The Fourth Hand

by John Winslow Irving

  Occasionally Mrs. Clausen and Wallingford would sleep together—without sex, even without nakedness. Doris would just sleep beside him—at his left side, naturally. Patrick didn’t sleep well, to a large degree because he was comfortable sleeping only on his back. The hand ached when he lay on his side or his stomach; not even Dr. Zajac could tell him why. Maybe it had something to do with a reduced blood supply to the hand, but the muscles and tendons and nerves were obviously getting a good supply of blood.

  “I would never say you were home free,” Zajac told Wallingford, “but that hand is looking more and more like a keeper to me.”

  It was hard to understand Zajac’s newfound casualness, let alone his love of Irma’s vernacular. Mrs. Clausen and her fetus had usurped Dr. Zajac’s three minutes in the limelight, but Zajac seemed relatively undepressed. (That a criminal was Wallingford’s only competition in hand-transplant surgery made Zajac more pissed-off than depressed.) And, as a result of Irma’s cooking, he’d actually put on a little weight; healthy food, in decent quantities, still adds up. The hand surgeon had given in to his appetites. He was famished because he was getting laid every day.

  That Irma and her former employer were now happily married was no business of Wallingford’s, but it was all the talk at Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink, Zajac

  & Associates. And if the best surgeon among them was looking less and less like a feral dog, his once-undernourished son, Rudy, had also gained a few pounds. Even to the envious souls who stood at the periphery of Dr. Zajac’s life and cravenly mocked him, the little boy whose father loved him now struck nearly everyone as happy and normal.

  No less surprising, Dr. Mengerink confessed to Zajac that he’d had an affair with the vengeful Hildred, Dr. Zajac’s now-overweight first wife. Hildred was seething about Irma, although Zajac had increased her alimony—the cost to Hildred was straightforward: she would accept dual, which was to say equal, custody of Rudy. Instead of becoming overwrought at Dr. Mengerink’s startling confession, Dr. Zajac was a portrait of sensitivity and compassion. “With Hildred? You poor man

  …” was all Zajac had said, putting his arm around Mengerink’s stooped shoulders.

  “It’s a wonder what a little nooky will do for you,” the surviving Gingeleskie brother remarked enviously.

  Had the shit-eating dog also turned a corner? In a way, she had. Medea was almost a good dog; she still experienced what Irma called “lapses,” but dogshit and its effects no longer dominated Dr. Zajac’s life. Dog-turd lacrosse had become just a game. And while the doctor had tried a glass of red wine every day for the sake of his heart, his heart was in good hands with Irma and Rudy. (Zajac’s growing fondness for red Bordeaux quite exceeded the parsimonious allotment that was deemed to be good for his ticker.)

  The unexplained ache in Patrick Wallingford’s new left hand continued to be of little concern to Dr. Zajac. But one night when Patrick was lying chastely in bed with Doris Clausen, she asked him, “What do you mean by an ‘ache,’ exactly? What kind of ache is it?”

  “It’s a kind of straining, only my fingers are barely moving, and it hurts in the tips of the fingers, where I still have no feeling. It’s weird.”

  “It hurts where you have no feeling?” Doris asked.

  “So it seems,” Patrick explained.

  “I know what’s wrong,” Mrs. Clausen said. Just because she wanted to lie next to his left hand, she should not have imposed the wrong side of the bed on Otto.

  “On Otto?” Wallingford asked.

  Otto had always slept at her left side, Doris explained. How this wrong-side-of-thebed business had affected Patrick’s new hand, he would soon see. With Mrs. Clausen asleep beside him, at his right side, something that seemed utterly natural happened. He turned to her, and—as if ingrained in her, even in her sleep—she turned to him, her head nestling in the crook of his right arm, her breath against his throat. He didn’t dare swallow, lest he wake her. His left hand twitched, but there was no ache now. Wallingford lay still, waiting to see what his new hand would do next. He would remember later that the hand, entirely of its own accord, went under the hem of Doris Clausen’s nightie—the unfeeling fingers moving up her thighs. At their touch, Mrs. Clausen’s legs drew apart; her hips opened; her pubic hair brushed against the palm of Patrick’s new left hand, as if lifted by an unfelt breeze.

