John Irving - The Fourth Hand

“Where’s that?” Wallingford asked.

“Cape Cod. Do you know what’s happened, Pat?”

“I was asleep, Mary.”

“Well, turn on the fucking news! I’ll call you back in five minutes. You can forget about going to Wisconsin.”

“I’m going to Green Bay, no matter what,” he told her, but she’d already hung up. Not even the brevity of her call or the harshness of her message could dispel from Patrick’s memory the little-girlish and excessively floral pattern of Mary’s bedspread, or the pink undulations of her Lava lamp and their protozoan movements across her bedroom ceiling—the shadows racing like sperm. Wallingford turned on the news. An Egyptian jetliner carrying 217 people had taken off from Kennedy, an overnight flight bound for Cairo. It had disappeared from radar screens only thirty-three minutes after take-off. Cruising at 33,000 feet in good weather, the plane had suddenly plummeted into the Atlantic about sixty miles southeast of Nantucket Island. There’d been no distress call from the cockpit. Radar sweeps indicated that the jet’s rate of descent was more than 23,000 feet per minute—“like a rock,” an aviation expert put it. The water was fifty-nine degrees and more than 250 feet deep; there was little hope that anyone had survived the crash.

It was the kind of crash that opened itself up to media speculation—the reports would all be speculative. Human-interest stories would abound. A businessman who preferred to be unnamed had arrived late at the airport and been turned away at the ticket counter. When they’d told him the flight was closed, he’d screamed at them. He went home and woke up in the morning, alive. That kind of thing would go on for days.

One of the airport hotels at Kennedy, the Ramada Plaza, had been turned into an information and counseling center for grieving family members—not that there was much information. Nevertheless, Wallingford went there. He chose Kennedy over Otis Air Force Base on the Cape—the reason being that the media would have limited access to the Coast Guard crews who’d been searching the debris field. By dawn that Sunday, they’d reportedly found only a small flotsam of wreckage and the remains of one body. On the choppy sea, there was nothing adrift that looked burned, which suggested there’d been no explosion. Patrick first spoke to the relatives of a young Egyptian woman who’d collapsed outside the Ramada Plaza. She’d fallen in a heap, in view of the television cameras surrounding the entrance to the hotel; police officers carried her into the lobby. Her relatives told Wallingford that her brother had been on the plane. Naturally the mayor was there, giving what solace he could. Wallingford could always count on a comment from the mayor. Giuliani seemed to like the lion guy more than he liked most reporters. Maybe he saw Patrick as a kind of police officer who’d been wounded in the line of duty; more likely, the mayor remembered Wallingford because Wallingford had only one hand.

“If there’s anything the City of New York can do to help, that’s what we’re trying to do,” Giuliani told the press. He looked a little tired when he turned to Patrick Wallingford and said: “Sometimes, if the mayor asks, it happens a little faster.”

An Egyptian man was using the lobby of the Ramada as a makeshift mosque: “We belong to God and to God we return,” he kept praying, in Arabic. Wallingford had to ask someone for a translation.

At the script meeting before the Sunday-evening telecast, Patrick was told point-blank of the network’s plans. “Either you’re our anchor tomorrow evening or we’ve got you on a Coast Guard cutter,” Mary Shanahan informed him.

“I’m in Green Bay tomorrow and tomorrow night, Mary,” Wallingford said.

“They’re going to call off the search for survivors tomorrow, Pat. We want you there, at sea. Or here, in New York. Not in Green Bay.”

“I’m going to the football game,” Wallingford told her. He looked at Wharton, who looked away; then he looked at Sabina, who stared with feigned neutrality back at him. He didn’t so much as glance at Mary.

“Then we’ll fire you, Pat,” Mary said.

“Then fire me.”

He didn’t even have to think about it. With or without a job at PBS or NPR, he’d made quite a lot of money; besides, they couldn’t fire him without making some kind of salary settlement. Patrick didn’t really need a job, at least for a couple of years.

Wallingford looked at Mary for some response, then at Sabina.

“Okay, if that’s how it is, you’re fired,” Wharton announced. Everyone seemed surprised that it was Wharton who said it, including Wharton. Before the script meeting, they’d had another meeting, to which Patrick had not been invited. Probably they’d decided that Sabina would be the one to fire Wallingford. At least Sabina looked at Wharton with an exasperated sense of surprise. Mary Shanahan had got over how surprised she was pretty quickly. For once, maybe Wharton had felt something unfamiliar and exciting taking charge inside him. But everything that was eternally insipid about him had instantly returned to his flushed face; he was again as vapid as he’d ever been. Being fired by Wharton was like being slapped by a tentative hand in the dark.

“When I get back from Wisconsin, we can work out what you owe me,” was all Wallingford told them.

“Please clear out your office and your dressing room before you go,” Mary said. This was standard procedure, but it irritated him.

They sent someone from security to help him pack up his things and to carry the boxes down to a limo. No one came to say good-bye to him, which was also standard procedure, although if Angie had been working that Sunday night, she probably would have.

Wallingford was back in his apartment when Mrs. Clausen called. He hadn’t seen his piece at the Ramada Plaza, but Doris had watched the whole story.

“Are you still coming?” she asked.

“Yes, and I can stay as long as you want me to,” Patrick told her. “I just got fired.”

“That’s very interesting,” Mrs. Clausen commented. “Have a safe flight.”

This time he had a Chicago connection, which got him into his hotel room in Green Bay in time to see the evening telecast from New York. He wasn’t surprised that Mary Shanahan was the new anchor. Once again Wallingford had to admire her. She wasn’t pregnant, but Mary had wound up with at least one of the babies she wanted.

“Patrick Wallingford is no longer with us,” Mary began cheerfully. “Good night, Patrick, wherever you are!”

There was in her voice something both perky and consoling. Her manner reminded Wallingford of that time in his apartment when he’d been unable to get it up and she’d sympathized by saying, “Poor penis.” As he’d understood only belatedly, Mary had always been part of the bigger picture.

It was a good thing he was getting out of the business. He wasn’t smart enough to be in it anymore. Maybe he’d never been smart enough.

And what an evening it was for news! Naturally no survivors had been found. The mourning for the victims on EgyptAir 990 had just begun. There was the footage of the usual calamity-driven crowd that had gathered on a gray Nantucket beach—the “body-spotters,” Mary had once called them. The “death-watchers,”

which was Wharton’s term for them, were warmly dressed.

That close-up from the deck of a Merchant Marine Academy ship—the pile of passengers’ belongings retrieved from the Atlantic—must have been Wharton’s work. After floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, train wrecks, plane crashes, school shootings, or other massacres, Wharton always chose the shots of articles of clothing, especially the shoes. And of course there were children’s toys; dismembered dolls and wet teddy bears were among Wharton’s favorite disaster items.