Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman

by Alice Mattison

  “Sometimes I know,” he said. “Your little Denny Ring, the supposed druggie. He was murdered.”

  “Denny was murdered?” I said.

  “Dennis Ring was murdered. I can’t prove it, but I know it. He was not taking drugs—not then. He did not inject himself with an overdose. People knew he was living in the store, and he talked too much. He was a courier who knew names and talked a lot, and somebody decided to inject him with an overdose. That’s how he died.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I knew before it happened. I tried to stop it. I went to people who knew and tried to stop it.”

  “So what is your point?” I said through sobs. “Why are you telling me this? You know about every murder in the city of New Haven forever? You go around with all these secrets, just to make yourself feel good?”

  “Nobody could prove it. There was no reason to ruin my life, talking about it. I’m sorry I made you cry, Daisy. My point is that it’s more complicated than you know—more complicated than Skeetling knows.”

  I pushed my plate of meatballs aside and dropped my head on my arms to cry. I’d done nothing to help Denny, all those years ago. I could do nothing for anyone. I cried for his solitude, alone with a murderer. Denny was almost always alone. That was why he was irresistible. He told me no secrets—though he talked all the time—and I told him none. I never had a phone number for him. He didn’t even clutter my address book. “My conference isn’t bad,” I said finally, “even if the people talking don’t know everything. Even then.”

  “Let’s go home and walk Arthur,” Pekko said. “I’m sorry. I should have told you years ago, or kept my mouth shut.”

  The leaves were turning and falling now, and our feet crushed leaves as we walked, with Arthur pulling to the left and right, sniffing, pissing on piles of leaves. The night was breezy, and the leaves on the trees were dry enough now to rustle. I had put on a heavy sweater when we stopped at the house for Arthur, and I pulled the sleeves down over my hands. We walked through Goatville to East Rock Park, and along the path at the edge of College Woods. The moon was out, and it was easy to see. We didn’t talk. I thought of Denny, times I’d been in this park with him. He liked to sit on the swings. He liked what he called “kid things.” When I too sat on the swings one night, Denny said, “You’re like a kid in some ways, Daisy, but not in my way.”

  “How am I like a kid?” I said.

  “You’re by yourself.”

  “Kids aren’t by themselves,” I protested. “They’re surrounded. Family, teachers . . .”

  “You felt surrounded because you were all by yourself,” Denny said as we swung—sometimes parallel, sometimes one up, one down or one forward, one back. “When I was a kid, I didn’t feel surrounded. I felt with people.”

  “But now you’re alone.”

  “Not the way you are.”

  “You’re the most alone person I know!” I said, all those years ago.

  Now Pekko and I sat down on a bench. A few years ago, workers took out trees and installed two benches at a place on the path where the river turns. The view is surprisingly grand—even in the dark—as the river comes toward you. We sat until I was cold. Pekko talked about a dog he’d had as a boy, who ran away. He stroked Arthur, who wouldn’t have run away but was firmly attached to his leash. We stood up. “I shouldn’t have told you, lovey,” he said.

  “I’m not perfect, either,” I said but gave no details.

  When we got home, it was too late for the news—we’d have to trust that there was nothing new and big—not in New York, Washington, or Afghanistan—and we went to bed quickly. I fell asleep while Pekko was still brushing his teeth.

  So I slept late and had to hurry in the morning, but it’s only a short drive from my house to the Yale building where the conference was held. I glanced at the Times; although people were worried about anthrax cases in Florida and New York, nothing significant had happened since the day before. I heard a weather forecast and one song while driving to the conference. When I reached the lobby of the building where we’d held most of our sessions, the caterer was setting out rows of muffins on trays, and a few early participants, talking together with cups of coffee in their hands, were eyeing them. A man squatted near the wall, the Times open in front of him.

  I answered a question the caterer put to me. The door crashed open behind me, and I knew it was Gordon from the urgency of the sound. When I turned he was standing still, squinting in the dim light, but then he came toward me swiftly. He had a newspaper under his arm, and I could see that it was the New Haven Register, a paper he ordinarily bypassed. “Guilty to making it happen. Not guilty to making it happen today,” he said. He seemed excited—happy—but a little uncomfortable.

