The Fourth Hand

by John Winslow Irving

  He was still the lion guy, but something in him had risen above that image of his mutilation; he was still disaster man, but he anchored the evening news with a newfound authority. He had actually mastered the look he’d first practiced in bars at the cocktail hour, when he was feeling sorry for himself. The look still said, Pity me, only now his sadness seemed approachable.

  But Wallingford was unimpressed by the progress of his soul. It may have been noticeable to others, but what did that matter? He didn’t have Doris Clausen, did he?

  CHAPTER NINE

  Wallingford Meets a Fellow Traveler

  MEANWHILE, AN ATTRACTIVE, photogenic woman with a limp had just turned sixty. As a teenager, and all her adult life, she’d worn long skirts or dresses to conceal her withered leg. She’d been the last person in her hometown to come down with poliomyelitis; the Salk vaccine was available too late for her. For almost as long as she’d had the deformity, she’d been writing a book with this provocative title: How I Almost Missed Getting Polio. She said that the end of the century struck her as “as good a time as any” to make multiple submissions to more than a dozen publishers, but they all turned her book down.

  “Bad luck or not, polio or whatever, the book isn’t very well written,” the woman with the limp and the withered leg admitted to Patrick Wallingford, on-camera. She looked terrific when she was sitting down. “It’s just that everything in my life happened because I didn’t get that damn vaccine. I got polio instead.”

  Of course she quickly acquired a publisher after her interview with Wallingford, and almost overnight she had a new title: I Got Polio Instead. Someone rewrote the book for her, and someone else would make a movie of it—starring a woman who looked nothing at all like the woman with the limp and the withered leg, except that the actress was attractive and photogenic, too. That was what being on-camera with Wallingford could do for you.

  Nor would Patrick miss the irony that when he’d lost his left hand the first time, the world had been watching. In those best-of-the-century moments that were positively made for television, the lion-eating-the-hand episode was always included. Yet when he’d lost his hand the second time—more to the point, when he’d lost Mrs. Clausen—the camera wasn’t on him. What mattered most to Wallingford had gone unrecorded.

  The new century, at least for a while, would remember Patrick as the lion guy. But it was neither news nor history that, if Wallingford were keeping score of his life, he wouldn’t have started counting until he met Doris Clausen. So much for how the world keeps score.

  In the category of transplant surgery, Patrick Wallingford would not be remembered. At the close of the century, one counts the successes, not the failures. Thus, in the field of hand-transplant surgery, Dr. Nicholas M. Zajac would remain unfamous, his moment of possible greatness surpassed by what truly became the first successful hand-transplant procedure in the United States, and only the second ever. “The fireworks guy,” as Zajac crudely called Matthew David Scott, appeared to have what Dr. Zajac termed a keeper.

  On April 12, 1999, less than three months after receiving a new left hand, Mr. Scott threw out the ceremonial first pitch at the Phillies’ opening game in Philadelphia. Wallingford wasn’t exactly jealous. (Envious… well, maybe. But not in the way you might think.) In fact, Patrick asked Dick, his news editor, if he could interview the evident “keeper.” Wouldn’t it be fitting, Wallingford suggested, to congratulate Mr. Scott for having what he (Wallingford) had lost? But Dick, of all people, thought the idea was “tacky.” As a result, Dick was fired, though many would argue he was a news editor waiting to be fired. Any euphoria among the New York newsroom women was short-lived. The new news editor was as much of a dick as Dick had ever been; anticlimactically, his name was Fred. As Mary whatever-her-name-was would say—Mary had developed a sharper tongue in the intervening years—“If I’m going to be dicked around, I think I’d rather be Dicked than Fredded. ”

