The Fourth Hand

by John Winslow Irving

  Patrick’s hotel room at the Charles was as silent and cool as a crypt; he lay on the bed trying to anticipate the worst before turning on the TV. Wallingford was thinking about JFK, Jr.’s older sister, Caroline. Patrick had always admired her for remaining aloof from the press. The summer house Wallingford was renting in Bridgehampton was near Sagaponack, where Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg was spending the summer with her husband and children. She had a plain but elegant kind of beauty; although she would be under intense media scrutiny now, Patrick believed that she would manage to keep her dignity intact. In his room at the Charles, Wallingford felt too sick to his stomach to turn the TV

  on. If he went back to New York, not only would he have to answer the messages on his answering machine, but his phone would never stop ringing. If he stayed in his room at the Charles, he would eventually have to watch television, even though he already knew what he would see—his fellow journalists, our selfappointed moral arbiters, looking their most earnest and sounding their most sincere.

  They would already have descended on Hyannisport. There would be a hedge, that ever-predictable barrier of privet, in the background of the frame. Behind the hedge, only the upstairs windows of the brilliantly white house would be visible. (They would be dormer windows, with their curtains drawn.) Yet, somehow, the journalist standing in the foreground of the shot would manage to look as if he or she had been invited.

  Naturally there would be an analysis of the small plane’s disappearance from the radar screen, and some sober commentary on the pilot’s presumed error. Many of Patrick’s fellow journalists would not pass up the opportunity to condemn JFK, Jr.’s judgment; indeed, the judgment of all Kennedys would be questioned. The issue of “genetic restlessness” among the male members of the family would surely be raised. And much later—say, near the end of the following week—some of these same journalists would declare that the coverage had been excessive. They would then call for a halt to the process. That was always the way. Wallingford wondered how long it would take for someone in the New York newsroom to ask Mary where he was. Or was Mary herself trying to reach him? She knew he was seeing his hand surgeon; at the time of the procedure, Zajac’s name had been in the news. As he lay immobilized on the bed in the cool room, Patrick found it strange that someone from the all-news network hadn’t already called him at the Charles. Maybe Mary was also out of reach. On an impulse, Wallingford picked up the phone and dialed the number at his summer house in Bridgehampton. A hysterical-sounding woman answered the phone. It was Crystal Pitney—that was her married name. Patrick couldn’t remember what Crystal’s last name had been when he’d slept with her. He recalled that there was something unusual about her lovemaking, but he couldn’t think what it was.

  “Patrick Wallingford is not here!” Crystal shouted in lieu of the usual hello. “No one here knows where he is!”

  In the background, Patrick heard the television; the familiar, self-serious droning was punctuated by occasional outbursts from the newsroom women.

  “Hello?” Crystal Pitney said into the phone. Wallingford hadn’t said a word.

  “What are you, a creep?” Crystal asked. “It’s a breather —I can hear him breathing!” Mrs. Pitney announced to the other women.

  That was it, Wallingford remembered. When he’d made love to her, Crystal had forewarned him that she had a rare respiratory condition. When she got out of breath and not enough oxygen went to her brain, she started seeing things and generally went a little crazy—an understatement, if there ever was one. Crystal had got out of breath in a hurry; before Wallingford knew what was happening, she’d bitten his nose and burned his back with the bedside lamp. Patrick had never met Mr. Pitney, Crystal’s husband, but he admired the man’s fortitude. (By the standards of the New York newsroom women, the Pitneys had had a long marriage.)

  “You pervert!” Crystal yelled. “If I could see you, I’d bite your face off!”

  Patrick didn’t doubt this; he hung up before Crystal got out of breath. He immediately put on his bathing suit and a bathrobe and went to the swimming pool, where no one could phone him.

  The only other person in the pool besides Wallingford was a woman swimming laps. She wore a black bathing cap, which made her head resemble the head of a seal, and she was churning up the water with choppy strokes and a flutter kick. To Patrick, she manifested the mindless intensity of a windup toy. Finding it unsettling to share the swimming pool with her, Wallingford retreated to the hot tub, where he could be alone. He did not turn on the whirlpool jets, preferring the water undisturbed. He gradually grew accustomed to the heat, but no sooner had he found a comfortable position, which was halfway between sitting and floating, than the lap-swimming woman got out of the pool, turned on the timer for the jets, and joined him in the bubbling hot tub.