  “What?”

  “Haven’t you seen the paper?”

  I tried to remember if I’d seen a headline on my way over. I hadn’t passed a box. He handed it to me. I still was more interested in the moment his hand touched mine as he thrust the newspaper at me than in what he wanted to show me. Yet I also felt a peculiar, new discomfort—noting his discomfort—and some fear: had something unbearable happened, too late for the Times? Then I had a sudden crazy thought that a decade late the newspaper was reporting the murder of Dennis Ring, young, white non–drug user, living in a frozen yogurt store that hadn’t existed for years and years.

  The headline announced the arrest of a suspect—Edmund Doyle, said the first sentence of the article—in the ancient Marie Valenti murder case.

  “I didn’t make it happen this way on purpose,” Gordon was saying. “It’s going to look like a cheap trick. Are you too busy counting muffins to talk for a minute about how we can work it in without making it seem cheap? Of course we have to include it. The worst thing—do you agree? Tell me if I’m wrong—would be to lead up to it and then announce it as a surprise. And I suppose it would backfire—somebody would have seen the paper and would bring it up too early.”

  “You went to the police?”

  “Well, of course I did. I don’t know why you didn’t. I don’t know why Pekko didn’t, long ago. Well, I suppose there was a certain loyalty there, but he could have made it happen without doing it himself. Maybe that’s why he told you. Maybe that’s what he wanted to do—make it happen without making it happen.”

  “No,” I said. I don’t think I’ve ever been less able to speak and make sense, but Gordon wasn’t listening. I didn’t ask myself whether somebody should have turned Edmund in. At the time all I took in was the difference I had made. What I had said—what had I said?—had made it possible for Edmund to be arrested.

  “But I didn’t know his last name,” I said.

  “Oh, that was easy. My contact said they had a list of everybody who’d been in school with her. But there was no reason to connect him, no more than any of the others. I guess there weren’t many Edmunds. Finding him was easy, once they knew.”

  The arrest had been made on the basis of fingerprints, which they had kept, of course. Edmund had been fingerprinted ten years ago for a job. That was long after the active search had ended.

  We’d walked through the corridor and into a stairwell. Time was passing. “So,” said Gordon, “I’m sorry if this isn’t what you had in mind. But I think the main thing right now is the morning session. What do you think?”

  “Did you mention Pekko?” I said. “Is Pekko going to be arrested?”

  “I did not mention Pekko. I said I had a friend who had a friend. I refused to give names, other than mine. Pekko won’t have to be a witness—unless he chooses to, of course.”

  I thought of Daphne’s house. If she recognized Edmund’s picture, she could turn Pekko in. Pekko had been Edmund’s teacher. It would be easy for the police to prove that Pekko knew Edmund, and not too hard to prove that he was sheltering Edmund. I didn’t know what the penalties were for obstructing justice, but I understood at last that because of what I had done, and because of Pekko’s unique notions of right and wrong, n
ot only could Edmund go to prison but maybe Pekko could as well.

  “But Edmund was doing good work. It was a single, terrible moment in his life. There was no point in ruining it now. What good will it do? Will it bring her back?”

  “Oh, Daisy, that’s nonsense, of course I had to turn him in. You’re proposing a totally chaotic legal system, in which everybody has his own philosophy and that’s how we make decisions.”

  “But didn’t you think of what it will be like for him, for his parents?”

  “I don’t think that way.” I stepped away from him, from his gray, floppy hair and his pointed, black eyebrows.

  “I have to leave,” I said.

  “We’re putting on an event here,” said Gordon.

  “I changed the catering order yesterday, so you’ll need a new invoice from her.” I touched Gordon’s sleeve and pulled my hand away. I gathered myself, my error-prone self. It was over. It was over. How could it be over? It was over. I couldn’t. I didn’t have to.

  “What? What?” Gordon shouted. “Where do you think you’re going? Daisy!”

  “I’m leaving,” I said. I did have to. I could turn around. I could walk.

