Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman

by Alice Mattison

  The next police officer to be murdered, some years later, was Irish. Again the book quoted the Register: “In consequence of the inequities practiced in the Fair Street, Italian quarter of the city, Policeman Hugh McKeon, a stalwart member of the New Haven Police . . . [was] the victim of the bullets of a dwarfed specimen of the Italian race.” Andrea Laudano, who’d been running “a house of ill repute,” shot the policeman three times when the cop broke the door down to stage a raid.

  By 1915 the witnesses to the murder of another police officer had Jewish names, and an officer was killed in 1935 by a burglar with a Polish name. Poles seemed to figure in the next murder as well; one of them, known as the Eel, escaped from prison. Near the end of the book, though it doesn’t say so, the perpetrators are probably black—to judge from the names and addresses—while the police officers are Italian. And the last murder described, of an undercover agent who posed as a bookmaker, seemed pretty clearly to be the killing of a black police officer.

  I was asking around for the names of urban sociologists, looking for someone who’d talk about New Haven’s ethnic history and how it connected to murder. I was also looking for a psychiatrist. I wanted to know about New Haven’s murders, but I also wanted to know about murder: how it feels to do it, why people do it, and how they sometimes get away with it. I didn’t like thinking about Marie Valenti because I didn’t know what to do with my knowledge, and couldn’t talk to Gordon about it, and I didn’t like thinking about Pekko’s disapproval. I hadn’t told him about the conference. I wasn’t afraid to have an argument with him, but I was afraid to think he might be right, that if anybody ever heard of my conference, it would be one more reason people I met outside New Haven might ask why on earth I lived there.

  Uncomfortable learning about Marie Valenti, I went searching for information about the murder of Penney Serra, another young woman killed in the seventies. One day I went to the public library to read about the murder itself. I thought the newspaper article at the time of her death would have huge headlines, but sitting in the library basement, trying to work a balky microfilm viewer, I took a while to find the story. I struggled with flapping plastic tape and reels that spun too slowly or too fast, then first came upon not the news story but the death notice. “Suddenly in this city July 16, 1973 . . .” Shaken, I continued looking. Another rattle of the machinery and I found the story, not a big headline—all the big headlines that month were about Nixon—but a story in the lower left-hand corner of the first page, police seek motive in garage slaying. Penney Serra, age twenty-one, had gone downtown looking for a job. She was found dead in a stairwell on the top level of the garage, which was fairly new then—one of those gray concrete, cavernous things; I remember wondering, when I first drove into it, if it could hold up so many cars. She had no reason to be at the top level. Her shoes were in the front seat of her car, and her purse was in the backseat. She’d been stabbed once in the chest, and also in the right hand: that brave child had been fighting back, and reading about that wound, I saw the girl—her useless, reflexive grab at the hand with the knife.

  Ellen, in a white T-shirt with a low neckline, walked with her usual hesitation into the bedroom, where I was sitting on the floor amid piles of clothing. She’d left me to talk on the phone; lately, that happened. For the first time, as she paused, watching me, her tentativeness pleased me. Ellen and I now worked together more easily. She still believed that objects own their present locations, or that people who had long forgotten them have a claim that they be well-treated. She argued, but now she was occasionally willing to lose. I guess she’d decided that I too had some respect for the ancient leaseholds of things. We stacked stuff in piles, room after room. Her house was turning into the worst sort of clutter museum, the organized sort.

  She lowered herself to a squat beside me, lightly touching my shoulder—a support—on the way down. In her absence I’d continued folding and piling. We were in a back bedroom used for storage of the children’s old clothes and of papers and notebooks Ellen had been accumulating all her life. She had so many bedrooms, she could do this sort of thing.

  Then she said, “Daisy, are you by any chance having an affair?”

  “No,” I said, too quickly. “Why?”

  “Nothing. Well, the man I’m seeing—you know, he’s another castaway. My brother made me see him. He knows my brother.”

