The Fourth Hand

by John Winslow Irving

  “A body ornament, for your belly button,” she explained.

  “Not for mine!” the man said, grinning.

  Patrick handed him the good-luck charm. That was when the Windbreaker slipped off Wallingford’s left forearm and the guards saw that his left hand was gone.

  “Hey, you’re the lion guy!” the male guard said. He’d scarcely glanced at the small platinum hand with the crossed fingers, resting in the palm of his bigger hand.

  The female guard instinctively reached out and touched Patrick’s left forearm.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you, Mr. Wallingford,” she said. What kind of sadness was it that showed in her face? Wallingford had instantly known she was sad, but he’d not (until now) considered the possible reasons. There was a small, fishhook-shaped scar on her throat; it could have come from anything, from a childhood accident with a pair of scissors to a bad marriage or a violent rape.

  Her colleague—the small, lean black man—was now looking at the body ornament with new interest. “Well, it’s a hand. A left one. I get it!” he said excitedly. “I guess that would be your good-luck charm, wouldn’t it?”

  “Actually, it’s for fertility. Or so I was told.”

  “It is ?” the Native American woman asked. She took the doohickey out of her fellow guard’s hand. “Let me see that again. Does it work?” she asked Patrick. He could tell she was serious.

  “It worked once,” Wallingford replied.

  It was tempting to guess what her sadness was. The female security guard was in her late thirties or early forties; she was wearing a wedding ring on her left ring finger and a turquoise ring on the ring finger of her right hand. Her ears were pierced—more turquoise. Perhaps her belly button was pierced, too. Maybe she couldn’t get pregnant.

  “Do you want it?” Wallingford asked her. “I have no further use for it.”

  The black man laughed. He walked away with a wave of his hand. “Oooh-oooh!

  You don’t want to go there!” he said to Patrick, shaking his head. Maybe the poor woman had a dozen children; she’d been begging to get her tubes tied, but her nogood husband wouldn’t let her.

  “You be quiet!” the female guard called after her departing colleague. He was still laughing, but she was not amused.

  “You can have it, if you want it,” Wallingford told her. After all, Mrs. Clausen had asked him to give it away.

  The woman closed her dark hand over the fertility charm. “I would very much like to have it, but I’m sure I can’t afford it.”

  “No, no! It’s free! I’m giving it to you. It’s already yours,” Patrick said. “I hope it works, if you want it to.” He couldn’t tell if the woman guard wanted it for herself or for a friend, or if she just knew somewhere to sell it. At some distance from the security checkpoint, Wallingford turned and looked at the Native American woman. She was back at work— to all other eyes, she was just a security guard—but when she glanced in Patrick’s direction, she waved to him and gave him a warm smile. She also held up the tiny hand. Wallingford was too far away to see the crossed fingers, but the ornament winked in the bright airport light; the platinum gleamed again like gold.

  It reminded Patrick of Doris’s and Otto Clausen’s wedding rings, shining in the flashlight’s beam between the dark water and the underside of the boathouse dock. How many times since she’d nailed the rings there had Doris swum under the dock to look at them, treading water with a flashlight in her hand? Or had she never looked? Did she only see them—as Wallingford now would—in dreams or in the imagination, where the gold was always brighter and the rings’

  reflection in the lake more everlasting?

  If he had a chance with Mrs. Clausen, it was not really a matter that would be decided upon the discovery of whether or not Mary Shanahan was pregnant. More important was how brightly those wedding rings under the dock still shone in Doris Clausen’s dreams, and in her imagination.

  When his plane took off for Cincinnati, Wallingford was—at that moment, literally—as up in the air as Doris Clausen’s thoughts about him. He would have to wait and see.

