The Fourth Hand

by John Winslow Irving

  Mrs. Clausen just smiled. She knew exactly where she was going. There was a special parking sticker on her car; she was waved into a lane with no other cars in it, from which she entered a reserved area of the parking lot. They parked very near the stadium and took an elevator to the press box, where Doris didn’t even bother showing her tickets to an official-looking older man who instantly recognized her. He gave her a friendly hug and a kiss, and she said, with a nod to Wallingford, “He’s with me, Bill. Patrick, this is Bill.”

  Wallingford shook the older man’s hand, expecting to be recognized, but there was no sign of recognition. It must have been the ski hat Mrs. Clausen had handed to him when they got out of the car. He’d told her that his ears never got cold, but she’d said, “Here they will. Besides, it’s not just to keep your ears warm. I want you to wear it.”

  It wasn’t that she didn’t want him to be recognized, although the hat would keep him from being spotted by an ABC cameraman—for once, Wallingford wouldn’t be on-camera. Doris had insisted on the hat to make him look as if he belonged at the game. Patrick was wearing a black topcoat over a tweed jacket over a turtleneck, and gray flannel trousers. Almost no one wore such a dressy overcoat to a Packer game.

  The ski hat was Green Bay green with a yellow headband that could be pulled down over your ears; it had the unmistakable Packers’ logo, of course. It was an old hat, and it had been stretched by a head bigger than Wallingford’s. Patrick didn’t need to ask Mrs. Clausen whose hat it was. Clearly the hat had belonged to her late husband.

  They passed through the press box, where Doris said hi to a few other officiallooking people before entering the bleacher-style seats, high up. It wasn’t the way most of the fans entered the stadium, but everybody seemed to know Mrs. Clausen. She was, after all, a Green Bay Packers employee. They went down the aisle toward the dazzling field. It was natural grass, 87,000 square feet of it—what they called an “athletic blue blend.” Tonight was its debut game.

  “Wow,” was all Wallingford said under his breath. Although they were early, Lambeau Field was already more than half full.

  The stadium is a pure bowl, with no breaks and no upper deck; there is only one deck at Lambeau, and all the outdoor seats are of the bleacher type. The stands were a primordial scene during the pregame warm-ups: the faces painted green and gold, the yellow plastic-foam things that looked like big flexible penises, and the lunatics with huge wedges of cheese for hats—the cheeseheads ! Wallingford knew he was not in New York.

  Down the long, steep aisle they went. They had seats at about midstadium level on the forty-yard line; they were still on the press-box side of the field. Patrick followed Doris, past the stout knees turned sideways, to their seats. He grew aware that they were seated among people who knew them—not just Mrs. Clausen, but Wallingford, too. And it wasn’t that they knew him because he was famous, not in Otto’s hat; it was that they were expecting him. Patrick suddenly realized that he’d met more than half of the closest surrounding fans before. They were Clausens!

  He recognized their faces from the countless photos tacked to the walls of the main cabin at the cottage on the lake.

  The men patted his shoulders; the women touched his arm, the left one. “Hey, how ya doing?” Wallingford recognized the speaker from his crazed look in the photograph that was safety-pinned to the lining of the jewelry box. It was Donny, the eagle-killer; one side of his face was painted the color of corn, the other the toovivid green of an impossible illness.

  “I missed seein’ ya on the news tonight,” a friendly woman said. Patrick remembered her from a photograph, too; she’d been one of the new mothers, in a hospital bed with her newborn child.

  “I just didn’t want to miss the game,” Wallingford told her. He felt Doris squeeze his hand; until then, he’d not realized she was holding it. In front of all of them! But they knew already—long before Wallingford. She’d already told them. She had accepted him! He tried to look at her, but she’d put up the hood of her parka. It wasn’t that cold; she was just hiding her face from him. He sat down beside Mrs. Clausen, still holding her hand. His handless arm was seized by an older woman on his left. She was another Mrs. Clausen, a much larger Mrs. Clausen—the late Otto’s mother, little Otto’s grandmother, Doris’s former mother-in-law. (Probably one shouldn’t say “former,” Patrick was thinking.) He smiled at the large woman. She was as tall as he was, sitting down, and she pulled him to her by his arm so that she could kiss his cheek.

