The Fourth Hand

by John Winslow Irving

  When Dr. Zajac asked her where she was from, Irma indignantly answered,

  “Boston!” Good for her! Zajac concluded. There is no patriotism like that of the grateful European immigrant. Thus Dr. Zajac would congratulate her on how good her English was, “considering,” and Irma would weep her heart out on the phone at night.

  Irma refrained from comment on the food the doctor bought every third Friday, nor did Dr. Zajac explain his instructions, every third Monday, to throw it all away. The food would simply be collected on the kitchen table—an entire chicken, a whole ham, fruits and vegetables, and melting ice cream—with a typewritten note: dispose of. That was all.

  It must be connected to his abhorrence of dogshit, Irma imagined. With mythic simplicity, she assumed that the doctor had a dispose-of obsession. She didn’t know the half of it. Even on his morning and evening runs, Zajac carried a lacrosse stick, a grown-up one, which he held as if he were cradling an imaginary ball.

  There were many lacrosse sticks in the Zajac household. In addition to Rudy’s, which was relatively toylike in appearance, there were numerous adult-size ones, in varying degrees of overuse and disrepair. There was even a battered wooden stick that dated from the doctor’s Deerfield days. Weaponlike in its appearance, because of its broken and retied rawhide strings, it was wrapped in dirty adhesive tape and caked with mud. But in Dr. Zajac’s skilled hands, the old stick came alive with the nervous energy of his agitated youth, when the neurasthenic hand surgeon had been an underweight but intensely accomplished midfielder. When the doctor ran along the banks of the Charles, the outmoded wooden lacrosse stick conveyed the readiness of a soldier’s rifle. More than one rower in Cambridge had experienced a dog turd or two whizzing across the stern of his scull, and one of Zajac’s medical-school students—formerly the coxswain of a Harvard eight-oared racing shell—claimed to have adroitly ducked a dog turd aimed at his head.

  Dr. Zajac denied trying to hit the coxswain. His only intention was to rid Memorial Drive of a notable excess of dogshit, which he scooped up in his lacrosse stick and flicked into the Charles River. But the former coxswain and medschool student had kept an eye out for the crazed midfielder after their memorable first encounter, and there were other oarsmen and coxswains who swore they’d seen Zajac expertly cradle a turd in his old lacrosse stick and fire it at them. It’s a matter of record that the former Deerfield midfielder scored two goals against a previously undefeated Andover team, and three goals against Exeter twice. (If none of Zajac’s teammates remembered him, some of his opponents did. The Exeter goalie said it most succinctly: “Nick Zajac had a wicked fucking shot.”)

  Dr. Zajac’s colleagues at Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink & Associates had also heard him decry the “utter silliness of participating in a sport while facing backward,” thereby documenting Zajac’s contempt for rowers. But so what? Aren’t eccentricities fairly common among overachievers?

  The house on Brattle Street resounded with warblers, like a woodland glen. The dining-room bay windows were spray-painted with big black X ’s to prevent birds from crashing into them, which gave Zajac’s home an aura of perpetual vandalism. A wren with a broken wing lay recovering in its own cage in the kitchen, where not long before a cedar waxwing with a broken neck had died—to Irma’s accumulating sorrows.

  Sweeping up the birdseed that was scattered under the songbirds’ cages was one of Irma’s never-ending chores; despite her efforts, the sound of birdseed crunching underfoot would have made the house an unwise choice for burglars. Rudy, however, liked the birds—the undernourished boy’s mother had heretofore refused to get him a pet of any kind—and Zajac would have lived in an aviary if he thought it would make Rudy happy, or get him to eat.

  But Hildred was so steadfastly conniving in tormenting her ex-husband that it was insufficiently satisfying for her to have reduced Zajac’s time with their son to a mere two days and three nights every month. And so, thinking she’d found a way to further poison their time together, she finally got Rudy a dog.

  “You’ll have to keep it at your father’s, though,” she told the six-year-old. “It can’t stay here.”

  The mutt, which came from some humane-society sort of place, was generously referred to as “part Lab.” Would that be the black part? Zajac wondered. The dog was a spayed female, about two years old, with an anxious, craven face and a squatter, bulkier body than that of a Labrador retriever. There was something houndlike about the way her upper lips were floppy and overhung her lower jaw; her forehead, which was more brown than black, was wrinkled by a constant frown. The dog walked with her nose to the ground, often stepping on her ears, and with her stout tail twitching like a pointer’s. (Hildred had got her in the hope that the abandoned mutt was a bird dog.)