  In the new century, that same international team of surgeons who performed the world’s first successful hand transplant in Lyon, France, would try again, this time attempting the world’s first double hand-and-forearm transplant. The recipient, whose name was not made public, would be a thirty-three-year-old Frenchman who’d lost both his hands in a fireworks accident (another one) in 1996, the donor a nineteen-year-old who had fallen off a bridge. But Wallingford would be interested only in the fates of the first two recipients. The first, ex-convict Clint Hallam, would have his new hand amputated by one of the surgeons who performed the transplant operation. Two months prior to the amputation, Hallam had stopped taking the medication prescribed as part of his anti-rejection treatment. He was observed wearing a leather glove to hide the hand, which he described as “hideous.” (Hallam would later deny failing to take his medication.) And he would continue his strained relationship with the law. Mr. Hallam had been seized by the French police for allegedly stealing money and an American Express card from a liver-transplant patient who’d befriended him in the hospital in Lyon. While he was eventually allowed to leave France—after he repaid some of the money—the police would issue warrants for Hallam’s arrest in Australia concerning his possible role in a fuel scam. (It seems that Zajac was right about him.)

  The second, Matthew David Scott of Absecon, New Jersey, is the only successful recipient of a new hand whom Wallingford would admit to envying in an interesting way. It was never Mr. Scott’s new hand that Patrick Wallingford envied. But in the media coverage of that Phillies game, where the fireworks guy threw out the first ball, Wallingford noted that Matthew David Scott had his son with him. What Patrick envied Mr. Scott was his son. He’d had premonitions of what he would call the “fatherhood feeling” when he was still recovering from losing Otto senior’s hand. The painkillers were nothing special, but they may have been what prompted Patrick to watch his first Super Bowl. Of course he didn’t know how to watch a Super Bowl. You’re not supposed to watch a game like that alone.

  He kept wanting to call Mrs. Clausen and ask her to explain what was happening in the game, but Super Bowl XXXIII was the symbolic anniversary of Otto Clausen’s accident (or suicide) in his beer truck; furthermore, the Packers weren’t playing. Therefore, Doris had told Patrick that she intended to lock herself away from sight or sound of the game. He would be on his own.

  Wallingford drank a beer or two, but what people liked about watching football eluded him. To be fair, it was a bad matchup; while the Broncos won their second straight Super Bowl, and their fans were no doubt delighted, it was not a close or even a competitive game. The Atlanta Falcons had no business being in the Super Bowl in the first place. (At least that was the opinion of everyone Wallingford would later talk to in Green Bay.)

  Yet, even distractedly watching the Super Bowl, Patrick for the first time could imagine going to a Packer home game at Lambeau Field with Doris and Otto junior. Or just with little Otto, maybe when the boy was a bit older. The idea had surprised him, but that was January 1999. By April of that year, when Wallingford watched Matthew David Scott and his son at the Phillies game, the thought was no longer surprising; he’d had a couple more months of missing Otto junior and the boy’s mother. Even if it was true that he’d lost Mrs. Clausen, Wallingford rightly feared that if he didn’t make an effort to see more of little Otto now—meaning the summer of ’99, when Otto junior was still only eight months old (he wasn’t quite crawling)—there would simply be no relationship to build on when the boy was older.

  The one person in New York to whom Wallingford confided his fears of the missed opportunity of fatherhood was Mary. Boy, was she a bad choice for a confidante! When Patrick said that he longed to be “more like a father” to Otto junior, Mary reminded him that he could knock her up anytime he felt like it and become the father of a child living in New York.

  “You don’t have to go to Green Bay, Wisconsin, to be a father, Pat,” Mary told him.

  How she’d gone from being such a nice girl to expressing her one-note wish to
have Wallingford’s seed was not a credit to the other women in the New York newsroom, or so Patrick believed. He continued to overlook the fact that men had been a far greater influence on Mary. She’d had problems with men, or at least she thought she had. (Same difference.)

  Every weeknight, when he concluded his telecast, Wallingford never knew if they were watching when he said, “Good night, Doris. Good night, my little Otto.”

  Mrs. Clausen had not once called to say she’d seen the evening news. It was July 1999. There was a heat wave in New York. It was a Friday. Most summer weekends, Wallingford went to Bridgehampton, where he’d rented a house. Except for the swimming pool—Patrick made a point of not swimming in the ocean with one hand—it was really like staying in the city. He saw all the same people at the same kinds of parties, which, in fact, was what Wallingford and a lot of other New Yorkers liked about being out there.