  She was a woman past the young side of middle age. Wallingford quickly noted her unarousing body and politely looked away.

  The woman, who was disarmingly without vanity, sat up in the roiling water so that her shoulders and upper chest were above the surface; she pulled off her bathing cap and shook out her flattened hair. It was then that Patrick recognized her. She was the woman who’d called him a “carrion feeder” at breakfast—hounding him, with her burning eyes and noticeable breathing, all the way to the elevators. The woman could not now conceal her shock of recognition, which was simultaneous to his.

  She was the first to speak. “This is awkward.” Her voice had a softer edge than what Wallingford had heard in her attack on him at breakfast.

  “I don’t want to antagonize you,” Patrick told the woman. “I’ll just go to the swimming pool. I prefer the pool to the hot tub, anyway.” He rested the heel of his right hand on the underwater ledge and pushed himself to his feet. The stump of his left forearm emerged from the water like a raw, dripping wound. It was as if some creature below the hot tub’s surface had eaten his hand. The hot water had turned the scar tissue blood-red.

  The woman stood up when he did. Her wet bathing suit was not flattering—her breasts drooped; her stomach protruded like a small pouch. “Please stay a minute,”

  the woman asked. “I want to explain.”

  “You don’t need to apologize,” Patrick replied. “In general, I agree with you. It’s just that I didn’t understand the context. I didn’t come to Boston because JFK, Jr.’s plane was missing. I didn’t even know about his plane when you spoke to me. I came to see my doctor, because of my hand.” He instinctively lifted his stump, which he still spoke of as a hand. He quickly lowered it to his side, where it trailed in the hot tub, because he saw that, inadvertently, he’d pointed with his missing hand to her sagging breasts.

  She encircled his left forearm with both her hands, pulling him into the churning hot tub with her. They sat beside each other on the underwater ledge, her hands holding him an inch or two above where he’d been dismembered. Only the lion had held him more firmly. Once again he had the sensation that the tips of his left middle and left index fingers were touching a woman’s lower abdomen, although he knew those fingers were gone.

  “Please listen to me,” the woman said. She pulled his maimed arm into her lap. He felt the end of his forearm tingle as his stump brushed the small bulge of her stomach; his left elbow rested on her right thigh.

  “Okay,” Wallingford said, in lieu of grabbing the back of her neck in his right hand and forcing her head underwater. Truly, short of half-drowning her in the hot tub, what else could he have done?

  “I was married twice, the first time when I was very young,” the woman began; her bright, excited eyes held his attention as firmly as she held his arm. “I lost them. The first one divorced me, the second died. I actually loved them both.”

  Christ! Wallingford thought. Did every woman of a certain age have a version of Evelyn Arbuthnot’s story? “I’m sorry,” Patrick said, but the way she squeezed his arm indicated that she didn’t want to be interrupted.

  “I have two daughters, from my first ma
rriage,” the woman went on. “Throughout their childhood and adolescence, I never slept. I was certain something terrible was going to happen to them, that I would lose them, or one of them. I was afraid all the time.”

  It sounded like a true story. (Wallingford couldn’t help judging the start of any story this way.)

  “But they survived,” the woman said, as if most children didn’t. “They’re both married now and have children of their own. I have four grandchildren. Three girls, one boy. It kills me not to see more of them than I do, but when I see them, I feel afraid for them. I start to worry again. I don’t sleep.”

  Patrick felt the radiating twinges of mock pain where his left hand had been, but the woman had slightly relaxed her grip and there was an unanalyzed comfort in having his arm held so urgently in her lap, his stump pressing against the swell of her abdomen.

  “Now I’m pregnant,” the woman told him; his forearm didn’t respond. “I’m fiftyone! I’m not supposed to get pregnant! I came to Boston to have an abortion—my doctor recommended it. But I called the clinic from the hotel this morning. I lied. I said my car had broken down and I had to reschedule the appointment. They told me they can see me next Saturday, a week from today. That gives me more time to think about it.”

