street, she dug out her cell phone to check on Maisie, but no matter what she did the screen stayed blank. She must have forgotten to charge it. Trying not to think what a bad mother she was, she climbed the long, low steps to the door. The sun sparkled off the icy railings. The week lay before her like a blank white field of snow.

  The diaries were small cloth-bound books, nearly square at four by five inches, each containing ninety-two sheets of creamy paper. There were twenty-six of them, filled with Masha’s assured, angular Cyrillic script, each one in its own archival folder neatly labeled with the dates. There were some blots and crossings out, but not many, and to Jane this made the quality of the writing all the more remarkable. This was no revised, reconsidered, ultimate version, as Karkov’s novels were, but a first intuitive draft.

  Jane sometimes wondered whether Marlena Frey, who had edited the diaries for publication, had even bothered to read them all. Had she just scanned the pages for Karkov’s name and included the entries that contained it? Was her Russian as fluent as Jane’s? Had she felt the pull of Masha’s language or of the picture of a particular, deeply felt life unfolding? Had Delholland or any of Karkov’s other biographers? Had Sigelman sat in this chilly, high-ceilinged room (already Jane was wishing she’d worn a warmer sweater) with volume 10 or 20 or 25 resting on a book pillow before him, a cloth book weight (book snakes, they were actually called, because of their shape) holding the pages open? It was possible, but she doubted it. She felt strongly that she herself was the first reader ever to appreciate Masha’s writing—or even to try to read it carefully—but she was determined she wouldn’t be the last.

  Masha had kept diaries sporadically starting in 1862, when she was thirteen and living in her parents’ lively household in Moscow. The entries for the first years mostly described balls and parties and squabbles with her sisters in fairly pedestrian, melodramatic language. It was not until 1865, during her courtship with Karkov, that her language became more original, her entries more regular, and her thoughts more interesting. From then on she wrote faithfully, never lapsing for more than a month or two.

  Jane turned her mind to the ambiguous circumstances of Masha’s death. She thought how unhappy Masha had been after Konstantin was born and again after Katya’s birth. She thought how hard it was for her, Jane, to manage life with just one child—how despite the sweetness that she felt so intensely some of the time, despite love, motherhood wore you down.

  And yet except for a few entries shortly after the births of the first three children, motherhood didn’t seem to have worn Masha down much. She seemed, if anything, to have grown into it, to have become accustomed to the fit. One might have thought that the birth of twins (Alexy and Pyotr in 1874) would have been a difficult time, but Masha seemed to flourish after their birth, writing, for instance:

  The autumn is so warm and clear that the children are outside from morning to night, even having their lesson under the lime tree. Pyotr has just learned to sit up and, naturally mild and easygoing, he is content to listen to his brothers recite history for half an hour at a time! While Alexy, who cannot sit, wants me or Yelizaveta to dance with him all day and far into the night by way of compensation. It bothers her rheumatism, but I like to do it. It’s beautiful weather, these October days, for dancing.

  …

  If Masha had committed suicide, it seemed to Jane that Vanya’s death must have had a lot to do with it. Vanyushka was her darling, the child she nursed herself, having finally given up the conventional wet nurse. He was the one who always seemed to come to her with a kiss when she needed one, the quiet, watchful boy who wanted everyone to be happy. The year after his death had been a dark one, indeed, but eventually Masha seemed to have forced herself back into the light, for the sake of the children if nothing else. But maybe she found, after all, that she couldn’t keep it up. Maybe the prospect of another baby who would seem to replace Vanyushka was too much for her.

  Or maybe, Jane thought (reminding herself again that a scholar lived by evidence, not intuition, and that evidence was something she did not yet have)—maybe seven had just proved a mortally unlucky number for Masha. Numberless women, after all, had died in childbirth over the millennia. She tried to quiet her busy mind and just read, to let the river of words carry her. There would be plenty of time for judgments later.

  On her previous trips to Special Collections, Jane had focused on a few particular periods in Masha’s life: 1866, when she was a new bride (like Yelizaveta in The Lime Trees); 1876, when she was a sometimes distracted, extremely busy mother of five (as was the careworn, shrewish Lyudmila in Prince Leopold); and 1882, when Vanya died (as the child Igor had died in Silent Passage). Now she meant to begin at the beginning and work her way methodically through, taking notes in three categories into three different folders on her laptop: one for passages that were reminiscent of passages in Karkov’s novels; one for animals and other nature references; and one for despair. After that she would look at Karkov’s correspondence around the time of Masha’s death and see if there were any clues there.

  She could not resist, however, beginning by opening the volume containing most of 1878, which was probably the happiest period of Masha’s life. She had overcome her early dislike of the country and found her footing as a provincial lady with a house full of children and visitors and servants. Konstantin was twelve, Katya eleven, Nikolai nine, the twins four, and Vanya still a babe in arms. She wrote in her diary frequently that year, long entries about family life in the house and animal life in the meadow, and the writing showed good humor and tolerance even toward Grigory. She se
emed to have found not only her balance but also her voice; perhaps they were the two sides of the same coin. Even when something did ruffle her, like her glamorous sister Varya Petrovna Lensky visiting from Moscow with her four children, she kept her sense of humor and perspective.

  That May, with the Lenskys in the house, there were picnics and expeditions, swimming in the Vaza River that ran, wide and shallow, at the bottom of the meadow. Katya adored her older cousin Alexandra, who was sometimes nice to her and sometimes wasn’t. There were tears and tantrums. Katya’s relation with Alexandra was in some ways an echo of the relation between the grown-up sisters. Varya traveled in the most exclusive circles in the capital. Her clothes were expensive. She wore a great deal of jewelry. Masha’s country life—comparatively impoverished, with half a dozen noisy children always running in and out, needing things, scheming, quarreling, and growing out of their clothes, with little social intercourse and no culture at all except what they could generate themselves—was foreign to Varya, who could not prevent herself from commenting on what she considered Masha’s coming down in the world.

  “Before Varya came I never gave a thought to what I wore,” Masha wrote.

  I put on whatever was to hand and clean. Now I find myself wasting precious minutes worrying which dress would be best—which is not too unfashionable, not too often mended, not too “country,” as she said of the blue I was wearing the day they arrived. Oh, what nonsense! This is country life, and if Varya doesn’t understand that, it is no excuse for my behavior.

  Jane could picture Masha standing in front of the mirror over her dressing table, holding up first one dress and then another. She could see her brow furrowing as she settled on the gray, then changed her mind and put on the blue after all, listening all the time to the voices out in the corridor. Was Varya giving impossible orders to the servants? Were any of the children crying? She could see Masha fumbling to catch a stray lock of hair in a comb before hurrying out of the room again in the mended blue dress, hot and irritable, hoping she’d manage to let her sister’s comments slip by.