  That weekend, friends had invited him to the Cape; he was supposed to fly to Martha’s Vineyard. But even before he felt a slight prickling where his hand had been detached—some of the twinges seemed to extend to the empty space where his left hand used to be—he’d phoned his friends and canceled the trip with some bullshit excuse.

  At the time, he didn’t know how lucky he was, not to be flying to Martha’s Vineyard that Friday night. Then he remembered that he’d lent his house in Bridgehampton for the weekend. A bunch of the New York newsroom women were having a weekend-long baby shower there. Or an orgy, Patrick cynically imagined. He passingly wondered if Mary would be there. (That was the old Patrick Wallingford wondering.) But Patrick didn’t ask Mary if she was one of the women using his summer house that weekend. If he’d asked, she would have known he was free and offered to change her plans.

  Wallingford was still undervaluing how sensitive and vulnerable women who have struggled to have a child were; a weekend-long baby shower for someone else would not likely have been Mary’s choice.

  So he was in New York on a Friday in mid-July with no weekend plans and nowhere to go. As he sat in makeup for the Friday-evening news, he thought of calling Mrs. Clausen. He had never invited himself to Green Bay; he’d always waited to be invited. Yet both Doris and Patrick were aware that the intervals between her invitations had grown longer. (The last time he’d been in Wisconsin, there was still snow on the ground.)

  What if Wallingford simply called her and said, “Hi! What are you and little Otto doing this weekend? How about I come to Green Bay?” Remarkably, without second-guessing himself, he just did it; he called her out of the blue.

  “Hello,” said her voice on the answering machine. “Little Otto and I are up north for the weekend. No phone. Back Monday.”

  He didn’t leave a message, but he did leave some makeup on the mouthpiece of the phone. He was so distracted by hearing Mrs. Clausen’s voice on the answering machine, and even more distracted by that half-imagined, half-dreamed image of her at the cottage on the lake, that without thinking he attempted to wipe the makeup off the mouthpiece with his left hand. He was surprised when the stump of his left forearm made contact with the phone—that was the first twinge. When he hung up, the prickling sensations continued. He kept looking at his stump, expecting to see ants, or some other small insects, crawling over the scar tissue. But there was nothing there. He knew there couldn’t be bugs under the scar tissue, yet he felt them all through the telecast.

  Later Mary would remark that there’d been something listless in the delivery of his usually cheerful good-night wishes to Doris and little Otto, but Wallingford knew that they couldn’t have been watching. There was no electricity at the cottage on the lake—Mrs. Clausen had told him that. (For the most part, she seemed unwilling to talk about the place up north, and when she did talk about it, her voice was shy and hard to hear.)

  The prickling sensations continued while Patrick had his makeup removed; his skin crawled. Because he was thinking about something Dr. Zajac had said to him, Wallingford was only vaguely mindful that the regular makeup girl was on vacation. He supposed she had a crush on him—he’d not yet been tempted. He thought it was the way she chewed her gum that he missed. Only now, in her absence, did he fleetingly imagine her in a new way—naked. But the supernatural twinges in his nonhand kept distracting him, as did his memory of Zajac’s blunt advice.

  “Don’t mess around if you ever think you need me.” Therefore, Patrick didn’t mess around. He called Zajac at home, although he assumed that Boston’s most renowned hand surgeon would be spending his summer weekends out of town. Actually, Dr. Zajac had rented a place in Maine that summer, but only for the month of August, when he would have custody of Rudy. Medea, now more often called Pal, would eat a ton of raw clams and mussels, shells and all; but the dog had seemingly outgrown a taste for her own turds, and Rudy and Zajac played lacrosse with a lacrosse ball. The boy had even attended a lacrosse clinic in the first week of July. Rudy was with Zajac for the weekend, in Cambridge, when Wallingford called.

  Irma answered the phone. “Yeah, what is it?” she said.

