Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman Read Online Free PDF Page A

seemed to offer permission of one sort or another. I got off the phone and hurried to my appointment.
    When I saw Gordon Skeetling a few days later, he did not wear the sweater I’d pictured. His hair was gray, thick, and straight—floppy—but his face was young, with inquiring, surprised blue eyes under black eyebrows that came to points. He was fifty, I guessed, a thin, rangy guy in a striped shirt and no tie, with long arms that often stretched sideways—toward a light switch, a coat hanger, a chair. He wore no wedding ring. Two desks stood in his big office—the main room of an old brownstone—but he was alone.
    â€œI’m one of those Yale people who doesn’t get tenure and doesn’t get fired,” he said, showing me around. “I got a grant and talked myself into an office, more than twenty years ago, and I’m good at finding money, so I’ve been here ever since. They’re a little ashamed of me because cities mean grubby, but they keep me because I locate my own funding. Mostly, I work on small cities, humdrum problems. I’m a researcher. I find things out for people who want to know them.”
    â€œNew Haven?”
    â€œSometimes New Haven. When Yale is accused of ignoring the inner city, they trot me out and I talk about research I did on public schools, or a study of prenatal care in low-income areas. That one, I worked with the medical school.”
    I felt the sense of permission I’d had on the phone—Gordon Skeetling gave it and had it—which surely is the opposite of arrogance, though he’d called himself a snob. I liked the thought of this man with long arms, unintimidated by Yale, who casually grabbed money and used it for some slightly confusing purpose. Gordon Skeetling found himself funny but wasn’t bitter, though he’d kept a job into middle age that probably wasn’t the one he’d imagined. Enjoying the permission, I said, “Did you think you’d do something else, twenty years ago?”
    â€œI don’t remember!” he said, waving his right arm, with apparent pleasure in his capacity to forget. “I have a law degree,” he said, “but I never practiced.”
    He led me to his archive—the mess that had brought us together—which was behind French doors, in a side room that had windows, because this row house was at the end of the row. The archive had once been a dining room or library. When I saw it, I sighed happily and stretched out my own arms as if to claim it, exaggerating the gesture to show that I too could make fun of my enthusiasms, that I had enthusiasms as remarkable as his.
    It was a colorful mess. Color matters. It was orderly but not too orderly. Extremely straight piles of accumulated artifacts make me uneasy, but these were rough piles in red, blue, green, yellow, and purple folders. There were heaps of folded maps, and the walls were covered with maps pasted to poster board in a nice, amateurish way: maps of Waterbury, Connecticut; Waterville, Maine; Worcester, Massachusetts; New Brunswick, New Jersey. New Haven. I said, “I’m glad New Haven counts.”
    â€œNew Haven counts. You like New Haven?”
    â€œI do.”
    â€œSo do I,” he said.
    Some maps were framed and properly hung. Others were propped against the wall, with still others behind them.
    â€œWhat’s in the folders?” I said.
    He shrugged. “Clippings, pamphlets, studies, offprints. Rules and regulations. Statutes and ordinances. No person shall keep a goat in the city of . . .”
    One wall held books and shelves of black boxes. On a table I saw posters and placards that Gordon Skeetling probably stole, warnings not to park because of construction, parades, street sweeping, leaf sweeping, snow plowing. A long table was covered with stacks of newspapers. Although he now worked alone, he said, over the years he’d sometimes had interns or assistants.