  “Have you talked to your daughters?” Wallingford asked. Her lion’s grip on his arm was there again.

  “They’d try to convince me to have the baby,” the woman replied, with renewed intensity. “They’d offer to raise the child with their children. But it would still be mine. I couldn’t stop myself from loving it, I couldn’t help but be involved. Yet I simply can’t stand the fear. The mortality of children… it’s more than I can bear.”

  “It’s your choice,” Patrick reminded her. “Whatever decision you make, I’m sure it will be the right one.” The woman didn’t look so sure.

  Wallingford wondered who the unborn child’s father was; whether or not this thought was conveyed by the tremble in his left forearm, the woman either felt it or she read his mind.

  “The father doesn’t know,” she said. “I don’t see him anymore. He was just a colleague.”

  Patrick had never heard the word “colleague” used so dismissively.

  “I don’t want my daughters to know I’m pregnant because I don’t want them to know I have sex,” the woman confessed. “That’s also why I can’t make up my mind. I don’t think you should have an abortion because you’re trying to keep the fact that you’ve had sex a secret. That’s not a good enough reason.”

  “Who’s to say what’s a ‘good enough’ reason if it’s your reason? It’s your choice,”

  Wallingford repeated. “It’s not a decision anyone else can or should make for you.”

  “That’s not hugely comforting,” the woman told him. “I was all set to have the abortion until I saw you at breakfast. I don’t understand what you triggered.”

  Wallingford had known from the beginning that all this would end up being his fault. He made the most tentative effort to retrieve his arm from the woman’s grasp, but she was not about to let him go that easily.

  “I don’t know what got into me when I spoke to you. I’ve never spoken to anyone like that in my life!” the woman continued. “I shouldn’t blame you, personally, for what the media does, or what I think they do. I was just so upset to hear about John junior, and I was even more upset by my first reaction. When I heard about his plane being lost, do you know what I thought?”

  “No.” Patrick shook his head; the hot water was making his forehead perspire, and he could see beads of sweat on the woman’s upper lip.

  “I was glad his mother was dead… that she didn’t have to go through this. I was sorry for him, but I was glad for her that she was dead. Isn’t that awful?”

  “It’s perfectly understandable,” Wallingford replied. “You’re a mother…” His instinct just to pat her on the knee, underwater, was sincere—that is, heartfelt without being in the least sexual. But because the instinct traveled down his left arm, there was no hand to pat her knee with. Unintentionally, he jerked his stump away from her; he’d felt the invisible crawling insects again. For a pregnant fifty-one-year-old mother of two and a pregnant grandmother of four, the woman was undaunted by Wallingford’s uncontrollable gesture. She calmly reached for his handless arm again. To Patrick’s surprise, he willingly put his stump back in her lap. The woman took hold of his forearm without reproach, as if she’d only momentarily misplaced a cherished possession.

  “I apologize for attacking you in public,” she said sincerely. “It was uncalled for. I’m simply not myself.” She gripped his forearm so tightly that an impossible pain was registered in Wallingford’s missing left thumb. He flinched. “Oh, God! I’ve hurt you!” the woman cried, letting go of his arm. “And I haven’t even asked you what your doctor said!”

  “I’m okay,” Patrick said. “It’s principally the nerves that were regenerated when the new hand was attached. Those nerves are acting up. My doctor thought my love life was the problem, or just stress.”

  “Your love life,” the woman repeated flatly, as if that were not a subject she cared to address. Wallingford didn’t want to address it, either. “But why are you still here?” she suddenly asked.

  Patrick thought she meant the hot tub. He was about to say that he was there because she’d held him there! Then he realized that she meant why hadn’t he gone back to New York. Or, if not New York, shouldn’t he be in Hyannisport or Martha’s Vineyard?

