John Irving - The Fourth Hand

But a Packer game, even on television, provided the longest sustained period of time that Mrs. Clausen would stroke the hand or permit the hand to touch her; and while she stared transfixed at the football game, Patrick could look at her the same way. He was conscious of memorizing her profile, or the way she bit her lower lip when it was third and long. (Doris had to explain to him that third and long was when Brett Favre, the Green Bay quarterback, had the greatest potential for getting sacked or throwing an interception.)

Occasionally she hurt Wallingford without meaning to. When Favre got sacked, or when he was intercepted—worse, whenever the other team scored—Mrs. Clausen would sharply squeeze her late husband’s hand.

“Aaahhh!” Wallingford would cry out, shamelessly exaggerating his agony. There would be kisses for the hand, even tears. It was worth the pain, which was quite different from those twinges caused by the kicking of the unborn child; those pins and needles were from another world.

Thus, bravely, Wallingford flew almost every week to Green Bay. He never found a hotel he liked, but Doris wouldn’t allow him to stay in the house she’d shared with Otto. During these trips, Patrick met other Clausens—Otto had a huge, supportive family. Most of them weren’t shy about demonstrating their affection for Otto’s hand. While Otto’s father and brothers had choked back sobs, Otto’s mother, who was memorably large, had wept openly; and the only unmarried sister had clutched the hand to her breast, just before fainting. Wallingford had looked away, thereby failing to catch her when she fell. Patrick blamed himself that she’d chipped a tooth on a coffee table, and she was not a woman with the best of smiles to begin with.

While the Clausens were a clan whose outdoorsy good cheer contrasted sharply with Wallingford’s reserve, he found himself strangely drawn to them. They had the loyal exuberance of season-ticket holders, and they’d all married people who looked like Clausens. You couldn’t tell the in-laws from the blood relatives, except for Doris, who stood apart.

Patrick could see how kind the Clausens were to her, and how protective. They’d accepted her, although she was clearly different; they loved her as one of their own. On television, those families who resembled the Clausens were nauseating, but the Clausens were not.

Wallingford had also traveled to Appleton to meet Doris’s mother and father, who wanted to visit with the hand, too. It was from Mrs. Clausen’s father that Wallingford learned more about Doris’s job; he hadn’t known that she’d had the job ever since her graduation from high school. For longer than Patrick Wallingford had been a journalist, Doris Clausen had worked in ticket sales for the Green Bay Packers. The Packers’ organization had been very supportive of Mrs. Clausen—they’d even put her through college.

“Doris can get you tickets, you know,” Mrs. Clausen’s father told Patrick. “And tickets are wicked hard to come by around here.”

Green Bay would have a rough season following their loss to Denver in Super Bowl XXXII. As Doris had said so movingly to Otto, the last day the unlucky man was alive, “There’s no guarantee of returning to the Super Bowl.”

The Packers wouldn’t get past the wild-card game, losing what Mrs. Clausen called a heartbreaker in the first round of the playoffs to San Francisco. “Otto thought we had the 49ers’ number,” Doris said. But by then she had a new baby to take care of. She was more philosophical now about Green Bay’s losses than she and Otto had ever been before.

It was a big baby, a boy—nine pounds, eight ounces—and he was so long overdue that they’d wanted to induce labor. Mrs. Clausen wouldn’t hear of it; she was one to let nature take its course. Wallingford missed the delivery. The baby was almost a month old before Patrick could get away from Boston. He should never have flown on Thanksgiving Day—his flight was late getting into Green Bay. Even so, he arrived in time to watch the fourth quarter of the Minnesota Vikings’ game with the Dallas Cowboys, which Minnesota won. (A good omen, Doris declared—Otto had hated the Cowboys.) Perhaps because her mother was staying with her, to help with Otto junior, Mrs. Clausen was relaxed about inviting Wallingford to visit her and the new baby at home.

Patrick did his best to forget the details of that house—all the pictures of Otto senior, for example. It was no surprise to see photographic evidence that Otto senior and Doris had been sweethearts—she’d already told Wallingford about that—but the photos of the Clausens’ marriage were more than Patrick could bear. There was in their photographs not only their obvious pleasure, which was always of the moment, but also their anticipated happiness—their unwavering expectations of a future together, and of a baby in that future. And what was the setting of the pictures that so seized Wallingford’s attention? It was neither Appleton nor Green Bay. It was the cottage on the lake, of course! The weathered dock; the lonely, dark water; the dark, abiding pines. There was also a photo of the boathouse apartment under construction, and there were Otto’s and Doris’s wet bathing suits, drying in the sunlight on the dock. Surely the water had lapped against the rocking boats, and—especially before a storm—it must have slapped against the dock. Patrick had heard it many times. Wallingford recognized in the photographs the source of the recurrent dream that wasn’t quite his. And always underlying that dream was the other one, the one the prescience pill had inspired—that wettest of all wet dreams brought on by the unnamed Indian painkiller, now banned.

Looking at the photographs, Wallingford began to realize that it was not the

“unmanly” loss of his hand that had conclusively turned his ex-wife against him; instead, in refusing to have children, he’d already lost her. Patrick could see how the paternity suit, even though it proved to be false, had been the bitterest pill for Marilyn to swallow. She’d wanted children. How had he underestimated the urgency of that?

Now, as he held Otto junior, Wallingford wondered how he could not have wanted one of these. His own baby in his arms!

He cried. Doris and her mother cried with him. Then they shut off the tears because the twenty-four-hour international news team was there. Although he was not the reporter assigned to this story, Wallingford could have predicted all the shots.

“Get a close-up of the hand, maybe the baby with the hand,” Patrick heard one of his colleagues say. “Get the mother and the hand and the baby together.” And later, in a sharply spoken aside to the cameraman: “I don’t care if Pat’s head is in the frame, just so his hand is there!”

On the plane back to Boston, Wallingford remembered how happy Doris had looked; although he rarely prayed, he prayed for the health of Otto junior. He hadn’t realized that a hand transplant would make him so emotional, but he knew it wasn’t just the hand.

Dr. Zajac had warned him that any decline in his slowly acquired dexterity could be a sign of a rejection reaction. Also, rejection reactions could occur in the skin. Patrick had been surprised to hear this. He’d always known that his own immune system could destroy the new hand, but why skin ? There seemed to be so many more important, internal functions that could go wrong. “Skin is a bugger,” Dr. Zajac had said.

No doubt “bugger” was an Irma-ism. She and Zajac, whom she called Nicky, were in the habit of renting videos and watching them in bed at night. But being in bed led to other things—Irma was pregnant, for example—and in the last video they’d watched, many of the characters had called one another buggers. That skin could be a bugger would be imparted to Patrick soon enough. On the first Monday in January, the day after the Packers dropped that wild-card game in San Francisco, Wallingford flew to Green Bay. The town was in mourning; the lobby of his hotel was like a funeral home. He checked into his room, he showered, he shaved. When he called Doris, her mother answered the phone. Both the baby and Doris were napping; she’d have Doris call him at his hotel when she woke up. Patrick was considerate enough to ask her to pass along his condolences to Doris’s father. “About the 49ers, I mean.”