  “And I suppose what we’ve had is meaningless to you?” he said.

  “No, it’s not,” I said. I turned around and touched the tiled wall, to push myself off, the way a swimmer pushes herself off from the side of the pool. I walked through the door to the lobby, and through the lobby, pretending not to hear a question someone called to me. I watched myself to see if I’d turn again, but I didn’t.

  Walking to my car, I was thinking of Daphne. I’d have to find Daphne and persuade her to keep her mouth shut. But Daphne was not going to be persuaded, and by talking to her I might let her know there was something to think about. I got into my car and drove through the downtown traffic, up Orange Street on that quiet morning, when nobody was out except women with strollers, old people going to the markets, and kids from Cross High School, with backpacks and baggy pants. I didn’t make the turn to my own street. I kept driving. Orange Street passes the high school and goes straight into East Rock Park, straight to the base of the hill—the hill of stones—and if you cross the river and turn left, which I did, passing the trail where I walked with Arthur, you can drive a loopy road under trees—lots of color just then—through woods and around the mountain, up to the top of East Rock, where there’s a parking lot, a Civil War monument, a place to look at New Haven and Long Island Sound, and meadows where families picnic on hot days. On a weekday morning in October, nobody was present. I did not jump off the cliff. I parked and sat on a bench and looked at the city below me, the lines of houses and trees, the bigger buildings downtown, the green, the water.

  I thought about what I’d learned at the conference. I’d learned that murder is dreadful, disgusting, and real. And appealing. I’d never murder anybody, but I did like to get rid of things, and maybe that was what had given me the nerve to get rid of my affair, which might as well have been stuffed into garbage bags and dropped off at the Salvation Army. My body seemed to have nothing inside it. I drove down the hill and stopped for coffee at Lulu’s. It was warm enough to sit outside in the sun, but the morning rush was over, and nobody I knew was there.

  As I write on my laptop at our kitchen table in the evening, in the hot, dry summer of 2002, Pekko walks in, coming from a meeting of a neighborhood group he belongs to. “Last month, in this area, no crime of any type was reported,” he says, leaning over to stroke Arthur, who has learned not to jump but is frantic with self-discipline and joy, seeing Pekko for the first time in two hours. “This month there were three break-ins. But the murder rate is the lowest in decades.”

  I drove to Ellen’s house. I knew she’d be at work, but I still had a key. I wanted to be in her house, with its intricate arrangement of uselessness. I wanted to walk from room to room and touch things, look at things. Instead of a dreary, cluttered house, it was now a zany, cluttered house. I saw she’d been busy yet again. The shrines to New York were giving way to other shrines, maybe shrines to complexity. A battered end table I hadn’t seen before held a collection of old kitchen utensils—ladles, tongs, tea strainers, wooden spoons. A shelf in the hall held more odd pieces of china than I remembered seeing there before. The floors were still mostly impassable. Soon dust would take over. Nobody could keep things clean here.

  I heard a key in the lock, and Ellen came in. I stepped forward and said her name, so she wouldn’t think I was a prowler. She started anyway. “I thought you were busy all week.”

  “I walked out of the conference.”

  “You left the play and the conference? What’s wrong with you?”

  “Different reasons.”

  “Did you come here today to meet Gordon Skeetling?”

  “No. That’s over,” I said.

  She looked doubtful, standing in the archway between the living and dining rooms, her pocketbook over her shoulder, confronting me as if she in her jacket were the visitor and I in my shirtsleeves dwelt there. She took off the jacket and put away the purse. “I came home for lunch, and to do a little crying,” she said.

  “Over the man?”

  “I don’t know. I’m still crying about the World Trade Center. Come in the kitchen and I’ll make lunch.”

  Ellen’s complicated house now constantly shifted meanings, as she did. As she walked through the rooms, the objects complemented and enlivened her indefiniteness, so I had the sense of someone whose surroundings matched her, but in a somewhat scary way. “Are you tired of living like this?” I said.

  “I’m tired of living,” said Ellen.

  “What should I do?”

