Lady of the Snakes

by Rachel Pastan

  It was hot, the air thick and sticky, the bushes swarming with mosquitoes and the lakes stinking of algae. Maisie was always damp, her hair flattened in sweaty curls against her scalp. At night in bed with the window fan on high, Jane and Billy talked about installing air-conditioning. They also talked about leaving Madison: if they were starting over, maybe they should really start over. Jane could look for a job somewhere new.

  Or if they stayed, should they buy a bigger house to accommodate a second baby? Somewhere in Verona, maybe, or Middleton, where prices were lower.

  “It could be nice,” Jane said one night. She was naked, flat on her back with one hand on her already bulging stomach. “New construction. New floors, new carpets, new drywall, new grass.”

  “Awful!” Billy said, his hand on top of hers and his head nestled into her neck despite the heat. “No history, no aesthetic value, no soul.”

  “No weeds,” Jane said. “No rotting windowsills.”

  “You couldn’t walk anywhere.”

  “I don’t walk anywhere now,” Jane said.

  Billy rolled closer and wrapped his arm around her. “You wouldn’t raise Maisie out there,” he said.

  “How do you know what I would do?”

  “I know.”

  Jane made herself keep her mouth shut. It was true: she didn’t want to move to the suburbs, or to leave Madison, or to buy a different house. But still, she wasn’t quite content either, although she didn’t know exactly what she wanted to be different. Maybe only herself—her greedy, rigid, irritable self. Or maybe the whole world with its eternal strictures: gravity, only twenty-four hours in a day. Death.

  * * *

  As she walked up the path to Greg Olen’s door, Jane could already hear the baby crying. She was nervous, her palms sweaty—all of her, in fact, starting to sweat. The sun beat down on the brownish grass and the blistered concrete driveways. She hoped it hadn’t been a mistake to come.

  Olen looked older when he answered the door. His hair had been cut short, exposing his drawn face with its broad, lined forehead. His black glittering eyes had dark circles under them, and his skin was bristly with stubble. He was holding the baby tightly as she screamed, arching her back and then falling forward against his chest. The noise she made was piercing and harsh, ceasing only for a moment at a time while she gasped for breath, and then redoubling itself. Jane could not remember Maisie ever crying like this, but maybe it was the kind of thing that, for your own sanity, you forgot.

  “This is a bad time,” Jane said.

  Olen hoisted the baby up onto his shoulder. “No worse than most.” He turned and walked back into the house, leaving the door open for Jane to follow.

  Inside, the floor was littered with clothes, shoes, baby toys, newspapers. Dirty dishes crowded the dining table—half-eaten bowls of cereal, plates strewn with crumbs, beer cans, Chinese take-out containers. Baby bottles, crusts of bread, empty chip bags, crusting cups of salsa. Olen led her into the kitchen, where he sat in the tiny breakfast nook, pushing aside the clutter to clear a patch of sticky Formica. The close air smelled of garbage and old socks. Didn’t this man have anyone to help him? His parents were dead—she knew that—but what about friends or neighbors or bustling women from church? Jane remembered the older woman’s voice she’d heard through the phone. His mother-in-law? An aunt? Where was she now, whoever she was, in this time of calamity?

  “She’s been crying since four,” Olen said, in the hyper-controlled voice of a man trying to keep himself from screaming. He stood up again and rocked the baby, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

  Jane watched him, trying to assimilate the picture he made, the desperado with the small pink bundle.

  “Is she hungry?” Jane asked.

  “She won’t take a bottle.”

  “Is she sick?”

  Olen glared at her but seemed unable to answer the question. “Is she hot?” Jane stood up and moved toward him to feel the baby’s forehead, but Olen took a step back.

  “Don’t touch her!” he said.

  “Put your hand on her forehead,” Jane said gently. “Maybe she has a fever.”

  Olen slumped where he stood, shutting his eyes. Then he opened them again and touched the child’s head. The baby took the opportunity to try to propel herself out of his arms, and he had to lunge to hold on. Her screaming crescendoed. Jane longed to get out of there, to scuttle out the door and home to her own healthy toddler, who only screamed every now and then, and usually for intelligible reasons. But she could see somebody had to do something, and there didn’t seem to be anybody else. She could hardly even think about the manuscript. It was hard, when a baby was crying, to think about anything else.