  “All of us are very happy to see you,” she said. “Doris has informed us.” She smiled approvingly.

  Doris might have informed me ! Wallingford was thinking, but when he looked at Doris, her face was hidden in the hood. It was only by the ferocity of her grip on his hand that he knew for certain she’d accepted him. To Patrick’s astonishment, they all had.

  There was a moment of silence before the game, which Wallingford assumed was for the 217 dead on EgyptAir 990, but he hadn’t been paying attention. The moment of silence was for Walter Payton, who’d died of complications from liver disease at the age of forty-five. Payton had run for the most yards in NFL history. The temperature was forty-five degrees at kickoff. The night sky was clear. The wind was from the west at seventeen miles per hour, with gusts to thirty. Maybe it was the gusts that got to Favre. In the first half, he threw two interceptions; by the end of the game, he’d thrown four. “I told you he’d be trying too hard,” Doris would say four times, all the while hiding under her hood. During the pregame introductions, the crowd at Lambeau had cheered the Packers’

  former coach, Mike Holmgren. Favre and Holmgren had embraced on the field. (Even Patrick Wallingford had noticed that Lambeau Field was located at the intersection of Mike Holmgren Way and Vince Lombardi Avenue.) Holmgren had come home prepared. In addition to the interceptions, Favre lost two fumbles. There were even some boos—a rarity at Lambeau.

  “Green Bay fans don’t usually boo,” Donny Clausen said, making it clear that he didn’t boo. Donny leaned close to Patrick; his yellow-and-green face added an extra dementia to his already demented reputation as an eagle-killer. “We all want Doris to be happy,” he whispered menacingly in Wallingford’s ear, which was warm under Otto’s old hat.

  “So do I,” Patrick told him.

  But what if Otto had killed himself because he couldn’t make Mrs. Clausen happy? What if she’d driven him to do it, had even suggested it in some way? Was it just a case of the bridal jitters that gave Wallingford these terrible thoughts? There was no question that Doris Clausen could drive Patrick Wallingford to kill himself if he ever disappointed her.

  Patrick wrapped his right arm around Doris’s small shoulders, pulling her closer to him; with his right hand, he eased the hood of her parka slightly away from her face. He meant only to kiss her cheek, but she turned and kissed him on the lips. He could feel the tears on her cold face before she hid herself in the hood again. Favre was pulled from the game, in favor of backup quarterback Matt Hasselbeck, with a little more than six minutes remaining in the fourth quarter. Mrs. Clausen faced Wallingford and said, “We’re leaving. I’m not staying to watch the rookie.”

  Some of the Clausens grumbled at their going, but the grumbles were goodnatured; even Donny’s crazily painted face revealed a smile. Doris led Patrick by his right hand. They climbed back up to the press box again; someone a little overfriendly let them in. He was a young-looking guy with an athletic build—sturdy enough to be one of the players, or a former player. Doris paid no attention to him, other than to point back in the young man’s direction after she and Wallingford had left him standing at the side door to the press box. They were almost at the elevator when Mrs. Clausen asked, “Did you see that guy?”

  “Yes,” Patrick said. The young man was still smiling at them in his overfriendly fashion, although Mrs. Clausen had not once turned to look at him herself.

  “Well, that’s the guy I shouldn’t have slept with,” Doris told Wallingford. “Now you kno
w everything about me.”

  The elevator was packed with sportswriters, mostly guys. The sports hacks always left the game a little early, to assure themselves of prime spots at the postgame press conference. Most of them knew Mrs. Clausen; although she worked principally in sales, Doris was often the one who issued the press passes. The hacks instantly made room for her. She’d pulled the hood back on her parka because it was warm and close in the elevator.

  The sportswriters were spouting stats and clichés about the game. “Costly fumbles

  …Holmgren has Favre’s number… Dotson getting thrown out didn’t help… only the second Green Bay loss in the last thirty-six games at Lambeau… the fewest points the Packers have scored in a game since that twenty-one-to-six loss in Dallas in ’96…”

  “So what did that game matter?” Mrs. Clausen asked. “That was the year we won the Super Bowl!”

  “Are you coming to the press conference, Doris?” one of the hacks asked.

