The Fourth Hand

by John Winslow Irving

“No, that was good. That was just fine. I think you’re great,” he said truthfully.

  “Ya just sayin’ that,” Angie told him. “Are ya tryin’ to get laid again or what?”

  So they had sex. What else were they going to do? This time, when Angie fainted again, Wallingford thoughtfully removed her old gum from the face of his clock before setting the alarm.

  Angie’s mother called once more—at least that was who Patrick assumed the caller was. Without saying a word, the woman wept on and on, almost melodiously, while Wallingford drifted in and out of sleep. He woke up before the alarm went off. He lay looking at the sleeping girl—her untrammeled goodwill was truly a thing of beauty. Patrick shut off the alarm before it sounded; he wanted to let Angie sleep. After he showered and shaved, he made a survey of his damaged body: the bruise on his shin from the glass-topped table at Mary’s, the burn from the hot-water faucet in Mary’s shower. His back was scratched from Angie’s nails; on his left shoulder was a sizable blood blister, a purplish hematoma and some broken skin from her spontaneous bite. Patrick Wallingford seemed in dubious condition for offering a marriage proposal in Wisconsin, or anywhere else. He made some coffee and brought the sleeping girl a glass of cold orange juice in bed.

  “Look at this place…” she was soon saying, marching naked through his apartment. “It looks like ya been havin’ sex!” She stripped the sheets and the pillowcases; she started gathering up the towels. “Ya gotta washin’ machine, don’tcha? I know ya gotta plane to catch—I’ll clean up here. What if that woman says yes? What if she comes back here with ya?”

  “That’s not likely. I mean it’s not likely she’ll come back here with me, even if she does say yes.”

  “Spare me ‘not likely’—she might. That’s all ya gotta know. Ya catch the plane. I’ll fix the place. I’ll rewind the answering machine before I leave. I promise.”

  “You don’t have to do this,” Patrick told her.

  “I wanna help!” Angie said. “I know what it’s like to have a messy life. Go on

  —ya betta get outta here! Ya don’t wanna miss your plane.”

  “Thank you, Angie.” He kissed her good-bye. She tasted so good, he almost didn’t go. What was wrong with sexual anarchy, anyway?

  The phone rang as he was leaving. He heard Vito’s voice on the answering machine. “Hey, listen up, Mista One Hand… Mista No Prick,” Vittorio was saying. There was a mechanical whirring, a terrifying sound.

  “It’s just a stupid blenda. Go on —don’t miss your plane!” Angie told him. Wallingford was closing the door as she was picking up the phone.

  “Hey, Vito,” he heard Angie say. “Listen up, limp dick.” Patrick paused on the landing by the stairs; there was a brief but pointed silence. “That’s the sound your prick would make in the blenda, Vito— no sound, ’cause ya got nothin’ there!”

  Wallingford’s nearest neighbor was on the landing—a sleepless-looking man from the adjacent apartment, getting ready to walk his dog. Even the dog looked sleepless as it waited, shivering slightly, at the top of the stairs.

  “I’m going to Wisconsin,” Patrick said hopefully.

  The man, who had a silver-gray goatee, looked dazed with general indifference and self-loathing.

  “Why don’tcha get a fuckin’ magnifyin’ glass so ya can beat off?” Angie was screaming. The dog pricked up its ears. “Ya know whatcha do with a prick as small as yours, Vito?” Wallingford and his neighbor just stared at the dog. “Ya go to a pet shop. Ya buy a mouse. Ya beg it for a blow job.”

  The dog, with grave solemnity, seemed to be considering all this. It was some kind of miniature schnauzer with a silver-gray beard, like its master’s.

  “Have a safe trip,” Wallingford’s neighbor told him.

  “Thank you,” Patrick said.

  They started down the stairs together—the schnauzer sneezing twice, the neighbor saying that he thought the dog had caught an “air-conditioning cold.”

  They’d reached the half-landing between floors when Angie shouted something mercifully indistinct. The girl’s heroic loyalty was enough to make Wallingford want to go back to her; she was a safer bet than Mrs. Clausen. But it was early on a summer Saturday morning; the day was brimming with hope. (Maybe not in Boston, where a woman whose name wasn’t Sarah Williams either was or was not waiting for an abortion.)

  There was no traffic on the way to the airport. Patrick got to the gate before boarding began. Since he’d packed in the dark while Angie slept, he thought it wise to check the contents of his carry-on: a T-shirt, a polo shirt, a sweatshirt, two bathing suits, two pair of underwear—he wore boxers—two pairs of white athletic socks, and a shaving kit, which included his toothbrush and toothpaste and some ever-hopeful condoms. He’d also packed a paperback edition of Stuart Little, recommended for ages eight through twelve.