  Wallingford knew where his fingers went, although he couldn’t feel them. The change in Doris’s breathing was apparent. He couldn’t help himself—he kissed her forehead, nuzzled her hair. Then she seized his probing hand and brought his fingers to her lips. He held his breath in anticipation of the pain, but there was none. With her other hand, she took hold of his penis; then she abruptly let it go. Wrong penis! The spell was broken. Mrs. Clausen was wide awake. They could both smell the fingers of Otto’s remarkable left hand—it rested on the pillow, touching their faces.

  “Is the ache gone?” Doris asked him.

  “Yes,” Patrick answered. He meant only that it was gone from the hand. “But there’s another ache, a new one…” he started to say.

  “I can’t help you with that one,” Mrs. Clausen declared. But when she turned her back to him, she gently held his left hand against her big belly. “If you want to touch yourself—you know, while you hold me—maybe I can help you a little. ”

  Tears of love and gratitude sprang to Patrick’s eyes.

  What decorum was called for here? It seemed to Wallingford that it would be most proper if he could finish masturbating before he felt the baby kick, but Mrs. Clausen held his left hand tightly to her stomach— not to her breast—and before Patrick could come, which he managed with uncommon quickness, the unborn child kicked twice. The second time elicited that exact same twinge of pain he’d felt before, a pain sharp enough to make him flinch. This time Doris didn’t notice, or else she confused it with the sudden shudder with which he came. Best of all, Wallingford would think later, Mrs. Clausen had then rewarded him with that special voice of hers, which he hadn’t heard in a long time.

  “Ache all gone?” she’d asked. The hand, again of its own accord, slipped from her giant belly to her swollen breast, where she let it stay.

  “Yes, thank you,” Patrick whispered, and fell into a dream. There was a smell he at first failed to recognize because it was so unfamiliar to him; it’s not a smell one experiences in New York or Boston. Pine needles! he suddenly realized.

  There was the sound of water, but not the ocean and not from a tap. It was water lapping against the bow of a boat—or maybe slapping against a dock—but whatever water it was, it was music to the hand, which moved as softly as water itself over the enlarged contour of Mrs. Clausen’s breast. The twinge (even his memory of the twinge) was gone, and in its aftermath floated the best night’s sleep Wallingford would ever have, but for the disquieting thought, when he woke up, that the dream had seemed not quite his. It was also not as close to his cobalt-blue-capsule experience as he would have liked. To begin with, there’d been no sex in the dream, nor had Wallingford felt the heat of the sun in the planks of the dock, or the dock itself through what seemed to be a towel; instead there’d been only a far-off sense that there was a dock somewhere else.

  That night he didn’t hear the camera shutter in his sleep. You could have taken Patrick Wallingford’s photograph a thousand times that night. He would never have known.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Rejection and Success

  IT WAS ALL RIGHT with Wallingford when Doris talked about wanting her child to know his or her father’s hand. What this meant to Patrick was that he could expect to go on seeing her. He loved her with slimmer and slimmer hope of her reciprocation, which was disquietingly unlike the way she loved the hand. She would hold it to her belly, against the unborn child’s persistent kicks, and while she could occasionally feel Wallingford flinch in pain, she had ceased to find his twinges alarming.

  “It’s not really your hand,” Mrs. Clausen reminded Patrick, not that he ne
eded reminding. “Imagine what it must be like for Otto—to feel a child he’s never going to see. Of course it hurts him!”

  But wasn’t it Wallingford’s pain? In his former life, with Marilyn, Patrick might have responded sarcastically. (“Now that you put it that way, I’m not worried about the pain.”) But with Doris… well, all he could do was adore her. Moreover, there was strong support for Mrs. Clausen’s argument. The new hand didn’t look like Patrick’s—it never would. Otto’s left hand was not that much bigger, but we do a lot of looking at our hands—it’s hard to get used to someone else’s. There were times when Wallingford would stare at the hand intently, as if he expected it to speak; nor could he resist smelling the hand—it did not have his smell. He knew that from the way Mrs. Clausen closed her eyes, when she smelled the hand, it smelled like Otto.