  “Not tonight,” she said. “I’ve got a date.”

  The sportswriters ooohed and aaahed; someone whistled. With his missing hand hidden in the sleeve of his topcoat, and still wearing Otto Clausen’s hat, Patrick Wallingford felt confident that he was unrecognizable. But old Stubby Farrell, the ancient sports hack from the all-news network, recognized him.

  “Hey, lion guy!” Stubby said. Wallingford nodded, at last taking off Otto’s hat.

  “Did you get the ax or what?”

  Suddenly it was quiet; all the sportswriters wanted to know. Mrs. Clausen squeezed his hand again, and Patrick repeated what he’d told the Clausen family.

  “I just didn’t want to miss the game.”

  The hacks loved the line, Stubby especially, although Wallingford wasn’t able to duck the question.

  “Was it Wharton, that fuck?” Stubby Farrell asked.

  “It was Mary Shanahan,” Wallingford told Stubby, thus telling them all. “She wanted my job.” Mrs. Clausen was smiling at him; she let him know that she knew what Mary had really wanted.

  Wallingford was thinking that he might hear one of them (maybe Stubby) say that he was a good guy or a nice guy, or a good journalist, but all he caught of their conversation was more sports talk and the familiar nicknames that would follow him to his grave.

  Then the elevator opened and the sports hacks trotted around the side of the stadium; they had to go out in the cold to get to either the home-team or the visiting-team locker rooms. Doris led Patrick out from under the stadium pillars and into the parking lot. The temperature had fallen, but the cold air felt good on Wallingford’s bare head and ears as he walked to the car holding Mrs. Clausen’s hand. The temperature might have been in the thirties, near freezing, but probably it was just the wind that made it feel that cold.

  Doris turned the car radio on; from her comments, Patrick wondered why she wanted to hear the end of the game. The seven turnovers were the most by the Packers since they had committed seven against the Atlanta Falcons eleven years before. “Even Levens fumbled,” Mrs. Clausen said in disbelief. “And Freeman—what did he catch? Maybe two passes all night. He might have got all of ten yards!”

  Matt Hasselbeck, the Packers’ rookie quarterback, completed his first NFL

  pass—he finished 2-of-6 for 32 yards. “Wow!” shouted Mrs. Clausen, derisively.

  “Holy cow!” The final score was Seattle 27, Green Bay 7.

  “I had the best time,” Wallingford said. “I loved every minute of it. I love being with you.”

  He took off his seat belt and lay down in the front seat beside her, resting his head in her lap. He turned his face toward the dashboard lights and cupped the palm of his right hand on her thigh. He could feel her thigh tighten when she accelerated or let up on the accelerator, and when she occasionally touched the brake. Her hand gently brushed his cheek; then she went back to holding the steering wheel with both her hands.

  “I love you,” Patrick told her.

  “I’m going to try to love you, too,” Mrs. Clausen said. “I’m really going to try.”

  Wallingford accepted that this was the most she could say. He felt one of her tears fall on his face, but he made no reference to her crying other than to offer to drive—an offer he knew she would refuse. (Who wants to be driven by a onehanded man?)

  “I can drive,” was all she said. Then she added: “We’re going to your hotel for the night. My mom and dad are staying with little Otto. You’ll see them in the morning, when you see Otto. They already know I’m going to marry you.”

  The beams from passing headlights streaked through the interior of the cold car. If Mrs. Clausen had turned the heat on, it wasn’t working. She drove with the driver’s-side window cracked open, too. There was little traffic; most of the fans were staying at Lambeau Field until the bitter end.

  Patrick considered sitting up and putting his seat belt back on. He wanted to see that old mountain of coal on the west side of the river again. He wasn’t sure what the coal stack signified to him—perseverance, maybe.

  Wallingford also wanted to see the television sets glowing in the darkness, all along their route, on their way back downtown; surely every set was still turned on to the dying game, and would stay on for the postgame analysis, too. Yet Mrs. Clausen’s lap was warm and comforting, and Patrick found it easier to feel her occasional tears on his face than to sit up beside her and see her crying. As they were nearing the bridge, she spoke to him: “Please put your seat belt on. I don’t want to lose you.”

