John Irving - The Fourth Hand

“I used to love you,” Mary reminded him; then she hung up. It pleased Wallingford that at least one phase of the office politics between them was over. He would find his own way to get fired, when he felt like it; if he decided to do it Mary’s way, she would be the last to know when. And, if it turned out Mary was pregnant, he would be as responsible for the baby as she allowed him to be—he just wouldn’t be dicked around by her.

Who was he kidding? If you have a baby with someone, of course you’re going to be dicked around! And he had underestimated Mary Shanahan before. She could find a hundred ways to dick him around.

Yet Wallingford recognized what had changed in him—he was no longer acquiescing. Possibly he was the new or semi-new Patrick Wallingford, after all. Moreover, the coldness of Mary Shanahan’s tone of voice had been encouraging; he’d sensed that his prospects for getting fired were improving. On his way to the airport, Patrick had looked at the taxi driver’s newspaper, just the weather page. The forecast for northern Wisconsin was warm and fair. Even the weather boded well.

Mrs. Clausen had expressed some anxiety about the weather, because they would be flying to the lake up north in a small plane; it was some kind of seaplane, or what Doris had called a floatplane. Green Bay itself was part of Lake Michigan, but where they were going was roughly between Lake Michigan and Lake Superior—the part of Wisconsin that is near Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Since Wallingford couldn’t get to Green Bay before Saturday and he had to be back in New York on Monday, Doris had determined they should take the little plane. It was too long a drive from Green Bay for such a short weekend; this way they would have two nights in the boathouse apartment at the cottage on the lake. To get to Green Bay, Patrick had previously tried two different Chicago connections and one connecting flight through Detroit; this time he’d opted for a change of planes in Cincinnati. Sitting in the waiting area, he was overcome by a moment of typically New York incomprehension. (This happened only seconds before the boarding call.) Why were so many people going to Cincinnati on a Saturday in July?

Of course Wallingford knew why he was going there—Cincinnati was simply the first leg of a journey in three parts—but what could possibly be attracting all these other people to the place? It would never have occurred to Patrick Wallingford that anyone knowing his reasons for the trip might have found Mrs. Clausen’s lasting allure the most improbable excuse of all.

THERE WAS A MOMENT when the floatplane banked and Doris Clausen closed her eyes. Patrick Wallingford, eyes wide open, didn’t want to miss the steep descent to the small, dark lake. Not even for a new left hand, a keeper, would Wallingford have blinked or looked away from that sideslipping view of the darkgreen trees and the suddenly tilted horizon. One wingtip must have been pointed at the lake; the window on the seaplane’s downward side revealed nothing but the fast-approaching water.

At such a sharp angle, the pontoons shuddered and the plane shook so violently that Mrs. Clausen clutched little Otto to her breast. Her movement startled the sleeping child, who commenced to cry only seconds before the pilot leveled off and the small plane landed less than smoothly on the wind-ruffled water. The firs flew by and the white pines were a wall of green, a blur of jade where the blue sky had been.

Doris at last exhaled, but Wallingford hadn’t been afraid. Although he’d never been to the lake up north before, nor had he ever flown in a floatplane, the water and the surrounding shore, as well as every frame of the descent and landing, were as familiar to him as that blue-capsule dream. All those years since he’d lost his hand the first time seemed shorter than a single night’s sleep to him now; yet, during those years, he had wished continually for that pain-pill dream to come true. At long last, Patrick Wallingford had no doubt that he’d touched down in that blue-capsule dream.

Patrick took it as a good sign that the uncountable members of the Clausen family had not descended en masse on the various cabins and outbuildings. Was it out of respect for the delicacy of Doris’s situation—a single parent, a widow with a possible suitor—that Otto senior’s family had left the lakefront property unoccupied for the weekend? Had Mrs. Clausen asked them for this consideration? In which case, did she anticipate that the weekend had romantic potential? If so, Doris gave no indication of it. She had a list of things to do, which she attended to matter-of-factly. Wallingford watched her start the pilot lights for the propane hot-water heaters, the gas refrigerators, and the stove. He carried the baby.

Patrick held little Otto in his left arm, without a hand, because at times he needed to shine the flashlight for Mrs. Clausen. The key to the main cabin was nailed to a beam under the sundeck; the key to the finished rooms above the boathouse was nailed to a two-by-four under the big dock.

It wasn’t necessary to unlock and open all the cabins and outbuildings—they wouldn’t be using them. The smaller shed, now used for tools, had been an outhouse before there was plumbing, before they pumped water from the lake. Mrs. Clausen expertly primed the pump and pulled the cord to start the gasoline engine that ran the pump.

Doris asked Patrick to dispose of a dead mouse. She held little Otto while Wallingford removed the mouse from the trap and loosely buried it under some leaves and pine needles. The mousetrap had been set in a kitchen cupboard; Mrs. Clausen discovered the dead rodent while she was putting the groceries away. Doris didn’t like mice—they were dirty. She was revolted by the turds they left in what she called “surprise places” throughout the kitchen. She asked Patrick to dispose of the mouse turds, too. And she disliked, even more than their turds, the suddenness with which mice moved. (Maybe I should have brought Charlotte’s Web instead of Stuart Little, Wallingford worried.) All the food in paper or plastic bags, or in cardboard boxes, had to be stored in tin containers because of the mice; over the winter, not even the canned food could be left unprotected. One winter something had gnawed through the cans—probably a rat, but maybe a mink or a weasel. Another winter, what was almost certainly a wolverine had broken into the main cabin and made the kitchen its lair; the animal had left a terrible mess.

Patrick understood that this was part of the summer-camp lore of the cottage. He could easily envision the life lived here, even without the other Clausens present. In the main cabin, where the kitchen and dining room were—also the biggest of the bathrooms—he saw the board games and puzzles stacked on shelves. There were no books to speak of, save a dictionary (doubtless for settling arguments in Scrabble) and the usual field guides that identify snakes and amphibians, insects and spiders, wildflowers, mammals, and birds.

In the main cabin, too, were the visualizations of the ghosts that had passed through or still visited there. These took the form of artless snapshots, curled at the edges. Some of these photos were badly faded from long exposure to sunlight; others were rust-spotted from the old tacks pinning them to the rough pine walls. And there were other mementos that spoke of ghosts. The mounted heads of deer, or just their antlers; a crow’s skull that revealed the perfect hole made by a .22caliber bullet; some undistinguished fish, home-mounted on plaques of shellacked pine boards. (The fish looked as if they’d been crudely varnished, too.) Most outstanding was a single talon of a large bird of prey. Mrs. Clausen told Wallingford it was an eagle’s talon; it was not a trophy but a record of shame, displayed in a jewelry box as a warning to other Clausens. It was awful to shoot an eagle, yet one of the less disciplined Clausens had done the deed, for which he was harshly punished. He’d been a young boy at the time, and he’d been “grounded,”