John Irving - The Fourth Hand

It sounded like a true story. (Wallingford couldn’t help judging the start of any story this way.)

“But they survived,” the woman said, as if most children didn’t. “They’re both married now and have children of their own. I have four grandchildren. Three girls, one boy. It kills me not to see more of them than I do, but when I see them, I feel afraid for them. I start to worry again. I don’t sleep.”

Patrick felt the radiating twinges of mock pain where his left hand had been, but the woman had slightly relaxed her grip and there was an unanalyzed comfort in having his arm held so urgently in her lap, his stump pressing against the swell of her abdomen.

“Now I’m pregnant,” the woman told him; his forearm didn’t respond. “I’m fiftyone! I’m not supposed to get pregnant! I came to Boston to have an abortion—my doctor recommended it. But I called the clinic from the hotel this morning. I lied. I said my car had broken down and I had to reschedule the appointment. They told me they can see me next Saturday, a week from today. That gives me more time to think about it.”

“Have you talked to your daughters?” Wallingford asked. Her lion’s grip on his arm was there again.

“They’d try to convince me to have the baby,” the woman replied, with renewed intensity. “They’d offer to raise the child with their children. But it would still be mine. I couldn’t stop myself from loving it, I couldn’t help but be involved. Yet I simply can’t stand the fear. The mortality of children… it’s more than I can bear.”

“It’s your choice,” Patrick reminded her. “Whatever decision you make, I’m sure it will be the right one.” The woman didn’t look so sure.

Wallingford wondered who the unborn child’s father was; whether or not this thought was conveyed by the tremble in his left forearm, the woman either felt it or she read his mind.

“The father doesn’t know,” she said. “I don’t see him anymore. He was just a colleague.”

Patrick had never heard the word “colleague” used so dismissively.

“I don’t want my daughters to know I’m pregnant because I don’t want them to know I have sex,” the woman confessed. “That’s also why I can’t make up my mind. I don’t think you should have an abortion because you’re trying to keep the fact that you’ve had sex a secret. That’s not a good enough reason.”

“Who’s to say what’s a ‘good enough’ reason if it’s your reason? It’s your choice,”

Wallingford repeated. “It’s not a decision anyone else can or should make for you.”

“That’s not hugely comforting,” the woman told him. “I was all set to have the abortion until I saw you at breakfast. I don’t understand what you triggered.”

Wallingford had known from the beginning that all this would end up being his fault. He made the most tentative effort to retrieve his arm from the woman’s grasp, but she was not about to let him go that easily.

“I don’t know what got into me when I spoke to you. I’ve never spoken to anyone like that in my life!” the woman continued. “I shouldn’t blame you, personally, for what the media does, or what I think they do. I was just so upset to hear about John junior, and I was even more upset by my first reaction. When I heard about his plane being lost, do you know what I thought?”

“No.” Patrick shook his head; the hot water was making his forehead perspire, and he could see beads of sweat on the woman’s upper lip.

“I was glad his mother was dead… that she didn’t have to go through this. I was sorry for him, but I was glad for her that she was dead. Isn’t that awful?”

“It’s perfectly understandable,” Wallingford replied. “You’re a mother…” His instinct just to pat her on the knee, underwater, was sincere—that is, heartfelt without being in the least sexual. But because the instinct traveled down his left arm, there was no hand to pat her knee with. Unintentionally, he jerked his stump away from her; he’d felt the invisible crawling insects again. For a pregnant fifty-one-year-old mother of two and a pregnant grandmother of four, the woman was undaunted by Wallingford’s uncontrollable gesture. She calmly reached for his handless arm again. To Patrick’s surprise, he willingly put his stump back in her lap. The woman took hold of his forearm without reproach, as if she’d only momentarily misplaced a cherished possession.

“I apologize for attacking you in public,” she said sincerely. “It was uncalled for. I’m simply not myself.” She gripped his forearm so tightly that an impossible pain was registered in Wallingford’s missing left thumb. He flinched. “Oh, God! I’ve hurt you!” the woman cried, letting go of his arm. “And I haven’t even asked you what your doctor said!”

“I’m okay,” Patrick said. “It’s principally the nerves that were regenerated when the new hand was attached. Those nerves are acting up. My doctor thought my love life was the problem, or just stress.”

“Your love life,” the woman repeated flatly, as if that were not a subject she cared to address. Wallingford didn’t want to address it, either. “But why are you still here?” she suddenly asked.

Patrick thought she meant the hot tub. He was about to say that he was there because she’d held him there! Then he realized that she meant why hadn’t he gone back to New York. Or, if not New York, shouldn’t he be in Hyannisport or Martha’s Vineyard?

Wallingford dreaded telling her that he was stalling his inevitable return to his questionable profession (“questionable” given the Kennedy spectacle, to which he would soon be contributing); yet he admitted this to the woman, however reluctantly, and further told her that he’d intended to walk to Harvard Square to pick up a couple of books that his doctor had recommended. He’d considered that he might spend what remained of the weekend reading them.

“But I was afraid someone in Harvard Square would recognize me and say something to me along the lines of what you said to me at breakfast.” Patrick added: “It wouldn’t have been undeserved.”

“Oh, God!” the woman said again. “Tell me what the books are. I’ll go get them for you. No one ever recognizes me. ”

“That’s very kind of you, but—”

“ Please let me get the books for you! It would make me feel better!” She laughed nervously, pushing her damp hair away from her forehead.

Wallingford sheepishly told her the titles.

“Your doctor recommended them? Do you have children?”

“There’s a little boy who’s like a son to me, or I want him to be more like a son to me,” Patrick explained. “But he’s too young for me to read him Stuart Little or Charlotte’s Web. I just want them so that I can imagine reading them to him in a few years.”

“I read Charlotte’s Web to my grandson only a few weeks ago,” the woman told him. “I cried all over again—I cry every time.”

“I don’t remember the book very well, just my mother crying,” Wallingford admitted.

“My name is Sarah Williams.” There was an uncharacteristic hesitation in her voice when she said her name and held out her hand.

Patrick shook her hand, both their hands touching the foamy bubbles in the hot tub. At that moment, the whirlpool jets shut off and the water in the tub was instantly clear and still. It was a little startling and too obvious an omen, which elicited more nervous laughter from Sarah Williams, who stood up and stepped out of the tub.

Wallingford admired that way women have of getting out of the water in a wet bathing suit, a thumb or a finger automatically pulling down the back of the suit. When she stood, her small belly looked almost flat—it was swollen ever so slightly. From his memory of Mrs. Clausen’s pregnancy, Wallingford guessed that Sarah Williams couldn’t have been more than two, at the most three, months pregnant. If she hadn’t told him she was carrying a child, he would never have guessed. And maybe the pouch was always there, even when she wasn’t pregnant.