  There were welcome distractions. During his long recovery and rehabilitation, Patrick’s career, which had been grounded in the Boston newsroom so that he could be close to Dr. Zajac and the Boston team, began to flourish. (Maybe

  “flourish” is too strong a word; let’s just say that the network allowed him to branch out a bit.)

  The twenty-four-hour international channel created a weekend-anchor slot for him following the evening news; this Saturday-night sidebar to the regular news show was telecast from Boston. While the producers still gave Wallingford all the stories about bizarre casualties, they permitted him to introduce and summarize these stories with a dignity that was surprising and newfound—both in Wallingford and in the all-news network. No one in Boston or New York—not Patrick, not even Dick—could explain it.

  Patrick Wallingford acted on-camera as if Otto Clausen’s hand were truly his own, conveying a sympathy previously absent from the calamity channel and his own reporting. It was as if he knew he’d got more than a hand from Otto Clausen. Of course, among serious reporters—meaning those journalists who reported the hard news in depth and in context—the very idea of a sidebar to what passed for the news on the disaster network was laughable. In the real news, there were refugee children whose mothers and aunts had been raped in front of them, although neither the women nor the children would usually admit to this. In the real news, the fathers and uncles of these refugee children had been murdered, although there was scant admitting to this, either. There were also stories of doctors and nurses being shot—deliberately, so that the refugee children would be without medical care. But tales of such willful evil in foreign countries were not reported in depth on the so-called international channel, nor would Patrick Wallingford ever get a field assignment to report them.

  More likely, he would be expected to find improbable dignity in and sympathy for the victims of frankly stupid accidents, like his. If there was what could be called a thought behind this watered-down version of the news, the thought was as small as this: that even in what was gruesome, there was (or should be) something uplifting, provided that what was gruesome was idiotic enough.

  So what if the all-news network would never send Patrick Wallingford to Yugoslavia? What was it the confused doorman’s brother had said to Vlad or Vlade or Lewis? (“Look—you have a job, don’t you?”) Well, Wallingford had a job, didn’t he?

  And most Sundays he was free to fly to Green Bay. When the football season started, Mrs. Clausen was eight months pregnant; it was the first time in recent memory that she wouldn’t see a single Packer home game at Lambeau Field. Doris joked that she didn’t want to go into labor on the forty-yard line—not if it was a good game. (What she meant was that no one would have paid any attention to her.) Therefore, she and Wallingford watched the Packers on television. Absurdly, he flew to Green Bay just to watch TV.

  But a Packer game, even on television, provided the longest sustained period of time that Mrs. Clausen would stroke the hand or permit the hand to touch her; and while she stared transfixed at the football game, Patrick could look at her the same way. He was conscious of memorizing her profile, or the way she bit her lower lip when it was third and long. (Doris had to explain to him that third and long was when Brett Favre, the Green Bay quarterback, had the greatest potential for getting sacked or throwing an interception.)

  Occasionally she hurt Wallingford without meaning to. When Favre got sacked, or when he was intercepted—worse, whenever the other team scored—Mrs. Clausen would sharply squeeze her late husband’s hand.

  “Aaahhh!” Wallingford would cry out, shamelessly exaggerating his agony. There would be kisses for the hand, even tears. It was worth the pain, which was quite different from those twinges caused by the kicking of the unborn child; those pins and needles were from another world.

  Thus, bravely, Wallingford flew almost every week to Green Bay. He never found a hotel he liked, but Doris wouldn’t allow him to stay in the house she’d shared with Otto. During these trips, Patrick met other Clausens—Otto had a huge, supportive family. Most of them weren’t shy about demonstrating their affection for Otto’s hand. While Otto’s father and brothers had choked back sobs, Otto’s mother, who was memorably large, had wept openly; and the only unmarried sister had clutched the hand to her breast, just before fainting. Wallingford had looked away, thereby failing to catch her when she fell. Patrick blamed himself that she’d chipped a tooth on a coffee table, and she was not a woman with the best of smiles to begin with.

