John Irving - The Fourth Hand

Wallingford drank a beer or two, but what people liked about watching football eluded him. To be fair, it was a bad matchup; while the Broncos won their second straight Super Bowl, and their fans were no doubt delighted, it was not a close or even a competitive game. The Atlanta Falcons had no business being in the Super Bowl in the first place. (At least that was the opinion of everyone Wallingford would later talk to in Green Bay.)

Yet, even distractedly watching the Super Bowl, Patrick for the first time could imagine going to a Packer home game at Lambeau Field with Doris and Otto junior. Or just with little Otto, maybe when the boy was a bit older. The idea had surprised him, but that was January 1999. By April of that year, when Wallingford watched Matthew David Scott and his son at the Phillies game, the thought was no longer surprising; he’d had a couple more months of missing Otto junior and the boy’s mother. Even if it was true that he’d lost Mrs. Clausen, Wallingford rightly feared that if he didn’t make an effort to see more of little Otto now—meaning the summer of ’99, when Otto junior was still only eight months old (he wasn’t quite crawling)—there would simply be no relationship to build on when the boy was older.

The one person in New York to whom Wallingford confided his fears of the missed opportunity of fatherhood was Mary. Boy, was she a bad choice for a confidante! When Patrick said that he longed to be “more like a father” to Otto junior, Mary reminded him that he could knock her up anytime he felt like it and become the father of a child living in New York.

“You don’t have to go to Green Bay, Wisconsin, to be a father, Pat,” Mary told him.

How she’d gone from being such a nice girl to expressing her one-note wish to have Wallingford’s seed was not a credit to the other women in the New York newsroom, or so Patrick believed. He continued to overlook the fact that men had been a far greater influence on Mary. She’d had problems with men, or at least she thought she had. (Same difference.)

Every weeknight, when he concluded his telecast, Wallingford never knew if they were watching when he said, “Good night, Doris. Good night, my little Otto.”

Mrs. Clausen had not once called to say she’d seen the evening news. It was July 1999. There was a heat wave in New York. It was a Friday. Most summer weekends, Wallingford went to Bridgehampton, where he’d rented a house. Except for the swimming pool—Patrick made a point of not swimming in the ocean with one hand—it was really like staying in the city. He saw all the same people at the same kinds of parties, which, in fact, was what Wallingford and a lot of other New Yorkers liked about being out there.

That weekend, friends had invited him to the Cape; he was supposed to fly to Martha’s Vineyard. But even before he felt a slight prickling where his hand had been detached—some of the twinges seemed to extend to the empty space where his left hand used to be—he’d phoned his friends and canceled the trip with some bullshit excuse.

At the time, he didn’t know how lucky he was, not to be flying to Martha’s Vineyard that Friday night. Then he remembered that he’d lent his house in Bridgehampton for the weekend. A bunch of the New York newsroom women were having a weekend-long baby shower there. Or an orgy, Patrick cynically imagined. He passingly wondered if Mary would be there. (That was the old Patrick Wallingford wondering.) But Patrick didn’t ask Mary if she was one of the women using his summer house that weekend. If he’d asked, she would have known he was free and offered to change her plans.

Wallingford was still undervaluing how sensitive and vulnerable women who have struggled to have a child were; a weekend-long baby shower for someone else would not likely have been Mary’s choice.

So he was in New York on a Friday in mid-July with no weekend plans and nowhere to go. As he sat in makeup for the Friday-evening news, he thought of calling Mrs. Clausen. He had never invited himself to Green Bay; he’d always waited to be invited. Yet both Doris and Patrick were aware that the intervals between her invitations had grown longer. (The last time he’d been in Wisconsin, there was still snow on the ground.)

What if Wallingford simply called her and said, “Hi! What are you and little Otto doing this weekend? How about I come to Green Bay?” Remarkably, without second-guessing himself, he just did it; he called her out of the blue.

“Hello,” said her voice on the answering machine. “Little Otto and I are up north for the weekend. No phone. Back Monday.”

He didn’t leave a message, but he did leave some makeup on the mouthpiece of the phone. He was so distracted by hearing Mrs. Clausen’s voice on the answering machine, and even more distracted by that half-imagined, half-dreamed image of her at the cottage on the lake, that without thinking he attempted to wipe the makeup off the mouthpiece with his left hand. He was surprised when the stump of his left forearm made contact with the phone—that was the first twinge. When he hung up, the prickling sensations continued. He kept looking at his stump, expecting to see ants, or some other small insects, crawling over the scar tissue. But there was nothing there. He knew there couldn’t be bugs under the scar tissue, yet he felt them all through the telecast.

Later Mary would remark that there’d been something listless in the delivery of his usually cheerful good-night wishes to Doris and little Otto, but Wallingford knew that they couldn’t have been watching. There was no electricity at the cottage on the lake—Mrs. Clausen had told him that. (For the most part, she seemed unwilling to talk about the place up north, and when she did talk about it, her voice was shy and hard to hear.)

The prickling sensations continued while Patrick had his makeup removed; his skin crawled. Because he was thinking about something Dr. Zajac had said to him, Wallingford was only vaguely mindful that the regular makeup girl was on vacation. He supposed she had a crush on him—he’d not yet been tempted. He thought it was the way she chewed her gum that he missed. Only now, in her absence, did he fleetingly imagine her in a new way—naked. But the supernatural twinges in his nonhand kept distracting him, as did his memory of Zajac’s blunt advice.

“Don’t mess around if you ever think you need me.” Therefore, Patrick didn’t mess around. He called Zajac at home, although he assumed that Boston’s most renowned hand surgeon would be spending his summer weekends out of town. Actually, Dr. Zajac had rented a place in Maine that summer, but only for the month of August, when he would have custody of Rudy. Medea, now more often called Pal, would eat a ton of raw clams and mussels, shells and all; but the dog had seemingly outgrown a taste for her own turds, and Rudy and Zajac played lacrosse with a lacrosse ball. The boy had even attended a lacrosse clinic in the first week of July. Rudy was with Zajac for the weekend, in Cambridge, when Wallingford called.

Irma answered the phone. “Yeah, what is it?” she said.

Wallingford contemplated the remote possibility that Dr. Zajac had an unruly teenage daughter. He knew only that Zajac had a younger child, a six-or sevenyear-old boy—like Matthew David Scott’s son. In his mind’s eye, Patrick was forever seeing that unknown little boy in a baseball jersey, his hands raised like his father’s—both of them celebrating that victory pitch in Philadelphia. (A “victory pitch” was how someone in the media had described it.)

“Yeah?” Irma said again. Was she a surly, oversexed babysitter for Zajac’s little boy? Perhaps she was the housekeeper, except she sounded too coarse to be Dr. Zajac’s housekeeper.