  “Your brother left him here, and you’re too nice to throw him away?” I said, hoping to confirm this change of subject.

  “He’s married.”

  “Your brother made you go out with a married man?”

  We were making no pretense at working. “He’s here for a few months, installing computer software for a bank. I was supposed to help him figure out New Haven. We met for lunch, and I brought him here and fucked him.”

  “That doesn’t seem like the sort of thing you’d do,” I said.

  “I never did before. I’m working on not falling in love with him. It’s such a reversal for me—I get handed things nobody wants, and I keep them. Now I’m trying not to want this guy, and of course his wife does want him. She’ll take him back.”

  “Maybe not.” I stood up and stretched, then flexed my feet to get the kinks out. “These patterns hold,” I said. “You’re the drop-off center. I don’t think there’s anything you can do about it.”

  “What I want to know,” Ellen said from the floor, “is—my God, Daisy, you’re using my house for something. If it’s an affair, you could help me. I’ll continue to pay you for your time, if that’s what you want.”

  There was a chair in the room, and I stopped doing half-remembered ballet steps and sat down. “Paid friendship?” I said, taking things one at a time, carefully.

  “Whatever you want.”

  “Do you think I’m like that?”

  “Someone who’d have an affair?”

  “No,” I said, thinking of my radio series, “someone who takes money to listen.”

  “A therapist?” said Ellen.

  “Never mind. I’m not a therapist, and I’m not having an affair.”

  “One of my neighbors saw you bring a man here.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Gordon Skeetling. I’m organizing his papers.” I told her quickly who he was and how I’d come to work with him. “It’s where I saw the headline about the two-headed woman,” I finished. Then I added, “Gordon and I were on our way to the library. I wanted to—” I hesitated, trying to think of something I’d legitimately want to do in her house, in her absence, that would justify bringing Gordon in. “He loves old houses. I shouldn’t have done it.

  I just gave him a bit of a tour. I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, that’s all right,” Ellen said. “Did he like it? What did he think of the mess?”

  “He liked the way the dining room windows look out at the backyard,” I said.

  “So you’re not in love with him?”

  “I’m not in love with him.” It wasn’t a lie. I felt wonderful as I said the words, not because I was misleading Ellen, which did make me uncomfortable, but because as I spoke I felt totally at ease about Gordon. I loved being with him, I loved going to bed with him—and we were going to do that only once more—but I didn’t love him, I wasn’t going to love him, and therefore I was free and in charge. What I like is power. Who doesn’t? But if it was that good—if I was that free—I didn’t need to stop at five sexual encounters, did I? I was too wary of myself to abandon discretion entirely, but as Ellen chattered I decided I could add another five, which meant I had six more altogether. What good news.

  Then my discomfort about what Ellen had said made me want to appease her, so I told her about the murder conference, and how Pekko would object if he knew. At some point we calculated how much time had elapsed since we’d stopped working, and I said I’d stop charging her then. When I was finished talking, Ellen said she had something to show me, and it was several shoe boxes of clippings and flyers from 1970, from the time of the New Haven trial of Bobb
y Seale and Ericka Huggins. New Haven’s most famous murder, the execution of Black Panther Alex Rackley, took place in 1969, before I came to town. Two local men did time for that murder, but Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins—nationally known revolutionaries—were acquitted of masterminding it. One of those convicted, imprisonment decades behind him, was now a respected counselor to former prisoners, running a New Haven program. He was on the list of speakers I planned to invite to the conference. (“Your murderer,” Gordon said. “Of course you need one actual murderer.”)

  “I can’t tell Pekko,” I said, as Ellen and I looked through the boxes. “Where did you get this?”

  “I was very interested, at the time. You can borrow it. But I’d tell him, if I were you, Daisy. I couldn’t think clearly about something as big as a conference unless I talked about it at home. And eventually he’ll know all about it. It’s open to the public, right?”