  “Distract me with your story.”

  “Is that a suicide threat?”

  “No, I’m a mother.”

  “Some mothers do it.”

  “Not this one.”

  “Getting help?”

  “Getting help. Not to worry. Distract me, distract me,” she said.

  She’d distracted me, but now the heft of the morning’s events stopped my mouth. She seemed to know my story already, so I told it to her, told her the story I’ve been telling here, leaving out what she already knew—herself, the play—but including, without details, Pekko’s connection to Edmund and what had happened. This time, though I was sure that now I had before me someone I could trust, I swore her to secrecy before saying that Pekko had known all along who killed Marie Valenti. “It’s funny,” I said. “From the time I first met him, I knew there was a secret. Maybe that’s why I married him. I knew he knew something that everyone wanted to know.”

  “I won’t tell,” she said, and as far as I know she hasn’t, though if Pekko knew I’d told her, I can’t imagine what he’d think. Of course, that’s not all he doesn’t know. Or so I believe.

  As I spoke, Ellen took a container of eggs and a bunch of spinach from the refrigerator and made us an omelet, beating the eggs in a bowl she placed on the only bare spot on her counter. “Is Gordon why you gave up the play?” she said. “Because he might phone when you were at a rehearsal? I used to stay home, hoping Lou would call. It’s shameful.”

  “That’s an old-fashioned reason. I have a cell phone.” But Gordon never used it. He said he hated the sound of cell phones. He said there were gaps in my sentences.

  “Or because he thinks the play is stupid?”

  “It is stupid.”

  “In fact, it’s not,” said Ellen. “I wouldn’t be in it if it were.”

  “You let everything happen to you,” I said.

  I don’t remember everything Ellen said about the play, my inextricable connection to the play. She didn’t say that I’d be sorry because I’d hate my disloyalty, or that I’d be sorry because I’d miss my friends and their fun. She may have said the connection existed whether I wanted it or not. “Thea can’t leave Dora,” she may have said. “Dora can’t leave Thea.” After a while she became tedious. I waved her quiet, and left quickly.

&nbs
p; As I entered my house—after driving many miles up I-91, fast, into Massachusetts, then back, fretting against the traffic—I didn’t hear anything. I was glad Pekko wasn’t there. Arthur came to greet me as usual. I scratched behind his ears and grasped his big, black feet to lower him when he placed his paws on my chest. The mail was on the table. Pekko was home, or had been home. I heard a sound and climbed the stairs. A light was on in the bathroom, but the door was ajar. “Pekko?” I called.

  “I’m in the tub. Come in.”

  The bathtub is against the wall at a right angle to the door, so when I paused in the doorway he was looking straight at me. Uncomfortable—still in a jacket in the warm bathroom—I had to stop myself from reaching to outline the doorjamb with my fingers. Gordon’s gesture.

  “Did you turn him in, Daisy?” Pekko said. He had filled the tub as full as possible, and his thick limbs and stubby penis shifted and wavered under the water. His beard rested on its surface.

  For many miles I’d been planning this conversation. I don’t remember what I’d decided, but I told the truth. “No. Gordon Skeetling turned him in. But it was my fault. I told Gordon.”

  “I thought it was Daphne.”

  “Daphne knows?” I said.

  “I told her ten years ago. I never should have told anybody. I was sure it was Daphne when I saw the paper, but she came to the office to tell me she didn’t. She knew he stayed in the house sometimes. She said, ‘I know right from wrong.’ ”

  I stood silent for a long time. “So you figured I didn’t know right from wrong.”

  “I didn’t know what else to think. Nobody else knew.”

  “I’m sorry I told Gordon.”

  I waited for Pekko to ask why I did it—and I don’t know what I’d have said—but he didn’t. He sat silent in the tub, his arms under the water. He had no washcloth or soap. His face looked sweaty. The water must have been quite hot.

  In the car, I’d imagined putting my arms around him and saying “I’m sorry” into his neck, but hugging him when he was in the tub would have been ludicrous. Another woman might have knelt and put out her arms and gotten wet, but I didn’t.