John Irving: The Fourth Hand

Fortunately for the all-news network, the first vessel to arrive at the crash site was a Merchant Marine Academy training ship with seventeen cadets aboard. These young novices at sea were great for the human-interest angle—they were about the age of college upperclassmen. There they were in the spreading pool of jet fuel with the fragments of the plane’s wreckage, plus people’s shopping bags and body parts, bobbing to the oily surface around them. All of them wore gloves as they plucked this and that from the sea. Their expressions were what Sabina termed

“priceless.”

Mary milked her end lines for all they were worth. “The big questions remain unanswered,” Ms. Shanahan said crisply. She was wearing a suit Patrick had never seen before, something navy blue. The jacket was strategically opened, as were the top two buttons of her pale-blue blouse, which closely resembled a man’s dress shirt, only silkier. This would become her signature costume, Wallingford supposed.

“Was the crash of the Egyptian jetliner an act of terrorism, a mechanical failure, or pilot error?” Mary pointedly asked.

I would have reversed the order, Patrick thought—clearly “an act of terrorism”

should have come last.

In the last shot, the camera was not on Mary but on the grieving families in the lobby of the Ramada Plaza; the camera singled out small groups among them as Mary Shanahan’s voice-over concluded, “So many people want to know.” All in all, the ratings would be good; Wallingford knew that Wharton would be happy, not that Wharton would know how to express his happiness.

When Mrs. Clausen called, Patrick had just stepped out of the shower.

“Wear something warm,” she warned him. To Wallingford’s surprise, she was calling from the lobby. There would be time for him to see little Otto in the morning, Doris said. Right now it was time to go to the game; he should hurry up and get dressed. Therefore, not knowing what to expect, he did. It seemed too soon to leave for the game, but maybe Mrs. Clausen liked to get there early. When Wallingford left his hotel room and took the elevator to the lobby to meet her, his sense of pride was only slightly hurt that not one of his colleagues in the media had tracked him down and asked him what Mary Shanahan had meant when she’d announced, to millions, “Patrick Wallingford is no longer with us.”

There’d doubtless been calls to the network already; Wallingford could only wonder how Wharton was handling it, or maybe they had put Sabina in charge. They didn’t like to say they’d fired someone—they didn’t like to admit that someone had quit, either. They usually found some bullshit way to say it, so that no one knew exactly what had happened.

Mrs. Clausen had seen the telecast. She asked Patrick: “Is that the Mary who isn’t pregnant?”

“That’s her.”

“I thought so.”

Doris was wearing her old Green Bay Packers parka, the one she’d been wearing when Wallingford first met her. Mrs. Clausen was not wearing its hood as she drove the car, but Patrick could imagine her small, pretty face peering out from it like the face of a child. And she had on jeans and running shoes, which was how she’d dressed that night when the police informed her that her husband was dead. She was probably wearing her old Packers sweatshirt, too, although Wallingford couldn’t see what was under her parka.

Mrs. Clausen was a good driver. She never once looked at Patrick—she just talked about the game. “With a couple of four-two teams, anything can happen,” she explained. “We’ve lost the last three in a row on Monday night. I don’t believe what they say. It doesn’t matter that Seattle hasn’t played a Monday-night game in seven years, or that there’s a bunch of Seahawks who’ve never played at Lambeau Field before. Their coach knows Lambeau—he knows our quarterback, too.”

The Green Bay quarterback would be Brett Favre. Wallingford had read a paper (just the sports pages) on the plane. That’s how he’d learned who Mike Holmgren was—formerly the Packers’ coach, now the coach of the Seattle Seahawks. The game was a homecoming for Holmgren, who’d been very popular in Green Bay.

“Favre will be trying too hard. We can count on that,” Doris told Patrick. As she spoke, the passing headlights flashed on and off her face, which remained in profile to him.

He kept staring at her—he’d never missed anyone so much. He would have liked to think she’d worn these old clothes for him, but he knew the clothes were just her game uniform. When she’d seduced him in Dr. Zajac’s office, she must have had no idea what she was wearing, and she probably had no memory of the order in which she’d taken off her clothes. Wallingford would never forget the clothes and the order.

They drove west out of downtown Green Bay, which didn’t have much of a downtown to speak of—nothing but bars and churches and a haggard-looking riverside mall. There weren’t many buildings over three stories high; and the one hill of note, which hugged the river with its ships loading and unloading—until the bay froze in December—was a huge coal stack. It was a virtual mountain of coal.

“I would not want to be Mike Holmgren, coming back here with his four-two Seattle Seahawks,” Wallingford ventured. (It was a version of something he’d read in the sports pages.)

“You sound like you’ve been reading the newspapers or watching TV,” Mrs. Clausen said. “Holmgren knows the Packers better than the Packers know themselves. And Seattle’s got a good defense. We haven’t been scoring a lot of points against good defenses this year.”

“Oh.” Wallingford decided to shut up about the game. He changed the subject.

“I’ve missed you and little Otto.”

Mrs. Clausen just smiled. She knew exactly where she was going. There was a special parking sticker on her car; she was waved into a lane with no other cars in it, from which she entered a reserved area of the parking lot. They parked very near the stadium and took an elevator to the press box, where Doris didn’t even bother showing her tickets to an official-looking older man who instantly recognized her. He gave her a friendly hug and a kiss, and she said, with a nod to Wallingford, “He’s with me, Bill. Patrick, this is Bill.”

Wallingford shook the older man’s hand, expecting to be recognized, but there was no sign of recognition. It must have been the ski hat Mrs. Clausen had handed to him when they got out of the car. He’d told her that his ears never got cold, but she’d said, “Here they will. Besides, it’s not just to keep your ears warm. I want you to wear it.”

It wasn’t that she didn’t want him to be recognized, although the hat would keep him from being spotted by an ABC cameraman—for once, Wallingford wouldn’t be on-camera. Doris had insisted on the hat to make him look as if he belonged at the game. Patrick was wearing a black topcoat over a tweed jacket over a turtleneck, and gray flannel trousers. Almost no one wore such a dressy overcoat to a Packer game.

The ski hat was Green Bay green with a yellow headband that could be pulled down over your ears; it had the unmistakable Packers’ logo, of course. It was an old hat, and it had been stretched by a head bigger than Wallingford’s. Patrick didn’t need to ask Mrs. Clausen whose hat it was. Clearly the hat had belonged to her late husband.

They passed through the press box, where Doris said hi to a few other officiallooking people before entering the bleacher-style seats, high up. It wasn’t the way most of the fans entered the stadium, but everybody seemed to know Mrs. Clausen. She was, after all, a Green Bay Packers employee. They went down the aisle toward the dazzling field. It was natural grass, 87,000 square feet of it—what they called an “athletic blue blend.” Tonight was its debut game.