John Irving - The Fourth Hand

Whoever she was, the thought that Patrick had been cheating on another woman—or that there was another woman in his life, one who felt wronged—had clearly upset her. Possibly she was cheating on someone; probably she had been cheated on. The abortion business had sounded true, as had her fear of her children and grandchildren dying. The only hesitation he’d heard in her voice had been when she’d told him her name.

Wallingford was upset that he had become a man to whom any decent woman would want to remain anonymous. He’d never thought of himself that way before. When he’d had two hands, Patrick had experimented with anonymity—in particular, when he was with the kind of woman to whom any man would prefer to remain anonymous. But after the lion episode, he could no more have got away with not being Patrick Wallingford than he could have passed for Paul O’Neill—at least not to anyone with his or her faculties intact.

Rather than be left alone with these thoughts, Patrick made the mistake of turning on the television. A political commentator whose specialty had always struck Wallingford as intellectually inflated hindsight was speculating on a sizable “what if…” in the tragically abbreviated life of John F. Kennedy, Jr. The selfseriousness of the commentator was perfectly matched to the speciousness of his principal assertion, which was that JFK, Jr., would have been “better off” in every way if he’d gone against his mother’s advice and become a movie star. (Would young Kennedy not have died in a plane crash if he’d been an actor?) It was a fact that John junior’s mom hadn’t wanted him to be an actor, but the presumptuousness of the political commentator was enormous. The most egregious of his irresponsible speculations was that John junior’s smoothest, most unalterable course to the presidency lay through Los Angeles! To Patrick, the fatuousness of such Hollywood-level theorizing was twofold: first, to declare that young Kennedy should have followed in Ronald Reagan’s footsteps; second, to claim that JFK, Jr., had wanted to be president.

Preferring his other, more personal demons, Patrick turned off the TV. There in the dark, the new idea of trying to get fired greeted him as familiarly as an old friend. Yet that other new notion—that he was a man whose company a woman would accept only on the condition of anonymity—gave Patrick the shivers. It also precipitated a third new idea: What if he stopped resisting Mary and simply slept with her? (At least Mary wouldn’t insist on protecting her anonymity.) Thus there were three new ideas glowing in the dark, distracting Patrick Wallingford from the loneliness of a fifty-one-year-old woman who didn’t want to have an abortion but who was terrified of having a child. Of course, it was none of his business if that woman had an abortion or not; it was nobody’s business but hers.

And what if she wasn’t even pregnant? She may simply have had a small potbelly. Maybe she liked to spend her weekends in a hotel with a stranger, just acting. Patrick knew all about acting; he was always acting.

“Good night, Doris. Good night, my little Otto,” Wallingford whispered in the dark hotel room. It was what he said when he wanted to be sure that he wasn’t acting.

THERE’D BEEN NEARLY a week of rapturous mourning when Wallingford tried and failed to ready himself for an impromptu weekend in Wisconsin with Mrs. Clausen and Otto junior at the cottage on the lake. The Friday-evening telecast, one week after the crash of Kennedy’s single-engine plane, would be Patrick’s last before his trip up north, although he couldn’t get a flight from New York with a connection to Green Bay until Saturday morning. There was no good way to get to Green Bay.

The Thursday-evening telecast was bad enough. Already they were running out of things to say, an obvious indication of which was Wallingford’s interview with a widely disregarded feminist critic. (Even Evelyn Arbuthnot had intentionally ignored her.) The critic had written a book about the Kennedy family, in which she’d stated that all the men were misogynists. It was no surprise to her that a young Kennedy male had killed two women in his airplane.

Patrick asked to have the interview omitted, but Fred believed that the woman spoke for a lot of women. Judging from the abrasive response of the New York newsroom women, the feminist critic did not speak for them. Wallingford, always unfailingly polite as an interviewer, had to struggle to be barely civil. The feminist critic kept referring to young Kennedy’s “fatal decision,” as if his life and death had been a novel. “They left late, it was dark, it was hazy, they were flying over water, and John-John had limited experience as a pilot.”

These were not new points, Patrick was thinking, an unconvincing half-smile frozen on his handsome face. He also found it objectionable that the imperious woman kept calling the deceased “John-John.”

“He was a victim of his own virile thinking, the Kennedy-male syndrome,” she called it. “John-John was clearly testosterone-driven. They all are.”

“‘They…’ ” was all Wallingford managed to say.

“You know who I mean,” the critic snapped. “The men on his father’s side of the family.”

Patrick glanced at the TelePrompTer, where he recognized what were to be his next remarks; they were intended to lead his interviewee to the even more dubious assertion of the “culpability” of Lauren Bessette’s bosses at Morgan Stanley. That her bosses had made her stay late on “that fatal Friday,” as the feminist critic called it, was another reason that the small plane had crashed. In the script meeting, Wallingford had objected to the word-for-word content of one of his questions being on the prompter. That was almost never done—it was always confusing. You can’t put everything that’s supposed to be spontaneous on the TelePrompTer.

But the critic had come with a publicist, and the publicist was someone whom Fred was sucking up to—for unknown reasons. The publicist wanted Wallingford to deliver the question exactly as it was written, the point being that the demonization of Morgan Stanley was the critic’s next agenda and Wallingford (with feigned innocence) was supposed to lead her into it. Instead he said: “It’s not clear to me that John F. Kennedy, Jr., was ‘testosteronedriven.’ You’re not the first person I’ve heard say that, of course, but I didn’t know him. Neither did you. What is clear is that we’ve talked his death to death. I think that we should summon some dignity—we should just stop. It’s time to move on.”

Wallingford didn’t wait for the insulted woman’s response. There was over a minute remaining in the telecast, but there was ample montage footage on file. He abruptly brought the interview to a close, as was his habit every evening, by saying, “Good night, Doris. Good night, my little Otto.” Then came the ubiquitous montage footage; it hardly mattered that the presentation was a little disorderly. Viewers of the twenty-four-hour international channel, already suffering from grief fatigue, were treated to reruns of the mourning marathon: the hand-held camera on the rolling ship (a shot of the bodies being brought on board), a totally gratuitous shot of the St. Thomas More church, and another of a burial at sea, if not the actual burial. The last of the montage, as time expired, was of Jackie as a mom, holding John junior as a baby; her hand cupped the back of the newborn’s neck, her thumb three times the size of his tiny ear. Jackie’s hairdo was out of fashion, but the pearls were timeless and her signature smile was intact. She looks so young, Wallingford thought. (She was young—it was 1961!) Patrick was having his makeup removed when Fred confronted him. Fred was an old guy—he often spoke in dated terms.