The Fourth Hand

by John Winslow Irving

  “It’s Monday Night Football, the Seahawks and the Packers at Lambeau Field.”

  Mrs. Clausen spoke with a reverence that was wasted on Wallingford. “Mike Holmgren’s coming home. I wouldn’t want to miss it.”

  “Me neither!” Patrick replied. He didn’t know who Mike Holmgren was. He would have to do a little research.

  “It’s November first. Are you sure you’re free?”

  “I’ll be free!” he promised. Wallingford was trying to sound joyful while, in truth, he was heartbroken that he would have to wait until November to see her. It was only the middle of September! “Maybe you could come to New York before then?” he asked.

  “No. I want to see you at the game,” she told him. “I can’t explain.”

  “You don’t have to explain!” Patrick quickly replied.

  “I’m glad you like the picture,” was the way she changed the subject.

  “I love it! I love what you did to me.”

  “Okay. I’ll see you before too long,” was the way Mrs. Clausen closed the conversation—she didn’t even say good-bye.

  The next morning, at the script meeting, Wallingford tried not to think that Mary Shanahan was behaving like a woman who was having a bad period, only more so, but that was his impression. Mary began the meeting by abusing one of the newsroom women. Her name was Eleanor and, for whatever reason, she’d slept with one of the summer interns; now that the boy had gone back to college, Mary accused Eleanor of robbing the cradle.

  Only Wallingford knew that, before he’d stupidly agreed to try to make Mary pregnant, Mary had propositioned the intern. He was a good-looking boy, and he was smarter than Wallingford—he’d rejected Mary’s proposal. Patrick not only liked Eleanor for sleeping with the boy; he had also liked the boy, whose summer internship had not entirely lacked an authentic experience. (Eleanor was one of the oldest of the married women in the newsroom.)

  Only Wallingford knew that Mary didn’t really give a damn that Eleanor had slept with the boy—she was just angry because she had her period. Suddenly the idea of taking a field assignment, any assignment, attracted Patrick. It would at least get him out of the newsroom, and out of New York. He told Mary that she would find him open to a field assignment, next time, provided that she not try to accompany him where he was being sent. (Mary had volunteered to travel with him the next time she was ovulating.)

  There was, in the near future, Wallingford informed Mary, only one day and night when he would not be available for a field assignment or to anchor the evening news. He was attending a Monday Night Football game in Green Bay, Wisconsin, on November 1, 1999—no matter what.

  Someone (probably Mary) leaked it to ABC Sports that Patrick Wallingford would be at the game that night, and ABC immediately asked the lion guy to stop by the booth during the telecast. (Why say no to a two-minute appearance before how many million viewers? Mary would say to Patrick.) Maybe disaster man could even call a play or two. Did Wallingford know, someone from ABC asked, that his hand-eating episode had sold almost as many videos as the annual NFL highlights film?

  Yes, Wallingford knew. He respectfully declined the offer to visit the ABC commentators. As he put it, he was attending the game with “a special friend”; he didn’t use Doris’s name. This might mean that a TV camera would be on him during the game, but so what? Patrick didn’t mind waving once or twice, just to show them what they wanted to see—the no-hand, or what Mrs. Clausen called his fourth hand. Even the sports hacks wanted to see it.

  That may have been why Wallingford got a more enthusiastic response to his letters of inquiry to public-television stations than he received from public radio or the Big Ten journalism schools. All the PBS affiliates were interested in him. In general, Patrick was heartened by the collective response; he would have a job to go to, possibly even an interesting one.

  Naturally he breathed not a word of this to Mary, while he tried to anticipate what field assignments she might offer him. A war wouldn’t have surprised him; an E. coli bacteria outbreak would have suited Mary’s mood. Wallingford longed to learn why Mrs. Clausen insisted on waiting to see him until a Monday Night Football game in Green Bay. He phoned her on Saturday night, October 30, although he knew he would see her the coming Monday, but Doris remained noncommittal on the subject of the game’s curious importance to her. “I just get anxious when the Packers are favored,” was all she said. Wallingford went to bed fairly early that Saturday night. Vito called once, around midnight, but Patrick quickly fell back to sleep. When the phone rang on Sunday morning—it was still dark outside—Wallingford assumed it was Vito again; he almost didn’t answer. But it was Mary Shanahan, and she was all business.

