John Irving - The Fourth Hand

And now Dr. Zajac’s housekeeper/assistant had transformed herself into an instant erection machine, although Zajac himself was too screwed up to realize it. Even old Schatzman, retired, had observed the changes in Irma. And Mengerink, who’d had to change his home phone number twice to discourage Zajac’s ex-wife from calling him—Mengerink had noticed Irma, too. As for Gingeleskie, he said: “Even the other Gingeleskie could pick Irma out of a crowd,” referring, of course, to his dead brother.

From the grave, a corpse couldn’t miss seeing what had happened to the housekeeper/assistant-turned-sexpot. She looked like a stripper with a day job as a personal trainer. How had Zajac missed the transformation? No wonder such a man had managed to pass through prep school and college unremembered. Yet when Dr. Zajac went shopping on the Internet for potential hand donors and recipients, no one at Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink & Associates called him crass or said that they thought www.needahand.com was a tad crude. Despite his shit-eating dog, his obsession with fame, his wasting-away thinness, and his problem-ridden son—and, on top of everything, his inconceivable obliviousness to his cheeks-of-steel “assistant”—in the pioneer territory of hand-transplant surgery, Dr. Nicholas M. Zajac remained the man in charge.

That Boston’s most brilliant hand surgeon was reputed to be a sexless jerk was a matter of no account to his only son. What does a six-year-old boy care about his father’s professional or sexual acumen, especially when he is beginning to see for himself that his father loves him?

As for what launched the newfound affection between Rudy and his complicated father, credit must be spread around. Some acknowledgment is due a dumb dog who ate her own poo, as well as that long-ago single-sex glee club at Deerfield, where Zajac first got the mistaken idea he could sing. (After the spontaneous opening verse of “I Am Medea,” both father and son would compose many more verses, all of them too childishly scatological to record here.) And there were also, of course, the stove-timer game and E. B. White.

In addition, we should put in a word for the value of mischief in father-son relations. The former midfielder had first developed an instinct for mischief by cradling and then whizzing dog turds into the Charles River with a lacrosse stick. If Zajac had initially failed to interest Rudy in lacrosse, the good doctor would eventually turn his son’s attention to the finer points of the sport while walking Medea along the banks of the historic Charles.

Picture this: there is the turd-hunting dog, dragging Dr. Zajac after her while she strains against her leash. (In Cambridge, of course, there is a leash law; all dogs must be leashed.) And there, running abreast of the eager part-Lab—yes, actually running, actually getting some exercise !—is six-year-old Rudy Zajac, his child-size lacrosse stick held low to the ground in front of him. Picking up a dog turd in a lacrosse stick, especially on the run, is a lot harder than picking up a lacrosse ball. (Dog turds come in varying sizes and are, on occasion, entangled with grass, or they have been stepped on.) Nevertheless, Rudy had been well coached. And Medea’s determination, her powerful lunges against the leash, gave the boy precisely what was needed in the process of mastering any sport—especially “dog-turd lacrosse,” as both father and son called it. Medea provided Rudy with competition.

Any amateur can cradle a dog turd in a lacrosse stick, but try doing it under the pressure of a shit-eating dog; in any sport, pressure is as fundamental a teacher as a good coach. Besides, Medea outweighed Rudy by a good ten pounds and could easily knock the boy down.

“Keep your back to her—attaboy!” Zajac would yell. “Cradle, cradle—keep cradling! Always know where the river is!”

The river was their goal—the historic Charles. Rudy had two good shots, which his father had taught him. There was the standard over-the-shoulder shot (either a long lob or a fairly flat trajectory) and there was the sidearm shot, which was low to the water and best for skipping the dog turds, which Rudy preferred. The risk with the sidearm shot was that the lacrosse stick passed low to the ground; Medea could block a sidearm shot and eat it in a hurry.

“Midriver, midriver!” the former midfielder would be coaching. Or else he would shout: “Aim for under the bridge!”

“But there’s a boat, Dad.”

“Aim for the boat, then,” Zajac would say, more quietly, aware that his relations with the oarsmen were already strained.

The resulting shouts and cries of the outraged oarsmen gave a certain edge to the rigors of competition. Dr. Zajac was especially engaged by the high-pitched yelps the coxswains made into their megaphones, although nowadays one had to be careful—some of the coxswains were girls.

Zajac disapproved of girls in sculls or in the larger racing shells, no matter whether the girls were rowers or coxswains. (This was surely another hallmark prejudice of his single-sex education.)

As for Dr. Zajac’s modest contribution to the ongoing pollution of the Charles River… well, let’s be fair. Zajac had never been an advocate of environmental correctness. In his hopelessly old-fashioned opinion, a lot worse than dogshit was dumped into the Charles on a daily basis. Furthermore, the dogshit that little Rudy Zajac and his father were responsible for throwing into the Charles River was for a good cause, that of solidifying the love between a divorced father and his son. Irma deserves some credit, too, despite being a prosaic girl who would one day watch the lions-eating-the-hand episode on video with Dr. Zajac and say, “I never knew lions could eat somethin’ so quick. ”

Dr. Nicholas M. Zajac, who knew next to everything there was to know about hands, couldn’t watch the footage without exclaiming: “Oh, God, my God—there it goes! Sweet Jesus, it’s gone ! It’s all gone!”

Of course it didn’t hurt the chances of Patrick Wallingford, Dr. Zajac’s first choice among the would-be hand recipients, that Wallingford was famous; a television audience estimated in the millions had witnessed the frightening accident. Thousands of children and uncounted adults were still suffering nightmares, although Wallingford had lost his hand more than five years ago and the televised footage of the accident itself was less than thirty seconds long.

“Thirty seconds is a long time to be engaged in losing your hand, if it’s your hand,” Patrick had said.

People meeting Wallingford, especially for the first time, would never fail to comment on his boyish charm. Women would remark on his eyes. Whereas Wallingford had formerly been envied by men, the way in which he was maimed had put an end to that; not even men, the gender more prone to envy, could be jealous of him anymore. Now men and women found him irresistible. Dr. Zajac hadn’t needed the Internet to find Patrick Wallingford, who had been the first choice of the Boston surgical team from the start. More interesting was that www.needahand.com had turned up a surprising candidate in the field of potential donors. (What Zajac meant by a donor was a fresh cadaver.) This donor was not only alive—he wasn’t even dying!

His wife wrote Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink & Associates from Wisconsin.

“My husband has got the idea that he wants to leave his left hand to Patrick Wallingford—you know, the lion guy,” Mrs. Otto Clausen wrote. Her letter caught Dr. Zajac in the middle of a bad day with the dog. Medea had ingested a sizable section of lawn hose and had required stomach surgery. The miserable dog should have spent the weekend recovering at the vet’s, but it was one of those weekends when young Rudy visited his father; the six-year-old divorce survivor might have reverted to his former inconsolable self without Medea’s company. Even a drugged dog was better than no dog. There would be no dog-turd lacrosse for the weekend, but it would be a challenge to prevent Medea from eating her stitches, and there was always the reliable stove-timer game and the more reliable genius of E. B. White. It would certainly be a good time to devote some constructive reinforcement to Rudy’s ever-experimental diet. In short, the hand surgeon was a trifle distracted. If there was something disingenuous about the charm of Mrs. Otto Clausen’s letter, Zajac didn’t catch it. His eagerness for the media possibilities overrode all else, and the Wisconsin couple’s unabashed choice of Patrick Wallingford as a worthy recipient of Otto Clausen’s hand would make a good story.