John Irving - The Fourth Hand

Zajac didn’t find it at all odd that Mrs. Clausen, instead of Otto himself, had written to offer her husband’s hand. All Otto had done was sign a brief statement; his wife had composed the accompanying letter.

Mrs. Clausen hailed from Appleton, and she proudly mentioned that Otto was already registered with the Wisconsin Organ Donor Affiliates. “But this hand business is a little different—I mean different from organs,” she observed. Hands were indeed different from organs, Dr. Zajac knew. But Otto Clausen was only thirty-nine and in no apparent proximity to death’s door. Zajac believed that a fresh cadaver with a suitable donor hand would show up long before Otto’s. As for Patrick Wallingford, his desire and need for a new left hand might possibly have put him at the top of Dr. Zajac’s list of wannabe recipients even if he hadn’t been famous. Zajac was not a thoroughly unsympathetic man. But he was also among the millions who’d taped the three-minute lion story. To Dr. Zajac, the footage was a combination of a hand surgeon’s favorite horror film and the precursor of his future fame.

It suffices to say that Patrick Wallingford and Dr. Nicholas M. Zajac were on a collision course, which didn’t bode well from the start.

TRY BEING AN ANCHOR who hides the evidence of his missing hand under the news desk—see what that gets you. The earliest letters of protest were from amputees. What was Patrick Wallingford ashamed of?

Even two-handed people complained. “Be a man, Patrick,” one woman wrote.

“Show us.”

When he had problems with his first prosthesis, wearers of artificial limbs criticized him for using it incorrectly. He was equally clumsy with an array of other prosthetic devices, but his wife was divorcing him—he had no time to practice.

Marilyn simply couldn’t get over how he’d “behaved.” In this case, she didn’t mean the other women—she was referring to how Patrick had behaved with the lion. “You looked so… unmanly,” Marilyn told him, adding that her husband’s physical attractiveness had always been “of an inoffensive kind, tantamount to blandness.” What she really meant was that nothing about his body had revolted her, until now. (In sickness and in health, but not in missing pieces, Wallingford concluded.)

Patrick and Marilyn had lived in Manhattan in an apartment on East Sixty-second Street between Park and Lexington avenues; naturally it was Marilyn’s apartment now. Only the night doorman of Wallingford’s former building had not rejected him, and the night doorman was so confused that his own name was unclear to him. Sometimes it was Vlad or Vlade; at other times, it was Lewis. Even when he was Lewis, his accent remained an indecipherable mixture of Long Island with something Slavic.

“Where are you from, Vlade?” Wallingford had asked him.

“It’s Lewis. Nassau County,” Vlad had replied.

Another time, Wallingford said, “So, Lewis… where were you from?”

“Nassau County. It’s Vlad, Mr. O’Neill.”

Only the doorman mistook Patrick Wallingford for Paul O’Neill, who became a right fielder for the New York Yankees in 1993. (They were both tall, dark, and handsome in that jutting-chin fashion, but that was as far as the resemblance went.)

The confused doorman had unusually unshakable beliefs; he first mistook Patrick for Paul O’Neill when O’Neill was a relatively unknown and unrecognized player for the Cincinnati Reds.

“I guess I look a little like Paul O’Neill,” Wallingford admitted to Vlad or Vlade or Lewis, “but I’m Patrick Wallingford. I’m a television journalist.”

Since Vlad or Vlade or Lewis was the night doorman, it was always dark and often late when he encountered Patrick. “Don’t worry, Mr. O’Neill,” the doorman whispered conspiratorially. “I won’t tell anybody.”

Thus the night doorman assumed that Paul O’Neill, who played professional baseball in Ohio, was having an affair with Patrick Wallingford’s wife in New York. At least this was as close as Wallingford could come to understanding what the poor man thought.

One night when Patrick came home—this was when he had two hands, and long before his divorce—Vlad or Vlade or Lewis was watching an extra-inning ball game from Cincinnati, where the Mets were playing the Reds.

“Now look here, Lewis,” Wallingford said to the startled doorman, who kept a small black-and-white TV in the coatroom off the lobby. “There are the Reds—they’re in Cincinnati ! Yet here I am, right beside you. I’m not playing tonight, am I?”

“Don’t worry, Mr. O’Neill,” the doorman said sympathetically. “I won’t tell anybody.”

But after he lost his hand, Patrick Wallingford was more famous than Paul O’Neill. Furthermore, it was his left hand that Patrick had lost, and Paul O’Neill bats left and throws left. As Vlad or Vlade or Lewis would know, O’Neill became the American League batting champion in 1994; he hit .359 in what was only his second season with the Yanks, and he was a great right fielder.

“They’re gonna retire Number Twenty-One one day, Mr. O’Neill,” the doorman stubbornly assured Patrick Wallingford. “You can count on it.”

After Patrick’s left hand was gone, his single return visit to the apartment on East Sixty-second Street was for the purpose of collecting his clothes and books and what divorce lawyers call personal effects. Of course it was clear to everyone in the building, even to the doorman, that Wallingford was moving out.

“Don’t worry, Mr. O’Neill,” the doorman told Patrick. “The things they can do in rehab today… well, you wouldn’t believe. It’s too bad it wasn’t your right hand—you bein’ a lefty is gonna make it tough—but they’ll come up with somethin’, I know they will.”

“Thank you, Vlade,” Patrick said.

The one-handed journalist felt weak and disoriented in his old apartment. The day he moved out, Marilyn had already begun to rearrange the furniture. Wallingford kept turning to look over his shoulder to see what was behind him; it was just a couch that had been moved from somewhere else in the apartment, but to Patrick the unfamiliarly placed shape took on the characteristics of an advancing lion.

“I think the hittin’ will be less of a problem than the throw to the plate from right field,” the three-named doorman was saying. “You’ll have to choke up on the bat, shorten your swing, lay off the long ball—I don’t mean forever, just till you’re used to the new hand.”

But there was no new hand that Wallingford could get used to; the prosthetic devices defeated him. The ongoing abuse by his ex-wife would defeat Patrick, too.

“You were never sexy, not to me,” Marilyn lied. (So she was guilty of wishful thinking—so what?) “And now… well, missing a hand… you’re nothing but a helpless cripple !”

The twenty-four-hour news network didn’t give Wallingford long to prove himself as an anchor. Even on the reputed disaster channel, Patrick failed to be an anchor of note. He moved quickly from early morning to midmorning to late night, and finally to a predawn slot, where Wallingford imagined that only night workers and insomniacs ever saw him.

His television image was too repressed for a man who’d lost his left hand to the king of beasts. One wanted to see more defiance in his expression, which instead radiated an enfeebled humility, an air of wary acceptance. While he’d never been a bad man, only a bad husband, Patrick’s one-handedness came across as selfpitying, and it marked him as the silent-martyr type. While looking wounded hardly hurt Wallingford with women, now there were only other women in his life. And by the time Patrick’s divorce was settled, his producers felt they had given him adequate opportunity as an anchor to protect themselves from any later charges that they’d discriminated against the handicapped; they returned him to the less visible role of a field reporter. Worse, the one-handed journalist became the interviewer of choice for various freaks and zanies; that the twenty-four-hour international channel already had a reputation for captured acts of mauling and mutilation only underscored Patrick’s image as a man irreversibly damaged.