  He had not packed Charlotte’s Web, because he doubted that Doris’s attention span could accommodate two books in one weekend; after all, Otto junior was not yet walking but he was probably crawling. There wouldn’t be much time for reading aloud.

  Why Stuart Little instead of Charlotte’s Web ? one might ask. Only because Patrick Wallingford considered the ending to be more in tune with his own on-the-roadagain way of life. And maybe the melancholy of it would be persuasive to Mrs. Clausen—it was certainly more romantic than the birth of all those baby spiders. In the waiting area, the other passengers watched Wallingford unpack and repack his bag. He’d dressed that morning in a pair of jeans and running shoes and a Hawaiian shirt, and he carried a light jacket, a kind of Windbreaker, to drape over his left forearm to conceal the missing hand. But a one-handed man unpacking and repacking a bag would get anyone’s attention. By the time Patrick stopped fussing over what he was bringing to Wisconsin, everyone in the waiting area knew who he was.

  They observed the lion guy holding his cell phone in his lap, pinning it against his thigh with the stump of his left forearm while he dialed the number with his one hand; then he picked up the phone and held it to his ear and mouth. When his Windbreaker slipped off the empty seat beside him, his left forearm reached to pick it up, but Wallingford thought better of it and returned the useless stump to his lap.

  His fellow passengers must have been surprised. After all these years of handlessness, his left arm still thinks it has a hand! But no one ventured to retrieve the fallen Windbreaker until a sympathetic couple, traveling with a young boy, whispered something to their son. The boy, who was perhaps seven or eight, cautiously approached Patrick’s jacket; he picked it up and put it carefully on the empty seat beside Wallingford’s bag. Patrick smiled and nodded to the boy, who self-consciously hurried back to his parents.

  The cell phone rang and rang in Wallingford’s ear. He had meant to call his own apartment and either speak to Angie or leave a message on his answering machine, which he hoped she would hear. He wanted to tell her how wonderful and natural she was; he’d thought of saying something that began, “In another life…” That kind of thing. But he hadn’t made that call; something about the girl’s sheer goodness made him not want to risk hearing her voice. (And what bullshit it was to call someone you’d spent only one night with “natural.”) He called Mary Shanahan instead. Her phone rang so many times that Wallingford was composing a message to leave on her answering machine when Mary picked up the receiver.

  “It could only be you, you asshole,” she said.

  “Mary, we’re not married—we’re not even going steady. And I’m not trading apartments with you.”

  “Didn’t you have a good time with me, Pat?”

  “There was a lot you didn’t tell me,” Wallingford pointed out.

  “That’s just the nature of the business.”

  “I see,” he said. There was that distant, hollow sound—the kind of echoing silence Wallingford associated with transoceanic calls. “I guess this wouldn’t be a good time to ask you about a new contract,” he added. “You said to ask for five years—”

&nb
sp; “We should discuss this after your weekend in Wisconsin,” Mary replied. “Three years would be more realistic than five, I think.”

  “And should I… well, how did you put it? Should I sort of phase myself out of the anchor chair—is that your suggestion?”

  “If you want a new, extended contract—yes, that would be one way,” Mary told him.

  “I don’t know the history of pregnant anchors,” Wallingford admitted. “Has there ever been a pregnant anchor? I suppose it could work. Is that the idea? We would watch you get bigger and bigger. Of course there would be some homey commentary, and a shot or two of you in profile. It would be best to have a brief maternity leave, to suggest that having a baby in today’s family-sensitive workplace is no big deal. Then, after what seemed no longer than a standard vacation, you’d be back on-camera, almost as svelte as before.”

  That transoceanic silence followed, the hollow sound of the distance between them. It was like his marriage, as Wallingford remembered it.

  “Am I understanding ‘the nature of the business’ yet?” Patrick asked. “Am I getting it right?”

  “I used to love you,” Mary reminded him; then she hung up. It pleased Wallingford that at least one phase of the office politics between them was over. He would find his own way to get fired, when he felt like it; if he decided to do it Mary’s way, she would be the last to know when. And, if it turned out Mary was pregnant, he would be as responsible for the baby as she allowed him to be—he just wouldn’t be dicked around by her.

  Who was he kidding? If you have a baby with someone, of course you’re going to be dicked around! And he had underestimated Mary Shanahan before. She could find a hundred ways to dick him around.

