I UNDID THE CRUMBLING RUBBER bands holding together the bundles of Jane’s letters as soon as I got back to New York. Many of them were written in ink, double-sided on onionskin. It would take me ages to decipher, but there she was. More of her than I ever dreamed still existed.
She was bold, witty, warm. “Can’t say I mind contemplating getting married. But then I also don’t mind contemplating the pizza I’m going to have when I get home,” she wrote to her parents from Movius’s excavation. There was so much of her, it overflowed to the back of the envelopes: she’d draw herself as a guinea pig holding the French flag, or she’d complain about licking the letter closed. “Pew! Peppermint-flavored envelopes.” Other times, she’d scrawl: “Greetings to the postman from Gay, Exotic Les Eyzies.”
There it all was. Jane, the summer after her sophomore year at college, congratulating her father on getting the job at Radcliffe. Report cards dating back to junior high school. A cartoon of Karl Heider, Elisabeth’s section leader, as a bird whose main attribute was “deceptive mating habits.”
Jane’s caption reads: “The Greater Fuzzy-Thinking Heider. Deceptive + not very benevolent. Peculiar mating habits. Call: uh, uh, well, uh.”
There was her parents’ collection of files on Jane’s murder: The UPI and the New York tabloid articles that I had come to know so well. The telegram that Boyd’s parents had sent him in Vietnam. His orders for emergency leave. The Needham Times funeral announcement. The signatures of the attendees at her funeral. Karl. Martie. Stephen and Eunice Williams. Jim Humphries. The Mitchells.
There were also the things I didn’t know to expect, like the package of Tepe Yahya articles that Karl had sent to Jane’s father just before Christmas 1979. And his cover letter that read: “Jane would have been pleased to see the importance of the work emerge; the more so as she would have become a major contributor to its success.” There were no hints as to how that exchange came to be. “If there is more I can do please call upon me. Warmest regards in this Christmas season,” Karl ended his letter. He had underlined her name in one of the articles he sent over.
I saved Jane’s letters for last. I wanted to study them in preparation for the meeting that Karl had promised me when I got back east.
I typed her letters as I read them. I loved the feeling of her words coming through my fingers. The letters had doubled as her diary entries—she told her parents to save them for her for that reason—and whatever her relationship to her parents may have been, she poured herself onto those pages. Perhaps the hunger for human contact on the digs had grown stronger than her worry about what she was revealing. It took me almost a week to type them all up, and it induced a somewhat hallucinatory state. I laughed out loud at her fifty-year-old jokes. I started writing my own emails like her. It felt a lot like love—a confusing mix of admiring her, devouring her, inhabiting her, emulating her, channeling her, and thinking I was her.
Dearest Muddah, Dahlink Faddah, here I am at—Verroia animal farm and how the Hell do I stop people calling me “Fangface”?
I wouldn’t want to do anything if I wasn’t going to do it very close to superbly.
Did I ever tell you after that amazing dinner Jim carried me across Russell Square…
Had a letter from Bwad (pre-Cal) who was going stir-crazy + helping me plot revenge on Franquemont (*which whole story may no one ever know, InshAllah) and I guess he has us both pegged, having said, “We may not be famous for running our lives very well, but nobody is gonna F___ WITH THE BRITTONS (wurf-wurf!)” The way I figure it, some people are natural predators + others are natural victims + we fall somewhere in between, not having the guts to be the first nor the humility of the second.
And then, in the middle of one of her 1965 letters, there was a reference to Jerry Roth, that mystery person whose untraceability had planted the seed for me that Jane might be an unreliable narrator. “In case my last letter missed you,” Jane wrote to her parents, “Jerry Roth is a geology major from Maine, son of Henry Roth who wrote ‘Call it Sleep.’”
The son of Henry Roth, not Philip Roth as Elisabeth and Boyd had remembered. Jane hadn’t been lying after all. It was just another detail lost in a game of telephone.
The feelings hit me in waves. At first, I was relieved that even if I could never know everything about her, some of her mysteries might have ends. I wrote to Boyd and Elisabeth. I knew they wondered, like I did, that if Jane had been lying about this, then what else wasn’t true? This fact put a stop to that erosion for me, and I hoped it might offer them the same peace.
But then relief turned into tremendous guilt. I had doubted Jane. We had all doubted Jane. We were quicker to blame her than to open ourselves up to the faultiness of our memory, and I realized that this wasn’t the only way that we had shifted the blame onto her. Even in the stories we told about what happened to her that night, in so many of the versions, Jane was the one at fault. She had an affair with Karl. She blackmailed someone. She angered someone.
Perhaps Jane’s story was a morality tale in more ways than I had realized. Not only did it serve as a narrative check on someone with power, like Karl, who was seen as transgressing, it was also a way of cautioning against promiscuous, assertive behavior from someone in Jane’s position: a female graduate student. Assigning guilt to the victim helped distance us from what happened to her; it wouldn’t happen to us, as long as we stayed in check. But in so doing, we had unconsciously been perpetuating a story whose moral derived from the very patriarchal system we thought we were surmounting by telling the story in the first place.
I’m sorry.