John Irving - The Fourth Hand

“The what?” Wallingford asked, just to be sure.

“Give me your hand, the fourth one,” Doris said. She seized his stump and gripped it tightly between her thighs, where he could feel his missing fingers come to life.

“There were the two you were born with,” Mrs. Clausen explained. “You lost one. Otto’s was your third. As for this one,” she said, clenching her thighs for emphasis,

“this is the one that will never forget me. This one is mine. It’s your fourth.”

“Oh.” Perhaps that was why he could feel it, as if it were real. They swam naked again after they made love, but this time one of them stood at the window in little Otto’s bedroom, watching the other swim. It was during Mrs. Clausen’s turn that Otto junior woke up with the sunrise.

Then they were busy packing up; Doris did all the things that were necessary to close the cottage. She even found the time to take the last of their trash across the lake to the Dumpster on the dock. Wallingford stayed with Otto. Doris drove the boat a lot faster when the baby wasn’t with her.

They had all their bags and the baby gear assembled on the big dock when the floatplane arrived. While the pilot and Mrs. Clausen loaded the small plane, Wallingford held Otto junior in his right arm and waved no-handed across the lake to the Peeping Tom. Every so often, they could see the sun reflected in the lens of his telescope.

When the floatplane took off, the pilot made a point of passing low over the newcomer’s dock. The Peeping Tom was pretending that his telescope was a fishing pole and he was fishing off his dock; the silly asshole kept making imaginary casts. The tripod for the telescope stood incriminatingly in the middle of the dock, like the mounting for a crude kind of artillery. There was too much noise in the cabin for Wallingford and Mrs. Clausen to talk without shouting. But they looked at each other constantly, and at the baby, whom they passed back and forth between them. As the floatplane was descending for its landing, Patrick told her again—without a sound, just by moving his lips—“I love you.”

Doris did not at first respond, and when she did so—also without actually saying the words, but by letting him read her lips—it was that same sentence, longer than

“I love you,” which she had spoken before. (“I’m still thinking about it.”) Wallingford could only wait and see.

From where the seaplane docked, they drove to Austin Straubel Airport in Green Bay. Otto junior fussed in his car seat while Wallingford made an effort to amuse him. Doris drove. Now that they could hear each other talk, it seemed they had nothing to say.

At the airport, where he kissed Mrs. Clausen good-bye, and then little Otto, Patrick felt Mrs. Clausen put something in his right front pocket. “Please don’t look at it now. Please wait until later,” she asked him. “Just think about this: my skin has grown back together, the hole has closed. I couldn’t wear that again if I wanted to. And besides, if I end up with you, I know I don’t need it. I know you don’t need it. Please give it away.”

Wallingford knew what it was without looking at it—the fertility doohickey he’d once seen in her navel, the body ornament that had pierced her belly button. He was dying to see it.

He didn’t have to wait long. He was thinking about the ambiguity of Mrs. Clausen’s parting words—“if I end up with you”—when the thing she’d put in his pocket set off the metal-detection device in the airport. He had to take it out of his pocket and look at it then. An airport security guard took a good look at it, too; in fact, the guard had the first long look at it.

It was surprisingly heavy for something so small; the grayish-white, metallic color gleamed like gold. “It’s platinum,” the security guard said. She was a dark-skinned Native American woman with jet-black hair, heavyset and sad-looking. The way she handled the belly-button ornament indicated she knew something about jewelry. “This must have been expensive,” she said, handing the doohickey back to him.

“I don’t know—I didn’t buy it,” Wallingford replied. “It’s a body-piercing item, for a woman’s navel.”

“I know,” the security guard told him. “They usually set the metal detector off when they’re in someone’s belly button.”

“Oh,” Patrick said. He was only beginning to grasp what the good-luck charm was. A tiny hand—a left one.

In the body-piercing trade, it was what they called a barbell—a rod with a ball that screws on and off one end, just to keep the ornament from falling off, not unlike an earring post. But at the other end of the rod, which served the design as a slender wrist, was the most delicate, most exquisite little hand that Patrick Wallingford had ever seen. The middle finger was crossed over the index finger in that near-universal symbol of good luck. Patrick had expected a more specific fertility symbol—maybe a miniature god or something tribal. Another security guard came over to the table where Wallingford and the first security guard were standing. He was a small, lean black man with a perfectly trimmed mustache. “What is it?” he asked his colleague.

“A body ornament, for your belly button,” she explained.

“Not for mine!” the man said, grinning.

Patrick handed him the good-luck charm. That was when the Windbreaker slipped off Wallingford’s left forearm and the guards saw that his left hand was gone.

“Hey, you’re the lion guy!” the male guard said. He’d scarcely glanced at the small platinum hand with the crossed fingers, resting in the palm of his bigger hand.

The female guard instinctively reached out and touched Patrick’s left forearm.

“I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you, Mr. Wallingford,” she said. What kind of sadness was it that showed in her face? Wallingford had instantly known she was sad, but he’d not (until now) considered the possible reasons. There was a small, fishhook-shaped scar on her throat; it could have come from anything, from a childhood accident with a pair of scissors to a bad marriage or a violent rape.

Her colleague—the small, lean black man—was now looking at the body ornament with new interest. “Well, it’s a hand. A left one. I get it!” he said excitedly. “I guess that would be your good-luck charm, wouldn’t it?”

“Actually, it’s for fertility. Or so I was told.”

“It is ?” the Native American woman asked. She took the doohickey out of her fellow guard’s hand. “Let me see that again. Does it work?” she asked Patrick. He could tell she was serious.

“It worked once,” Wallingford replied.

It was tempting to guess what her sadness was. The female security guard was in her late thirties or early forties; she was wearing a wedding ring on her left ring finger and a turquoise ring on the ring finger of her right hand. Her ears were pierced—more turquoise. Perhaps her belly button was pierced, too. Maybe she couldn’t get pregnant.

“Do you want it?” Wallingford asked her. “I have no further use for it.”

The black man laughed. He walked away with a wave of his hand. “Oooh-oooh!

You don’t want to go there!” he said to Patrick, shaking his head. Maybe the poor woman had a dozen children; she’d been begging to get her tubes tied, but her nogood husband wouldn’t let her.

“You be quiet!” the female guard called after her departing colleague. He was still laughing, but she was not amused.

“You can have it, if you want it,” Wallingford told her. After all, Mrs. Clausen had asked him to give it away.

The woman closed her dark hand over the fertility charm. “I would very much like to have it, but I’m sure I can’t afford it.”