  “I’ll give you a choice,” she told him, without bothering to say hello or so much as his name. “You can cover the scene at Kennedy, or we’ll get you a plane to Boston and a helicopter will take you to Otis Air Force Base.”

  “Where’s that?” Wallingford asked.

  “Cape Cod. Do you know what’s happened, Pat?”

  “I was asleep, Mary.”

  “Well, turn on the fucking news! I’ll call you back in five minutes. You can forget about going to Wisconsin.”

  “I’m going to Green Bay, no matter what,” he told her, but she’d already hung up. Not even the brevity of her call or the harshness of her message could dispel from Patrick’s memory the little-girlish and excessively floral pattern of Mary’s bedspread, or the pink undulations of her Lava lamp and their protozoan movements across her bedroom ceiling—the shadows racing like sperm. Wallingford turned on the news. An Egyptian jetliner carrying 217 people had taken off from Kennedy, an overnight flight bound for Cairo. It had disappeared from radar screens only thirty-three minutes after take-off. Cruising at 33,000 feet in good weather, the plane had suddenly plummeted into the Atlantic about sixty miles southeast of Nantucket Island. There’d been no distress call from the cockpit. Radar sweeps indicated that the jet’s rate of descent was more than 23,000 feet per minute—“like a rock,” an aviation expert put it. The water was fifty-nine degrees and more than 250 feet deep; there was little hope that anyone had survived the crash.

  It was the kind of crash that opened itself up to media speculation—the reports would all be speculative. Human-interest stories would abound. A businessman who preferred to be unnamed had arrived late at the airport and been turned away at the ticket counter. When they’d told him the flight was closed, he’d screamed at them. He went home and woke up in the morning, alive. That kind of thing would go on for days.

  One of the airport hotels at Kennedy, the Ramada Plaza, had been turned into an information and counseling center for grieving family members—not that there was much information. Nevertheless, Wallingford went there. He chose Kennedy over Otis Air Force Base on the Cape—the reason being that the media would have limited access to the Coast Guard crews who’d been searching the debris field. By dawn that Sunday, they’d reportedly found only a small flotsam of wreckage and the remains of one body. On the choppy sea, there was nothing adrift that looked burned, which suggested there’d been no explosion. Patrick first spoke to the relatives of a young Egyptian woman who’d collapsed outside the Ramada Plaza. She’d fallen in a heap, in view of the television cameras surrounding the entrance to the hotel; police officers carried her into the lobby. Her relatives told Wallingford that her brother had been on the plane. Naturally the mayor was there, giving what solace he could. Wallingford could always count on a comment from the mayor. Giuliani seemed to like the lion guy more than he liked most reporters. Maybe he saw Patrick as a kind of police officer who’d been wounded in the line of duty; more likely, the mayor remembered Wallingford because Wallingford had only one hand.

  “If there’s anything the City of New York can do to help, that’s what we’re trying to do,” Giuliani told the press. He looked a little tired when he turned to Patrick Wallingford and said: “Sometimes, if the mayor asks, it happens a little faster.”

  A
n Egyptian man was using the lobby of the Ramada as a makeshift mosque: “We belong to God and to God we return,” he kept praying, in Arabic. Wallingford had to ask someone for a translation.

  At the script meeting before the Sunday-evening telecast, Patrick was told point-blank of the network’s plans. “Either you’re our anchor tomorrow evening or we’ve got you on a Coast Guard cutter,” Mary Shanahan informed him.

  “I’m in Green Bay tomorrow and tomorrow night, Mary,” Wallingford said.

  “They’re going to call off the search for survivors tomorrow, Pat. We want you there, at sea. Or here, in New York. Not in Green Bay.”

  “I’m going to the football game,” Wallingford told her. He looked at Wharton, who looked away; then he looked at Sabina, who stared with feigned neutrality back at him. He didn’t so much as glance at Mary.

  “Then we’ll fire you, Pat,” Mary said.