  “Medea will be put to death if we don’t keep her, Dad,” Rudy solemnly told his father.

  “Medea,” Zajac repeated.

  In veterinary terms, Medea suffered from “dietary indiscretion”; she ate sticks, shoes, rocks, paper, metal, plastic, tennis balls, children’s toys, and her own feces. (Her so-called dietary indiscretion was definitely part Lab.) Her zeal for eating dogshit, not only her own, was what had prompted her former family to abandon her.

  Hildred had outdone herself in finding a dog on death row with habits that seemed certain to make her ex-husband insane, or more insane. That Medea was named for a classical sorceress who killed her own children was too perfect. Had the voracious part-Lab had puppies, she would have eaten them. What a horror it was for Hildred to discover that Dr. Zajac loved the dog. Medea searched for dogshit as assiduously as he did—they were kindred souls—and now Rudy had a dog to play with, which made him happier to see his father. Dr. Nicholas M. Zajac may have been a hand surgeon to the stars, but he was first and foremost a divorced dad. It would be initially her tragedy and then her triumph that Irma was moved by Dr. Zajac’s love for his son. Her own father had left her mother before she was born, and he’d not troubled himself to have any relationship with Irma or her sisters.

  One Monday morning after Rudy had gone back to his mother, Irma began her workday by attempting to clean the boy’s room. For the three weeks that he was gone, the six-year-old’s room was kept as tidy as a shrine; in practice, it was a shrine, and Zajac could often be found sitting worshipfully there. The morose dog was also drawn to Rudy’s room. Medea appeared to miss Rudy as much as Zajac did.

  This morning, however, Irma was surprised to find Dr. Zajac asleep, naked, in his departed son’s bed. The doctor’s legs overhung the foot of the bed, and he had flung the bedcovers off; no doubt the heat of the sixty-pound dog was sufficient. Medea lay chest-to-chest with the hand surgeon, her muzzle at his throat, a paw caressing the sleeping doctor’s bare shoulder.

  Irma stared. She’d never before had such an uninterrupted look at a naked man. The former midfielder was more puzzled than insulted that women were not drawn to his superb fitness, but while he was by no means an unattractive man, his utter craziness was as visible as his skeleton. (This was less apparent when Zajac was asleep.)

  The transplant-driven surgeon was both mocked and envied by his colleagues. He ran obsessively, he ate almost nothing, he was a bird nut newly enamored of the dietary indiscretion of an exceedingly neurotic dog. He was also driven by the unchecked agony he felt for a son he hardly ever saw. Yet what Irma now perceived in Dr. Zajac overrode all this. She suddenly recognized the heroic love he bore for the child, a love shared by both man and dog. (In her newfound weakness, Irma was also moved by Medea.)

  Irma had never met Rudy. She didn’t work weekends. What she knew was only what she could glean from photographs, of which there were an increasing number after each of the blessed son’s visits. While Irma had sensed that Rudy’s room was a shrine, she was unprepared to see Zajac and Medea in their embrace in the little boy’s bed. Oh, she thought, to be loved like that!

  That instant, that very second, Irma fell in love with Dr. Zajac’s obvious capacity for love—no
twithstanding that the good doctor had evinced no discernible capacity for loving her. On the spot, Irma became Zajac’s slave—not that he would soon notice it.

  At that life-changing moment, Medea opened her self-pitying eyes and raised her heavy head, a string of drool suspended from her overhanging lip. To Irma, who had an unrestrained enthusiasm for finding omens in the most commonplace occurrences, the dog’s slobber was the haunting color of a pearl. Irma could tell that Dr. Zajac was about to wake up, too. The doctor had a boner as big around as his wrist, as long as… well, let’s just say that, for such a scrawny guy, Zajac had quite a schlong. Irma thereupon decided that she wanted to be thin. It was a reaction no less sudden than the discovery of her love for Dr. Zajac. The awkward girl, who was nearly twenty years younger than the divorced doctor, was scarcely able to stagger into the hall before Zajac woke up. To alert the doctor that she was nearby, she called the dog. Halfheartedly, Medea made her way out of Rudy’s room; to the depressed dog’s bewilderment, which quickly gave way to fawning, Irma began to shower her with affection.