  “Is she gassy, maybe?” Jane persisted.

  Olen shook his head blankly, as though he didn’t understand the language she was speaking.

  Did she miss her mother? That was the question that hung in the air, the question Jane couldn’t bring herself to ask. She spoke quietly to Olen, trying to direct her voice under the baby’s cries rather than yelling over them. “Listen,” she said. “There are lots of reasons that babies cry. Maybe she’s teething. Maybe she’s just overtired.”

  “She’s overtired!” he said.

  “I could hold her, if you want,” Jane offered. “I’d be happy to. And you could try to get some sleep.”

  He shook his head. It was clear he was afraid to let the baby go. She was all he had, after all: all he had left.

  “How about this,” Jane said. “There must be a drugstore nearby. Why don’t I go pick up a few things, and when I get back, you let me try them.” She felt that something had to be done, that almost anything would be better than nothing.

  Slowly he nodded. “I guess,” he said.

  It was a relief to be out of the house, away from the noise and the mess. The hazy summer morning smelled of cut grass and, distantly, of manure. Jane got in her car, turned it around, and drove slowly down the street. Again she was tempted to keep on going, to drive right home and leave Greg Olen to his misery, but instead she turned at the corner onto the street where he had said she would find a drugstore.

  Jane had always liked drugstores, the way they were crowded with such an odd assortment of things. Medicines and greeting cards: what did they have to do with each other? Toothbrushes and candy, cosmetics and laxatives. Surely cigarettes did not belong in the same store that filled prescriptions for Taxol. She cruised past the supplements aisle—garlic tablets and Saint-John’s-wort and bee pollen extract—thinking of Masha dispensing King of Denmark’s drops to her sick children. Tinctures of medicinal grasses, water sweetened with jam. Had they really come back to this after a hundred years?

  Back at the house, she went in without knocking and followed the sound of crying up the stairs to the baby’s room: cheap white crib, an old rocking chair, dust bunnies, the powerful smell of old diapers. Dirty clothes and towels lay damply on the rug. Olen had laid the baby in the crib and now stood watching her while she screamed and flailed, trying to shove a tiny snot-covered fist into her mouth. Jane came over and stood beside him. Then, boldly, she reached into the crib and laid her hand against the baby’s cheek. Olen looked at her, but he didn’t try to stop her.

  The baby was warm, but not burning up. Not a fever, Jane was pretty sure. Or if it was, not a bad one. Not meningitis, for instance, or pneumonia.

  “Hush,” Jane said, stroking the child’s head. She eased her finger into the screaming mouth, probed the gums. Startled, the baby quieted for a moment and bit down fiercely on Jane’s finger. Jane could feel the nubs of teeth ready to push through on both the top and the bottom. She pressed hard, and the baby moaned and sucked.

  “What did you do?” Olen demanded in the sudden quiet, caught between relief and alarm.

  “She’s teething, I think,” Jane said. “Poor thing!” She felt calm and sure of herself. She knew infinitely more about babies than he did.

  “How can you tell?” Olen
asked.

  She took his big hand and guided it into the baby’s mouth, pushing his finger against his daughter’s gums and the ridged enamel just beneath the surface. “Rub them. Babies like the pressure.”

  He did as she said. The baby stopped squirming and stayed quiet. Olen looked at Jane with newfound respect and suspicion, as though she had clapped her hands and made it rain.

  Jane produced the bottle of infant Tylenol she’d bought, undid its complicated wrappings, filled the eye dropper. “Have you ever given her medicine before?”

  He shook his head.

  “This is how you do it. Watch.”

