John Irving - The Fourth Hand

At least there was nothing comparable to the anticipation he’d felt when Mrs. Clausen would roll on her side, away from him, holding his (or was it Otto’s?) hand at first against her side and then against her stomach, where the unborn child was waiting to kick him. There would be no matching that, or the taste of the back of her neck, or the smell of her hair.

Patrick Wallingford had lost his left hand twice, but he’d gained a soul. It was both loving and losing Mrs. Clausen that had given Patrick his soul. It was both his longing for her and the sheer wishing her well; it was getting back his left hand and losing it again, too. It was wanting his child to be Otto Clausen’s child, almost as much as Doris had wanted this; it was loving, even unrequited, both Otto junior and the little boy’s mother. And such was the size of the ache in Patrick’s soul that it was visible —even on television. Not even the confused doorman could mistake him for Paul O’Neill, not anymore.

He was still the lion guy, but something in him had risen above that image of his mutilation; he was still disaster man, but he anchored the evening news with a newfound authority. He had actually mastered the look he’d first practiced in bars at the cocktail hour, when he was feeling sorry for himself. The look still said, Pity me, only now his sadness seemed approachable.

But Wallingford was unimpressed by the progress of his soul. It may have been noticeable to others, but what did that matter? He didn’t have Doris Clausen, did he?

MEANWHILE, AN ATTRACTIVE, photogenic woman with a limp had just turned sixty. As a teenager, and all her adult life, she’d worn long skirts or dresses to conceal her withered leg. She’d been the last person in her hometown to come down with poliomyelitis; the Salk vaccine was available too late for her. For almost as long as she’d had the deformity, she’d been writing a book with this provocative title: How I Almost Missed Getting Polio. She said that the end of the century struck her as “as good a time as any” to make multiple submissions to more than a dozen publishers, but they all turned her book down.

“Bad luck or not, polio or whatever, the book isn’t very well written,” the woman with the limp and the withered leg admitted to Patrick Wallingford, on-camera. She looked terrific when she was sitting down. “It’s just that everything in my life happened because I didn’t get that damn vaccine. I got polio instead.”

Of course she quickly acquired a publisher after her interview with Wallingford, and almost overnight she had a new title: I Got Polio Instead. Someone rewrote the book for her, and someone else would make a movie of it—starring a woman who looked nothing at all like the woman with the limp and the withered leg, except that the actress was attractive and photogenic, too. That was what being on-camera with Wallingford could do for you.

Nor would Patrick miss the irony that when he’d lost his left hand the first time, the world had been watching. In those best-of-the-century moments that were positively made for television, the lion-eating-the-hand episode was always included. Yet when he’d lost his hand the second time—more to the point, when he’d lost Mrs. Clausen—the camera wasn’t on him. What mattered most to Wallingford had gone unrecorded.

The new century, at least for a while, would remember Patrick as the lion guy. But it was neither news nor history that, if Wallingford were keeping score of his life, he wouldn’t have started counting until he met Doris Clausen. So much for how the world keeps score.

In the category of transplant surgery, Patrick Wallingford would not be remembered. At the close of the century, one counts the successes, not the failures. Thus, in the field of hand-transplant surgery, Dr. Nicholas M. Zajac would remain unfamous, his moment of possible greatness surpassed by what truly became the first successful hand-transplant procedure in the United States, and only the second ever. “The fireworks guy,” as Zajac crudely called Matthew David Scott, appeared to have what Dr. Zajac termed a keeper.

On April 12, 1999, less than three months after receiving a new left hand, Mr. Scott threw out the ceremonial first pitch at the Phillies’ opening game in Philadelphia. Wallingford wasn’t exactly jealous. (Envious… well, maybe. But not in the way you might think.) In fact, Patrick asked Dick, his news editor, if he could interview the evident “keeper.” Wouldn’t it be fitting, Wallingford suggested, to congratulate Mr. Scott for having what he (Wallingford) had lost? But Dick, of all people, thought the idea was “tacky.” As a result, Dick was fired, though many would argue he was a news editor waiting to be fired. Any euphoria among the New York newsroom women was short-lived. The new news editor was as much of a dick as Dick had ever been; anticlimactically, his name was Fred. As Mary whatever-her-name-was would say—Mary had developed a sharper tongue in the intervening years—“If I’m going to be dicked around, I think I’d rather be Dicked than Fredded. ”

In the new century, that same international team of surgeons who performed the world’s first successful hand transplant in Lyon, France, would try again, this time attempting the world’s first double hand-and-forearm transplant. The recipient, whose name was not made public, would be a thirty-three-year-old Frenchman who’d lost both his hands in a fireworks accident (another one) in 1996, the donor a nineteen-year-old who had fallen off a bridge. But Wallingford would be interested only in the fates of the first two recipients. The first, ex-convict Clint Hallam, would have his new hand amputated by one of the surgeons who performed the transplant operation. Two months prior to the amputation, Hallam had stopped taking the medication prescribed as part of his anti-rejection treatment. He was observed wearing a leather glove to hide the hand, which he described as “hideous.” (Hallam would later deny failing to take his medication.) And he would continue his strained relationship with the law. Mr. Hallam had been seized by the French police for allegedly stealing money and an American Express card from a liver-transplant patient who’d befriended him in the hospital in Lyon. While he was eventually allowed to leave France—after he repaid some of the money—the police would issue warrants for Hallam’s arrest in Australia concerning his possible role in a fuel scam. (It seems that Zajac was right about him.)

The second, Matthew David Scott of Absecon, New Jersey, is the only successful recipient of a new hand whom Wallingford would admit to envying in an interesting way. It was never Mr. Scott’s new hand that Patrick Wallingford envied. But in the media coverage of that Phillies game, where the fireworks guy threw out the first ball, Wallingford noted that Matthew David Scott had his son with him. What Patrick envied Mr. Scott was his son. He’d had premonitions of what he would call the “fatherhood feeling” when he was still recovering from losing Otto senior’s hand. The painkillers were nothing special, but they may have been what prompted Patrick to watch his first Super Bowl. Of course he didn’t know how to watch a Super Bowl. You’re not supposed to watch a game like that alone.

He kept wanting to call Mrs. Clausen and ask her to explain what was happening in the game, but Super Bowl XXXIII was the symbolic anniversary of Otto Clausen’s accident (or suicide) in his beer truck; furthermore, the Packers weren’t playing. Therefore, Doris had told Patrick that she intended to lock herself away from sight or sound of the game. He would be on his own.