  Yet Wallingford recognized what had changed in him—he was no longer acquiescing. Possibly he was the new or semi-new Patrick Wallingford, after all. Moreover, the coldness of Mary Shanahan’s tone of voice had been encouraging; he’d sensed that his prospects for getting fired were improving. On his way to the airport, Patrick had looked at the taxi driver’s newspaper, just the weather page. The forecast for northern Wisconsin was warm and fair. Even the weather boded well.

  Mrs. Clausen had expressed some anxiety about the weather, because they would be flying to the lake up north in a small plane; it was some kind of seaplane, or what Doris had called a floatplane. Green Bay itself was part of Lake Michigan, but where they were going was roughly between Lake Michigan and Lake Superior—the part of Wisconsin that is near Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Since Wallingford couldn’t get to Green Bay before Saturday and he had to be back in New York on Monday, Doris had determined they should take the little plane. It was too long a drive from Green Bay for such a short weekend; this way they would have two nights in the boathouse apartment at the cottage on the lake. To get to Green Bay, Patrick had previously tried two different Chicago connections and one connecting flight through Detroit; this time he’d opted for a change of planes in Cincinnati. Sitting in the waiting area, he was overcome by a moment of typically New York incomprehension. (This happened only seconds before the boarding call.) Why were so many people going to Cincinnati on a Saturday in July?

  Of course Wallingford knew why he was going there—Cincinnati was simply the first leg of a journey in three parts—but what could possibly be attracting all these other people to the place? It would never have occurred to Patrick Wallingford that anyone knowing his reasons for the trip might have found Mrs. Clausen’s lasting allure the most improbable excuse of all.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Up North

  THERE WAS A MOMENT when the floatplane banked and Doris Clausen closed her eyes. Patrick Wallingford, eyes wide open, didn’t want to miss the steep descent to the small, dark lake. Not even for a new left hand, a keeper, would Wallingford have blinked or looked away from that sideslipping view of the darkgreen trees and the suddenly tilted horizon. One wingtip must have been pointed at the lake; the window on the seaplane’s downward side revealed nothing but the fast-approaching water.

  At such a sharp angle, the pontoons shuddered and the plane shook so violently that Mrs. Clausen clutched little Otto to her breast. Her movement startled the sleeping child, who commenced to cry only seconds before the pilot leveled off and the small plane landed less than smoothly on the wind-ruffled water. The firs flew by and the white pines were a wall of green, a blur of jade where the blue sky had been.

  Doris at last exhaled, but Wallingford hadn’t been afraid. Although he’d never been to the lake up north before, nor had he ever flown in a floatplane, the water and the surrounding shore, as well as every frame of the descent and landing, were as familiar to him as that blue-capsule dream. All those years since he’d lost his hand the first time seemed shorter than a single night’s sleep to him now; yet, during those years, he had wished continually for that pain-pill dream to come true. At long last, Patrick Wallingford had no doubt that he’d touched down in that blue-capsule dream.

  Patrick took it as a good sign that the uncountable members of the Clausen family had not descended en masse on the various cabins and outbuildings. Was it out of respect for the delicacy of Doris’s situation—a single parent, a widow with a possible suitor—that Otto senior’s family had left the lakefront property unoccupied for the weekend? Had Mrs. Clausen asked them for this consideration? In which case, did she anticipate that the weekend had romantic potential? If so, Doris gave no indication of it. She had a list of things to do, which she attended to matter-of-factly. Wallingford watched her start the pilot lights for the propane hot-water heaters, the gas refrigerators, and the stove. He carried the baby.

  Patrick held little Otto in his left arm, without a hand, because at times he needed to shine the flashlight for Mrs. Clausen. The key to the main cabin was nailed to a beam under the sundeck; the key to the finished rooms above the boathouse was nailed to a two-by-four under the big dock.

  It wasn’t necessary to unlock and open all the cabins and outbuildings—they wouldn’t be using them. The smaller shed, now used for tools, had been an outhouse before there was plumbing, before they pumped water from the lake. Mrs. Clausen expertly primed the pump and pulled the cord to start the gasoline engine that ran the pump.

