John Irving - The Fourth Hand

Yet for Patrick there endured the hope, however scant, that she might one day consider doing it again—notwithstanding that she was pregnant, and she revered her pregnancy the way women who’ve waited a long time to get pregnant do. Nor was there any doubt in Mrs. Clausen’s mind that this would be an only child. Her most inviting tone of voice, which Doris Clausen could call upon when she wanted to, and which had the effect of sunlight after rain—the power to open flowers—was only a memory now; yet Wallingford believed he could wait. He hugged that memory like a pillow in his sleep, not unlike the way he was doomed to remember that blue-capsule dream.

Patrick Wallingford had never loved a woman so unselfishly. It was enough for him that Mrs. Clausen loved his left hand. She loved to put it on her swollen abdomen, to let the hand feel the fetus move.

Wallingford hadn’t noticed when Mrs. Clausen stopped wearing the ornament in her navel; he’d not seen it since their moment of mutual abandonment in Dr. Zajac’s office. Perhaps the body-piercing had been Otto’s idea, or the doohickey itself had been a gift from him (hence she was loath to wear it now). Or else the unidentified metal object had become uncomfortable in the course of Mrs. Clausen’s pregnancy.

Then, at seven months, when Patrick felt an unfamiliar twinge in his new wrist—one especially strong kick from the unborn child—he tried to conceal his pain. Naturally Doris saw him wince; he couldn’t hide anything from her.

“What is it?” she asked. She instinctively moved the hand to her heart—to her breast, was what registered with Wallingford. He recalled, as if it were yesterday, how she had held his stump there while she’d mounted him.

“It was just a twinge,” Patrick replied.

“Call Zajac,” Mrs. Clausen demanded. “Don’t fool around.”

But there was nothing wrong. Dr. Zajac seemed miffed at the apparently easy success of the hand transplant. There’d been an early problem with the thumb and index finger, which Wallingford could not get his muscles to move on command. But that was because he’d been without a hand and wrist for five years—his muscles had to relearn a few things.

There’d been no crises for Zajac to avert; the hand’s progress had been as relentless as Mrs. Clausen’s plans for the hand. Perhaps the true cause of Dr. Zajac’s disappointment was that the hand seemed more like her triumph than his. The principal news was that the donor’s widow was pregnant, and that she still maintained a relationship with her late husband’s hand. And the labels for Wallingford were never “the transplant guy” or “transplant man”—he was still and would remain “the lion guy” and “disaster man.”

And then, in September 1998, there was a successful hand-and-forearm transplant in Lyon, France. Clint Hallam, a New Zealander living in Australia, was the recipient. Zajac seemed miffed about that, too. He had reason to be. Hallam had lied. He’d told his doctors that he lost his hand in an industrial accident on a building site, but it turned out that his hand had been severed by a circular saw in a New Zealand prison, where he’d been serving a two-and-a-half-year sentence for fraud. (Dr. Zajac, of course, thought that giving a new hand to an ex-convict was a decision only a medical ethicist could have made.)

For now, Clint Hallam was taking more than thirty pills a day and showing no signs of rejection. In Wallingford’s case, eight months after his attachment surgery, he was still popping more than thirty pills a day, and if he dropped his pocket change, he couldn’t pick it up with Otto’s hand. More encouraging to the Boston team was the fact that his left hand, despite the absence of sensation at the extremities, was almost as strong as his right; at least Patrick could turn a doorknob enough to open the door. Doris had told him that Otto had been fairly strong. (From lifting all those cases of beer, no doubt.)

Occasionally Mrs. Clausen and Wallingford would sleep together—without sex, even without nakedness. Doris would just sleep beside him—at his left side, naturally. Patrick didn’t sleep well, to a large degree because he was comfortable sleeping only on his back. The hand ached when he lay on his side or his stomach; not even Dr. Zajac could tell him why. Maybe it had something to do with a reduced blood supply to the hand, but the muscles and tendons and nerves were obviously getting a good supply of blood.

“I would never say you were home free,” Zajac told Wallingford, “but that hand is looking more and more like a keeper to me.”

It was hard to understand Zajac’s newfound casualness, let alone his love of Irma’s vernacular. Mrs. Clausen and her fetus had usurped Dr. Zajac’s three minutes in the limelight, but Zajac seemed relatively undepressed. (That a criminal was Wallingford’s only competition in hand-transplant surgery made Zajac more pissed-off than depressed.) And, as a result of Irma’s cooking, he’d actually put on a little weight; healthy food, in decent quantities, still adds up. The hand surgeon had given in to his appetites. He was famished because he was getting laid every day.

That Irma and her former employer were now happily married was no business of Wallingford’s, but it was all the talk at Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink, Zajac

& Associates. And if the best surgeon among them was looking less and less like a feral dog, his once-undernourished son, Rudy, had also gained a few pounds. Even to the envious souls who stood at the periphery of Dr. Zajac’s life and cravenly mocked him, the little boy whose father loved him now struck nearly everyone as happy and normal.

No less surprising, Dr. Mengerink confessed to Zajac that he’d had an affair with the vengeful Hildred, Dr. Zajac’s now-overweight first wife. Hildred was seething about Irma, although Zajac had increased her alimony—the cost to Hildred was straightforward: she would accept dual, which was to say equal, custody of Rudy. Instead of becoming overwrought at Dr. Mengerink’s startling confession, Dr. Zajac was a portrait of sensitivity and compassion. “With Hildred? You poor man

…” was all Zajac had said, putting his arm around Mengerink’s stooped shoulders.

“It’s a wonder what a little nooky will do for you,” the surviving Gingeleskie brother remarked enviously.

Had the shit-eating dog also turned a corner? In a way, she had. Medea was almost a good dog; she still experienced what Irma called “lapses,” but dogshit and its effects no longer dominated Dr. Zajac’s life. Dog-turd lacrosse had become just a game. And while the doctor had tried a glass of red wine every day for the sake of his heart, his heart was in good hands with Irma and Rudy. (Zajac’s growing fondness for red Bordeaux quite exceeded the parsimonious allotment that was deemed to be good for his ticker.)

The unexplained ache in Patrick Wallingford’s new left hand continued to be of little concern to Dr. Zajac. But one night when Patrick was lying chastely in bed with Doris Clausen, she asked him, “What do you mean by an ‘ache,’ exactly? What kind of ache is it?”

“It’s a kind of straining, only my fingers are barely moving, and it hurts in the tips of the fingers, where I still have no feeling. It’s weird.”

“It hurts where you have no feeling?” Doris asked.

“So it seems,” Patrick explained.

“I know what’s wrong,” Mrs. Clausen said. Just because she wanted to lie next to his left hand, she should not have imposed the wrong side of the bed on Otto.

“On Otto?” Wallingford asked.

Otto had always slept at her left side, Doris explained. How this wrong-side-of-thebed business had affected Patrick’s new hand, he would soon see. With Mrs. Clausen asleep beside him, at his right side, something that seemed utterly natural happened. He turned to her, and—as if ingrained in her, even in her sleep—she turned to him, her head nestling in the crook of his right arm, her breath against his throat. He didn’t dare swallow, lest he wake her. His left hand twitched, but there was no ache now. Wallingford lay still, waiting to see what his new hand would do next. He would remember later that the hand, entirely of its own accord, went under the hem of Doris Clausen’s nightie—the unfeeling fingers moving up her thighs. At their touch, Mrs. Clausen’s legs drew apart; her hips opened; her pubic hair brushed against the palm of Patrick’s new left hand, as if lifted by an unfelt breeze.