  She lifted the baby out of the crib and sat in the rocker with the child on her lap, a powerful, unexpected feeling of tenderness washing over her—she was so tiny, and her skin was so soft. She bounced Caroline on her lap for a minute and touched her small fist. Then she laid her across her knees and went to work, holding the head in place with her left hand and pinning her arms and legs. Caroline began to scream again. Quickly, Jane took the eye dropper and squeezed the medicine into the back of the baby’s mouth. The baby screeched in protest, then swallowed. Jane sat her up and gave her back to Olen. “Teething rings are good. You can put them in the freezer; the cold helps soothe the pain. Or you can take a washcloth, soak it in water, and freeze it. Let her chew on that.” She handed him a tube of teething gel she’d bought. “Rub this on her gums every now and then.”

  The baby was still crying, but more quietly now. Olen held her in one arm and rubbed her gums with the other. Thirty seconds later she was asleep. The silence was a miracle, like the wind dropping after a hurricane. Olen laid her back in the crib, where she sighed deeply and settled herself into the mattress. He pulled a blanket over her, and they left the room.

  The living room, although dusty, was neat, suggesting Olen had been avoiding it. The samovar, tarnished now to a foggy gray, still sat high on top of the crowded bookshelf, and Susannah’s pictures still hung nearby on the wall, warm with watery, colored light. Jane saw Greg’s eyes go to them and then look quickly away. He sank onto the couch. Jane sat opposite him on a chair.

  “I didn’t know about the teeth,” Olen said.

  “I have a toddler,” Jane said. “I’ve been through it.”

  “Susannah took care of all those kinds of things.” Olen kept his voice carefully neutral, as though they were discussing a distant mutual acquaintance.

  “There are books,” Jane offered. “Lots of books about taking care of children.”

  “Yes,” he said dully. “I think Susannah had one, or some.” He lapsed again into tired silence.

  “Listen,” Jane said after a few minutes. “I can go now, if you want me to. I can come back another time. You said there was something you wanted to talk about, but I guess it can probably wait.”

  He rubbed his eyes, rubbed his stubble with his palms, and then sat forward, his hands clasped between his knees. “Now is fine,” he said. “I wanted to talk to you about the manuscript.”

  Jane waited. Her heart squirmed and wriggled in her chest.

  “Since Susannah—” He stopped and then started again, his voice harsher this time and more determined. “Since Susannah died, it seems clearer to me than ever that I have to hold on to what I have. Keep things for Caroline. Whatever is left to keep.” He looked hard at Jane, and she nodded. “That Sigelman is very persistent,” he said. “He also has a lot of money.”

  Jane waited.

  “Susannah didn’t like him, though. When he came here to talk to me about the papers. Not that she cared one way or the other about the papers themselves. Susannah always laughed at what she called my obsession with my family. With the past. Old stuff, relics, junk, that was what she said it was.” He watched Jane carefully as though looking for any sign that she agreed with Susannah, but of course Jane didn’t agree.

  “It’s your heritage. As you said.”

  “She liked you,” Greg said. “Actually. She thought you were okay. You must have said something she liked, I don’t know what, but she said why didn’t I let you look at the junk, if you wanted to.” Greg passed his hand over his face and looked over Jane’s shoulder toward the window, open to the oppressive afternoon.

  “Greg,” Jane said, “you decide whatever you decide—that’s fine. But if you do want, or need, to sell the papers, I’d guess a library might buy them from you. Maybe even the Newberry, where most of the Karkov papers already are. Maybe not for as much as Sigelman would give you. But you don’t need to accept the first offer you get.”

  Greg slumped lower on the couch, cracking his knuckles. He looked even more tired, if that were possible. His skin was ashen and his whole body seemed to sag, limbs heavy, muscles slack, as though gravity were stronger on his side of the room. At last he pushed himself up off the couch with a great effort and ran his hands through his shorn hair. “Wait,” he told her. He crossed the room, almost stumbling with fatigue. Jane watched him go out the door, listened to his slow footsteps climb the stairs. She remembered the last time she was here, when he had gone away for a very long time and she had sat in this room holding the sleeping baby above whom fate had hovered invisibly with its knife.