  At the time of the Bobby Seale trial, Ellen had demonstrated on the green, a young girl taking days off from college (Smith, an hour and a half away) to come home and participate in riots. She’d stayed at this house—her parents’ house—while they argued with her. Ellen couldn’t stop telling me the story, which was more about her parents than about the Black Panthers. But that was all right.

  I left her house, eventually, feeling that restless emotion that makes you know there’s undone business. It’s like sitting opposite a drawer that’s slightly open, with a bra strap hanging out of it. You have to get up, stuff it in, and close the drawer—but for me, the appeal is in not getting up. I don’t get up for a long, long time. I like the slightly sick feeling of uneasy anticipation. I like to keep bad things from happening, while preserving the feeling. Now Pekko mustn’t know about the conference or Gordon, and Ellen mustn’t know what I did in her house. Yet I knew I’d keep on risking conversations with both of them, nearly telling, wondering if they’d guessed.

  I took Ellen’s boxes, with thanks, and drove straight to Gordon’s office, so I could leave them there. Gordon was on the phone. “What was the name of that kid—the girl who got killed? The famous murder?” he called as I passed, apparently not surprised to see me, his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone.

  “Suzanne Jovin.”

  “No, a long time ago.”

  “Penney Serra,” I said.

  “No, the other one. The high school kid. On the green.”

  “Marie Valenti.”

  “What year?”

  “1976.”

  “Unsolved, right?”

  “Right.” I went into the archive and waited until he got off the phone, though I could have put my boxes on a table and walked right past and out again. “Marie Valenti,” I heard him say. There followed half sentences and mumbles, while I looked out the window at nothing, irritated that he was taking so long but not knowing why it mattered.

  When he hung up he said, “I did something good. That was the state forensics expert. I told him we’d do a whole morning on Marie Valenti, and he agreed to come. Maybe we’ll solve it. We can put together everything anybody ever knew or said.”

  “Did he work on it?”

  “No, the original guy is dead. But he’s aware of it, and he’s willing to spend some time on it.”

  “Let’s not,” I said. “I thought this was my conference.”

  “Of course we will!” Gordon said. “Why not? It’s a great idea. Tell me if I’m wrong. He’d be a terrific speaker. I worked hard to get him interested.”

  “I think not,” I said.

  “Of course we will,” said Gordon.

  I have a red, two-piece bathing suit, and I began carrying it in my purse, stuffed into a plastic bag, after Gordon and I swam off the shore near his house one day in late June. The water was cold. On some days, though I spent time in Gordon’s office, I didn’t have a use for the suit. Other afternoons, we might look at each other and start figuring out how long to work before leaving. Under the water, he’d work my bathing suit bottom down and, his trunks lowered, stroke me with his penis. Or I’d straddle and squeeze his bent knee. The cold water kept him from having enough of an erection to enter me then, but later we’d fuck vigorously in the still sunniness of his bedroom. I stopped counting our meetings, stopped planning to end the affair on schedule. It would be humiliating to form a resolve and abandon it; letting the future take care of itself seemed alert and mature. I was no longer some fool who thought occasions in bed should be numbered.

  Swimming isn’t easy to keep secret. At night my bathing suit would be a sodden lump in its plastic bag. I didn’t consider leaving it at Gordon’s. Why not, I ask myself now, as I write. Did I fear that another woman would see it drying helplessly over the towel rod? Did I think that he’d blackmail me with it, or that I’d end the affair between visits and lose my swimsuit? If you’d asked me, I’d have said I wanted it in case I chose to swim when I wasn’t with Gordon, although a woman can buy a second bathing suit. I didn’t want to leave it in his power.

  I’d be too cheerful after swimming, cooled and refreshed within, with the tang of salt on my tongue or in my nose despite a shower. Pekko isn’t a curious man, but he’s sensitive, and something in my freshness would appeal to him. He’d often approach me himself the night after I’d been with Gordon. So I’d learn again why I needed both: my husband with his reliable, almost workmanlike attitude toward sex, and my lover, who fucked exuberantly and originally, talking all the time (often not about me or what we were doing), and who seemed eager not so much to please as to interest me.