  That was Monday, July 26, 1999. Wallingford would long remember the date; he wouldn’t see Mrs. Clausen again for ninety-eight days.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Lambeau Field

  HE WOULD HAVE TIME TO HEAL. The bruise on his shin (the glass-topped table in Mary’s apartment) first turned yellow and then light brown; one day it was gone. Likewise the burn (the hot-water faucet in Mary’s shower) soon disappeared. Where his back had been scratched (Angie’s nails), there was suddenly no evidence of Patrick’s thrashing encounter with the makeup girl from Queens; even the sizable blood blister on his left shoulder (Angie’s love-bite) went away. Where there’d been a purplish hematoma (the love-bite again), there was nothing but Wallingford’s new skin, as innocent-looking as little Otto’s shoulder—that bare, that unmarked.

  Patrick remembered rubbing sunscreen on his son’s smooth skin; he missed touching and holding his little boy. He missed Mrs. Clausen, too, but Wallingford knew better than to press her for an answer.

  He also knew that it was too soon to ask Mary Shanahan if she was pregnant. All he said to her, as soon as he got back from Green Bay, was that he wanted to take her up on her suggestion to renegotiate his contract. There were, as Mary had pointed out, eighteen months remaining on Patrick’s present contract. Hadn’t it been her idea that he ask for three years, or even five?

  Yes, it had. (She’d said, “Ask for three years—no, make that five.”) But Mary seemed to have no memory of their earlier conversation. “I think three years would be a lot to ask for, Pat,” was all she said.

  “I see,” Wallingford replied. “Then I suppose I might as well keep the anchor job.”

  “But are you sure you want the job, Pat?”

  He believed that Mary wasn’t being cautious just because Wharton and Sabina were there in her office. (The moon-faced CEO and the bitter Sabina sat listening with seeming indifference, not saying a word.) What Wallingford understood about Mary was that she didn’t really know what he wanted, and this made her nervous.

  “It depends,” Patrick replied. “It’s hard to imagine trading an anchor chair for field assignments, even if I get to pick my own assignments. You know what they say:

  ‘Been there, done that.’ It’s hard to look forward to going backward. I guess you’d have to make me an offer, so I have a better idea of what you have in mind.”

  Mary looked at him, smiling brightly. “How was Wisconsin?” she asked. Wharton, whose frozen blandness would begin to blend in with the furniture if he didn’t say something (or at least twitch) in the next thirty seconds, coughed minimally into his cupped palm. The unbelievable blankness of his expression called to mind the vacuity of a masked executioner; even Wharton’s cough was underexpressed.

  Sabina, whom Wallingford could barely remember sleeping with—now that he thought of it, she’d whimpered in her sleep like a dog having a dream—cleared her throat as if she’d swallowed a pubic hair.

  “Wisconsin was fine.”

  Wallingford spoke as neutrally as possible, but Mary correctly deduced that nothing had been decided between him and Doris Clausen. He couldn’t have waited to tell her if he and Mrs. Clausen were really a couple. Just as, the second Mary knew she was pregnant, she wouldn’t wait to tell him. And they both knew it had been necessary to enact this standoff in the presence of Wharton and Sabina, who both knew it, too. Under the circumstances, it wouldn’t have been advisable for Patrick Wallingford and Mary Shanahan to be alone together.

  “Boy, is it ever frosty around here!” was what Angie told Wallingford, when she got him alone in the makeup chair.

  “Is it ever !” Patrick admitted. He was glad to see the good-hearted girl, who’d left his apartment the cleanest it had been since the day he moved in.

  “So… are ya gonna tell me about Wisconsin or what?” Angie asked.

  “It’s too soon to say,”
Wallingford confessed. “I’ve got my fingers crossed,” he added—an unfortunate choice of words because he was reminded of Mrs. Clausen’s fertility charm.

  “My fingers are crossed for ya, too,” Angie said. She had stopped flirting with him, but she was no less sincere and no less friendly.

  Wallingford would throw away his digital alarm clock and replace it with a new one, because whenever he looked at the old one he would remember Angie’s piece of gum stuck there—as well as the near-death gyrations that had caused her gum to be expectorated with such force. He didn’t want to lie in bed thinking about Angie unless Doris Clausen said no.