  Doris asked Patrick to dispose of a dead mouse. She held little Otto while Wallingford removed the mouse from the trap and loosely buried it under some leaves and pine needles. The mousetrap had been set in a kitchen cupboard; Mrs. Clausen discovered the dead rodent while she was putting the groceries away. Doris didn’t like mice—they were dirty. She was revolted by the turds they left in what she called “surprise places” throughout the kitchen. She asked Patrick to dispose of the mouse turds, too. And she disliked, even more than their turds, the suddenness with which mice moved. (Maybe I should have brought Charlotte’s Web instead of Stuart Little, Wallingford worried.) All the food in paper or plastic bags, or in cardboard boxes, had to be stored in tin containers because of the mice; over the winter, not even the canned food could be left unprotected. One winter something had gnawed through the cans—probably a rat, but maybe a mink or a weasel. Another winter, what was almost certainly a wolverine had broken into the main cabin and made the kitchen its lair; the animal had left a terrible mess.

  Patrick understood that this was part of the summer-camp lore of the cottage. He could easily envision the life lived here, even without the other Clausens present. In the main cabin, where the kitchen and dining room were—also the biggest of the bathrooms—he saw the board games and puzzles stacked on shelves. There were no books to speak of, save a dictionary (doubtless for settling arguments in Scrabble) and the usual field guides that identify snakes and amphibians, insects and spiders, wildflowers, mammals, and birds.

  In the main cabin, too, were the visualizations of the ghosts that had passed through or still visited there. These took the form of artless snapshots, curled at the edges. Some of these photos were badly faded from long exposure to sunlight; others were rust-spotted from the old tacks pinni
ng them to the rough pine walls. And there were other mementos that spoke of ghosts. The mounted heads of deer, or just their antlers; a crow’s skull that revealed the perfect hole made by a .22caliber bullet; some undistinguished fish, home-mounted on plaques of shellacked pine boards. (The fish looked as if they’d been crudely varnished, too.) Most outstanding was a single talon of a large bird of prey. Mrs. Clausen told Wallingford it was an eagle’s talon; it was not a trophy but a record of shame, displayed in a jewelry box as a warning to other Clausens. It was awful to shoot an eagle, yet one of the less disciplined Clausens had done the deed, for which he was harshly punished. He’d been a young boy at the time, and he’d been “grounded,”

  Doris said—meaning he had missed two hunting seasons, back-to-back. If that wasn’t lesson enough, the murdered eagle’s talon remained as further evidence against him.

  “Donny,” Doris said, shaking her head as she uttered the eagle-killer’s name. Attached to the plush lining of the jewelry box (by a safety pin) was a photo of Donny—he looked crazed. He was a grown man now, with children of his own; when his kids saw the talon, they were probably ashamed of their father all over again.

  Mrs. Clausen’s telling of the tale was sobering, and she related it in the manner that it had been told to her—a cautionary tale, a moral warning. DON’T SHOOT

  EAGLES!

  “Donny was always a wild hair,” Mrs. Clausen reported.

  In his mind’s eye, Wallingford could see them interacting—the ghosts in the photographs, the fishermen who had caught the shellacked fish, the hunters who’d shot the deer and the crow and the eagle. He imagined the men standing around the barbecue, which was covered with a tarp and stowed on the sundeck under an eave of the roof.

  There was an indoor and an outdoor fridge, which Patrick imagined were full of beer. Mrs. Clausen later corrected this impression; only the outdoor refrigerator was full of beer. It was the designated beer fridge—nothing else was allowed in it. While the men watched the barbecue and drank their beer, the women fed the children—at the picnic table on the deck in good weather, or at the long diningroom table when the weather was bad. The limitations of space in cottage life spoke to Wallingford of children and grown-ups eating separately. Mrs. Clausen, at first laughing at Patrick’s question, confirmed that this was true. There was a row of photographs of women in hospital gowns in beds, their newborns beside them; Doris’s photo was not among them. Wallingford felt the conspicuousness of her and little Otto’s absence. ( Big Otto hadn’t been there to take their picture.) There were men and boys in uniforms—all kinds of uniforms, military and athletic—and women and girls in formal dresses and bathing suits, most of them caught in the act of protesting that their pictures were being taken. There was a wall for dogs—dogs swimming, dogs fetching sticks, some dogs forlornly dressed in children’s clothes. And in a nook above the dresser drawers in one of the bedrooms, inserted by their edges into the frame of a pitted mirror, were photos of the elderly, probably now deceased. An old woman in a wheelchair with a cat in her lap; an old man without a paddle in the bow of a canoe. The old man had long white hair and was wrapped in a blanket like an Indian; he seemed to be waiting for someone to sit in the stern and paddle him away. In the hall, opposite the bathroom door, was a cluster of photographs in the shape of a cross—a shrine to a young Clausen male declared missing-in-action in Vietnam. In the bathroom itself was another shrine, this one to the glory days of the Green Bay Packers—a hallowed gathering of old magazine photos picturing the “invincible ones.”