  This time he was gone only a minute or two. When he came back, he was holding a carton that, according to the legend on the side, had once held Crawford’s Best pork sausages. He set it down on the coffee table. “I decided what I want to do,” he said. “I pretty much decided before I wrote to you, but I wanted to see you again to make sure. I’m keeping the papers—fuck the libraries—but I’ll let you look at them. You can see them now, and you can come back later and look at them some more. I imagine you’ll want to take notes and stuff.”

  “Oh!” Jane said. “Thank you!” Her sudden joy seemed very wrong in this house of grief.

  He waved her thanks away. “I’m going upstairs to lie down,” he said. He turned and left the room again, leaving Jane alone with the box.

  She waited until his footsteps had stopped. Then she knelt on the floor and pulled the carton to her.

  Inside, there was paper, lots of paper. Thin, brittle, yellow sheets smelling of dust and age—sheaves of it, thick with ink. They crackled in Jane’s fingers as she lifted a handful and scanned the top sheet with greedy eyes. Here was Masha’s handwriting, familiar as an old friend, only more cramped than it was in the diaries. It was more slanted, too, scratchier and splotched with blots, as though her pen had pressed heavily at the same time as it raced along. Here were crossings-out—words, phrases, entire paragraphs slashed, new ones scribbled in the margins, between the lines, wherever empty space could be found. Jane ran her finger across a page as though it were written in Braille, feeling the warped, dry texture of it, like dead leaves.

  Masha, she thought. Are you here?

  There she sat on the floor, the work of one dead woman in her lap, that of another looking down on her from the walls. Upstairs, their survivors slept the deep, urgent sleep of the exhausted, while inside Jane a new creature stretched and bobbed in its saltwater cocoon. One day Jane herself would join the ranks of the mourned and moldering dead, but not yet. Not yet. Life loomed before her, steep and shadowy. She leafed through the pages of Masha’s novel, too excited to read them carefully, wondering what else, if anything, she might find here.

  At the bottom of the box, there was a letter, dated June 12, 1884. It read:

  Grisha,

  It is long past midnight, but I cannot sleep. The baby heaves and lurches inside me. I can feel its desperation, its sense of being locked up in darkness. It is longing to get out into the world where the sun shines and the flowers drink up its rays, and pale green seedlings, the sickly color of cabbage worms, transform themselves into radiance.

  I think it will go badly with me. The child, like any parasite, will tear me apart to reach the light. I find I have some things I want to say to you first.

  Grisha, do you remember those days long ago in Moscow, in my parents’ house? The grand s
taircase, the carpets, the chandelier dangling from the painted ceiling. I remember, as a girl, waiting impatiently for the days you would come and talk with Papa—the air of life that used to sweep into the house when you came in, and the way your laughter rang along the halls. The way you smiled at me when I came downstairs to listen to the talk, me just eleven or twelve then with my big staring eyes and my skinny girl’s body—so much like a boy’s body, really. Me with my adoration.

  Was that truly us? Is my memory correct? Or is it rather a dream, a spun-sugar fantasy bodying forth from my imagination the way those feverish, vivid pictures swirled around me as I lay on the cold floor of the Feska church? Never have I had dreams like those, Grisha, dreams of what I—or someone like me—might have done in another life. A holy woman, a woman filled up with God! A woman walking the roads, healing the sick, whereas all I do is lie in my cold, carved bed, my body swollen with a helpless creature conceived in what I think of more as an act of will than of love. If you read the scribbled sheets below, you will see what I’m referring to.

  This life has not been the life I imagined when I was young. Well, nor has yours been, I expect. Maybe you wish you had married a stupider woman—a woman easier to fool anyway—who wouldn’t have guessed what you were up to when you went out with your gun and came back only with that look on your face—dumb relief mixed with anger. I used to think the anger was born of shame, but lately I don’t think that’s it. I think you’re just angry.

  How often I have hated you for marrying me! Hated myself for not being what you wanted, even as I loved you—love you still!—have loved you ever since I was that foolish, dreamy, headstrong girl. God knows I have tried not to, but it seems I might as well try not to breathe.

  Of course you have given me the children.

  And then there are your books, which I loved and later resented. I resented you for that rapt, private look on your face when you were deep in the writing, and for how you used me the way a painter uses a shivering model. Still, it has been an education.