  For now, Doris was being vague. Wallingford had to acknowledge that it was hard to know what to make of the photographs she sent him, although her accompanying comments, if not cryptic, struck him as more mischievous than romantic.

  She hadn’t sent him a copy of every picture on the roll; missing, Patrick saw, were two he’d taken himself. Her purple bathing suit on the clothesline, alongside his swimming trunks—he’d taken two shots in case she wanted to keep one of the photos for herself. She had kept them both.

  The first two photos Mrs. Clausen sent were unsurprising, beginning with that one of Wallingford wading in the shallow water near the lakeshore with little Otto naked in his arms. The second picture was the one that Patrick took of Doris and Otto junior on the sundeck of the main cabin. It was Wallingford’s first night at the cottage on the lake, and nothing had happened yet between him and Mrs. Clausen. As if she weren’t even thinking that anything might happen between them, her expression was totally relaxed, free of any expectation. The only surprise was the third photograph, which Wallingford didn’t know Doris had taken; it was the one of him sleeping in the rocking chair with his son. Patrick did not know how to interpret Mrs. Clausen’s remarks in the note that accompanied the photographs—especially how matter-of-factly she reported that she’d taken two shots of little Otto asleep in his father’s arms and had kept one for herself. The tone of her note, which Wallingford had at first found mischievous, was also ambiguous. Doris had written: On the evidence of the enclosed, you have the potential to be a good father.

  Only the potential ? Patrick’s feelings were hurt. Nevertheless, he read The English Patient in the fervent hope he would find a passage to bring to her attention—maybe one she had marked, one they both liked.

  When Wallingford called Mrs. Clausen to thank her for the photographs, he thought he might have found such a passage. “I loved that part about the ‘list of wounds,’ especially when she stabs him with the fork. Do you remember that?

  ‘The fork that entered the back of his shoulder, leaving its bite marks the doctor suspected were caused by a fox.’ ”

  Doris was silent on her end of the phone.

  “You didn’t like that part?” Patrick asked.

  “I’d just as soon not be reminded of your bite marks, and your other wounds,” she told him.

  “Oh.”

  Wallingford would keep reading The English Patient. It was merely a matter of reading the novel more carefully; yet he threw caution to the wind when he came upon Almásy saying of Katharine, “She was hungrier to change than I expected.”

  This was surely true of Patrick’s impression of Mrs. Clausen as a lover—she’d been voracious in ways that had astonished him. He called her immediately, forgetting that it was very late at night in New York; in Green Bay, it was only an hour earlier. Given little Otto’s schedule, Doris usually went to bed early. She didn’t sound like herself when she answered the phone. Patrick was instantly apologetic.

  “I’m sorry. You were asleep.”

  “That’s okay. What is it?”

  “It’s a passage in The English Patient, but I can tell you what it is another time. You can call me in the morning, as early as you want. Please wake me up!” he begged her.

  “Read me the passage.”

  “It’s just something Almásy says about Katharine—”

  “Go on. Read it.”

  He read: “ ‘She was hungrier to change than I expected.’ ” Out of context, the passage suddenly struck Wallingford as pornographic, but he trusted Mrs. Clausen to remember the context.

  “Yes, I know that part,” she said, without emotion. Maybe she was still half asleep.

  “Well…” Wallingford started to say.

  “I suppose I was hungrier than you expected. Is that it?” Doris asked. (The way she said it, she might as well have asked, “Is that all ?”)

  “Yes,” Patrick answered. He could hear her sigh.

  “Well…” Mrs. Clausen began. Then she seemed to change her mind about what she was going to say. “It really is too late to call,” was her only comment. Which left Wallingford with nothing to say but “I’m sorry.” He would have to keep reading and hoping.