  Everything has a purpose, the simple girl was thinking. She remembered her earlier unhappiness and knew that the dog was her road to Dr. Zajac’s heart.

  “Come here, sweetie-pie, come with me,” Zajac heard his housekeeper/assistant saying. “We’re gonna eat only what’s good for us today!”

  As has been noted, Zajac’s colleagues were woefully beneath his surgical skills; they would have envied and despised him even more if they hadn’t been able to feel they had certain advantages over him in other areas. It cheered and encouraged them that their intrepid leader was crippled by love for his unhappy, wasting-away son. And wasn’t it wonderful that, for the love of Rudy, Boston’s best hand surgeon lived night and day with a shit-eating dog? It was both cruel and uncharitable of Dr. Zajac’s inferiors to celebrate the unhappiness of Zajac’s six-year-old, nor was it accurate of the good hand surgeon’s colleagues to deem the boy “wasting-away.” Rudy was crammed full of vitamins and orange juice; he drank fruit smoothies (mostly frozen strawberries and mashed bananas) and managed to eat an apple or a pear every day. He ate scrambled eggs and toast; he would eat cucumbers, if only with ketchup. He drank no milk, he ate no meat or fish or cheese, but at times he exhibited a cautious interest in yogurt, if there were no lumps in it.

  Rudy was underweight, but with even a small amount of regular exercise or any healthy adjustment in his diet, Rudy would have been as normal-looking as any little boy. He was an exceptionally sweet child—not only the proverbial “good kid” but a model of fairness and goodwill. Rudy had simply been fucked up by his mother, who had nearly succeeded in poisoning Rudy’s feelings for his father. After all, Hildred had three weeks to work on the vulnerable six-year-old; every third weekend, Zajac had scarcely more than forty-eight hours to counteract Hildred’s evil influence. And because Hildred was well aware of Dr. Zajac’s idolatry of strenuous exercise, she forbade Rudy to play soccer or go ice-skating after school—the kid was hooked on videos instead.

  Hildred, who in her years with Zajac had half killed herself to stay thin, now embraced plumpness. She called this being “more of a woman,” the very thought of which made her ex-husband gag.

  But what was most cruel was the way Rudy’s mother had all but convinced the child that his father didn’t love him. Hildred was happy to point out to Zajac that the boy invariably returned from his weekends with his father depressed; that this was because Hildred grilled Rudy upon his return would never have occurred to her.

  “Was there a woman around? Did you meet a woman?” she would begin. (There was only Medea, and all the birds.)

  When you don’t see your kid for weeks at a time, the desire to bestow gifts is so tempting; yet when Zajac bought things for Rudy, Hildred would tell the boy that his father was bribing him. Or else her conversation with the child would unfold along these lines: “What did he buy you? Roller skates! A lot of use you’ll get out of them—he must want you to crack your head open! And I suppose he didn’t let you watch a single movie. Honestly, he has to entertain you for just two days and three nights—you’d expect him to be on his best behavior. You’d think he’d try a little harder!”

  But the problem, of course, was that Zajac tried too hard. For the first twenty-four hours they were together, his frenetic energy overwhelmed the boy. Medea would be as frantic to see Rudy as Zajac was, but the child was listless—at least in comparison to the frenzied dog—and despite the evidence, everywhere, of what affectionate preparations the hand surgeon had undertaken to show his son a good time, Rudy seemed downright hostile to his father. He had been primed to be sensitive to examples of his father’s lack of love for him; finding none, he began their every weekend together confused.

  There was one game Rudy liked, even on those miserable Friday nights when Dr. Zajac felt he’d been reduced to the painful task of trying to make small talk with his only child. Zajac clung with fatherly pride to the fact that the game was of his own invention.

  Six-year-olds love repetition, and the game Dr. Zajac had invented might well have been called “Repetition Plus,” although neither father nor son bothered to name the game. At the onset of their weekends together, it was the only game they played.