  “Then fire me.”

  He didn’t even have to think about it. With or without a job at PBS or NPR, he’d made quite a lot of money; besides, they couldn’t fire him without making some kind of salary settlement. Patrick didn’t really need a job, at least for a couple of years.

  Wallingford looked at Mary for some response, then at Sabina.

  “Okay, if that’s how it is, you’re fired,” Wharton announced. Everyone seemed surprised that it was Wharton who said it, including Wharton. Before the script meeting, they’d had another meeting, to which Patrick had not been invited. Probably they’d decided that Sabina would be the one to fire Wallingford. At least Sabina looked at Wharton with an exasperated sense of surprise. Mary Shanahan had got over how surprised she was pretty quickly. For once, maybe Wharton had felt something unfamiliar and exciting taking charge inside him. But everything that was eternally insipid about him had instantly returned to his flushed face; he was again as vapid as he’d ever been. Being fired by Wharton was like being slapped by a tentative hand in the dark.

  “When I get back from Wisconsin, we can work out what you owe me,” was all Wallingford told them.

  “Please clear out your office and your dressing room before you go,” Mary said. This was standard procedure, but it irritated him.

  They sent someone from security to help him pack up his things and to carry the boxes down to a limo. No one came to say good-bye to him, which was also standard procedure, although if Angie had been working that Sunday night, she probably would have.

  Wallingford was back in his apartment when Mrs. Clausen called. He hadn’t seen his piece at the Ramada Plaza, but Doris had watched the whole story.

  “Are you still coming?” she asked.

  “Yes, and I can stay as long as you want me to,” Patrick told her. “I just got fired.”

  “That’s very interesting,” Mrs. Clausen commented. “Have a safe flight.”

  This time he had a Chicago connection, which got him into his hotel room in Green Bay in time to see the evening telecast from New York. He wasn’t surprised that Mary Shanahan was the new anchor. Once again Wallingford had to admire her. She wasn’t pregnant, but Mary had wound up with at least one of the babies she wanted.

  “Patrick Wallingford is no longer with us,” Mary began cheerfully. “Good night, Patrick, wherever you are!”

  There was in her voice something both perky and consoling. Her manner reminded Wallingford of that time in his apartment when he’d been unable to get it up and she’d sympathized by saying, “Poor penis.” As he’d understood only belatedly, Mary had always been part of the bigger picture.

  It was a good thing he was getting out of the business. He wasn’t smart enough to be in it anymore. Maybe he’d never been smart enough.

  And what an evening it was for news! Naturally no survivors had been found. The mourning for the victims on EgyptAir 990 had just begun. There was the footage of the usual calamity-driven crowd that had gathered on a gray Nantucket beach—the “body-spotters,” Mary had once called them. The “death-watchers,”

  which was Wharton’s term for them, were warmly dressed.

  That close-up from the deck of a Merchant Marine Academy ship—the pile of passengers’ belongings retrieved from the Atlantic—must have been Wharton’s work. After floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, train wrecks, plane crashes, school shootings, or other massacres, Wharton always chose the shots of articles of clothing, especially the shoes. And of course there were children’s toys; dismembered dolls and wet teddy bears were among Wharton’s favorite disaster items.

  Fortunately for the all-news network, the first vessel to arrive at the crash site was a Merchant Marine Academy training ship with seventeen cadets aboard. These young novices at sea were great for the human-interest angle—they were about the age of college upperclassmen. There they were in the spreading pool of jet fuel with the fragments of the plane’s wreckage, plus people’s shopping bags and body parts, bobbing to the oily surface around them. All of them wore gloves as they plucked this and that from the sea. Their expressions were what Sabina termed

  “priceless.”

  Mary milked her end lines for all they were worth. “The big questions remain unanswered,” Ms. Shanahan said crisply. She was wearing a suit Patrick had never seen before, something navy blue. The jacket was strategically opened, as were the top two buttons of her pale-blue blouse, which closely resembled a man’s dress shirt, only silkier. This would become her signature costume, Wallingford supposed.

  “Was the crash of the Egyptian jetliner an act of terrorism, a mechanical failure, or pilot error?” Mary pointedly asked.