  Meanwhile, Mary Shanahan summoned him to her office— not for the purpose, Patrick soon realized, of telling him that she was or wasn’t pregnant. Mary had something else on her mind. While Wallingford’s idea of a renegotiated contract of at least three years’ duration was not to the all-news network’s liking—not even if Wallingford was willing to give up the anchor chair and return to reporting from the field—the twenty-four-hour international channel was interested to know if Wallingford would accept “occasional” field assignments.

  “Do you mean that they want me to begin the process of phasing myself out of the anchor job?” Patrick asked.

  “Were you to accept, we would renegotiate your contract,” Mary went on, without answering his question. “Naturally you’d get to keep your present salary.” She made the issue of not offering him a raise sound like a positive thing. “I believe we’re talking about a two-year contract.” She wasn’t exactly committing herself to it, and a two-year contract was superior to his present agreement by a scant six months.

  What a piece of work she is! Wallingford was thinking, but what he said was, “If the intention is to replace me as the anchor, why not bring me into the discussion? Why not ask me how I’d like to be replaced? Maybe gradually would be best, but maybe not. I’d at least like to know the long-range plan.”

  Mary Shanahan just smiled. Patrick had to marvel at how quickly she’d adjusted to her new and undefined power. Surely she was not authorized to make decisions of this kind on her own, and she probably hadn’t yet learned just how many other people were part of the decision-making process, but of course she conveyed none of this to Wallingford. At the same time, she was smart enough not to lie directly; she would never claim that there was no long-range plan, nor would she ever admit that there was one and that not even she knew what it was.

  “I know you’ve always wanted to do something about Germany, Pat,” was what she told him, seemingly out of the blue—but nothing with Mary was out of the blue.

  Wallingford had asked to do a piece about German reunification—nine years after the fact. Among other things, he’d suggested exploring how the language for reunification—now “unification” in most of the official press—had changed. Even The New York Times had subscribed to “unification.” Yet Germany, which had been one country, had been divided; then it was made one again. Why wasn’t that re unification? Most Americans thought of Germany as re unified, surely. What were the politics of that not-so-little change in the language? And what differences of opinion among Germans remained about reunification or unification?

  But the all-news network hadn’t been interested. “Who cares about Germans?”

  Dick had asked. Fred had felt the same way. (In the New York newsroom, they were always saying they were “sick of” something—sick of religion, sick of the arts, sick of children, sick of Germans.)

  Now here was Mary, the new news editor, holding out Germany as the dubious carrot before the reluctant donkey.

  “What about Germany?” Wallingford asked suspiciously. Naturally Mary wouldn’t have raised the issue of him accepting “occasional” field assignments if the network hadn’t had one such assignment
already in mind. What was it?

  “Actually there are two items,” Mary answered, making it sound as if two were a plus.

  But she’d called the stories “items,” which forewarned Patrick. German reunification was no item —that subject was too big to be called an item. “Items”

  in the newsroom were trivial stories, freakish amusements of the kind Wallingford knew all too well. Otto senior blowing his brains out in a beer truck after the Super Bowl—that was an item. The lion guy himself was an item. If the network had two

  “items” for Patrick Wallingford to cover, Wallingford knew they would be sensationally stupid stories, or trivial in the extreme—or both.

  “What are they, Mary?” Patrick asked. He was trying not to lose his temper, because he sensed that these field assignments were not of Mary’s choosing; something about her hesitancy told him that she already knew how he would respond to the proposals.

  “You’ll probably think they’re just silly,” she said. “But they are in Germany.”

  “What are they, Mary?”

  The channel had already aired a minute and a half of the first item—everyone had seen it. A forty-two-year-old German had managed to kill himself while watching the solar eclipse that August. He’d been driving his car near Kaiserslautern when a witness observed him weaving from one side of the road to the other; then his car had accelerated and struck a bridge abutment, or some kind of pier. It was discovered that he’d been wearing his solar viewers—he didn’t want to miss the eclipse. The lenses had been sufficiently dark to obscure everything but the partially occluded sun.