  He sat up quickly and buckled his belt. In the dark car, he couldn’t tell if she’d stopped crying or not.

  “You can shut the radio off now,” she told him. He did. They drove over the bridge in silence, the towering coal stack at first looming and then growing smaller behind them.

  We never really know our future, Wallingford was thinking; nobody’s future with anyone is certain. Yet he imagined that he could envision his future with Doris Clausen. He saw it with the unlikely and offsetting brightness with which her and her late husband’s wedding rings had leapt out of the dark at him, under the boathouse dock. There was something golden in his future with Mrs. Clausen—maybe the more so because it struck him as so undeserved. He no more merited her than those two rings, with their kept and unkept promises, deserved to be nailed under a dock, only inches above the cold lake.

  And for how long would he have Doris, or she him? It was fruitless to speculate—as fruitless as trying to guess how many Wisconsin winters it would take to bring the boathouse down and sink it in the unnamed lake.

  “What’s the name of the lake?” he asked Doris suddenly. “Where the cottage is . .

  . that lake.”

  “We don’t like the name,” Mrs. Clausen told him. “We never use the name. It’s just the cottage on the lake.”

  Then, as if she knew he’d been thinking about her and Otto’s rings nailed under the dock, she said: “I’ve picked out our rings. I’ll show them to you when we get to the hotel. I chose platinum this time. I’m going to wear mine on the ring finger of my right hand.” (Where the lion guy, as everyone knew, would have to wear his, too.)

  “You know what they say,” Mrs. Clausen said. “ ‘Leave no regrets on the field.’ ”

  Wallingford could guess the source. Even to him, the phrase smacked of football—and of a courage he heretofore had lacked. In fact, it was what the old sign said at the bottom of the stairwell at Lambeau Field, the sign above the doors that led to the Packers’ locker room.

  LEAVE

  NO REGRETS

  ON THE FIELD

  “I get it,” Patrick replied. In a men’s room at Lambeau, he’d seen a man with his beard painted yellow and green, like Donny’s face; the necessary degree of devotion was getting through to him. “I get it,” he repeated.

  “No, you don’t,” Mrs. Clausen contradicted him. “Not yet, not quite.” He looked closely at her—she’d stopped crying. “Open the glove compartment,” Doris said. He hesitated; it occurred
to him that Otto Clausen’s gun was in there, and that it was loaded. “Go on—open it.”

  In the glove compartment was an open envelope with photographs protruding from it. He could see the holes the tacks had made in the photos—the occasional rust spot, too. Of course he knew where the photos were from before he saw what they were of. They were the photographs, a dozen or more, that Doris had once tacked to the wall on her side of the bed—those pictures she’d taken down because she couldn’t stand to see them in the boathouse anymore.

  “Please look at them,” Mrs. Clausen requested.

  She’d stopped the car. They were in sight of the hotel. She had just pulled over and stopped with the motor running. Downtown Green Bay was almost deserted; everyone was at home or returning home from Lambeau Field. The photographs were in no particular order, but Wallingford quickly grasped their theme. They all showed Otto Clausen’s left hand. In some, the hand was still attached to Otto. There was the beer-truck driver’s brawny arm; there was Otto’s wedding ring, too. But in some of the pictures, Mrs. Clausen had removed the ring—from what Wallingford knew was the dead man’s hand.

  There were photos of Patrick Wallingford, too. Well, at least there were photos of Patrick’s new left hand—just the hand. By the varying degrees of swelling in the hand and wrist, and in the forearm area of the surgical attachment, Wallingford could tell at what stages Doris had photographed him with Otto’s hand—what she had called the third one.

  So he hadn’t dreamed that he was having his picture taken in his sleep. That was why the sound of the shutter had seemed so real. And with his eyes shut, naturally the flash would have struck him as faint and distant, as incomplete as heat lightning—just the way Wallingford remembered it.

  “Please throw them away,” Mrs. Clausen asked. “I’ve tried, but I can’t make myself do it. Please just get rid of them.”

  “Okay,” Patrick said.

  She was crying again, and he reached out to her. He’d never initiated touching her breast with his stump before. Even through her parka, he could feel her breast; when she clasped his forearm tightly there, he could also feel her breathing.