  I would have reversed the order, Patrick thought—clearly “an act of terrorism”

  should have come last.

  In the last shot, the camera was not on Mary but on the grieving families in the lobby of the Ramada Plaza; the camera singled out small groups among them as Mary Shanahan’s voice-over concluded, “So many people want to know.” All in all, the ratings would be good; Wallingford knew that Wharton would be happy, not that Wharton would know how to express his happiness.

  When Mrs. Clausen called, Patrick had just stepped out of the shower.

  “Wear something warm,” she warned him. To Wallingford’s surprise, she was calling from the lobby. There would be time for him to see little Otto in the morning, Doris said. Right now it was time to go to the game; he should hurry up and get dressed. Therefore, not knowing what to expect, he did. It seemed too soon to leave for the game, but maybe Mrs. Clausen liked to get there early. When Wallingford left his hotel room and took the elevator to the lobby to meet her, his sense of pride was only slightly hurt that not one of his colleagues in the media had tracked him down and asked him what Mary Shanahan had meant when she’d announced, to millions, “Patrick Wallingford is no longer with us.”

  There’d doubtless been calls to the network already; Wallingford could only wonder how Wharton was handling it, or maybe they had put Sabina in charge. They didn’t like to say they’d fired someone—they didn’t like to admit that someone had quit, either. They usually found some bullshit way to say it, so that no one knew exactly what had happened.

  Mrs. Clausen had seen the telecast. She asked Patrick: “Is that the Mary who isn’t pregnant?”

  “That’s her.”

  “I thought so.”

  Doris was wearing her old Green Bay Packers parka, the one she’d been wearing when Wallingford first met her. Mrs. Clausen was not wearing its hood as she drove the car, but Patrick could imagine her small, pretty face peering out from it like the face of a child. And she had on jeans and running shoes, which was how she’d dressed that night when the police informed her that her husband was dead. She was probably wearing her old Packers sweatshirt, too, although Wallingford couldn’t see what was under her parka.

  Mrs. Clausen was a good driver. She never once looked at Patrick—she just talked about the game. “With a couple of four-two teams, anything can happen,” she explained. “We’ve lost the last three in a row on Monday night. I don’t believe what
they say. It doesn’t matter that Seattle hasn’t played a Monday-night game in seven years, or that there’s a bunch of Seahawks who’ve never played at Lambeau Field before. Their coach knows Lambeau—he knows our quarterback, too.”

  The Green Bay quarterback would be Brett Favre. Wallingford had read a paper (just the sports pages) on the plane. That’s how he’d learned who Mike Holmgren was—formerly the Packers’ coach, now the coach of the Seattle Seahawks. The game was a homecoming for Holmgren, who’d been very popular in Green Bay.

  “Favre will be trying too hard. We can count on that,” Doris told Patrick. As she spoke, the passing headlights flashed on and off her face, which remained in profile to him.

  He kept staring at her—he’d never missed anyone so much. He would have liked to think she’d worn these old clothes for him, but he knew the clothes were just her game uniform. When she’d seduced him in Dr. Zajac’s office, she must have had no idea what she was wearing, and she probably had no memory of the order in which she’d taken off her clothes. Wallingford would never forget the clothes and the order.

  They drove west out of downtown Green Bay, which didn’t have much of a downtown to speak of—nothing but bars and churches and a haggard-looking riverside mall. There weren’t many buildings over three stories high; and the one hill of note, which hugged the river with its ships loading and unloading—until the bay froze in December—was a huge coal stack. It was a virtual mountain of coal.

  “I would not want to be Mike Holmgren, coming back here with his four-two Seattle Seahawks,” Wallingford ventured. (It was a version of something he’d read in the sports pages.)

  “You sound like you’ve been reading the newspapers or watching TV,” Mrs. Clausen said. “Holmgren knows the Packers better than the Packers know themselves. And Seattle’s got a good defense. We haven’t been scoring a lot of points against good defenses this year.”

  “Oh.” Wallingford decided to shut up about the game. He changed the subject.

  “I’ve missed you and little Otto.”