  Wallingford dreaded telling her that he was stalling his inevitable return to his questionable profession (“questionable” given the Kennedy spectacle, to which he would soon be contributing); yet he admitted this to the woman, however reluctantly, and further told her that he’d intended to walk to Harvard Square to pick up a couple of books that his doctor had recommended. He’d considered that he might spend what remained of the weekend reading them.

  “But I was afraid someone in Harvard Square would recognize me and say something to me along the lines of what you said to me at breakfast.” Patrick added: “It wouldn’t have been undeserved.”

  “Oh, God!” the woman said again. “Tell me what the books are. I’ll go get them for you. No one ever recognizes me. ”

  “That’s very kind of you, but—”

  “Please let me get the books for you! It would make me feel better!” She laughed nervously, pushing her damp hair away from her forehead.

  Wallingford sheepishly told her the titles.

  “Your doctor recommended them? Do you have children?”

  “There’s a little boy who’s like a son to me, or I want him to be more like a son to me,” Patrick explained. “But he’s too young for me to read him Stuart Little or Charlotte’s Web. I just want them so that I can imagine reading them to him in a few years.”

  “I read Charlotte’s Web to my grandson only a few weeks ago,” the woman told him. “I cried all over again—I cry every time.”

  “I don’t remember the book very well, just my mother crying,” Wallingford admitted.

  “My name is Sarah Williams.” There was an uncharacteristic hesitation in her voice when she said her name and held out her hand.

  Patrick shook her hand, both their hands touching the foamy bubbles in the hot tub. At that moment, the whirlpool jets shut off and the water in the tub was instantly clear and still. It was a little startling and too obvious an omen, which elicited more nervous laughter from Sarah Williams, who stood up and stepped out of the tub.

  Wallingford admired that way women have of getting out of the water in a wet bathing suit, a thumb or a finger automatically pulling down the back of the suit. When she stood, her small belly looked almost flat—it was swollen ever so slightly. From his memory of Mrs. Clausen’s pregnancy, Wallingford guessed that Sarah Williams couldn’t have been more than two, at the most three, months pregnant. If she hadn’t told him she was carrying a child, he would never have guessed. And maybe the pouch was always there, ev
en when she wasn’t pregnant.

  “I’ll bring the books to your room.” Sarah was wrapping herself up in a towel.

  “What’s your room number?”

  He told her, grateful for the occasion to prolong his procrastination, but while he was waiting for her to bring him the children’s books, he would still have to decide whether to go back to New York that night or not until Sunday morning. Maybe Mary wouldn’t have found him yet; that would buy Patrick a little more time. He might even discover that he had the willpower to delay turning the TV

  on, at least until Sarah Williams came to his room. Maybe she would watch the news with him; they seemed to agree that the coverage would be unbearable. It’s always better not to watch a bad newscast by yourself—let alone a Super Bowl. Yet as soon as he was back in his hotel room, he could summon no further resistance. He took off his wet bathing suit but kept the bathrobe on, and—while noticing that the message light on his telephone was flashing—he found the remote control for the TV in the drawer, where he’d hidden it, and turned the television on.

  He flipped through the channels until he found the all-news network, where he watched what he could have predicted (John F. Kennedy, Jr.’s Tribeca connection) come to life. There were the plain metal doors of the loft John junior had bought at 20 North Moore. The Kennedys’ residence, which was across the street from an old warehouse, had already been turned into a shrine. JFK, Jr.’s neighbors—and probably utter strangers posing as his neighbors—had left candles and flowers; perversely, they’d also left what looked like get-well cards. While Patrick felt genuinely awful that the young couple and Mrs. Kennedy’s sister had, in all likelihood, died, he detested those people groveling in their fantasy grief in Tribeca; they were what made the worst of television possible. But as much as Wallingford hated the telecast, he also understood it. There were only two positions the media could take toward celebrities: worship them or trash them. And since mourning was the highest form of worship, the deaths of celebrities were understandably to be prized; furthermore, their deaths allowed the media to worship and trash them all at once. There was no beating it. Wallingford turned off the TV and put the remote back in the drawer; he would be on television and a part of the spectacle soon enough. He was relieved when he called to inquire about his message light—only the hotel itself had called, to ask when he was checking out.