  They took turns hiding a stove timer, unfailingly set for one minute, and they always hid it in the living room. To say they “hid it” is not quite correct, for the game’s only rule was that the stove timer had to remain visible. It could not be tucked under a cushion or stowed away in a drawer. (Or buried under a mound of birdseed in the cage with the purple finches.) It had to be in plain sight; but because it was small and beige, the stove timer was hard to see, especially in Dr. Zajac’s living room, which, like the rest of the old house on Brattle Street, had been hastily—Hildred would say “tastelessly”—refurnished. (Hildred had taken all the good furniture with her.) The living room was cluttered with mismatched curtains and upholstery; it was as if three or four generations of Zajacs had lived and perished there, and nothing had ever been thrown away. The condition of the room made it fairly easy to hide an innocuous stove timer right out in the open. Rudy only occasionally found the timer within one minute, before the beeper would sound, and Zajac, even if he spotted the stove timer in ten seconds, would never locate the thing before the minute was up—much to his son’s delight. Hence Zajac feigned frustration while Rudy laughed. A breakthrough beyond the simple pleasure of the stove-timer game took both father and son by surprise. It was called reading—the truly inexhaustible pleasure of reading aloud—and the books that Dr. Zajac decided to read to Rudy were the two books Zajac himself had loved most as a child. They were Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web, both by E. B. White.

  Rudy was so impressed by Wilbur, the pig in Charlotte’s Web, that he wanted to rename Medea and call her Wilbur instead.

  “That’s a boy’s name,” Zajac pointed out, “and Medea is a girl. But I suppose it would be all right. You could rename her Charlotte, if you like—Charlotte is a girl’s name, you know.”

  “But Charlotte dies,” Rudy argued. (The eponymous Charlotte is a spider.) “I’m already afraid that Medea will die.”

  “Medea won’t die for a long time, Rudy,” Zajac assured his son.

  “Mommy says you might kill her, because of the way you lose your temper.”

  “I promise I won’t kill Medea, Rudy,” Zajac said. “I won’t lose my temper with her.” (This was typical of how little Hildred had ever understood him; that he lost his temper at dogshit didn’t mean he was angry at dogs!)

  “Tell me again why they named her Medea,” the boy said.

  It was hard to relate the Greek legend to a six-year-old—just try describing what a sorceress is. But the part about Medea assisting her husband, Jason, in obtaining the Golden Fleece was easier to explain than the part about what Medea does to her own children. Why would anyone name a dog Medea? Dr. Zajac wondered. In the six months since he’d been divorced, Zajac had read more than a d
ozen books by child psychiatrists about the troubles children have after a divorce. A great emphasis was put on the parents’ having a sense of humor, which was not the hand surgeon’s strongest point.

  Zajac’s indulgence in mischief overcame him only in those moments when he was cradling a dog turd in a lacrosse stick. However, in addition to his having been a midfielder at Deerfield, Dr. Zajac had sung in some kind of glee club there. Although his only singing now was in the shower, he felt a spontaneous outpouring of humor whenever he was taking a shower with Rudy. Taking a shower with his father was another item on the small but growing list of things Rudy liked to do with his dad.

  Suddenly, to the tune of “I Am the River,” which Rudy had learned to sing in kindergarten—the boy, as many only children do, liked to sing—Dr. Nicholas M. Zajac burst into song.

  I am Medea

  and I eat my poo.

  In an-tiq-ui-ty

  I killed my kids, too!

  “What?” Rudy said. “Sing that again!” (They’d already discussed antiquity.) When his father sang the song again, Rudy dissolved into laughter. Scatological humor is the best stuff for six-year-olds.

  “Don’t sing this around your mother,” Rudy’s father warned him. Thus they had a secret, another step in creating a bond between them.

  Over time, two copies of Stuart Little made their way home with Rudy, but Hildred would not read it to the boy; worse, she threw away both copies of the book. It wasn’t until Rudy caught her throwing away Charlotte’s Web that he told his father, which became another bond between them.

  Every weekend they were together, Zajac read all of either Stuart Little or Charlotte’s Web to Rudy. The little boy never tired of them. He cried every time Charlotte died; he laughed every time Stuart crashed the dentist’s invisible car. And, like Stuart, when Rudy was thirsty, he told his father that he had “a ruinous thirst.” (The first time, naturally, Rudy had to ask his father what “ruinous”