  Wallingford contemplated the remote possibility that Dr. Zajac had an unruly teenage daughter. He knew only that Zajac had a younger child, a six-or sevenyear-old boy—like Matthew David Scott’s son. In his mind’s eye, Patrick was forever seeing that unknown little boy in a baseball jersey, his hands raised like his father’s—both of them celebrating that victory pitch in Philadelphia. (A “victory pitch” was how someone in the media had described it.)

  “Yeah?” Irma said again. Was she a surly, oversexed babysitter for Zajac’s little boy? Perhaps she was the housekeeper, except she sounded too coarse to be Dr. Zajac’s housekeeper.

  “Is Dr. Zajac there?” Wallingford asked.

  “This is Mrs. Zajac,” Irma answered. “Who wants him?”

  “This is Patrick Wallingford. Dr. Zajac operated on—”

  “Nicky!” Patrick heard Irma yell, although she’d partly covered the mouthpiece of the phone with her hand. “It’s the lion guy!”

  Wallingford could identify some of the background noise: almost certainly a child, definitely a dog, and the unmistakable thudding of a ball. There was the scrape of a chair and the scrambling sound of the dog’s claws slipping on a wood floor. It must have been some kind of game. Were they trying to keep the ball away from the dog? Zajac, out of breath, finally came to the phone.

  When Wallingford finished describing his symptoms, he added hopefully, “Maybe it’s just the weather.”

  “The weather?” Zajac asked.

  “You know—the heat wave,” Patrick explained.

  “Aren’t you indoors most of the time?” Zajac asked. “Don’t they have airconditioning in New York?”

  “It’s not always pain,” Wallingford went on. “Sometimes the sensation is like the start of something that doesn’t go anywhere. I mean you think the twinge or the prickle is going to lead to pain, but it doesn’t—it just stops as soon as it starts. Like something interrupted… something electrical.”

  “Precisely,” Dr. Zajac told him. What did Wallingford expect? Zajac reminded him that, only five months after the attachment surgery, he’d regained twenty-two centimeters of nerve regeneration.

  “I remember,” Patrick replied.

  “Well, look at it this way,” Zajac said. “Those nerves still have something to say.”

  “But why now ?” Wallingford asked him. “It’s been half a year since I lost it. I’ve felt something before, but nothing this specific. I actually feel like I’m touching something with my left middle finger or my left index finger, and I don’t even have a left hand !”

  “What’s going on in the rest of your life?” Dr. Zajac responded. “I assume there’s some stress attached to your line of work? I don’t know how your love life is progressing, or if it’s progressing, but I remember that your love life seemed to be a matter of some concern to you—or so you said. Just remember, there are other factors affecting nerves, including nerves that have been cut off.”

 
“They don’t feel ‘cut off’—that’s what I mean,” Wallingford told him.

  “That’s what I mean,” Zajac replied. “What you’re feeling is known medically as

  ‘paresthesia’—a wrong sensation, beyond perception. The nerve that used to make you feel pain or touch in your left middle finger, or in your left index finger, has been severed twice—first by a lion and then by me! That cut fiber is still sitting somewhere in the stump of your nerve bundle, accompanied by millions of other fibers coming from and going everywhere. If that neuron is stimulated at the tip of your nerve stump—by touch, by memory, by a dream —it sends the same old message it always did. The feelings that seem to come from where your left hand used to be are being registered by the same nerve fibers and pathways that used to come from your left hand. Do you get it?”

  “Sort of,” Wallingford replied. (“Not really,” was what he should have said.) Patrick kept looking at his stump—the invisible ants were crawling there again. He’d forgotten to mention the sensation of crawling insects to Dr. Zajac, but the doctor didn’t give him time.

  Dr. Zajac could tell that his patient wasn’t satisfied. “Look,” Zajac continued, “if you’re worried about it, fly up here. Stay in a nice hotel. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “Saturday morning?” Patrick said. “I don’t want to ruin your weekend.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Dr. Zajac told him. “I’ll just have to find someone to unlock the building. I’ve done that before. I have my own keys to the office.”

  Wallingford wasn’t really worried about his missing hand anymore, but what else was he going to do this weekend?