  While the Clausens were a clan whose outdoorsy good cheer contrasted sharply with Wallingford’s reserve, he found himself strangely drawn to them. They had the loyal exuberance of season-ticket holders, and they’d all married people who looked like Clausens. You couldn’t tell the in-laws from the blood relatives, except for Doris, who stood apart.

  Patrick could see how kind the Clausens were to her, and how protective. They’d accepted her, although she was clearly different; they loved her as one of their own. On television, those families who resembled the Clausens were nauseating, but the Clausens were not.

  Wallingford had also traveled to Appleton to meet Doris’s mother and father, who wanted to visit with the hand, too. It was from Mrs. Clausen’s father that Wallingford learned more about Doris’s job; he hadn’t known that she’d had the job ever since her graduation from high school. For longer than Patrick Wallingford had been a journalist, Doris Clausen had worked in ticket sales for the Green Bay Packers. The Packers’ organization had been very supportive of Mrs. Clausen—they’d even put her through college.

  “Doris can get you tickets, you know,” Mrs. Clausen’s father told Patrick. “And tickets are wicked hard to come by around here.”

  Green Bay would have a rough season following their loss to Denver in Super Bowl XXXII. As Doris had said so movingly to Otto, the last day the unlucky man was alive, “There’s no guarantee of returning to the Super Bowl.”

  The Packers wouldn’t get past the wild-card game, losing what Mrs. Clausen called a heartbreaker in the first round of the playoffs to San Francisco. “Otto thought we had the 49ers’ number,” Doris said. But by then she had a new baby to take care of. She was more philosophical now about Green Bay’s losses than she and Otto had ever been before.

  It was a big baby, a boy—nine pounds, eight ounces—and he was so long overdue that they’d wanted to induce labor. Mrs. Clausen wouldn’t hear of it; she was one to let nature take its course. Wallingford missed the delivery. The baby was almost a month old before Patrick could get away from Boston. He should never have flown on Thanksgiving Day—his flight was late getting into Green Bay. Even so, he arrived in time to watch the fourth quarter of the Minnesota Vikings’ game with the Dallas Cowboys, which Minnesota won. (A good omen, Doris declared—Otto had hated the Cowboys.) Perhaps because her mother was staying with her, to help with Otto junior, Mrs. Clausen was relaxed about inviting Wallingford to visit her and the new baby at home.

  Patrick did his best to forget the details of that house—all the pictures of Otto senior, for example. It was no surprise to see photographic evidence that Otto senior and Doris had been sweethearts—she
’d already told Wallingford about that—but the photos of the Clausens’ marriage were more than Patrick could bear. There was in their photographs not only their obvious pleasure, which was always of the moment, but also their anticipated happiness—their unwavering expectations of a future together, and of a baby in that future. And what was the setting of the pictures that so seized Wallingford’s attention? It was neither Appleton nor Green Bay. It was the cottage on the lake, of course! The weathered dock; the lonely, dark water; the dark, abiding pines. There was also a photo of the boathouse apartment under construction, and there were Otto’s and Doris’s wet bathing suits, drying in the sunlight on the dock. Surely the water had lapped against the rocking boats, and—especially before a storm—it must have slapped against the dock. Patrick had heard it many times. Wallingford recognized in the photographs the source of the recurrent dream that wasn’t quite his. And always underlying that dream was the other one, the one the prescience pill had inspired—that wettest of all wet dreams brought on by the unnamed Indian painkiller, now banned.

  Looking at the photographs, Wallingford began to realize that it was not the

  “unmanly” loss of his hand that had conclusively turned his ex-wife against him; instead, in refusing to have children, he’d already lost her. Patrick could see how the paternity suit, even though it proved to be false, had been the bitterest pill for Marilyn to swallow. She’d wanted children. How had he underestimated the urgency of that?