  “Here’s this breast,” Gordon might say. “What shall I do with this breast? Hmm?” He’d listen to know if I was in suspense.

  We didn’t go to Ellen’s house now, though I sensed that she was encouraging me to use it, to leave my affair there as others left their detritus, and I understood that her role in collecting other people’s leavings was not entirely passive. We didn’t go to Ellen’s, and of course it was better at Gordon’s. We’d drive in separate cars because Gordon was generally done with work for the day. Even if he planned to return, I still took my Jetta. I’d learned the route quickly. Driving there was delicious: taking myself to my lover. And driving home was delicious, too. I liked to depart just a moment or two before he might think I would, sometimes while he was in the shower, or dressing. I’d make him kiss me good-bye shoeless, one sock on a foot, the other in his hand.

  One night Pekko and I had a late supper of take-out Buffalo chicken wings and celery spears from Archie Moore’s, a few blocks from our house. As we ate, a long-awaited thunderstorm began. Leaving our food on the table, we sat watching the rain and lightning from the top step of our tiny front porch, while Arthur stood behind us, nuzzling our backs and licking our ears. When the rain touched us, we moved inside, and I cleared the table in a desultory way.

  “So are you still working with Skeetling?” Pekko said, emptying bones into the garbage. “I saw him at Clark’s Pizza.”

  “Did you talk?”

  “Just waved.”

  “I’m still working with him.”

  “Just clearing his trash out? You’re not doing a presentation about murder, are you?”

  “Well, I am,” I said. I put our plates into the dishwasher, then sat down, pressing my feet into the floor. The thunder had diminished, and I could hear that the rain had increased. Nothing tentative about that rain.

  Pekko stood in the doorway. “You said you’d keep me informed.”

  “I couldn’t think if I kept you informed,” I said. “Once you start giving your opinion, it’s like a casual chat about sex with the Pope.” But it was a mistake to mention sex when Gordon’s name had just been spoken. “Or a conversation with a vegetarian about how to cook steak,” I said.

  “Is it radio?”

  “A conference. At Yale. Not until October. Nobody will know about it except a bunch of desiccated academics.”

  “Not likely. What’s the topic, New Haven: Murder Capital of America?”

  “No.
It’s about murder in small cities. New Haven is only one example.”

  “Which makes a difference?”

  “Pekko,” I said, “what do you want? Even the chamber of commerce doesn’t advocate censorship.”

  “I’m not in favor of censorship, I’m against sensationalism,” he said. “This is scholarly sensationalism.”

  I was angry. “You give me no credit for sense, no credit for decency, no credit for intelligence” was one of my comments. He sat down on the old, faded sofa and fell silent. I washed angry words over him with the speed and intensity of the rain, describing, for example, a panel discussion we planned on perceptions of murder in New Haven—the difference between what happened and what people assumed happened. We’d be counteracting sensationalism,

  I said.

  After a while, feeling safer if I mentioned Gordon impersonally, I began to complain about him. I had plenty of disagreements with him by now. I wanted to include in the conference a discussion of killings by police, including the shooting of Malik Jones, the young black man who’d been killed by an East Haven cop after a chase into New Haven. Gordon said I was losing my focus. Many people considered that killing unjustified, but it was not usually described as murder.

  “It’s a different topic,” Gordon had said that morning with barely suppressed sarcasm, so his words came out as condescending baby talk. “It’s a different . . . topic.” As I summarized the incident to Pekko, I realized I’d been accused of stupidity by each man. Pekko had become silent, sitting with his arms crossed, looking thicker in the midsection than he ordinarily does, leaning back. Sometimes when he does that it’s kindness at work, an offer to take on your troubles, but at other times he’s a police detective, unobtrusively running the tape recorder while you convict yourself. At last I stopped. The rain had lessened, but new weather hadn’t come in. The air felt lighter but moist and warm.